Maybe he was right that our tactics are wrong; the reaction of the people will eventually answer that question. But his whole attitude, his whole orientation was wrong. As I listened to Powell I was reminded of the late-19th century writer, Brooks Adams, and his division of the human race into two classes: spiritual man and economic man. Powell was the epitome of economic man.
Ideologies, ultimate purposes, the fundamental contradiction between the System's world view and ours-all these things had no meaning for him. He regarded the Organization's philosophy as just so much ideological flypaper designed to catch recruits for us. He saw our struggle against the System as a contest for power and nothing more. If we could not whip them, then we should try to force them to compromise with us.
I wondered how many others in the Organization thought the way Powell did, and I shuddered. We have been forced to grow too quickly. There has not been sufficient time to develop in all our people the essentially religious attitude toward our purpose and our doctrines which would have prevented the Powell incident by screening him out early.
As it was, we had no real choice in deciding Powell's fate. There was not only his disobedience to consider, but also the fact that he had revealed himself to be fundamentally unreliable. To have one of us-and a unit leader, at that-talking openly to other members about trying to find a way to compromise with the System, with the war just beginning… There was only one way to deal with such a situation.
The eight male members present drew straws, and three of us, including me, ended up on the execution squad. When Powell realized that he was going to be killed, he tried to make a break. We tied his hands and feet, and then we had to gag him when he began shouting. We drove him to a wooded area off the highway about 10 miles south of Washington, shot him, and buried him.
I got back a little after midnight, but I still haven't been able to get to sleep. I am very, very depressed.
Chapter VIII
November 4, 1991. Soup and bread again tonight, and not much of that. Our money is almost gone, and there still hasn't been anything from WFC. If our pay doesn't come through in the next couple of days, we'll have to resort to armed robbery again-an unpleasant prospect.
Unit 2 still has what seems to be an unlimited supply of food, and we'd already be in a much worse way if they hadn't given us that carload of canned goods a month ago-especially since we now have seven mouths to feed. But it is just too dangerous to drive up to Maryland for our food supply. The chances are too great of running into a police roadblock.
That is the most noticeable-and to the public it must be by far the most irritating-consequence to date of our terror campaign. Travel by private automobile has become-at least, in the Washington area-a nightmare, with enormous traffic jams everywhere caused by the police checks. In the last few days this police activity has increased significantly, and it looks as if it will remain a regular feature of life for the foreseeable future.
So far, however, they haven't been stopping pedestrians, bicyclists, or buses. We can still get around, although less conveniently than before.
Oops, there go the lights again. This is the second time this evening we've had to break out the candles. Until this year, the worst power shortages have occurred in the summer, but it's November now and we're still stuck with the "temporary" 15 percent voltage reduction they imposed in July. Even this perpetual "brownout" isn't saving us from an increasing number of involuntary blackouts.
It's obvious that somebody's profiting from the power shortage, though. When Katherine was lucky enough to find some candles at one of the grocery stores last week, she had to pay S1.50 apiece for them. The price of kerosene and gasoline lanterns has gone out of sight, but the hardware stores never have any of them in stock anyway. When I next have some free time, I'll see what I can improvise in that direction.
We have been maintaining the pressure against the System during the past week with a lot of one-man, low-risk activities. There have been approximately 40 grenade attacks against Federal buildings and media facilities in Washington, for example, and our unit is responsible for 11 of them.
Since it is now virtually impossible to enter any Federal building except a post office without a complete body-search, we have had to be ingenious. On one occasion Henry simply pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade and then slipped it down between two cartons on a big pallet of freight waiting outside the freight door of the Washington Post, wedging it so that the safety lever was held in place by the cartons. He didn't wait around, but news reports later confirmed that there was an explosion inside the Post building which killed one employee and seriously wounded three others.
Most often, however, we have used grenade-throwers improvised from shotguns. They give us a maximum range of more than 150 yards, but the grenade always explodes sooner than that unless the delay element is modified. All one needs to use them effectively is a place of concealment within about 100 yards of the target.
We have fired from the back seat of a moving auto, from the restroom window of an adjacent building, and-at night- from a patch of shrubbery in a small park across the street from the target building. With luck one can hit a window and get an explosion inside an office or a corridor. But even when the grenade bounces off an outside wall the explosion shatters windows, and the shrapnel keeps people jumping.
If we keep it up long enough we can probably force the government to shutter all the windows in Federal buildings, which will certainly help raise the consciousness of Federal workers. But it is clear that we can't maintain this kind of activity indefinitely. We lost one of our best activists yesterday-Roger Greene, from Unit 8-and we are bound to lose more as time passes. The System must inevitably win any sort of war of attrition, considering the numerical advantage they have over us.
We have talked this problem over among ourselves many times, and we always come back to the same stumbling block: a revolutionary attitude is virtually non-existent in America, outside the Organization, and all our activities to date don't seem to have changed this fact. The masses of people certainly aren't in love with the System-in fact, their grumbling has increased steadily over the past six or seven years as living conditions have deteriorated - but they are still far too comfortable and complacent to entertain the idea of revolt.
On top of this is the enormous disadvantage we suffer from having the System controlling the image of us which reaches the public. We receive a continuous feedback from our "legals" on what the public is thinking, and most people have accepted without hesitation the System's portrayal of us as "gangsters" and "murderers."
Without some sort of empathy between us and the general public we can never find enough new recruits to make up for our losses. And with the System controlling virtually every channel of communication with the public, it's hard to see how we're going to develop that empathy. Our leaflets and the occasional seizure of a broadcasting station for a few minutes just can't make much headway against the non-stop torrent of brainwashing the System uses for keeping the people in line.
The lights have just come on again-now that I'm ready to hit the sack. Sometimes I think the System's own weaknesses will bring about its downfall just as quickly without our help as with it. The incessant power failures are only one crack among thousands in this crumbling edifice we are trying so desperately to pull down.
November 8. The last few days have seen a major change in our domestic affairs. The population in our shop increased to eight last Thursday, and now it's down to four again: myself, Katherine, and Bill and Carol Hanrahan, formerly of Unit 6.
Henry and George have teamed up with Edna Carlson, who also came to us after Unit 6's disaster, and with Dick Wheeler, the only survivor of a police raid on Unit I l 's hideout Thursday. The four of them have moved to a new location, in the District.
The new arrangement has us better divided along functional lines than before-as well as solving the personal problem which had been worrying Katherine and me. We here in the shop are now e
ssentially a technical-services unit, while the four who left are a sabotage-and-assassination unit.
Bill Hanrahan is a machinist, a mechanic, and a printer. Until two months ago he and Carol operated a printing shop in Alexandria. His wife doesn't share his mechanical genius, but she is a reasonably competent printer. As soon as we get another press set up here, her job will be to produce many of the leaflets and other propaganda materials which the Organization clandestinely distributes in this area.
I will continue to be responsible for the Organization's communications equipment and for specialized ordnance. Bill will assist me with the latter and will also be our gunsmith and armory-keeper.
Katherine will have a chance to exercise her editorial skills again, to a limited extent, in that she will have the responsibility for transforming the typewritten propaganda we receive from WFC into camera-ready headlines and text for Carol. She will be able to use her own discretion in making condensations, deletions, and other changes necessary for copyfitting.
Bill and I finished our first special-ordnance job together yesterday. We modified a 4.2 inch mortar to handle 81 mm projectiles. The modification was necessary because we have so far been unable to pick up an 81 mm mortar for the projectiles which we grabbed in the raid on Aberdeen Proving Ground last month. One of our gun-buff members, however, had a serviceable 4.2 inch mortar which he had kept hidden away since the late 1940's.
The Organization is planning a very important mission in the next day or two, in which the mortar will be used, and Bill and I were under pressure to finish the job on time. Our main difficulty was in finding a piece of steel tube of the right I.D. to weld inside the 4.2 inch tube, since we have no lathe or other machine tools at this time. Once we found a supplier for the tube the rest was fairly easy, and we are proud of the result-although it weighs more than three times as much as an 81 mm mortar should.
Today we did a job which was simple enough in theory but which gave us more trouble in practice than we had anticipated: melting the explosive filler out of a 500-lb bomb casing. With a great deal of straining and swearing-and with several good burns from the boiling water we managed to splash all over ourselves-we got most of the tritonal explosive from the bomb into a variety of empty grapefruitjuice cans, peanutbutter jars, and other containers. The work took all day and exhausted everyone's patience, but now we have the makings for enough medium-sized bombs to last us for months.
I think that I will find Bill Hanrahan a congenial comrade-in-arms for carrying out our unit's new duties for the Organization. (We are now designated Unit 6, and I am in charge.) Certainly the new living arrangement here is more congenial for Katherine and me, now that we are sharing OUR building with another married couple instead of with two bachelors.
I just wrote "another married couple," but, of course, that was a slip of the pen, since Katherine and I are not formally married. In the last two months-and particularly in the last two or three weeks-however, we have experienced so much together and become so dependent on one another for companionship that a bond at least as strong as that of marriage has developed between us.
In the past, whenever one of us had an Organizational assignment to carry out, we usually contrived to work together on it. Now such collaboration will not require any contrivance.
It is interesting that the Organization, which has imposed on all of us a life which is unnatural in many respects, has led to a more natural relationship between the sexes inside the Organization than exists outside. Although unmarried female members are theoretically "equal" to male members, in that they are subject to the same discipline, our women are actually cherished and protected to a much larger degree than women in the general society are.
Consider rape, for example, which has become such an omnipresent pestilence these days. It had already been increasing at a rate of 20 to 25 per cent per year since the early 1970's until last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that all laws making rape a crime are unconstitutional, because they presume a legal difference between the sexes. Rape, the judges ruled, can only be prosecuted under the statutes covering nonsexual assaults.
In other words, rape has been reduced to the status of a punch in the nose. In cases where no physical injury can be proved, it is now virtually impossible to obtain a prosecution or even an arrest. The result of this judicial mischief has been that the incidence of rape has zoomed to the point that the legal statisticians have recently estimated that one out of every two American women can expect to be raped at least once in her lifetime. In many of our big cities, of course, the statistics are much worse.
The women's-lib groups have greeted this development with dismay. It isn't exactly what they had in mind when they began agitating for "equality" two decades ago. At least, there's dismay among the rank and file of such groups; I have a suspicion that their leaders, most of whom are Jewesses, had this outcome in mind from the beginning.
Black civil rights spokesmen, on the other hand, have had only praise for the Supreme Court's decision. Rape laws, they said, are "racist," because a disproportionately large number of Blacks have been charged under them.
Nowadays gangs of Black thugs hang around parking lots and school playgrounds and roam the corridors of office buildings and apartment complexes, looking for any attractive, unescorted White girl and knowing that punishment, either from the disarmed citizenry or the handcuffed police, is extremely unlikely. Gang rapes in school classrooms have become an especially popular new sport.
Some particularly liberal women may find that this situation provides a certain amount of satisfaction for their masochism, a way of atoning for their feelings of racial "guilt." But for normal White women it is a daily nightmare.
One of the sickest aspects of the whole thing is that many young Whites, instead of opposing this new threat to their race, have apparently decided to join it. White rapists have become more common, and there have even been instances of integrated rape-gangs recently.
Nor have the girls remained entirely passive. Sexual debauchery of every sort on the part of young White men and women-and even children in their pre-teens-has reached a level which would have been unimaginable only two or three years ago. The queers, the fetishists, the mixed-race couples, the sadists, and the exhibitionists-urged on by the mass media- are parading their perversions in public, and the public is joining them.
Just last week, when Katherine and I went into the District to pick up the salaries for our unit-which finally came through, when we were down nearly to our last can of soup-there was a nasty little incident. While we were waiting at a bus stop for a homeward-bound bus I decided to run into a drugstore a few feet away to buy a newspaper. I was gone for no more than 20 seconds, but when I came back a greasy-looking youth - approximately White, but with the "Afro" hair style popular among young degenerates - was taunting Katherine with obscenities while dancing and weaving around her like a boxer.
(Note to the reader: "Afro" refers to the Negro or African race, which, until its sudden disappearance during the Great Revolution, exerted an increasingly degenerative influence on the culture and life styles of the inhabitants of North America.)
I grabbed him by the shoulder, spun him around, and hit him in the face as hard as I could. As he went down I had the deep, primitive satisfaction of seeing four or five of his teeth come washing out of his shattered mouth on a copious flow of dark-red blood.
I reached into my pocket for my pistol, fully intending to kill him on the spot, but Katherine seized my arm, and caution returned. Instead of shooting him, I straddled him and directed three kicks at his groin with all my strength. He jerked convulsively and emitted a short, choking scream with the first kick, and then he lay still.
Passersby averted their eyes and hurried on. Across the street two Blacks gawked and hooted. Katherine and I hurried around the corner. We walked about six blocks, then doubled back and caught the bus at another stop.
Katherine told me later that the youth had run up to her as soo
n as I had entered the drugstore. He had put his arm around her, propositioned her, and started pawing her breasts. She is fairly strong and agile, and she was able to jerk away from him, but he blocked her from following me into the drugstore.
As a rule Katherine carries a pistol, but the day was unseasonably warm, unsuited for a coat, and she wore clothes which left no room for concealing a firearm. Since she was with me she hadn't even bothered to carry one of the tear-gas cannisters which have become essential articles of dress for women these days.
In that regard it is interesting to note that the same people who agitated so hysterically for gun confiscation before the Cohen Act are now calling for tear gas to be outlawed too. There have even been cases recently where women who used their tear gas to fend off would-be rapists have been charged with armed assault! The world has become so crazy that nothing really comes as a surprise any more.
In contrast to the situation outside, rape inside the Organization is almost unthinkable. But there is no doubt at all in my mind that if a genuine case of forcible rape did occur, the perpetrator would be rewarded with eight grams of lead within a matter of hours.
When we got back to the shop, Henry and another man were waiting for us. Henry wanted me to give him a final rundown on the sight settings for the mortar we had modified. When they left, they took the mortar with them. I still don't know what they will use it for.
Katherine and I are both very fond of Henry, and we will miss his presence in our new unit. He is the kind of person on whom the success of the Organization will ultimately depend.
Katherine had already taught Henry most of her tricks of makeup and disguise, and when he left with the mortar she gave him the greater part of her supply of wigs, beards, plastic gizmoes, and cosmetics.
The Turner Diaries: A Novel Page 8