Category: Biography

Categories
Biography Cicero Jewish question (JQ) Judea v. Rome (masthead of this site) Literature Mexico

Krauze and the JQ

Last Friday I added a short piece on Spinoza in Mexico Park: a book by the Mexican-Jewish Enrique Krauze that I had just bought. Now that I’ve been reading it, I couldn’t resist the urge to write a critical review of it for The Occidental Observer (TOO). My book review has just been published in that webzine for JQ connoisseurs—click: here!

The following is a passage (my translation) of Spinoza in Mexico Park that I could have quoted in my TOO article:

José María Lassalle: In our last conversation we had covered a decade in your intellectual life: that of your integration into Mexican culture as a historian and as editorial secretary of the magazine Vuelta… The one you described in the first conversation with great detail and love: your culture of origin, Jewish culture. I was very surprised by everything you said. I didn’t know that this root was so deep. It almost covered everything… I understand that you wanted to belong to Mexico and to the Hispanic world, and all your life you have worked to achieve it. But secretly you were driven by that initial impulse, by that root. That root is Judaism: the tree grew in Mexico, in Mexican soil, and bore Mexican fruit, but the root and the trunk were Jewish.

Enrique Krauze: What I did was to build that Jewish compound in Amsterdam [obliquely, Krauze is referring to Spinoza, who was born in Amsterdam]… And I began to build a library of Jewish subjects from all eras. A library, above all, of characters and ideas. [pages 419-420]

Latin Americans idolise their intellectuals and writers, so there are a couple of things I’d like to add to what I wrote in the TOO review.

Besides having enormous fame in the Spanish-speaking world, Krauze is one of those serene-speaking ethnic Jews with subtle but toxic messages for the white world. For example, he hasn’t only translated Susan Sontag for the cultural magazines in Spanish he has edited (I have read Krauze since 1990). In Spinoza in Mexico Park, where he talks a lot about WW2, the historian Krauze doesn’t mention David Irving once. Moreover, Krauze writes ‘Holocaust’ in a capital letter and ‘gulag’ in a lowercase in spite of the fact that far more Gentiles died in the Gulag than Jews in the so-called holocaust!

In the TOO piece I only mentioned a few names of the Jewish authors that influenced Krauze, but Spinoza in Mexico Park is replete with other names of historical Jews, from cover to cover. (There is no notable writer in the Spanish-speaking world to point these things out. That’s why I have been calling Latin America the ‘blue pill’ subcontinent.)

On the dilemma that plagues every Westerner—Athens or Jerusalem?—Krauze wrote the following (my translation) about the Greco-Roman world, in the context of Jewish writers of antiquity, such as Josephus and Philo:

[Jewish historian Arnaldo] Momigliano argues that Jerusalem resisted Athens because of the radical religious obstinacy of the people. The Jewish people remained faithful to the priests, the guardians of orthodoxy. For them, Greek culture was synonymous with idolatry, vain pleasures, frivolous comedies, and pagan myths… The Alexandrian Jews tried to persuade the Greek world of the goodness of their faith… One text points to the excesses of a certain Flaccus, the Roman governor in Egypt, who unleashed a veritable pogrom in that city. Even then, this persecution took on the dramatic forms and dimensions that were to be seen many centuries later in the Middle Ages. The profile he [the Jew Momigliano] draws of the delirious Caligula is a jewel worthy of Suetonius [Spinoza in Mexico Park, pages 430-431].

Regular visitors to The West’s Darkest Hour know that this site has a masthead, a guide that allows us to navigate the seas of history. Compare Krauze’s Jewish POV quoted above with the Aryan POV of our ‘masthead’ (pages 33-123 of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, linked in our featured post):

In 62-61 b.c.e., the proconsul Lucius Valerius Flaccus (son of the consul of the same name and brother of the consul Gaius Valerius Flaccus) confiscated the tribute of ‘sacred money’ that the Jews sent to the Temple of Jerusalem. The Jews of Rome raised the populace against Flaccus. The well-known Roman patriot Cicero defended Flaccus against the accuser Laelius (a tribune of the plebs who would later support Pompey against Julius Caesar) and referred to the Jews of Rome in a few sentences of 59 b.c.e., which were reflected in his In Defence of Flaccus, XVIII:

‘The next thing is that charge about the Jewish gold… I will speak in a low voice, just so as to let the judges hear me. For men are not wanting who would be glad to excite those people against me and against every eminent man, and I will not assist them and enable them to do so more easily. As gold, under the pretence of being given to the Jews, was accustomed every year to be exported out of Italy and all the provinces to Jerusalem, Flaccus issued an edict establishing a law that…’

From these phrases, we can deduce that already in the 1st century b.c.e., the Jews had great political power in Rome itself and that they had an important capacity for social mobilization against their political opponents, who lowered their voices out of fear: the pressure of the lobbies.

Thus spake Cicero (brown letters) before the senate. The story of the Flaccus family doesn’t end there. In the masthead we then see what happened to another Flaccus[1] in the section about Caligula: another historical figure maligned by Jews and Christians, including the historian Krauze.

Incidentally, I’m in the final proofreading of the November 2022 edition of On Exterminationism, so I won’t be adding more entries here while I work on it. But I’ll answer any questions I am asked about Krauze, whom I met personally—even shook hands with him in 1993!—when he and Octavio Paz published a book by Cuban dissident Guillermo Cabrera Infante.

________

[1] Aulus Avilius Flaccus was appointed praefectus of Roman Egypt from 33 to 38 c.e.

Categories
Biography David Irving Free speech / Free press Jewish question (JQ) Second World War

The remarkable historiography of David Irving

by Ron Unz

 
I’m very pleased to announce that our selection of HTML Books now contains works by renowned World War II historian David Irving, including his magisterial Hitler’s War, named by famed military historian Sir John Keegan as one of the most crucial volumes for properly understanding that conflict.

With many millions of his books in print, including a string of best-sellers translated into numerous languages, it’s quite possible that the eighty-year-old Irving today ranks as the most internationally-successful British historian of the last one hundred years. Although I myself have merely read a couple of his shorter works, I found these absolutely outstanding, with Irving regularly deploying his remarkable command of the primary source documentary evidence to totally demolish my naive History 101 understanding of major historical events. It would hardly surprise me if the huge corpus of his writings eventually constitutes a central pillar upon which future historians seek to comprehend the catastrophically bloody middle years of our hugely destructive twentieth century even after most of our other chroniclers of that era are long forgotten.

Carefully reading a thousand-page reconstruction of the German side of the Second World War is obviously a daunting undertaking, and his remaining thirty-odd books would probably add at least another 10,000 pages to that Herculean task. But fortunately, Irving is also a riveting speaker, and several of his extended lectures of recent decades are conveniently available on YouTube, as given below. [Editor's note: They have already been censored on YouTube, but can be viewed on BitChute.] These effectively present many of his most remarkable revelations concerning the wartime policies of both Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler, as well as sometimes recounting the challenging personal situation he himself faced. Watching these lectures (here and here) may consume several hours, but that is still a trivial investment compared to the many weeks it would take to digest the underlying books themselves.

When confronted with astonishing claims that completely overturn an established historical narrative, considerable skepticism is warranted, and my own lack of specialized expertise in World War II history left me especially cautious. The documents Irving unearths seemingly portray a Winston Churchill so radically different from that of my naive understanding as to be almost unrecognizable, and this naturally raised the question of whether I could credit the accuracy of Irving’s evidence and his interpretation. All his material is massively footnoted, referencing copious documents in numerous official archives, but how could I possibly muster the time or energy to verify them?

Rather ironically, an extremely unfortunate turn of events seems to have fully resolved that crucial question.

Irving is an individual of uncommonly strong scholarly integrity, and as such he is unable to see things in the record that do not exist, even if it were in his considerable interest to do so, nor to fabricate non-existent evidence. Therefore, his unwillingness to dissemble or pay lip-service to various widely-worshiped cultural totems eventually provoked an outpouring of vilification by a swarm of ideological fanatics drawn from a particular ethnic persuasion. This situation was rather similar to the troubles my old Harvard professor E.O. Wilson had experienced around that same time upon publication of his own masterwork Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, the book that helped launch the field of modern human evolutionary psychobiology.

These zealous ethnic-activists began a coordinated campaign to pressure Irving’s prestigious publishers into dropping his books, while also disrupting his frequent international speaking tours and even lobbying countries to bar him from entry. They maintained a drumbeat of media vilification, continually blackening his name and his research skills, even going so far as to denounce him as a “Nazi” and a “Hitler-lover,” just as had similarly been done in the case of Prof. Wilson.

During the 1980s and 1990s, these determined efforts, sometimes backed by considerable physical violence, increasingly bore fruit, and Irving’s career was severely impacted. He had once been feted by the world’s leading publishing houses and his books serialized and reviewed in Britain’s most august newspapers; now he gradually became a marginalized figure, almost a pariah, with enormous damage to his sources of income.

In 1993, Deborah Lipstadt, a rather ignorant and fanatic professor of Theology and Holocaust Studies (or perhaps “Holocaust Theology”) ferociously attacked him in her book as being a “Holocaust Denier,” leading Irving’s timorous publisher to suddenly cancel the contract for his major new historical volume. This development eventually sparked a rancorous lawsuit in 1998, which resulted in a celebrated 2000 libel trial held in British Court.

That legal battle was certainly a David-and-Goliath affair, with wealthy Jewish movie producers and corporate executives providing a huge war-chest of $13 million to Lipstadt’s side, allowing her to fund a veritable army of 40 researchers and legal experts, captained by one of Britain’s most successful Jewish divorce lawyers. By contrast, Irving, being an impecunious historian, was forced to defend himself without benefit of legal counsel.

In real life unlike in fable, the Goliaths of this world are almost invariably triumphant, and this case was no exception, with Irving being driven into personal bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of his fine central London home. But seen from the longer perspective of history, I think the victory of his tormenters was a remarkably Pyrrhic one.

Although the target of their unleashed hatred was Irving’s alleged “Holocaust denial,” as near as I can tell, that particular topic was almost entirely absent from all of Irving’s dozens of books, and exactly that very silence was what had provoked their spittle-flecked outrage. Therefore, lacking such a clear target, their lavishly-funded corps of researchers and fact-checkers instead spent a year or more apparently performing a line-by-line and footnote-by-footnote review of everything Irving had ever published, seeking to locate every single historical error that could possibly cast him in a bad professional light. With almost limitless money and manpower, they even utilized the process of legal discovery to subpoena and read the thousands of pages in his bound personal diaries and correspondence, thereby hoping to find some evidence of his “wicked thoughts.” Denial, a 2016 Hollywood film co-written by Lipstadt, may provide a reasonable outline of the sequence of events as seen from her perspective.

Yet despite such massive financial and human resources, they apparently came up almost entirely empty, at least if Lipstadt’s triumphalist 2005 book History on Trial may be credited. Across four decades of research and writing, which had produced numerous controversial historical claims of the most astonishing nature, they only managed to find a couple of dozen rather minor alleged errors of fact or interpretation, most of these ambiguous or disputed. And the worst they discovered after reading every page of the many linear meters of Irving’s personal diaries was that he had once composed a short “racially insensitive” ditty for his infant daughter, a trivial item which they naturally then trumpeted as proof that he was a “racist.” Thus, they seemingly admitted that Irving’s enormous corpus of historical texts was perhaps 99.9% accurate.

I think this silence of “the dog that didn’t bark” echoes with thunderclap volume. I’m not aware of any other academic scholar in the entire history of the world who has had all his decades of lifetime work subjected to such painstakingly exhaustive hostile scrutiny. And since Irving apparently passed that test with such flying colors, I think we can regard almost every astonishing claim in all of his books—as recapitulated in his videos—as absolutely accurate.

Aside from this important historical conclusion, I believe that the most recent coda to Irving’s tribulations tells us quite a lot about the true nature of “Western liberal democracy” so lavishly celebrated by our media pundits, and endlessly contrasted with the “totalitarian” or “authoritarian” characteristics of its ideological rivals, past and present.

In 2005, Irving took a quick visit to Austria, having been invited to speak before a group of Viennese university students. Shortly after his arrival, he was arrested at gunpoint by the local Political Police on charges connected with some historical remarks he had made 16 years earlier on a previous visit to that country, although those had apparently been considered innocuous at the time. Initially, his arrest was kept secret and he was held completely incommunicado; for his family back in Britain, he seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth, and they feared him dead. More than six weeks were to pass before he was allowed to communicate with either his wife or a lawyer, though he managed to provide word of his situation earlier through an intermediary.

And at the age of 67 he was eventually brought to trial in a foreign courtroom under very difficult circumstances and given a three-year prison sentence. An interview he gave to the BBC about his legal predicament resulted in possible additional charges, potentially carrying a further twenty-year sentence, which probably would have ensured that he died behind bars. Only the extremely good fortune of a successful appeal, partly on technical grounds, allowed him to depart the prison grounds after spending more than 400 days under incarceration, almost entirely in solitary confinement, and he escaped back to Britain.

His sudden, unexpected disappearance had inflicted huge financial hardships upon his family, and they lost their home, with most of his personal possessions being sold or destroyed, including the enormous historical archives he had spent a lifetime accumulating. He later recounted this gripping story in Banged Up, a slim book published in 2008, as well as in a video interview available here.

Perhaps I am demonstrating my ignorance, but I am not aware of any similar case of a leading international scholar who suffered such a dire fate for quietly stating his historical opinions, even during in darkest days of Stalinist Russia or any of the other totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Although this astonishing situation taking place in a West European democracy of the “Free World” did receive considerable media exposure within Europe, coverage in our own country was so minimal that I doubt that today even one well-educated American in twenty is even aware it ever happened.

Categories
Autobiography Biography Child abuse Laurent Guyénot Trauma model of mental disorders

Don’t transfer your wrath onto Steve!

I have been reproducing most of the text of the article ‘The Holy Hook’.

‘Christianity without the Old Testament?’ is the last section of that essay by Laurent Guyénot. It consists of 900 words. I don’t want to reproduce it here but you can read it in The Unz Review.

In that last section, Guyénot falls into the same errors we have seen time and again in the racial right that desperately wants to save the religion of our parents despite its roots. Since, as we saw in David Skrbina’s book, the New Testament was written by Jews for Gentile consumption, it cannot be sanitised from the point of view of the fourteen words. However, what we have read in the previous instalments of ‘The Holy Hook’ is important to better understand the psyop represented by the forced conversion of the white race to the god of the Jews. But what Guyénot lacked, which Skrbina didn’t lack, was to assimilate the legacy of Nietzsche.

For the rest of this article I would like to talk about issues that I have touched on in recent posts. In the video Gonzalo uploaded today we no longer see him mocking with his typical black humour, because things are getting very ugly in Ukraine, where he is trapped, and perhaps we will see an October surprise before the US mid-term elections next month.
 

The Dahmer case—again!

Another issue I recently touched on and have given some more thought to is the Dahmer case. As you may recall, at the end of last month I confessed that I had watched the miniseries by pressing the forward button to avoid watching the morbid stuff Netflix shows us. But yesterday I saw, without pressing that button, a couple of scenes based on the real-life Dahmer family that caught my attention.

Jeffrey’s father, once with his new wife and the other time right after Jeff was sentenced, blames both his first wife—Jeff’s mother—and himself, for creating a monster because of how Jeff was mistreated as a child. And after the sentence, the mother writes a confession in which she feels guilty about the way she treated her son before turning on the gas tap in an attempt to kill herself. Having pressed the forward button so many times in the past month, I hadn’t thought about this pair of revealing scenes which, as I said, are apparently based on real-life anecdotes.

As a teenager I had, to some extent, a mother like Jeffrey’s, so I know how one internalises the verbal abuse of what Jung called ‘a dragon mother’. What hurt Jeff the most as a child is that his dad, who should’ve been the countervailing force, left him alone with the dragon and literally walked out of the home. It was in that house that Jeff committed his first murder and precisely when his young victim, Steven Mark Hicks (pictured below) wanted to leave the house.

After several hours of talking, drinking and listening to music, Steve ‘wanted to leave and I didn’t want him to leave’. Dahmer struck Steve from behind with the dumbbell while Steve was sitting in a chair. When he fell unconscious, Dahmer choked him to death with the barbell bar.

It seems obvious to me that the eighteen-year-old Jeff displaced pent-up anger towards the father in a sort of ‘Now you’re not leaving!’ From my own experience I know that resentment towards the passive father who didn’t stop the abuse is far more serious than resentment towards the dragon mother, insofar as he could have saved us and did nothing.

Of course, regarding his psychic wounds Jeff’s twist was very different from mine. He began to recreate his impotent rage with scapegoats, starting with Steve, and the betrayal he had been subjected to at home never crossed his conscience (transferred, unconscious hatred is infinite, since it’s not directed toward the real perp). I preferred to leave a legacy to humanity with my autobiographical confessions—see the only comment in the featured post.

Having been watching so many YouTube interviews with the real Jeff Dahmer, I realised that what trauma researchers say is true. To the extent that the subject doesn’t know himself—Jeff didn’t know himself—he will displace his unconscious rage on others. Bringing to consciousness the horrors of our childhoods (or adolescence in my case) prevents mental disorders, or our taking it out on innocent Steves.

Categories
Biography David Irving Heinrich Himmler True Himmler (book)

True Himmler, chapter 3

 
Editor’s Note: Below, excerpts from the third chapter, ‘A Witch in the Family’, of David Irving’s book on Heinrich Himmler (available through Irving’s bookstore here).
 

______ 卐 ______

 

Himmler’s missing 1940 diary appeared on the auction block in Munich in 2006; we were languishing that year in a Vienna prison cell, convicted of ‘reviving the Nazi Party’ through views expressed sixteen years earlier. The original is now deposited under glass, like a rare poisonous beetle, in the museum of a medieval castle called Wewelsburg, of which we shall eventually hear more. We know that Professor Michael Wildt worked on Himmler’s 1937 diary in Moscow, and we obtained copies of the 1941 and 1942 diaries from the NA and the same archives.

There is one other trove to be mentioned: the papers of Himmler’s wife and daughter. Years ago, an Englishman won them at an auction in New York. Chaim Rosenthal, a crooked cultural attaché at the Israeli consulate, offered to the naïve Englishman to convey these to the U.K., but hastened back to Tel Aviv instead. He donated them to Tel Aviv university. Upon realising that they were twice-stolen property, the Israeli university quiet properly returned them, though to Rosenthal and not their rightful owner.

* * *

Not every child is blessed to have a school headmaster as a father, although Heinrich Himmler may not have considered it good fortune at the time. Heinrich had been born into such a teacher’s family in Munich, just two hundred and eighty days into the Twentieth Century upon which he was to leave such an indelible mark; some of his ill-starred contemporaries including Hans Frank and Martin Bormann were also born in 1900…

Their ancestral line stretched back over the centuries, its nodes and gridlines populated by a motley cast of businessmen, gendarmes, and schoolmasters. Heini’s own experts would trace them back to before Charlemagne. One of Heini’s female ancestors named Passanquay had been burned at the stake as a witch. Reinhard Heydrich would derive satisfaction from informing him in May 1939 of another unfortunate, Margareth Himbler, of Markelsheim, burned as a witch on Apr 4, 1629…

Having retired at sixty-five with the venerable rank of Geheimrat, or privy counsellor, the professor would die on October 29, 1936, before Heini’s fame had turned to infamy. His wife, Frau Geheimrat Anna, was remembered as a gentle little woman, a churchgoer. ‘She could not have hurt a fly,’ said one who knew her. They had been living on the second floor of No. 6, Hildegard Strasse, when she produced Heini, their second boy, on October 7, 1900… A few months later, in March 1901, they moved to a new apartment above a pharmacy in Liebig Strasse, in a genteel area of Munich.

A tall carved statue of Christ stood in the entrance hall—an heirloom left to their mother, and the boys crossed themselves each time before it, just as their parents did. Heini set up an Ahnen-Zimmer, an ancestral shrine, where he spent hours studying his ancestors… The photos show him already wearing the round-eyed glasses which were to become iconic later in his life.

He made many friends at the Gymnasium. One was Wolfgang Hallgarten, three months his junior and son of a New York Jew (but raised as a Lutheran). Heini occasionally visited their home; the boys’ governess Luise Essert discovered his passion for hot chocolate. It was a wealthy, enlightened household. Thomas Mann and Bruno Walter the conductor were among other guests, and the young physicist Werner Heisenberg played his cello within its walls. ‘We knew him from 1910 to 1913,’ wrote Hallgarten of Heinrich Himmler, rising rather notably to his defence in the 1950s, ‘the years when we were all students at the Royal Wilhelm Gymnasium in Munich’… ‘I for my part failed to discover the slightest anti-Semitic streak in him’, reminisced Hallgarten, referring to those shared childhood years at school. For many years he assumed that the fearsome Himmler that people spoke about was a brother, and not the boy he had known…

An older brother, named Gebhard like their father, had been born toward the end of the century which the world had left behind—on July 29, 1898 to be precise. A third son, little Ernst Hermann Himmler, arrived five years after Heini. He was born two days before Christmas in 1905. ‘Ernstl,’ as they called him, married Paula during World War Two, and would disappear on its last day, killed in action. Ernst had joined the Volkssturm, Germany’s ‘Home Guard,’ and when the Soviet Army attacked Berlin’s Charlottenburg district he went out, rifle in hand, to defend the Radio building with the rest of his staff and was not seen again…

‘If my parents’ house was an extraordinarily liberal, free, quiet one,’ recalled Karl, on trial for his life half a century later, ‘then the Himmler house was that of a strong orthodox Catholic schoolmaster, whose son was brought up strictly and kept very short of cash.’ Karl Gebhardt would accompany Heini throughout his life…

The Himmlers were a church-going family. They prayed together, and stayed together. His parent’s influence remained overbearing. Heinrich was received into the Catholic church on April 1, 1911; he placed in his private papers a printed ‘First Communion’ certificate based on a painting of Christ at the Last Supper; he went frequently to Mass and received Holy Communion kneeling at his father’s side, he celebrated his own family name-days and those of the Bavarian royal family. When Gebhard fell dangerously ill with pleurisy in 1914, they promised a pilgrimage to Burghausen and a special Mass if he recovered, and they kept their promise. Heini went to church every morning, and mentioned each visit in the diary in case the Lord had not caught sight of this little lamb attending His House…

This was not without its effect on the impressionable youngster. How he envied Gebhard when he turned on July 29 and signed up for the Landsturm, the reserve: ‘O, to be out there with the rest of them!’—meaning the fighting front. Instead he stayed behind, teaching Ernstl to swim, and went for walks to more churches and monasteries with his pious mother. Once they climbed up to see the church atop the Marienburg; Heini counted the steps on the way down, to where in 1143 a Cistercian monastery had been founded: 265 steps, he found. He entered the number in his diary…

* * *

Young Heini applied for a commission in the navy, we are told, but the navy turned him down, because of his poor eyesight… As Germany’s war fortunes declined, the request was refused. Heini left school on October 8, 1917 and began training as a Fahnenjunker with the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment ‘Von der Tann’ in Regensburg. He formally entered military service on January 2, 1918. Still of indifferent physique, he found the training demanding…

With the war over… his godfather Prince Heinrich had been killed in action. In Bavaria the Communists had seized power, overthrown the Wittelsbach monarchy, and established a republic under the Jew Kurt Kamonowsky, better known as Kurt Eisner.

He began to sport a small toothbrush moustache, and this was no accident. Men who had entered the war with handlebar moustaches had trimmed them to fit the gasmask issued after they came under mustard-gas attack. The toothbrush moustache became the unstated badge of the western front veteran… He moved to Munich, where he would start his further education and eventually become involved, much against his will, in politics.

* * *

As for his father, we have a final glimpse of this extraordinary pedagogue. By now nicknamed Quince Face by his pupils, because of his jaundiced pallor, he retired with high honours aged sixty-five in 1930. In 1989 the writer Alfred Andersch published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Father of a Murderer. It was a fictional account of a school class dominated by a terrifying and sadistic Old Man Himmler, a class ending with Alfred’s summary expulsion…

Heini’s father died in 1936. He had never been the pedagogic sadist depicted by Andersch and his profitable pen, but a stern man of quiet discipline and abiding religious fervour, inspired by a genuine pietas bavarica. The Germans however like their comfortable stereotypes: The Andersch novel was filmed and is now required reading for German schoolchildren.

Stereotypes will continue to blur the image of Heinrich Himmler, confusing though it is. They choke history like bindweed in a jungle, through which we have first to hack and clear a path.

Categories
Biography

Metapedia’s articles

Last year I found out about an article of Metapedia on me in German (here). Now, a certain Herman started one on me in English (here).

Categories
Biography William Pierce

The Fame, 7

WLP

From The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
An Up-Close Portrait of William Pierce
by Robert Griffin


 
“I’m William Pierce. I’ve been waiting for you.”

Pierce looked to me to be around sixty years old. He is a couple inches taller than I am, which would make him about 6’3” or so. He has a large head and graying and thinning conventionally cut hair parted on the left side. His hair was long enough so that it curled up in the back. He is a bit hunched, and his head nestles down into his shoulders and thrusts forward. What stood out to me about his face were his large forehead and mouth. His face is unlined, his nose is straight and unremarkable, and his small ears protrude some. His eyes were blue behind the thick lenses of the conservative plastic-framed glasses he had on.

That day, Pierce had on a jeans jacket over a dark blue T-shirt with a pocket in which he had what appeared to be a white index card. His faded blue jeans hung straight down in the back in the way they do with older men. He had on brown workboots. Around his waist was a pistol belt. A holstered weapon was on his right and more to the back than to the side. The weapon wasn’t visible because he had pulled his T-shirt over it.

Pierce’ s basic appearance is long and lean, but when I shook hands with him I was taken by the size and strength of his hands and forearms which showed beneath his rolled-up jacket sleeves. His handshake was firm and confident. I had read that Pierce, as it was phrased, “doesn’t have a very dynamic presence.” That certainly wasn’t the impression I was getting. He had the air of somebody important and as being the kind of person who very much fills up the space they are in.

“Come on in,” Pierce said, motioning with his left hand toward the building to my right. I turned and for the first time got a good look at the National Alliance headquarters building. It is two stories tall and perhaps sixty feet wide.

The most prominent feature of the building is a ten-foot-high dark brown symbol attached to the building above the door. I couldn’t tell whether it was made of metal or wood. It looks something like a Christian cross except that the crossbar is longer and instead of going straight across from nine o’clock to three o’clock, it is as if it were cut at the mid-point and the two pieces, still attached to the vertical bar, are pointed upward toward ten-thirty and one-thirty. I later learned that this is called a Life Rune and that it is the symbol for the National Alliance. I remember having an emotional charge that first time I took in this Life Rune image, so large and dominating. Especially in this setting, so removed from everywhere, it seemed alien, something out of Brave New World or 1984…

Pierce has a Ph.D in physics, and this room is where he goes to get away from it all. One other thing on the second floor: a television set next to the back wall amid boxes of books. I believe it is the only one on the property. It turns out that Pierce and those around him are down on television, seeing it as a reality-distorting and mind-warping force in the hands of their adversaries. Pierce isn’t about to get the cable, and the only station that reaches this remote area is an NBC affiliate—barely reaches, the picture is snowy and doesn’t qualify as being in color. Pierce is a faithful watcher of the NBC evening news. As far as I know, that is the extent of his television viewing other than tapes friends and followers send him, and I don’t believe anyone around him watches television at all.

Categories
Biography William Pierce

The Fame, 5

WLP

From The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
An Up-Close Portrait of William Pierce
by Robert Griffin


 
As the days and weeks went along, I noticed that Pierce seemed to look forward to our sessions, which were from 7:00 to 9:00 in the evenings after his long workday. It was at his suggestion that we talk consecutive evenings rather than the three times a week I originally had in mind…

Pierce is concerned with it all and how everything fits together—history, philosophy, politics, economics, the media, education, men-women identities and relationships, child-raising practices, and approaches to leisure—and that offered me the broad canvas, the inclusive frame of reference, I wanted. I didn’t think the fact that Pierce approaches these concerns from a position on the extreme end of the ideological spectrum was a drawback, because one of the ways to make better sense of what is going on at the core of American life, which is what I really want to do, is to contrast it with what is happening on its outermost edge…

I find Pierce to be an absolutely fascinating character and his story to be a whale of a tale. And besides Pierce, in the course of putting this book together I came across a number of other fascinating—which is not to say admirable—characters, among them, George Lincoln Rockwell, Robert Lloyd, Revilo P. Oliver, Francis Parker Yockey, Savitri Devi, Elizabeth Dilling, Bob Mathews, and William Gayley Simpson. This cast of characters and their world was all new to me, and I have had the treat of a terrific, real-life movie for the year and a half I have been working on this book. I found that that alone has been enough to keep me going.

Categories
Biography William Pierce

The Fame, 4

WLP

From The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
An Up-Close Portrait of William Pierce
by Robert Griffin

 
In late 1997 I wrote Pierce a letter broaching the idea of writing a book about him and his ideas. In the letter, I said:

I’m not talking about anything authorized, that is to say, where explicitly or implicitly I have the job of fronting for you, making you look good, selling you. But at the same time, I wouldn’t be aiming to demonize you or set you up as a straw man to serve some agenda of my own. I also don’t want to play a game academics often play [I am a university professor], which is to stand above their subjects, as it were, and patronizingly critique them and make themselves look good in the process. What I do want to do is focus on the issues you raise and the ideas you affirm and your current activities within the context of the events and circumstances of your life, and to present it as objectively as I can. Whatever else comes through, I want who you are and what you are and where you have come from put out there for readers straight and true. I am not interested in exposes or inside journalism. I am interested in where this culture and society is heading and how we live our individual lives, and what you and what you represent have to do with that.

Pierce wrote back:

Your idea is an intriguing one. I am not convinced that the things I have accomplished to date merit a biography—although I always am trying to acquire more merit. From a practical point of view, if you succeed in getting a biography of me published and it is not a hatchet job, it should be helpful. Although you might be subject to pressure from your publisher to produce a book fitting a certain stereotype of me and my message. Anyway, it is a project that I am willing to discuss with you.

I wrote back to Pierce that I wasn’t planning on writing a full-scale, detailed biography, bringing in multiple sources and perspectives and all. Rather, I was thinking of something akin to what goes on between a subject posing for a portrait and an artist. That is to say, the book would essentially be about him and me: the way he presents himself to me and the way I make sense of and render that presentation. I said I wanted to hear him talk about his life growing up and what he has done as an adult. I wanted to learn about the circumstances in society and the people and experiences and ideas that have had an impact on him. I wanted to become familiar with the books that have made a difference to him—I’ d like to read them if I haven’t—and see if I can learn why they affected him as they did. I wanted to look at how his public life and private life have affected one another. I wanted to do those things in order to paint a picture of him, so to speak. So a portrait would be a more accurate way of referring to what I had in mind than a biography.

And, really, I said in the letter, I am not setting out to do a hatchet job on you. I am not intending to write a judgmental book; rather, I want to be a vehicle that will allow readers the chance to get a good look at you and to decide for themselves what they see. I told Pierce I would stay away from slanting or channeling people’ s impression of him by tacking negative labels on him—neo-Nazi, anti-Semite, bigot, hater. However, he had to understand that after hearing what he has to say and reviewing what he has done with his life, readers may well decide that, indeed, those labels suit him. And as for publishers pushing me to fit him into a certain stereotype—he had mentioned that possibility—I told him that I was not going to bend reality for anybody.

I told Pierce that I wanted to meet him in person—I hadn’t at that point—and talk more about this project and see if it seemed as if the two of us could work together. I said I thought a couple of hours with one another should give us a good sense of whether we ought to keep exploring this idea.

Pierce said that was all right with him, and I went to see him in West Virginia. This was in the fall of 1997. We talked for two hours in the afternoon at his office in the National Alliance headquarters building on his three hundred forty-six acre plot of land. Basically, we got acquainted. He asked me about what things were like at the university where I am on the faculty, and we talked about university politics for a time. I thought the session went well. Pierce seemed open and unthreatened—I had expected more wariness, which would have been understandable—and he was congenial and expansive. At the end of that first meeting, we decided that I should come back and spend a full work day at the property.

Categories
Biography Civil war Justice / revenge Real men United States William Pierce

The Fame, 3

WLP

From The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
An Up-Close Portrait of William Pierce
by Robert Griffin

 
In addition to the weekly broadcasts and book-selling activities, Pierce writes the copy for a members-only monthly National Alliance newsletter. There is also the irregularly published glossy magazine, National Vanguard, which the ADL [Note of the Ed.: a Jewish hate group] report says attempts to intellectualize the Alliance’s racist and anti-Semitic agenda. The highbrow tone of National Vanguard contrasts sharply with the cruder, poorly-edited propaganda materials of other extremist groups and heightens the appeal the National Alliance has among those whom the report refers to as “better-educated bigots.”

Explosion of Hate notes that other murderers and terrorists besides Timothy McVeigh appear to have been inspired by Pierce’s violence-filled writings and pronouncements. In the 1980s a gang calling itself the “Order,” after the elite paramilitary unit in The Turner Diaries, went on a crime spree which included bombing a synagogue, murdering a Jewish talk show host, counterfeiting, and robbing over four million dollars in an armored car heist. The Order’s leader, Robert Mathews, was a member of the National Alliance and recruiter for the Alliance who once spoke at one of the organization’s national conventions. Reportedly, Mathews told people that he was intent on being the catalyst for an uprising against the System like the one described in Pierce’s book.

Mathews, who was killed by FBI agents in a shoot-out, has become a martyr and cult hero among right wing fringe elements and a model for others who would follow his lead. The ADL report cites the statement of then-publisher George Burdi in the skinhead-oriented magazine Resistance invoking Mathews’ memory in the course of singing the praises of the National Alliance. Said Burdi: “The National Alliance is clearly the most forward-looking and progressive racialist organization in the world today, and it is no wonder that Robert Mathews endorsed them so wholeheartedly.” Another example, authorities say a white supremacist group calling itself the Aryan Republican Army and led by a man called Peter Langan committed twenty-two bank robberies and bombings across Midwest between 1992 and 1996. Langan praised Robert Mathews and instructed his viewers to “learn from Bob.” Not surprisingly The Turner Diaries was required reading in the Aryan Republican Army.

The ADL report lists a number of recent crimes that can be linked in some way to Pierce and the National Alliance. Among them:

  • In March of 1998, Dennis McGiffin and two others were charged with conspiracy to possess and make machine guns. FBI agents testified that McGiffin and the others were influenced by The Turner Diaries. They planned to form a “New Order” and talked of, among other things, bombing state capitols and post offices and poisoning public water supplies with cyanide.
  • In 1997, Todd Vanbiber, a National Alliance adherent in Winter Park, Florida, pleaded guilty to illegally constructing and possessing explosives and was sentenced to six-and-one-half years in prison. At a sentencing hearing in October 1997, a cellmate testified that Vanbiber admitted he planned to use the bombs against African Americans attending Fourth of July celebrations. A Federal complaint against Vanbiber alleged that he had met with William Pierce at his West Virginia compound for two hours and while there donated one thousand dollars to the National Alliance and purchased seven hundred dollars worth of its literature.
  • In December 1995, a black couple was gunned down near Fort Bragg in North Carolina in what prosecutors called a racially motivated killing. James Burmeister and Malcolm Wright, members of the 82nd Airborne Division, were convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. Burmeister and Wright reportedly read National Alliance propaganda. Prior to these events, the National Alliance had been attempting to attract members among U.S. Army personnel at Fort Bragg. One of its activitists, Robert Hunt, a soldier and recruiter for the Alliance, rented a billboard and used it to post an advertisement and local phone number for the organization.
  • In April of 1996, Larry Wayne Shoemaker killed one African American and injured seven others in Jackson, Mississippi. According to his ex-wife, Shoemaker first encountered National Alliance propaganda in the mid-1980s, when he borrowed The Turner Diaries from a friend. She said her husband wasn’t the same after he read Pierce’s novel. “It was like an eye-opener for him,” his wife said. “There was a distinct difference in him.” Shoemaker soon began subscribing to Pierce’s monthly publications.
Categories
Biography Civil war Turner Diaries (novel) William Pierce

The Fame, 2

WLP

From The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds:
An Up-Close Portrait of William Pierce
by Robert Griffin


 
In William Pierce’s novel, The Turner Diaries, the events that set off the anti-government terrorist acts of Earl Turner were a series of brutish government raids on gun owners following the passage of federal legislation outlawing the private ownership of firearms. Turner reacted to the raids by blowing up a federal building with a fuel-oil and fertilizer bomb concealed in a truck. Not only was the composition of the fictional bomb almost exactly the same as the one Timothy McVeigh constructed and detonated, it was also almost exactly the same weight. It seems very probable that McVeigh saw parallels between the government raid on the Branch Davidians in Waco to enforce anti-gun laws and the gun raids portrayed in The Turner Diaries, and that McVeigh responded to what he saw as the unwarranted and violent assaults on gun owners in Waco the same way that the protagonist in Pierce’s book, Earl Turner, had responded to the heavy-handed crackdowns on gun owners by agents of the fictional federal government.

Anti-Defamation League [Note of the Ed.: A Jewish hate group] sources have reported that just days before the bombing, McVeigh mailed an envelope to his sister in Florida containing copies of the cover and selected pages from The Turner Diaries. He included a note that said she should be sure to read the back cover. On the back cover of The Turner Diaries at the top in bold black letters is the question, “What will you do when they come to take your guns?” And then the answer: “The patriots fight back with a campaign of sabotage and terror.” When McVeigh’s sister learned of her brother’s arrest in connection with the bombing, she burned the contents of the envelope.

Incidentally, McVeigh’s accomplice in the bombing, Terry Nichols, also may have been influenced by the writings of William Pierce. Federal agents found a copy of another of Pierce’s novels, Hunter, in Nichols’ home. They saw few other books in the house. Hunter, written in the late 1980s, is Pierce’s follow-up to The Turner Diaries. It recounts the exploits of Oscar Yeager, who tries to “cleanse” America by killing first interracial couples and then Jews.

In the weeks immediately preceding the bombing, McVeigh stayed at the Imperial Hotel off Route 66 near Kingman, Arizona. Several sources have reported that between April 5th and April 11th McVeigh made seven calls to a message center operated by a radical right-wing organization called the National Alliance. The chairman of the National Alliance is William Pierce. Two of the seven calls allegedly were patched through to Pierce’s unlisted number in West Virginia where he is headquartered.

The Turner Diaries was the very first piece of evidence introduced by the prosecution at McVeigh’ s trial in Denver. During the trial, several of McVeigh’s friends told the court that he had mailed them copies of the book along with a note encouraging them to read it. One of them, Kyle Kraus, a buddy from McVeigh’ s army days, testified that when he learned of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was immediately reminded of scenes from the book and grabbed the copy McVeigh had sent him and took it to the local FBI office.

McVeigh’s first contact with The Turner Diaries came when he was in the army and ran across an advertisement for the book in the mail order section of the survivalist magazine, Soldier of Fortune. McVeigh ordered the book and according to those around him at the time awaited its arrival with eager anticipation. When the book finally arrived, McVeigh became obsessed with it, reports his roommate William Dilly. “He took it into the field and read it for three weeks straight,” Dilly said. “He said it was really wild and tried to get me to read it.” Another friend of McVeigh’s, Brandon Sticky, said that McVeigh read and re-read the book and was known for constantly carrying his well-thumbed copy of the small paperback around with him in his pocket.

After leaving the service, McVeigh sold The Turner Diaries at weekend gun shows, often for less than his own cost. Fellow gun-show merchants said it was as if the contents of the book were his religion and he were looking for converts. “Mostly, McVeigh’s fervor came from The Turner Diaries,” a gun collector who crossed paths with him said later. “He was its greatest publicist. He carried the book all the time. He sold it at the shows. He’d have a few copies in the cargo pocket of his cammies. They were supposed to be $10, but he’d sell them for $5.”

Apparently The Turner Diaries altered the course of Tim McVeigh’s life as well as the lives of thousands of people in Oklahoma City. And to the extent that the Oklahoma City bombing is a memorable event—and even, in ways that are not clear to us now, a significant event—William Pierce’s self-published novel has become part of the history of America.