‘Diaries’: Racist Fantasy, or Primer for War of Hate?

Aryan hotheads keep jumping the gun, but William Pierce, the man who wrote the book on racist revolution, is leaving nothing to chance.

Holed up here in the hills of West Virginia, on a 345-acre compound surrounded by an electric fence and miles of primeval forest, Pierce is quietly writing propaganda and preparing for Armageddon.

If his 1978 novel is any guide--and there are those who take it as gospel--the end of the world as we know it is only a few years away. Law enforcement officials believe the author and intellectual guru of the American Nazi movement is at work devising ways to ensure that the underground army already being assembled will have food and water to carry out its task.

“He’s a very dangerous man,” said Jerry Dale, the local sheriff who has kept tabs on Pierce’s activities since 1985.

In his novel, the “Turner Diaries,” Pierce’s fictional “Organization” launches its war against the U.S. government in 1991. The overthrow begins with scattered bombings, strategic sabotage and the assassination of federal judges, government officials and journalists.

By 1993, the Organization has taken control of much of California. Blacks have been driven from the “liberated” zone. Race-mixers and white “traitors” have been killed. And any surviving Jews have been driven underground. The book ends with a nuclear conflagration and the destruction of the U.S. government.

It is a racist fantasy, but one which various violent supremacist groups have tried to make a reality, according to the authorities. Similarities between some actions in the book and recent mail bombings in the South which killed a federal judge and a civil rights lawyer have not escaped federal investigators. The FBI recently began exploring the possibility that the motive for the bombings may not have been racial, but a source close to the probe said: “We are aware of the book . . . . We are familiar enough with it to apply it” to the investigation.

For his part, Pierce denies instigating violence and says his novel is nothing more than a political action thriller. “It’s clearly not a blueprint or a plan,” he said in an interview. “It’s a novel in which the action and characters serve as a vehicle for the presentation of ideas.”

The Anti-Defamation League has a different view. “I would say it is a manual in fiction form of how to undertake a neo-Nazi revolution in the United States,” said Irwin Suall, ADL national fact-finding director.

“The ‘Turner Diaries’ is an influential book,” Suall continued. “It’s particularly influential among the more violent segments of the movement.”

Pierce’s book is written as the diary of a dedicated member of the Organization. Its beginning is set in 1989, when federal “gun raids” drive outraged extremists underground and strengthen their resolve to overthrow a government they deem to be oppressive and dominated by Jewish influence.

Leaders of one West Coast neo-Nazi group were so enamored of the book that they took the name of the novel’s elite terrorism unit--The Order--as their own. They launched a campaign of robberies, counterfeiting and murder in the early 1980s that an FBI informant later testified were patterned after the “Turner Diaries.”

Twenty-two members of the now-defunct Order are serving time on racketeering convictions in a conspiracy to bring about a racist revolution through their terrorist activities. Robert Jay Mathews, the leader, was killed in 1984 in a shoot-out with FBI agents in Washington state.

Pierce said he knew Mathews. “He was a very sincere person who apparently thought that he was doing the only thing that made sense to him,” he said.

In 1987, in a coordinated crackdown, grand juries in Arkansas and Colorado indicted 15 white supremacists, some of whom were among the 22 already serving time, on charges of plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. The charges included a conspiracy to assassinate a federal judge and other federal officials and pollute municipal water supplies and the 1984 murder of Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg.

The white supremacists were acquitted of sedition charges, but testimony in the trial and in other court proceedings indicated that a wide array of criminal activity had been inspired by the book.

While Pierce did not denounce the use of terrorism, he said social conditions at present make the country not yet ripe for revolution.

“I think the country as a whole is not ready for that type of activity,” he said. “It’s pointless . . . and doesn’t accomplish anything.” He said Mathews jumped the gun. “He misread the climate of the country.”

For all the violence his writings have inspired, Pierce himself, from all reports, is a quiet figure, an intellectual who, as an editor and writer, has helped fashion the theoretical framework of the modern Nazi movement. While he is considered one of the leaders of the white supremacist movement, he is more of a strategist than a front-line activist.

The tall, painfully thin former Oregon State University assistant professor of physics quit in the mid-1960s to become the right-hand man to George Lincoln Rockwell, the late founder of the American Nazi Party who was assassinated in 1967.

Pierce’s nonfiction writings--full of international conspiracy theories and ideology--appeal more to academics and intellectuals than to the poorly educated working class whites generally thought of as Ku Klux Klan members, said Bill Stanton, former director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Klanwatch unit, which monitors white supremacist groups.

The National Vanguard, a publication of Pierce’s National Alliance organization, “tended to be a little bit more literate than the average white segregationist publication,” Stanton said.

And Pierce’s followers seen at his remote West Virginia compound tend to be either “educated, well-heeled people or else young people just out of college,” Dale said.

The sheriff of this sparsely populated county in southeastern West Virginia said he discovered Pierce’s presence here by accident in 1985.

“When I ran for sheriff I was thinking about ‘Mayberry RFD,’ with one bullet in my pocket,” he said. “Nothing ever happened around here.” But a year after he took office, he spotted Pierce’s compound from the air while flying in a light plane, using a powerful telescopic lens to look for marijuana fields in the wilderness that covers most of his 1,000-square-mile jurisdiction.

That night he went in on foot to investigate and discovered that the compound--which then consisted of a newly built two-story metal building, a restored century-old farmhouse and several trailers--was surrounded by an electric fence.

Dale thought he had discovered a PCP factory until the FBI shortly afterward informed him that his county had become home to something called the Cosmotheist Community Church. This was the latest incarnation of Pierce’s Nazi organization.

The sheriff’s informants tell him that no more than 14 people live at the compound at any one time, although as many as 300 people from all over the world gathered there in 1986 for the dedication of the organization’s symbol, a Y-like letter from the Norse alphabet, Dale said. Last spring he said six adolescents from Denmark came to stay at the compound for seven weeks.

“I feel like they’re there for the word,” said the sheriff. “Then they go out and somebody else comes in. It’s almost like they’re having seminars or something.”

Pierce’s philosophy, as expressed in his writings, seems similar to that of the Christian Identity religion, which is common to many members of neo-Nazi groups. Among its tenets are the beliefs that Jews are the children of Satan and blacks their subhuman pawns.

Pierce said his religion differs from the Christian Identity movement, though, in that Cosmotheists do not believe in supernatural law. “The Cosmotheist Church has no Christian flavor to it at all,” he said.

Pierce doesn’t see Jews as being literally the children of Satan, but he said his religion’s adherents are “concerned about the role that Jews are playing in the country and in the world.” He said he believed Jews have a “disproportionate influence” in the media and in government policy.

Non-Jewish whites are an endangered race, Pierce said. He faulted the country’s immigration policies, miscegenation and higher birth rates for nonwhites than whites.

“These are the most immediate, obvious physical threats,” he said. “But we also see a more profound moral threat in that the white population today has really lost its sense of identity, its sense of purpose.” When that happens, he said, a people “becomes prey for another group of people who still have their sense of identity and their sense of purpose.”

While the 56-year-old Pierce ostensibly is a man of thought rather than of action, a RAND Corp. study said that in the mid-1980s a loose confederation of groups sharing his concerns about Jewish and black influence in American life formed the country’s “first truly nationwide terrorist network.” The groups, some of which were influenced by Pierce’s book, were gathered under the umbrella of the Idaho-based Aryan Nations organization, and for a time they became the country’s most active domestic terrorists.

“Members of these groups are considerably more skilled with weapons than are other terrorists in this country, they possess large stockpiles of sophisticated weapons, they are well trained in guerrilla warfare and survival techniques, and they possess an apocalyptic vision of the future,” wrote Bruce Hoffman, author of the study, titled “Recent Trends and Future Prospects of Terrorism in the United States.” He said these factors make them the group “most likely” to attempt an act of nuclear terrorism in this country.

Dale said he believes Pierce is preparing for such an eventuality, as are other survivalist-leaning white supremacists. “I hear he’s trying to learn how to raise rabbits as a fast food source and freeze-drying them so that when nuclear war does occur they will be able to survive in the cave network under their property,” Dale said. He said he also has been told Pierce has set up devices in the limestone caves that catch condensation.

“This way there’s going to be a fresh water supply when the big war comes in the 1990s,” the sheriff said.

Pierce, who according to Dale likes to walk around the compound with an exotic cat perched on his shoulder, dismissed all of this as “total nonsense . . . . We are not planning on a nuclear war in the 1990s.

“I don’t know where he got that,” he said of Dale. “I presume he was smoking something that was really too strong for him.” He called the sheriff “a yahoo who really doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

The leadership and ranks of the most virulent white supremacist groups have been decimated by federal crackdowns, but federal officials and organizations that monitor the groups say they still bear watching.

Members of The Order have been convicted of a crime spree that included two murders and more than $4 million in robberies. One white supremacist who admitted to authorities that he received money stolen in a 1984 Brinks armored car robbery in California was F. Glenn Miller, a former Green Beret who was captured by federal marshals in 1987 in a trailer home in Missouri that authorities said was filled with grenades, pipe bombs, flak jackets, guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. He testified in 1987 that Pierce also received stolen money, but Pierce denies this.

In previous court testimony while on trial in Raleigh, N.C., in 1986 for violating a court order banning him from staging paramilitary operations, Miller acknowledged that he was building a “white Christian army” in the South. His now-defunct White Patriot Party was preparing for the day that the U.S. economy would collapse, spawning “an outbreak of disorder,” including race wars and food riots, he said.

This is what happens in the “Turner Diaries.” Only it doesn’t happen spontaneously; it is helped along by the terrorist activities of the racist underground army.

“There is a good possibility, in my opinion,” Miller continued, “that law and order is going to break down in our country, and the National Guard and police departments won’t be able to handle it by themselves, at which time we’ll be prepared, and we’re going to restore law and order and protect our people.”

He said he thought the upheaval would happen in 1992; the time frame in Pierce’s novel is late 1991 to 1993.

Bill Stanton, the former Klanwatch director, said the “Turner Diaries” had been “required reading” in Miller’s organization.

For his part, Pierce said he does not subscribe to Miller’s prediction, despite its similarity to his fictional plot. Race riots in the 1990s are a possibility, he said, but the current economic climate does not lead him to believe there will be food riots. As for nuclear war, “we’re not planning on it,” he said.

The successful prosecution of neo-Nazi leaders in the latter half of the 1980s and the increase in prominence of young skinhead youth gangs has given rise to speculation that Pierce’s book has less influence today on white supremacists than it once had.

Stanton said he believes older neo-Nazis like Pierce continue to plan and organize, but he said, “Grass-roots, unorganized actions (by the skinheads) seem to be happening all over the place.”

Reportedly, the Aryan Nations recently began a recruitment campaign among the skinheads. But Stanton said the skinheads had appeared to have rejected groups such as the klan. “It makes me wonder how much organized groups are playing a role” in racial violence today, he said.

Suall agreed that the failure of groups such as The Order to ignite a mass movement, coupled with the current economic and social climate, make a large resurgence of organized Nazi and klan violence unlikely. “The activists who pursued that course are now serving time, lengthly terms actually, in federal prisons,” he said.

Dale said, however, that he believes the underground white supremacists pose a much greater threat. “The skinheads are getting all the attention now,” he said. “They’re the ones going on Donahue and Geraldo. But the feds have got files on all of them. They’re easily recognized.

“But the manual will always be there, and that manual is the ‘Turner Diaries,’ ” he said. “Pierce will always be there. He’s the one who’s planning the battles and keeping things going. He’s the brains behind the whole movement.”

Times Staff Writer Lee May contributed to this report.