First appeared in The Windy City Times July 20, 1995.
IN THE WAKE OF THE APRIL 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, it was sometimes pointed out that a very similar ammonium nitrite bomb is used to destroy the FBI Washington headquarters in an obscure novel called The Turner Diaries by William Pierce.
By July 5, New York Times correspondent John Kifner had tracked down people who said chief suspect Timothy McVeigh was a fan of the book.
"He carried the book all the time," one gun collector told Kifner. "He sold it at [gun] shows. He'd have a few copies in the pockets of his cammies... They were supposed to be $10, but he'd sell them for $5. It was like he was looking for converts."
The Turner Diaries(1978) is an authoritarian, white supremacist, anti-Semitic novel in which Earl Turner, through a series of diary entries, records his work in helping the "Organization" --essentially a Nazi underground group. By bombing government buildings, and sabotaging businesses and utilities, the Organization foments civil disorder, seizes a stronghold in California and eventually takes over the country, exterminates minorities, and provides "wise and benevolent rule."
Almost lost among the denunciations of blacks and Jews are references to "gay bars, massage parlors, porn stalls, liquor stores, and similar capitalist ventures." In the same vein, Turner notes a rise in "sexual debauchery:" "the queers, the fetishists, the mixed-race couples, the sadists... are parading their perversions in public and the public is joining them."
It has generally gone unremarked that The Turner Diaries is Pierce's first novel. There is a second: Hunter, published in 1989. Hunter is a kind of preliminary or "prequel" to the first book showing how actions here and now could plausibly lead to the creation of the "Organization" and its revolution.
In Hunter, Oscar Yeager ("Yeager" is German for "hunter" or "rifleman"), a former combat pilot in Vietnam with a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado (Pierce himself has a Ph.D. from Colorado) finds himself revolted by the decay of modern society as exemplified by drug use, race mixing, and open homosexuality, and decides to become a vigilante, shooting interracial couples.
Eventually Yeager meets members of a group called the "National League" (Pierce's organization, which publishes his books, is called National Alliance) who educate him about the key role of Jews in the decay of civilization and destruction of the white race. At the end, the League goes underground and Yeager recommends destroying the economic infrastructure to foment civil disorder.
In a way, Hunter constitutes a kind of Old Testament to the Turner Diaries' New Testament. The OT is a history of the ancient Jews; Hunter is the history of a man being taught how Jews destroy civilization. The NT is about the founding of a new religion replacing Judaism; Turner Diaries is about the founding of a new regime with a literally religious attitude toward racial purity that overcomes both Judaism and Christianity.
The notion is not entirely fanciful. The OT has 39 books: Hunter has 39 chapters. The NT has 27 books. The Turner Diaries has 28 chapters, thus going one step beyond, or overcoming, Christianity.
However that may be, Hunter, published 11 years after The Turner Diaries, contains Pierce's updated thoughts and his response to recent social change. It is far more anti-gay than The Turner Diaries. Along with denunciations of Jews, blacks, "race traitors," and man-hating feminists, there are more than 20 hostile references to homosexuals, queers, fairies, fags, faggots, and sodomites.
Yeager is disgusted by "the open displays of homosexual behavior by an increasing number" of young people. "Queers" are said to have a "general antipathy toward the heterosexual world." Yeager's girlfriend shows a "natural revulsion" when "two obviously 'gay' men had swished into a restaurant where they were eating... and held hands as the perused the menus."
Yeager asks, "don't these fags realize all the hatred they're causing... Do they really think they can keep rubbing the average guy's nose in their filth indefinitely and there'll never be any payback?" Comes the reply from his mentor, "Gays are really not rational. They're a lot like Jews in some ways. They don't know when to stop pushing."
In one episode Yeager cheerfully agrees to kill Sen. Howard Carter, a powerful New England Republican who is a closet "homosexual and pederast."
Gaining entrance to the office, Yeager first kills the senator's Jewish legislative aide: "The knife slipped easily into Sheldon Schwartz' belly and Oscar ripped savagely upward with it, spilling the man's entrails on the carpet. The eviscerated Schwartz could utter no more than a long wheezing gasp as his knees buckled and he fell forward."
Coming to investigate, Carter sees Yeager with the knife, freezes with horror and exclaims, "Oh Shit!"
"'Yes, and that's all she wrote, faggot,' was Oscar's reply as he plunged the ten-inch blade into the center of Carter's chest."
In a later incident gay activists picket the publishers of a book called The Growing Threat of AIDS in America that urges universal HIV testing and quarantining of those infected. One day two demonstrators slosh allegedly infected blood on a female employee.
The next day the woman's husband drives up, shoots and kills some of the demonstrators while 30 New York policemen assigned to keep order do nothing to stop him. The police even order the demonstrators not to run away while the man stops to reload his gun.