Stephen Webster, American Renaissance, April 2002

Ward Kendall, Hold Back This Day, Writers Club Press, 2001, 179 pp.

What will the world be like if all the current anti-white trends — multiculturalism, the denigration of whites, miscegenation, plummeting white birthrates and massive non-white immigration into the West — continue? Could it resemble the world described by Ward Kendall in this chilling dystopian novel, in which a handful of whites struggle to survive domination by non-whites?

This story unfolds in the mid-22nd century, nearly 100 years after the planet has been forcibly united under World Gov, an authoritarian regime dedicated to eliminating racism and discrimination of all kinds. World Gov’s cure for racism is forced blending of peoples to engineer a single human racial hue called Skintone 5 (whites are Skintone 1, African blacks are Skintone 10). A new, state-mandated faith, Chrislamhinbuddism, has eliminated religious discrimination. World Gov encourages homosexuality as a population-control measure, but still struggles to feed its 19 billion subjects. Famine is widespread, and the government orders euthanasia for the wretches it cannot feed.

Jeff Huxton is a skoolplex administrator, or principal, whose job is to make sure students learn proper attitudes. He is an unblended white, who sticks out uncomfortably in a brown world. He suffers prejudice, but accepts it because of the role his forefathers played in creating the world of white privilege World Gov thankfully replaced with the Unification. He and his second wife, Li Ming, have produced a beautiful Skintone 6.2 daughter, Puja, but he is still haunted by the death of his first wife, a Skintone 1 like himself, during a race riot in Ciudad Detroit years earlier. He worries that his son by her, Adam, also an unblended white, will not fit in. He is so committed to the ideals of World Gov that he envies the nondescript racelessness of his boss, Ahmad Yehudit:

Yehudit was a natural, Jeff realized, the end genetic result of parents, grandparents, and great grandparents who themselves had been racially mixed and remixed until all traces of their original racial ancestry had been dissolved into one great vat of racial homogeneity. For like a child gifted with high intelligence, Yehudit was ‘gifted’ with an utterly bland racial appearance. Being of no particular race, culture, nation, or ethnicity, he was the 22nd century’s Everyman. ‘The Ideal,’ Jeff thought. ‘Everything the Unification had fought to achieve.’

Huxton, increasingly worried by 16-year-old Adam’s troubles in school, searches his room and finds he has joined a terrorist organization called Nayra (Never Again Yield Racial Allegiance, or Aryan spelled backwards). Nayra plans to hijack a spaceship, and Huxton pretends to join the plot in the hope of sabotaging it and keeping Adam out of trouble. There follows much adventure, in which Huxton meets the heroic Nayra leader, Karl Ramstrom, but is not swayed by his eloquence or his fierce racial pride.

The Nayra plot succeeds despite Huxton’s efforts, but Huxton manages to convince World Gov authorities that he valiantly tried to stop it, and is rewarded with a trip to the World Gov capital, Beijing. Many plot twists later, and after considerable maturation of his own understanding about race, Huxton has a final confrontation with Yehudit, now a senior World Gov official. Huxton discovers the famous quotation from Abraham Lincoln arguing that the physical differences between blacks and whites will always prevent them from living in social and political equality.

‘So they knew . . . even back then,’ said Huxton. Yehudit is unfazed. ‘So they did. What of it? Your kind were too weak to heed the warning. For centuries, your kind held the world in the palm of your hand . . . and yet you gave it up . . . And now, this is how you end.’ ‘We gave up the world believing we could bring about a nobler and better humanity.’ Ahmad laughed. ‘I know something of those times myself. Even World Gov has preserved the truth, deep inside its archives.’ ‘And what is the truth, Ahmad?’ The man who was of all races and no race at all, replied, ‘It was not nobility of spirit that made your leaders turn over the world to us non-whites. It was fear, Jeff. Nothing more. Just cowardly fear . . . Your people should have listened to a man like [Lincoln] . . . while you still had the chance.’

In the end, of course, Huxton makes a noble sacrifice and the whites are saved, presumably never to repeat their past errors.

There is very little modern white nationalist fiction, most of it awful. Hold Back This Day is something of an exception. Ward Kendall has written a compelling story, set in a convincingly developed future. Unfortunately, the writing is florid, and the characters are undeveloped. Nayra leader Karl Ramstrom — scientist, killer, secret agent, charismatic leader — is far too good to be true. Still, fans of science fiction and futuristic novels may well enjoy this book so long as they are not expecting another Brave New World.

Every broad-based movement eventually develops a literature that reflects its commitments and sensibilities. Racial solidarity used to figure in the backgrounds of European and American novels just as naturally as sky and mountains — that is to say, just as naturally as it did in daily life. It will be long before we return to those sane and healthy times, but Hold Back This Day is a beginning.