As promised, here is another slightly revised and link-enhanced review-essay from the time-worn pages of the print incarnation of The Hoover Hog, which existed from 1996 to 1997. Touching as it does on the mid-nineties militia panic, it seems quaintly dated now. But we know how the pendulum swings. William Luther Pierce has been feeding the worms for half a decade now, but "The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds" remains good fodder for racist and anti-racist alike.
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The first thing I saw in the moonlight was the placard with its legend in large, block letters: "I defiled my race." Above the placard leered the horribly bloated, purplish face of a young woman, her eyes wide open and bulging, her mouth agape. Finally, I could make out the thin, vertical line of rope disappearing into the branches above. Apparently, the rope had slipped a bit or the branch to which it was tied had sagged, until the woman's feet were resting on the pavement, giving the uncanny appearance of a corpse standing upright of its own volition.
-- "Andrew Macdonald," The Turner Diaries
In 1973, an erudite melanophobic Frenchman named Jean Raspail authored a patently racist novel that read like high literature. It was called Camp of the Saints, and it was received with measured praise from some important people. People like Sydney Hook and Max Lerner and James Kilpatrick.
Envisioning the impending arrival of a vast fleet of Ganges refugees ("The Last Chance Armada") to the naked shores of Mother France, Raspail's tale depicts the the chaos and implosive social declension that take root following the Armada's media-celebrated "peaceful invasion" of precious Western soil. In structure and tone and pace, Camp of the Saints has a certain undeniable resonance. It stands as a high-minded requiem, a tragically-framed exaltation of a fragile and glittery blood-willed occidental world in collapse.
Fascinating how the limn devolves, in calculated Boschian reels, to evoke perfect and specifically prurient chords of lizard-brain revulsion. Toward the dark-skinned "other." In one rhapsodically salacious sequence depicting a free-for-all orgy aboard one of the refugee freighters, the flood gates are let open.
. . . everywhere, a mass of hands and mouths, of phalluses and rumps. Young boys passed from hand to hand. Young girls, barely ripe, lying together cheek to thigh, asleep in a languid maze of arms and legs, and flowing hair, waking to the silent play of arms, and legs, and flowing hair, waking to the silent play of eager lips. . . Everywhere, rivers of sperm, streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers. Bodies together, not in twos, but in threes, in fours, whole families of flesh gripped in gentle frenzies and subtle raptures. Men with women, men with men, men with children, children with each other, their slender fingers playing eternal games of carnal pleasure.
Which, apparently, is just what we might expect from a heaping boatload of malnourished sand-niggers who "never found sex to be a sin." One can only wonder whether Monsieur Raspail jerked off between sentences.
And one can only speculate about a more acutely atavistic -- yet comic -- penchant for fecal metaphor. The self-imagined messiah of the Indian masses is affectionately dubbed "the turd eater," and our French scribe dwells, presumably without ironic intent, on the "the horrible stench" emanating from the fleet due to the refugees' resourceful practice of utilizing shit as fuel with which to cook their depleting rations of grain rice:
. . . the decks became weird workshops, where hands deft at molding this curious coal -- children, for the most part, down on their haunches -- took each new batch of turds, kneaded and shaped them, pressing out the liquid, and rolling them into little round briquettes, like the kind we used to burn in our stoves not very long ago. . . Other children, quick and clever, kept them supplied, eyes peeled for anyone, man or woman, poised in the humanoid fecal position. Zip! zip! there they were, hands flashing between two outspread thighs, grabbing the precious substance and trotting it off to the dung rollers while it was hot.
Yech. The intent, I gather, might turn on making the foreigners seem, well, foreign. When the enemy comes, he will smell like shit. And he will be brown, like shit. Capisce?
Anywise, this is one way of looking at things. But there are others.
In 1978, a paranoid Aspergery American writer named William Pierce authored a patently racist novel that read like downmarket smut. It was called The Turner Diaries, and it was received with unequivocal condemnation among all the important people. At least those who deigned, invariably for transparently self-serving reasons, to notice it.
The Turner Diaries is clumsily written, preposterously plotted, and unremittingly psychotic in its masturbatory portrayal of full-on violent caucasoid insurrection. Still I can't help but like it, if for no other reason than it's just about the meanest goddamn book ever written.
Following the passage of the ominous "Cohen Acts" of 1993, goes the story, the dreaded "equality police" set about large-scale confiscatory gun raids, thereby fomenting the formation of a covert paramilitary counteroffensive among a theretofore complacent aggregation of racially conscious white patriot-revolutionaries. Our hero and eponymous narrator is Earl Turner, a nascent fanatic who, having seen the light, rises through the ranks of "The Organization," punctuating his ascent with schizophrenic flourishes of charmingly overwrought Hitleresque polemics.
Turner and his guerrilla compatriots start off small, blowing up central FBI headquarters in the nation's Judaically compromised capitol. But the pyrotechnics amp up in short order, with the destruction of ZOG-controlled media establishments and with federal targets being picked off like lice. Chaos ensues, and although the moribund enemy-government vainly returns fire, the bloated Zionist machine is no match for our intrepid team of firebrand Nordic warriors who make haste in launching a full-scale paramilitary takeover of California.
The Golden State provides the setting for the infamous "Day of the Rope," when bands of suspected race traitors are duly rounded up, beaten up, and strung up, all as the niggers, kikes, and chinks are "deported," shot and hanged as whim and circumstance dictate. Having somehow secured a modest arsenal of nuke-weaponry, the genocidal pranksters proceed to mount their penultimate offensive against The System by, naturally, blowing New York and Israel off the map. And with central command disabled, our man Turner has but to seal his martyrdom, Kamikaze-style, in an air raid over the Pentagon. In a fiery warrior's death, he secures a final tactical victory for The Organization, ensuring that future legions of race baitin' Jew hatin,' 14-word-recitin' milky white folk will inherit the blood-ennobled task of instauration. So it is written.
Skip to the epilogue, where it is implausibly explained that, with a few minor and to-be-expected eruptions, the Organization continues apace and unabated in its racial conquests until the only impure nation remaining is China. To "stem the yellow tide," the industrious Aryan soldiers launch an all-out bio-chemo-nuclear attack over "16 million miles of the Earth's Surface, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean." And thus our tale ends happily with THE ANNIHILATION OF THE ENTIRE NON-WHITE WORLD.
What fun.
If I didn't know better, I'd swear the whole book was a hoax, concocted for the usual insipid reasons, à la Report From Iron Mountain or "Israel Cohen's" fabled playbook, A Racial Program for the Twentieth Century. It's all just so ridiculously lurid and contrived and gratuitous.
And stupid. For example. When Turner looks into the prospect of recruiting Organization foot-soldiers from a none-too-promising throng of young "dropouts," he is disgusted to learn of the netherworldly existence of one "Kappy the Kike," a Jewish white slave merchant said to sell nubile runaway girls to "certain exclusive clubs in New York where the wealthy go to satisfy strange and perverted appetites." But it gets better -- I mean, um, worse -- because a number of Kappy's hapless teenyboppers, "it is rumored, are eventually sold to a Satanist club where they are dismembered in gruesome rituals."
And there's that bit after the Cali-coup, when looting and social discord lead to drastic food shortages, and black folk reflexively "lapse into cannibalism." Or the part where a hyper-Semitic TV news anchor, after reporting on the Organization's nuke attack on "his beloved New York City" shed's the mask and falls into paroxysms of comicbook rage, chanting in Hebrew and pounding his chest. That's right, pounding his chest.
I could go on. About the sanguinary excesses attending the Day of the Rope, where the author dwells ever-lewdly on the curious punishments endured by (usually white and female) race-mixers. About how Hitler is cryptically and admiringly called "The Great One." About further adventures in hair-trigger Negro savagery. And so on. There's never a dull moment, kids. But I think you get the point. It reads like a bad joke.
Both Camp of the Saints and The Turner Diaries portray racial strife in decidedly apocalyptic terms, but whereas the former tome has fallen into relative obscurity, Pierce's pseudononymously penned hate fantasy never strays far from the news cycle. This is due in large measure to the occasional right-wing terrorist who whose criminal actions are, in media-speak, "linked" to the novel or its ever-peculiar author. In the 80s, it was the "Brotherhood of the Order," or something. More recently, it was suggested the book "inspired" Timothy McVeigh in his call to infamy.
While the high-profile headlines surely account for part of the banked fascination, I suspect there may be something more at work. At a bookstore where I once worked, we made a point of carrying The Turner Diaries from time to time, usually when it was in the news for whatever reason. What struck me was that with scant exception, those who purchased the book were rather obviously creatures of Chomsky-benumbed leftist pedigree. And they would always -- always -- make a point of emphasizing their cultivated disapproving stance toward the book's unseemly content, usually couching their regrettable transaction with some fatuous "know thy enemy" explanation-excuse. Yes, I see. You're writing a paper, then? All in keeping with the research.
Curiouser, one notices that career anti-racists like Morris Dees and Ken Stern are conspicuously animated by Pierce and his little red book. And a goodly chunk of mainstream reporting on the over-hyped militia movement gravitates lazily toward Earl Turner's saga, lending the festivities a significance well beyond due. Displaying a keen awareness of the liberal meta-market, Lyle Stewart's Barricade Books stole the punchline by announcing that fully half of Turner-derived profits would go to some obnoxious anti-gun group. What up wit dat?
It's simple enough, really. Just as The Turner Diaries plays into reactionary fantasies of race-warfaring insurgency, it also slakes the liberal need for demons. Whether through accident or ingenuity, Pierce's tome neatly affirms the unacknowledged prejudices of those who wish desperately to believe that NRA constituents are closeted tiny-dicked frothing racist villains whose desire to bear arms may be read as a kind of transferred holocaust-lust. It feeds the needs of Nazi and Nazi-hunter alike.
Is The Turner Diaries a "blueprint for tyranny" as some have suggested? Is it a "Bible of Hate" as FBI busybodies sanctimoniously advise? Is it scary or or dangerous or evil? Nah. It is at base a silly book. A cartoon, really. But one thing seems sure: if The Turner Diaries did not exist, it would be necessary for liberals to invent it.