The Turner Diaries
June 27, 1993. So, I finally have my orders!
It's to be California for me during our big summer offensive. At first I
was very disappointed that I won't be able to go back to Washington, but
the more I consider the implications of some of the things I was told this
afternoon, the more I'm convinced that the real focus of our activity in
the next few weeks will be on the West Coast. It looks like I'll be in the
thick of things there, and that will be a welcome change from all this
classroom work, at least.
Denver Field Command summoned me
and six of my pupils to a meeting today on two hours' notice. We were told
almost nothing, except that I and four of the others are to be in Los
Angeles by Wednesday night at the latest. The last two were given a
destination in San Mateo, just outside San Francisco.
I
protested immediately and vehemently: "All these people have been trained
especially to attack specific targets in this area. And they've been
trained as teams. It doesn't make sense to break them up now and send some
of them to California, when they can be so much more effective here. If
they are sent away, our whole program for the Rocky Mountain area will be
jeopardized."
The two DFC officers at the meeting assured
me that their decision had not been made capriciously and that they are
fully cognizant of the validity of my objections, but that more pressing
considerations must prevail. I finally forced them to reveal that they had
received an urgent order from Revolutionary Command to transfer every
activist they could spare to the West Coast immediately. Apparently other
field commands all over the country have received similar
orders.
They were reluctant to say more, but from the
emphasis they put on our deadline for reporting to our California
destinations, I strongly suspect that things are set to blow sometime next
week.
I did accomplish one thing this afternoon: I arranged
to have Albert Mason, who was to go to San Mateo but whose presence here
is really essential to the success of the operations planned for this
area, swapped for another man. But I had trouble gaining even that
concession. I insisted on knowing exactly what criteria had been used in
selecting the men to be transferred. It turned out that, except in my
case, there were two: infantry combat experience and rifle
marksmanship-which makes it look like they want snipers and barricade
fighters out on the Coast, rather than saboteurs and demolition
experts.
Al, it is true, qualified as an "expert" with the
rifle when he was in the service, and he spent three years as a squad
leader in Southeast Asia. (Note to the reader: Turner is referring to the
so-called "Vietnam War," which had been over for two decades at the time
but which played an enormously important role in laying the groundwork for
the Organization's later success in dealing with the System's armed
forces.) But he has also been my best pupil here. He is the one man I
spent time with explaining some of the newer military gadgets we expect to
acquire in our raids on the arsenals around here. He is the only one I am
sure will be able to use the new M-58 laser range finders, for example,
and teach our mortar teams how to use them too. And he is also the only
one here to whom I taught enough basic electronics so that he can rig up
the radio-controlled detonators which are an essential part of our plan
for knocking out the highway network in this area and keeping it knocked
out.
Only when I pointed out these things to DFC did they
agree to let Al stay here. We then spent half an hour going over a list of
all the other activists here before we found one I thought could go to
California in Al's place without jeopardizing things here and who also
satisfied their criteria.
My impression is that everything
we planned for this area is still "go," and it is still considered
important for us to achieve our objectives here, but the really critical
theater of operations will be the West Coast. We are approximately
doubling our manpower there with these last-minute transfers, but we are
doing it in such a way that at least most of the operations planned for
other areas can go ahead, though with fewer
personnel.
Well, we only have 48 hours to drive more than
1,000 miles, and there's no telling how many checkpoints we'll be stopped
at. The others will be by to pick me up in about two hours, and then it'll
take me at least four hours to pack my gadgets in the car so they won't be
found if we're searched. I think I'll take a quick nap
now.
July 1. Wow! Are things tense here! We arrived
yesterday, around one in the morning, after a trip I'd just as soon
forget. The others are dispersed to their assigned units, but I'm staying
with Los Angeles Northwest Field Command temporarily, in a place called
Canoga Park, about 20 miles northwest of Los Angeles
proper.
It is apparent that the Organization is much more
solidly entrenched here than elsewhere, simply from the fact that there
are eight different field commands in the Los Angeles metropolitan area,
whereas one suffices for most other major cities in the country. That
would indicate an underground membership here in the 500-700
range.
Mostly, I've been catching up on my sleep since I
arrived, but the other people here don't seem to be doing any sleeping at
all. Couriers are constantly coming and going, and conferences are being
held at all hours. This evening I finally buttonholed someone and got at
least a partial briefing on the situation.
A simultaneous
assault on more than 600 military and civilian targets all over the
country has been scheduled for next Monday morning, July 4. Unfortunately,
however, one of our members here was picked up by the police on Wednesday,
just a few hours before our arrival. It seems to have been just a fluke.
He was stopped on the street for a routine identification check, and the
cops became suspicious about something.
Since the man is
not in the Order, he was neither prepared nor under an absolute obligation
to kill himself if captured. The great worry for the last two days has
been that, under torture, he will reveal enough of what he knows to tip
off the System to the fact that a major assault is scheduled for Monday.
Then, even though the authorities won't know just which targets we plan to
hit, they'll tighten up security everywhere to the point that our
casualties will be unbearably high.
Revolutionary Command
has two choices: silence our man before he can be interrogated, or
reschedule our entire offensive. The latter choice is almost unthinkable:
too many things have been carefully arranged and synchronized in detail
for next Monday to allow the date to be advanced, and a postponement might
run into months-with enormous risks attendant on having so many people,
already primed for Monday, knowing so much for so long.
So
it was decided yesterday to act on the first choice. But even that
presents a major problem: we can't hit our man here in Los Angeles without
risking blowing the cover of one of our most valuable legals, a special
agent in the FBI's Los Angeles office. That's because the prisoner is
being held in a location which is supposed to be a big secret. If we raid
the place, they'll only have; half-a-dozen people to suspect as the one
who leaked the information to us.
The System's customary
procedure when they pick up one of our people is to perform only a very
cursory interrogation in the field-just enough to determine whether there
is any indication that the prisoner is connected in any way with the
Organization. If there is, then he is flown back to Washington for a
thorough working over by their Israeli torture specialists. And the latter
is what we can't afford to let happen.
The interesting
thing in this particular case-and the thing which has kept Revolutionary
Command in a state of agonized indecision for two days now-is that the FBI
has been holding the prisoner here, instead of flying him back to the
Washington headquarters Thursday morning, as soon as they suspected they
had an Organization member. No one seems to know exactly why, not even our
FBI legal. It may just be an instance of organizational inefficiency on
their part. Or perhaps they're bringing an interrogation team out here
from Washington this time, contrary to their previous
routine.
Anyway, RC has decided to hold off on the hit
and see what happens. If no move is made to put the prisoner on a plane
for Washington or to interrogate him further here within the next 36
hours, the problem will be solved; any information the System extracts
from him will come too late to interfere with our Monday schedule. But if
a transfer or an interrogation seems imminent before Sunday afternoon,
we're prepared to launch a lightning raid on the FBI's secret prison here,
even at the risk of losing our inside man in the local FBI office, whose
information in coming months can be invaluable to us.
As
for me, I still don't know why I'm here or what I'm supposed to do, and
I'm not sure anyone else does either. I was just told to
wait.
Well, I guess we're really facing a major test again,
like we did in September 1991. It just seems incredible to me that the
Organization is actually launching an all-out assault on the System in two
days. The total number of men we can put on the firing line, for the whole
country, can't be more than 1,500, despite the very rapid gains in
recruiting we've made in the last few months. Altogether-including our
support personnel, our female members, and our legals-our strength can't
possibly exceed 5,000 people, and I'd estimate that nearly a third of them
are concentrated here in California now. It just seems unreal- like a gnat
planning to assassinate an elephant.
Of course, we're not
expecting the System to collapse Monday. If it did we wouldn't know how to
cope with the situation, because the Organization is still far too small
to take over the running of the country and the rebuilding of American
society. We'll need an infrastructure 100 times as large as we have now to
even begin tackling that job.
What we will do Monday is
escalate the conflict to a new level and forestall the System's latest
strategy for dealing with us. We really have no choice in the matter; if
the Organization is to survive and continue growing under the very
difficult circumstances which have been imposed on us, we must maintain
our momentum-especially our psychological momentum.
The
danger in not constantly escalating the war is that the System will find a
new equilibrium, and the public will become accustomed to it. The only way
to maintain the present influx of recruits is to keep a substantial
portion of the public psychologically off balance-keep them at least half
convinced that the System isn't strong enough and efficient enough to wipe
us out, that we are an irresistible force, that sooner or later the war
will sweep them, too, up in it.
Otherwise, the worthless
bastards will take the easy way out by just sitting back to see what
happens. The American people have already proved that they can shamelessly
continue their crass pursuit of pleasure under the most provocative
conditions imaginable - so long as new provocations are introduced
gradually enough for them to become accustomed to them. That's our
greatest danger in not acting.
Besides that, however, the
political police are continually tightening the screws. Despite our
extraordinary security procedures, they will eventually succeed in
penetrating the Organization and wrecking us-if we give them time. And
it's becoming harder all the time for us to move around without being
picked up. Very soon now, the new internal passport system which we
wrecked more than a year ago will be back on the tracks, twice as mean as
before. I don't know how we'll survive when that becomes
operational.
Thinking back over the last two years, though,
it's amazing that we've survived even until now. There have been a hundred
times when I didn't know how we'd be able to last another
month.
Part of the reason we've been able to make it this
far is something for which we really can't take credit-and that's the
inefficiency of the System. They've made some bad mistakes and failed to
follow up on a lot of things which could have hurt us
badly.
One gets the impression that except for the Jews,
who are really burning the midnight oil in their efforts against us, the
rest of the System is a bunch of clock-watchers. Thank "equal
opportunity"-and all those niggers in the FBI and in the Army-for that!
The System has become so corrupt and so mongrelized that only the Jews
feel at home in it, and no one feels any loyalty toward
it.
But a bigger part of the reason is the way we've
adapted to our peculiar circumstances. In just two years the Organization
has learned a whole new way of existence. We're doing a number of things
now which are absolutely vital to our survival but to which we had given
almost no thought two years ago.
Our interrogation
technique for checking out new recruits, for example; there's no way we
could have lasted this long without that, and we didn't develop it until
we absolutely had to have it. What we would have done without Dr. Clark to
work out the technique, I don't know.
And then there's the
matter of false identities. We had only the vaguest ideas about coping
with this problem when we first went underground. Now we have a number of
specialized units who do nothing but provide nearly foolproof false
identities for our activists. They are real professionals, but they've had
to learn their rather gruesome trade in a hurry.
And
money-what a problem that was in the beginning! Having to count our
pennies affected our whole psychology; it made us think small. So far as I
know, no one in the Organization had ever given any serious thought to the
problem of financing an underground movement before the problem became
crucial. Then we learned the counterfeiting trade.
It was
providential that we had someone in the Organization with the requisite
technical knowledge, of course, but we still had to set up our
distribution network for getting the counterfeit bills into circulation
after we'd printed them.
In just the last few months this
accomplishment has made an enormous difference for all of us. Having a
ready supply of cash - being able to buy whatever we need instead of
hijacking it, as in the old days-has made things much easier. It has given
us greater mobility and greater safety.
There's been a
certain element of luck in our success so far, and there's no doubt that
Revolutionary Command has been doing a pretty good job of generalship.
We've had good planning, a good strategy-but, more than that, we've shown
the ability to meet new challenges and solve new problems. We've remained
flexible.
I think the history of the Organization proves
that no one can make a fixed plan for a revolution and then stick to it.
The future is always too uncertain. One can never be sure how a given
situation will develop. And totally unexpected things are always
happening-things that no planner, however thorough, could have foreseen.
So, in order to be successful, a revolutionary must always be ready to
adapt to new circumstances and take advantage of new
opportunities.
Our record in that regard is reassuring, but
I cannot help being apprehensive about next week. I am sure we will knock
hell out of the bastards Monday. We will throw a good-sized monkey wrench
into the country's economic machinery if only half the things we have
planned come off successfully. And we will force the System into a state
of total mobilization, with the resulting psychological shock to the
general public.
But what then? What about next month and
the month after that? We're throwing everything we've got into next week's
offensive, and there is just no way we can keep up such a level of
activity for more than a few days. We are stretched too thin
everywhere.
And yet my instinct tells me that the
Organization is not acting purely from desperation now. We are not making
one, last, desperate effort to wreck the System Monday. At least, I hope
not. If we make an all-out effort, then have to retrench when it fails-as
it surely will-the psychological effect will be as lethal for us as it
will be helpful for the System.
So Revolutionary Command
must have something up its sleeve I don't know about. I am sure the heavy
concentration of our people in California is a clue, but I can't figure it
out.