Blog:The Turner Diaries

The Turner Diaries is a dystopian political novel by white supremacist and former National Alliance leader William Luther Pierce under the pen name Andrew Macdonald, first published in 1978. The book is told from the perspective of White "freedom fighter" and former electrical engineer Earl Turner, who joins a white supremacist group known as the Organization and its inner circle the Order to fight against "the System," Pierce's term for the U.S. government. The story also takes place mostly during the 1990s and centers around a plot to start a race war and entrench White people on top.

Why It Should Be Purged

 * 1) To get the elephant out of the room, it is one long piece of neo-Nazi white supremacist propaganda, and any groups who don't align with the protagonist's views are automatically villainized. Some examples:
 * 2) *The Jews are portrayed as little more than greedy megalomaniacs who control the government and businesses, control non-Whites, and are seeking to subjugate the White race. And yet they lose at the end.
 * 3) *Blacks are presented as nothing more than lecherous, violent, stupid idiots who want to rape White women and engage in cannibalism when supplies are low. Any time they're in any position of authority, they take advantage of it to inflict rape and abuse.
 * 4) *Liberals are shown as allies of the Jews, while libertarians and conservatives are decried throughout the story as foolish and misguided.
 * 5) *Pierce calls LGBT+ people "degenerate" and constantly blasts them for allegedly contributing to the downfall of society.
 * 6) *Whites who don't align themselves with the Organization's views are stereotyped as "betraying" their race. For example, they're slaughtered during the "Day of the Rope" (a mass public hanging) for sleeping with, living with, marrying, or even being kind to non-Whites!
 * 7) Hell, the book even ends "110 years after the birth of the Great One," obviously meant to be Adolf Hitler from the few facts we know about him in this universe.
 * 8) Extremely poor writing below high school level, as the entries above and below will tell you. This could be explained that this work was intended as a manual for White dominance rather than as a novel, but that doesn't excuse the extremely poor quality.
 * 9) A monumentally terrible premise: The United States government passes the Cohen Act, a law forbidding privately owned guns, and then proceeds to pass a series of laws including decriminalizing rape to "promote equality between the sexes" and forbidding White people to defend themselves against their non-White counterparts. This prompts Earl to join the Organization (whose actions are presented as the only viable response no matter how extreme or heinous), which then proceeds to exterminate all Jews, non-Whites, "race traitors," and pretty much everyone who doesn't subscribe to their beliefs in the country and eventually around the world, in order to defy the System. This dooms humanity to a futile struggle against nuclear fallout, even though it's presented as the White race wisely and benevolently ruling over the remaining inhabitants. See WIS#10 for further information about the ending.
 * 10) Earl Turner is one of the most horribly written protagonists in literature, almost to the point of being a Gary Stu. He joins the Order, engages in Shoah denial, commits rape along with his allies, kills two girls just for befriending a Black man, participates in the Day of the Rope, and is basically Pierce's mouthpiece for everything in the book's world, and worst of all, HE'S REWARDED FOR ALL THIS! He is punished later on, but that consists of flying a plane into the Pentagon on a "heroic" suicide mission. Though he's presented as the hero, he'd make a great villain in almost any other story.
 * 11) The other characters are just as flat, to the point where there's practically no one worth rooting for. Some examples:
 * 12) *Catherine is a boring satellite love interest, who has sex with Earl for no good reason, despite the author constantly saying they "love" each other.
 * 13) *Henry is meant to be a mentor archetype to Earl, but he indoctrinates the latter in the Organization's racist ways.
 * 14) *The attorney general of the United States, who comes on TV at one point to decry the Organization as "depraved, racist terrorists" (a 100% accurate description), is portrayed as a strawman who won't support them in their quest for "justice."
 * 15) *A libertarian member of the Organization makes a valid point that they are contributing to the hostility of the System's actions, but he's executed for not being like them.
 * 16) *A Black civil rights leader calls out the Jews' actions, but he's executed and quickly replaced before we know anything about him. He isn't even named!
 * 17) Plus, the Organization wins victories so easily their strategies don't make a lick of sense: for instance, they, an organization made up of under 2000 members (with operatives and moles in almost every government, which could provide an explanation, but still), are somehow able to take over Los Angeles and triumph over thousands of police and National Guard officers using 500 lightly armed members, despite the opposition being considerably stronger in numbers and equipment.
 * 18) False advertising: There's a woman on the cover accompanying Earl in his mission (possibly Catherine), but all the Catherine in the book proper does is have sex with Earl.
 * 19) The book tries to argue that rape is wrong regardless of whom it's inflicted upon, but that message falls flat when Earl and his allies are raping their opponents, which is portrayed as heroic.
 * 20) *Also, the book argues that only men are prosecuted for raping women, as mentioned in WIS#4, when men can also be raped as well (and women can also rape people).
 * 21) THE ENDING: Despite being presented as happy, the Organization has wiped out nine tenths of the world's human population so that only the neo-Nazis survive and nuked large portions of the Earth in an effort to achieve this goal. They've ruined the Earth's ecological system beyond repair and, as mentioned in WIS#4, also paved the way for a long and hopeless nuclear struggle to happen. The only good that can be said about this is that they have essentially caused their own future deaths in the process.

The Only 2 Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) It's so stupid it can be unintentionally funny.
 * 2) It sends a message that rape is wrong, even if it's poorly and hypocritically executed as mentioned in WIS#9.

Trivia

 * Amazon removed the book from sale on its website in late 2020, citing connections with the far-right QAnon movement.
 * It had also inspired many white supremacist terrorist attacks before that. Some examples:
 * The Order, a 1980s white supremacist organization named after the one in the book, murdered three people, including Alan Berg, a critical radio host, on his driveway.
 * Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted of taking part in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, was found with pages of The Turner Diaries.
 * White supremacists Shawn Berry, Lawrence Brewer, and John King murdered an African American man, James Byrd Jr., in 1998 by dragging him behind a truck. King reportedly said, "we're going to start The Turner Diaries early."
 * Neo-Nazi David Copeland killed three people in a bombing attack against the Black, Asian, and gay communities, quoting lines from the book during interviews with police.
 * Uwe Böndhart, Uwe Mundlos, and Beate Zschäpe of the National Socialist Underground murdered nine immigrants between 2000 and 2007, apparently influenced by the book, which has been banned in Germany since 2006.
 * Pierce would later publish two more white supremacist works, the 1989 novel Hunter and the 1993 comic book The Saga of White Will, under the same pen name and his real name respectively.