The Turner Diaries: A Novel

by Andrew Macdonald

  "Each day we make decisions and carry out actions which result in the deaths of White persons, many of them innocent of any offense which we consider punishable. We are willing to take the lives of these innocent persons, because a much greater harm will ultimately befall our people if we fail to act now. Our criterion is the ultimate good of our race. We can apply no lesser criterion to ourselves.

  "Indeed, we must be much sterner with ourselves than with others. We must maintain for ourselves a standard of conduct much higher than we demand of the general public or even of ordinary members of the Organization. In particular, we must never accept the idea, born of the sickness of our era, that a good excuse for nonperformance of a duty is a satisfactory substitute for performance.

  "For us, there can be no excuses. Either we perform our duty, or we do not. If we do not, we need no excuse; we simply accept the responsibility for failure. And if there is a penalty, we accept that too. The penalty for Oath-breaking is death."

  The room was perfectly still, but I could hear a buzzing in my ears, and the floor seemed to sway under my feet. I stood in stunned silence until Williams began speaking again, this time in a somewhat softer voice:

  "The duty of this tribunal is clear, Earl Turner. We must act in your case in such a way that every member of this Order who may, at some time in the future, find himself in circumstances similar to yours during the police raid on your headquarters, will know that death is inevitable if he cannot avoid capture-either an honorable death by his own hand or a less-than-honorable death at the hands of his comrades later. There must be no temptation for him to avoid his duty, in the hope that a 'good excuse' later will preserve his life.

  "Some of us here today have argued that this consideration- setting a firm example for others - should be the sole determinant of your fate. But others of us have argued that, because you had not yet achieved full membership in this Order at the time in question- because you had not yet participated in the rite of Union-your conduct can be reasonably judged by a different standard than would be applied to someone who had completed his probationary period and achieved Union.

  "Our decision has not been easy, but now you must hear it and you must abide by it. First, you must satisfactorily complete your extended period of probation. Then, at some time after the end of that period, you will be permitted Union-but only on a conditional basis, something we have never allowed before. The condition will be that you undertake a mission whose successful completion can reasonably be expected to result in your death.

  "Unfortunately, we are all too often presented with the painful task of assigning such 'suicide missions' to our members, when we can find no other way to achieve a necessary goal. In your case, such a mission will serve two ends.

  "If you complete it successfully, the act of completion will remove the condition from your Union. Then, even though you die, you will continue to live in us and in our successors for as long as our Order endures, just as with any other member who achieves Union and then loses his life. And if, by some chance, you should survive your mission, you may then take your place in our ranks with no stain on your record. Do you understand everything I have said?"

  I nodded, and answered: "Yes, I understand, and I accept your judgment without reservation. It is just and proper. I have never expected to survive the struggle in which we are now engaged, and I am grateful that I will be allowed to make a further contribution to it. I am also grateful that the prospect of Union remains before me."

  March 25. Today Henry came over, and he, Bill, and I had a long talk. Henry is heading for the West Coast tomorrow, and he wanted to help Bill fill me in on the developments of the past year before he leaves. Apparently he will be engaged in training new recruits and handling some of the Organization's other internal functions in the Los Angeles area, where we are especially strong. When he greeted me he showed me the Sign, and I knew that he had also become a member of the Order.

  In essence, what I learned today is what I had already concluded in my prison cell: the Organization has shifted the main thrust of its attacks from tactical, personal targets to strategic, economic targets. We are no longer trying to destroy the System directly, but are now concentrating on undermining the general public's support for the System.

  I have felt for a long time that this change is necessary. Apparently two things forced Revolutionary Command to the same conclusion: the fact that we were not recruiting enough new members to make up our losses in the war of attrition against the System, and the fact that neither our blows against the System nor the System's increasingly repressive responses to those blows were having any really decisive effect on the public's attitude toward the System.

  The first factor was mandatory. We simply could not keep up our level of activity against the System as our casualties steadily mounted, even if we wanted to. Henry estimated that the total number of our front-line combat troops for the whole country- those ready and able to use knife, gun, or bomb against the System-had declined to a low point of about 400 persons last summer. Our front-line troops make up only about a fourth of the Organization's membership, and they have been suffering a greatly disproportionate casualty rate.

  So, the Organization was forced to de-escalate the level of the war temporarily, while we still preserved a strong enough nucleus for another approach. Our whole strategy against the System was failing.

  It was failing because the great bulk of White Americans were not responding to the situation in the way we had hoped they would. That is, we had counted on a positive, imitative response to our "propaganda of the deed," but it was not forthcoming.

  We had hoped that when we set the example of resisting the System's tyranny, others would resist too. We had hoped that by making dramatic strikes against top System personalities and important System facilities, we would inspire Americans everywhere to initiate similar actions of their own. But, for the most part, the bastards just sat on their asses.

  Sure, a dozen or so synagogues were burned, and there was an overall rise in the level of politically motivated violence, but it was generally misdirected and ineffective. Without organization such activities have little value, unless they are very widespread and can be sustained over a long period.

  And the System's response to the Organization irritated many people and caused a lot of grumbling, but it didn't even come close to provoking a rebellion. Tyranny, we have discovered, just isn't all that unpopular among the American people.

  What is really precious to the average American is not his freedom or his honor or the future of his race, but his pay check. He complained when the System began busing his kids to Black schools 20 years ago, but he was allowed to keep his station wagon and his fiberglass speedboat, so he didn't fight.

  He complained when they took away his guns five years ago, but he still had his color TV and his backyard barbeque, so he didn't fight.

  And he complains today when the Blacks rape his women at will and the System makes him show an identity pass to buy groceries or pick up his laundry, but he still has a full belly most of the time, so he won't fight.

  He hasn't an idea in his head that wasn't put there by his TV set. He desperately wants to be "well adjusted" and to do and think and say exactly what he thinks is expected of him. He has become, in short, just what the System has been trying to make of him these past 50 years or so: a mass-man; a member of the great, brainwashed proletariat; a herd animal; a true democrat.

  That, unfortunately, is our average White American. We can wish that it weren't so, but it is. The plain, horrible truth is that we have been trying to evoke a heroic spirit of idealism which just isn't there any more. It has been washed right out of 99 per cent of our people by the flood of Jewish-materialist propaganda in which they have been submerged practically all their lives.

  As for the last one per cent, there are various reasons why they aren't doing us much good. Some, of course, are too ornery to work within the confines of the Organization-or any organiz
ed group; they can only "do their own thing," as a number, in fact, are. The others may still have different ideas of their own, or they simply may not have been able to make contact with us since we were forced underground. Eventually we could recruit most of these, but we no longer have the time.

  What the Organization began doing about six months ago is treating Americans realistically, for the first time-namely, like a herd of cattle. Since they are no longer capable of responding to an idealistic appeal, we began appealing to things they can understand: fear and hunger.

  We will take the food off their tables and empty their refrigerators. We will rob the System of its principal hold over them. And, when they begin getting hungry, we will make them fear us more than they fear the System. We will treat them exactly the way they deserve to be treated.

  I don't know why we held back from this approach for so long. We have had the example of decades of guerrilla warfare in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to instruct us. In every case the guerrillas won by making the people fear them, not love them. By publicly torturing to death village leaders who opposed them and by carrying out brutal massacres of entire village populations which refused to feed them, they inspired such terror in neighboring villages that everyone was afraid to refuse them what they asked.

  We Americans observed all this but failed to apply the lesson to ourselves. We regarded-correctly-all those non-Whites as mere herds of animals and were not surprised that they behaved as they did. But we regarded ourselves-incorrectly- as something better.

  There was a time when we were better-and we are fighting to insure that there will be such a time again-but for now we are l merely a herd, being manipulated through our basest instincts by a pack of clever aliens. We have sunk to the point where we no longer hate our oppressors or try to fight them; we merely fear l them and attempt to curry favor with them.

  So be it. We will suffer grievously for having allowed ourselves to fall under the Jewish spell.

  We stopped wasting our resources in small-scale terror attacks and shifted to large-scale attacks on carefully selected economic targets: power stations, fuel depots, transportation facilities, food sources, key industrial plants. We do not expect to bring down the already creaky American economic structure immediately, but we do expect to cause a number of localized and temporary breakdowns, which will gradually have a cumulative effect on the whole public.

  Already a sizable portion of the public has been made to realize that it will not be allowed to sit back and watch the war on TV in safety and comfort. In Houston, for example, hundreds of thousands went for nearly two weeks without electricity last September. The food in their refrigerators and freezers quickly spoiled, as did the perishables in their supermarkets. There were two major food riots by hungry Houstonians before the Army was able to set up enough relief stations to handle everyone.

  In one instance Federal troops shot 26 persons in a mob trying to storm a government food depot, and then the Organization got another riot started with the rumor that the emergency rations the government was handing out were contaminated with botulism. Houston isn't back to normal yet, with most of the city still subject to a staggered six-hour-a-day power blackout.

  In Wilmington we put half the city on the dole by blowing up two big DuPont plants. And we turned the lights off for half of New England when we knocked out that power-generating station just outside Providence.

  The electronics manufacturer we hit in Racine wasn't very big, but he was the sole supplier of certain key components for other manufacturers all across the country. By torching his plant, we eventually caused twenty others to shut down.

  The effects of these actions are not decisive yet, but, if we can keep it up, they will be. The public reaction has already convinced us of that.

  That reaction can certainly not be considered friendly to us, on the whole. In Houston a mob took two prisoners-suspects arrested for questioning in one of the bombings-away from the police and tore them limb from limb. Fortunately, they were not our people- just two hapless fellows who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  And the conservatives, of course, have redoubled their squawking and cackling that we're ruining all chances for an improvement in conditions by "provoking" the government with our violence. What the conservatives mean when they talk of an "improvement" is a stabilization of the economy and another round of concessions to the Blacks, so that everyone can return to consuming in multiracial comfort.

  But we learned long ago not to count our enemies, only our friends. And the number of the latter is growing now. Henry indicated that we have increased nearly 50 per cent in membership since last summer. Apparently our new strategy has knocked a lot of spectators off the fence-some on our side and some on the other. Perceptive people are beginning to realize that they won't be able to sit this war out. We are forcing them into the front lines, where they must choose sides and participate, whether they like it or not.

  Chapter XV

  March 28, 1993. I'm finally back in the swing of things now. Over the weekend Katherine answered many questions for me and gave me the details, especially about local developments, which I failed to get from Henry Friday.

  While I was locked up the work on our communications equipment had to go on, of course, and now there are two other well-qualified people in the area handling that task. But there's still plenty of technical work left for me. Bill is a fine mechanical craftsman and gunsmith, but he can't handle the ordnance jobs that require chemical or electronic techniques. He gave me a long list of requests for special devices which came into our unit while I was in prison and which he had been obliged to put aside.

  We went over the list carefully last night and decided which items are most important for the current needs of the Organization. I then made up my own list of supplies and equipment needed to begin work.

  The top-priority items on Bill's list of requests are radio-controlled detonators and time-delay detonators and igniters. The Organization has been improvising in the latter category-and getting too high a percentage of misfires. We want a time-delay device which is adjustable from a few minutes to a day or more and which is 100 per cent certain.

  Another category of items requested is disguised bombs and incendiary devices. It is now just about impossible to get into any government or media facility without walking through a metal-detector, and all packages and mail are routinely scanned by x-ray. This will require some cleverness, but I already have a few ideas.

  And then there is Bill's own project, on which he needs some technical assistance: counterfeiting! The Organization is already successfully printing money on a fairly large scale on the West Coast, Bill said, and they want him to begin doing the same thing here.

  I understand now why the economic status of the Organization seems to have improved so much in the last year! Actually, since we switched to large-scale actions we've begun tapping some new sources of contributions-mostly fat cats buying "insurance," I suspect-but we are apparently still finding it useful to print some of our own money.

  Whatever genius is running our West Coast counterfeiting operation made up a very thorough set of instructions, which Bill showed me. The guy must have worked for the Secret Service or the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. He really seems to know his business. (Note to the reader: The "Bureau of Engraving and Printing" was the government agency which produced paper money in the United States, and the "Secret Service" was a police agency which combatted counterfeiting, among other things. As we know, counterfeiting was later used by the Organization not only to supply its units with funds but also to disrupt the general economy. In the last days of the Great Revolution, the Organization was dumping such huge quantities of counterfeit money that the government, in desperation, outlawed all paper money, requiring all monetary transactions to take place either in coin or by check. This move played havoc with public morale and was one of the factors leading to the final success of the Revolution.)

  Bill has already
finished setting up nearly everything; he has a really fine shop for precision printing. He just needs help with the fluorescence problem. The instructions tell him what chemical additives to put in his ink, but not where to get them. And he is not sure about how to make and use an ultraviolet inspection unit for checking the finished product. That won't be hard.

  Our new working and living arrangement is radically different from the one we had before. Instead of sneaking around "underground," we are right out in the open now. There's a neon sign in the window of the printing shop, and it's listed in the Yellow Pages. During the day the shop is "open for business," with Carol behind the counter, but Bill keeps his prices so high that just enough work to maintain appearances comes in. His real work takes place after hours, usually in the basement, where the armory is.

  The four of us live above the shop, like we did over the old place, but we don't have to keep the windows blacked out. And Bill's pickup truck stays parked right on the street in front. So far as the world is concerned, we are just two young couples in the printing business together.

  The trick, of course, was in establishing false identities that would stand up to System scrutiny, but the Organization has developed an admirable degree of expertise along that line. We all have Social Security cards, and two of us have driver's licenses. The cards and licenses are genuine (I have heard some unpleasant stories about how the Organization obtained them), so we can open bank accounts, pay taxes, and do other things like anyone else.

  I just have to remember that my new name is-ugh!- "David J. Bloom." I am really being ribbed about that. Fortunately, the photograph on the driver's license is indistinct enough to pass for me, as long as I keep my hair dyed.