Pierce Nat'l Alliance
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pete smothered
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But back to Buchanan: Utilizing the prestige he had amassed as a White House staffer for two powerful Presidents, Buchanan opened his tent to an unholy alliance of anti-semitic and white nationalists on the political fringes. The extremists included William Luther Pierce, whose novel, The Turner Diaries, features the hanging of ‘race-traitors’ (like Caucasians and plantation owners who have sex with African Americans) and bodies dangling from street lamps, while armed white ‘Americans’ who all look like Chris Evans, Austin Butler or Tatum Channing roam from house to house executing miscreants.
The Turner Diaries became a playbook for Timothy McVeigh, the white nationalist later executed for bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Kansas City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 men, women, and children. McVeigh was a follower of Buchanan’s and the Spotlight, a newspaper published weekly by the Liberty Lobby, which supported segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as Buchanan. In many respects, Buchanan was ahead of his time. His calls to fringe groups and armed extremists anticipated Trump’s calls (under Steve Bannon’s advice) to many of the same factions, which culminated in the failed insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Such groups have always existed in America and however fantasy-filled, and weapon-eroticized they may be, a number have maintained their military “readiness” awaiting a call to action by those they considered their superiors....
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https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/william-pierce
Pierce was the movement's fiercest anti-Semitic ideologue and he built the Alliance into a money-making machine through its hate music business, Resistance Records. Pierce was also the author of the race war novel The Turner Diaries. The book has been called "the bible of the racist right," is known to have drawn many into the movement, and was a key inspiration for Timothy McVeigh's 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
In His Own Words
"After the sickness of ‘multiculturalism,' which is destroying America, Britain, and every other Aryan nation in which it is being promoted, has been swept away, we must again have a racially clean area of the earth for the further development of our people. … We will not be deterred by the difficulty or temporary unpleasantness involved, because we realize that it is absolutely necessary for our racial survival."
— "What is the National Alliance?", National Alliance website, undated
"[T]he Alliance has no interest at all in the so-called movement. We're not interested in uniting with the movement, and we're not interested in competing with the movement for members. If anything, we should be grateful that the movement is out there to soak up a lot of the freaks and weaklings who otherwise might find their way into the Alliance and make problems for us. In this regard, I was sorry to note Aryan Nations and the [World] Church of the Creator have, for all practical purposes, died in the last few weeks. I hope one or two replacement groups spring up to draw away from us the defectives."
— Pierce's final speech, National Alliance leadership conference, April 2002
"If the protagonist learns something or comes to believe in something, if he changes his ideas, the reader tends to do the same thing, he changes too. So what you have is a powerful teaching tool, a persuasive tool."
— Pierce, quoted in a biography of him called Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, on the power of narrative
Background
William Luther Pierce's bigoted attitudes toward people of color were inculcated at an early age. He was born in Atlanta into an Old South aristocracy that included his mother and her ancestors. His great-grandfather, he has said, was governor of Alabama and attorney general of the Confederacy during the Civil War. According to a fawning biography of Pierce by University of Vermont Professor Robert Griffin, Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce, he grew up in a Southern household during segregation with older relatives who treated a black servant like a virtual slave.
Pierce graduated from Houston's Rice University in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratorybefore attending graduate school, first at Caltech and then at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he earned his Ph.D. in physics in 1962. He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965. It was during that time that Pierce became concerned by the threat to the white race that he believed was posed by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, and he joined the John Birch Society, a right-wing group that once accused President Eisenhower, among many others, of being a communist.
The John Birch Society, which generally rejected anti-Semitism, turned out to be too namby-pamby for Pierce. In 1966, he quit a job as a senior research scientist at a Connecticut aerospace firm to join George Lincoln Rockwell's American Nazi Party(1959-67). Upon buying a printing press, Pierce become editor of the party's National Socialist World. After Rockwell was assassinated the following year, Pierce continued to work with the remnants of the group, which by then was renamed the National Socialist White People's Party. In 1968, Pierce became an official of Youth for Wallace, an organization supporting Alabama segregationist and former Gov. George Wallace's bid for the presidency. Willis Carto, already one of America's leading anti-Semitic activists, also joined the Wallace group and in 1970 he and Pierce reconfigured Youth for Wallace into the National Youth Alliance (NYA). But the two men had a major falling out, and each claimed to be the new group's leader. In 1971, Carto accused Pierce of stealing a mailing list belonging to Carto's anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby organization. Pierce had written to those on the mailing list, attacking the Liberty Lobby's leaders, including Carto. Eventually, Pierce won control of the NYA, which was limited to people under age 30 and focused on activities on college and university campuses.
In 1974, Pierce dropped the age limit and reorganized the NYA as the National Alliance (NA), which he would lead until his death in 2002. The NA, which aimed to be a vanguard party capable of leading the "lemmings" comprising the white masses to revolutionary victory, adopted the slogans "Free Men Are Not Equal" and "Equal Men Are Not Free." Effectively a Leninist in terms of tactics, Pierce was not interested in winning his battle through electoral successes. He wanted his vanguard to lead the white masses to power, something that could only come after a period of ethnic cleansing that Pierce referred to as a "temporary unpleasantness," the seizure of state power and creation of all-white nations.
The text that made Pierce famous, however, was his novel of race war, The Turner Diaries, published in 1978 under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald after first being serialized in the NA publication Attack! The NA boasted that the book was a "Blueprint," a "Handbook for White Victory." Pierce told his seminal story through two years of diary entries by his white supremacist hero, Earl Turner. Turner carries out orders for the Organization, an underground group struggling against the System — an anti-white, anti-gun U.S. government that continually puts more restrictions on its citizens. Using "detonators, timers, igniters and other gadgets" built by Turner, the Organization spawns vicious warfare between blacks, Jews and whites as it takes over the country, city by city. The violence is unforgettably vivid. Turner describes slicing the throat of a Jewish shop owner "from ear to ear," murdering a Washington Post editor with two shotgun blasts, and watching starving blacks barbecue and eat white children. By the novel's end, Turner is working for an elite survivalist group called the Order and plotting a suicide mission — flying a crop-duster plane strapped with a warhead into the Pentagon, the System's last remaining military stronghold. "Two-thirds of the troops around the Pentagon are niggers," Turner writes in his journal, "which should greatly enhance my chances of getting through."
Pierce's novel has inspired many a terrorist. In 1983, the NA's Pacific Northwest leader, Robert Mathews, joined with three other Alliance members and, later, some 20 other people, to create The Order, a white supremacist terrorist group.Based on the group portrayed in The Turner Diaries, Mathews' gang ultimately robbed some $4 million from armored cars. Declaring "War in '84," members of The Order murdered a well-known Jewish talk show host, Alan Berg, in Denver. (The first person on their hit list was Southern Poverty Law Center co-founder Morris Dees. They abandoned that attempt due to high levels of security.) Later that year, Mathews was killed in a shootout with the FBI. Pierce hailed his martyred acolyte, saying Mathews "took us from name-calling to bloodletting."
In 1995, Timothy McVeigh, aided by Army pals Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, blew up the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people, including 19 children. The day before, according to officials, McVeigh called an NA recorded message line seven times. When McVeigh was arrested, police found excerpts from The Turner Diaries in his car. After the attack, which was patterned on a similar bombing depicted in The Turner Diaries, Pierce predicted, or maybe hoped, that resentment of Jews, minorities and others would lead to terrorism "on a scale the world has never seen before." In 1998, before three white men in Texas beat and dragged James Byrd Jr. to death behind a pickup truck, one of the men, John King, reportedly announced, "We're starting The Turner Diaries early." There are many other cases, as well, where killers were said to be inspired by the novel.
In 1989, Pierce's publishing arm, National Vanguard Books, printed his second novel, Hunter, depicting the assassination of interracial couples, Jews and politicians. The book was dedicated to Joseph Paul Franklin, convicted of the sniper murders of at least two black men. That same year, on the100th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's birth, Pierce editorialized that the Nazi leader was "the greatest man of our era." In 1991, Pierce began broadcasting a shortwave radio program, "American Dissident Voices," that was heard worldwide. Within months, it was carried by several AM stations.
In 1984, after several years in the Arlington, Va., area, Pierce paid $95,000 in cash for a 346-acre tract of land atop a small mountain in West Virginia, where he set up what would become the NA's permanent compound. He would build several structures on the land, including a building for his Cosmotheist Church, which housed the bogus religion conjured up by Pierce primarily as an unsuccessful tax dodge. It was from this compound that Pierce ran an empire that ultimately included sales of books, cassettes, music, and racist paraphernalia. The group created a system of monthly dues and produced a monthly update for its members, the National Alliance Bulletin. At its peak, around the time of Pierce's death in 2002, the NA had more than 1,400 dues-paying members.
The NA also served as a launching pad for many white supremacist terrorists. Besides the Order members, in 1996 officials arrested NA member Todd Vanbiber in Florida after a pipe bomb he was building exploded in his face. After Vanbiber was sentenced for federal firearms violations, other NA confederates testified that the Vanbiber gang had robbed three banks and donated at least $2,000 to Pierce. A week before the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, Larry Shoemake opened fire on a black neighborhood in Jackson, Miss., killing one person and wounding seven others. Relatives said he was inspired by Pierce's writings.
In 1999, Pierce made an important business investment, buying white power music label Resistance Records for some $250,000. The deal gave Pierce control of the label's CD catalogue, inventory, mailing list and publishing arm. In the next few years, Resistance came to dominate the white power music scene and also became the biggest moneymaker in the NA empire. Pierce added to that empire in 2000, after "national socialist black metal" musician and convicted German murderer Hendrik Möbus took up residence at the NA headquarters. Möbus' music label, Cymophane, was then transferred to Pierce's control. Three months after arriving at the compound, Möbus was arrested on an international arrest warrant issued in Germany. Pierce spearheaded a campaign to free Möbus and raised money to pay for his legal fees. Ultimately, however, Möbus was deported and jailed in Germany.
In 2001, in a major break with the past, the NA began to hold rallies and engage in other public activities like leafleting.Organized by Deputy Membership Coordinator Billy Roper, NA members joined, for the first time, with other white supremacists in front of the Israeli Embassy to protest Jewish influence in the U.S.
According to Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, Pierce married five times. His first wife was Patricia Jones, whom he met while at the California Institute of Technology. They were married in 1957 and had twins sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1962. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982. Pierce was remarried that same year to Elizabeth Prostel, who worked for the NA. The marriage ended in 1985, when Pierce moved his headquarters to West Virginia. In Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds, Pierce talks of preferring immigrant women from Eastern Europe. He married Hungarian Olga Skerlecz in 1986, a marriage that lasted until 1990, when she left Pierce and West Virginia "for greener pastures in California." Pierce then wed a woman named Zsuzsannah, also Hungarian, in early 1991. They met through an ad that Pierce placed in a Hungarian women's magazine. Zsuzsannah left him for Florida in mid-1996. His last marriage, which lasted until his death, was with another Eastern European woman whom he married in 1997. He was sharp and condescending toward his last wife, identified only with the pseudonym Irena in Fame, when he was not ignoring her. Irena was miserable living with the savior of the white race.
In 2002, Pierce made his last public speech at one of the NA's secretive "leadership conferences" that were held twice a year at the West Virginia compound. Held on April 20, Hitler's birthday, Pierce emphasized the need to continue building a professional organization while rejecting alliances with other hate groups, whom he derisively mocked. For the 10 days before his unforeseen death from kidney failure and cancer on July 23, 2002, Pierce instructed his subordinates, and worked feverishly to try to assure the survival of the NA. Pierce died an old-fashioned death, appropriate for a man who conceived of himself in decidedly old-fashioned terms — as a lord among serfs, an elite leader uniquely capable of leading "his people" to victory over Jews, "race traitors," and a whole host of other enemies.
Pierce's 2002 death came at a critical moment for the NA. A quarter-century after birthing the group, Pierce had finally remade his outfit into a remarkably professional organization. Much of the previous two years had been spent building up a talented staff, learning how to run a profitable business, and intensifying recruiting and propaganda. Just before his death, the NA was bringing in more than $1 million a year, had a paid national staff of 17 full-time officials, and was better known than at any time in its history. Pierce's voice, broadcast via his "American Dissident Voices" Internet show, was being heard in Europe and the U.S. In just five days in June 2002, NA members in 20 states distributed 70,000 leaflets.
Six days after Pierce's death, a committee of his key staffers announced that the NA had selected a new leader. Erich Gliebe, the hard-edged former boxer who fought professionally as "The Aryan Barbarian," would be the new chairman, although all agreed that no one could replace Pierce, who was memorialized as "Our Eternal Chairman," comparable to Hitler himself. But Pierce's condescending and harsh words during his final speech doomed the group. His comments that other hate groups were filled with "freaks and weaklings," something first disclosed by theIntelligence Report, seriously undermined the group by driving away its customer base. Within a few months, infighting broke out among the leadership, and splits started to occur. By 2009, the NA had lost nearly all of its members, falling from a high of more than 1,400 to fewer than than 100, Resistance was losing money, and Gliebe was living in the basement of his mother's Cleveland-area home.
Genocide as 'Hoax'
In 1966, American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell, interviewed in Playboy, took the argument one step further, saying it was "self-defense" for people to kill Jews.
"Are you implying that Hitler was justified in exterminating 6 million European Jews?" Playboy interviewer Alex Haley asked.
"I don't believe for one minute that any 6 million Jews were exterminated," Rockwell replied. "It never happened. You want me to prove it?" Rockwell then offered up statistics purporting to show that there were more Jews alive after the war than before it.
In 1976, another American, Arthur R. Butz, wrote The Hoax of the Twentieth Century. A professor of electrical engineering at Northwestern University, Butz's book conceded that Jews were persecuted, but denied they were exterminated. Any gas chambers were for delousing, and not for mass murder, he claimed.
There would be others, too, including Gary "Gerhard" Lauck, a Nebraskan who wrote, published and helped smuggle Holocaust denial literature into Germany and other European countries in the 1980s and early 1990s.
To this day, U.S. groups such as the neo-Nazi National Alliance publish and sell denial material. To most of them, Jews intentionally made up the "Holohoax" as part of a nefarious plan to extract war reparations from Germany and to win the world's sympathy....
Between January and April 2000, the case of Irving v. Penguin and Lipstadt was heard before Mr. Justice Gray at the High Court in London.
In the months that led up to the trial, defense experts pored over Irving's books, tracking his footnotes back to their sources — something that had not been done systematically before. What emerged was a consistent pattern of distortion that exonerated the Nazis in general, and Hitler in particular.
Every historian, of course, makes mistakes. But, as the defense experts made clear, Irving's factual errors were always in one direction.
On April 11, 2000, the court issued a 349-page decision, declaring complete victory for Lipstadt and her publisher.
"It appears to me," Justice Gray wrote, "that Irvingqualifies as a Holocaust denier. ... Irving is anti-Semitic. ... Irving is a racist. ... Irving [is] a right-wing, pro-Nazi polemicist."
Truth, Memory and Evidence, Too
The trial was not only a victory for "truth and memory," as Lipstadt had so eloquently put it. It also produced extensive evidence — largely in the form of Irving's meticulously detailed diaries, which the court gave the defense access to — of Irving's international connections, and of his frequent disingenuousness.
For example, Irving denied any contact with the National Alliance, the West Virginia-based organization headed by William Pierce, a key former member of the American Nazi Party and the author of The Turner Diaries, a novel of race war that served Timothy McVeigh as a blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing.
But the defense was able to show that Irving not only had corresponded with National Alliance members (at least one of whom had written to Irving on National Alliance stationery), but also that the group had regularly organized events for Irving in the United States, including at least two in 1995, three in 1996 and two in 1997.
In fact, Irving's diaries gave proof positive of his close association with far-right racist and anti-Semitic parties and figures around the world, including nearly two decades of involvement with the major figures at the IHR (Willis Carto, Mark Weber, Tom Marcellus, Greg Raven and others), whose conferences he attended six times.
Irving also had connections to the neofascist British National Party, the [British] Clarendon Club and many German Nazis and neo-Nazis including Ernst Zündel; Ewald Bela Althans; the far-right party, Deutsche Volksunion, and its leader Gerhard Frey; Ostrat Günter Deckert; Karl Philipp; Ernst Otto Remer; Christian Worch; Ingrid Weckert; Michael Swierczek, Udo Walendy and others.
That wasn't all. One of Irving's contacts was Ahmed Rami, head of Sweden-based Radio Islam and a key promoter of anti-Semitism worldwide.
(Rami's Web site contains a treasure trove of antisemitica, including the notorious Czarist forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and speeches by American Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the black separatist Nation of Islam (NOI). The NOI publishes materials blaming Jews for the slave trade and even invited Holocaust denier Arthur Butz to address its "Saviour's Day" celebration.)
BTB
Chapter 3: The Apostle of Fascism
If the international fascist movement has a single founding father, that man would be George Lincoln Rockwell. George took the ideologies and the hateful, vicious drive to exterminate and dominate that Adolf Hitler established, and he found a way to let these things function in a post-world war two era. After the war, fascism had lost its ability to attract a mass audience in the United States. It was seen as the ideology that had torn the world apart - because it was. People wouldn’t show up to Nazi party meetings, or pay dues, or vote as fascists, and so Rockwell instead focused on generating mass media attention with the few men he actually had at his disposal. He picketed civil rights marches wielding signs covered in racial slurs and trusting in the police to defend him and his outnumbered crew. Even if he could only get 9 or 10 men to march with them, the rage and violence his signs inspired in counter-protesters were a guarantee of mass media coverage. He spoke at colleges for the same reason, knowing the protests and attacks caused by his presence would get him in the papers and ensure a steady stream of donations. Rockwell positioned himself as a free speech crusader, since arguing to the public about his desire for genocide would have seemed less appealing. These are all tactics modern fascists use today. We see them on display with men like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes and his Proud Boys, Joey Gibson and Patriot Prayer. Whether they know it or not, all these men cribbed from the playbook of George Lincoln Rockwell. But the fascist movement has evolved considerably since GLR’s days. While many of the tools he pioneered are still incredibly effective today, his obsession with Nazi imagery and the swastika in particular was doom for his hopes of ever creating a mass movement. He had started to realize this near the end of his career. In 1966 he came up with the brilliant slogan “White power”, which he had printed up on t-shirts and protest placards. He worked the phrase into his speeches in Chicago, where he arrived to counterprotest Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King was in the city to organize a protest that advocated for more public housing in traditionally white, and thus more affluent, parts of the city. For the first time in his career, Rockwell was able to strike a nerve with a large number of white Americans, by focusing on their fear and resentment of black people. On August 6th, 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. Led a group of marchers through Gauge park. He was met by an enormous crowd of counter-protestors, organized, and radicalized, by George Lincoln Rockwell. They numbered more than 2,500. The crowd carried placards and banners emblazoned with Rockwell quotes like “Join the White Rebellion”, and “We Worked Hard for What We Got”. Thousands of furious voices shouted “White Power” at king and his comrades. It marked one of the most violent and vicious receptions Dr. King ever received. And it also marked the high point of Rockwell’s career. He was shot dead one year later.
His dream of fomenting a white revolution, however, did not die with him. It lived on in his apostles, and chief among them was a man named William Luther Pierce. Pierce was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 11th, 1933. His father, also William Luther Pierce, died in a car accident when he was 8 years old. His mother had to scramble to support him and his younger brother. Leonard Zeskind, author of the crucialbook, Blood and Politics, suspects her background heavily influenced the fascist Pierce would later become. “Marguerite, his mother’s biological father had run off when she was a child, leaving her fatherless until Marguerite’s mother, Bill’s grandmother, remarried. The new stepfather was a Jewish man, from New York, who had moved south and Marguerite had a bitter relationship with him. William Pierce’s story thus begins with his own absent father, and his mother’s unhappy tie to a Jewish stepfather. Marguerite moved about the south with their two young sons in tow. From these travails, William Pierce claimed he learned the virtues of self-discipline, and the importance of delaying immediate gratification for a greater goal. Values, he said, that became constant themes in his life. Pierce worked as a child to help his mom feed the family. He would later write that his difficult upbringing made him into the man he later became. “I think this external discipline, this external control, being forced over a long period of time to do things I didn’t want to do but were necessary to do helped me develop self-discipline. A lot of children these days never learn that. It’s amazing how many adults can’t do that. They can’t stick at a job they don’t want to do.” Young Bill was clearly a brilliant boy. He did well in high school and went to a military Academy in Brine, Texas, from 1949 to 1951. He earned a job there, cleaning the chemistry lab stockroom, and that job wound up stoking what would become a deep love of science. William went to college and then graduate school where he studied to become a physicist. He worked at the jet propulsion lab in Pasadena for a year, and married Patricia Jones, who was also a brilliant mathematician. The couple moved to Boulder and Pierce finished his doctorate in physics in 1962. His dissertation, which had something to do with nuclear dipole and electric quadrupole resonance, held no hints as to the sort of man he would become. Pierce got a job as the assistant professor of physics at Oregon State University, in Corvallis. He and his wife had twins and they settled into what seemed like It would be a perfectly dull, normal, healthy life. Pierce later wrote “Until I was 30 years old, I had hardly given a thought to politics, to race, or to social questions.” That changed after he started working at Oregon State University. He started showing up at meetings of the John Birch Society.
Now, you may not have heard of these guys but they’re one of the most important organizations in the history of the American radical right. Named after an American advisor in China, who the group’s founder, Robert Welsh, considered to be the first American who died fighting communists, the John Birch Society publications encouraged the US to withdraw from the UN, urged the impeachments of Chief Justice Earl Warren, accused former president Eisenhower of being a secret communist, and other similar battiness. Here’s a quote from one of their 1960 publications, “The Blue Book'', which William Peirce would certainly have read. “Now if the danger from the Communist conspiracy were all we had to worry about, it would be enough, but every thinking and informed man senses that even as cunning and ruthless, and as determined as are the activists whom we call Communists, with a capital C, the conspiracy could never have reached it’s present extensiveness and the gangsters at the head of it could never have reached their present power, unless there were tremendous weaknesses in the whole body of our civilization; weaknesses to make the advance of such a disease so rapid and it’s ravages so disastrous.” Now Robert Welch always denied any anti-Semitic leanings within the John Birch Society, but many people suspected that the weaknesses Welch saw in American society were, in fact, Jewish people. This is because John Birch Society propaganda was often incredibly similar to the Third Reich’s own propaganda. The Nazis also felt like Communism was brought down on society by hidden actors who weakened the state enough for this disease to advance on it. The main difference between the two is that the Nazis named the Jews explicitly, and the John Birch society did not. Pierce’s primary issues with the John Birch Society is that it wasn’t willing to discuss “the Jews'' or explicitly racial issues. The Birchers were far-right, but they didn’t want anyone to mistake them for literal Nazis. Peirce later wrote, “I quickly found out that the two topics on which I wanted an intelligent discussion, race and Jews, were precisely the two topics Birch society members were forbidden to discuss!”.
William Pierce maintained a successful career as a physicist while he devoured more and more John Birch propaganda. In 1965 he left the university, and got a job in Connecticut, working for the Pratt & Whitney aircraft plant as a senior research associate physicist. He made good money and he did well, but his coworkers described him as a real loner, who worked poorly with others and seemed almost unable to manage subordinance. Pierce’s political leanings were kept more or less under wraps until the plant’s workers went on strike. This face to face contact with what Pierce considered Communism, infuriated him so much that he tried to drive his car through a picket of a thousand union men. This is perhaps not so surprising since William Peirce had used his move to the East coast as an opportunity to start visiting the American Nazi party headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. William and George Lincoln Rockwell got along well, and Pierce found national socialism a perfect fit with the beliefs he’d been developing since his move to Oregon. His only issue with Rockwell, and the Nazis was, well, all the Nazi stuff. Pierce thought that the old fashioned fashy uniforms and swastikas made them look like they were LARP-ers, rather than serious revolutionaries. Obviously he didn’t use the term “LARP-er” but he accused them of “Hollywood antics”, which amounts to the same thing. In May of 1966, Pierce resigned from his factory job, and moved his family to Virginia. His wife, Patricia, started teaching university math so she could support her husband in his, you know, Nazi efforts. Weirdly enough Patricia wasn’t a Nazi, and later divorced her husband for his beliefs. But for a time she was willing to, I don’t know, humor him? She may have thought it was a phase he was going to get over eventually. Spoilers; he did not.
In Blood and Politics,Zeskind writes, “Over the decades Pierce showed little emotional commitment to his two sons or multiple wives. Only his mother, Marguerite, and his Siamese cats successfully vied with his single-minded devotion to national socialist politics. During these early years he began a small business selling guns, NS arms, and registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. His inventory included machine guns. The business folded after passage of gun control legislation in 1968. One guess as to what “NS Arms'' stood for. Now Rockwell and Pierce embarked on a publishing venture together, putting out 6 issues of a Nazi magazine, but William refused to actually join the group until Rockwell changed its name from the American Nazi Party to the National Socialist White People’s Partty. When Rockwell was gunned down outside the parking lot of that laundromat, the movement he had spent his adult life crafting quickly began to fracture. Nazis were, then, as now and always, catty bitches. GLR had kept his party together by sheer force of will, and even he hadn’t done a great job of that, what with the whole “getting murdered by one of his own men'' thing.
Pierce stuck with the NSWPP which retained the most members after Rockwell’s death.For a while, he tried to take Rockwell’s place, acting as the functional head of the party, writing all its propaganda, and even speaking at university campuses. He did not have Rockwell’s talent for drawing media attention. His only real success was saying that Nixon should be dragged out of his office and shot, which drew some coverage and got then FBI to start looking into him. During this period, Pierce became something of a mentor to a fella names James Mason. Young James had joined Rockwell’s American Nazi Party back in 1966, when he was 14. Two years later, at age 16, James got in trouble at school; he was disciplined by his principle and in retaliation started planning to go on a shooting spree, and murder multiple members of the school administration. Before carrying out his plan he called the NSWPP’s headquarters and wound up on the horn with Williams Pierce. The two talked it out, and Peirce convinced Mason to move to Virginia, work for the party, and learn how to run a printing machine instead of massacring his classmates. We’ll be talking about Mason more in a later chapter. He would go one to write a book titled Siege, which provided the nuts and bolts inspiration for the terrorist group Attomwaffen, but I’m getting ahead of myself. As the 60s wound to a close, Pierce started to get frustrated with the NSWPP, mainly with the fact that, again, it was just too darn Nazi-y. He believed fascism needed an authentically American character, and movement, if it was going to have any chance of taking over in this country. Just dressing up as Nazis was not going to cut it. He quit the party in July of 1970, and published a paper called “Prospectus for a National Front”, which he circulated around neo-Nazi circles. Here’s how it opened; “America today, and more specifically the American people, face the most serous and deadly menace which has arisen in their entire history. This menace far overshadows that post by any war we have fought and the economic catastrophe though which we have passed, or any domestic strife which has torn us. For today were are faced not just with a threat to out territorial integrity, or to our material possessions, or to our way of life, or even to our own lives, but to something far dearer. Today, all that we ever have been and all that we ever might be, our race itself, is threatened with extinction. “
Pierce went on to complain that none of the existing radical right-wing organizations existing in the United States had the ability to turn into a “large scale revolutionary movement”. “Their long established and unbroken record of failure is the best evidence of this fact.” He wrote. He attacked the movement for being filled with “overgrown children” and said “In essence, we need to stop waiting around for a new Hitler to rise up and unify all of our fringe little groups”. Instead, Pierce suggested America’s fascists take a leaf out of Communism’s book and create a national front; a large umbrella organization that would combine and coordinate all the different right-wing groups, and allow them to recruit people more easily, without the baggage of swastikas and Klan robes. Towards this end, William Pierce established the National Alliance in 1974. We’ll talk more about it throughout this book but obviously the National Alliance didn’t wind up being the trick to create a mass Fascist movement in the United States. It was, objectively, more successfully than Rockwell’s American Nazi party, drawing in thousands of members over the years and generating millions of dollars in income. But it proved no more capable of creating a popular revolution than the ANP had been. However, buried in Pierce’s prospectus, was a very important paragraph that contained a realization far more crucial than his National alliance would ever become. “About the only good thing which can be said about all these little groups is that they do generate quite a flood of pamphlets, leaflets, bulletins, newsletters, and other printed materials which express some excellent sentiment. But even here, it is largely an incestuous sort of affair in which the propaganda and the sentiment are circulated largely within the same vaguely defined ‘movement’ in which they were born. Any real contact or rapport with the general population is absent, and this lack of contact with the public is not due simply to problems of distribution or lack of access to the mass media. Most movement literature would fail to evoke a sympathetic response from the masses even if it could be placed regularly in their hands. It is, for the most part, too esoteric, too introverted, and too kooky to strike a responsive chord among the general public.” Pierce correctly understood that to really make progress, American Fascism was going to have to craft propaganda that could infect the hearts and minds of normal white Americans. It would take years for Pierce to translate this insight into action, but when he did, the result would quite literally shake the world.
First, however, came his dalliance with a spritely gentleman named Willis Carto. Now, Carto is one of the very few individuals in this story whose commitment to Fascism precedes the activism of George Lincoln Rockwell. He started a monthly paper in 1955 called, revealingly in my opinion, “Entitled Right, the Journal of Forward-Thinking American Nationalism”. According to Zeskind, “It promoted many of the anti-communist, anti-Semitic and segregationist ideas then circulating on the far right.” In 1957 Carto first wrote openly about his idea to create something called “The Liberty Lobby”, which he promised would “Lock horns with the minority special interest pressure groups in order to support the needs of white people.” who, it must be said, were suffering mightily in the 1950s. Carto wrote that “To the goal of political power all else must temporarily be sacrificed.” He spent his life embodying that creed. Now, Willis Carto was not an out-in-the-street bullhorn and placards activist. Nor was he an armed revolutionary, clutching a rifle and calling for racial holy war. Instead, he sought to bring anti-communists and segregationists together and craft a thoroughly American fascist movement. In 1962 he started publishing a magazine, “Western Destiny”, dedicated to inculcating these ideas among the American right. He wrote about “culture creators” (white people) and their eternal battle against “culture destroyers” (black people). “Tolerance”, Carto wrote, “can often be a culture-retarding and culture-distorting weakness”. “Western Destiny” began to attract a dedicated audience of budding extremists, including a teenager named David Duke. It is possible that Willis Carto is the man who red-pilled Duke.
Throughout the 1960s, as William Pierce was coming up with his idea for a National Front, Willis Carto built the Liberty Lobby into a moderately large mailing list for distribution of far-right, but not openly fascist, propaganda. He latched on to the 1968 presidential bid of a fellow named George Wallace. The 45th governor of Alabama, Wallace was one of the leading voices against the Civil Rights Movement. His most famous line is probably this: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod the earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say ‘segregation today, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!’”...
Due in part to Pierce’s desire to appeal to normal people, as well as the novel’s limited circulation among Neo-Nazis, Turner assumes its readers are already racist and do not need to be recruited to that mindset. The abandonment of “why” empowers a single narrative focus on “what” and “how”, the necessity of immediate, violent action and concrete suggestions about how to go about it. This is part of why the book has so often been associated with violence and terrorism.
The Turner Diarieswould go on to become probably the most influential single piece of fascist propaganda sinceMein Kampf. It’s inspired more than 200 murders since its publication. But it’s also inspired a hell of a lot more than just murder. The Turner Diaries became the ideological underpinning of a vicious American insurgency, which eventually led to hundreds and hundreds of armed men around the country working actively towards the establishment of a white supremacist state. The Turner Diaries also inspired a whole genre of fascist and quasi-fascist propaganda books, written to the same rubric but reining in on the racism, just a little bit, in order to avoid freaking out the “normies”. In 1996 John Ross published Unintended Consequences, a novel that is best described as The Turner Diaries but all the racism is whispered. The cover of the copy I have features a burning copy of the Constitution, with a black-clad cop attempting to sexually assault Lady Justice in front of it. Its main innovation from The Turner Diaries was to switch the focus of its revolutionaries away from race war and towards just gun rights. The plot focuses around a man, Henry Bowman, who winds up being framed by the ATF for some stupid reason related to their desire to take all of America’s guns. He kills most of the ATF agents who come for him and then brutally tortures one who he captures. Bowman and a small group of gun rights activists then carry out a terrorist campaign, horribly murdering gun control advocates around the nation until the president repeals all gun control law. Alex Jones has mentioned multiple times on InfoWars that Unintended Consequences is one of his favorite books.
In more recent years a guy named Matt Bracken has written a whole series of books starting with Enemies Foreign and Domestic. Like Unintended Consequences, his first book is basically Turner Diaries with less racism.The liberal government creates a false flag mass shooting to take away everyone’s guns. The ATF is the bad guy, and brave patriots beat them via terrorism. Bracken’s innovation was to have the cast of his books include numerous non-white people. The idea seems to be that if most of the people aren’t white, then the book can’t be racist. On an unrelated note, the second book in the series is Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista. Its plot is that the evil liberals orchestrate an invasion of Mexicans with the goal of having them ban English in the Southwest and secede from the United States. J.M. Berger, this time writing for The Daily Beast identified some similarities between Bracken’s third book and The Turner Diaries. “After an earthquake demolishes Memphis, black refugees turn into a seething mob of gang-rapists and cannibals, characterizations that feature memorably in The Turner Diaries, while urban blacks loot a path from Baltimore to Washington DC, where they demand and receive a new Socialist constitution engineered by a thinly veiled caricature of President Obama. The narrative disclaimers continue; one character condemns white racist killings in the chaos after the quake, and a battle-weary white racist girl near the end of the book accepts the hand of comfort offered by a black army medic, but these and other individual moments of race-grace are hard pressed to counter the otherwise vivid, lengthy depiction of African-Americans en masse as cannibal rapists directly responsible for destroying America’s constitution.”
In writing The Turner Diaries, William Pierce ignited a movement within the far right that is still very much present and relevant today. The next chapter will discuss, in depth, the generation of terrorists who were inspired by his words to take horrifying, bloody action. Like Christian Identity, The Turner Diarieshave influenced many people who may never have even read the book. In his manifesto, the Christchurch Mosque shooter wrote about his hope that his attack would spark renewed calls for gun control in the United States, because he believed this would lead inevitably to a new civil war. The Poway Synagogue shooter repeated the same desire. William Peirce died in 2002 but his ideas live, and kill, to this day.