What ‘The Turner Diaries’ is all about

by William Pierce

It is important for us to understand that one person is not a Methodist and another a Catholic and a third a Marxist as the result of any rational process—at least, not in the vast majority of cases, although there are individual exceptions.

That is, one is not a Methodist because one sat down and studied the Methodist doctrine, compared it with other doctrines, and decided that Methodism was what made the most sense. One is a Methodist, generally, because one’s parents and neighbors were—that is, out of an entirely unreasoning desire to conform, to believe what one perceives that one is expected to believe. John Wesley undoubtedly was an exception to this rule, but very few other Methodists have been.

There has been strong resistance to accepting the implications of this important facet of human behavior. People seem to want to believe that we are all quite rational, when most of us aren’t. For our purposes, the implication of the fact that most people are governed far more by herd instinct than by reason is this: Insofar as the general public is concerned, truth cannot fight its own battles. As long as Norman Lear, the Jewish television producer, has more kilowatts for reaching the public than we do, it will be his view of history and, more important, his view of what is moral rather than ours which will be generally accepted and which will govern the political process.

This means that we can realistically expect our educational efforts to be effective with only a rather small minority of our fellow citizens. We cannot expect to make a partisan for our cause out of the average man or woman who perceives, even unconsciously, that our cause is not popular, no matter how many books or leaflets we may coax that person into reading. We win only two types of people: One is the person who is already alienated to a certain extent from Mr. Lear’s world and does not fully feel himself a part of the herd to which Mr. Lear is preaching with his cleverly designed television sermons. Unfortunately, in many cases people are alienated for reasons which are entirely or partly wrong from our point of view. That is why protest movements and revolutionary movements always pick up lots of defective people. On the other hand, alienation is certain to remain a growth industry, as they say, and one can hope to see many more essentially healthy people becoming alienated from the mainstream in the years ahead.

The second type of person we are able to win with an educational effort at this time is the person who is one of those rare exceptions to the general rule, a person who is strongly motivated by ideas as well as by instinct, and who has already been groping in our direction. Our effect with such a person is primarily to help him clarify his ideas and to lead him more rapidly to their logical conclusions.

This contrast between idealistic motivation and herd instinct tell us only part of the story as to why people behave the way they do. The rest of the story takes us into the realm of values. Consider your average man or woman, your ordinary White American: what, other than herd instinct, determines his behavior—in particular, the way he votes?

Well, he generally likes to be warm, dry, and comfortable. He likes to eat. He likes sex. He likes to feel secure. He likes to be entertained. He likes to own shiny things, such as automobiles, boats, houses, new golf clubs, and jewelry. And that’s about it. If these desires of his are gratified, then he is satisfied. If he thinks a politician will satisfy him, he’ll vote for the man.

Now, if this average citizen hears that Blacks are rioting and killing Whites somewhere 1,000 miles away he will be annoyed—if Norman Lear hasn’t already affected his mind too much and he still has healthy instincts. When he hears that hundreds of thousands of non-White aliens are pouring into the country, again he’ll be annoyed. All these things are, to a greater or lesser extent, perceived as threats at the instinctual level. They trigger his normal territorial or xenophobic reflexes. But unless the threat becomes very direct and very personal—unless the riot is in his neighborhood, unless a member of his immediate family marries a non-White, or unless he receives a special tax bill in the mail to provide welfare payment for more immigrants—the annoyance remains minor. It does not override his desire to be satisfied.

When it comes time to vote, if one candidate is in favor of forced busing or more boat people and a second candidate is against these things—and if all other factors are equal—then he’ll vote for the second man. But all the other factors are never equal. And if the pro-busing man has a nice smile and a warm personality that makes the voter feel more secure, while the anti-busing man wants to raise the charge for fishing licenses, say, and the voter likes to fish, then he’ll vote for the pro-busing candidate nine times out of ten.

That is why a state like Minnesota, which has one of the racially healthiest populations in the country, could keep sending a piece of filth like the late Hubert Humphrey back to the U.S. Senate term after term. Old Hubert could stand up in the Senate and support forced busing, forced housing, forced hiring, and everything else that most Minnesotans didn’t favor—except, of course, those Minnesotans already convinced by Norman Lear that they should favor those things—and then Hubert could make up for it all by going for bigger farm price supports than his opponent and by being, as they say in New York, a mensch. And the good folks of Minnesota would re-elect him.

Many people don’t like the view of human behavior I am presenting to you, because it is mechanistic; it reduces man to no more than another animal. And I’ll admit that it is an oversimplified view. But it is nevertheless a fact that man is an animal, and that fact accounts for 99 per cent of his behavior. In particular, it accounts for the way he votes. That’s why democracy is such a catastrophe.

I said the fact that man is an animal explains 99 per cent of his behavior, and anyone who wants to change the world in any way must take that fact into account. But it is the other one per cent of human motivation that I’m more interested in and that the Alliance is more interested in. It’s the other one per cent that explains why Earl Turner, the hero of The Turner Diaries, did the things he did.

Earl Turner was a man whose priorities were different from those of your average American voter. Earl Turner liked to be warm and dry and to have a full belly, just like everyone else. He enjoyed sex. And, presumably, he liked to own shiny things. But when Blacks killed Whites 1,000 miles away, it wasn’t just a minor annoyance to him. He had a larger view of the world and of his race and of his relationship to them. He could abstract what was a minor, personal threat to your average voter, and he could relate that abstraction to his view of the world.

When Earl Turner saw a racially mixed couple on the street, the sight did more than arouse a twinge of xenophobia or offend his sense of beauty. Unlike your average voter, he saw all the implications of that mixed couple. He saw mongrel children and mongrel grandchildren; he saw a race defiled. He saw a threat not just to himself, but to the whole upward course of life; a threat not just to his race, but to what his race could become.

And it was this that was important to Earl Turner: it was this that counted more than being satisfied, more than owning shiny things. And that’s why he didn’t behave like your average voter. His priorities were different.

Actually, there are two concepts here. First, Earl Turner had the capacity for abstraction, for taking an idea out of a specific set of circumstances and putting it into a more general context: for converting an idea into an ideal. That is a capacity which distinguishes our race from Blacks, in general, but it is still a capacity which relatively few Whites have to any significant degree.

And, second, there are values, the choice of which things count most. For most people the things that come first, even if they have the capacity for abstraction, are entirely personal. It is only for a minority within a minority that the long-range things are the ones that count. Only the very few can feel that it is more important that strength and beauty and wisdom prevail and become stronger and more beautiful and wiser with each succeeding generation than it is that any individual—or a million individuals—have full bellies.

In The Turner Diaries the real struggle was not so much one of a revolutionary band against the government as it was of one set of values against another set. Earl Turner and his Organization were the champions of a life-centered set of values, a set of values in which the central reality is not the individual, but all of Life: the Cosmos, in its entire temporal extension. Opposed to them were not only the values of the government and the media and the plutocrats, but also the individual-centered set of values of mass man, of the average voter. And in The Turner Diaries the life-centered values won, and those values then ruled. And the whole world was changed: its government, its racial composition, its art and industry, it life-styles, and all its priorities.

Human nature didn’t change—that is, the mentality and the values of the average White person didn’t change, because those are things which can only be changed over the course of generations, through the evolutionary process. But a different set of values, the values of an elite minority, gained precedence over the values of man. That’s what The Turner Diaries is all about.

And as I said earlier, it’s not a plan or a blueprint. The details—the bombings and assassinations, the nuclear war and its aftermath—are all fiction. But the struggle for dominance between the two sets of values portrayed in the book is not fiction. That’s real. And it is in this regard that Earl Turner’s Organization is the model for the National Alliance.

We are concerned, then, not only with education, with helping people clarify their thoughts and reach the proper conclusions, but also with embodying and institutionalizing a set of fundamental values and a view of the world. We are convinced that, unless our values prevail and rule, unless it is our world view which determines the shape of the future by setting men’s priorities and guiding them in their decisions, then there will be no future—that is, no future worth mentioning, because it will be a retrograde future, and our race will not be a part of it. And, in fact, the only valid reason why our race should survive is that it is the bearer of the values that we are determined shall prevail. For life loses its intrinsic value when its only motive is to increase its quantity, when its only goal is satiety.

The value of every form of life—of every race—of every individual—is not that it is an end in itself but that it is a means to a higher end. The value of a man’s life is not to be found in the degree to which he enjoys himself or in the amount of wealth or power he accumulates—and it especially is not to be found in the so-called good he does by making life more comfortable for others. It is to be found only in the extent to which he helps prepare the way for a higher, a more fully conscious life than his own.

Earl Turner understood that and acted accordingly and we must do the same.

____________

The above material has been excerpted from a portion of Pierce’s address at the Estonian House in New York City. The original title was ‘Whose Values Shall Rule?’ which appeared in the National Alliance Bulletin of June, 1980.