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The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds

...by Dr. Robert S. Griffin

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11 ____________

PIERCE ON THE TURNER DIARIES

"You know what the first line of your obituary is going to be, don't you?" I said to Pierce.

"Well, it depends on when I die, before or after the revolution," he answered.

"Let's say before the revolution."

"And you're talking about in the New York Times ."

"Yes. It is sure to say something like, 'William Pierce, author of the white supremacist novel, The Turner Diaries , died today.' I would assume that just about everybody links you up with that book— especially with all the notoriety around the Tim McVeigh connection. Probably to a lot of people you and the book are synonymous."

"Yes, I realize that, at this point anyway, I'm pretty much identified with The Turner Diaries in people's minds."

"When you talked to Revilo Oliver, he said you had to get to the people who only do recreational reading. Was that your audience for this book?"

"I did think that this kind of book would get to people who wouldn't be likely to read my other material. Initially at least, the people who got into the book were predominantly those who don't read much besides adventure fiction. But then of course the book began getting publicity and other people wanted to see what the fuss was about, so eventually the book got read by many different types of people. Although I must say that many of the lower-class white people who are affected by the book are not the kinds of people I am trying to recruit, because they are not particularly useful people. They don't have good character, and they aren't really strong and capable people. But I did reach some very fine people through the book who I'm sure I wouldn't have otherwise.

"I think the main thing, though, is that the book made a big impact on the public consciousness— it's become a household word. There was a story I read in the Village Voice [newspaper in New York City ] about six months ago. There was a fellow named Turner— Harry Turner, I think it was— who was a highway commissioner or something like that, some political job. He was caught up in some kind of scandal or controversy. Anyway, the headline in the article had ‘Turner Diaries' in it— I guess they thought that would be a cute headline. But really the book had nothing to do with the story. It was just that this guy's name was Turner and the headline writer figured that everybody would get the reference. I read that and I thought to myself, 'We've arrived!'"

(Another example of how The Turner Diaries and Pierce seemingly have entered the mainstream culture: In the 1999 Jeff Bridges film, Arlington Road , as in Pierce's book, the FBI headquarters building in Washington is blown up and a delivery truck is involved. Also, the Bridges character's wife is killed tracking down an extreme right-wing figure in West Virginia by the name of Parsons.)

"I think you're right," I concurred, " The Turner Diaries has had an impact on the public consciousness. But I do think that the associations most people have are very negative ones. At least the people I tend to be around— I'm talking about middle-class professional types, people who see themselves as informed, enlightened, reasonable, and moral— say to me 'I've got no time to read that ignorant, racist garbage, nor do I have any time for anybody who produces that sort of material. How could somebody have written such a hateful, violent book? What in the world did he think he was doing?' How do you respond to people like that? What do you say to them?"

" The Turner Diaries and Hunter 1 and everything else I write are not pieces of propaganda designed by marketing experts. They'd say 'Here are the elements you need to have in it, and here's what you have to avoid. Punch these buttons to appeal to the housewives and these over here to get the small businessmen,' and so forth. I didn't do that. I suppose I might have tried to write in that sort of calculated way, and I'm not sure how it would have come out. As far as I went in that direction was to buy into Oliver's idea that I ought to try fiction as a medium to get my message across.

“What I did with The Turner Diaries was imagine myself a member of a revolutionary organization, Earl Turner. I put myself inside his skin and looked at the fictional situation I had created through his eyes. Or maybe it is through my eyes; it is kind of me as Earl and Earl as me. Anyway, I tried to imagine how I would react to the various situations he was in, what I would do, and how other people in the Organization would react and behave, and proceeded from there. What came out of that is going to get a more sympathetic reading from people with a similar mentality to mine, I understand that.

"This book is not going to get a big response from somebody who has a basically mercantile outlook or a feminist-conditioned turn of mind. It isn't going to get a receptive response from, say, an intelligent person who is concerned about all the problems he sees around him— racial conflict, the effects of economic globalization, the de-industrialization of this country, the breakdown of morality in America, the negative influence of television and the other media— but who just wants those problems to go away without it putting him out or having things get messy. He's worried about crime because it keeps him from enjoying his life in the way he would like. His business has been held up or burglarized a couple of times. Now, that is a hell of a big nuisance to him— it costs a lot for insurance for one thing. He'd like somebody to do something about all these problems, that's for sure, but, really, he doesn't give a damn about the fundamental things I was concerned with in The Turner Diaries . He just wants the problems fixed so he can enjoy his life without interference.

“People like that aren't going take to the book. They're going to say, 'My God, a revolution! Oh, that would be bad for business, terrible for profits.' Or they'd turn pale at the idea of all the bloodshed and suffering and violence that goes along with cleaning up the mess we are in and that is in the book. But I wasn't putting that in because I'm bloodthirsty or an anarchist or just trying to shock anybody. It's there because I think that is the way history works, that when the old order gives way to the new order usually there is widespread bloodshed, suffering, and chaos. So I just wrote it the way I imagine things like this happen.

"Now if I had wanted to appeal to your average middle-class consumer, then I would have described the problems The Turner Diaries deals with in a muted, euphemistic way, and then I would have had a knight-on-white-horse politician appear on the scene— we can both think of some possibilities to use as a prototype for this character— and he'd win the election and fight the bad guys, and lo and behold! America would be restored to its pristine state of 1925 or so: blacks would be back in their place, crime under control, children not smart-assing their parents, and so on— all with no big upset to the lifestyle of ‘Mr. Sunday New York Times .' Yes, he would have related to that because that resonates with his mentality.

"But even if I had tried to write a book like that it wouldn't have had much vitality. I just couldn't put my spirit into something like that. I wrote it the way I did, and some people read it— not the ones we've been talking about, but other people, and a lot of them— and it knocks them off their chair. They really relate to the book. 'Damn, this makes sense!' they think— and the ideas stick in their minds, and it's not just a momentary thing. They join the National Alliance and go from there, different from the way they'd done things before.

“So while some people read The Turner Diaries and are horrified, there are many others who are deeply affected by the book. And contrary to what the ‘horrifieds' believe, these others and I are not their inferiors. If these horrified people are really going to understand the ideas and incidents in the book, they are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their reaction to these incidents has to do with the limits in their mentality as much or more than the limits they attribute to my mentality or that of the people who like the book.

"Of course many people who don't like it haven't even read the book. They've only heard about it from talking to other people, or they have read about in the newspaper or seen references to it on television. But they still think they know about it and therefore have an opinion about it. Most of them are sheep. They go wherever the rest of the herd is going. They believe whatever the New York Times or the networks or the New Republic tells them they should believe. Whatever the accepted, proper response to the book is, that is where they are— you can bet on it.

“I have a stack of reviews this thick telling people what the proper response to the book is. Nobody who writes for the mainstream press approves of the book. They all say either that this is a terrible book and obviously the work of a madman or— and actually this is more flattering— that this is a very dangerous book. So for the people who make sure they are on the side of those in the know, they are getting some clear direction on what to think about the book and me.

“Although nobody around here is likely to ever see it, one reviewer from the Johannesburg Star in South Africa wrote what I thought was a decent review of The Turner Diaries . He didn't really approve of the book, but he acknowledged that the book hits the nail on the head about the problems we're facing and that everybody ought to read the book. He said it is a radical book, an extreme book, but it has a lot of very thought- provoking things in it. I like that."

"At one point in The Turner Diaries ," I said to Pierce, “you have Jews and ‘near-whites,' as you call them, out in California being marched off to extermination. People ask me, 'What is he getting at here? Is this what he wants? Is he advocating this kind of thing?' What are you trying to say with that?"

"You've got to remember that The Turner Diaries is a novel. It is fiction, and therefore by definition it is not a book of advocacy. What I did try to do, however, is make it realistic. What do these sheltered middle-class consumers think went on over in the Balkans among the Serbs and Bosnians and Muslims? They have tortured and slaughtered each other wholesale over there. What do they think ethnic cleansing is? This is the kind of thing that has been going on since the beginning of time. It is real, it's the way people behave, and just because this crowd has been insulated from these realities doesn't mean they don't exist. Certainly it went on all through World War II, a period of history I personally care a lot about. It is true that everybody has heard about how the Germans cleansed their nation of Jews— in fact, it seems that is all we have heard about, over and over. But what we don't hear about is what happened to the Germans who were expelled from countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia . Two million Germans died in that process. My point is that this sort of thing has been commonplace in the world. I'm simply reflecting reality."

"But weren't you afraid that writing a book like this would exile you to the fringe of American life, marginalize you, make you look like an extremist, outside the boundaries of acceptability?"

"I know that if I tell the truth as I see it I will become a social outcast from the part of society that takes its cues from the authorities and the news media and [movie director] Steven Spielberg and the rest. I will be cast into the outer darkness, I realize that. But then again, if you yourself write a book that gets outside of today's acceptable discourse and somehow it manages to get published, you'll never get invited to another faculty party, and you'd better already be tenured and tough as leather."

"The book ends with Turner's suicide mission, destroying the Pentagon with a nuclear bomb. Why did you end the book that way?"

“When I began the tabloid installments that turned out to be The Turner Diaries, I had a situation, that's pretty much it. There was the Organization and it was trying to get rid of the government and the government was trying to get rid of it. They were fighting each other. How would it go? I imagined some things, but I didn't have the whole thing plotted out. I went chapter by chapter, one chapter per installment. I tried to get one explosive or charged-up incident in each episode to keep the readers interested, and I tried to get my lessons in.

"One of the lessons I tried to get across had to do with responsibility. A person is responsible for his actions, including the failure to act. Earl Turner was a good guy, but he did act irresponsibly [when he broke under torture and revealed information about the Order instead of taking cyanide as he had been instructed to do]. He broke the rules, and as a consequence the Organization suffered substantial damage. He was sentenced to death for that and then given a reprieve and given a chance to make up for what he had done— that's the Pentagon mission [the last episode in the book where Turner dies dropping a nuclear bomb on the Pentagon]. Turner saw it as fair and proper that it went that way.

"The Organization was in a precarious situation. The government was getting its act together and eventually would have attacked its enclave in California . The Organization had to prevent that, and they did it by destroying the System's command and control center at the Pentagon in Washington . It was really hard to do because the government had cleaned out the whole area around the Pentagon to keep anybody from getting a bomb in there on the ground. They had put up blast shutters and beams around the Pentagon and wouldn't let anyone get within two miles of the place. They knew the Organization had nuclear weapons it had gotten from the air force base. So the only way the Organization could get a bomb in was through an aerial attack. If they had had high-tech and more time they might have made a remote-control bomb, stolen a Tomahawk missile or something, but they didn't, so they went the low-tech approach, put the bomb in the back seat of a cropduster, and Turner got in and flew the damn thing into the Pentagon and succeeded in his mission. It was the responsible thing for him to do, and it saved the day and it made a hero out of him, and I thought it was a good ending for the book.”

 

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