The Turner Diaries: book review (and calling out Goodreads)

Somebody at Goodreads has apparently decided that The Turner Diaries should be delisted from their database. This means my review, as well as that of many others, is now listed as a review of NOT A BOOK. A search for the book's title yields no results on Goodreads or Amazon. This is wrong. Deleting a book's name from your database does not make it go away.

I suppose I can understand why Amazon wouldn't list it, but not Goodreads. It deserves to be catalogued and reviewed for what it is, even if there is no legal way to purchase it.

I'm unsure who is responsible for this or what their motivation is, but I flatly disagree. People treat this book as a bible of white supremacy. You can hear its talking points everywhere. People quote it all the time, and unless we are made aware of what these talking points mean, where they come from, and what the internal logic behind them is, we will never know how to combat them.

Along with Camp of the Saints (which is still listed in Goodreads' database), The Turner Diaries is vital to white supremacist views and deserves to be called out as such. I'm posting my extended review of it here, since I'm not restricted by an arbitrary character limit.

This review contains some excerpts from the book, with the intent to present the book's language of antisemitism, racism, and misogyny for context and criticism. I do not share these views. I am simply not afraid to read such ideas and call them out for what they are.

 

The Turner Diaries

by Andrew MacDonald (William Luther Pierce)

The hardest thing about this book is that the most hateful sections are the most readable parts.

 

In the far-off year of 1989, Civil Rights Legislation has required forcing the races to mix for the last 30 years or so, and the obvious end result is violence and rape (always about rape). White people are being oppressed by the enforcement of integration policies to such an extent it has become the catalyst for a police state, and the first thing to go is our guns. When Americans have no guns, nothing can stop the government from oppressing its citizens.

I knew going into it that this book would hurt.

Long story short: white author is scared of integration and thinks Israel is controlling the US government and is orchestrating a mixing of the races to bring white people down. Liberals are complicit in it because they believe the Jewish lie that the races are equal and should be allowed to mix. Libertarians are worthless because they are not race loyal, only business loyal. The government is getting bigger and becoming Orwellian purely to enforce integration policies. Only the racists see the truth of what’s happening, and this is the author’s fantasy-blueprint for how the revolution should go.

The author’s description of the computer system that’s going to track everyone’s activities is honestly prophetic. There was once a time when you could eat at a cafe and nobody would know where you were, but now the government in this book (the System) is about to start tracking everyone in order to find the racists and all who oppose racial integration (the Organization). Funny how people like this are terrified when the government does it, but when private corporations launch these same systems and make billions of dollars doing it, they don’t even blink.

It’s amusing to think this author is so terrified of black people he has framed desegregation as the justification for the beginning of a police state. A police state that must oppress white people to force the races to mix, despite all the crime nonwhites are committing.

Well, it would be amusing if people didn’t actually believe it. I disagree with other reviewers’ claims that there is no justification for its racism and hatred. The following passages are more than enough to establish in-story justification for its racism and hatred...

The Enemy we are fighting fully intends to destroy the racial basis of our existence. No excuse for our failure will have any meaning, for there will be only a swarming horde of indifferent, mulatto zombies to hear it. There will be no White men to remember us—either to blame us for our weakness or to forgive us for our folly. If we fail, God’s great Experiment will come to an end, and this planet will once again, as it did millions of years ago, move through the ether devoid of higher man.

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 [...] 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. All the liberals and the Jews had to do was begin screeching about "inhumanity" or "injustice" or "genocide," and most of our people who had been beating around the edges of a solution took to their heels like frightened rabbits. Because there was never a way to solve the race problem which would be "fair for everybody or which everyone concerned could be politely persuaded into accepting without any fuss or unpleasantness, they kept trying to evade it, hoping that it would go away by itself.

We were all under a bit of tension following the big bombing, and Katherine came across a bit shrill—almost like a women's libber. (Note to the reader: "Women’s lib" was a form of mass psychosis which broke out during the last three decades of the Old Era. Women affected by it denied their femininity and insisted that they were "people," not "women." This aberration was promoted and encouraged by the System as a means of dividing our race against itself.)

What's happening now is reminiscent of the media campaign against Hitler and the Germans back in the 1940’s: stories about Hitler flying into rages and chewing carpets, phony German plans for the invasion of America, babies being skinned alive to make lampshades and then boiled down into soap, girls kidnapped and sent to Nazi "stud farms." The Jews convinced the American people that those stories were true, and the result was World War II, with millions of the best of our race butchered -by us-and all of eastern and central Europe turned into a huge, communist prison camp. Now it looks very much like the System has again made the deliberate decision to build up a state of war hysteria in the public by representing us as an even bigger threat than we really are. We are the new Germans, and the country is being wound up psychologically to lick us.

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. [...] In cases where no physical injury can be proved, it is now virtually impossible to obtain a prosecution or even an arrest. [...] 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.

...and they only get bigger as the book moves on, even finding ways to justify dictatorship and genocide. Being anti-integration is a larger crime than murder in this version of America. The police in this reality are so afraid of being labeled “racist” they won’t even stop a black man from raping a white teenager. ...because white men would never commit rape... One time the book refers to black men as "rutting bucks." Yeah. This author's fixation on rape makes me reconsider the Freudian analysis of racism I read about in Love and Theft (see my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3565244107). I think there's some kind of sexual insecurity going on. I really do. Why the hell else would the author write about it so much?

The hatred is presented so clinically it barely comes across as such, but oh yeah, it starts off as just racist, and then the misogyny hits, then the Jews are behind it all, then the Hitler sympathy, then the rebels take inspiration from groups they had despised in order to win this fight, and then genocide of nonwhites along with purifying the white race of undesirable traits. It really does get progressively worse.

The only break from hatred is the technical descriptions of how the narrator sets up a perimeter alert system, how the shower system is rigged, how the radio system works, how the assault on the telephone headquarters went. The narrator goes on and on about this stuff, and the book drags. They’re obviously meant to help real people set up places like this, indirect blueprints for how to make explosives and the like, because that’s all it takes for citizens to stop an oppressive government. Bombs and guns. Sure...

Even in the 1970s, the US military had tanks and planes. None of those things show up here, meaning the citizens have a relatively easy time standing up to an oppressive government that’s forcing white people to accept other races living among them.

Well, tanks and military equipment are mentioned a couple times, but the System never seems interested in using them against the rebels, and we later learn that the rebels have recruited within the military, and the armed forces have become so heavily “integrated” with Blacks and Jews that nobody in any service branch is competent at anything anymore. How convenient. Equally convenient is how the Organization prevents infiltrators from being recruited into their ranks. Some sort of chemically-induced interrogation technique. The System never comes up with such a technique; they just beat and torture people to get information out of them.

White Supremacists hold the belief that the government is giant, oppressive, and enacting elaborate conspiracies to control the population, while at the same time the government is a bloated, incompetent bureaucracy that can’t do anything right, so a relatively tiny group of average citizens can take it down in just a few years. Both of these things can’t be true, but this book relies on it for the revolution to work.

That the hateful parts are the worldbuilding makes the book even harder to read because that’s where the actual storytelling happens, and the reader can get a feel for the world this book is creating, but there is no way to interpret this as fiction, or a story taking place from a bad guy’s point of view. Well, ok, maybe there was before the bombing in Oklahoma City, but when the author does not condemn the act, you can no longer claim this is fiction.

Life is uglier and uglier these days, more and more Jewish. But it is still moderately comfortable, and comfort is the great corrupter, the great maker of cowards. It seems that, for the time being, we have already caught all the real revolutionaries in America in our net. Now we must learn how to make some more, and quickly.

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.

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.

It is a terrible thing to kill women of our own race, but we are engaged in a war in which all the old rules have been scrapped. We are in a war to the death with the Jew, who now feels himself so close to his final victory that he can safely drop his mask and treat his enemies as the "cattle" his religion tells him they are. Our retribution against the sheriff here should serve as a warning — to the Jew’s Gentile henchmen, at least, that if they adopt the Jew’s attitude toward our women and children, then they cannot expect their own families to be safe. (Note to the reader: Several sets of books containing the Jewish religious doctrine, which was called "Judaism," are still extant today. These books, the Talmud and the Torah, do, indeed, refer to non-Jews as, "cattle." Especially horrifying to us is the attitude the Jews had toward non-Jewish women. The word they used to designate a girl of our race was "shiksa," which was derived from the Hebrew word meaning both "abomination" and "non-kosher meat" or "unclean meat.")

That’s the turning point of the book: when the rebels stop trying to get ordinary Americans on their side and just start eliminating everyone who disagrees with their worldview.

By far the most ghastly parts of the book happen after the 3/4 mark, when the rebels manage to take control of southern California. The rebels force the nonwhite population to migrate East, and as for the whites left behind, there is the Day of the Rope, when the rebels purify the white race of traitors. Their troops abduct white people who married or lived with blacks or otherwise helped the Jews enact their racial integration conspiracy, and lynch them. Problem of nonbelievers solved, and the Organization applies this solution globally. Don’t bother living with nonwhites or race traitors anywhere. Just wipe them all out.

Let me be clear about this: the happy ending is the Organization, the rebels, takes over the United States and is now free to go around the world wiping out other races. Genocide is the ultimate goal, and it’s presented as a good thing here. No more other races diluting the purity of the white race. No more Jews conspiring to bring down the white race. No more negotiations. Just wipe them all out.

It’s not terrorism when white people do it to protect the purity of their own race. When White Supremacists get power, they get to decide who is in the club and who is not. Skin color is not an automatic pass. People like this do not want democracy—they see democracy as being easily corrupted by Jewish influence, so only a strong, oppressive, military dictatorship that makes unilateral decisions about their lives can save them from a government that wants to oppress them and make unilateral decisions about their lives.

People on the Left have a fantasy of owning the Right by pointing out their hypocrisy, but empathy is required to have a sense of that, so there is absolutely no purpose in letting them know what they’re doing is hypocritical.

My favorite part of the book is when a Jewish broadcast news anchor is reporting the events of the rebellion, and then his mask slips off and he accidentally reveals the whole game on live television. This passage makes it more than clear exactly what’s happening, in-world.

Meanwhile, it was with a feeling of deepest despair that I and half-a-dozen others who were gathered around the television set in the darkened basement of the gift shop late that night heard a newscaster gloatingly announce the destruction of our liberated zone in California. He was a Jew, and he really let his emotions carry him away; I have never before heard or seen anything like it.

After a solemn rundown of most of the cities which had been hit that day, with preliminary estimates of the death tolls [...] he came to New York. At that point tears actually appeared in his eyes and his voice broke.

Between sobs he gasped out the news that 18 separate nuclear blasts had leveled Manhattan and the surrounding boroughs and suburbs out to a radius of approximately 20 miles, with an estimated 14 million killed outright and perhaps another five million expected to die of burns or radiation sickness within the next few days. Then he lapsed into Hebrew and began a strange, wailing chant, as tears streamed down his cheeks and his clenched fists pounded his breast.

After a few seconds of this he recovered, and his demeanor changed completely. Anguish was replaced first by a burning hatred for those who had destroyed his beloved, Jewish New York City, then by an expression of grim satisfaction which gradually turned into an exultant gloating: “But we have taken our vengeance against our enemies, and they are no more. Time and again, throughout history, the nations have risen up against us and tried to expel us or kill us, lot we have always triumphed in the end. No one can resist us. All those who have tried-Egypt, Persia, Rome, Spain, Russia, Germany - have themselves been destroyed, and we have always emerged triumphant from the ruins. We have always survived and prospered. And now we have utterly crushed the latest of those who have raised their hands against us. Just as Moses smote the Egyptian, so have we smitten the Organization.”

His tongue flickered wetly over his lips and his dark eyes gleamed balefully as he described the hail of nuclear annihilation which he said had been unleashed on California that very afternoon: “Their precious racial superiority did not help them a bit when we fired hundreds of nuclear missiles into the racist stronghold,” the newscaster gloated. “The White vermin died like flies. We can only hope they realized in their last moments that many of the loyal soldiers who pressed the firing buttons for the missiles which killed them were Black or Chicano or Jewish. Yes, the Whites and their criminal racial pride have been wiped out in California, but now we must kill the racists everywhere else, so that racial harmony and brotherhood can be restored to America. We must kill them! Kill them! Kill! Kill! ...”

Then he lapsed into Hebrew again, and his voice became louder and harsher. He stood up and leaned into the camera, an incarnation of pure hatred, as he shrieked and gibbeted in his alien tongue, gobs of saliva flying from his mouth and dribbling down his chin.

This extraordinary performance must have been embarrassing to some of his less emotional brethren, because he was suddenly cut off in mid-shriek and replaced by a Gentile, who continued to give out revised casualty estimates into the early hours of the morning.

White Supremacists believe the Jews are the lizardpeople. It would be hilarious how cartoonish this is if people didn’t actually believe it.

At least it’s a fast read.

Fuck this book.