Talk:Harold Covington

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I notice that the founder of Wikipedia has become so disgusted with what has been done to his creation that he is now founding his own new online encyclopedia. The kind of egregious and defamatory statements contained in this absurd article are a classic example of the way that left-wing kooks have taken over Wikipedia and ruined what might have been a really useful source of knowledge.

-HAC

Contents

[edit] Edits by User:Haroldcovington

This article is being repeatedly changed to a version by a user who judging by his username claims to be, and presumably is, the subject. These new versions break many Wikipedia guidelines, particularly to do with neutral POV and sourcing of facts. If you want to edit the article, I'd suggest you start by reading the Help section. Meanwhile, I'm reverting again to the preceding version. As that makes my third reversion today, any further edits will mean the Wikipedia:Three-revert rule kicks in and we'll have to move on to requesting page protection, which will make this article a lot harder to edit.

If you have any particular challenges to facts in the article, here would be a good place to discuss them. Dogville 10:10, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Am I going to have to hire an attorney?

If you want to simply remove the article, fine. If not, I need to know who to speak to at Wikipedia about this. Guys, I know you think you're just doing your job, but the article you are publishing about me contains extreme inaccuracies and I WILL HIRE A LAWYER AND FILE A LAWSUIT FOR LIBEL if it is not corrected. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Haroldcovington (talk • contribs)


Not at all. There's no desire here to publish an inaccurate article. Known facts and published allegations are sourced and cited as such. You can certainly cite any denials of allegations, and if any of the published claims have been the subject of court action and retractions that would be very material and justify their removal from the piece. But it would be a lot more helpful to go through the existing article and point out what you think is wrong than to keep replacing it with a self-penned encomium.
Basically, your rewrite covers a lot of the same history (Greensboro, Collin) and, apart from heroising your involvement, doesn't seem to differ that much.
The problem with your rewrites are twofold. First, you need to cite published sources: you cite none. This is particularly important where, for example, you differ with generally accepted history, as in your claim that the Greensboro massacre was a "gun battle".
Second, you fail to stick to the required neutral point-of-view, though I notice your last version tries a bit harder on that front than the earlier "dead Reds" version.
It would be more productive if you edited the existing, sourced version rather than rewriting it wholesale.
It's against the rules for me to revert this again, so I've had to request page protection in the meantime. Dogville 10:32, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

Sorry about not signing my previous comment. Although I am familiar in a general sense with what Wikipedia is, I've never used this site before, just opened my account, and I am unfamiliar with its navigation.

I wish to point out that the existing Wikipedia article purporting to be about me is willfully inaccurate and malicious to the point of being libelous, and while I would rather not become embroiled in a long and expensive process that will probably take years, I will do so if necessary.

Bluntly--I have been putting up with this crap for years, and my patience with it has reached an end. It's defamatory and it's not true.

The "sources" cited are all of an extreme-left nature and are written by people acting out of a wide assortment of ulterior motives and hidden agendas, as paranoid as I know that sounds. But just because you're paranoid don't mean they ain't out to get you.

One of the biggest problems in the article is with citing the Southern Poverty Law Center of Morris Seligmann Dees as if it were an unbiased and legitimate source. It is not. I could go into Tolstoyan length as to why the SPLC is not a legitimate source (or a legitimate anything,) but suffice it to say that anything emanating from the SPLC is highly suspect. If you want "sources" on that I can probably track you down some really juicy stuff from the Montgomery, Alabama Advertiser. They know Morris Dees and his works.

I substituted what I believe to be a fair and accurate short appraisal of my own career. This is admittedly a stopgap, the purpose of which is to remove the libelous material. The "source" for this is the best of all sources, the horse's mouth, so to speak.

If this version is unacceptable, I will be glad to work with someone at Wikipedia to produce a more balanced article. Or better yet, why not simply remove the whole thing? I'm not that important an individual and I don't think that the world's storehouse of knowledge will be in any way diminished if I don't have a Wikipedia entry.

Guys, I REALLY don't want to screw around in courtrooms, but as far as my simply letting these lies stand--ain't gonna happen. Not under any circumstances.

-HAC

It wasn't a very long article and you clearly don't disagree with all of it as it has a lot of crossover with your version. And I don't think many people would agree with you that Time magazine or academic books are "extreme left". The Searchlight source could easily be substituted with several mainstream British newspapers of the time, as you must know.
I can assure you the article is not wilfully inaccurate or malicious, as I was the one who wrote it. I'm entirely open to correcting any inaccuracies. Why not take a couple of minutes to list which parts of the original piece you take issue with? Dogville 10:50, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Southern Poverty Law Centre

Not that I wish to support your claims about the SPLC, but it was not cited as a source in any version of this article. Dogville 10:57, 8 May 2006 (UTC)


Actually, yes, it was. The SPLC was cited right after the phrase "Covington is the author of a number of novels" in the version of your original article which I just looked at.

The original version of the Wikipedia article purporting to be my biography contains a number of significant inaccuracies of fact regarding dates, organizations, and events. The OVERALL EFFECT of the article is defamatory, as of course it is intended to be--for example as when British leftist Larry O'Hara's false allegation that I am a "state asset" is left unchallenged, but the high incidence of factual inaccuracy demonstrates that the people who compiled it don't have a very high regard for the truth in general.

This is not just poor scholarship; it is a violation of one of the historian's primary intellectual goals as Barbara Tuchman defined it, the attainment of "Wie Es Wirklich War"--how it really was. History is more than just a collection of facts, of course, but if the facts are inaccurate then any analysis is faulty and the sum total of human knowledge suffers accordingly. Okay, off my soap box.

1. I did not "emerge" in 1979. I first became involved in National Socialism in 1972. By 1979 I had already run in two election campaigns in North Carolina and I was widely known locally. The implication that I just sort of "appeared" on the morning of Greensboro, common among left-wing conspiracy theorists is false.

2. Glenn Miller was at that time a member of the NSPA. His own White Patriot Party did not come into being until 1983 or so, if memory serves, but in any case, some years after Greensboro. For the writer to claim that White Patriot Party people were involved in Greensboro shows a disregard for facts which is sloppy at best. It shows they just plain don't know what they're talking about, and can't be bothered to check.

3. Mordecai Levy is/was insane, and was generally recognized to be such by everyone including his own Jewish Defense League colleagues, who expelled him from their group. Even Gerry Gable refused to have anything to do with him. His subsequent "Jewish Defense Organization" consisted of exactly one member--Mordecai Levy. When I say that he is/was insane (I don't know if he's still alive) I am simply repeating what a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation determined many years later after he was involved in a shooting affray in New York City with his former Jewish Defense League associate, Irv Rubin. I can also personally attest, from hundreds of obscene and threatening phone calls that Levy made to me down through the years, that the man is mentally and emotionally unbalanced. To treat Mordecai Levy as a legitimate source for anything is simply ludicrous. Five minutes of conversation with him would show anyone how ridiculous that idea is.

4. I have never seen any bona fide proof that any such "press conference" on Levy's part ever took place. Basically, it seems to be an ex post facto attempt by Mordecai to get in on the Greensboro action. This canard has become an apocryphal case of left-wing conspiracy theory, one that has been repeated so often that it has become generally accepted as fact. And yet I can tell you that nothing of the kind occurred; back then, when my name was mentioned in any context I always got called by the media for comment, and not one reporter ever asked me about it. I can also tell you that the FBI agents in charge of the Greensboro case had no knowledge of any such "press conference," and that they considered Levy to be a kook. They came by my office on Hargett Street every week or so for some months after November 3rd and did Clint Eastwood impressions, and they never mentioned any such "press conference." They didn't know Levy from dog doo.

5. Berkeley Press is a source as left-wing as Berkeley University was back in The Day, and I believe still is. It is said that outside of North Korea and Cuba, the only remaining bastions of Marxism in the world are American University campuses. Anything coming out of Berkeley is going to be as Red as a London double-decker bus, and everybody with two brain cells to rub together knows it.

6. There were sixteen defendants in the Greensboro case, not six. Six of them went ON TRIAL in Greensboro--an important distinction, because the D. A., Michael Schlosser, knew from the beginning that it was a clear-cut case of self defense and his case against the other ten was so shaky he didn't dare bring them into court. I know, this is a nit-pick, but you are purporting to tell a story here, and you're telling it wrong if you play fast and loose with the facts.

7. The contents of the "dirt box" regarding Mr. Collin were not found by me, but by members of the Chicago NSPA unit, nor have I ever "claimed" that I found them as your article asserts. Another factual inaccuracy which you may claim to be minor, but it IS an inaccuracy. If Wikipedia can't get its facts right, why should anyone use it or trust it as a source?

8. I did not "go underground" in March 1981. This implies flight of some sort and is a completely inaccurate and defamatory assertion. I moved to Charleston, South Carolina where I continued to publish a newsletter and maintained full contact with most of my previous friends, comrades, and associates, as I did when I was in Europe. There has never in my life been any mystery as to my whereabouts, among those who have some right or need to know. I have never "gone into hiding" and to assert that I have done so is defamatory.

9. The assertion of British leftist Larry O'Hara that I am a "state asset" is scurrilous, defamatory, malicious in intent, is based on no personal knowledge, and is completely without foundation of any kind, now or in the past. O'Hara is a left-wing kook and I don't take him seriously, but constant repetition of this kind of disinformation and treating people like O'Hara as if they were legitimate journalists or sources is what I have to take a stand against at some point.

Any fruit loop can publish an authoritative-sounding article on a web site or in a loony-left publication claiming that George W. Bush is an extraterrestrial being who is directed by microwave signals beamed at his brain from the planet Neptune. Would you allow something like that to be used as a "source" in the case of someone whom you knew darned well had the capability to compel correction?

This is running way long, but to sum up: the article which Wikipedia posted about me is based on untrue information, much of it published with malicious intent, from illegitimate sources which are politically and personally biased and who are in some cases as crazy as loons. I am not an important public figure by any stretch of the imagination, but I would suggest to you that it is important for Wikipedia to establish and maintain a reputation for factual accuracy and truth. Otherwise your web site is useless as a research tool or resource and there is no point to any of what you are doing. My impression was that you want your site to be a bona fide source of information for the public. If that is the case, then you're way, way off the mark and you're going to become just another internet joke along with rotten.com etc.

-Harold A. Covington

Thanks for the detailed response. I'll try to separate out the helpful corrections, matters of dispute, and entertaining rhetoric, and update as appropriate when I have more time. The article was compiled from sources that I did my best to reflect but there's really no attempt to misrepresent the facts (you must understand that from my perspective the most damaging thing is your white supremacism, over which there is no dispute, so defamation is kind of beside the point). You don't, in the above, contest the C18 associations that were widely reported in the mainstream press and the subject of a television documentary; do I assume that's not something you consider defamatory? Dogville 12:18, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

C-18 I don't mind. There's a lot of crap been written about my involvement with C-18 (most of it by Gerry Gable) but that's one of those "if you can't stand the heat stay out of the kitchen" things. Besides, they were some fine lads I was proud to know and assist. Tommy Atkins at his best.

Actually, I'm not a White supremacist, I'm a White separatist, and the difference is roughly that between a Tridentine Roman Catholic and a Muslim imam, but I understand most people don't get that.

What I will NOT stand for is any allegation, implication, or insinuation that I am some kind of informer or government agent, or ever have been. This allegation is completely untrue, and since to make it is to imply that I work or have worked for a government which now legally and openly practices torture, detention without trial, racial profiling, and which commits war crimes and atrocities without number, I would say that is most DEFINITELY defamatory.

'Tis a strange world we live in, Master Jack.

-HAC

May 9th, 2006 - Yesterday I posted a shorter version of the article with suggested legitimate news sources instead of weirded out left-wing kooks. I've removed that because it was just adding more wordage, and because apparently this has been referred to "NPOV Dispute" which will take a while to resolve. In the meantime, my hastily cobbled-together autobio seems to be staying up in place of the lefty rant, which is fine by me.

Let me make this offer to Dogville. He wants "verifiable sources". I am not sure how some fringe-left self-appointed "journalist" who has never met me in his life, and who clearly knows nothing about my life or my work can be considered a "verifiable source," especially when he offers nothing except pure personal opinion based on politically-motivated malice, i.e. Larry O'Hara's mendacious assertion without proof of any kind that I am a "state asset." Nor can anything whatsoever from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a private organization which raises millions of dollars by assaulting and destroying the civil rights and liberties of Americans of European descent, be considered in any way a legitimate source of information or validation. Trashing people like me is how Morris Dees makes his millions.

My e-mail is harold_covington@hotmail.com. If Dogville wants to do an article on me, rather than using neo-Marxist nuts as sources, why not simply go to the horse's mouth? Why not just ASK ME?

-HAC

Apologies for the delay: real work is getting in the way of finding the necessary time and probably will for a few days more. You'll notice I've left your versions in place with the NPOV note until I can find time to do a redraft. And thanks for the offer -- unfortunately, while it sounds pretty reasonable on the face of it (ignoring the issue of how we know you're really HAC; I kind of assume you are) -- Wikipedia rules don't allow "horse's mouth" sources to trump published ones. In fact, original research is flat-out not allowed, and verifiability (against published sources) is more important than truth. It may sound crazy but I didn't make the rules -- for more detail see here. (If you were say to publish a book of your memoirs, those would obviously be a valid source.)
You must of course know that the competing claims to truth of the SPLC versus you will be less straightforwardly judged than you assert above by those not of your political persuasion. It's a common problem with writing articles in this field -- the only publications who cover it in detail are ones like Searchlight, who the subjects then insist can't possibly be used as sources. [Yes, I know Searchlight is flawed, has an agenda, can't always be believed; on the other hand a lot of what it prints does turn out to be true, and blacklisting it wholesale shuts out a huge amount of detail.] I hadn't found the SPLC source mainly because I'd used it to backup my claim that you've written novels, which you don't dispute.
By the way, as you were a member of the American Nazi Party and used the phrase 'national socialist' in your own draft, why do you seem to object to the descriptor 'neo-nazi'?
Again, apologies for the delay. (God, this is surreal.) Dogville 13:54, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Haroldcovington's edits

I went ahead and reverted the edits to a version before Haroldcovington (specifically to Dogville's latest revert). Hope this was alright *crosses fingers* Ash Lux (talk | Contribs) 22:02, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] NSWPP/ANP

Removed statement that the latter-day "National Socialist White People's Party" headed by Harold Covington had formerly been the "American Nazi Party". See http://www.adl.org/poisoning_web/longtime.asp, which states: "Following Rockwell's assassination by a disgruntled party member in 1967, Matthias (Matt) Koehl took over his American Nazi Party, renaming it the National Socialist White People's Party....In 1982, Koehl dropped the name NSWPP in favor of the name 'The New Order,' and Covington's NSPA disbanded. In 1994, Covington founded a new group using the old name once used by Koehl: NSWPP." The latter-day NSWPP was a new organization, distinct from the organization of the same name descended from the American Nazi Party. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tom Goldman (talk • contribs) 23:21, 8 December 2007 (UTC)