The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald), the late leader of the National Alliance, a white separatist organization. The novel depicts a violent racist revolutionary struggle in the United States that escalates into global genocide, leading to the extermination of all people who are not white. For novelist Pierce, this was not a dystopian outcome, but rather the fulfillment of his "dream of a White world".
The novel was initially only available through mail order and at gun shows, and partially serialized in National Alliance publications. Sales of the book have been estimated as high as 500,000 copies. [citation needed] However, such figures are very unlikely for a non-mainstream fictional publication of this kind. The novel is now available for sale through mainstream book sources (ISBN 1-56980-086-3), or freely available from white supremacist websites.
According to the book description accompanying the 1996 edition published by Barricade Books, the United States Department of Justice considers the novel to be a manifesto for far right militia groups, while the Federal Bureau of Investigation believes that it served as inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
Plot
The narrative starts with a foreword set in the year 2099, one hundred years after most, if not all, of the non-whites in the world have been killed and a white supremacist revolutionary world government has been established. The bulk of the book then quotes a recently discovered diary of a man named Earl Turner, an active member of the movement that caused these events. The book details a violent overthrow of the United States federal government by Turner and his comrades and a brutal contemporaneous race war that takes place first in North America, and then the rest of the world.
The story starts soon after the US federal government has confiscated all civilian firearms in the US under the "Cohen Act", and the "Organization" of which Turner and his cohorts are members "go underground" to launch a guerrilla war against the "System", which is depicted as the totality of the government, media and economy that is under "Jewish control" (which equates, in the book, with support of multiculturalism). The Organization starts with acts such as the bombing of FBI headquarters and continues to prosecute an ongoing, low level campaign of terrorism, assassination and economic sabotage throughout the United States. Turner's exploits lead to his initiation into the "Order", an inner cadre that directs the Organization and whose existence remains secret to both the System and ordinary Organization members.
Eventually, the Organization seizes physical control of Southern California, including nuclear weapons at Vandenberg Air Force Base; ethnically cleanses the area of all blacks, Hispanics, and Asians; and summarily executes all Jews and "race-traitors". They then use both this base of operations and their nuclear weapons to open a wider war in which they launch nuclear strikes against New York City and Israel, initiate a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, and plant nuclear weapons and new cells throughout North America. The diary section ends with the protagonist flying an airplane equipped with an atomic bomb on a suicide mission to destroy The Pentagon, in order to eliminate the leadership of the remaining military government in the US. The novel ends with an epilogue summarizing how the Organization continued on to conquer the rest of world and to eliminate all people of other races.
The book is graphically violent. All non-whites, which include blacks and latinos, are viciously depicted as being sub-human and bestial. Jews are depicted as conniving and manipulative puppet-masters who control the government, media and economy. Whites who do not support the race war are described as weak "race traitors" who must be terrorized into supporting it or else killed along with the non-whites.
The book depicts the hypothetical US of the mid-1990s as being a bleak, poor, decaying and oppressive society, with an economy on the brink of collapse, a government that has become a police-state, and a society that has taken multiculturalism and liberalism to irrational extremes (all of which is cast as the result of "Jewish domination"). It should be noted that the book was first published in 1978, amidst the US economic difficulties of the 1970s, such as stagflation and the gas crunch; at the tail end of the second, "identity politics" phase of the American Civil Rights Movement; and prior to the changes in the US political system and economy that occurred in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. This indicates that the hypothetical US depicted in The Turner Diaries was probably a rather fanciful future extrapolation of the circumstances of the late-1970s that the author believed, and perhaps hoped, would be ripe for future revolution.
There are several obvious contradictions and inconsistencies. In the society described, the Feminist movement is strong and powerful (it is depicted as a decoy set up by "the Jews" in order to distract white women from their duty to have more white babies); yet it is also a society where rape is common, is committed almost openly and goes unpunished (that is, the rape of white women by black men). In some parts of the book Arabs are depitced positively as the enemies of Jewish Israel, but after the nuclear excange which "the Organization" provoked, its members contol the provision of food and shelter in ruined cities and make it dependant upon producing "the freshly cut head" of a "non-white person" - and the cut off heads of "Middle Eastern people" are accepted in this grisly "trade", as well as those of blacks.
In some parts of the book the Holocaust is denied - for example, it is asserted that Eichmann was an ordinary middle-ranking German Army officer, victimised by "the Jews" for no fault of his own. Yet Turner himself and other members of the Organization often vow to exterminate the Jews; some of the Organization's acts described in the book are directly inspired by the Nazi extermination methods, for example taking Jews and "mongrels" from Los Angeles to be executed in a canyon outside the city, obviously inspired by Babi Yar; and the diaries' supposed editor, a hundred years later, notes with satisfaction that all Jews had been exterminated though some copies of the Talmud had been preserved "to show what evil people the Jews were".
Many compare the novel to a later book written by William Pierce (again under the Macdonald pseudonym,) Hunter. While The Turner Diaries portrays a classic hierarchical revolutionary movement, Hunter illustrates the concept of leaderless resistance. Hunter depicts the actions of a man, Oscar Yeager (Jaeger means "hunter" in German), obsessed with ridding society of the perceived enemies of the white race: blacks, Jews, and mixed-race couples. Yeager's actions eventually cultivate him a following, a small revolutionary cadre, which many correlate to early incarnations of The Order.
In the early chapters, the protagonist and his comrades are depicted as concerned mainly with the confiscation of arms under the law introduced by "Senator Cohen" - which is obviously intended to capture the support of opponents of gun control. In later chapters, however, the racist agenda of the book becomes more apparent, and the protagonist eventually gives an ironic "thanks to Senator Cohen" for having disarmed the Black population and thereby making easier their "neutralisation" and eventual imprisonment in what the book terms "holding camps" from which evidently none of them emerges alive. Upon its victory, the Organization institutes a dictatorial oligarchy, which is portrayed as being all-powerful and certainly not leaving anybody else the option of holding firearms, and of working towards "reclaiming the world for people of European ancestry" by such means as subjecting the entire continent of Asia to three whole years of bombardment by weapons of mass destruction and transforming it into "The Great Eastern Waste". At the supposed time of publication, a hundred years after the events described, preparations are made to exterminate the "mutants" who still live there after these bombardments.
The choice of the main protaginist's family name might indicate that the book was intended as a kind of "counterbalance" to the 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron - a fictional first-person narration by Nat Turner who led a slave revolt in 19th Century Virginia, and who is regarded as a hero by Black Americans. The protaginst's first name "Earl" might have been taken from the name of James Earl Ray, the confessed assassin of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. - of whose supposed act this rabidly racist writer presumably approved. \
Quotes from the book
- "What is really precious to the average American is not his freedom or his honor or the future of his race, but his pay check. He complained when the System began busing his kids to Black schools 20 years ago, but he was allowed to keep his station wagon and his fiberglass speedboat, so he didn't fight... He complained when they took away his guns five years ago, but he still had his color TV and his backyard barbeque, so he didn't fight... And he complains today when the Blacks rape his women at will and the System makes him show an identity pass to buy groceries or pick up his laundry, but he still has a full belly most of the time, so he won't fight... He hasn't an idea in his head that wasn't put there by his TV set... That, unfortunately, is our average White American..."
- "About 45 seconds after the second round the third one landed on the roof of the south wing of the Capitol and exploded inside the building... We saw beautiful blossoms of flame and steel sprouting everywhere, dancing across the asphalt, thundering in the midst of splintered masonry and burning vehicles, erupting now inside and now outside the Capitol, wreaking their bloody toll in the ranks of tyranny and treason." (describing an Organization mortar attack on the US Capitol)
- "These were no soft-bellied, conservative businessmen assembled for some Masonic mumbo-jumbo; no loudmouthed, beery red-necks letting off a little ritualized steam about "the goddam niggers"; no pious, frightened churchgoers whining for the guidance or protection of an anthropomorphic deity. These were real men, White men... the best my race has produced... combin[ing] fiery passion and icy discipline, deep intelligence and instant readiness for action... They are the vanguard of the coming New Era, the pioneers who will lead our race out of its present depths... And I am one with them!" (describing the Order)
- "Today has been the Day of the Rope-a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one. Tonight,from tens of thousands of lampposts, power poles, and trees throughout this vast metropolitan area the grisly forms hang. Even the street signs at intersections have been pressed into service, and at practically every street corner I passed this evening on my way to HQ there was a dangling corpse, four at every intersection. Hanging from a single overpass only about a mile from here is a group of about 30, each with an identical placard around its neck bearing the printed legend, "I betrayed my race." Two or three of that group had been decked out in academic robes before they were strung up, and the whole batch are apparently faculty members from the nearby UCLA campus.(...) The first thing I saw in the moonlight was the placard with its legend in large, block letters: "I defiled my race." Above the placard leered the horribly bloated, purplish face of a young woman, her eyes wide open and bulging, her mouth agape. Finally I could make out the thin, vertical line of rope disappearing into the branches above. I shuddered and quickly went on my way. There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that in this city tonight, all wearing identical placards around their necks. They are the White women who were married to or living with Blacks, with Jews, or with other non-White males. There are also a number of men wearing the l-defiled-my-race placard, but the women easily outnumber them seven or eight to one. On the other hand, about ninety per cent of the corpses with the I-betrayed-my-race placards are men, and overall the sexes seem to be roughly balanced. Those wearing the latter placards are the politicians, the lawyers, the businessmen, the TV newscasters, the newspaper reporters and editors, the judges, the teachers, the school officials, the "civic leaders," the bureaucrats, the preachers, and all the others who, for reasons of career or status or votes or whatever, helped promote or implement the System's racial program". (The Organization's treatment of Los Angeles after capturing it).
- "Then, of course, came the mopping-up period, when the last of the non-White bands were hunted down and exterminated, followed by the final purge of undesirable racial elements among the remaining White population ... But it was in the year 1999, according to the chronology of the Old Era — just 110 years after the birth of The Great One (Adolf Hitler) — that the dream of a White world finally became a certainty." (from the book's epilogue)
(Some white separatists argue that the "White world" actually only refers to the White Western World, not the whole world, but nothing in the text of the book supports this assertion. In fact, a passage near the end of the book describes the systematic bombing of the entire continent of Asia with Weapons of Mass Destruction, with the express purpose of rendering it lifeless.)
Actions allegedly inspired by the book
To date, a number of actions are alleged to have been inspired by the novel:
- At the time of his arrest, Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted for the Oklahoma City bombing, had a copy of The Turner Diaries in his possession. McVeigh's bombing was similar to the event described in the book where the fictional terrorist group blows up FBI Headquarters.
- The Order, an early 1980s white supremacist group involved in murder, robberies and counterfeiting, was named after the group in the book and motivated by the book's scenarios for a race war. The group murdered Alan Berg, a controversial and outspoken Jewish talk show host, and engaged in other acts of violence in order to hasten the race war described in the book. The Order's efforts later inspired another group, The New Order, which planned to commit similar crimes in an effort to start a race war that would lead to a violent revolution.
- John William King was convicted for dragging James Byrd, an African-American, to his death in Jasper, Texas. As King shackled Byrd's legs to the back of his truck he was reported to have said, "We're going to start the Turner Diaries early."
- The suicide mission to bomb the Pentagon at the end of the book is eerily similar in some people's minds to the suicide attack of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001(Dr. William Luther Pierce's Birthday) by members of Muslim extremist group Al Qaeda. It has been suggested by some that the book only serves as a model of how a local grass-roots movement can overthrow a powerful and tyrannical central government, and that this has led to some groups that do not even agree with the white separatist/supremacist movement using it as a model or blueprint for revolution. Another similar coincidence is that the attacks on New York and Washington fall on the same day that the Organisation in the Turner Diaries carries out an assault on the city of Houston, which happens on September 11 and 12, 1992 in the book.
- A copy of The Turner Diaries was found (amidst other Neo-Nazi propaganda) in the home of Jacob Robida, who attacked a gay bar and then committed suicide in 2006.
First and second editions
In its first printing, dated May 1978, The Turner Diaries was set in the 1980s. Its reprinting (September 1980) brought a second edition that retained the essentials of the novel, but moved the setting forward ten years. Although different printings of The Turner Diaries have featured different cover art or back cover copy, subsequent printings have kept to the second edition text.
In keeping with the new 1990s time frame, events in the past are generally aged by ten years, though not always. Some examples:
- Turner's diatribe about the "long string of Marxist acts of terror 10 to 15 years ago" is changed to "20 years ago."
- Turner's lament at the success of the System's brainwashing "these past 50 years or so" remains unchanged.
- A reference to the Order's "nearly 58 years of existence" is increased to 68, even though the Order is fictional.
- Turner's astonishment at "how many dark, kinky-haired Middle Easterners have invaded this country in the last decade" is not changed.
- The epilogue's exultation that in 1989, "exactly a century after the birth of The Great One... the dream of a White world finally became a certainty," becomes "just 110 years" after Adolf Hitler's birth.
Also to make the book fit its later date, prices are usually doubled, and sums of money are also often doubled, but not consistently. Some examples from the second chapter:
- Turner's cell is forced to go underground with only about $37 in their pockets. The second edition changes this to $70.
- A note by the future historian tells readers that in Turner's day, a dollar could buy "a half-kilo loaf of bread or about a quarter of a kilo of sugar." The second edition reads two dollars.
- Another Organization cell has $200, and helps out Turner's unit with a car and $50. In the second edition, they have $400, but still give $50.
- The price of black market gasoline doubles from $5 a gallon to $10.
- A robbery nets Turner's unit $1426, described as enough to feed them for "more than two months." This remains unchanged.
The second edition retains one major artifact of the original setting: in the first edition, dates fall on the same day of the week as their real-world 1980s dates. The later edition does not change days of the week, putting them out of sync with their 1990s dates. Another minor change is that a short passage, where Turner's lover spots his Order pendant, is moved a few pages earlier to the end of Chapter X. The first edition also featured illustrations by Dennis Nix. Later printings dropped the illustrations, used a smaller typeface, and switched from bold to italics for emphasis.