NEO NAZIS FIGHT THE COSMIC WAR: I READ "THE TURNER DIARIES" SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO
THE TURNER DIARIES AS APOCALYPTIC LITERATURE
The Turner Diaries is a Neo-Nazi classic. It is from The Turner Diaries that we get the idea that the Libs are run by the Blacks, but the Blacks are too stupid to do anything themselves so they are actually being run by the Jews. It is also from The Turner diaries that we get the forms of accelerationism popular with the far right today. We also get the phrase “the day of the rope”. So, a nasty piece of fiction written in 1978 under a pseudonym, for a tiny readership, designed to inspire the author’s fellow fash to action, has ended up becoming part of the broader conspiracy theory milieu, and even influenced policy as “the great replacement” becomes a more mainstream idea. Well, shit, ay.
Kia Ora Tatou and welcome to Ending the Cosmic War with me, Karen Effie.
Of course I am most interested in this book as it relates to the Cosmic War, but first I will just give a brief outline and history.
This was a difficult read because the language is rough. It is peppered with terms I would actively eschew. Racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, it all goes without saying. The violence is also rough. The body count is almost as high as in Left Behind. In The Turner Diaries most people in the world are killed, even white people. The only ones left are white men and women who are fascists.
I was not going to buy the cursed thing, so I read a version on Internet Archive. It is readily available, although Amazon has apparently banned it.
Some history: The Turner Diaries was written by William Pierce, under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald. Pierce was a Neo-Nazi from the beginning. He was also a physicist, working in academia and then in the aerospace industry, which is I guess why in the book he displayed his absolute boner for the technology of mass violence. So, not a loser then. He kept his beliefs throughout is life, which ended in a trailer on a compound that has now become a sort of place of pilgrimage for the fash.
The book is a fictional diary of Earl Turner, a “foot soldier” in the war against Woke. Ok not quite, the war against The System. The system is a liberal regime where men are vilified and whiteness is derided. Women and Blacks run everything, but behind them is the shadow of the powerful Jew. Violence and rape abound, and the economy is collapsing, with infrastructure in jeopardy and soaring prices. Turner belongs to a cell of activists working and living in secret. They are with the Organization, a loose network of right thinking white men and their women. They plan and execute an escalating series of violent attacks on Jews, Blacks and infrastructure. The instruments of violence are lovingly described in detail; I suspect they are Pierce’s true love. After proving worthy, Turner is initiated into The Order, an elite group of men who run The Organization. The initiation ceremony involves hooded figures, candles, circles ‘n shit, you know the sort of thing. After that the shit gets real, they take over California, and there is a forced migration of all the Blacks, and they kill the Jews. They nuke Florida, that bastion of liberalism, and they nuke Baltimore for some reason. They make a white ethnostate in some of the west of the United States. Then comes the famous Day of the Rope, where they hang many thousands of white race traitors. Turner regrets this slightly, even though it has to be done. In the end the only people left are the fash. Happy white youngsters now till the fields and everyone works hard but cheerfully to build a new world. But the task is not yet finished. Turner is chosen for a suicide mission, and dies flying a plane into the Pentagon. After his death, the author describes the further carnage lovingly as The Organization spreads over the western world and most of the population is killed.
As I said, a body count almost as big as in Left Behind.
In case I haven’t made this clear, this is a bad book. It is explicitly racist and anti-Semitic, and the language makes me squirm. It has influenced many killings, most famously The Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 which killed 167 people. The “Day of the Rope” phrase is considered a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League. I am reviewing it because of its influence in that very far right milieu that is becoming more mainstream and more powerful. Its language talks across to the language of Christian nationalism, and of the January 6 rioters, not just the actual fash. This is the shit in the water we all drink now. I think we have to reckon with it.
Here is a longish quote:
And is that not a key to the whole problem? The corruption of our
people by the Jewish-liberal-democratic-equalitarian plague which
afflicts us is more clearly manifested in our soft-mindedness, our
unwillingness to recognize the harder realities of life, than in
anything else.
Liberalism is an essentially feminine, submissive world view.
Perhaps a better adjective than feminine is infantile. It is the world
view of men who do not have the moral toughness, the spiritual
strength to stand up and do single combat with life, who cannot
adjust to the reality that the world is not a huge, pink-and-blue,
padded nursery in which the lions lie down with the lambs and
everyone lives happily ever after.
Nor should spiritually healthy men of our race even want the
world to be like that, if it could be so. That is an alien, essentially
Oriental approach to life, the world view of slaves rather than of
free men of the West.
But it has permeated our whole society. Even those who do not
consciously accept the liberal doctrines have been corrupted by
them. Decade after decade the race problem in America has
become worse. But the majority of those who wanted a solution,
who wanted to preserve a White America, were never able to
screw up the courage to look the obvious solutions in the face.
For the first time I understand the deepest meaning of what we
are doing. I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we
must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing
it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depend
on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His
Grand Design.
My interest is in how The Turner Diaries relates to the Cosmic War.
Here are some Cosmic War tropes: we must be sacrificial in our fight for the true way. There is only one truth, ours, and we are the only ones who know it. Battle is inevitable. Winning is inevitable. Mass casualties are inevitable and thus not to be worried about. Mass destruction is desirable in order to make the world anew. Purity of thought and opinion must be retained. We are the future. Everything has led up to this. It will not last long. We will have our revenge. The enemy is irrevocably evil and must be totally destroyed. Society is irredeemable. We are a tiny band of virtuous rebels who hold the future in our hands. Our knowledge of the truth is esoteric and layered, with the whole of it known only to initiates. Our fight is total, with its own moral rules that transcend that of society’s.
Apocalyptic literature is just that, a form of literature. The Turner Diaries has many apocalyptic features of the sort I have written about previously. It is a revenge fantasy, as is the book of Daniel in the Hebrew Bible and Revelation in the New Testament. It has its own eschatology, in that most of the world’s population is murdered, the planet is nuked, the infrastructure of civilization is destroyed. It describes its own version of collapse: society is collapsing because of liberalism, yet when the Organization takes over, they destroy the infrastructure and everyone they don’t like is murdered, expelled, or starved to death after the Organization takes control of the food supply. It is a revealing of greater truth, as Turner is initiated into the Order in an occult-style ceremony.
There are some traditional features of apocalyptic literature that The Turner Diaries lacks. There is no journey to heaven, no guide, no throne scene, nothing metaphysical about it. Nothing wondrous. The Cosmic War takes place in two spheres: the heavenly realm, and the material world. The Turner Diaries is about the material world only. Nevertheless, it has enough of the flavour of the Cosmic War to be useful for my purposes, and it influences those who believe they fight this war in the heavenly realm.
Now you don’t have to read it. I did it for you. Thank you Karen Effie for sniffing out the shit in the water. You’re welcome. Thank you for reading this, and ma te wa.
FURTHER:
Don’t go there. Just don’t. Just go stand in the rain.
Picture: Idaya the Devon Rex disapproves of this book.
