From Searchlight 40 years ago: Blueprint for genocide

In March 1986, Searchlight magazine exposed how the National Front was peddling a blueprint for extermination written by the leader of one of the most hardline nazi organisations in the United States. Published in the form of a novel, the book set out how terrorism could get results for a committed elite of racist fanatics who had long since abandoned the ballot box in favour of the bullet.

The publication, The Turner Diaries, provided a detailed framework for a clandestine revolutionary struggle, advocating for a strategy of destabilisation through bank robberies, assassinations, and eventually, large-scale nuclear terrorism. The NF’s promotion of the book further revealed its shift toward a “Third Position”, signalling that despite their public claims of seeking democratic legitimacy, their internal strategy was increasingly aligned with the most violent fringes of the international fascist movement.

Blueprint for genocide

Today, the most important document for the international nazi movement is no longer Mein Kampf, nor even works of so-called “revisionist” history which seek to exonerate the Hitler regime. It is a novel, written in the form of a diary, which contains a detailed blueprint for a nazi take-over of California, the United States and eventually the world.

The novel — called The Turner Diaries — was written by William Pierce, head of the National Alliance, probably the leading “hard-line” nazi group presently operating in the United States.

It has already had a dramatic influence on at least one clandestine nazi group, 23 of whose members were recently convicted in Seattle for a terrorist campaign which included various tactics drawn from the Diaries — including counterfeiting dollars in order to subvert the currency, threatening their own members with execution for disloyalty (and in one case, carrying it out), and murdering prominent “liberals”, especially Jews, as part of a strategy of destabilisation.

In June 1984, the group (which calls itself a variety of names, including “The Order”, which is also culled from the book) shot and killed Alan Berg, a well-known liberal radio personality in Denver, Colorado. At the trial — which ended in early January — the FBI confirmed that the group had indeed used the book as a model.

Its influence has spread way beyond the United States. The British National Front has been peddling large numbers of copies, backed up by a prominent promotional campaign in National Front News.

Ritual condemnation

Despite ritual condemnations of terrorism by NF leaders like Derek Holland (see, for instance, Nationalism Today, September 1985) the book’s thesis bears considerable relevance to the tactics and strategy of the Italian “Third Position” group, whose personal and political influence on the present Strasserite leadership of the Front has been and is so strong.

The first thing to be said about the novel itself — published in paperback by the National Alliance, and although credited to “Andrew Macdonald”, copyrighted to William Pierce — is that it is exceptionally well written, and its ideological message, although transparent, is largely effortlessly integrated into a text that has undoubted thriller qualities.

The “Diaries” of “Earl Turner” deal with the years between 1991 and 1993, and tell the story of the growth of a clandestine neo-nazi “organisation” (led by a pseudo-mystic “order” of obviously Odinist bent) which takes on a corrupt, multi-racial “system”, and is eventually — and apocalyptically — triumphant.

Initially, a small group of activists — formed in a cell — stash arms, engage in “survivalist” training, and undertake random murders of “racial enemies”. A clandestine, underground movement is gradually created (backed up by non-clandestine “legals”, in medicine, the legal profession, the police and the military). In preparation for the great day of revolution, the “organisation” infiltrates, forges money, robs banks, kills Blacks and Jews, and shoots “mutineers” within its own ranks. Finally, leading cadres move to Los Angeles, where a successful coup d’etat is undertaken.

Executed

In the first days of the New Order, Blacks and Mexicans are expelled from the “liberated zone”, and tens of thousands of Jews and white “race traitors” are executed. However, the “system” marshals its forces in the rest of the United States, and despite the consequent diminution of the white races, the “organisation” is forced by circumstances to use its captured nuclear arsenal to wipe out Baltimore, New York, and several other cities, as well as undertaking a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union.

The resultant retaliation lays waste most of Los Angeles, but enough of the “New Order” remains for the “organisation” to spread its revolution, first through the United States, then western Europe, leaving (eventually) only China unresolved, to be dealt with by “a combination of chemical, biological and radiological means” which leaves most of Asia uninhabitable, but safe for eventual colonisation by the New Order, which will, we are told in an epilogue, “spread its wise and benevolent rule over the earth for all time to come”.

Mastery of Europe

As William Pierce is a nazi, and the book is published by a nazi organisation, it is no surprise that The Turner Diaries present a straight National Socialist line on matters like the Jewish conspiracy, white racial superiority and the fact that “when the Germans and the Jews were locked in struggle for the mastery of central and eastern Europe”, America, tragically, “ended up on the Jewish side”.

There is also the occasional reference to the birth of a “Great One”, and regimes lasting a thousand years. But, by and large, the book avoids much open sentimentality about nazi Germany. Significantly, there is only one reference to “the old ‘gas chamber’ propaganda”, for reasons that will become apparent.

But perhaps the most important difference between the Diaries and previous nazi propaganda — back to and including Mein Kampf — is their complete disillusion with mass-activity of any kind, and their advocacy of clandestine terror not as a temporary expedient, nor as a destabilisation tactic, but as a complete strategy for the achievement of power.

In consequence, Pierce’s organisation holds no rallies or demonstrations, stands in no elections, produces no literature (indeed, apart from the passage of the “Cohen Act” outlawing private guns, there is hardly any mention of governmental activity except on the narrowest of law and order fronts). And when the action is interrupted for Earl Turner to express his thoughts, it is almost always for him to pour contempt on the vast majority of the American people, indeed of the American whites, for allowing themselves to fall prey to liberalism:

“If the freedom of the American people were the only thing at stake, the existence of the Organisation would hardly be justified. Americans have lost their right to be free. Slavery is the just and proper state for a people who have grown as soft, self-indulgent, careless, credulous and befuddled as we have . . . We have allowed a diabolically clever, alien minority to put chains on our souls and our minds”.

Brainwashed masses

This point is reiterated, again and again: “we badly underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our fellow citizens”. “One gets the impression that except for the Jews, . . . the rest of the System is a bunch of clock-watchers”.

And, “can we justly blame what has happened to us entirely on deliberate subversion . . .? Or must we place a large share of the blame on inadvertent decadence — on the spiritually debilitating life style into which the Western people have allowed themselves to slip in the twentieth century?”

Slavery is the just and proper state for a people who have grown as soft, self-indulgent, careless, credulous and befuddled as we have . . . We have allowed a diabolically clever, alien minority to put chains on our souls and our minds”

Turner Diaries, William Pierce

This argument has several consequences. First of all, the brainwashed masses are not to be relied upon to vote in their true “race interests”: “Doesn’t the old fool understand”, Turner rhetorically demands of a Conservative, “that the American people voted themselves into the mess they’re in now? . . . Where does he think new elections can possibly lead now, with this generation of TV-conditioned voters, except right back into the same Jewish pigsty?”

But even without the baleful effects of the mass media, the majority cannot be relied upon. “Actually”, Turner concludes, “it has been true all through history that only small portions of a population are either good or evil. The great bulk are morally neutral — incapable of distinguishing absolute right from absolute wrong — and they take their cue from whoever is on top at the moment”.

Filthy and destructive

So, “when evil men rule, as has been the case in America for many years now, most of the population will wallow happily in degeneracy of the worst kind and will self-righteously parrot every filthy and destructive idea that they have been taught”.

For this reason, the smallness of the central core of the Organisation is a positive virtue: and the fact that (despite Turner’s own fears of the organisation being “a gnat planning to assassinate an elephant”), a body of less than 2,000 appears to be able to “take” Southern California is proof of the strength of the committed elite (an echo of Hitler’s “the strong man is mightiest alone”).

But the most important lesson that Pierce wishes his readers to draw goes beyond the inadequacies of elections, or the virtues of elitism. For him, “the key to the whole problem” is that “the corruption of our people by the Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian plague which afflicts us is more clearly manifested in our soft-mindedness, our unwillingness to recognise the harder realities of life, than in anything else”.

Chilling

And this “essentially feminine, submissive world view” has meant that “Americans have for so many years been unwilling to make unpleasant decisions”, and to accept that “our race is like a cancer patient undergoing drastic surgery in order to save his life”. In this context, “there is no sense in asking whether the tissue being cut out now is ‘innocent’ or not”. Or, put another way, “there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people”.

It has to be said, in the context of The Turner Diaries, that “many thousands” is something of an underestimate.

The novel is grotesquely violent. From the first, individual acts of terror (a television commentator is decapitated, a grocer’s wife has “a jar of kosher pickles” smashed in her face), through to the post-revolutionary “Day of the Rope” (during which tens of thousands of “race traitors” are summarily hanged, first by rope and subsequently by telephone wire, in a gruesome echo of the fate of the July 1944 anti-Hitler conspirators), the organisation’s path is strewn with corpses, whose grizzly ends are described in luxuriant, if not always unambiguous detail.

Overt sadism

Poor old Turner is particularly choked by the sight of white girls swinging from the lamp-posts, even if they have “defiled their race” by sleeping with Blacks. Indeed, it is the sense of grim necessity, rather than overt sadism, which is particularly chilling, although Pierce cannot always fully suppress his sense of glee at, for instance, the thought of “as many as 50,000 marchers” being directed into a “boulder-strewn canyon”, a trip which, as he gloatingly surmises, “will be a one-way affair!”

Poor old Turner is particularly choked by the sight of white girls swinging from the lamp-posts, even if they have “defiled their race” by sleeping with Blacks.

Turner Diaries, William Pierce

By the time that the organisation really sets to, blasting off its nuclear arsenal at New York, Moscow and (of course) Tel Aviv, it is clear why Turner makes only ritual genuflection to the idea that the Holocaust didn’t happen.

Indeed, having gone to some trouble to argue the need to deal with his enemies categorically rather than on the basis of individual guilt (it being “physically impossible, considering the relative numbers involved”, to deal with “the Jews, the Blacks, the Chicanos, and the other troublesome elements on an individual basis”) the only surprise is that Turner doesn’t demand that, if Hitler didn’t wipe out the Jews, then what the hell was he playing at?

In short, The Turner Diaries provides a dangerously sophisticated rationale, entertainingly packaged in a popular format, for small groups of fanatics to pursue strategies of terror against both the political and the racial targets of their fancy, on the basis that the majority is too brainwashed and supine to understand its own interests, and that, for the sake of intimidating the minorities and waking up the majority, the bloodier the terror is, the better.

Individual acts of brutality

Indeed, a willingness to reject “feminine, submissive” scruples is the first badge of suitability for admittance to the mystic order of racial freedom-fighters. As, over the last six years, the British fascist right has become more and more risible as an electoral force, as its members turn increasingly to individual acts of brutality (and fantasies of heroic guerrilladom from the hills), it’s easy to see the appeal of the Diaries, both as a rationale and as a model.

There is one further irony. Before he took to writing fictional diaries, William L. Pierce was wont to receive real letters, from British fascists, on topics of contemporary concern. On 23 March 1967, for instance, a letter was written to Pierce by none other than John Tyndall, now leader of the British National Party, then führer of the small but nasty Greater Britain Movement.

Modify our propaganda

“To be frank”, Tyndall told Pierce, “I do not believe that a movement with an openly nazi label has a hope of winning national power either in Britain or the US in the foreseeable future. I have therefore sought to modify the form of our propaganda, though not of course the essence of the ideology . . . ” Within any right wing coalition it might enter, however, “our faction — the National Socialist faction — will have the key strategic advantage, and will therefore put us in a position to thwart any moves towards a takeover by liberal elements”.

Thus, Tyndall concluded, it would be possible “to use the moderate elements, to work behind them for as long as is necessary, but to effectively control them”.

Manual for terrorism

Within a year, Tyndall’s GBM was inside the National Front, at that time an organisation of superficial respectability, keen to deny any fascist or nazi connections. Nineteen years later, that same organisation is eagerly peddling a manual for a form of fascist terrorism that goes even beyond the German nazi model, into hitherto uncharted territories of sadism and brutality.

Let no one claim they haven’t been warned.