I say shock, the parlous state of Harold’s health was hardly a secret, all the same I hadn’t expected him to pass so soon, and I find it difficult to believe he could have died as long ago as July 18 - nearly a year - without my having read or heard something.
Passing over his various obituaries, it is clear Harold is remembered by his detractors as a notorious bigot, with more than a little justification, and even by some people on his own side as a pernicious influence. He became a non-person to his brother Ben. This article contains some interesting background information on Harold, though the reader will have to decide for himself how much of it is truth and how much spin. The idea that white supremacy is a “mental illness” is certainly quaint.
Harold has of course been accused of being a state asset, primarily because of his outrageous rhetoric. He has been accused of forging documents, a claim that is not entirely baseless as I know from one e-mail exchange with him.
However Harold is remembered by others, I will always remember him as a true friend in my darkest hour, certainly my darkest hour in a long time when a filthy cabal tried to and nearly did destroy me over a triviality, basically an off-the-cuff remark. The lies they told and the spin they put on it still takes my breath away. All Harold knew was that a cyber-correspondent, a man he had never met, was in deep trouble, and he did what he could to broadcast my plight to the world; he also wrote to me several times and sent me a mailing I much appreciated. Later he sent me copies of his Northwest Novels, one of which I read intensely, and later still a copy of Give Me The Night, which I reviewed.
It is likely that as his brother points out Harold became anti-black due to childhood experiences, though the claim that he was a coward, that he was ever a coward, is too stupid to comment on. People who engage in his sort of extremism, including on the far left, often have more courage than common sense. Harold himself recognised this; while I have no doubt he was as horrified as the rest of us by the atrocities of 9/11, he expressed amazement, almost admiration for the way it was carried out, and that withstanding his later comments about the entire outrage being a false flag, a view shared by a lot of people across a wide political spectrum who should know better.
In spite of his so-called racism, Harold sympathised with the Arab cause and everyone who suffered under Zionism and other fascistic ideologies. And now I am going to say something that will probably make his friends laugh as much as his enemies. If Harold had lived in Nazi Germany, he would not have joined the SS, he would have ended up in a concentration camp. Had he lived in Amsterdam in 1944, he would have hidden the Frank family rather than betrayed them.
I say this because not only did Harold sympathise with the underdog, but like me, he was a born contrarian. Also like me he experienced the full force of wanton state power, and was equally contemptuous of the petty sadists who wield it. Although he was a student of history and had an encyclopaedic knowledge of it from the perspective of Western Man, he made the same mistake as so many black “radicals”. When they come up against it, they call it the white power structure; Harold called it ZOG. The reality is that whoever wields such power will crush anyone if they have the chance. Anyone, white, black or Jew, poor or rich, radical, progressive, or just plain ordinary. Anyone who doubts this should study the cases of Conrad Black, Dinesh D’Souza, or more historically, the black separatist Marcus Garvey and the atheist John William Gott.
Having said that, the people Harold hated most were the apparatchiks of the power structure, and he had no problem in calling them out. The truth is that Harold was at heart a Libertarian, one who believed passionately in The Fourteen Words. Recall that famous saying from the Middle East: “I and my brother against my cousin, I and my cousin against our neighbor, I and my neighbor against the world.”
There is no expression of hate here, ditto “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”.
Harold would gladly have seen that phrase universalised, even for Jews, but he decided to concentrate on saving his own people. What is so bad about that? The answer is of course nothing, and it is only his political enemies who would have us believe so by their incessant demonisation of everything white. And it is a sad fact that so many of those political enemies have been Jews, as the better among the Jews readily acknowledge, including Michael Levin and Paul Gottfried.
I could write a lot more about Harold, I will add only that he had great taste in music, introducing me to both Axe and Loreena McKennitt, the latter of whom he once said convinced him there really was a God in Heaven by the angelic quality of her voice.
I am not ashamed to say that after learning yesterday of Harold’s death I was not dry eyed. He deserved a better fate if only to live for the Biblical three score and ten. To his detractors he was Weird Harold doubtless among many other appellations; to me he was Wicked Harold, after a poem I wrote about Sonia Gable, but wicked in the colloquial sense. Now he walks in Valhalla, unlike most of his enemies and not a few fellow travellers, who will be going to the other place.
R.IP. Harold
