I Read The Turner Diaries So You Don’t Have To: Chapters 1 - 2

I was going to open this by saying I’m not sure why I’m even doing it, because it will probably be painfully disgusting and an unpleasant experience for all concerned. But that’s not quite true; I do have a couple of specific reasons for wanting to put in the time and energy involved in this project, a couple of specific reasons why I think it’s worthwhile. 

First, I believe that the book itself is important. Not in and of itself, mind you; in and of itself it’s total poorly-written trash without any redeeming features whatsoever. The world would be better if it had never been written and it has contributed to doing a tremendous amount of harm including getting a lot of people killed—including a bunch of children in a daycare, murdered by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. 

But that harm is why it’s important.  

It was and is no secret the degree to which it influenced McVeigh to do what he did, and it’s influenced any number of other white supremacist far right groups and individuals; the Southern Poverty Law Center has called it “the bible of the racist right”. If one wants to understand what drives a particular group’s ideology, it’s helpful—albeit not, I think, always necessary—to be at least somewhat familiar with that group’s core text(s), the source of their first principles. But I believe The Turner Diaries is useful for understanding not only extremist groups but the entire contemporary Republican Party and why it looks the way it does, and the under-and-overcurrents that have guided its trajectory for the last half century. 

Many “moderates” in the GOP would have you believe that their own brand of conservatism is wholly good, and has nothing whatsoever to do with stuff like The Turner Diaries. They are either incorrect in good faith, or they are lying. I think it’s more often the latter, although the deception is working in multiple directions. And as the GOP slides further and further right without less and less compunction about maintaining a veneer of respectability, one has less and less of an excuse for ignorance. 

To put it simply: I think The Turner Diaries is worth paying some attention to because this is what they want. This is where their ideology is tacking, even if they don’t want to admit it to us or to themselves. 

I think it would be tempting to respond to that with “well, of course it’s awful, because any ideology taken to its logical extreme ends up being awful”. I could write a goddamn book on why that isn’t true, or at least on why it’s a spectacular oversimplification as well as a fantabulous case of Both-Sidesism. But I don’t want to write that book right now. I want to write about this other book, God help us. In the process, I may gesture broadly at that first unwritten book, because it might at some point end up being relevant. 

The other reason I’m doing this proceeds from the first, which is that I’m doing it so you don’t have to. You’re welcome. 

That being said, I think some warnings are in order. I probably don’t need to issue a content warning for racism and antisemitism, but I do think I should issue one for the intensity and degree of those things, which is utterly mind-blowing. This book is so fucking racist, y’all. It is inexpressibly horrible. It is in-your-face hateful and it is relentless about it. I mean, it’s a book that ends with the extermination of all People of Color on Earth and any white person who dared to take their side in any respect, and that’s painted as the happiest of all possible happy endings. Do not look for the vicious racism to let up, because it won’t. 

The other thing I need to warn for is that it’s very violent, and a lot of that violence is, from what I’ve read about the book, sexual in nature. The author is absolutely drenched in THEY WANT TO RAPE THE PURE WHITE WOMEN paranoia. I mean of course he is; that paranoia is intrinsic to racism of all kinds. But besides the rape there is apparently generally horrific levels of misogyny—again, of course there is; talk to anyone who studies racist groups and they’ll say those people also don’t tend to like women very much. 

This is a Let’s Read where I will be analyzing what I’m reading, not merely summarizing it, so I’ll try to keep the descriptions of the truly awful parts as spare as I can and minimize actual excerpts of them. But there’s no way to talk about this book without exposing you to how awful it is. I’m not making you look right into the open core, but if you insist on coming near this particular exploded reactor, I can’t totally shield you from all the radiation.

Now that all of that’s out of the way: Put on your lead-lined suits and LET’S READ THE TURNER DIARIES

Or I will, and you can watch.

Chapters 1 - 2

The Turner Diaries was written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce writing as Andrew Macdonald. Pierce was a full-on Nazi. For my purposes that’s the only relevant fact about him and it’s certainly the only one I care to mention other than that he was 100% garbage. If for reasons best known to God you really must know more about him, you can look him up on your own time.

It’s actually a frame story, presented by some unnamed archivist of The Future as the recovered diaries of a “martyred” (spoiler alert: the guy dies, it’s like the one single good thing that happens) terrorist operating in the fantastical future setting of the 1990s. The first thing I want to note is that we are told almost nothing in the archivist’s foreword about the racist utopia said terrorist helped to bring about. Nothing. We’re told that there’s been a “Great Revolution”, about which a lot has been written. In fact, right off the bat we’re told more about the revolution itself than what the revolution produced—that it was “a time of cataclysmic upheaval and rebirth”, that the capital of the US is no longer Washington DC because for as-yet unclear reasons Washington DC is in ruins which no one has bothered to rebuild despite the revolution having happened a century ago, and that the “Martyrs” of the revolution are considered so important, so literally sacred, that schoolchildren are required to memorize and recite all their names. 

Given how many people will end up dying in the revolution in question, that must be absolutely miserable and the recitation likely takes hours. This is already a horrific dystopia and we haven’t even gotten to the explicitly genocidal racism yet. 

I do want to flag this, though, and it’s especially relevant when taken in context with the weird dearth of information regarding what this future-contemporary world is like. One might think that there’s not much information at this point because it would be some kind of spoiler, and the author chose to tease it at the beginning and then reveal that information bit by bit. Well, sort of, but also kind of not really, or at least I don’t expect it to go down like that. If the stuff I’ve read about this book is true, there will be incredibly little ink spent on describing the racially pure paradise on earth people have to look forward to once this Great Revolution is over.

Because the author doesn’t really care about it, and does not imagine that his readers will either. The truly interesting and exciting bits are everything that happens beforehand—all the violence, hatred, and mass murder. Once you win, there’s no one left to kill, and who wants to read about that? 

Except one detail specifically mentioned is how overwhelmingly important the “martyrs” are. 

This isn’t just a story about and by and for a racist cult, it’s a story about and by and for a racist death cult, a group of people obsessed with extravagant violence and defined by their racist bloodlust. It is inherently nihilistic. It isn’t concerned with the future, because the future isn’t the point, and in fact the truth is that it’s an ideology which is probably much happier if it never wins. Because if it wins, it no longer has a reason to exist.

What I’d like to point out here in relation to the modern GOP is that the modern GOP doesn’t like winning either, and when they do win control of government they don’t appear to know what to do with it other than a) tear it apart, and b) use it to enrich themselves and their friends and then tear it apart. It could be no other way; a political movement predicated on the notion that government is bad isn’t going to care much about governing well, or about maintaining the institutions of government for the common good. 

In 2016, the GOP attained a unified government, and they have never gotten over it. They hate it. They were never so happy than when they were the largely impotent opposition, because then they could focus on complaining and acting victimized without the burden of actually having to do anything meaningful. Oh, sure, they love the judges and they love the part where they enrich themselves and their friends, but they’re also in a constant state of whiny disarray and it’s really just all rather pathetic. 

Moving on to the book proper. 

Chapter 1 is not long, and is almost entirely lengthy exposition coupled with an only tangentially relevant flashback, because as we all know there’s no better way to begin your book than with lengthy exposition and an only tangentially relevant flashback (I know that the actual quality of the writing here is so much less important than the horror of the subject matter, but a) I actually think they’re related, and b) it’s rather like Stephen Miller’s speeches, you know, where the content is appalling but the packaging is so amazingly bad that you do need to spare a few seconds for it as well). 

It’s September 16th, 1991, and Earl Turner is so goddamn hyped that he can’t sleep. The reasons for this are hinted at, and then never made clear and never mentioned again:

I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning, when George phoned to warn that the arrests had begun, and it’s after midnight now. I’ve been keyed up and on the move all day. 

But at the same time I’m exhilarated. We have finally acted! How long we will be able to continue defying the System, no one knows. Maybe it will all end tomorrow, but we must not think about that. Now that we have begun, we must continue with the plan we have been developing so carefully ever since the Gun Raids two years ago.

A couple things to pick out here. The first is the phenomenon—repeated throughout the rest of the book and often common to other similar examples of explicitly ideological literature—of taking the broadest possible terms/names for things and capitalizing them to indicate their Importance, as well as only bothering to imagine them in the broadest possible strokes. 

The government of this world seems to be defined almost entirely by how oppressively anti-racist it is; whether or not it has any other policies or agendas is a mystery, although in chapter 2 there are references to shortages and ration cards so clearly things aren’t going well. That it’s a leftist government can be inferred from *GESTURES AT THINGS IN GENERAL* as well as the Communist boogeyman of shortages, but otherwise: who knows? They’re anti-racist; that’s probably all that really matters. Although they’re also vehemently anti-gun, about which more in a minute. 

This overall laziness of imagination is encapsulated perfectly in how the regime is named and the questions that name leaves unanswered. It’s called only the System. Which is... Is that just Earl’s name for them? Do they call themselves that? If they do, isn’t that a little on the nose? Would a System really call itself The System? That would be the political equivalent of a villainous corporation in a kids’ movie going by the name DastardlyEvilCo Inc. 

But of course even if it did call itself that, it would be perfectly in keeping with this kind of ideological fiction, where the villains all skulk around steepling their fingers and cackling and wearing big badges that say HI WE’RE THE VILLAINS (and in the case of this book guess what kinds of noses they’d have, I think I’m too sober to be doing this tbh). Creating a complex antagonist works directly against the all-important task of presenting the hero’s cause as Ultimately Right and Just, so we can’t possibly be having that. 

Yet this lack of imagination is not confined to the villainous-and-probably-Jewish leftist government. Because as we discover, once Earl starts reminiscing about the Gun Raids (capitalization not mine) of November 1989, the terrorist organization Earl and his friends are members of is called The Organization, and later in the book we’ll further discover that the core leaders of the Organization are creatively known as The Order. 

As I said, Pierce doesn’t consider these details important. Imagination itself isn’t important, because telling a good story is completely secondary to getting across the ideological message, and everything else either serves that or has no reason to be there. 

Empathy is also fairly significant for the cultivation and use of a rich imagination, and empathy and racist extremism don’t tend to coexist well in the same brain. 

The rest of the chapter is devoted to a weirdly-placed flashback to 1989, when Earl’s apartment is broken into by scary Black people wielding clubs and kitchen knives. They have apparently been deputized by local law enforcement (which is obviously on the side of the anti-racist leftists instead of the heroic white supremacists). The Scary Black People are looking for concealed firearms; we are informed that it became illegal to own firearms after the Cohen (yep) Act of 1988. Why this happened, we are not told, and like so many other worldbuilding details it doesn’t matter: it simply follows that an anti-racist leftist government wouldn’t want red-blooded (white) American Citizens to own guns.

This anti-Second Amendment theme in the book has led some of the people it’s inspired—McVeigh included—to claim that they never read it as a violently racist screed at all but instead merely as a story about guns and how important it is to have them. Which is transparently ludicrous, so let’s move on. 

Earl isn’t sure initially that the Scary Black People are even there on official business; he believes they may be robbers, because the police have decided that it’s racist to try to stop Black people from doing anything and as everyone knows Black people are inherently criminal so of course crime—almost entirely against white people—is now rampant and largely unchecked. 

Hang on, I need to lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling for a second.

To continue: A guy with a clipboard comes in, and he is in charge. He’s technically white, but he has an “unusually dark complexion” so you know he’s evil. He is told that no guns have been found, but is unsatisfied with this report: Earl, you see, is “a bad one” with “a racist record” and therefore some more intensive searching is needed. 

A note here: Yet another core tenet of extremist white supremacist ideology is that Black people are possessed of a sort of animal cunning but no real initiative or organizational abilities, and that therefore anything they do is orchestrated by far more intelligent evil puppet masters—usually Jews. This is one reason why the whole “outside agitator” line is highly problematic at best when used in the context of the kind of uprising we’ve seen after George Floyd’s murder; it has a long ugly history that ties into the notion that Black people would never rise up against oppression themselves so someone else in the shadows must be manipulating them into doing it. 

Anyway, the thing to bear in mind here is that in this world, Black people are certainly villainous but they are not the real ultimate villains. Israel is!

No, seriously, it’s Israel. We’ll get there. If I can stand to. 

(Sure, it’s just a book about guns. Absolutely.)

Evil White Guy does some kind of scan with some unspecified device and Earl’s handgun is found hidden in a wall. Earl is in trouble. This will be okay eventually, because he and his Organization buddies buried an oil drum full of firearms in the woods of Pennsylvania (this part of the book takes place in Virginia) so all they need to do is drive out there and retrieve it when the coast is clear. 

Earl and three other people found guilty of concealing guns and ammunition are forced to sit down on the cold sidewalk and it’s all so horrible and unfair. And then people are disdainful to Earl and it’s sad.

One man stopped to ask what it was all about. One of our guards brusquely explained that we were all under arrest for possessing illegal weapons. The man stared at us and shook his head disapprovingly. 

Then the Black pointed to me and said “And that one’s a racist.” Still shaking his head, the man moved on.

I just... 

I am probably going to keep saying certain things over and over and over, assuming I manage to paddle any significant way into this shit lagoon let alone all the way across it, but I really have to stop here and reflect on the fact that Pierce and people like him truly do think the country is on the verge of being like this. Or they think it already is that way. This is (at the time of the book’s writing) the near future, and it is a future in which, as far as American society is concerned, the worst thing you can be is a racist, the worst thing you can own is a gun, and everyone is either heartily on that page or content to pretend to be so. Oh, and the cops are basically Antifa. 

This cartoonish funhouse mirror vision of a socially just society is what they think we want—in that the funhouse mirror is all they can see. And that’s not confined to extremists. It’s a key feature of the contemporary American right. How many times have you seen Ted Cruz or the like tweet some THIS IS THE DYSTOPIAN FUTURE LIBERALS WANT bullshit and be presenting, almost entirely without spin, something that genuinely sounds pretty great and is in fact broadly popular with a majority of the country, like universal health care or legal weed.

The whole notion of the right and the left wanting basically the same positive future and merely having different ideas about how to get there is as much a fantasy as this book is. I don’t think it ever wasn’t a fantasy.

Anyway, it turns out that the Gun Raids (remember, this is still a flashback) ended up with around 800,000 arrests, far too many people to jail. The newspapers suggest throwing everyone in makeshift concentration camps in the middle of winter because of course they do. This is where we get our first hints that (white) public sentiment may not entirely be with the System, because there’s some disgruntled rumbling about how hardly any Black neighborhoods were raided. Also a lot of government officials end up arrested, and the whole thing is so embarrassing for the System that they eventually let almost everyone go, although much personal data is recorded and many arrestees including Earl are informed that they will be tracked and could be picked up again at any time. 

The Organization takes a big hit and retreats fully underground. Earl hates it, but in the hindsight of 1991 he concludes that the Organization wasn’t Organized enough at that point to accomplish much anyway. Here is where we get our first hints of straight-up far right accelerationism, because the complacent public can’t be counted on for anything:

As soon as the public had been reassured by the media that they were in no danger, that the government was cracking down only on the “racists, fascists, and other anti-social elements” who had kept illegal weapons, most relaxed again and went back to their TV and funny papers.

As we began to realize this, we were more discouraged than ever. We had based all our plans—in fact, the whole rationale of the Organization—on the assumption that Americans were inherently opposed to tyranny, and that when the System became oppressive enough they could be led to overthrow it. We had badly underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our fellow citizens, as well as the extent to which their feelings could be manipulated by the mass media. 

As long as the government is able to keep the economy somehow gasping and wheezing along, the people can be conditioned to accept any outrage.

This is also an example of a deeply disturbing phenomenon that I’ve started thinking of as Sorta Almost Right By Accident Except Then Oh God No—SARBAETOGN. Because there is a kernel of truth here, as we’ve dismayingly seen for ourselves: it can be really, really hard to get people to realize that something is terribly wrong and they ought to put a stop to it. Solidarity is an immensely difficult and exhausting project, and in terms of anti-racism it involves breaking down and through a lot of conditioning as well as the degree to which capitalism is fine-tuned to keep people overwhelmingly busy with the task of merely keeping their heads above water. Plus, yeah, media of all kinds is a huge goddamn problem here. 

Leaving aside the notion that there’s something special about Americans, no one is inherently opposed to tyranny, or at least it isn’t that simple. If people can be made to believe the tyranny works for them, or even if it doesn’t that there’s nothing they can do about it so there’s no point in trying, or that yeah, the tyranny is bad but Those Other People are worse, then no, they won’t do anything. 

So obviously the best and indeed the only way to address this is: violent extremism. 

Post-Gun Raids, the Organization works on getting its shit together. It tightens its security and raises the quality of its planning, it establishes a network of spies and informants, and Earl reflects on how racial integration of government and police has turned out to be a blessing in disguise in terms of establishing said network because naturally a racially diverse workforce is going to be terrible at its job so it’s easier to get away with stuff. Back to the present: it’s four AM, we still have no idea what just happened and why Earl is so keyed up, and we never do find out because he falls asleep and the chapter mercifully ends. 

ON TO CHAPTER 2. 

About half of chapter 2 (set a couple of days later) is devoted to a lengthy explanation of logistics and how Earl’s happy little terrorist cell is getting itself established with an apartment, money, other resources like fuel—fuel is expensive and rationed and there is apparently a thriving black market—and transportation. It goes on for a while and is highly tedious; it’s the kind of thing that might indeed end up in someone’s real diary, but that doesn’t mean it should go in a book. In any case it isn’t interesting enough to cover in depth, so I’ll skip over it and proceed to the one point of action in the chapter, wherein Earl and co-terrorist Henry rob a Jewish-owned liquor store and kill two—maybe three—people. 

The fact that it’s Jewish-owned is important. Henry, you see, has Principles:

My inclination was just to walk up to the first liquor store we came to, knock the manager on the head with a brick, and scoop up the money from the cash register. 

Henry wouldn’t go along with that, though. He said we couldn’t use means which contradicted our ends. If we begin preying on the public to support ourselves, we will be viewed as a gang of common criminals, regardless of how lofty our aims are. Worse, we will eventually begin to think of ourselves the same way. 

Henry looks at everything in terms of our ideology. If something doesn’t fit, he’ll have nothing to do with it. 

...

Anyway, he convinced me that if we are going to rob liquor stores we have to do it in a socially conscious way. If we are going to cave in people’s heads with bricks, they must be people who deserve it. 

I...

Yep, back to the floor. Hang on. 

Okay, let me remind you that totally aside from the global genocide, the heroes of this book end up brutally slaughtering a tremendous number of white people for the unforgivable crimes of loving a Person of Color, being friends with a Person of Color, being nice to a Person of Color, and even being in close proximity to a Person of Color at the wrong moment, and this is all 100% fine and morally justified. 

Real ideological consistency is for race traitors. 

Anyhoo, Earl and Henry rob Berman’s Liquors and Wines and knock out—and possibly kill—the dude who has the bad luck to be working the register. He’s Black, so it’s cool. They get $800 from the register and ought to just high-tail it outta there, but Mr. Ideology spots the next-door deli that Berman owns and his ideological principles say that he just cannot call it a night without also killing a Jew, so they rob that too and Henry murders Berman by cutting his throat, and then goes ahead and murders Mrs. Berman as well when she gets understandably upset about it. Earl is very shaken by the whole thing, which embarrasses him. It’s decided that from now on Henry will do all the robbing and murdering, since Earl obviously doesn’t have the stomach for real terrorism.

A day later, Earl is preparing to travel up to PA to retrieve the buried guns. Earl is depressed about how uncertain and chaotic his life has become, and he misses the regular life he used to have before all the terrorism, which is very sad because clearly he had no choice about being a terrorist. 

Most of the rest of the chapter is meandering skippable bits of backstory, but there is one bit I want to flag:

Looking at it philosophically, one can’t avoid the conclusion that it is corruption, not tyranny, which leads to the overthrow of governments. A strong and vigorous government, no matter how oppressive, usually need not fear revolution. But a corrupt, inefficient, decadent government—even a benevolent one—is always ripe for revolution. 

Okay, two things. 

1. Earl—and by extension Pierce, because I think we can assume Earl is basically his mouthpiece—fundamentally does not understand how a state works. Tyrannical governments are essentially always corrupt. Corrupt governments are also often oppressive. Oppression and corruption go hand-in-hand nearly without fail, and indeed, tyranny specifically serves as cover for rampant self-dealing. Democratic institutions, when they function the way they should, counter corruption. We’ve seen first-hand that one of the primary tasks of a corrupt government will be tearing those down so that it can go ahead and be as corrupt as it likes without any public accountability. 

Indeed, corruption basically has no meaning in a truly tyrannical government, because the rule of law no longer means anything other than what the corrupt people in power want it to mean. The rule of law is only for people they don’t like, people who step out of line, and otherwise it’s a dead subject.

There are people whom the law protects but does not bind, and people whom the law binds but does not protect.

2. This is another thing in the text that I’ll be pointing out repeatedly: the notion that It’s Fine When We Do It. What makes something moral or immoral is not the thing itself, but who’s doing the thing. The extremist moral universe Pierce presents here is absolutist and binary, but it’s also entirely relativistic, because the only thing that determines the morality of an act is whether the right people are acting. 

Which is part of why Henry’s vaunted ideological purity is so laughable but also actually quite consistent in that respect: what the Right People do is Right—period—and if you suffer as a result of it, that just proves that you’re Wrong. The post-Great Revolution tyrannical regime is established through a global campaign of terror and genocide unlike anything seen in the history of the world, but it’s only tyrannical for the Wrong People. What makes the government tyrannical or “benevolent” for you is entirely determined by the orientation of your own identity. 

And of course the Right People have nothing ever to fear, because they could never slip into being the Wrong People—or if they do, well, they just should have tried harder to be Right, shouldn’t they?

This is why, when the right accuses the left of being decadently morally relativistic, the only reasonable response is wild laughter. 

And so concludes chapter 2. 

I don’t think the installments after this will tend to be quite this long—I had a lot to write on the front end, and it’ll probably be easier to gloss over less important things as we proceed. And I do want to proceed. I’m aiming to update this once a week, but I intend to do a lot of things, so we’ll just have to see how it pans out. 

In any case, thanks for reading. If you’d like more of this—for some incomprehensible reason—I hope you’ll consider becoming a supporter.