The Turner Diaries
The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, the founder and chairman of National Alliance, an American white nationalist group, published under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. It was serialised in the National Alliance publication Attack! from 1975–1978 before being published in paperback form by the National Alliance in 1978. the book had sold an estimated 300,000 copies, initially only available through mail order from the National Alliance. In 1996, it was republished by Barricade Books with a foreword that disavowed the novel.
It depicts a violent revolution in the United States, caused by a group called the Organization. The Organization's actions lead to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war, and ultimately a race war which leads to the systematic extermination of non-whites and Jews worldwide. Whites viewed as "race traitors" are ultimately hanged in a mass execution called the "Day of the Rope". The novel utilizes a framing device, presenting the story as a historical diary of an average member, Earl Turner, with historical notes from a century after the novel's events.
The Turner Diaries was described as "explicitly racist and anti-Semitic" by The New York Times. The book has been influential in shaping white nationalism and the later development of the white genocide conspiracy theory. It has also inspired numerous hate crimes and acts of terrorism, including the 1984 assassination of Alan Berg and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. It is estimated to have influenced perpetrators in over 200 killings.
Plot
The story is told from diary entries from Earl Turner from the period of September 16, 1991, to November 9, 1993. A future historian from 2099 gives the novel's main text a historical context, which is presented as the journal of Earl Turner, an active but low-ranking member of a white nationalist movement known as the Organization. After the federal government has confiscated all white civilian firearms in the country under the Cohen Act, the Organization goes underground to wage a guerrilla war against what they term the "System", a loose network of America's most powerful institutions of government, media, society, and finance, which are depicted as all being led by Jews. In response to the Organization's actions, the System begins implementing numerous repressive laws and new surveillance measures.Turner plays a large part in activities in the Washington, D.C. area; a former electrical engineer, he is skilled with technology and has an important role in the Organization's communications and in setting up weaponry for their terrorist attacks. He helps facilitate the first large scale attack by the Organization, in which they attack an FBI headquarters using a car bomb. Turner's service leads to his initiation into the Order, a secret higher level organization within the Organization, which secretly leads it. Inductees into the Order are given a poisonous capsule to kill themselves in the event of capture.
Turner's hideout is raided by law enforcement after he fails to maintain proper security practices, and during an ensuing gun battle with authorities, everyone in the unit manages to escape except Turner, who is captured and nearly killed. He is arrested and sent to a military base for interrogation by the FBI and an Israeli intelligence officer. He is tortured for information on the Organization. Months later, other members of the Order rescue Turner. They inform him of his punishment for breaking his oath to the Order: he will be given a suicide mission in the future. If he completes the mission successfully, he will be forgiven by the Order, whether alive or dead; Turner accepts this.
Eventually, the Organization seizes the nuclear weapons at Vandenberg Air Force Base in Southern California and targets missiles at New York City and Tel Aviv. While in control of California, the Organization ethnically cleanses the area of all non-whites by forcing them into the Eastern United States, which is still controlled by the System. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of African Americans are forced into the desert to cause an economic crisis on the System's welfare system and all Jews are beaten, lynched, or shot. The resulting racial conflict in the east causes many whites to "wake up" and begin fleeing to Southern California, which becomes a white ethnostate. Northern California also falls, but is ruled under martial law by a conservative general who refuses to cooperate with the Organization.
The Organization raids the houses of all individuals who have been reported to be race traitors in some way, including those white people who "defiled" their race by living with or marrying non-whites. These individuals are dragged from their homes and hanged in the streets of Los Angeles in an event which comes to be known as the "Day of the Rope". The Organization then uses its Southern Californian base of operations and its nuclear weapons to open a wider war in which it launches nuclear strikes against New York City and Israel, initiates a nuclear exchange between the United States and Soviet Union, and plants nuclear weapons and new combat units throughout North America. Many major U.S. cities are destroyed, including Baltimore and Detroit. Governments all over the world fall one by one, and violent anti-Jewish riots break out in the streets. Meanwhile, the United States is put in a state of absolute martial law and transformed into a military dictatorship.
The United States government decides to invade the Organization's stronghold in Southern California. The leaders of the Order now inform Earl Turner of his punishment for having failed to resist interrogation: he must pilot an aircraft equipped with a nuclear warhead and destroy the Pentagon in a kamikaze style suicide strike, before the invasion can be launched. The 2099 epilogue summarizes how, following the success of Turner's mission, the Organization went on to conquer the rest of the world and how all non-white races of people were murdered.
Background
Author
The Turner Diaries was written by William Luther Pierce. Pierce was both founder and leader of the National Alliance organization, which the Anti-Defamation League called in 2000 "the single most dangerous organized hate group in the United States today". Pierce himself was said by the Southern Poverty Law Center to have been "America’s most important neo-Nazi" as well as "the movement’s fiercest antisemitic ideologue".Pierce was a physicist who received his doctorate from the University of Colorado, and a former professor at Oregon State University. He was formerly a member of the John Birch Society, before leaving the JBS to become an affiliate of George Lincoln Rockwell and his American Nazi Party. He edited the ANP-affiliated magazine National Socialist World. After Rockwell's 1967 murder, Pierce became a member of the ANP's successor, the National Socialist White People's Party, before leaving due to several internal feuds and joining the National Youth Alliance. He edited their journal, Attack! When the NYA collapsed, Pierce founded the National Alliance out of what remained. With his schism from the NYA, he took over Attack!
Attack! had "Revolutionary Notes" which included practical advice for revolutionaries, including how to build bombs. Content in Attack! prior to The Turner Diaries used similar language to what was found in the book. For example, in late 1970 Pierce wrote:
Pierce stated in a 1997 interview that at the time he had written The Turner Diaries, he had desired to put "all of the feminist agitators and propagandists and all of the race-mixing fanatics and all of the media bosses up against a wall, in batches of a thousand or so at a time, and machine-gun them". He added that he still wished to do so. Pierce denied that he had written the book intending for it to function as a model for the depicted violent race war, and in a 1990 documentary Jacob Young directed about him, Dr. No?, claimed the book's portrayal of violence was entirely fictional. In his self-review of the book in 1978, he called it a "blueprint for victory".
Inspiration
Pierce grew up as a fan of science fiction pulp novels, which have also been viewed as a possible influence on Turner. The book utilizes some science fiction tropes.The Turner Diaries is a work of dystopian fiction; this genre emerged prominently in the early 19th century, and early dystopian novels often had racist themes. Terrorism researcher J.M. Berger connected Turner to several other racial dystopia novels, saying they had influenced Turner
Jack London's 1907 novel The Iron Heel has also been seen an influence; The Turner Diaries shares some themes, descriptions and its main narrative device with that book.' Pierce disputed that this book was an influence. The 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat by the Door by black author Sam Greenlee is also seen as a possible influence on The Turner Diaries; the release of its film adaption was controversial and widely publicized. It follows the first black CIA agent, who then uses his knowledge to lead a black insurgency against the CIA. Greenlee described it as "a training manual for guerrilla warfare", and all white characters in the book are racists who have exclusively hostile interactions with the protagonists.
In Pierce's authorized biography The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, the anonymous 1959 novel The John Franklin Letters was cited by Pierce as the most direct inspiration for the novel. Pierce was given this book by Revilo P. Oliver, who is considered the most probable author of The John Franklin Letters. Oliver had written a review for Attack! In a meeting, probably in late 1974, Pierce expressed to Oliver that he was having difficulty getting people to respond to his message. Oliver suggested he write fiction, something Pierce had not previously done, arguing that the kinds of people who would agree with Pierce's views were not the kind of people who would read the non-fiction material Pierce had previously written. Oliver suggested that Pierce write in a genre enjoyed by the people who Pierce's ideas would appeal to, which Oliver said was "fiction, and particularly light, action-filled recreational fiction". Similar to The John Franklin Letters, The Turner Diaries utilizes a framing device where the events are prefaced by an in-universe future historian.
While Pierce was writing The Turner Diaries, his favorite book was The Riot Makers: The Technology of Social Demolition by Eugene H. Methvin. That book was a right-wing survey of left-wing propaganda and tactics, which Methvin saw as instigating 1960s rioting; Methvin is critical and attempts to expose these tactics, especially the practice of what Methvin called "pre-conditioning". Pierce, however, saw in The Riot Makers a guide to making his own propaganda based on the very tactics Methvin was criticizing. Pierce believed identification and was the key element in writing propaganda fiction. Pierce said: