Jonathan
S. Cullick
The Literary Offenses of a
Neo-Nazi:
Narrative Voice in The Turner Diaries
On Sunday, 7 June 1998, in Jasper,
Texas, three white men-avowed racist John William King and two
accomplices-murdered an African-American man named James Byrd. The trial
told the story of King, an ex-convict who had acquired “white pride” in
prison. As The Washington Post reported, in the early summer of
1998 King was evicted, rejected, and jobless, with little education and no
prospects, and so “about all he had left was his Aryan pride.” That
“pride” would be deA-DLy for Byrd, whom King accosted on a quiet road.
According to the confession of one of the killers, before King chained Byrd’s
ankles to his pick-up truck and dragged him, he clumsily joked, “We’re starting
The Turner Diaries early” (Duggan A05). King was referring to a book
that has been called “the ‘bible’ of various radical right, neo-nazi militia
groups” by Terence Ball and Richard Dagger (717).
In the words of its current
publisher, Lyle Stuart, The Turner Diaries is “a dreadful book”
but its effects cannot be ignored. When initially published, the novel
had been publicized underground by word-of-mouth and had been an inspiration
for the Order, a violent supremacist group of the 1980s. The novel
received national attention when federal authorities discovered that Timothy
McVeigh had used it as his blueprint for the 19 April 1995 bombing of the
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The resulting publicity
transformed the book’s notoriety into sales figures reaching 250,000 copies in
mainstream book stores and web sites, according to its publishers (Sutherland).
Reviewers and commentators in the
popular media have treated the book as a curiosity related to McVeigh and the
contemporary militia movement. Serious critics have come to it from
political and theological perspectives. Remaining to be considered is the
author’s technique, or lack of it, which has been summarily dismissed if it is
noticed at all. As a work of fiction, it is an inept attempt, because
substantial and persistent technical deficiencies undermine the novel.
What is fascinating about these narrative failures, though, is that they are
not incidental to the novel’s separatist, neo-Nazi ideology. Quite the
opposite, they directly result from the narrator’s inability to subject his
supremacist doctrine to critical examination. The first-person narrator
wishes to rebel against a static and oppressive system; however, his voice
becomes as monological and oppressive as the system he would displace.
The result is that he fails as a narrator.
Why such a poorly written novel
has become so popular is a question answered by the novel’s origins.
Publishing under the pseudonym “Andrew Macdonald,” the author is William
Pierce, leader of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization that the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith has called “the single most dangerous
organized hate group in the United States today” (A-DL). Originally from
Atlanta, Georgia, Pierce received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of
Colorado and taught at Oregon State University in the early 1960s, during which
time he served as an aide to George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi
Party. Pierce eventually took over the National Youth Alliance, founded
by Willis Carto (founder of the Liberty Lobby), changing its name and mission
to the National Alliance in 1974. That year he moved the National
Alliance to a 346 acre compound in West Virginia. Four years later he
published The Turner Diaries and created National Vanguard Books, the
publishing arm of the National Alliance, to teach and to inspire “in the hope
that the inspiration and the knowledge together will strengthen and guide the
will of the reader to participate in shaping the future of his people,” as the
National Alliance reports in its website article, “Why National Vanguard
Books?” By 1991 Pierce had established American Dissident Voices,
a short-wave radio show that broadcasts to every state in the nation. In
1999 Pierce purchased Resistance Records, which distributes “hatecore” or
“white power” music to young adults through its magazine and web site.
The National Alliance is now
present in at least twenty-six states across the country with sixteen active
cells, according to the Anti-Defamation League, making it “the largest and most
active neo-Nazi organization in the nation.”
With a membership spanning all regions, age groups, and social classes,
the National Alliance recruits on university campuses, and its “highbrow tone
contrasts sharply with the cruder, poorly edited propaganda materials of some
other extremist groups” (A-DL). With this marketing strategy and the
anonymity it gives its members, the National Alliance has made itself
attractive to some well educated individuals. The organization boasts
that professors, physicians, attorneys, and other professionals make up its
ranks.
The most far-reaching product of
this organization has been The Turner Diaries, which “is considered
required reading by virtually every member of the American white supremacist
movement” (A-DL). One group spawned by the novel was the Order, “the most
violent and notorious domestic terrorist group of the 1980s,” according to The
Nizkor Project, “and many of the crimes for which Order members were convicted
resembled terrorist acts described in the book.” Similar to the Organization in
The Turner Diaries, the Order funded extremist activities by conducting
counterfeiting operations and armed robberies-along the way executing members
whose loyalty fell under suspicion. The activities of the Order were
halted with the arrest of several members and the death of its leader, Robert
Mathews, in a confrontation with federal law enforcement officers.
Although Pierce has tried to
distance himself from the Order, the connection is apparent. Mathews was
a member of the National Alliance. The
Anti-Defamation League reports:
[Matthews] told an acquaintance that he had
orchestrated [a Seattle bank robbery in 1983] as the opening scene in what he
hoped would be a reenactment of Pierce’s American Nazi revolution. . . . Even
the group’s name, the Order, was chosen as a reverent nod to its inspiration-an
elite, clandestine paramilitary unit featured in The Turner Diaries.
The National Alliance web site
demonstrates approval for Mathews. Among leaflets that can be downloaded,
one advertisement aimed at recruiting new members prominently features a
quotation attributed to Robert Mathews: “Out of all of the Racialist
organizations in the Nation, the Alliance-and only the Alliance-has the
potential to bring us to victory.”
The novel’s influence upon Timothy
McVeigh is equally apparent. When they arrested him, FBI agents found in
his car a used copy of the novel with passages highlighted. During the
trial, several of McVeigh’s friends and his sister testified that he had sent
them copies of the novel and had sold copies in gun shows. It is not
farfetched to say that the novel supplied the idea for the Oklahoma City
bombing. As numerous news stories reported after the crime, McVeigh’s
methods, motivations, and target were almost identical to those of the novel’s
protagonist-much too similar to be ascribed to coincidence. Pierce has
attempted to dissociate himself from McVeigh, arguing that even if the act had
been influenced by the book, it “made little political sense because it was not
sustained.” In the on-line “Program of the National Alliance” Pierce
advocates an entire revolution, in which individual acts of violence combine to
effect radical national transformation. In other words, Pierce disagrees
with McVeigh, but more in procedure than principle. The criminal
activities of others associated with the National Alliance or inspired by
The Turner Diaries have been documented by the Anti-Defamation League, the
Southern Poverty Law Center, and Michael Barkun (see Barkun 270-271).
Pierce’s novel is so influential
upon men like Mathews, McVeigh, King, and others because it presents a utopia
for anti-government white supremacists: a revolution of ethnic cleansing that leads
to a “New Era” of Aryan domination. The novel consists of the diaries of
Earl Turner, an electrical engineer who served actively in the Organization
(a racist guerilla army) in its resistance against the System (federal
government). Published in A.D. 2100 by a fictionalized editor, the
diaries depict Turner’s rise to heroism in the Great Revolution. As the
novel opens, Turner’s personal weapons are seized in raids conducted under the
auspices of the Cohen Act, federal legislation that outlaws private firearm
ownership. After Turner’s unit retrieves weapons they had cached, they
destroy the FBI’s computer center in Washington, D.C., the hub of a national
internal passport system. They use a truck bomb comprised of ammonium
nitrate fertilizer and oil drums with dynamite detonators, which results in
massive loss of life. With the aid of sympathizers within the military,
they steal weapons and commit assassinations and bombings around the country,
including a mortar attack on the U.S. Capitol Building. Turner is
inducted into the Order, the Organization’s secret inner circle.
He is captured and tortured by federal agents but escapes; however, the Order
convicts him for oath-breaking for having allowed himself to be imprisoned
rather than committing suicide. He is sentenced to perform a suicide
mission at a later date.
Now based in Washington, D.C.,
Turner’s unit sets up a printing shop as a cover for their counterfeiting
operation. The Organization commits hundreds of attacks on civilian and
military targets nationwide, destroying or seizing communications, utilities,
police command centers, and military bases. Gaining control of
California, they drive all minorities out of the state and execute all
Jews. Then follows the “Day of the Rope,” a national day of lynching
Jews, Blacks, and sympathizers-particularly politicians, judges, and
professors. Now in control of nuclear arsenals, the Organization launches
missiles that destroy New York City, Israel, and the Soviet Union. The
white race ethnically cleanses all of Western Europe and South Africa, and Arab
nations conquer Israel. Turner’s final act is the complete destruction of
the Pentagon by piloting a small plane loaded with a nuclear weapon into the
building. (For comprehensive synopses of the plot, see John J. Reilly and
John Sutherland.)
In his first-person narrative,
Turner describes his group’s terroristic methods in detail, interpolating
radical right-wing commentaries on liberalism, feminism, race, miscegenation,
Jewish world conspiracies, government centralization, and the economic and
moral deterioration of the United States. The fictional editor, an
admirer of Turner, interposes occasional “Notes to the Reader” to gloss terms
Turner uses. Structurally and stylistically, this novel is not a serious
attempt at fiction. The Turner Diaries does not show William
Pierce to be sincere about practicing the craft of fiction. But it does
show that he is a sincere racist.
Popular discussions of the novel
demonstrate this dichotomy. Since the Barricade edition was published in
1996, over seventy customers of on-line bookseller Amazon.com have
posted comments in the Reader Reviews section on the Turner Diaries
web page. The novel elicits complex if not contradictory responses (date
of posting in parentheses):
The worst book I couldn’t put down.
(12/11/99)
Interesting concept, mediocre writing.
(3/28/98)
If you are a white supremacist in need of a
biodegradable fantasy, read it. If you seek a well written, captivating novel,
run away! (4/1/01).
The worst book I’ve ever finished. (10/5/99)
A number of the readers doubt that
a book so poorly written could inspire anyone. In answer to those who
cite this book as the blueprint for the Oklahoma City bombing, one reader comments:
“It’s a blueprint, but probably more for how not to write a novel than for how
to start a revolution” (5/2/00). It is easy to criticize this book.
Yet what makes the author’s lack of technique most remarkable is not simply
that it results in a work of fiction that is, in the words of one reader,
“laughably bad” (10/16/98), but that it actually undermines the supremacist
message that it intends to propagate. As one uniquely perceptive reader
observes, “A model of hypocrisy, it does turn out educating, but not in any
sense that one feels the author intended” (6/28/98).
The initial problem facing any
reader is that individual episodes are far-fetched. The Organization
plans over six hundred simultaneous assaults on military and civilian targets,
necessitating a massive, nation-wide conspiracy. Amazingly, the System, a
federal government with purportedly omniscient powers of domestic surveillance
and infiltration, knows nothing of these plots. Federal agents discover
the conspiracy only by chance, when they happen to stop an Organization member
for random questioning. An all-purpose, comic-book superhero, Turner is
an electronics expert, munitions expert, explosives expert, armed robber, mass
murderer, nuclear physicist, world-class counterfeiter, mastermind of plots,
and airplane pilot. Through it all, he records in the diaries his unit’s
top secret activities-including dates, names, locations, and
methods-information that would seriously damage the revolution were the diaries
to be discovered. As L.J. Hurst observes in an on-line review, “a secret
society that could tolerate a diarist on the scale of Earl Turner must have
many looser mouths and lesser intelligences in it.” Eventually, the
Organization perpetuates widespread destruction with nuclear, biological, and
chemical warfare; however, the effects of their actions are miraculously
isolated, with no devastating consequences to their own environment.
At a deeper narrative level, the
main problem is the narrator himself. We may admit that the premise
Pierce begins with does have promise. The discovered diaries of a
revolutionary could be an effective narrative vehicle in the hands of an able
novelist, who could develop the daily interior monologue of a militant
supremacist grappling with self-doubt. However, Pierce never rises to
this promise. The narrative lapses into a monotonously detailed record of
events that stretch probability, and its author never comes to the
rescue. The protagonist-narrator is not much more than a procedural kind of
writer. Turner is unable to depict other people meaningfully, and he is
equally unable to self-reflect or represent himself as a realistic, complex
human being. Below, I examine these failures of the narrator and locate
reasons for them in white supremacist ideology itself. The novel’s
technical faults are the direct result of its ideological basis. The
first-person narrator fails because he is who he is.
Turner’s most faulty
representations are of those from whom he feels most disconnected, namely anyone
on his doctrinal hit list. The best he can do is to characterize them
with absurd stereotyping. When authorities investigate his counterfeiting
shop, he pretends to be a Jewish shop owner, affecting what he calls a “Jewish
expression” and “a ‘So, vot’s goink on here, already?’ routine” (113).
The worst of these episodes appears toward the novel’s conclusion. A
Jewish newscaster reporting the race war works himself into demonic
histrionics, with flickering tongue and gleaming eyes. Like a Saturday
morning cartoon villain, he yells, “We have taken our vengeance against our
enemies, and they are no more. . . . The White vermin died like flies”
(188-189). Throughout the novel, Turner himself becomes cartoonish with
statements like “We’ll go to the uttermost ends of the earth to hunt down the
last of Satan’s spawn [Jews]” (199).
Turner’s Jewish caricatures
originate in supremacist ideology, specifically from the contemporary Christian
Identity movement, which advances the biblical interpretation that Jews are the
progeny of Satan. Turner’s conception of Jews has been shaped for
him rather than by him. He receives images packaged for him in the
ideological wrapping of extreme right wing religious belief. Turner rants
against Americans for complacently accepting the information and values that
the political system and news media fabricate for them. Yet he is himself
the product of the way the Organization has shaped him, and he is at least as
intellectually complacent as those he criticizes. Turner assumes that the
Organization has freed his intellect from the System, but he neglects to notice
that the Organization has only provided him with a different kind of cognitive
prison.
Within that prison he cannot even
successfully narrate his closest relationships. The novel includes a
putative love story. Devoid of passion, Turner and Katherine (a fellow
soldier in his paramilitary unit) talk rarely and when they do, the topic is
almost always related to the activities of the Organization. Even after
not having seen Katherine for three months, Turner describes their reunion in
one quick sentence that remains subordinate to the business of the
Organization: “Last night was the first uninterrupted night I’ve had alone with
Katherine since I’ve been back. And tomorrow it’s another bomb-planting
mission” (177).
In a love scene that Molly Ivins
calls “hilariously bad,” Turner and Katherine accidentally encounter each other
naked near the shower one evening, and this is what happens:
I impulsively held out my arms to Katherine.
Hesitantly, she stepped toward me. Nature took her course.
We lay
in bed for a long while afterward and talked. It was the first time I
have really talked to Katherine, alone. (28)
Turner’s glib description of
love-making as nature taking its course implies that “love” between
Katherine and Turner is little more than a physiological experience.
Indeed, Turner discloses in the final sentence that they have had no previous
meaningful interaction. Not surprisingly, this passage continues by
quickly returning to the business of the Organization.
Pierce does not make his narrator
do better than this because he cannot. This one-dimensional character
cannot be contorted into the multi-dimensional circumstances of intersubjective
relationships. In a section that Pierce seems to have written as an
escape clause, Turner explains that while he and Katherine do not want their
relationship to be without commitment, their primary obligation is to their
political cause. Likewise, Turner’s creator could not create a
believable, compelling love story because he had no real commitment to it in
light of his other obligations. The narrative is only a vehicle of
Pierce’s ideology, with the love story a footnote to the political work of the novel.
Turner’s identity is subordinate
to the cause of the Organization. In an early diary entry Turner states,
“My private life had ceased to matter” (7). A few weeks later when he is
admitted to the secret Order he writes, “Now our lives truly belong only to the
Order” (74). His loss of self has made him almost android-like in his
devotion to the Organization. Posing under assumed names and disguises,
Turner reaches the point when he can say that he has forgotten who he is.
In her study of the apocalyptic themes in the novel, Renee Brodie argues, “As
followers of Jesus found new life in Him, a parallel situation occurs where
members of the Organization are called upon to sacrifice themselves for the
goals of the group” (17). Indeed, Turner will become so subsumed into the
cause that he will self-destruct on behalf of the Organization.
Thus Turner subverts his own
contention that he is an individual with autonomous identity. Whatever he
does, he is governed by the System, the Organization, or the Order-as the names
suggest, it is all the same. Turner neither questions nor struggles with
his ideology and actions. The few times he feels disgust with violence,
he quickly dismisses, trivializes, or rationalizes his emotions away. As
much as he rants against the System and imagines himself an iconoclast, he
functions as an automaton.
If we hold Turner up to a taxonomy
of development from cognitive psychology, we observe that his comprehension
stagnates at the most basic level of perception. He is able to sequence
events chronologically and identify causal connections, but he is unable to do
much more. Even his political commentaries are simply applications of
received ideology rather than self-generated analyses. Turner’s ideology
functions as a lens through which he understands sensory experience and selects
future courses of action; however, Turner is unable to rise to the level of
seeing the lens itself. Never questioning or even considering the
Organization’s assumptions and claims anywhere in his diaries, Turner has no
control over the cognitive apparatus that he employs. Because he never
gets to higher levels of critical thought, he lives the role of passive
recipient, using his diaries to record his sensory data and replay memorized
doctrine. Governed by that doctrine, even his actions are
deterministically scripted for him.
Consequently, he is the perfect
agent for the Organization, a man whose only personal intent is to behave
according to the dictates of his superiors. He styles himself as an individually-empowered
resistor who can think for himself, but his only real act of individual choice
is his selection of an ideological program to surrender his individuality
to. Since the diaries begin in medias res, the reader is denied
any description of that surrender, so we cannot infer that there is any story
of personal struggle in it. Rather than the independent, self-sufficient
man of the American Dream whom right-wing anti-government militants idealize,
Turner is the perfect “company man.”
Pierce cannot depict his
protagonist-narrator as a realistic, complex human being because Turner has no
personal identity that will allow the kinds of complications essential to
dramatic conflict. He is a monological character obsessed with procedure,
unable to engage dialogically or generate compelling drama. As one
Amazon.com reader has noted (7/1/00), despite all the violence in this
novel, there is much tedium and little conflict.
Because of who he is, Turner could
not have been successful as a narrator, and this is why the novel’s ideology is
ultimately the cause of its technical shortcomings. It is too facile to
say that this is a poorly written book simply because it is racist, and I would
not go so far as to say that a supremacist cannot make a good fictional
character or narrator. As I indicated above, the diary genre for a white
supremacist character would have much promise in the hands of a skilled
novelist. The challenge to the novelist is to create the kind of
protagonist-narrator who can assume the dialogical stance that makes for a
dramatic, compelling, first-person account. But dialogue was never
Pierce’s goal to begin with, nor is it the goal of the ideology to which he and
his main character adhere.
Turner’s ideology is, to use the term
coined by Michael Barkun, “the politics of ultimacy.” Extremist positions
or ultimatums limit one’s political options. The result is a paralytic
political position in which the elements of civil political
discourse-compromise and gradualism-cannot survive. When all positions
but one are considered contaminative, one cannot compromise. When
anything but complete victory is considered total defeat, gradualism is
unthinkable. To Barkun’s argument we can add: as compromise and gradualism
break down, the best of narrative conventions break down as well. The
result is monological ranting rather than dialogical engagement, caricature
rather than complexity of characterization, mere violence rather than dramatic
conflict. William Pierce’s novel fails because his narrator subscribes to
a political theology that limits his cognitive choices and, by extension, his
narratorial choices.
Pierce’s mistake, then, was the
installation of a first-person narrator who was insufficient for the
task. But this criticism loses its sting in light of Pierce’s objective,
which probably has little to do with creating a quality work of fiction.
Pierce is more interested in rhetoric than dialogue. The device of the
diarist-narrator is merely the vehicle for a book that is intended to carry
heavy ideological freight. Supremacists, separatists, militants, and
anti-government “patriots” around the nation have purchased and celebrated this
book. It is fair to speculate that they are so hungry for someone to tell
their story that they are willing to accept any story no matter how poorly
conceived, even to the extent that they become unable to distinguish a bA-DLy
written novel from a good one. Whatever the case, the fact that so many
have taken inspiration from a “hero” as myopic and inarticulate as the one
Pierce supplies is, in the end, the most troubling aspect of this novel.
Jonathan S. Cullick
Department of Literature and Language
Landrum Academic Center 500
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights, Kentucky 41099
Works Cited
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—. “Why National
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