The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “And then what happened?” asked Ekstrom.

  “Then they came,” replied Morehouse simply. “We refer to this among ourselves as The Awakening, and we still don’t understand it fully. Don’t get me wrong when I say this, because we’re not a religious movement, rather the reverse in fact. But the best and most comprehensible way that I can put this, is that it had to be some kind of divine intervention. God decided to give His most wonderful and yet wayward children one final break before He threw the white race onto the scrap heap of history. He reached into the hearts of one hundred people and moved them, changed them, so that they let the scales fall from their eyes and they knew they had to put something above their own well being; that they had to live for something besides a job and a paycheck and a shopping spree at the mall. One day it just kind of began, and one hundred people stopped worrying about themselves and went out and began packing the moving van. The Old Man had his first hundred, and they became the nucleus of the Party that was formed when they came to the Homeland and were in place. Without that first hundred people, there could have been no Party, because it was they who set up the infrastructure and the safety net so the rest of the migrants would have something to Come Home to.”

  “We’re going to need more than a hundred men now,” said Washburn gloomily.

  “They will come,” said Morehouse with quiet confidence. “They came before. Damned late, but they came. Very well. Let’s get on with it.” He knocked back the rest of his coffee, put down the mug, and leaned forward to speak to them. “We are here to make history, gentlemen. We are here to plan and execute the first organized, armed insurrection against the United States of America since 1861. We are going to finish what began in Coeur d’Alene two months ago. The media is now crowing that the so-called racist republic is dead. It is not. The Northwest American Republic exists. It exists because we say it does, and because we are willing to spill the blood of others and to give up our own lives to make good on what we say. That is how nations come to life in the world, gentlemen. I am a representative of that Republic, of its provisional government in the present form of the Army Council until we can establish a state under the draft constitution we’ve been keeping in our drawers for so long. In that capacity, I am asking you to enlist in the armed forces of that Republic and fight a war of liberation against a cruel and wicked tyrant. Will you do so?”

  “I’m in,” said Hatfield.

  “I’m in,” said Washburn.

  “And I,” said Ekstrom.

  “Gentlemen, you just swore your blood oath. Make sure you honor it all the days of your lives,” said Red softly.

  “I look back at all the crap our people have put up with over the past century and I am still astonished that we never picked up a gun before,” said Washburn plaintively. “Why the hell has the white man never fought?”

  “Oh, God,” said Morehouse with a sigh. “Some of us have spent our entire lifetimes studying that one simple question, Charlie, and I have to say we’re no closer to an answer than we were at the beginning. There are a few standard, canned answers, of course. Up until the past couple of decades, most white people simply had it too good. Life was just too damned sweet, and all the bullshit caused by liberal democracy and political correctness didn’t seem to be really life-threatening, just more and more annoying as time wore on. When men are merely annoyed, they write letters to the editor, or phone a radio talk show, or bitch and gripe drunkenly in bars about how the world is going to hell. They don’t pick up a rifle or start making bombs in their basement. And of course, up until about twenty years ago, if things got too bad where you were living, then you could just up stakes and move to the suburbs, or some other state that was a little whiter. We got hundreds of thousands of organic migrants here to the Northwest that way.”

  “Oh, yeah, I think we’ve got half the population of California living in Clatsop County,” said Washburn. “Most of those same people pull the straight Democratic ticket lever in the polling booth, and they’d cut off their own goolies rather than admit that they came here looking for a whiter and safer environment.”

  “Mmm hmm,” said Morehouse with a chuckle. “Liberals are always the first to flee from the messes they make. Usually, they’re the only ones who can afford to do so. Anyway, liberalism and political correctness have gone beyond the merely annoying phase for a long time now. Things have been getting colder and crueler for white people ever since the economy went south under Bush Two and never recovered, when Social Security and Medicare went under, and when the neocons finally had to bring back the draft. You can’t conquer the world without a huge army; all their high-tech toys and smart bombs and computerized weapons of mass death simply wouldn’t serve. If we were going to keep that fossil fuel pumping, the Middle East had to be actually occupied, and so now every American family with a male child knows that when their boys turn 18 there is a good chance they’re going to be dragged away to the desert and butchered. Everyone knows at least one young man who came back from Iraq or Saudi wounded or crippled, minus an arm or a leg, or blind, or insane. And of course the drawbacks of our wonderful democracy have become quite apparent to those of us who find ourselves living in the northernmost province of Mexico. They can’t sweep all the problems under the rug anymore. They’re too visible and obvious, and no one has any money left to run to the suburbs.”

  “But that still hasn’t produced anything other than an army of white people hollering on talk radio and then trooping in to the polls on election day to vote Republican,” complained Ekstrom. “We vote in some white guy in a blow-dried hair do, with a bright smile and a thousand-dollar suit, then as soon as he hits Washington he betrays us, and all we get is more Mexicans, more crime, more taxes and fewer jobs, and all our savings gone on medical bills because nobody has any insurance anymore, and more dead kids coming back in coffins that no one is allowed to photograph. Surely we’re not that stupid? This isn’t an overnight development. This has been going on for 50 years. What the hell was wrong with us back in the 60s and 70s? Or even earlier? Why didn’t we fight?”

  “Perhaps the more pertinent question, Len, would be why are we fighting now?” asked Morehouse. “As for our failure to resist this genocide by force of arms before, it’s of course tempting to put it down to cowardice plain and simple, and there has always been a lot of that in what passed for a white resistance movement, to be sure. Way too much of it. Not to mention the fact that most of our self-appointed leaders were little more than con men who didn’t have the chops to make it as televangelists. But it’s more complicated than that. White American males are still capable of being physically brave, sure they are. They prove it every day on the battlefield. Every week you can see some story on the tube about a white cop who faces down a pack of gang-bangers or a white fireman who pulls kids out of a burning building, and then you get these extreme sports kooks who jump out of airplanes with snowboards and try to surf down Mount Everest, or snorkel butt naked in a school of sharks, that kind of nonsense.”

  “God knows I saw enough Aryan heroism every day in Iraq,” said Hatfield. “White men will still be as brave as lions, granted, but only for the Jews or for their money, Red. When it comes to standing up and fighting for ourselves, against the Jews and the government that’s tyrannizing us, all of a sudden we wuss out.”

  “Mmmmm, here’s where it gets complex, Zack,” said Red contemplatively, dragging out a filthy old pipe from his pocket and beginning to stuff it with tobacco. “The white man can still show physical courage, yes. Lots of it. That courage gene is definitely still there in our makeup. But what we can’t seem to do is to be brave on our own, for our own interests, without the Jewish seal of approval. We have developed a poisonous symbiosis with the system. It needs us and we need it, psychologically. White males are addicted to social approval nowadays. We need it like an addict needs his crack pipe. We’ve got to have that supportive peer group around us yelling attaboy. We can be brave in a structured environment, so
long as it is an officially approved form of courage, and so long as afterwards we can belly up to the bar and talk drunken shit with the boys and get slapped on the back, and then go home to the little woman and the comfortable middle class lifestyle from which we have ventured out, however briefly.

  “The white man can face danger, but he can’t face loneliness,” Morehouse went on, lighting his pipe with a match from a paper book. “He can’t handle being away from the comforting herd. He can’t handle being out in front anymore. He’s lost there. The pioneer spirit is all but dead; you would have to have lived through those bleak times in the early 2000s like I did, before those first hundred people Came Home and built the Party, to understand how rare the true pioneer, the trail-blazer, the man or woman who can go first, has become among us. You might say the Jew has succeeded in domesticating the Aryan. We can be brave and good dogs so long as we hear the reassuring sound of our master’s voice and get the occasional doggie treat from his hands, but we can’t be lone wolves anymore. We can venture into the forest and do battle for our masters, but we can’t live in the dark wood and make it our home and kingdom anymore, hunting on our own and keeping our entire kill for ourselves. We must always return to the master’s warm fire and his doggie treats, and of course his collar and his leash. We didn’t fight, Charlie, up until now, because for a century or so we have no longer been wolves, but dogs. The Jew domesticated us. But now we must hear the call of the wild again. We have to find that spirit of the wolf once more within us, and bite the hand that feeds us. And I suppose I’d better abandon that simile before I stretch it into a pretzel. But you get what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah, I do,” said Zack with a sigh. “And that poisonous symbiosis between the American white male and the system is still very much with us, an ingrained part of us. How many guys are going to be able to break out of it? Those are going to be pretty rare birds.”

  “Well, maybe not so rare,” said Red with a smile and a swirl of smoke. “Once that first hundred stepped forward, it wasn’t so hard for others to do so, because more and more, when they came here they found a crowd to hide in. It was getting that first hundred to go first that was the real bitch. There are more now, a lot more. We’ve got six of them here tonight. Four in here and two very fine young people out in the car.”

  “Red, I’m not so stupid as to ask how many men are in the Northwest Volunteer Army . . .” began Ekstrom.

  “I couldn’t tell you even if you asked,” interposed Morehouse. “No one knows how many Volunteers there are, and I doubt anyone ever will know.”

  “But how many men do you think it’s going to take to get this job done?” persisted Ekstrom. “To create our own country here and make it good? To drive out the federal authority?”

  “Far fewer than you might think,” Morehouse told them. “Our victory, gentlemen, will be the ultimate victory of quality over quantity. The American régime is not invincible, you know. The Muslims have shown us that, in spades. Bear in mind, gentlemen, that we are facing an opponent who passed the top of his game a long, long time ago. We will be the tiny lion against the enormous snake, but the serpent is old and sick and dying, poisoned with its own crapulence. We are facing a putrid mass of corruption, incompetence, bureaucracy and sloth, quavering with senility, an enemy who already is maintaining an army of almost two million men around the globe in an attempt to create and maintain an empire containing all of the world’s petroleum reserves. American soldiers are engaged in trying to keep that rickety empire together from Venezuela to Tehran, and very few if any will be available to pull back here to fight against us.”

  “The movement has always had to deal with this defeatist and paranoid belief that if we ever really tried anything, the might of the Army and the Marines would simply crush us,” said Hatfield. “Well, I can tell you, having seen the military from the inside, that the Army and Marines ain’t anywhere as mighty as they once were. And do you seriously think the Americans will abandon Iraq and Israel and Saudi Arabia and Venezuela and cut themselves off from their own oil supply to drop a million men on a handful of partisans in the Pacific Northwest, and maintain that level of occupation in a part of the world that is just as much a foreign country to those East Coast and L.A.-centric Jews and intelligentsia as Iraq ever was? The ruling élite all consider the Northwest to be a minor backwater.”

  “You would think that maintaining the territorial integrity of the United States would be the régime’s first priority, but it won’t be,” agreed Morehouse. “With the growing world fuel shortage, oil is frankly more important than land, and will become more so. After all, the Northwest has no oil, other than Alaska, which is a separate problem. The Army Council’s strategic assessment is that initially, at least, there will be only a small actual military commitment against us, if any. They won’t take us seriously. Wishful thinking on their part: they desperately won’t want to take us seriously. The idea that white boys would actually revolt against them boggles their minds too much. They’re not going to be sending B-52s to bomb Seattle or landing the Third Marine Division in Astoria. What would that accomplish against small bands of guerrillas who will simply melt away in the face of overwhelming force, and then strike where the underbelly is soft? I think they’ve learned at least that much in Iraq and Iran. It won’t be that type of war.

  “No, they’ll try to treat us as a crime problem at first,” Morehouse went on, the three of them leaning forward intently to listen. “Our enemies on the ground will consist of a hodge-podge of local police, National Guard reservists, FBI and BATFE, Homeland Security and other enemy paramilitaries, and eventually probably some SWAT-type special units and loyalist vigilante groups. And of course the black and Mexican gangs in the cities who may be sworn in as special U.S. Marshals or something of the kind when the shit really hits the fan. And the media, of course. Our enemy will be fragmented, disorganized, poorly coordinated in his many arms and agencies, and like all federals, each group will be jealous of its own turf and resources. They won’t work well together, they’ll trip over one another’s shoelaces, and they will fight us just as incompetently as they fought against the Iraqis and Iranians.”

  “I’ve had to work with the federal government in the Forestry Department for years,” said Washburn. “I can tell you, the people in charge of us are fucking idiots. They break down just trying to establish a coherent forest firefighting plan, and don’t even get me started on FEMA. Get somebody actually shooting at these bureaucrats, and they’ll fall to pieces.”

  “Exactly,” agreed Morehouse. “The reality is that for the first few months and years, we won’t be coming up against anybody that we can’t outshoot in a clutch, if our gunners can stay cool and calm and sober, keep the initiative in our hands, hunt them instead of letting them hunt us, and put some guts behind our guns. Of course, ideally speaking, it should never come to a full-blown shootout. We live light, we move light, we hit hard, and then we vanish before they can bring their superior force to bear. Classic guerrilla tactics. Remember those long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East? Many of our Volunteers will be military veterans who have been under fire on the other end of the stick, and man for man they’ll be every bit the personal equal or better than some pot-bellied highway patrolman or affirmative action FBI bitch in a feminist business suit.”

  “So how many men do you think we will need in the NVA to get the job done?” asked Ekstrom again.

  Morehouse puffed his pipe meditatively. “All right. I’m going to give you guys the theory here, all nice and neat. In reality, of course, nothing about this war is going to be nice and neat, but I am going to create a scenario for you that will at least approximate how we will win the Northwest American Republic, so you can get a glimpse of the possibilities. Assume we have intelligent and determined leadership. Assume we can get Volunteers with strong character and courage. Assume we can formulate a coherent battle plan and tactics, and add a generous dollop of good old-fashioned luck from the G
od of Battles. Those things acquired, and remembering how essentially weak and hollow the enemy really is, we should be able effectively to terminate federal control over three Northwestern states and maybe more territory as well, if we can maintain a force in the field of approximately one thousand men. And women, lest we forget.”

  “Overthrow the United States government with a thousand men?” demanded Washburn in skeptical amazement. “Bullshit!”

  “I didn’t say overthrow the United States government,” Morehouse corrected him. “I said effectively terminate federal control and authority in three large Northwestern states, which is not the same thing.”

  “How?” asked Ekstrom.

  “By hitting the enemy hard and often, in teams or crews of two to five or six people max. Let’s assume an average of five Volunteers per squad or crew. Our thousand effectives will make up two hundred such crews. Assume half of them are involved in support duties, supply, intelligence, medical services, propaganda, whatnot. That’s one hundred combat teams of five guys each remaining, who are actually pulling triggers and making things go boom. Imagine each of those crews striking the enemy on an average of once per day, all across the Northwest. Remember, one of the main reasons we migrated and we’re restricting our campaign to this corner of the country is to reduce the problem to manageable proportions. Let’s assume an average of a single dead enemy of one kind or another per attack. That’s 100 people per day being killed in one three-state area, with concomitant damage to enemy property, infrastructure, and damage to his morale, his public image, and thereby his capacity to govern. Their armies are designed to fight Star Wars, but we won’t be fighting Star Wars. We’ll be fighting Godfather style in the cities and Jesse James style in the countryside. We will be fighting high tech with low tech, and low tech is the one thing the United States has never known how to beat.” Morehouse knocked out his pipe onto the concrete floor, and then went on.