Political Fictions: The “Aryan” Medievalisms of Harold A. Covington

Summary

In the twenty-first century, political medievalism has been dominated by the right wing, including but not limited to far-right violent extremists. Scholarship exploring the medievalisms of the post-war far right has tended towards the very contemporary and reactive with, for example, examinations of the manifesto of the Oslo White terrorist murderer, the digital medievalisms of the English Defence League and Al-Qaida, US identitarians and other extremist groups, and the circulation of medievalist memes. These investigations are typically focused on the digital realm, including social media, and often on overtly political speech. Cord Whitaker finds roots of alt-right medievalisms in twentieth-century fascisms, but the medievalism of the far right between the end of World War II and the present remains under-studied, as do medievalist novels by extremists. Novels by White extremists, particularly William L. Pierce’s infamous The Turner Diaries, have received some scholarly attention, but this has without exception focused on those that narrativize violent White revolution set in near-future dystopias. In this essay, I explore the political function of the medievalist novels of Harold A. Covington (1953–2018), an American White nationalist and neo-Nazi. Covington articulated his vision of an ideal “Aryan” nation in his medievalist novels, which construct a male-led White nuclear family as a microcosm for the political state.

Covington was a prolific writer of both non-fiction and fiction, which he disseminated online from the early days of the internet, including on blogs and internet radio, and via print-on-demand services and e-books in PDF and other formats. He was notorious for having organized the National Socialist Party of America march that resulted in the Greensboro Massacre. Covington’s chief political goals were neo-Nazi revolution and establishment of an “Aryan” ethnostate in the Pacific Northwest of North America. To this end, he founded the Northwest Front in 2008, building on earlier ideas, including those of Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, to first encourage migration of Whites to that area and then incite separatist revolution and the founding of what he named the Northwest American Republic (NAR). He developed and articulated this political project through both non-fiction and fiction. His most infamous novels are the Northwest quintet, a series of near-future dystopias that are “blueprints and fantasies” of his plan for achieving these specific political goals.