Pierce was a professor of engineering before he retired to run his Aryan supremacist church (presumably using his nom-de-plume to maintain his tenure), writing this book in the mid-70s (it has copyright dates of 1978 and 1980). Turner's first entry, dated September 16^th 1991, lay ten years or more in Pierce's future. Reader's now find it ten years in the past, so references to "Gun Raids" in November 1989 to enforce the "Cohen Act" (banning the private possession of firearms) passed in May 1988 mean that this has become Alternative History.

Turner begins his diary while in hiding from an increasingly repressive (as he sees it) government. His cell begins a series of bomb attacks on the capital area, on orders of a secretive revolutionary command. Turner is an electronics expert and it is her who helps build the nitrate bomb copied in Oklahoma City. It has exploded by page 44, destroying the FBI headquarters, where a computer database would have controlled a ubiquitous system of personal ID cards. Through his technical expertise and ruthlessness Turner is able to advance through "the Organisation", until he is accepted as an initiate into the central "Order" where he reads "the Book" which reveals the full truth to him. Unfortunately for him he is arrested and interrogated soon after, suffering in a prison camp until a mass breakout. With his partner Katherine, Turner continues as an urban guerilla until revolution breaks out in California, and the Revolutionary Command obtain nuclear weapons. Not only are the Organisation willing to exterminate tens of thousands, they are prepared to destroy large parts of the world (and thus millions) to obtain enclaves that are white only.

The Organisation is aware of the failings of earlier rebels - both left and right - there are references to Vietnam that could mean the new resistance copies the methods of both the US Army and the Vietcong. And in a similar way the novel repeats earlier work, regardless of whether those earlier novels were favourable to Pierce's philosophy - entering a small leadership circle and reading "the Book" seems a direct lifting from Orwell's dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four (where Winston and Julia volunteered for terrorist duty). The final epilogue which describes a world made nuclear desert echoes Norman Spinrad's Nazi fantasy The Iron Dream ⁽²⁾.

Reading the first part of The Turner Diaries one notices Pierce's failings and inconsistencies, even though he must have re-written the book at least once. On page 22 he writes that the Organisation uses three digit codes, and then gives as an example "2006". As an example of an incompetent government he says that no new highways are being built, but a few pages later the Washington subway system is being extended, with no clear reason why the government should extend one means of transport and not the other, except that Turner needs stolen explosives at that point. The femininity of his partner is good, the femininity of liberalism is bad. Unfortunately Pierce's critics cannot rely on him making his mistakes on a bigger scale, and he is able to construct his plots without these errors. Turner is never a member of the Revolutionary Command, misses several seminal actions, and so these events come as a surprise. When the rebellion breaks out in California it is not clear how the rebels will hold out - the means by which the upper hand is reversed comes as a massive and horrific surprise. Nevertheless it has a ghastly logic. This must be one of the reasons why this novel was so popular - Pierce mastered plot and storytelling.

In the first chapter of Philip K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle⁽³⁾ , first published in 1962, Frank Frink thinks of what has to happened to Africa after the Nazi conquest, only a few Negroes are left: "Ogres out of a palaeontology exhibit, at their task of making a cup from an enemy's skull, the whole family industriously scooping out the contents - the raw brains - first, to eat. Then useful utensils of men's leg bones. Thrifty, to think not only of eating the people you did not like, but eating them out of their own skull." In the seventh chapter another character is at a dinner party with his Japanese hosts. He thinks "THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT EXACTLY HUMAN. They don the dress but they're like monkeys dolled up in the circus. They're clever and can learn, BUT THAT IS ALL" (emphasis/italics in original). Dick, a political liberal, cast his satirical net in all directions. Perhaps it is familiarity with what others (Dick or Spinrad, for instance⁽⁴⁾) have done with racist imagery that only appears to weaken Pierce's political propaganda. Would readers not familiar with how other novelists have dealt with disasters of all kinds find Pierce's work more persuasive than someone used to reading, say, SF? Or is it the case, as John Sutherland wrote in his newspaper article, that Pierce was disappointed that he had not managed to found or inspire an organisation like the one in his book, but instead had to put up with a few low-brow rednecks? Is the unsustainability of the racist argument inherent and obvious any time it is put⁽⁵⁾?

George Orwell several times said that we should never think of the political right as being "stupid". In the construction of his novel Pierce was not stupid, nevertheless like a well built wall around a concentration camp (another of Orwell's examples) it is worth condemning. Most of these systems contain the seed of their own destruction, and for Pierce it must be that a secret society that could tolerate a diarist on the scale of Earl Turner must have many looser mouths and lesser intelligences in it. That Turner cannot see his own contribution to their weakness, suggests also that the people attracted to this philosophy cannot see the conclusion to which it has always lead.

1. Andrew Macdonald - The Turner Diaries (Second Edition) Barricade Books, 1996, pp211, $12.00 ISBN 1-56980-086-3

2. Re-issued in 2000 by Toxic Press

3. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965. To be re-issued by the Library of America in 2007.

4. They have been able to put themselves in their characters' heads, I mean, not that they sympathise with these views. Nevertheless, someone like Dick saw what extending the Nazi vision must mean - keeping others as grotesque parodies, scraping brains out of skulls.

5. In the current controversies about immigrants and asylum seekers I have seen no reference to the prescience of Christopher Priest's Fugue For A Darkening Island (1972), particularly given the subject matter (gun control) of his most recent fiction.