The Turner Diaries

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... 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.

The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce (published under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald) and a favorite on the far-right loony bin circuit. It is a fictional account of a guerrilla war waged by a white supremacist cadre organization (leaderless resistance) to overthrow the United States government and set up a neo-Nazi regime. Although on the surface "just" a novel, every plot device in the book appears carefully and coldly calculated to impart the positions of the National Alliance, the neo-Nazi group which William Pierce led, and to serve as a blueprint for a white supremacist revolution in the U.S.

The book was self-published by the National Alliance and mostly sold via mail order and word of mouth until Lyle Stuart Books decided, against all better judgment, to give it a mainstream reprinting. It wound up on the shelves of every Barnes & Noble and Borders for most of the late 1990s.

Synopsis
The book is presented as the diary of Earl Turner, a guerrilla fighter for "The Organization", published a century after the revolution. The beginning of the guerrilla war is set in 1991. It was immediately preceded by the passage of a 1989 "Cohen Act" banning private possession of firearms, and a Supreme Court decision legalizing rape on the grounds that laws against rape are racist (presumably not the same laws in force today). The apparent racist framing of both — Jews want to take your guns, and blacks want to rape your white daughters — establishes the tone from the outset. Soon there are roving gangs of non-whites raping and looting at will. The book's protagonist, Earl Turner, joins The Organization fully committed to giving his life to the revolution. The Organization is in the form of small cell groups under the control of a secretive high command.

The book includes crude racist stereotyping on almost every page; black people are always portrayed as animalistic criminal thugs, while Jews are always conniving exploiters. Turner's cell group's first act is to rob a Jewish-owned liquor store. (Because of course Jews run all the liquor stores. But hey, at least it doesn't portray blacks robbing the liquor store...I guess?) From there, they go on to bigger acts of terrorism: attacking the FBI building with a delivery truck bomb, and numerous attacks on power plants. Trying to find allies for the revolution, he makes the mistake of contacting a left-wing hippie commune, thinking they would be sympathetic because they both have a common enemy in "the system". The hippies instead turn them in to the police and the Israeli intelligence. (Apparently, Pierce intended this as a "very strong warning" against neo-Nazis trying to make allies on the far left, and not that leftists would, of course, oppose violent racists.) For both this grave mistake and allowing himself to be taken alive by Israeli intelligence, Turner is assigned the punishment of an eventual suicide mission upon his release from a military prison. In another "very strong warning", northern California falls to a military coup led by a conservative Bircher-type Air Force general who wants to "restore the Constitution". The Organization first tries allying with him as both movements gain ground, but he is portrayed as an obstructionist who denounces the white revolution as communism. The Organization assassinates him because even racist militia wannabes aren't crazy enough to follow the Birchers.

As the revolution proceeds, one of the most sickening scenes in the book, exceeded only by the epilogue, is "The Day of the Rope", a mass lynching where all white women who married black and Jewish men are hanged in public. Liberal Hollywood actresses and politicians are lynched. The Organization then launches nukes at Israel and the Soviet Union, which leads to the Soviet Union launching nukes at the United States. New York City, Miami, Detroit, Baltimore, Charleston, and Los Angeles are nuked, and Jews flee to Toronto, which is later also nuked. Arabs storm Israel and kill all of the Israelis who escaped the nuclear attack. France, the Netherlands, and the Soviet Union collapse, and anti-Semitic violence is carried out in cities worldwide. Earl Turner carries out his suicide mission, flying a crop duster plane into the Pentagon with a nuclear bomb strapped on the co-pilot seat. This is where the diaries themselves end.

An epilogue (or as Pierce spells it, "epilog") describes Turner's suicide mission as the turning point, but several more years of guerrilla war follow, degenerating into complete genocide in which cities are taken one by one and their leaders, white or not, "liquidated" to establish the Organization's control. Food being scarce, it is rationed in such a way that "it was no longer sufficient to be merely White; in order to eat one had to be judged the bearer of especially valuable genes." North America is ethnically cleansed, with genocide committed against anyone not white and even "lesser" whites. The revolution spreads to Europe, sweeping across it in just a few months amid "ankle-deep" blood. This leaves what the epilogue calls the "Chinese problem", which is "solved" using chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks, leaving all of China uninhabitable for hundreds of years except for "mutants" (yes, really), probably because China is Red!  What happens to Africa is left unstated, except earlier the book says the "Negro race" suddenly disappears during the revolution.

Influence
Given the book's sickening advocacy of race war and mass genocide over the entire earth, even to the point of leaving large landmasses uninhabitable to secure a pure white planet, it is a wonder the book has an audience at all except among the most hard-core of neo-Nazis. Nonetheless, The Turner Diaries quite likely played a role in inspiring at least three different terrorist activities in the U.S.:
 * "The Order", a violent splinter group of Aryan Nations active circa 1983-1985, who robbed banks and murdered, a Jewish radio host, in his driveway for insulting them on-air. In the novel, the Order is the upper echelon of the Organization, and an unnamed Jewish radio talk show host is ambushed and shot to death in his driveway.
 * Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. In the novel, a similar attack destroys the FBI building in Washington, DC.
 * The Columbine High School massacre in 1999 from Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the former (at least) trying to replicate McVeigh's attack (albeit failing).

The Anti-Defamation League cites other terrorist groups during the 1990s also being inspired by The Turner Diaries, including the Aryan Republican Army, which committed bank robberies and bombings, and The New Order, whose members were indicted before being able to carry out their planned attacks on the ADL and other civil rights groups. The methodology and targets of the terrorist attacks in The Turner Diaries — using trucks to bomb federal buildings and flying aircraft into the Pentagon — also bear an unsettling resemblance to many real-life terrorist attacks including 9/11, although any actual influence, as opposed to such attacks being in the nature of terrorism in general, are purely speculation. Likewise, there has been speculation on to what extent, if any, The Turner Diaries may have influenced Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 attacks in Norway, although Breivik's manifesto also heavily plagiarized from the Unabomber's manifesto.

Inspirations
Scholars who have analyzed The Turner Diaries have, interestingly, noted that the novel appears to draw heavily from two speculative political novels of the left, The Iron Heel by Jack London and, less clearly, Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach. The Iron Heel is an anti-fascist novel but one which William Pierce was known to be a fan of, and like The Turner Diaries, it is written in posthumously-published diary style. Meanwhile, Ecotopia is an environmentalist novel in which Northern California and the Pacific Northwest secede from the United States and form a 'green' republic. It is discussed as a possible influence in Michael Barkun's Religion and the Racist Right due to both the timing (Ecotopia was published in 1975) and to The Turner Diaries using the secession of northern California in its plot.

Kinder, Gentler Turner Diaries?
Camille Jackson, writing in the Fall 2004 SPLC Intelligence Report, notes another possible influence: In the past 15 years, dozens of racist and extremist novels have been published by writers hoping to use the tool of fiction as persuasively — if, perhaps, to a less explicitly violent end — as Pierce. The novels span every category of extremism — neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, radical environmentalist, anti-immigration, anti-government — but most stick to Pierce's formula. She cites such futuristic race war novels such as Dark Millennium by Gerald James McManus and Hold Back This Day by Ward Kendall, as well as Bedford, a World Vision by Ellen Williams, a fundamentalist Christian and neo-Confederate novel depicting a nightmarish world controlled by secular humanists. A sidebar shows more books of this sort, mostly obscure, with several more racist books, and some on other themes ranging from radical animal rights to anti-technology to gun rights to tax revolt.

In reality, this genre of dystopian right-wing fiction long predates The Turner Diaries. The films of Russell Doughten depicted an underground of Christian believers fighting the Antichrist's one-world government after the rapture. , a mainstream and best-selling 1973 novel from France, depicts Europe degenerating into anarchy while being overrun by boat people from an overpopulated India. It, unfortunately, has been regaining popularity in light of the European migrant crisis. The 1971 film If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? was a Christian film depicting, in violently graphic detail, a Communist takeover of America. Then, of course, there is Atlas Shrugged (shudder). As mentioned, the radical left also has its own books in this genre, from Jack London's The Iron Heel (arguably the true pioneer of the genre, dating back to 1908), to Communist tales of class warfare in the streets like Klaus Neukrantz's Barricades in Berlin, to several hard green novels, of which The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey is probably the most infamous.

All of these predate The Turner Diaries, depict underground resistance, sometimes violent or illegal, and promote radical ideologies of one sort or another. Mainstream novels of underground resistance, like George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Sinclair Lewis' , should also be mentioned — though, needless to say, these books aren't absolutely batshit crazy. More recently, evangelical Christianity has produced some bestsellers of dystopian fiction, with an end times or sometimes anti-abortion or spiritual warfare theme, such as Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series, Pat Robertson's End of the Age, Charles Colson's Gideon's Torch, and Frank Peretti's This Present Darkness. Lastly, dystopian societies and rebellions against them became popular subject matter for young-adult fiction starting in the late '00s, most famously with Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, with these books typically trending more apolitical and less crazy by focusing on the generation gap and often portraying the rebels themselves as flawed and/or extremist in their own right.

Clearly, then, The Turner Diaries didn't begin the genre of radical dystopian underground resistance fiction. What The Turner Diaries effected was to up the ante, opening a space for novels promoting race war and white supremacy that explicitly advocated mass genocide, while at the same time making any novels since look less bad by comparison. Take, for example, the novels of Matthew Bracken, which his fans will admit are in this genre, but at the same time, they will vehemently denounce any comparison to The Turner Diaries as unwarranted and unfair. Furthermore, in its refusal to tie its racial politics to any specific ideology (such as neo-Nazism or Christian Identity), it was able to promote a broader vision for white nationalism that any white person with a chip on their shoulder about minorities could theoretically embrace, serving as a forebear to the alt-right of the 2010s.

Prequel
William Pierce followed it up with another novel,  about a sniper who targets interracial couples in the Washington, D.C. area. The sniper is a lone nutcase whom both the FBI and a white supremacist group try to co-opt for their own ends. The novel's ending hints that it is a prequel to The Turner Diaries, as the sniper is the founder of the Organization. It was dedicated to a serial killer who murdered at least 20 people between 1977 and 1980, targeting African-Americans and Jews in an attempt to start a race war, robbing banks, and attempting to assassinate Larry Flynt.