This is not another book report although I have finished reading THE TURNER DIARIES. It really only took a day to read the entire thing. I took another day off to think about the second half of the book.  I am not sure if people who condemn this book have either read it or have gone beyond the bomb making and sedition that permeate it.  Now that I have read it completely through and have gone back to places I marked to make copies of paragraphs and pages I would like to save, I find that I can sit and put my thinking down on paper. Actually, it was quite an indigestible experience - but it is impossible to throw it all up or make it go away.  Such terrible ideas, such outrageous and destructive ideas are seductive and as such can attract the immature, dysfunctional and impressionable.

I think that this book is far more dangerous than merely a catalog of recipes and formulae to kill people and subvert government. It turns society on its head and makes self-government the enemy of the people. Tim McVey may have used its formulas for making bombs but he learned a great deal more about race hatred and bigotry. Even so, I think it should be printed in as many copies as can be made and disseminated as the American “Mein Kampf” or, rendered from the German into English, “My Struggle”. It should be studied not for the now outmoded guerrilla military tactics it details but to show how twisted and perverted thinking can make a Hitler or one of his imitators into a threat to the peace of the world. We have not learned from history. Hitler wrote about his “struggle” in prison where he was mildly reprimanded for an attack to overthrow a timid new democracy in the wake of World War I. He used nothing but dirty tricks and lies and stole a country that made war on peaceful democracies.

Mr. Pierce, who has a doctorate in science, wrote The Turner Diaries and took leafs from Mein Kampf and the works of other revolutionaries. He was particularly impressed by how terror can tilt power.  It may be concluded that Mr. Bin Laden and Mr. Hussein and others have taken pages from this book as well as from pages from Mr. Mao’s Little Red Book, another depiction of how to take over a country. The same can be said about Cuba exporting terror and revolution led by “Che” who was cloaked in the same garment as savior of down-trodden peoples as worn by the salesman of international Communism, Leon Trotsky. Revolutions are rarely spontaneous uprisings.  They are led by small bands of discontented people with fixed ideas who do not care if the innocents they are “liberating” are murdered for having gotten in the way. Revolutionaries are frightening when they turn the world up-side down.

I was struck by how recurring ideas were repeated in the story of Earl Turner, the “hero” of The Turner Diaries. The story in this book denied that the “Holocaust” in World War II ever happened. It stated flatly that 6 million Jews were never destroyed along with another 6 million civilians in other countries – although it was a good idea. Hitler “didn’t finish the job”. In the “Turner Diaries” the roundup of Jews, Blacks and other “non-whites” by the revolutionaries against the American government (labeled “the System”) was a direct copy of Nazi Germany when, even as defeat approached, it could not stop its zeal for killing “untermenchen” or, sub-humans.. 

The twist here is that ALL non-white peoples (and this included Jews) were declared non-human in preparation of their being liquidated.  Their lives were not even justified viable as slaves.  All “Blacks” and shades down into “almost white” of peoples who included Asians and particularly Hispanics from Mexico, Puerto Rico and South America were proscribed, driven into camps and “eliminated”.  One particularly relished idea was to drive the Jews, Blacks and others out of a part of southern California the “Order” had liberated to the east over into the System’s land where the American government would have to deal with them.

If anyone can remember or has read “Ecotopia”, this was a “utopia” where the three westernmost states created a kind of America where differences were applauded and racial hatred had no place and nature was enshrined by eliminating machinery. Ecotopia got rid of the internal combustion engine and used solar power.  Turner recorded how the “System” took away the people’s guns and turned them into race mixing sub-humans who deserved to be killed off. By taking over California “ethnic cleansing” could begin the process decreed for all of America with true “Americans” or racially pure “Aryans” left to rule. In the one small mention of getting rid of “priests” you know that the kind of Americanism talked about is not only anti-Black, anti-Semitic but also anti-Catholic.

It is clear in reading this immature and half-baked craziness that no one with a real old fashioned public school education could believe any of it.  It is not even an interesting story.  But, Mr. Hussein and Mr. Bin Laden have learned from Mr. Hitler and have studied the ideas featured in both Mein Kampf and the Turner Diaries. Race hatred and religious intolerance are alive and well in the world of post September 11,’01.