With its November-28 cover story, “My Life as a White Supremacist,” Newsweek has published what amounts to an extended press release from the Southern Poverty Law Center. Featuring a flaming cross on the cover and pictures of brown-clad stormtroopers from the National Socialist Movement on the inside, one expects to read a suspenseful tale of intrigue and deception in the heart of America's vast Neo-Nazi underground—a kind of Turner Diaries in which The System is triumphant. What actually emerges is a story of government incompetence, the usual self-interested hyperventilating about a non-existent revolutionary movement, and the deluded actions of a sad old paleo-American, who sacrificed his life for people who hate him.

The story profiles one John Matthews, a Vietnam veteran and “ardent anticommunist” who had “long run in extremist circles.” Matthews, inspired by John Wayne, fought for his country in Vietnam. He returned to the United States, found that the nation “showed no respect for what he sacrificed,” and learned his comrades were contracting chronic health conditions from exposure to Agent Orange. Matthews become a part of the militia network around one Tom Posey, whom Oliver North and the Reagan Administration used to supply the Nicaraguan contras with weapons. Once he outlived his usefulness, however, Posey was prosecuted by the government. (Oliver North went on to Fox News.) Though he was eventually cleared, an embittered Posey allegedly began talking about stealing weapons and blowing up a nuclear plant to start a revolution. Matthews went straight to the FBI, who recruited him as an informant. He would stay an informant for the next 10 years. 

The author of the piece, R.M. Schneiderman, then takes us on a rather boring adventure, as Matthews meets with various self-important militia leaders who talk about elaborate schemes . . . but don’t seem to do very much. Hilariously, Schneiderman notes Matthews’s handler was a Black named Donald Jarrett, who “wore nice suits and kept his hair closely cropped” (as if he’s assuring us that he wasn’t wearing dreadlocks and a hoodie.) Given that the DEA is looking for ebonics translators, I suppose we should be grateful for that. Without much of a story, Schneiderman resorts to a grab bag of various media clichés about the “far right” and simply mixes them all together. Matthews sat in church pews “with would-be abortion-clinic bombers” (no elaboration). A supposed Vietnam vet shows up to a meeting wearing a green bomber jacket, which, we are solemnly informed, “was popular among skinheads at the time.” The story picks up when this man talks about robbing armored cars . . . but unfortunately it turns out that he, too, is FBI agent. For a report about 10 years in the Nazi underground, there’s not much of an underground and seemingly no Nazis.

There is, however, some semblance of the American Right, and there’s always good money for a reporter who can pathologize it. Schneiderman sneers, “Posey went on about the New World Order, which to extremists like him meant the threat of global takeover by an assortment of international organizations including banks, the United Nations, and other elite institutions.” One sighs with relief that such a view has no basis in truth and is only held by “extremists.” Even so, if only Posey had dressed in all black, instead of camo, and taken a shit on a police car, he could have been recognized as a proto-Occupy protester and be getting an adoring interview on Democracy Now as we speak.

The Node
By Tito Perdue
Nine-Banded Books
258 Pages
(Cover art by Alex Kurtagic)

Literary renegade Tito Perdue’s new novel, The Node, is a dystopian comedy set later this century in an ultra-multi-cultural Third-World America where Caucasians (or “Cauks” as they’re called) are by law a disenfranchised minority.

In this wretched and wasted, yet still consumer-crazed land, pollution has ruined the atmosphere, overpopulation caused by third-world immigration has destroyed all the resources, and the most valued currency is the Chinese Yuan.

Looting, murder, robbery and pederasty are all considered normal, and an infamous prison called The Wedge is reserved for whites suspected of having “ethnocentric tendencies.”

Everything, it seems, in this bad new world is named (or re-named) after Martin Luther King Junior: streets, lakes, rivers, buildings, bridges, and New York City.

The book’s un-named 44-year-old protagonist, forced to abandon his rural Tennessee homestead, makes a dangerous 4-mile trek to “the city,” seeking propane for warmth, and visits a “node,” a covert compound peopled with white men and women endeavoring to illegally repopulate themselves. These “nodists” are part of an ever-expanding network of such groups, or franchises, they call them, that are springing up all over the country.

Here, the hero meets and talks with the movement’s founder, Larry Schneider, an eccentric idealist obsessed with a yen to “turn the world around” and who complains bitterly about their race’s bizarre predicament:

“Odd business, no? We spent a thousand years putting together some advantages for ourselves, and now we’re supposed to give them all away.”

“Yeah. Everybody’s good except us. We’re bad.”

“Precisely. Entirely appropriate that black people, yea and Asians too, should look to their interests. But don’t you try it!”

Sympathetic with their cause, the novice decides to stay among them. Returning home, he later learns, would do no good anyway, since in his absence, the government has given his house and acreage to Cambodians for the sake of “diversity.”

Larry Schneider eventually recruits “our man,” (as Perdue often calls his protagonist) to go on a mission to rendezvous with an out-of-state contingent of like-minded whites and create a new node.

Once he finally finds his comrades, our man and his nuevo nodists, after many mishaps and misadventures, appropriate a piece of abandoned farmland and horde a supply of ammunition, guns, explosives, pharmaceuticals, food, and synthetic water. They then build a twenty-foot wall around the compound and set to work making babies and raising cattle.

Eventually, they win over a large part of the local population (nine counties worth) with their philosophy and create a micro-nation called Peluria, which is to be measured, as the movement’s founder puts it “not by prosperity, but by the quality of men.”

But one is left wondering, will the Cauks prevail? Will the white race survive? Will they be “the winners” who get to write their own history, outnumbered, maligned, and despised as they are in that nightmare state that used to be America?

One can guess that Perdue had considerable fun writing The Node. Though the magical realism, so abundant in his other works, is not as prevalent here, the novel does contain a number of inter-textual references and inside jokes (another characteristic of Perdue’s fiction).

When, for instance, the protagonist overhears a mother “teaching her child the rudiments of what sounded like the old-fashioned English of a hundred years before,” he wonders:

Was this indeed the tongue that held sway in North America once, the dialect of Wolfe, Faulkner, and Perdue?

And later, he happens upon a faded and forgotten manuscript in a drawer titled Morning Crafts (a book of Perdue’s due to be published before the end of this year).

From Opportunities in Alabama Agriculture, to The Sweet-Scented Manuscript, to The New Austerities, to Lee, to Fields of Asphodel (and a number of other yet to be published novels) Perdue’s entire oeuvre involves a fictionalized version of his ancestors, his family, and himself (as his brazen alter-ego, Leland Pefley).

But The Node is the first work in which the American South’s most luminous radical reactionary ruminates upon and prognosticates about the future of the white race and the fate of his (and also our) descendents.

MacMillan has made available to us an excerpt of Pat Buchanan's Suicide of a Superpower audiobook. The atmosphere in this recording is, as you may expect, dark, grim, apocalyptic—one cannot help but imagine how this will sound on the other side of the catastrophe, once what we know today and once knew is gone, and this audio, surviving perhaps in fragments, found in some archeological site, petrified but somehow partially recovered and translated, provides the titans of the next manvantara with a glimpse of what it must have been like for people in the vanished American civilisation to live in the final slope of the Kali-Yuga.

You can hear the clip here.

From time to time I encounter the slogan ‘worse is better’ within dissidents on the Right. To me this has always sounded as a rationalisation, a mantra intended by the user to help him cope with loss, defeat, inaction, and helplessness. The reason is that, for worse to really be better, there would need to be a credible alternative to the existing system already in place, needing only the critical mass that would be made available by a collapsing system. And as at present a genuine alternative exists mostly in theory, and only very incipiently in practice, with credibility outside its cultural ghetto yet to be earned, for as long as that is the case, worse for us can only mean worse.

An iteration of the ‘worse is better’ mantra was recently enunciated in connection with the United States presidential elections of 2012, which the incumbent, Barack Obama, intends to fight against an as yet unspecified Republican candidate. It was argued that, in the light of Obama’s record to date and of precedent established by previous presidential second terms, an Obama win would be immensely beneficial. The assumption is that Obama will further discredit himself with a large-enough majority of voters, and that his discredit will infect the mainstream political establishment, causing voters to seek alternatives outside of this establishment. It was further argued that a Republican win would create the illusion of progress among the ill-informed, while only delaying, and ultimately opening the way, for further evil from the hard Left.

While the latter argument is correct, the former one relies on fallacies.