The Turner Diaries

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The Turner Diaries is a 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald), the late leader of the National Alliance, a white separatist organization. The novel depicts a violent revolutionary struggle in the United States that begins with gun confiscation and then escalates into global depopuation, leading to the extermination of all Jews and non-whites.

The novel was initially only available through mail order and at gun shows. Previously the book was serialized in the tabloid Attack! first appearing in that publication around January 1975. The novel is available in the US through mainstream book sources (ISBN 1-56980-086-3) and can be read online. However, in Canada it is a different story: the book has been banned in that country and seized by Canadian Customs officials for a number of years.[1]

In 1996 the book was republished as a second edition by independent publisher Lyle Stuart. In 2000 it was reported to have been read by half a million people.

Plot summary

The narrative starts with a foreword set in the year 2099, one hundred years after the events depicted in the book. The bulk of the book then quotes a recently discovered diary of a man named Earl Turner, an active member of the movement that caused these events. The book details a violent overthrow of the United States federal government by Turner and his militant comrades and a brutal contemporaneous race war that takes place first in North America, and then the rest of the world. It included the long-remembered phrase, The Day of The Rope.

The story starts soon after the federal government has confiscated all civilian firearms in the country under the Cohen Act, and the Organization to which Turner and his cohorts belong goes underground and engages in guerrilla war against the System, which is depicted as the totality of the government, media, and economy that is under Jewish control.

Eventually, the Organization seizes physical control of Southern California, including the nuclear weapons at Vandenberg Air Force Base; ethnically cleanses the area of all blacks, Hispanics, and Asians; and summarily executes all Jews and race traitors. They then use both this base of operations and their nuclear weapons to open a wider war in which they launch nuclear strikes against New York City and Israel, initiate a nuclear exchange between the US and the Soviet Union, and plant nuclear weapons and new cells throughout North America. The diary section ends with the protagonist flying an airplane equipped with an atomic bomb on a suicide mission to destroy The Pentagon, in order to eliminate the leadership of the remaining military government before it orders an assault to retake California. The novel ends with an epilogue summarizing how the Organization continued on to conquer the rest of the world.

Terrorism

The book has been reported as the inspiration of several terrorism incidents, the first being the founding of The Order by Robert Mathews and the Oklahoma City bombing by Timothy McVeigh.

Editions

There have been four different editions of the novel. Three editions reflect changes in the cover artwork when the book was published by National Vanguard Books. The first edition had illustrations and a cover drawn by Dennis Nix. (here) Later editions excluded the illustrations. The second edition also reflected a ten year advance in dating of events in the novel.

The fourth edition came from a different publisher when in 1996 Lyle Stuart bought the rights and issued it under the imprint Barricade Books.

In 2017 the book was made available as an audio book read by its author. Audio book link

See also

External links

References