The Turner Diaries

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The Turner Diaries ( German  The Turner diaries ) is a novel created in the 1970s, written by the American William L. Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald and which became a worldwide underground sales success. The novel propagates racist and anti-Semitic ideas, the focus is on the inevitability of a " race struggle ".

The novel is considered a standard work of the racist white supremacy movement in the United States. The FBI assumes that the book politically motivated the perpetrators of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing to commit their act. The novel quickly spread in the worldwide neo-Nazi scene; Blood and Honor referred to it as the first large network . Also Anders Breivik and members of the National Socialist Underground have read the work.

The novel has been indexed in Germany since April 2006 by the Federal Inspectorate for Media Harmful to Young People.

History of origin

Pierce was inspired by the anonymously published novel The John Franklin Letters (1959) to write a fictional book, the story of which is told in the form of diary entries. The suggestion to write a fictional work came from Revilo P. Oliver , who met Pierce in Washington in 1974 and also sent him the John Franklin Letters published by the " John Birch Society " shortly after the conversation . Oliver is probably the author of the book himself.

Pierce's debut novel The Turner Diaries was published in 1978 under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald in several episodes of the right-wing US magazine Attack! published which were sent to interested parties by post. Elsewhere there is talk of a first publication as a paperback . In the first version, the action took place in the 1980s. Changes were made in later editions, including postponing the action ten years into the future in the second edition.

content

A prologue dated to the year 2099 refers to a revolution dating back a century - the diary tells of the 1990s - in which the majority of the world's population of non-European descent was killed. Since then, a “white” world government has held power. The "race war" , so called by Pierce , which led to the annihilation of the inhabitants of the African and Asian continents, began in the United States of America and then spread across the world. Recently, the fictional narrator of the prologue continues, the diaries of an Earl Turner, a racist activist who played a decisive role in the revolution, were found.

Earl Turner's fictional diary narration begins with a confiscation of arms by the state (called “the system”) on a Jewish initiative (implied by the last name of the Senator responsible for the law, “Cohen” ). Turner and his comrades, who are members of an association called "the Organization," go underground to fight against "the system" that is portrayed as being Jewish controlled. In the course of this fight, for example, the FBI headquarters are bombed out, attacks and acts of sabotage are carried out by “the organization”. Turner, who excels here through efficiency, is accepted into a secret inner cadre of the "organization", the "order".

Turner is captured in the course of the plot, collapses under the torture and reveals the secret of the existence of the "order". The author's anti-Semitic stance is very succinctly expressed in this passage, since the agent who interrogates and tortures Turner (which is described in detail) is an Israeli Jew.

Turner is eventually fired and returned to the organization, but is told that his betrayal has rendered him no longer eligible for membership and that the penalty for betraying the "Order" is death. His only possibility of rehabilitation, as the last diary entry implies, is a suicide bombing .

Turner is again entrusted with key tasks, primarily in the areas of weapons development and logistics as well as training paramilitary units. In the course of the coordinated attack of the "organization" on Southern California , in which he was helped by uprisings within the military of the "system", he organized the reconstruction of the destroyed Los Angeles and carried out bloody ethnic cleansing of the surviving minorities of California. The "organization" eventually comes into possession of nuclear weapons and radioactive explosives with which they want to put the "system" under pressure. With the help of these newly captured weapons, the "organization" can expand the war and, in addition to New York and Israel, also attack the Soviet Union, which in turn reacts with a nuclear strike against important cities in the "system". As a result of the nuclear exchange of blows, a large part of the remaining “systematic” cities is destroyed and the “organization” can establish new “enclaves” for the surviving “whites” in their ruins.

In order to avert the imminent invasion of Southern California by the armed forces of the "system", Turner decides to carry out his suicide bombing by equipping his plane with an atomic bomb and throwing it into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the "system" which has been converted into a fortress. The diaries close with the entry describing these preparations. The protagonist's death remains unspoken, but must be accepted for the reasons given above.

A short epilogue tells how the “organization” succeeded in carrying out the aforementioned global genocide against non-Europeans.

Reception and impact history

Although The Turner Diaries, due to its racist content, was neither published by an established publisher nor included in the assortment of major national distributors, the novel is said to have sold over 300,000 copies in the United States alone (as of 2001). There are now translations of the work into several languages ​​- including German, French and Portuguese. The worldwide distribution of The Turner Diaries is impossible to estimate, since the work is available free of charge in several languages ​​on the Internet and can be downloaded.

The book is considered to be the main trigger for the bomb attack on the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995, as extracts from the book were found in the car of the main culprit, Timothy McVeigh , who allegedly belongs to the paramilitary group Michigan Militia (see militia movement ) . The excerpts describe the attack on FBI headquarters, which was believed to have been copied.

The English assassin and neo-Nazi David Copeland named the Turner Diaries as a source of inspiration for his attacks in April 1999.

The political scientist Gideon Botsch states in a survey of the extreme right in the Federal Republic of Germany since 1949 that the novel reached Germany in the mid-1990s; Botsch cites it as an example of the concept of leaderless resistance adopted by German neo-Nazis from the Anglo-Saxon region at the time , which aims to “escalate a brutal race war through small underground cells of nationalist activists”. Botsch names the acts of violence committed by neo-Nazi Kay Diesner in 1997, the Thuringian Homeland Security Association and the bomb attack on the grave of the former chairman of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Heinz Galinski , in December 1998, as the German implementations of this concept . Christoph Busch names The Turner Diaries in an article about the National Socialist Underground (NSU) "a blueprint for a violent takeover of the state [...] that begins with right-wing terrorist attacks". The NSU committed the murders of nine migrants and one police officer between 2000 and 2007. The Federal Testing Agency for Media Harmful to Young People put the book on the index in April 2006.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ David Schraven , Jan Feindt : Weisse Wölfe , 2015, ISBN 978-3-9816917-0-2 , p. 211.
  2. ↑ Question to the Bundestag on February 16, 2007 (PDF; 44 kB)
  3. ↑ Robert S. Griffin. The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds. An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce. o. O .: 1st Books, 2001, p. 143 f.
  4. ↑ Stefan Aust , Dirk Laabs : Heimatschutz. The state and the NSU series of murders. Pantheon Verlag Munich 2014, p. 201, p. 348
  5. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from June 28, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ^ Gideon Botsch : The extreme right in the Federal Republic of Germany 1949 until today . Scientific Book Society, Darmstadt 2012, p. 109.
  7. ↑ Christoph Busch: The “National Socialist Underground” in the light of right-wing extremist violence bpb.de ( Federal Agency for Civic Education ), May 10, 2012
  8. ^ Börsenblatt for the German book trade , online edition, May 18, 2006

literature

  • Andrew MacDonald : The Turner Diaries. A novel . Barricade Books, New York 1996, ISBN 1-56980-086-3 .
  • Thomas Grumke : The "Turner Diaries" and the "Oklahoma City Bombing". Right-wing extremism in the USA . In: Neue Gesellschaft, Frankfurter Hefte. Vol. 45, Issue 7, 1998, pp. 583-587.