The Turner Diaries
Chapter VII
October 23, 1991. This morning is my first chance to
write since Katherine and I picked up the munitions in Maryland last week.
Our unit has carried out three missions in the last six
days. Altogether, the Organization is held responsible for
more than 200 separate incidents in different parts of the country,
according to news reports. We are really into the thick of a guerrilla war
now. Last Monday night, Henry, George, and I raided the
Washington Post. It was a quick thing, requiring little preparation,
although we did argue for a few minutes ahead of time about the way it
should be done. Henry was for going after personnel, but we
ended up wrecking one of their presses instead. Henry's idea was that the
three of us should force our way into the newsroom and editorial offices
on the sixth floor of the Washington Post building and kill as many people
as we could with fragmentation grenades and machine guns. If we struck
just before their 7:30 PM deadline, we would catch nearly everyone
in. George overruled that maneuver as being too risky to be
carried out without detailed planning. Hundreds of people work in the
Washington Post building, and the sounds of grenades and shooting on the
sixth floor would probably bring a lot of them swarming into the
stairwells and lobby. If we tried to come down on the elevators, someone
could pull the main switch on us, and we'd be
trapped.
On the other hand, the Post's pressroom is
visible through a big plate-glass window from the lobby. So I rigged up a
makeshift bomb by taping a hand grenade to a small anti-tank mine. The
whole thing weighed about six pounds and was quite awkward, but it could
be thrown about 50 feet like an oversized grenade. We
parked in an alley about 100 yards from the main entrance of the Post. As
soon as George had disarmed the guard, Henry blasted a huge hole in the
pressroom window with his sawed-off shotgun. Then I pulled the pin on the
grenade-mine contraption I had rigged and heaved it into the rollers of
the nearest press, which was just being plated up for the night's
run. We ducked behind the masonry parapet while the bomb
exploded, and then Henry and I hurriedly threw half-a-dozen thermite
grenades into the pressroom. We were all back in the all before anyone had
even come out onto the sidewalk, and so no one saw our car. Katherine, of
course, had done her usual magic with our faces. The next
morning the Post appeared on the streets about an hour later than usual,
and home subscribers missed their papers altogether, since the early
editions had been skipped, but the Post was otherwise apparently none the
worse for wear. We had substantially damaged only one press with our bomb
and smoked things up a bit with our incendiary grenades, one of which set
a barrel of ink afire, but the Post had lost virtually none of its
capacity for spreading its lies and venom as a result of our
efforts. We were quite chagrined by this outcome. It became
clear to us that we had foolishly taken a risk far out of proportion to
any advantage which could have been reasonably expected. We
have resolved that, in the future, we will undertake no mission on our own
initiative until we have carefully evaluated its objective and convinced
ourselves that it is worth the risk. We cannot afford to strike the System
simply for the sake of striking, or we will become like an army of gnats
trying to bite an elephant to death. Each blow must be carefully
calculated for its effect. Henry's idea of attacking the
Post's newsroom and editorial of fices seems much better in retrospect. We
should have held off for a few days in order to work out a sound plan
which would have really crippled the Post, instead of rushing into our
halfassed raid on its presses. All we really succeeded in doing was
putting the Post on guard and making any future raids much more
hazardous. We did redeem ourselves a bit the morning after
the raid, however. Surmising that the editorial staff had spent most of
the night in their offices writing new copy about the events of the
evening and would, therefore, be at home sleeping late, we decided to pay
one of them a visit. After looking over the newspaper, we
settled on the editorialpage editor, who had written a particularly
vicious editorial against us. His words dripped with Talmudic hatred.
Racists like us, he said, deserve no consideration from the police or any
decent citizen. We should be shot down on sight like mad dogs. Quite a
contrast with his usual solicitude for Black rapists and murderers and his
tirades against "police brutality" and "overreaction"
! Since his editorial was an incitement to murder, it
seemed to us only appropriate that he be given a taste of his own
remedy. Henry and I rode a bus downtown and then waved down
a taxi with a Black driver. By the time we pulled up in the editor's
driveway in Silver Spring, the Black was in the
trunk-dead. I waited in the taxi while Henry rang the bell
and told the woman who answered that he was delivering a package from the
Post and needed a signed receipt. When the sleepy-eyed editor appeared at
the door in his bathrobe a few moments later, Henry literally blew him in
half with two blasts from the sawed-off shotgun he had been carrying under
his jacket. On Wednesday all four of us (Katherine drove
the car) completely destroyed the Washington area's most powerful TV
transmitter. That one was hairy, and there were moments when I didn't
think we were going to get away. It is still not clear what
effect all our activity is having on the general public. For the most part
they are just going about their affairs as they always
have. There have been effects, though. The National Guards
of a dozen states have been called up to reinforce local police forces,
and there are now large, around-the-clock guard details stationed outside
every government building in Washington, the major media of fices in a
number of cities, and the homes of hundreds of government
officials. Within a week, I suspect, every Congressman,
every Federal judge, and every Federal bureaucrat from the
assistant-secretary level on up will have been assigned a permanent
bodyguard detail. All the sandbags, machine guns, and khaki uniforms that
one is beginning to see everywhere in Washington cannot help but raise the
consciousness of the public-although I'm sure the situation is much less
dramatic out in Iowa than it is here. Our biggest
difficulty is that the public sees us and everything we do only through
the media. We are able to make ourselves enough of a nuisance that the
media can't afford to ignore or belittle us, and so they are using the
opposite tactic of deluging the public with distortions, half-truths, and
lies about us. For the last two weeks they've been giving us a non-stop
roasting, trying to convince everyone that we are the incarnation of evil,
a threat to everything decent, noble, and worthwhile. They
have unleashed the full power of the mass media on us; not just the usual
biased-news treatment, but long "background" articles in the Sunday
supplements, complete with faked photographs of Organization meetings and
activities, discussions by "experts" on TV panel shows-everything! Some of
the stories they've invented about us are really incredible, but I'm
afraid the American public is just gullible enough to believe
them. What's happening now is reminiscent of the media
campaign against Hitler and the Germans back in the 1940's: stories about
Hitler flying into rages and chewing carpets, phony German plans for the
invasion of America, babies being skinned alive to make lampshades and
then boiled down into soap, girls kidnapped and sent to Nazi "stud farms."
The Jews convinced the American people that those stories were true, and
the result was World War II, with millions of the best of our race
butchered -by us-and all of eastern and central Europe turned into a huge,
communist prison camp. Now it looks very much like the
System has again made the deliberate decision to build up a state of war
hysteria in the public by representing us as an even bigger threat than we
really are. We are the new Germans, and the country is being wound up
psychologically to lick us. Thus, the System is cooperating
more fully than we could have imagined in arousing the public's
consciousness of our struggle. What is unnerving about it is my strong
suspicion that the top echelons in the System aren't really that worried
about our threat to them and are cynically using us as an excuse for
carrying through certain programs of their own, such as the
internal-passport program. Our unit was assigned the
general task-right after the FBI bombing-of combating the media in this
area by direct action, Just as other units were assigned other arms of the
System as targets. But it is clear that we can't win by direct action
alone; there are too many of them and too few of us. We must convince a
substantial portion of the American people that what we are doing iS both
necessary and proper. The latter is a propaganda task, and
so far we haven't been very successful. Units 2 and 6 are primarily
responsible for propaganda m the Washington area, and I understand that
Unit 6's people have strewn out tons of leaflets in the streets; Henry
picked up one from a sidewalk downtown yesterday. I'm afraid that leaflets
alone can't make much headway against the System's mass media,
though. Our most spectacular propaganda effort here
occurred last Wednesday, and it ended in a major tragedy. The same day our
unit blew up the TV station, three men from Unit 6 seized a radio station
and began broadcasting a call for the public to join the Organization's
fight to smash the System. They had pre-recorded their
message on tape, and they boobytrapped the doors to the station, after
locking all the station employees in a supply closet. They intended to
make their getaway while the tape was being broadcast, hoping that the
police would think they were still inside and would lay siege to the place
with tear gas-thus giving them half an hour or more of air
time. But the police arrived sooner than expected and
stormed the station almost immediately, trapping our men inside. Two were
shot to death in the ensuing fight, and the third is not expected to live.
The Organization's message was on the air for less than 10
minutes. Those were the first casualties we've suffered
here, but they just about wiped out Unit 6. Their survivors, two women and
a man, have moved into our place temporarily. With one of their members in
the hands of the police, they had to abandon their own headquarters
immediately, of course. With it we lost one of the
Organization's two printing presses in the Washington area, although we
were able to clear out most of their printing supplies and lighter
equipment. And we gained their pickup truck, which will really be handy if
they stay here.
October 28. Last night I had to do the
most unpleasant thing that I have been called to do since joining the
Organization four years ago. I participated in the execution of a
mutineer. Harry Powell was Unit 5's leader. Last week, when
Washington Field Command gave his unit the assignment of assassinating two
of the most obnoxious and outspoken advocates of racial mixing in this
area-a priest and a rabbi, coauthors of a widely publicized petition to
Congress requesting special tax advantages for racially mixed marned
couples - Powell refused the assignment. He sent a message back to WFC
saying that he was opposed to the further use of violence and that his
unit would not participate in any acts of terrorism. He was
immediately placed under arrest, and yesterday one representative from
each unit under WFC-including Unit S- was summoned to judge him. Unit 10
was not able to send anyone, and so 11 members-eight men and three women-
met with an officer from WFC in the basement storeroom of a gift shop
owned by one of our "legals." I was Unit l 's
representative. The officer from WFC stated the case
against Powell very briefly. The Unit 5 representative then confirmed the
facts: Powell had not only refused to obey the assassination order, but he
had instructed the members of his unit not to obey either. Fortunately,
they had not allowed themselves to be subverted by
him. Powell was then given an opportunity to speak in his
behalf. He did so for more than two hours, interrupted occasionally by a
question from one of us. What he said really shook me, but it made our
decision easier for all of us, I am sure. Harry Powell was,
in essence, a "responsible conservative." The fact that he was not only a
member of the Organization but had become a unit leader reflects more on
the Organization than it does on him. His basic complaint was that all our
acts of terror against the System were only making things worse by
"provoking" the System into taking more and more repressive
measures. Well, of course, we all understood that! Or, at
least, I thought we all understood it. Apparently Powell didn't. That is,
he didn't understand that one of the major purposes of political terror,
always and everywhere, is to force the authorities to take reprisals and
to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and
generating sympathy for the terrorists. And the other purpose is to create
unrest by destroying the population's sense of security and their belief
in the invincibility of the government. As Powell continued
talking, it became clearer and clearer that he was a conservative, not a
revolutionary. He talked as if the whole purpose of the Organization were
to force the System to institute certain reforms, rather than to destroy
the System, root and branch, and build something radically and
fundamentally different in its place. He was opposed to the
System because it taxed his business too heavily. (He had owned a hardware
store before we were forced underground.) He was opposed to the System's
permissiveness with Blacks, because crime and rioting were bad for
business. He was opposed to the System's confiscation of firearms, because
he felt he needed a gun for personal security. His were the motivations of
a libertarian, the sort of self-centered individual who sees the basic
evil in government as a limitation on free
enterprise. Someone asked him whether he had forgotten what
the Organization has repeated over and over, namely, that our struggle is
to secure the future of our race, and that the issue of individual freedom
is subordinate to that one, overwhelming purpose. His retort was that the
Organization's violent tactics are benefiting neither our race nor
individual freedom. This answer proved again that he didn't
really understand what we are trying to do. His initial approval of the
use of force against the System was based on the naive assumption that, by
God, we'll show those bastards! When the System, instead of backing down,
began tightening the screws even faster, he decided that our policy of
terrorism is counter-productive. He simply could not accept
the fact that the path to our goal cannot be a retracing of our course to
some earlier stage in our history, but must instead be an overcoming of
the present and a forging ahead into the future-with us choosing the
direction instead of the System. Until we have torn the rudder out of its
grasp and thrown the System overboard, the ship of state will go careening
on its hazardous way. There will be no stopping, no going back. Since we
are already among rocks and shoals, we are bound to get scraped up pretty
badly before we find any clear sailing. Maybe he was right
that our tactics are wrong; the reaction of the people will eventually
answer that question. But his whole attitude, his whole orientation was
wrong. As I listened to Powell I was reminded of the late-19th century
writer, Brooks Adams, and his division of the human race into two classes:
spiritual man and economic man. Powell was the epitome of economic
man. Ideologies, ultimate purposes, the fundamental
contradiction between the System's world view and ours-all these things
had no meaning for him. He regarded the Organization's philosophy as just
so much ideological flypaper designed to catch recruits for us. He saw our
struggle against the System as a contest for power and nothing more. If we
could not whip them, then we should try to force them to compromise with
us. I wondered how many others in the Organization thought
the way Powell did, and I shuddered. We have been forced to grow too
quickly. There has not been sufficient time to develop in all our people
the essentially religious attitude toward our purpose and our doctrines
which would have prevented the Powell incident by screening him out
early.
As it was, we had no real choice in deciding
Powell's fate. There was not only his disobedience to consider, but also
the fact that he had revealed himself to be fundamentally unreliable. To
have one of us-and a unit leader, at that-talking openly to other members
about trying to find a way to compromise with the System, with the war
just beginning .... There was only one way to deal with such a
situation. The eight male members present drew straws, and
three of us, including me, ended up on the execution squad. When Powell
realized that he was going to be killed, he tried to make a break. We tied
his hands and feet, and then we had to gag him when he began shouting. We
drove him to a wooded area off the highway about 10 miles south of
Washington, shot him, and buried him. I got back a little
after midnight, but I still haven't been able to get to sleep. I am very,
very depressed.

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