The Brigade

by H. A. Covington

  “You also understand that it will be a long time before we can re-establish two-way contact?” asked Charlie. “We have to assume that from the moment you leave the meeting, if you leave it at all, you will be followed, surveilled, wiretapped, and electronically monitored everywhere you go by the enemy, either the government or these people’s private spy network, hunting for some connection between you and the Army they can pick up and unravel like a loose thread on a garment. You’re going to be on your own for a long time, and everything you do, you’re going to have to wing it.”

  “I can do that,” said Brewer with a nod. “I do have the one number you gave me memorized.”

  “Yeah, but for any one of a dozen reasons, by the time you need to use it, that number may no longer be valid,” warned Charlie. “If that happens, you’re fucked. You’ve got that one number and that one authentication code word. They may try and set you up by pretending to be us, or pretending to be a Volunteer in distress or something like that. If they don’t have that code word, you don’t respond, not at all. You tell whoever it is to shoot through and hang up. Got it?”

  “Got it,” said Brewer.

  “Me and Oscar here are the only ones who know that word,” continued Charlie. “If both of us buy the farm, then you’re well and truly buggered, because you’ll have no way to authenticate. I have to admit, I’m not happy about leaving you turning slowly in the wind like this, but it’s the only way this will work. You will be the only sure NVA man whose identity and location they know about, at least you’d damned well better be the only one. We can’t risk them using you to start working up the chain.”

  “Got it,” said Brewer. “I’m down for this, don’t worry. I’ve been helping you guys all this time, but I still have this feeling I’m not doing enough. I’m not brave like you. I couldn’t do what you guys do, or what our friends did up on that beach in Oregon, but I know Tinsel Town inside and out, and this I can do.”

  “You’re about to walk alone and unarmed into a room with some of the most powerful Jews in the world, all of whom will want to tear you limb from limb and none of whose word you can trust farther than you can throw them,” said Oscar. “I’d say that’s pretty courageous, comrade.”

  “I suppose I should be worried or afraid, but I’m not,” said Brewer with a shrug. “It’s just that at long last, I can help do something to fix this goddamned mess, or at least my part of it. You guys don’t have show business in your blood. I do. This town and this industry are my life. With all the new technology and skills we’ve developed, we could do such good here, make such beautiful and enduring works of art. It just makes me want to weep and scream and bang my fists against the wall when I see what these, these people are using all this power and potential for. The potential for beauty and greatness has always been here, and sometimes it comes out in spite of everything when a truly great picture is made, but there’s always been this undercurrent of filth and poison running through it all. I just can’t live with it anymore. This is something that has to be done.”

  “Sure you don’t want a ride down there?” asked Oscar.

  “No, you guys need to take it on the arches now. I’ll call a cab.”

  “Good luck, comrade,” they said, shaking hands for the last time before Oscar and Charlie moved out into the searing neon night of Los Angeles.

  As it happened, the studio executives kept their word, at least visibly. Brewer arrived at the Paradigm studios gate in his cab and identified himself to the heavily armed guards there. He was picked up by a silent flunky in a golf cart and driven to the Bunker with no frisking or metal detectors. It was almost midnight when he walked into the meeting. This one was being held in the formal conference room, and over a dozen men sat waiting for him seated around a long mahogany table. All were Jewish, and at least half were wearing yarmulkes. The air was frigid as ice, and not just from the air conditioning that rumbled full blast from the air vents. The eyes of the Jews at the table bored into Brewer with a concentrated, pure hatred that was almost radioactive; Brewer knew full well that every man there wanted him dead, and they were all thinking of ways that might be accomplished, preferably tonight, right here in this room, and as bloodily as possible. For him there was no offer of refreshment, no schmoozing, no polite small talk, not even a water pitcher and glass on the table. Brewer walked to the far end of the table and without a word sat down, opened his briefcase, and took out the yellow legal pad and pen, which he placed before him. Somehow the very paucity of the briefcase’s contents seemed to add to their anger and their sense of insult; the scowls deepened and there was a low sound almost like the growling of beasts. Brewer looked up at them calmly and began to speak.

  “First off, about myself. No one should ever ask, but if anyone does, I am officially a consultant. You will be employing my services on certain sensitive matters because you find my input to be valuable, and that is all that should ever be said. You needn’t pay me anything. While I am performing this service for our community I will be living off my life’s savings and accumulated assets, and also off my talent agency business. Please refrain from fucking with me in that regard or blacklisting my clients. That will be regarded as a hostile act, and some of my friends don’t handle hostility well. My clients are all talented actors and actresses. With one obvious exception they know nothing about any of this, and they don’t deserve ill treatment.”

  “Why?” grated Arnold Blaustein, his voice like metal scraping on metal. “This town made you. We made you. All your life we have put every crumb of food on your table, bought every mai tai you ever drank in Trader Vic’s, bought every car you ever drove, paid every penny of your mortgage, and for this you have spat the blood of God’s Chosen People in our faces. Why have you done this, Barry?”

  “And that’s all you see, isn’t it?” said Brewer. “Money. Material things. Life as a balance sheet drawn up with double-entry bookkeeping, profit and loss. It’s all any of you can see, isn’t it? Never mind. I have done it because it had to be done, and no one else would. Beyond that I won’t be making any speeches or harangues, and I recommend the same course to you. We have business to settle. Now can we get on with this? I assure you gentlemen that your company is just as distasteful to me as mine is to you, so the sooner we get done the sooner we can depart.”

  “I agree. Get on with it,” snarled Moshe Feinstein from Dreamworks-Disney. He lit a huge cigar, his hands trembling so bad in impotent rage he could barely flick the $4,500 platinum Zippo lighter into a flame.

  “There is a war going on in the Pacific Northwest,” said Brewer. “Up until now Hollywood and the entertainment industry as a whole have supported one side in that war, the United States of America and its government. That support ends tonight, and Hollywood will become neutral. Not openly, just in practice. No one expects you to make any public declarations or dramatic announcements. Assuming you accept the terms I will lay out for you, when the active service unit is withdrawn and military operations cease on our part, and certain kinds of material ceases to issue forth from your studios and your networks, then I’m sure people will draw their own conclusions. Conclusions that you may of course deny or simply meet with a no-comment as you choose. It will be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that a deal has been struck, make no mistake. But I recommend that your attitude be one of least said, soonest mended. Just get back to work, make your movies and your inane sitcoms and your ridiculous reality shows and your sleazy soft porn, and you’ll be amazed at how quickly the short American attention span kicks in and the events of this Oscar night become ancient history. It only took the great American public a few years to forget about 9/11.”

  “And this neutrality that you speak of involves our doing what, exactly?” demanded Dave Danziger coldly.

  “Not much, but it does entail an extensive list of things which you will not do,” said Brewer. “We’re realistic. We understand that we can’t bring back the Hayes Office and stop you from spewing for
th the kind of perverted filth and mindless rubbish that you always have. You have spent the past three generations creating a market for that sewage, it’s what the brain-dead public now wants, and it sells. When there is a public demand for something, someone is going to provide it, as witness Prohibition and the drug situation. We don’t demand that you fire all your non-white or sodomitic employees, nothing like that. You will be able to get back to business as usual, and soon the shekels will be rolling in once more. But certain specific topics are henceforth off limits, or else they need to be handled very, very carefully, lest it piss off some people with itchy trigger fingers who would like nothing better than to catch you trying to slither around our little agreement, come down here again and give you another lesson in manners.”

  “And those topics would be?” asked Sam Glaser from TriVision.

  “To begin with, there will be no movies or television episodes produced that, in the guise of drama, are nothing more than U.S. government propaganda directed against the NVA and the Party in the Northwest. There will be no more incitement of hatred against the NVA or the Northwest independence movement. This also applies to such personages as wise-ass late night talk show hosts, potty-mouthed stand-up comedians, and cable news show talking heads. We have shown our willingness to kill and to die ourselves for our freedom and our integrity as a people. That is the way that men earn respect, and from now on you will damned well show us that respect. There will be no more snide little needling jokes, no more vilification and insulting portrayals of Northwest Volunteers as psychos and cretins and generally bad people.”

  Walt Wexler from World Artists spoke up. “Uh, sorry, Barry, I’ve got to ask. Did you actually see what you and your—your friends did on Oscar night? I did, because I was there, although by the grace of God all I got was a slight wound. How in the name of God can you say that the perpetrators of that horror are not bad people? What would you call that unspeakable slaughter if not psychopathic?”

  “I would call it an act of war just as much as any engagement between soldiers. In case you’ve missed the past century, Walt, that’s how wars have been fought since 1914,” said Brewer in a level voice. “Combatants no longer need carry a rifle. In fact, the most effective combatants in modern warfare carry briefcases or slide rules or laptops. Or video and film cameras. This entire industry consists mostly of active and purposeful combatants against Western civilization, and has almost since its inception. What happened at the Awards ceremonies was horrible, yes, but it was no more horrible than the kind of thing your Israel and our own government have been doing to Muslim peoples throughout the Middle East for decades. It’s just that this time we got a good close-up in our living rooms of all the blood and the brains. Multiply Oscar night by ten thousand times, and you have the story of American foreign policy for the past seventy years. If those people had been Palestinians crushed by Israeli tanks or Iraqis killed by American bombs, none of you men in this room would have batted an eye and most of you would have laughed. The only reason you give a damn now is because your own ox is being gored. You’re all bent out of shape because you finally got a dose of your own medicine. I’m sorry, I know I promised no harangues, but you asked.”

  “Sorry I asked,” mumbled Wexler.

  Brewer continued. “Secondly, Hollywood’s moratorium on anti-white plots, characters, imagery, and polemics in general will not just apply to the Northwest conflict or the NVA. Anti-white incitement and group defamation from Hollywood and the television industry, directed against Gentile people of European ancestry, will cease forthwith. This isn’t just a matter of common decency or fairness; we wouldn’t be so naïve. It’s so you can’t sneak in anti-NVA propaganda in the guise of historical films or apparently unrelated plot lines in TV series, etcetera. There are to be no more fat Southern sheriffs beating on poor defenseless white liberals. There are to be no more evil Nazis acting as clownish foils for your infantile action heroes. There are to be no more evil Confederates flogging black women, no more Ku Klux Klansmen raping and lynching, no more stereotyped redneck villains getting beaten up by clever wisecracking niggers, no more equating a woman having blond hair with being an idiot and a slut. No more racial or cultural stereotyping of any kind directed against white people. I don’t have to spell this out for you, gentlemen. You all know damned well what you’ve been doing for the past century, and please do not insult my intelligence by trying to deny that you don’t understand me perfectly well. Now you’re going to stop it. As the events of the past few months have proven, making a career and a fortune out of insulting white men and degrading white women is no longer a viable proposition. Your people have always been very practical, I’ll give you that. The white man now has an armed deterrent, and we can no longer be pissed on at your pleasure. Accept the new reality. Learn to live with it and work with it.”

  “We get it,” said Blaustein with a nod.

  “Thank you. The third point may be the hardest for you to swallow, but I need to emphasize that these terms are a complete package, not a buffet. It’s all or nothing.” Brewer took a deep breath. “All Holocaust propaganda comes to a screeching halt. Now, and that includes that piece of dreck your people are over in Poland filming now, Mr. Feinstein.”

  “What? Ashes of Auschwitz? You’re telling me I can’t commemorate the Shoah, where one hundred and thirty-seven of mine family vas gassed by Hitler? How dare you? Chillul HaShem!” shrieked Feinstein, turning purple and waving his fists in the air, spittle flying from his lips as the burning cigar fell down into his lap unheeded.

  “Crap,” said Brewer succinctly. “It’s crap, it was always crap, and you’ve milked it long enough. For three generations you people have squeezed an endless river of gold out of something that never happened, at least not in any way, shape, or form resembling your official version. Now you are going to stop it, just like you’re going to stop insulting and degrading white people as a whole. Germans are white people and they are most distinctly covered in the no-defamation and no-lying clauses of our little entente here. No one expects you to admit that you’ve been defrauding the world for 75 years. Like I’ve said, we’re realistic. But you’ve already got enough of that horseshit in circulation to keep you rolling in royalties for the next 75 years. You’re going to shut down the Holocaust sector of the entertainment industry now, as much as that’s possible. No more movies, no more TV specials, no more long moans in black and white with cellos in the background, and your palms out for money and sympathy you don’t deserve. No more of that crap! My God, the FBI already arrests anyone who questions the official version anyway under the hatecrime laws, and sends them off to re-education camps to have their brains washed squeaky clean like Winston Smith in 1984. Isn’t that enough for you? We understand that the mountain of Holocaust shit already reaches to the sky, and it’s going to take generations to undo the damage you’ve done to humanity’s psyche with your lies, but you’re not going to be allowed to throw one more shovel-load of shit on the heap. Hear what I say, gentlemen, or by God, we will show you a Holocaust, and we have demonstrated that we have the capability to do just that.”

  Feinstein screamed again like a woman, not just in rage, but because the burning cigar he dropped had set his pants on fire. Dave Danziger grabbed a water carafe from a sideboard and dumped it in Feinstein’s lap. Feinstein began to shout and curse in Yiddish, but Blaustein cut him off with a gesture.

  “Zip it, Moe,” he said dejectedly. “Hey, there’s no business like Shoah business, and we’ve all had a good run on that one. But all good things must come to an end sometime, and we need to get back to work.”

  “Mr. Brewer,” spoke up Ira Einhorn from Fox Network, “You understand that while we might agree to—redirect our creative energies elsewhere, let us say, in return for you people re-directing your homicidal energies elsewhere, we can’t do anything about an entire repertoire of films and television that goes back almost a century. What, we’re supposed to track down and burn every copy of To
Kill a Mockingbird and Winds of War? You’re talking about thousands of films and television episodes, on film, on DVD, in digital libraries . . .”

  “We understand that an apparatus of defamation and deceit such as your culture has created over such a length of time can’t be dismantled overnight, and that’s not what we expect of you,” Brewer explained. “We’re not trying to de-Judaize the entire movie and entertainment industries. We know that’s not possible. What we are trying to do is neutralize those industries as a weapon in the hands of the occupying power in the Northwest. We don’t expect you openly to oppose them or support us. We simply expect you to stop acting as the United States’ cheering section, in the Northwest, in the Middle East, in every way. You must stop giving aid and comfort to our enemies. We know that we’re dealing with a very complex structure, and stopping it will be about like stopping a speeding train. It can’t be done simply by hitting the brakes. But we expect you to start applying those brakes and start steering the train onto a different track. It will take time, especially since you will be doing it reluctantly and under duress, and there will be all kinds of questions and issues and glitches. That is the purpose of retaining me as a consultant. Your rule of thumb needs to be when in doubt, ask. Don’t try to be clever dicks and see what you can slip past us. That’s a good way to find yourselves floating in your own swimming pool face down.”

  “Look here,” spoke up Peter Shenker from CBS, “You opened up tonight by saying there is a war going on in the Northwest. That’s true, it is a war, even if the government chooses not to so call it for PR reasons. It’s on the news every day. The NVA is on the news every day. We are in the business of helping people escape from reality, true, but that’s only half of it. The other half of our mandate, if you want to call it that, is to portray reality in an artistic and entertaining form. I don’t see how you can ask us to simply bee-bop forward from now on as if nothing at all is happening in the Northwest, nobody’s getting killed and no bombs are going off in Seattle and Portland and Spokane. How can we do that? If nothing else, it will soon become ridiculously obvious to our audiences that we’ve caved in to your violence, and we will lose a lot of our credibility. Hell, that business on Sunset Beach the other day has made-for-TV movie written all over it, and you’re telling us we can’t touch it?”