Tentacles of Hate From a Racist’s Legacy

William Pierce’s life as a neo-Nazi leader stymied the imagination. Now cyberspace is flying with conjecture that his death in July from cancer will end the threat from the National Alliance, the organization he built.

If only it were so.

Pierce’s 1978 race war novel, “The Turner Diaries,” was wildly successful. But despite that success, Pierce would be forgotten for years at a time, until some new killer steeped in “Turner Diaries” mythology pushed him back into the headlines.

Robert Mathews, leader of a band of bank bandits who killed Denver talk-radio host Alan Berg in 1984, modeled his cruelly real guerrilla group, the Order, on the fictional one that Pierce had created in print.

Timothy McVeigh, of Oklahoma City bombing infamy, sold Pierce’s novel on the gun-show circuit and built his truck-bomb almost to “Turner Diaries” specifications.

In the public’s mind, Pierce’s personal influence over Aryan warriors loomed so large that his National Alliance apparatus seemed inconsequential. How could it stand and stay together after the professor’s death?

Yet in the months and years ahead, we will ignore it at our collective peril.

Over the last 25 years, white supremacists have changed uniforms but have not altered their core ideas.

The white majority, they believe, is biologically endowed with a superior set of abilities and the rights to unquestioned ownership and control in the land of their fathers. They believe they were dispossessed, however, by an international Jewish conspiracy that worked like Satan on God’s people.

Klansmen, neo-Nazis, so-called Christian patriots and white-power skinheads became a single movement with interlocking directorates and overlapping memberships. In this milieu, Pierce was a unique figure. He jealously guarded the National Alliance from contamination by other groups and at the same time created a movement-wide literature and leadership. And while others foolishly marched in armed formation before television cameras in the 1990s, Pierce’s followers quietly buried their weapons in containers he personally designed.

In the years since the Oklahoma City bombing, the National Alliance has placed its more seasoned apparatchiks in organizations with larger, less politically defined constituencies and cherry-picked the most disciplined skinheads out of the white-power youth scene.

The National Alliance’s importance has been defined by its influence over other like-minded organizations and not by the size of its own apparatus. Its cadres have participated in the fight against immigration, marched alongside others for the Confederate flag and staged white-power music concerts and skinhead rallies.

One former National Alliance cadre member is today a serious contender for leadership of a unit of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Another heads up a Holocaust revisionist outfit headquartered in Orange County.

The National Alliance’s future can be seen in the selection of 38-year-old Erich Gliebe as its next chairman. By keeping the existing headquarters staff in place and elevating Gliebe from his position as editor of a white-power music magazine, the National Alliance maintains organizational stability and makes a bow toward the source of many of its new recruits: the racist youth scene.

Unlike his predecessor, Gliebe is not a rocket scientist. In fact, much of his stature among skinheads devolves from his past as a professional boxer. But just as it was a mistake to let Pierce’s biography captivate our attention while we ignored the organization he represented, we should not let Gliebe’s personal history blind us to the generation of new leaders now emerging.

They are techno-savvy and well-educated. They will eschew Klan robes, swastika armbands and camouflage fatigues. Having never lived through World War II, they will not be chastened by the horrors of Hitlerism. Having never experienced Jim Crow and the struggles against it, they will be unburdened of its memory.

Their only uniform will be their white skins. They will seek to establish a white nation-state, with definable economic, political and racial borders, out of the wreckage they hope to create of the United States. And from Pierce they will have learned the arts and sciences of Aryan revolution.