The Turner Diaries & Hunter

The NA's propaganda, which includes some of the most racist, anti-Semitic and explicitly violent materials available, has had a far greater impact on the country than the group's membership activities. Most significantly, The Turner Diaries, William Pierce's novel of racist revolution, is considered required reading by virtually every member of the American white supremacist movement. The book describes -- in gory, graphic and unabashedly racist passage after passage -- a world takeover by an all-white army called the "Organization," and the army's systematic extermination of Blacks, Jews and "race traitors."

Hunter: Glorifying Racial Murder

Pierce's sequel to The Diaries, called Hunter, tells the story of a drive-by killer who tries to cleanse America of its "sickness" by murdering interracial couples and eventually "working his way up" to assassinating Jews. Hunter is dedicated to the racist murderer and synagogue bomber Joseph Paul Franklin, who confessed to killing as many as 18 individuals between 1977 and 1980 in an attempt to start "a race war." His victims included random Blacks, Jews and interracial couples. Franklin, who is on death row in Missouri, is praised in the novel as "the Lone Hunter, who saw his duty as a White man and did what a responsible son of his race must do."

The Mechanics of Terrorist Activity

In The Turner Diaries, such painstaking attention is paid to the mechanics of terrorist activity that the book cannot be dismissed as merely a work of fiction. Pierce has admitted that his motives were hardly pure when he wrote the novel. Speaking to The Washington Post shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing, he said, "I don't have the time to write just for entertainment. It's to explain things to people. I'd like to see North America become a white continent." Indeed, in practice, The Turner Diaries is regarded by many in the hate movement as an explicit terrorism manual.

The Turner Diaries and the Oklahoma City Bombings

Praise from convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, a dedicated promoter of Pierce's novel, is a prime example of the extremist movement's regard for the book. The early pages of The Diaries contain a scenario strikingly similar to that of the April 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building: Members of the "Organization" raid a farm-supply warehouse to obtain bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, mix the fertilizer with heating oil and load the bags on to a stolen delivery truck. At 9:15 the next morning, "Organization" members detonate the bomb in front of the FBI Building in Washington, DC, causing massive loss of life. They revel in the destruction.

Days before he bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, McVeigh mailed a letter to his sister warning that "something big is going to happen," followed by a second envelope with clippings from The Turner Diaries. When she learned of her brother's arrest in connection with the bombing, McVeigh's sister burned the clippings.

What Timothy McVeigh Read

FBI agents also found a copy of a passage from The Turner Diaries in a search of the car McVeigh drove on the day of the Oklahoma City blast. McVeigh had highlighted several sentences from The Diaries passage, which reflects on the terrorist bombing of the U.S. Capitol and an airliner bound for Tel Aviv. It reads:

The real value of our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties. For one thing, our efforts against the System gained immeasurably in credibility. More important, though, is what we taught the politicians and the bureaucrats. They learned today that not one of them is beyond our reach. They can huddle behind barbed wire and tanks in the city, or they can hide behind the concrete walls and alarm systems of their country estates, but we can still find them and kill them.

During the bombing trial, several of McVeigh's friends testified that he had sent them copies of William Pierce's novel with notes encouraging them to read it. Testimony also showed that McVeigh sold The Diaries and Hunter at weekend gun shows. One of his army buddies told the court that McVeigh, a former U.S. army sergeant, read The Turner Diaries for days during training. Kyle Kraus, one of the friends to whom McVeigh mailed the novel, stated in court that when he learned of the Oklahoma City bombing, he was immediately reminded of scenes from The Turner Diaries. Kraus grabbed his copy of the book and brought it to a local FBI office.

Terry Nichols, who was convicted of conspiracy in the Oklahoma City bombing, may have also been a fan of William Pierce's writings. Federal agents found a copy of Pierce's book, Hunter, in a search of Nichols' Michigan home. They saw few other books in the house.