Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda in the Turner Diaries

When Agent William Eppright of the FBI's evidence response team opened the sealed envelope found in Timothy McVeigh's yellow Mercury, he found among the clippings two highlighted passages from The Turner Diaries. This novel of Aryan revolution was written by Dr. William Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance (Serrano 218-20). During McVeigh's trial, The Turner Diaries was the first piece of evidence introduced, and the prosecution called witnesses that testified to McVeigh's obsession with the text. These witnesses told the court that McVeigh had read the novel repeatedly while in the military and later sold it at a loss at gun shows (Griffin 8). While McVeigh's case brought The Turner Diaries to the public's attention, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented multiple cases since the 1980s in which violent hate groups have cited Pierce's novel as influential. Two of these have even taken their names from the novel (ADL). During the dragging murder of James Byrd in 1998, the driver, John William King, is reported to have shouted, "We are going to start the Turner Diaries early," as he shackled Byrd's legs to his truck (Meggido 2). Pierce's novel was first self-published in his periodical Attack! and then self -published as a novel in 1978. Since that time it has become required reading for Aryan groups and has been widely disseminated at gun shows throughout the country. While no precise circulation numbers are available, as of 2001 estimates were that at least 300,000 copies had been sold (Griffin 138). As a vehicle for hate propaganda, Pierce's tract has been all too successful. The Turner Diaries is unambiguously a hate novel. According to its Foreword, the novel is a manuscript found in 2100 after a worldwide Aryan revolution. This manuscript is the diary of Earl Turner, a member of the Aryan "Organization" that started the revolution that has led to the worldwide massacre of all non-Aryans. The diary narrates the beginnings of this revolution from the perspective of Turner and follows him through his guerilla war against the "System," documenting his methods and hate crimes. Despite its historical and political importance, critical research on The Turner Diaries has been sparse- presumably because one finds simply reading it horrifying enough. Those critics who have examined the novel write about it as hate speech: condemning its politics and psychology, and critiquing its narrative failings.1 For example, in a insightful discussion of the novel's anti-Semitism and racism, Joe Lockard has noted that the novel "is not one that invites prolonged contemplation on issues of critical undecidability" and that the Aryan ideology exists "beneath a fairly crude narrative surface" (Lockard 121, 127). Evaluating the novel's obvious ideological contradictions, Jonathan Cullick has argued that "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" (Cullick). Lockard's and Cullick's evaluations of the novel's literary merit are accurate. The Diaries are crudely written and the ethical position they invoke is not only repugnant, but also often inconsistent and self-contradictory. However despite these failings, a "cognitive prison" is exactly what the novel intends for its reader. As a piece of propaganda fiction it is not interested in trying to open up discussion or encourage deliberation and "undecidability," but instead seeks to trap its reader within its ideology, persuading through identification and imposing its ideological authority. While Cullick sees "the device of the diarist-narrator [as] merely the vehicle for a book that is intended to carry heavy ideological freight," the diaries and the framing narrative are not "merely" trappings, but calculated propaganda techniques (Cullick). The voices of the diarist narrator and the editor work in unison to promote the ideology of hate by urging the reader to identify with Turner while using editorial authority to foreclose ideological alternatives. …