The Turner Diaries
December 4, 1991. I went over to Georgetown today
to talk to Elsa, the little redheaded "dropout" I met there a couple of
weeks ago. The reason for my visit was to try to make a better evaluation
of the potential of some of Elsa's friends for playing a role in our fight
against the System.
Actually, some of them-or, at least,
people in similar circumstances-already are involved in their own war
against the System. In the last month there's been a bewildering
proliferation of incidents in which the Organization has not been
involved. These have included bombings, arson, kidnapping, violent public
demonstrations, sabotage, death threats against prominent figures, even
two widely publicized assassinations. Credit for the various incidents has
been claimed by so many different groups-anarchists, tax rebels,
"liberation fronts" of one stripe or another, half-a-dozen far-out
religious cults-that no one can keep up with it all. Every nut with an ax
to grind seems to have gotten into the act.
Most of these
people are such careless amateurs that even our racially integrated FBI
has been doing a fairly creditable job of rounding them up, but more seem
to keep cropping up. The general atmosphere of revolutionary violence and
governmental counter-violence that the Organization's activities have
brought on is apparently responsible for encouraging most of
them.
The most interesting aspect of all this is the proof
it represents that the System's grip on the minds of the citizenry is less
than total. Most Americans, of course, are still marching in mental
lockstep with the high priests of the TV religion, but a growing minority
have broken step and regard the System as an enemy. Unfortunately, their
hostility is usually based on the wrong reasons, and it would be nearly
impossible to coordinate their activities.
In fact, in the
great majority of cases there is no reasoned basis at all for their
activity. It is really just a massive venting of frustrations in the form
of vandalism rather than political terrorism. They just want to smash
something, to inflict some injury on the people they see as responsible
for the unlivable world they are forced to live in. Vandalism on the
massive scale we are seeing now is something with which the political
police simply cannot continue to cope for very long. It is running them
ragged.
Besides the political vandals and the loonies, two
other segments of the population have been playing an important role in
recent events: the Black separatists and the organized criminals. Until a
few weeks ago everyone assumed that the System had finally bought off the
last of the nationalist-minded Blacks back in the '70's. Apparently
they've just been lying low and minding their own business, and now they
see a chance to get a few licks in. Mostly they seem to have been blowing
up the offices of Tom groups and shooting each other, but they organized a
pretty good riot in New Orleans last week, in which there was a lot of
window-breaking and looting. More power to them!
The
Mafia, two or three of the big labor unions they own, and a couple of
other organized-crime groups have been capitalizing on the disorder and
the public apprehension by substantially stepping up their extortion
activities. When they tell a businessman or a merchant that they'll bomb
his place of business unless he coughs up a "protection" payment, they are
more likely to be believed than they were a few months ago. And kidnapping
has become a big business. The cops are too busy working on things the
System is really worried about (namely, us) to bother the professional
thugs, and they are having a field day.
Taking a strictly
cold-blooded view, we must welcome even this upsurge in crime, since it
helps to undermine the confidence of the public in the System. But the day
must also come when we will take every one of these elements which the
System's "bought" judges have coddled for so long and put them up against
the wall without further ado-along with the judges.
I
knocked at the address Elsa gave me-it is the basement entrance of what
was once an elegant townhouse-and when I asked for Elsa I was invited in
by an obviously pregnant young woman with a bawling infant in her arms.
When my eyes adjusted to the dim light, I saw that the whole basement is
being used as a communal living area. Blankets and sheets tied to the
pipes which run along the low ceiling serve to crudely partition off
half-a-dozen corners and niches as semi-private sleeping areas. In
addition, there are several mattresses on the floor in the main portion of
the basement. Other than a card table next to the laundry sink, where two
young women were washing some cooking utensils, there is no furniture, not
even a chair.
Against one wall there is an ancient,
wood-burning stove, which gives off the only heat in the basement. As I
learned later, running water is the only public utility which the little
commune has at its disposal, and they obtain fuel for their stove by
scavenging in the neighborhood or by sending a raiding party upstairs to
break up doors, bannisters, window jambs, even floorboards. Another,
larger commune occupies the upper portion of the house, beyond the heavily
barricaded steel door at the head of the basement stairs, but they often
indulge in wild drug parties, after which they are in no condition to
repel fuel-raiders from downstairs.
The basement dwellers
shun hard drugs and regard themselves as quite superior to the upstairs
people. They nevertheless prefer the grubby basement for themselves,
because it is easier to heat and easier to defend than upstairs, the only
windows being a few tiny, dirt-streaked panes near the ceiling, far too
small to admit any hostile intruder. In addition, it is cooler in the
summer.
Seven or eight of them were sprawled on mattresses,
watching some inane "game" program on a battery-powered television
receiver and smoking marijuana cigarettes, when I entered. The whole place
was permeated by the stink of stale beer, unwashed laundry, and marijuana
smoke. (They don't regard marijuana as a drug.) Two small boys, about four
years old, both stark naked, were rolling on the floor and fighting near
the stove. A gray cat, perched comfortably on one of the idle heating
pipes near the ceiling, stared down at me curiously.
The
people on the mattresses, though, after a brief glance, paid no further
attention to me. I could see that none of the faces illuminated by the TV
screen was Elsa's. When the girl who had admitted me called out her name,
however, one of the blanket-partitions in a far corner was suddenly thrust
aside, and Elsa's head and bare shoulders became momentarily visible. She
squealed with delight when she saw me, ducked back behind her blanket, and
emerged a moment later in her "granny" dress. I was vaguely disturbed to
catch a glimpse of another form on the mattress in the dim recess as Elsa
parted the blanket and came out. A twinge of jealousy?
Elsa
gave me a quick hug of genuine affection and then offered me a cup of
steaming coffee, which she poured from a battered pot on the stove. I
gratefully accepted the coffee, for the walk from the bus stop had
thoroughly chilled me. We sat on an unoccupied mattress near the stove.
The sound from the TV and the noise being made by the crying baby and the
two scuffling boys allowed us to talk in relative
privacy.
We talked of many things, for I didn't want to
blurt out immediately the true reason for my visit. I learned a lot about
Elsa and the people she is living with. Some of the things I learned
saddened me, and some profoundly shocked me.
I was saddened
by Elsa's story of herself. She is the only child of upper-middle-class
parents. Her father is (or was-she hasn't been in touch with her family
for more than a year) a speech writer for one of the most powerful
Senators in Washington. Her mother is an attorney for a left-wing
foundation whose principal activity is buying up houses in White, suburban
neighborhoods and moving Black welfare families into
them.
Until she was 15 Elsa had been very happy. Her family
had lived in Connecticut until then, and Elsa had attended an exclusive,
private school for girls. (Single-sex schools are illegal now, of course.)
She spent the summers with her parents at their vacation home on the
beach. Elsa's face glowed as she described the woods and trails around
their summer home and the long walks she took by herself. She had her own
little sailboat and often sailed to a tiny island offshore for private
picnics and long, happy hours of lying in the sun and
daydreaming.
Then the family moved to Washington, and her
mother insisted that they take an apartment in a predominantly Black
neighborhood near Capitol Hill, rather than living in a White suburb. Elsa
was one of only four White students at the junior high-school to which
they sent her.
Elsa had developed early. Her natural warmth
and open, uninhibited nature combined with her outstanding physical charms
to produce a girl who had been extraordinarily attractive sexually even at
15. The result was that the Black males, who also continually badgered the
one other White girl at the school, gave Elsa no peace. The Black girls,
seeing this, hated Elsa with special passion and tormented her in every
way they could.
Elsa dared not go into the restroom or even
let herself out of the sight of a teacher for a moment while she was at
school. She soon found that the teachers offered no real protection, when
a Black assistant principal cornered her in his office one day and tried
to put his hand inside her dress.
Each day Elsa came home
from school in tears and begged her parents to send her to another school.
Her mother's response was to scream at her, slap her face, and call her a
"racist." If the Black boys were bothering her, it was her fault, not
theirs. And she should try harder to make friends with the Black
girls.
Nor did her father offer her any comfort, even when
she told him about the incident with the assistant principal. The whole
issue embarrassed him, and he didn't want to hear about it. His liberalism
was more passive than her mother's, but he was usually intimidated by his
thoroughly "liberated" wife into going along on any matters that touched
on race. Even when three young, Black thugs accosted him on his very
doorstep, took his wallet and wristwatch, and then knocked him down and
stomped on his eyeglasses, Elsa's mother wouldn't let him call the police
and report the robbery. She regarded the very thought of filing a police
complaint against Blacks as somewhat "fascist."
Elsa stood
it for three months, and then she ran away from home. She was taken in by
the little commune she is with now, and, having a basically cheerful
disposition, she learned to be tolerably happy in her new
situation.
Then, about a month ago, the trouble arose which
led to my meeting her. A new girl, Mary Jane, had joined their group, and
there was friction between Elsa and Mary Jane. The boy Elsa was sharing
her mattress with at the time had apparently known Mary Jane earlier,
before either had joined the group, and Mary Jane regarded Elsa as a
usurper. Elsa in turn resented Mary Jane's none-too-subtle efforts to
entice her boyfriend away. The result was a screaming, clawing,
hairpulling fight between the two one day which Mary Jane, being the
stronger, had won.
Elsa had wandered the streets for two
days-that's when I met her-and then she had returned to the basement
commune. Mary Jane, meanwhile, had gotten on the wrong side of another of
the girls in the group, and Elsa pressed this advantage by issuing an
ultimatum: either Mary Jane must go or she, Elsa, would leave permanently.
Mary Jane had responded by threatening Elsa with a
knife.
"So, what happened?" I asked.
"We
sold her," was Elsa's simple reply.
"You sold her? What do
you mean?" I exclaimed.
Elsa explained: "Mary Jane refused
to leave after everyone sided with me, so we sold her to Kappy the Kike.
He gave us the TV and two hundred dollars for her."
"Kappy
the Kike," it turned out, is a Jew named Kaplan who makes his living in
the White slave trade. He makes regular trips to Washington from New York
for the purpose of buying runaway girls. His usual suppliers are the "wolf
packs," from one of which I had rescued Elsa. These predatory groups
snatch girls off the street, keep them for a week or so, and then, if
their disappearance has caused no comment in the newspapers, sell them to
Kaplan.
What happens to the girls after that no one can say
with certainty, but it is thought that most are confined in certain
exclusive clubs in New York where the wealthy go to satisfy strange and
perverted appetites. Some, it is rumored, are eventually sold to a
Satanist club and painfully dismembered in gruesome rituals. Anyway,
someone in the commune had heard that Kaplan was in town and "buying," so
when Mary Jane wouldn't leave they tied her up, located Kaplan, and made
the sale.
I had thought I was unshockable, but I was
horrified by Elsa's story of Mary Jane's fate. "How," I asked in a tone of
outrage, "could you sell a White girl to a Jew?" Elsa was embarrassed by
my obvious displeasure. She admitted that it was a terrible thing to have
done and that she sometimes feels guilty when she thinks about Mary Jane,
but it had seemed like a convenient solution to the commune's problem at
the time. She offered the feeble excuse that it happens all the time, that
the authorities apparently know all about it and don't interfere, and so
it is really more society's fault than anyone's.
I shook my
head in disgust, but this turn of our conversation gave me a convenient
opening to the topic in which I was mainly interested. "A civilization
which tolerates the existence of Kaplan and his filthy business should be
burned to the ground," I said. "We should make a bonfire of the whole
thing and then start over fresh."
I had unconsciously
raised my voice loud enough for my last comment to be heard by everyone in
the basement. A shaggy individual got up from his mattress in front of the
TV and sauntered over. "What can anyone do?" he asked, not really
expecting an answer. "Kappy the Kike's been arrested at least a dozen
times, but the cops always turn him loose. He's got political connections.
Some of the big Jews in New York are his customers. And I've heard that
two or three Congressmen go up there regularly to visit some of the clubs
he supplies."
"Then someone should blow up the Congress," I
answered.
"I guess that's already been tried," he laughed,
apparently referring to the Organization's mortar
attack.
"Well, if I had a bomb now I'd try it myself," I
said. "Where can I get some dynamite?"
The fellow shrugged
his shoulders and wandered back to the TV set. I then tried pumping Elsa
for information. Which groups in Georgetown have been doing bombings? How
can I get in touch with one of them?
Elsa tried to be
helpful, but she just didn't know. It was a subject in which she had no
particular interest. Finally, she called out to the man who had strolled
over earlier: "Harry, aren't the people over on 29th Street, the ones who
call themselves 'Fourth World Liberation Front,' into fighting the
pigs?"
Harry was obviously not pleased by her question. He
jumped to his feet, glared fiercely at the two of us, and then stomped out
of the basement without answering, slamming the door behind
him.
One of the women at the laundry sink turned around and
reminded Elsa that it was her day to prepare the midday meal and that she
hadn't even put the potatoes on the stove to boil yet. I squeezed Elsa's
hand, wished her well, and made my exit.
I guess I botched
things rather badly. It was incredibly naive of me to imagine that I could
just walk into the "dropout" community and be politely directed to someone
engaged in violent and illegal activity against the System. Obviously
every undercover cop in Washington has been trying the same thing. Now the
word must certainly be out everywhere that I'm a cop too. That blows any
chance I may have had of making contact with anti-System militants in that
particular milieu.
Of course, we could send someone else
over to try to find the "Fourth World Liberation Front," whatever the hell
it is. But I wonder now whether there's any point in that. My visit with
Elsa has pretty well convinced me that, in the people who share her
life-style, there's just not much potential for constructive collaboration
with the Organization. They lack self-discipline and any real sense of
purpose. They've given up. All they really want to do is lie around all
day screwing and smoking pot. I almost believe that if the government
would double their welfare allowances, even the bomb throwers would lose
their militancy
Elsa is basically a good kid, and there
must be a number of others whose instincts are mostly all right but who
just couldn't cope with this nightmare world and so they dropped out.
Although we both reject the world in its present condition and have both
dropped out, in a sense, the difference between the people in the
Organization and Elsa's friends is that we are capable of coping and they
aren't. I cannot imagine myself or Henry or Katherine or anyone else in
the Organization just sitting around watching TV and letting the world go
by when so much needs to be done. It is a difference of human
quality.
But there's more than one kind of quality that's
important to us. Most Americans are still coping, some barely and some
quite successfully. They haven't dropped out, because they lack a certain
sensitivity-a sensitivity which I believe we in the Organization share
with Elsa and the best of her friends-a sensitivity which allows us to
smell the stink of this decaying society and which makes us gag. The
copers out there, just like many of the non-copers, either can't smell the
stink or it doesn't bother them. The Jews could lead them to any kind of
pigsty at all, and as long as there was plenty of swill they would adapt
to it. Evolution has made skilled survivors of them, but it has failed
them in another respect.
How fragile a thing is man's
civilization! How superficial it is to his basic nature! And upon how few
of the teeming multitudes to whose lives it gives a pattern does it depend
for its sustenance!
Without the presence of perhaps one or
two per cent of the most capable individuals-the most aggressive,
intelligent, and hardworking of our fellow citizens-I am convinced that
neither this civilization nor any civilization could long sustain itself.
It would gradually disintegrate, over centuries, perhaps, and the people
would not have the will or the energy or the genius to patch up the
cracks. Eventually, all would return to their natural, pre-civilized
state-a state not too different from that of Georgetown's
dropouts.
But even energy and will and genius are not
enough, clearly. America still has enough over-achievers to keep the
wheels turning. But these over-achievers seem not to have noticed that the
machine their exertions keep running long ago ran off the road and is now
hurtling headlong into an abyss. They are insensitive to the ugliness and
unnaturalness, as well as to the ultimate danger, of the direction they
have taken.
It is really only a minority of a minority
which led our race out of the jungle and along the first few steps toward
true civilization. We owe everything to those few of our ancestors who had
both the sensitivity to feel what needed doing and the ability to do it.
Without the sensitivity no amount of ability can lead to truly great
achievement, and without the ability sensitivity leads only to daydreams
and frustration. The Organization has selected from the great mass of
humanity those of our present generation who posses this rare combination.
Now we must do whatever is necessary to prevail.