Freedom's Sons

by H. A. Covington

  “And you didn’t used to like all those Mexicans, either,” said Kevin reminded his mother as he spooned mashed potatoes into his mouth.

  “Kevin, that’s not true!” snapped Amber.

  “Then why did you always wrinkle your nose and tap your toes and snort like a horse when they held us up in the line?” asked Kevin. “I guess it’s true what Mr. Overbury at school says. Liberals are hypocrites. They want to tell everybody else how to live, but they don’t want to live in the messes they create.”

  “Oh, my God, what are these monsters turning you into?” moaned Amber. “I suppose the Nazis make poor Mr. Overbury say those things, or else they’ll come and take him away in the night. And don’t tell me they’re not doing just that very thing, Clancy! You ought to know, after what happened to poor Linda!”

  “I have no intention of denying it, dear,” said Dr. Myers with a sigh.

  It was true. Linda Barnard at the University had disappeared on Christmas Eve, and Clancy had been delegated by the faculty to approach Jason Stockdale about it, since he seemed to have a friendly relationship with the new chancellor. Stockdale had proclaimed an open door policy, and so Myers took advantage of it. He went to Stockdale’s office on the day after New Year’s and knocked on the door, noting with approval that the young man had exchanged his NDF uniform for a sober and more academic suit and tie. “Linda who?” Stockdale had replied to the question, arching his eyebrows.

  “Professor Linda Barnard from the Media and Journalism Department,” said Clancy patiently. “She’s missing, but her mother is still in the nursing home, her car is in her garage, and I’m told there is no sign she took any of her things with her or that she left voluntarily. Mr. Stockdale, you know quite well who and what I’m talking about. I don’t expect you to reveal classified information, if that’s what this is, but if she’s dead, her friends would like to know. I’d also like to know if we’re going to be arrested and disappear ourselves, if we have a quiet private memorial service for Linda and for the Copettas?”

  “I repeat, Linda who?” asked Stockdale. “There is no record of any such person ever having worked here at the University of Montana, on the faculty or in any other capacity,” he went on. “Check the computer and personnel files yourself if you don’t believe me. In fact, you will find that no such person ever existed. No driver’s license, no voter’s registration, no bank records, no property listing. If you go to the house this imaginary individual allegedly lived in, you will find that the premises have been taken over by the Bureau of Race and Resettlement, and for all I know there may be a family of white refugees from Florida or Toronto living there already. I suspect that given time, there will eventually be no birth certificate or old social security number or anything like that. We’ve got a lot of really good computer people working for us over in Olympia who specialize in correcting erroneous public records all throughout North America, and even the world. You won’t even find any references to any such individual in back issues of the school paper. Those files have been sequestered until a number of factual errors in them can be corrected. It seems our student reporters were very sloppy; there are all kinds of references in there to people who never existed and events that never occurred. Don’t worry; we’ll have definitive editions back in the archives soon.”

  “Good God, it’s like 1984!” groaned Clancy, slumping down into a chair in front of Stockdale’s desk. “Right down the memory hole! Mr. Stockdale, I…”

  “Call me Jason. You did when I was in your class, and I see no reason to get all formal now.”

  “Uh, I did explain to you that the favor you think we did for Jenny was done without the knowledge of my wife or myself?” asked Myers.

  “Yes, I know, it was Peanut and Kevin and Bobby, but the end effect is the same,” said Stockdale. “My wife owes her life to your family.”

  “Then hopefully I can speak a bit more freely than most without going down the memory hole myself,” said Myers. “Jason, I won’t deny that I see a lot of good coming out of your revolution. I see it already, here in the university where we can actually teach without fear again, to students who really want to learn. Not to mention our new faculty—my God, we now have three Nobel laureates teaching here who have fled from Europe! Just not having to worry about the constant petty crime from Mexicans and drug addicts is wonderful, being able to leave my house and my car unlocked, and not having to worry about Georgia if she’s an hour or so late coming home from school, because I can be sure she hasn’t been snatched off the street by some kind of pedophile freak. I’m genuinely grateful for that, Jason. We all are. You guys are well on your way to winning people’s hearts and minds, and then you go and do something like this! I suppose my attitude is typical of people around here for whom the jury is still out: thanks for getting the American assholes off our backs, now when are you going to stop killing people?”

  “Hmmm…” said Stockdale, tapping his pen on the desk. “Look, Dr. Myers, I was just a Volunteer, a common or garden-variety shoot-’em-in-the-head and wire-a-bomb-to-their-car type. I’m not a trained Party political officer or a historian like Doctor Luger, but I’ll answer that as best I can. I think if you asked every Northwest Volunteer why he or she did what they did during the war, you’d get a different answer each time. I admit that a lot of us—hey, maybe most of us—joined the NVA and staged this revolution purely out of personal motives of anger and revenge, and there’s nothing wrong with that, or unexpected. Very few people are deep philosophical types, and fewer still actually base their behavior and their lives on profound moral principles. Hell, we were lucky enough back in the ’teens to find that first thousand white people who still could base their behavior and their lives on some kind of idealistic principle. I was one such person, though, and here’s my take on it.

  “At some point in time, a long time ago, our whole civilization started to slide off the tracks. There’s all kinds of debate as to when that point was, and everybody’s got a pet theory. Adam Weishaupt and the Illuminati, the Civil War, the establishment of the Federal Reserve, the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whatever. The fact remains that by the time you and I were born, all of Western civilization was off the track and sinking into a swamp. Not only civilization, but the very existence of the race that created it was in question. You know the rap, I’m sure. I won’t ask you if you agree, because what matters is that the new government agrees.” Stockdale leaned forward. “For the first time in generations, Dr. Myers, white people now have a country of our own, and the forces resisting the existential crisis of the white race now have the full power of a modern state behind us.

  “What we have to do, Dr. Myers, is wrench that train of Western civilization back onto the track by force, the same way we took this land from the United States, because it is now apparent that nothing else will work. Our enemies are utterly implacable, they are impervious to civil argument or reason, and so from now on, they get a club upside the head. Among other things, that means avoiding the mistakes of the past. This experiment was tried once before, during the last century in Germany, and the Germans made a terrible mistake that eventually cost them the life of their nation. They allowed the Jews and the lefty scum to conduct a six-year campaign of incitement to hatred and economic warfare. Eventually the Jews got their war. That’s not going to happen this time,” Stockdale went on in a grim voice. “We will not allow disloyalty, subversion, incitement or cultural poisoning from within the Republic or from outside it. This non-existent person you referred to and all like her are finally going to hear the word no, loud and clear. She’s heard it already, and though I don’t know for certain, I suspect it was the last thing she ever heard.”

  Clancy groaned and buried his face in his hands; Stockdale ignored him. “We are now a free country, but in order to keep us that way, we do make a few very basic demands of our own people. One of them is that every young man must become a soldier for a time, and defend their country and their civilization, including
your son Kevin and my brother Bobby when their time comes. Another demand is that from now on, our people refrain from two or three specific behaviors that our instinct teaches us are vile and wicked, and which our history and experience as a people teaches us are socially and culturally poisonous.

  “Avoiding these behaviors is not particularly onerous or hard; there is nothing at all painful or intolerably restrictive to anyone’s personal liberty about not doing these things. I, for one, have never had any difficulty refraining from fucking other men in the ass. It’s an incredibly easy thing to not do. Nor have I ever been so bloody, bird-brained stupid as to believe that the Jews are God’s Chosen people or that NS Germany gassed six million of them. Even if I did, I would have sense enough to keep my mouth shut about it, find something else in life to concern myself with, and not attempt to do harm to others for the sake of this weird notion. This non-existent person that you speak of was fully aware of what her position would be in a society run by moral decency, and yet like so many of her kind she was so stupidly arrogant as to believe the rules did not apply to her, and that what she did was a personal matter that was none of anyone else’s business. She found out the hard way that she was wrong, but she wasn’t just wrong, she was bad. Sinful, if you want to put a religious slant on it. We are returning to the old ways where gray areas are few and far between, and what is bad and sinful is not only not tolerated, but punished.

  “As to the removal of such people from the historic record insofar as it is possible for us to do so, there are two reasons for that. In the first place, we have no intention of allowing our living enemies to make political and propaganda hay from our dead ones. They will anyway, since of course, we can’t completely erase a hundred years of filth from official memory, but as a matter of policy we intend to make it as hard for them to do so as possible. We don’t give them a single inch, not ever. The second reason is a moral one. This endless procession of deviancy and corruption and sin that has trooped through everyone’s lives for the past century deserves to be forgotten as much as possible. There is always shit in the sewers, but it needs to stay there and not overflow into the streets and onto people’s lawns. Allowing these people to have names and human faces detracts from the overriding magnitude and import of their crimes. It generates sympathy they don’t deserve. We don’t want anyone to put a human face on their revolting behavior. It is enough to know that it happened, and it must never happen again. We don’t need to wallow in endless details.”

  “And what the hell gives you the right to erase human beings from memory as if they never existed?” Clancy demanded.

  “What gives us that right?” chuckled Jason. “We’re the guys with the guns and the will to use them, that’s what. We gained that right when we finally stopped tapping on computer keyboards and stood up to ZOG with weapons in our hands and spilled blood, including our own, to obtain it. Dr. Myers, there are certain things in life that simply have to be done, for no other reason than because they are right. You don’t agonize or introspect over these things, you simply do them, and you never, ever talk about them afterward.”

  “But these are people, dammit!” shouted Clancy.

  “Of course they are,” said Jason, nodding in agreement. “Bad people. People are the source of everything that’s wrong in the world, in case you haven’t noticed. Back in the old days, screwed-up angst-ridden and disillusioned young white people used to moan about how life sucks, and the world is a horrible place. Not true. Life is actually wonderful, and the world is a beautiful place. It’s people and their behavior who make it horrible and sad. Now there are a few less of those people here in the Northwest.”

  Back at the Myers family dinner table, Clancy asked Kevin, “Overbury is your history teacher, right?”

  “Nobody makes Mister Overbury say anything, Mom. He’s just saying what he always wanted to say,” Kevin told his mother. “He explained that to us. Now he’s free to teach us real history, what really happened, and not what some politically correct school board full of mud people and faggots say happened, most of which is bullshit.”

  Amber was about to light into her son for his language when the doorbell rang. Amber got up and peeped out the curtains she always kept pulled over the picture window these days. She turned to her husband, her face white as a sheet. “Clancy!” she whispered. “It’s happening! They’ve come for me!”

  Clancy got up and looked out the window. “Amber, that’s just one of the new police cars,” he told her.

  “The blue, white and green ones?” asked Kevin.

  “Yes. The Civil Guard, it’s called now.”

  The doorbell rang again. “I’ll get it,” said Clancy steadily. He was unsettled and nervous; despite the lack of any real outward appearance of a totalitarian police state, he couldn’t help but remember Linda Barnard’s disappearance. Had they just sent one single car for her?

  “No, don’t interfere, Clancy, it’s me they want!” announced Amber dramatically. She threw open the door.

  “Good evening, ma’am,” said a male voice outside on the front steps. “Are you Mrs. Amber Myers?”

  “That’s Ms. Amber Escott-Myers to you, fascist scum!” Amber replied in a snide yet shaky voice. His wife was genuinely terrified, but she was still trying to show courage in front of the children, and Clancy couldn’t help but admire her for it. “Finally made it to the top of your little list, did I?”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am, you did,” said the voice. Clancy stepped to his wife’s side and saw a single police officer standing on his doorstep, a large genial-looking man wearing the new uniform of dark green trousers with bloused boots, light green shirt with a slightly different version of the eagle-and-swastika emblem from that worn by the NDF, and a green-billed cap with silver sunburst-type crest on it.

  “I’m Doctor Clancy Myers. What can I do for you, Officer, uh, Rhinehart?” asked Clancy, looking at the man’s nametag.

  “Actually, it’s Guardsman Rhinehart now,” replied the cop with a smile. “Don’t worry, I’m still not used to it myself. I’m here to…”

  “I know why you’re here,” said Amber, re-appearing at the door with her coat on and holding her purse. The two kids crowded behind her, staring at the cop with wide eyes. “I don’t know who denounced me, maybe even someone in my own family.” (She glared at Clancy.) “But whoever it was, they’re right. I am still a loyal American, I love and respect people of all colors and religion, and I will never give in to you murdering racist bastards! No matter what you do to me! So go ahead, you son of a bitch! Drag me away from my home in front of my children, and show them just what you are! Take me down to your secret torture chamber and do your worst! Beat me! Waterboard me! Put your electrodes on my nipples and fry my tits to teriyaki! Gang rape me! I will tell you nothing! Nothing!” she shouted, her voice rising to a frenzied scream.

  “Oooo-kaaaaay,” said the puzzled cop. “Actually, that’s not why I’m here, ma’am.” He handed her a bulky manila envelope. “Here’s the deed and property title to your house.”

  “What?” said Amber, surprised.

  “The deed to your house,” explained Rhinehart patiently. “Basic Law of March Seventh. No more mortgage payments for anybody. Your house is all yours, now. No more property taxes to pay, either, so long as people are actually living here full time. One of you needs to sign for these papers.”

  Amber gaped at him. Clancy stepped forward and took the envelope of documents, then signed the paper taped to the outside of the envelope. The cop tore off the top copy, folded it, and put it into his pocket. “Thanks, folks. Hope you enjoy living in your new debt-free house. I know I like living in mine. You folks have a good evening.”

  “Wait,” said Clancy. “Look, Officer, uh, Guardsman Rhinehart, I have a few questions. You did us a good turn bringing us these papers, and although we were just sitting down to dinner, the least we can do is offer you a cup of coffee or a glass of iced tea. Won’t you come in for a few minutes? Please?” Amber wa
s glaring icicles at him, but he eased her out of the way and beckoned the policeman into the house.

  “Might as well,” said Rhinehart agreeably. “Coffee sounds good. I’ve only got a couple more of these to deliver.”

  “Georgia, bring a cup of coffee for Guardsman Rhinehart, will you?” Clancy told his daughter, figuring he’d better not ask his wife. “How do you take it?”

  “Black is fine,” said the cop.

  “I’m curious about something,” Clancy went on as he ushered the Guard into his living room. “Not that we don’t appreciate it, but why are the police delivering these documents? Don’t you have more important things to do?”

  “Not really, thank God,” said Rhinehart, seating himself on the sofa at Clancy’s invitation. “Not much crime these days. Well, hasn’t been much actual crime in Missoula for some years now, since the NVA ran all the beaners and the junkies and the drunken Indians out.”

  “What about the crime caused by the NVA itself, with their murders and their bombings and their terrorism?” snapped Amber from the doorway, still glaring at them.

  “Yes, ma’am, there was that,” agreed Rhinehart. “Although we had more problems with those damned FATPOs, getting drunk and stoned, beating people on the street, shooting into people’s houses, that kind of thing, not to mention what they did in their official capacity. Not that the local police were allowed to do anything about that. Any of us who tried ended up sitting in one of those torture chambers you mentioned just now, Mrs. Myers. Their federal badges topped ours. But nowadays everything is as quiet and peaceful as I’ve ever known it. The people who made trouble simply aren’t around any more.”

  “I notice you’re not wearing a sidearm,” pointed out Clancy. “How’s that working out?”

  “Oh, my gun’s in the car. I can get it if it looks like I may need it, but that hasn’t happened so far. They’re weaning us off ’em, so to speak, but it looks like unarmed police in an armed society is turning out to be a good idea,” Rhinehart replied, taking the cup of coffee from Georgia. “Thanks, young lady.”