by Ward Kendall
Counter-Currents, SF, 2011 (first published 2001)
A Review and Plot Summary by Joseph Rex Kerrick
1. The Future Has Changed
The genre of this novel might be called ”white racial salvation”, which has seen an upsurge of published titles since the turn of the millennium. It was the first of the new batch I’ve read, and it harked me back to the original groundbreaker: The Turner Diaries (1978) by Andrew Macdonald, aka William Pierce, the leader of National Vanguard. Like a lot of science fiction set in the future, both books are extrapolations of the society of their own time, and what struck me was the difference in the racial landscape between the two eras as reflected in the stories. Back in the ’70s and ’80s it was still possible to imagine that a well-disciplined white revolutionary group of sufficient size and calibre could use sabotage and clandestine military operations to overthrow a corrupt old order and reconquer the USA and even the world. The verisimilitude was strong enough for the target audience that a fair number of folks were inspired to act out the fantasy, notably Bob Mathews and his Bruder Schwegen, and the perpetrators of the Oklahoma City bombing.
By stark contrast, in the 22nd century of Hold Back This Day (only 23 years later in real time), the whole world is ruled by an iron-fisted dictatorship dedicated to wiping out racial differences by enforced interbreeding ~ and it has already nearly succeeded. Global population has skyrocketed to 19 billion, a vast brown-skinned mass. The remaining whites are a miniscule fraction of a percentage, and are brainwashed into seeing themselves as inferior freaks. The further the plot unfolds, the more we realize that the situation is racially hopeless, that there is no place in the new order for self-affirming whites, and no hope of overthrowing it. And sure enough, the climactic solution is to leave the planet.
2. Plot Summary
The protagonist is Jeff Huxton, a school administrator who in the racial nomenclature is a “skintone 1”, meaning pure white. Pure blacks are skintone 10, with the rest of the population in between. The goal of World Gov is to blend everyone into skintones 5 & 6, a nice uniform brown, which already comprises the great hump of the racial bell curve. Jeff has done well in his profession despite the terrible handicap of being white. Part of the reason is that racial discrimination is still formally illegal, but the limitations of the law are revealed when we learn that Jeff’s first wife was in a protest movement of skintones 1 and 2 against anti-white prejudice. She was killed when a group of protestors was attacked by gangs of skintones 4, 5, and 6. Jeff is now married to a woman named Li Ming of a comfortably middle-range skintone, and they have a daughter Puja, just slightly lighter; but Jeff’s son Adam by his first wife is a skintone 1 like him.
Just as the multiracial agenda is being fulfilled by eliminating racial differences, so also multiculturalism has triumphed by wiping out the many cultures. Massive chunks of the populace are uprooted from their native turf by World Gov and replanted elsewhere, preferably where the most divergent type of culture had prevailed. There are place-names like “Guadalajarastadt” in Germany, inhabited mostly by Mexicans. At the beginning of the story Jeff has been reassigned from a “Skoolplex” in Europe to one in Africa, and as the family arrives on a monorail they see hardly any difference except in the remaining patches of natural landscape. We hear that the last unblended cohort of Europeans has arrived in Africa from Iceland. Et cetera.
Jeff has accepted the Big Lie that such a world is the fulfillment of a glorious ideal, but is tormented by ambivalent angst for a number of reasons. In his youth, a dying old man gave him a clue to a terrible secret about the genesis of the new order. Jeff followed it up and risked a trip to a forbidden zone in his native Australia: he searched an abandoned space port, descending into a deep underground silo-complex where there were signs of a battle. At the bottom he found a cache of datadisks which told the story: back in the 21st century whites had rebelled against the rapidly coagulating power of World Gov, and fought a bloody last stand which enabled fifty thousand of them to escape to colonies that had been established on Mars. The remainder were slaughtered, tortured, and executed en masse in gas chambers ~ a white holocaust.
In the next time-sequence Adam is 16, and is having serious psychosocial problems. His class is having their “First Time” field trip, in which they’ll be guided by participating teachers into their “government-mandated socially-engineered first fuck”. It’s especially traumatic for Adam because he’s so unpopular that he got paired for the trip with the “ugliest girl in class”. Jeff checks the school records on his computer and discovers that she’s a stunningly beautiful Nordic girl. The ugliness is in the self-perceptions of the young people struggling to exist as white “freaks” among their “normal” brown peers. Adam takes his anger out on his father, ranting that all his problems are because “I look like you!”
Some months later Adam has become even less communicative than usual. Worried that he might be planning suicide, Jeff searches his room and is shocked to find a plasma handgun. Private weaponry has been totally banned by World Gov, the enforcement methods are strict, and violation is punished by death. Etched on the gun is the cryptic word “Nayra”. Urged on by desperation, Jeff snoops through Adam’s computer files till he finds a journal which tells the story: Adam was approached in a park by a white girl named Emerald (for the color of her eyes) who persuaded him to join a “secret terrorist faction” named Nayra (spelled backwards it’s “an old word that stands for white people”). The journal tells how Adam met the leader of Nayra, a man named Karl Ramstrom. Over the following months Adam took part in the military training and other activities of the group under Ramstrom’s charismatic tutelage. This restored his self-respect and banished his shame about being white. The account hints strongly that Adam and Emerald fell in love. And to Jeff’s horror it reveals Nayra’s plan to steal a solarship from Johannesburg Space Port and travel to a Martian colony named Avalon. The target date is only two days away. Finally Adam wrote that Emerald was pregnant by him.
On the fateful day Jeff tails Adam on the monorail, in a walk through an abandoned industrial area outside Johannesburg, and finally into a building. He’s waylaid by Ramstrom and his comrades; they know who he is, and that he hopes to somehow prevent Adam from taking part in the mission to Mars. Karl is a man of boundless confidence, and tries to lift Jeff out of his pragmatic resignation to the ideal of racial harmony, which he knows is false. Karl skewers him with the self-evident facts of how life in the One World Order has become a hell, not only for whites but for everyone ~ except the members of World Gov. Jeff feigns being won over, and the scheme unfolds.
The Nayra members disguise themselves as officers of Wopo, the World Police, and gain access to the spacecraft. They’re betrayed by a double agent named Marten; he releases a gas that knocks them all unconscious, except for Karl and Jeff who are still outside the ship. Marten holds them at gunpoint, but Karl’s martial skills are so keen that he attacks anyway and kills him. In the scuffle Jeff grabs a gun and gets the drop on Karl, demanding his son back. Karl reveals that he knows that the Avalon colony is still alive because he was born and raised there, and the true mission is to “repatriate” to Mars as many more whites as possible within a year, and then break contact with Earth. Jeff is still adamant, and Karl agrees to let him take Adam. His word is his bond as the two of them carry the unconscious Adam from the ship. Wopo jets appear, Karl boards the ship, and Jeff gets his groggy son to run with him a safe distance. By the time Adam comes to his senses, he’s shocked to see the ship lifting off without him. In anguish he shouts “Emerald!” Wopo fires missiles at the solarship, but they fall short and explode in its wake. The sight of the ascending vessel stirs something deep in Jeff, and he silently shouts: Go, Karl! Go!
The aftermath is that Adam can’t readjust to “normal” life among “browned humanity”. He enters college but knows that most of what he’s taught are lies, like the rewritten history that attributes most great white achievements to Africans and other racial groups. He finally cracks in class and starts screaming that a white man was the first to land on the Moon; for such “delusions” he gets forcibly committed to a maximum-security “mentalplex” in Antarctica. Thus Jeff realizes his tragic mistake, and goes through agonies of regret. Meanwhile, Li Ming divorces him for a browner man, and takes their daughter with her.
It’s increasingly difficult for Jeff to carry on the hypocrisy of his own teaching career, but he receives an invitation to a ceremony at World Gov headquarters in Beijing to get an Outstanding Citizen award for attempting to foil the Nayra plot to steal the solarship. This gives him an inside look at what life is like for the rulers of Earth. Mass starvation has reached the point where millions of “nutritionally challenged citizens” are euthanized daily, but the World Gov High Quorum are well-fed and “eat with sensual abandon”. At the event Jeff meets up with an old colleague, a man named Ahmad Yehudit, his superior at the skoolplex who has now risen to the exalted rank of Commissioner of Multiculturalism. He brings Jeff along to a private party after the awards ceremony, to the luxurious house of a Quorum member which is under water for security. He observes that the relationship of the guests to the servants is that of masters to slaves, and that their attitude to him is like master to beast. Ahmad reveals to him the secret “philosophy of power” that justifies the special privilege: humanity operates on two levels, and so must it ever be. Furthermore, says Ahmad, if the people knew the truth they’d revolt and the world would collapse. Thus Jeff learns that the noble ideal of human brotherhood was no more than a carefully-tended illusion.
Spoiler Alert! I’ll now give a summary of the concluding sequence of Hold Back This Day. Those who intend to read the book may want to scroll down to chapter 3: Commentary.
The Avalon colonists are working on a star drive to reach an Earth-like planet that has been discovered in the nearby Centauri system. World Gov wants the star drive so that the bloated rulers can escape the looming collapse of their own order. They launch an invasion fleet to Mars with the last of the solarships, which are now irreplaceable because of the lack of white genius and technical expertise. Jeff is brought along as a prisoner because he acquired secret information about the star drive from a white scientist who collaborated with Karl Ramstrom.
The invaders manage to take the Avalons by surprise and begin to overrun the settlement in pitched combat. Jeff escapes and befriends a little girl named Mara whose parents have been killed in the attack. She’s surprised to hear that he’s from Earth, because she thought all Earth people were brown-skinned “mults”. They’re picked up by a commando unit headed by Karl, and go to a magnificent building which is a museum of white history. Karl reveals that a starship is in a chamber below, preparing to take off for Centauri with fifteen thousand specially-selected whites aboard ~ the best remnant of the race, the cream of the crop. But before they can reach the elevator to go down, World Gov troops blast into the museum. Karl, Jeff, and Mara make it to a sheltering niche but are pinned down. Ahmad Yehudit shouts an order for them to come out and surrender or be blown away. Karl has a belt full of plasma grenades, and he wants to sacrifice himself to create a diversion so that Jeff and Mara can make a run for the elevator. Jeff says that a man like Karl will be needed on the new planet much more than himself, and volunteers for the suicide mission. Impressed by the nobility of the gesture, and the pragmatic truth of the assertion, Karl agrees.
Jeff steps out to face Yehudit, and they have an ironic conversation about the folly of the white race in succumbing to the masochistic ideal that cost them their existence as a people. Jeff gets the last word as he detonates the grenades. The final scene is twelve years later as Karl beholds an idyllic landscape of farms and homesteads on the shores of New Europe Bay, and observes that “the first generation of Centaurans was already growing strong and sturdy under the light of another sun.”
3. Commentary
I was struck by the fact that the heroic white leader is named Ramstrom. Karl is Swedish, and “strom” is a familiar nominal suffix in that language. The syllable “ram”, though, has no meaning in Swedish, and I doubt that it’s ever used as the prefix in a name; so clearly Kendall is using the English word “ram” with its potent symbolism of masculine driving force. It’s also possible that he had heard about RamaSpirit, whose genesis was in May 2000, the year before publication of Hold Back This Day. If not, then I feel sure that he was subliminally influenced by it in the choice of name, because the coming of the Ram at the turn of the millennium sent a powerful psychic-spiritual wave rippling out through the white collective unconscious. Millions were affected by it, and continue to be, but only a few have so far consciously awakened to the source.
We know, of course, that the program of racial conglomeration and white extermination is not driven merely by misguided liberal ideals ~ and so does Ward Kendall. He chose to reveal the identity of the perpetrators of the global plot only in symbolic form, but he did it so plainly and dramatically that I can hardly believe that an otherwise astute whiteside reviewer, John Londen, somehow missed it and criticized the book for “the complete absence of any mention of Jewish power and influence. That really is the elephant in the room and a major omission.” In fact the Jewish power is clearly identified right in chapter one in the person of Ahmad Yehudit, whose surname is one of the oldest and most common Yiddish-based slurs for “Jew”, with a ‘t’ simply added at the end. Including the first name, we can easily guess that the author is insinuating that the character is “a crazy Jew” ~ i.e., a mad Yehudi. Furthermore, he’s described as a big man with “a lumbering way of walking, as if he were a bull elephant moving slowly through a herd of gazelles”; then he reaches out “a thick leathery hand”. He’s definitely the “elephant in the room”, and it seems downright uncanny how this anticipates and answers Londen’s critique!
Yehudit is just as much a racial blend as all the other citizens who match the milk chocolate ideal; in the climactic sequence he’s described as “the man who was of all races and yet no race at all”. And like everyone else, he’s a member of the one universal religion, “Chrislamhinbuddhism”, and worships “the four gods: Jesus, Allah, Vishnu, and Buddha”. We note that a certain religion and god somehow got left out of the polyglot amalgam, and if Kendall is consciously making a symbolic point, I take it to be that the Jewish power-clique has been willing to sacrifice what racial homogeneity they may have had, and even the observance of their religion, in order to seize total political-secular power. And the subtext for those who know is that their overweening sense of tribal identity would survive even if stripped to this essential. When Ahmad gets promoted to the High Quorum, we see him exercising a decisive influence among his brown peers; the implication is that once the racial and national identity of all the other peoples has been eliminated, the Jews will be able to manipulate the leaders much more readily than they do now.
In the events leading up to the climax, Jeff regards the carnage wreaked on the Avalon colony as “grim evidence of Ahmad Yehudit’s iron will to exterminate the white race right down to the last gene.” So there it is ~ the raw essentials of the best-documented “conspiracy theory” in history are all there between the covers of this book. There are no major omissions. You don’t even have to read between the lines, just peer through the transparent layer of symbolism.
Lastly I’ll offer some critical remarks, which shouldn’t put off anyone who might be inclined to read the book; obviously I view it as an important work or I wouldn’t have given it such extensive treatment. The quality of the writing is definitely not literary grade, but is within the range of commercial pop fiction; and it’s much better than that of some small-press racial novels of the past. Other reviewers who liked HBTD said it was fast-paced and compelling, and that the character of Jeff Huxton was well-drawn. For me, though, the narrative was bogged down by Jeff’s repetitive, redundant, and unconvincing soul-searching about the race-blended ideal and the bloody truth behind how it was achieved. My standard is pretty high, since I enjoy the deep multi-dimensional characters of great literature, and so for me Jeff didn’t come across as a real person but as an ideological instrument, a mouthpiece for a point of view. This can be a legitimate type of fictional character (just consider John Galt and his one-dimensional crew), and I’ve created a few myself along the way.
The Kin of Aries 
Where do I get this book?
Click on the title link at the top of the post to go to the Amazon page for it.