192 The Journal of American Culture ! Volume 32, Number 3 !
September 2009
Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda in
The Turner Diaries
Rob McAlear
When Agent William Eppright of the FBI’s ev-
idence response team opened the sealed envelope
found in Timothy McVeigh’s yellow Mercury, he
found among the clippings two highlighted pas-
sages from The Turner Diaries. This novel of
Aryan revolution was written by Dr. William
Pierce, leader of the neo-Nazi organization the
National Alliance (Serrano 218–20). During
McVeigh’s trial, The Turner Diaries was the first
piece of evidence introduced, and the prosecution
called witnesses that testified to McVeigh’s obses-
sion with the text. These witnesses told the court
that McVeigh had read the novel repeatedly while
in the military and later sold it at a loss at gun
shows (Griffin 8). While McVeigh’s case brought
The Turner Diaries to the public’s attention, the
Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has documented
multiple cases since the 1980s in which violent
hate groups have cited Pierce’s novel as influen-
tial. Two of these have even taken their names
from the novel (ADL). During the dragging mur-
der of James Byrd in 1998, the driver, John Wil-
liam King, is reported to have shouted, ‘‘We are
going to start the Turner Diaries early,’’ as he
shackled Byrd’s legs to his truck (Meggido 2).
Pierce’s novel was first self-published in his pe-
riodical Attack! and then self-published as a novel
in 1978. Since that time it has become required
reading for Aryan groups and has been widely
disseminated at gun shows throughout the coun-
try. While no precise circulation numbers are
available, as of 2001 estimates were that at least
300,000 copies had been sold (Griffin 138). As a
Rob McAlear is completing his dissertation in twentieth-century American literature at the University of Wisconsin—Madison.
The Journal of American Culture, 32:3
r 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
vehicle for hate propaganda, Pierce’s tract has
been all too successful.
The Turner Diaries is unambiguously a hate
novel. According to its Foreword, the novel is a
manuscript found in 2100 after a worldwide
Aryan revolution. This manuscript is the diary
of Earl Turner, a member of the Aryan ‘‘Organi-
zation’’ that started the revolution that has led to
the worldwide massacre of all non-Aryans. The
diary narrates the beginnings of this revolution
from the perspective of Turner and follows him
through his guerilla war against the ‘‘System,’’
documenting his methods and hate crimes.
Despite its historical and political importance,
critical research on The Turner Diaries has been
sparse—presumably because one finds simply
reading it horrifying enough. Those critics who
have examined the novel write about it as hate
speech: condemning its politics and psychology,
and critiquing its narrative failings.1 For example,
in a insightful discussion of the novel’s anti-Sem-
itism and racism, Joe Lockard has noted that the
novel ‘‘is not one that invites prolonged contem-
plation on issues of critical undecidability’’ and
that the Aryan ideology exists ‘‘beneath a fairly
crude narrative surface’’ (Lockard 121, 127). Eval-
uating the novel’s obvious ideological contradic-
tions, Jonathan Cullick has argued that ‘‘Turner
assumes that the Organization has freed his in-
tellect from the System, but he neglects to notice
that the Organization has only provided him with
a different kind of cognitive prison’’ (Cullick).
Lockard’s and Cullick’s evaluations of the novel’s
 Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda ! Rob McAlear
literary merit are accurate. The Diaries are
crudely written and the ethical position they in-
voke is not only repugnant, but also often incon-
sistent and self-contradictory.
However despite these failings, a ‘‘cognitive
prison’’ is exactly what the novel intends for its
reader. As a piece of propaganda fiction it is not
interested in trying to open up discussion or en-
courage deliberation and ‘‘undecidability,’’ but in-
stead seeks to trap its reader within its ideology,
persuading through identification and imposing
its ideological authority. While Cullick sees ‘‘the
device of the diarist-narrator [as] merely the ve-
hicle for a book that is intended to carry heavy
ideological freight,’’ the diaries and the framing
narrative are not ‘‘merely’’ trappings, but calcu-
lated propaganda techniques (Cullick). The voices
of the diarist narrator and the editor work in uni-
son to promote the ideology of hate by urging the
reader to identify with Turner while using edito-
rial authority to foreclose ideological alternatives.
Given that literary sophistication is less of an
issue than propagandistic persuasion, it is impor-
tant to understand how the novel conveys its
message of hate through examination of the con-
text of its original publication, its narrative form,
and the origins of Pierce’s propaganda strategies.
The analysis of foundational sources for the work,
the John Birch Society’s John Franklin Letters and
Eugene Methvin’s The Riot Makers, alongside
editorials and commentary in Pierce’s propaganda
paper Attack!, explain Pierce’s move from direct,
blunt propaganda messages to a layered narrative
approach. From these varied sources, a genealogy
of the text develops that gives insight into how the
novel came to take its current form. Pierce’s pro-
paganda techniques move from a direct authority-
driven approach in his tabloid, to a combination
of narrative and authority in the Diaries, and then
to a separation of narrative and authority in his
later publications. By charting this development,
one sees the origins of The Turner Diaries’ use of
the diary form to foster identification with Aryan
ideology, and its use of narrative frames and foot-
notes to establish authority over its readers. The
focus here is not a discussion of the hate content
of the novel—content which is disturbing to say
193
the least—but rather an attempt to provide a his-
torical context for and narrative analysis of what
has unfortunately turned out to be an influential
piece of American writing. Applying the criteria
of ethical responsibility commonly used in a dis-
cussion of a political novel misses the propaganda
function of the text: persuasion to a single ideo-
logical worldview.
The Roots of a Hate Novel
In 1968, Pierce began publishing the Aryan
propaganda tabloid Attack! in order to build up
membership in the failing National Youth Alli-
ance (Griffin 115). Edited and published by Pierce
himself, Attack! overflows with anti-Semitism
and racism. Early issues take a predictable form:
Aryan-slanted journalism, racist cartoons, photo-
graphs of purported Israeli ‘‘massacres,’’ bomb-
making instructions, and a repeated blurb on the
second page titled ‘‘What It’s All About.’’ This
blurb, which remains consistent over much of the
periodical’s publication, explains the purpose of
Attack! The column tells us that the tabloid is
‘‘aimed at just one thing: catching your attention
and your interest so we can tell you how much
more wonderful life is when you’re working for
something that really matters—and so we can in-
vite you to work with us’’ (‘‘What’’ 11). One is
struck by the bluntness of this formulation. In
contrast to Pierce’s later attempts at narrative
persuasion in The Turner Diaries, this is a direct
statement of what he hopes the magazine will do.
Perhaps his approach in these early papers reflects
Pierce’s training as a physicist. Pierce graduated
from University of Colorado at Boulder with a
PhD in Physics in 1962 and taught at the Uni-
versity of Oregon from 1962 to 1965 (NNDB).
His early attempts at propaganda seem to reflect
his training in the sciences. That is, he wants to
present Aryan ‘‘facts’’ to his readers and persuade
them based on their interest in the evidence that
he puts forward. Thus, many of the early issues
propagandize through slanted news stories and
Pierce’s editorials about what must be done to
194 The Journal of American Culture ! Volume 32, Number 3 ! September 2009
right these perceived wrongs. While rhetoric in
the pejorative sense abounds, Pierce’s approach is
mostly a direct one based on his interpretation of
biased data.
Nevertheless, even this direct appeal to Aryan
beliefs in the early issues of Attack! reveals
Pierce’s thinking about how to propagandize
most effectively. In an interview with H. M. Bar-
rett on the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront.org, Bar-
rett, who worked with Pierce at the time, tells his
interviewer that one of Pierce’s favorite books
while he was writing The Turner Diaries was Eu-
gene Methvin’s The Riot Makers: The Technology
of Social Demolition (Manon). Published in 1970,
Methvin’s work is a rightwing survey of the left’s
tactics used to instigate the riots of the 1960s.
While Methvin’s book is mostly an attempt at
exposing what he sees as the various stages in left
propagandizing that lead to rioting, Pierce reads
this book as how-to manual for creating his own
propaganda. For example, Methvin argues that
Pre-conditioning by radicals flatters the individual,
inflates his self importance. . . . He is depicted as weak
and exploited, but simultaneously, if he will but unite
against the oppressor, mighty and invincible. . . . Rev-
olutionary pre-conditioning teaches that the ‘‘govern-
ment’’, ‘‘the ruling class’’ or ‘‘power elite’’ or
‘‘imperialist explorer’’ is a venal and cruel exploiter,
inhuman and callous or at least self-centered and un-
caring, a relic of man’s primitive past which has per-
versely persisted beyond its age. (242)
Methvin’s formulation of how pre-condition-
ing sets the stage for revolution nearly parallels
Pierce’s own in the early issues of Attack! when he
writes that ‘‘we’re teaching Americans to look at
life in a new way. Each White person is not only
an individual, but is also a member of his racial
community, a community with its roots in the
most distant past and a destiny in the unlimited
future’’ (‘‘What’’ 11).2 Here we can see the influ-
ence of Methvin’s work on Pierce’s thought. The
connection between the individual and the group
present in Methvin is made explicit. The Aryan
future is ‘‘unlimited’’ and pre-destined, and the
present is a historical relic. In this early formula-
tion one can see that Pierce bluntly states how he
is trying to convince his reader—something that
will change as his propaganda strategy develops.
One way that Pierce preconditions his reader is
through the terms that he sets up in early issues of
Attack!. The dichotomy between the oppressive
‘‘System’’ and the revolutionary ‘‘Organization’’
with its inner ‘‘Order’’ later used in The Turner
Diaries is partially present before the novel itself
was written. In the Fall 1970 issue of Attack!,
Pierce begins to develop this vocabulary, writing
that ‘‘the System which rules America today is on
the way out. . . . before a people can rid them-
selves of an unwholesome order of things, as a
preparation for building a new and healthy order,
they must be emotionally prepared to dispense
with the old order’’ (‘‘Revolution’’ 6). The rhetor-
ical slant of this language is transparent: the
current society is seen as diseased and ‘‘unwhole-
some,’’ evoking once again both a break toward
the new and an implied healthier past. Certainly
ideas about language were in historical circulation
in places other than Methvin, and ‘‘system,’’ ‘‘or-
der,’’ and ‘‘organization’’ do not make up a novel
vocabulary. However, the relevance of Methvin’s
book is that it highlights the importance of using
language in propaganda to frame ideas:
It is obvious that it makes a great deal of difference in a
person’s behavior—particularly if he lacks broad edu-
cation—whether he thinks in terms of ‘‘exploitation’’
‘‘class struggle’’ ‘‘direct action,’’ ‘‘confrontation,’’ and
the like, or in terms of ‘‘law and order,’’ due process,’’
[and] ‘‘parliamentary persuasion’’. . . . It is, after all,
ideas that hold any society together. . . . The Soviet
propaganda apparatus goes to great lengths to intro-
duce into the international dialog new words and
phrases that put at shiny gloss on a particular strategic
gambit. (247)
Pierce develops a similar vocabulary of Aryan
ideas in early issues of Attack! Five years before
the first publication of the Diaries, Pierce begins
using the terms that become an integral part of his
later propaganda technique. Given the evidence that
he was reading Methvin in the early to mid 1970s, it
seems likely that ideas about leftist propaganda
were influential in his own propaganda’s devel-
opment. One cannot be certain of Methvin’s di-
rect influence—plenty of other sources discuss
such ideas—but as one examines The Turner Di-
aries, the influence of Methvin’s work on Pierce’s
propaganda becomes increasingly clear.
 Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda ! Rob McAlear
In January of 1975, there is clear shift in the
persuasive strategies of Attack! from the former
direct approach. While the tabloid had always
contained single frame propaganda cartoons, it
now has two serial narratives: ‘‘Future Zero’’ a
comic that begins with the military forcing its
way into houses to ensure that everyone is being
properly educated in ‘‘equality,’’ and the first in-
stallment of The Turner Diaries (‘‘Future’’ 12,
‘‘Diaries’’ 5). While much of the old editorial and
journalistic content remains, it is now paired
alongside these narratives. The cause of this shift
from journalism to journalism mixed with narra-
tive is most likely due to the influence of Revilo
Oliver: Aryan sympathizer, founding member of
the John Birch Society, and classics professor at
the University of Illinois. In his interviews with
Griffin, Pierce cleared up the misconception that
The Turner Diaries is a rewriting of London’s The
Iron Heel.3 He says that the inspiration came in-
stead from Oliver, who had recently written a re-
view for Attack!
Pierce said he told Oliver at the lunch meeting that he
was finding it hard getting a response out of people to
the message he was trying to get across. Oliver asked
him whether he had ever thought of writing fiction.
Oliver told Pierce that many of the sorts of people
who would respond to his ideas—those toward the
bottom or on the margins of society with less stake in
the existing arrangements and less to lose—simply
don’t read the kind of non-fiction material he was
generating. If they read anything at all, Oliver said, it is
fiction, and particularly light, action-filled recreational
fiction. (Griffin 138)
While no date for this meeting is given, the
shift in tactics in 1975 seems to indicate that it
occurred sometime in late 1974. In the second to
last issue of 1974 a fictional narrative first appears
in Attack! in the form of the short piece ‘‘A Par-
able’’ which argues that non-Aryans deserve
whatever violence they receive because of their
inferior genes. This hate parable is the precursor
to the change in propaganda strategy of January
1975 that resulted in the first installment of The
Turner Diaries.
The book that Oliver gave Pierce, The John
Franklin Letters, provided the foundation for the
narrative structure of Pierce’s novel. It is a
straightforward tale of conservative resistance to
195
what we would now call ‘‘The New World Or-
der.’’ It has an introduction that frames the tale in
much the same way that The Turner Diaries does
and is the story of a conservative revolution con-
cluding in 1989. Unlike the editor of the Diaries,
The John Franklin Letters’ editor gives the reader
some background and then says that he will ‘‘step
aside’’ so that the reader can make his own judg-
ments (3). There is some speculation that Oliver
wrote the anonymous text, and this seems likely
given that the editor, Harley N. Ogden, is pur-
portedly a professor at Oliver’s university. The
Letters itself is of interest not only because it
provides Pierce with the idea of writing the Di-
aries as a found manuscript, but also because of its
use of history. The Letters begins before the date
of its publication and mentions actual historical
and political events, like the New Deal and Su-
preme Court decisions, before it invents a new
political timeline. This slippage between actual
events and invented ones is a strategy that Pierce
will later take up in The Turner Diaries.
However Pierce’s contact with Oliver may
have been equally as influential as the Letters
themselves. Pierce published some of Oliver’s
work in the Fall 1969 issue of Attack!, so they
were definitely in contact well before the Diaries’
publication. Oliver, as a professor of classics, was
familiar with the use of narrative framing devices.
In a 1965 book review of Taylor Caldwell’s fic-
tional biography of Cicero, A Pillar of Iron, Ol-
iver writes that ‘‘A Pillar of Iron is a singularly
vivid and moving novel. The story, as in Poe’s
Arthur Gordon Pym and Thackeray’s Henry Es-
mond, really begins with the Foreword, in which
fact and imagination are so skillfully blended’’
(Oliver 270). In his later comments about this re-
view, Oliver writes that the book contained many
factual and translation errors, but that he con-
sented to review it because ‘‘it was both useful and
dangerous as ‘‘conservative’’ propaganda’’ (Oliver
263). Oliver’s acknowledgment of the value of
blending ‘‘fact and imagination’’ in framing nar-
ratives gives another possible source for Pierce’s
work. One can only speculate as to the degree of
influence Oliver had on Pierce’s writing, but de-
spite his politics Oliver was clearly knowledge-
196 The Journal of American Culture ! Volume 32, Number 3 ! September 2009
able about literature and rhetoric. Sometime after
meeting with Oliver and reading The John Frank-
lin Letters, Pierce changes his propaganda strategy
to include narratives, and in January 1975 pub-
lishes the first installment of The Turner Diaries.
Hate PropagandizingThrough
Narrative
The narrative of the Diaries is an attempt to
balance Pierce’s desire to indoctrinate his readers
into his ideology with his need for them to first
identify with his position so that he can persuade
them. The novel’s two narrative voices, Turner
and the editor, work to fulfill these two functions.
Turner’s narration provides a means of identifica-
tion because, since it is told ‘‘from the viewpoint
of a rank-and-file member of the Organization,’’
‘‘. . .its author did not have an eye on his place in
history as he wrote’’ (Turner iii). Especially in the
early entries, Turner is an everyman made to ap-
peal as much as possible to common readers. The
problem for Pierce is that he needs to direct this
appeal toward his desired end. Pierce does not
simply desire a change from the status quo but
specifically wants to replace it with a neo-Nazi
utopia. The editor’s authoritative voice allows
Pierce to channel the appeal of Turner’s ‘‘rank and
file’’ point of view into a teleological view of his-
tory. It is this combination of identification and
authority, of the imminent Aryan revolution as
well as its long-term inevitability, that the narra-
tive form holds in tension.
Turner’s journey from disgruntled racist to
militant revolutionary begins when the govern-
ment, ‘‘the System,’’ sends squads of ‘‘Negroes’’
into the homes of citizens believed to have fire-
arms (Turner 1). Turner tells us of their search of
his apartment noting that ‘‘these inexperienced
Blacks couldn’t find [my .357 Magnum] in a mil-
lion years’’ (2). Thus begins the reader’s initiation
into the hate narrative that is to follow. Turner
then joins other members of the Aryan revolu-
tionary movement called ‘‘the Organization’’ in
order to recover cached weapons and begin the
process of building bombs and planning for the
overthrow of the System. After a successful
bombing of an FBI building, Turner is initiated
into the secret inner ranks of the Organization
called ‘‘the Order.’’ He is eventually captured and
subsequently escapes, only to discover that he is
now considered a traitor by the Order for allow-
ing himself to be taken prisoner rather than com-
mitting suicide. The Order tells him that they will
call on him to give his life, and at the end of the
Diaries Turner straps a nuclear bomb to himself
and flies a small airplane into the Pentagon, ru-
ining the infrastructure of the System once and
for all. Many anti-Semitic and racist monologues
appear throughout the story, and these, in con-
junction with the ever increasing racist and anti-
Semitic violence perpetrated by the Organization,
comprise most of the plot.
Turner’s narrative is framed as a manuscript
that has been found in 2100 during excavations of
the Organization’s ‘‘Eastern Command Center’’
near Washington, District of Columbia (ii). The
editor of these documents, Andrew Macdonald,
provides the reader with a Foreword and Epilog.
The editor also intersperses Turner’s diary with
parenthetical notes to the twenty-second century
reader that explain terms from the period and
comment on Turner’s account of history. The
Epilogue tells the story of what happened after
Turner’s suicide mission: nuclear warheads were
launched at the Soviet Union, Israel, and Toronto
(where many American Jews had fled), and the
‘‘Great Eastern Waste’’ was created by ‘‘purifying’’
the Asian land mass (208–09). Thus the Diaries
themselves were written by Pierce in 1978, are
narrated from the perspective of 1994, and are
commented on from 2100.4
The diary portion of the novel attempts to
foster identification with Turner in order to move
the reader from his current worldview to an
Aryan one. The first entry in Turner’s diary tells
us that the Organization began planning the rev-
olution after the ‘‘Gun Raids two years ago’’ (1).
As Turner relates, on the day of the Gun Raids, ‘‘I
opened the door and four Negroes came pushing
into the apartment before I could stop them’’ (1).
 Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda ! Rob McAlear
When the men are unable to find Turner’s hidden
weapons they call in Mr. Tepper, ‘‘a Caucasian,
though with an unusually dark complexion’’ who
finds the guns and arrests Turner (2). Immediately
racism and anti-Semitism are conflated with gov-
ernmental seizure of firearms and warrant-less
searches. The intention is clear: angering gun en-
thusiasts with governmental trampling of liber-
ties, and trading on the stereotypes of the
incompetent African American and the crafty
Jew. The novel overflows with these types of hate
by its end, but here the associations are more
subtle (though not all that subtle). Through this
pairing, the narrative links the legitimate political
fears of warrant-less searches and seizure of legal
firearms with racism and anti-Semitism and makes
these minority groups scapegoats for the reader’s
political concerns.
Pierce again attempts a similar identification
and shift by developing a vocabulary that reflects
his Aryan ideology. As we have seen, Pierce’s
specific vocabulary is based in an understanding
of communist propaganda and was developed in
Attack!, but now it appears fully formed in the
Diaries. Pierce calls the Aryan revolutionaries
‘‘the Organization’’ while his Jewish-led govern-
ment is called ‘‘the System.’’ The disparity be-
tween these terms is one of agency. ‘‘The System’’
connotes a type of perpetual motion machine that
runs itself, one with no purpose and no governing
ideology. Describing something as a ‘‘system’’ is
characterizing it as the way something is, as it
functions in the world, instead of identifying its
purpose—and makes those that take part in it
mindless drones. In opposition to the System is
the ‘‘Organization,’’ a term that implies a con-
scious purpose in its construction. The inner cir-
cle of the Organization is ‘‘the Order,’’ a term
again connoting purpose and naturalness, and
drawing on Pierce’s historical interest in the Teu-
tonic Order which ‘‘significantly and permanently
shifted the course of European history’’ (‘‘Crite-
ria’’ 3). In his discussion of the Teutonic Order as
an Aryan model, Pierce argues that ‘‘the only way
that the movement’s members can be expected to
shed their old values and attitudes is through a
complete organizational nexus . . . reading and
197
studying all of the organization’s publications’’
(4). Embracing Pierce’s Aryan vocabulary is part
of this shedding process. As Methvin puts it, pro-
paganda works by ‘‘exploiting the ancient and
tested principle that the quickest way to find an
ally is to find a common enemy. Through this
technique [the propagandist] establishes a mindset
of identifications with the ‘‘progressive vanguard’’
and antipathies toward the ‘‘reactionary ruling
clique’’ that facilitate his revolutionary task’’
(Methvin 240). Pierce develops this vocabulary
to instill a ‘‘mindset of identification’’ in his reader
so that he views the world through the Aryan lens
of ‘‘us against them.’’
Another way that Pierce bolsters identification
is by reinterpreting current events in order to
make them fit with the events foretold in the Di-
aries. In the June 1976 issue of Attack!, he notes
that in this issue’s segment of the Diaries
White parents deliberately send their teenage daughter
to a black school in Washington, D.C. although they
easily have the means to send her to a private school or
a predominantly white school. Purely by coincidence,
a White anthropologist has just published her study of
just such a group of parents and children—not imag-
inary people in the 1980’s, but real people here and
now. Excerpts appeared in Washington’s two daily
newspapers. (‘‘Pawn’’ 3)
This is almost certainly a gimmick. Pierce, by
his own admission, wrote the diaries between
publication of issues, so the ‘‘coincidence’’ seems
unlikely. However, by writing them under the
pseudonym of ‘‘Andrew Macdonald,’’ and char-
acterizing them as a finished novel from their first
publication, he attempts to persuade the reader
that the book is foreseeing real-world events.
Turner’s fictional experiences and the reader’s real
life experiences are meant to overlap. It seems
much more likely that Pierce read the articles
about the study, and then included a caricature of
it in his novel. The segment on the teenage girl,
‘‘Elsa,’’ consists of her liberal parents forcing her
to continue attending school in a ‘‘predominantly
Black neighborhood near Capitol Hill’’; she is re-
peatedly sexually abused, and her parents’ apathy
leads her into a life of prostitution (Turner 82–84).
This is, of course, a far cry from the conclusion
reached in the actual newspaper article by the
198 The Journal of American Culture ! Volume 32, Number 3 ! September 2009
study’s author who found that despite some in-
stances of difficulties, ‘‘the white children . . .
aren’t suffering academically, nor did I find them
fearful, anxious, or isolated’’ (Daniel A15). Yet by
addressing current concerns over school desegre-
gation, Pierce attempts to get his reader to iden-
tify with Turner, and he then reinforces the book’s
foresight by pairing it with an actual event rein-
terpreted through his propaganda lens.
The Turner Diaries is clearly a hate novel
crafted for the propaganda function of establish-
ing rhetorical identification with the reader. Ken-
neth Burke’s term identification enables us to
understand the way in which the novel attempts
to use these narrative devices to persuade the
reader of the appropriateness of its ideological
position. For most readers, the novel’s abhorrent
ideology negates the persuasive force of these
narrative devices, but Pierce’s work has in mind
an audience of gun enthusiasts and those that
identify with white supremacist groups like the
National Alliance, the KKK, and the National
Vanguard. Given this intended audience, Burke’s
observations about identity and difference make
sense of the narrative strategies the novel uses. In
A Rhetoric of Motives Burke writes that
In pure identification there would be no strife. Like-
wise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness,
since opponents can join battle only through a media-
tory ground that makes their communication possible,
thus providing the first condition necessary for their
interchange of blows. Put identification and division
ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for
certain just where one ends and the other begins, and
you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. (25)
For Burke identification creates the need for
rhetoric because we are both, to use his terms,
‘‘consubstantial’’ with the other and an ‘‘individual
locus of motives’’ (21). Identification, with its im-
plication of identity and difference, is the foun-
dation upon which all rhetoric is based.
However, Burke is aware that identification is
a neutral term. Thus, at one point in A Rhetoric of
Motives he calls war ‘‘that ultimate disease of co-
operation’’ (22). For Burke, rhetoric is always
political, and so his work strives to avoid the
horrors that persuasion can cause. He is well
aware that cooperation born through identifica-
tion might again lead to totalitarian horrors like
those he witnessed in the twentieth century (or
those in Pierce’s novel), and one of the aims of his
work is to attempt to prevent these atrocities from
happening again. For Burke the way to prevent
ideology from congealing into totalitarianism is
through guarded cooperation based on both iden-
tity and difference. The inherent recognition of
identity and difference allows for us to cooperate
alongside rather than enforce upon. The challenge
for the author of an ethical political novel is to
move this tension that we hold daily between
identity and difference into the literary realm in
such a way that it can lead to social change. To
paraphrase Burke, persuasion becomes possible
when we attempt to bridge this gap between
identity and difference.5
The goal of a propaganda text like The Turner
Diaries is not to raise deliberation by maintaining
the tension between identity and difference, but
instead to obliterate that difference. The result is
that features of literature such as openness, devel-
opment of characters, and complexity are off limits
to the author of propaganda fiction. These devices,
with their promotion of critical thinking and re-
flection are precisely what the text wants to avoid.
To cut off these forces, the text deploys narrative
devices like those discussed above in order to force
the reader to identify with the ideological position
of the author. In fact, Pierce admitted to this in a
discussion of the popularity of his work:
I formulated an explanation, which I am sure isn’t
original, as to why fiction if it is done right has such a
powerful impact on people. Simply, the reader—or
television watcher or movie viewer or playgoer—
comes to identify with the protagonist. And once that
happens, you’ve got this person where you want him.
. . . The reader develops a kind of rooting interest in
how things turn out for the protagonist. And not only
that, but if something is well-written the reader starts
to think as the protagonist does and—the most pow-
erful thing of all—if the protagonist learns something
or comes to believe in something, if he changes his
ideas, the reader tends to do the same thing, he changes
too. So what you have is a powerful teaching tool, a
persuasive tool. (Griffin 238)
Pierce’s rudimentary literary theory speaks
well to the aims of his propaganda narrative. Its
main purpose is to persuade through identifica-
 Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda ! Rob McAlear
tion, and indoctrinate through authority. It needs
to contradictorily open its target’s mind to ideo-
logical teaching through identification while clos-
ing the target’s mind to any position but the
propagandist’s. The two narrative voices at work
in the Diaries are representative of this tension
between openness and closure, identification and
authority.
The narrative technique of framing in the
Foreword draws on the editor’s authority to limit
historical possibilities. The Foreword sets the his-
torical scene of the narrative, but it also informs
the reader of the inevitability of the Great Rev-
olution, and the importance of Turner’s manu-
script. The reader is told that
There exists such an extensive body of literature on the
Great Revolution, including the memoirs of virtually
every one of its leading figures who survived into the
New Era, that yet another book dealing with the
events and circumstances of that time of cataclysmic
upheaval and rebirth may seem superfluous. The
Turner Diaries, however, provides an insight into the
background of the Great Revolution which is uniquely
valuable. (Turner i)
This opening establishes the context in which
the novel is meant to be read: history has un-
folded; the Aryan revolution has taken place and is
certain. This technique appears drawn almost di-
rectly from The Riot Makers. In his discussion of
revolutionary ‘‘pre-conditioning,’’ Methvin writes
that ‘‘the pre-conditioned person sees the world in
the grand apocalyptic pattern of class warfare, a
titanic struggle between the old and the new’’
(240). Methvin is discussing communist propa-
ganda, but Pierce implements this exact strategy in
the writing of his Foreword. The ‘‘cataclysmic
upheaval and rebirth’’ echoes Methvin’s ‘‘titanic
struggle between the old and new.’’ The apoca-
lypse has come and gone, and there is only one
victor. This lends narrative authority to the edi-
tor—he has access to future historical information
that the readers does not. Moreover, although we
are given a cursory summary in the Epilog there
are no other traces of what the world looks like
after the ‘‘Glorious Revolution.’’ Our only access
is provided through editorials and notes.
This lack of access makes it impossible for the
reader to question the editor’s notes, since there is
199
no basis for comparison from which to disagree
with him. Therefore, even the relatively benign
note that ‘‘counterfeiting was later used by the
Organization not only to supply its units with
funds but also to disrupt the general economy,’’
works to reinforce this authority by presenting us
with invented fact (Turner 104). Since Macdonald
speaks from future knowledge, his ‘‘notes to the
reader,’’ and their interpretations, become un-
questionable within the narrative’s logic.
The editor’s authority is further reinforced by
the reader’s ability to verify certain notes with
empirical experience. The first note we encounter
tells the reader that ‘‘the ‘dollar’ was the basic
monetary unit in the United States in the Old Era.
In 1991, two dollars would buy a half-kilo loaf of
bread or about a quarter of a kilo of sugar’’ (8).
The obviousness of this note gives credence to the
editor’s historical account. The next note works
similarly when it states that:
Throughout his diaries Turner used so-called ‘‘English
units’’ of measurement, which were still in common
use in North America during the last years of the Old
Era. For the reader not familiar with these units, a
‘‘mile’’ was 1.6 kilometers, a ‘‘gallon’’ was 3.8 liters, a
‘‘foot’’ was .30 meter, a ‘‘yard’’ was .91 meter, an ‘‘inch’’
was 2.5 centimeters, and a ‘‘pound’’ was the weight of
.4 kilograms—approximately. (14)
Under the guise of explanation to readers
in 2100, the intended effect is to develop trust in
Macdonald as a source of knowledge for readers in
the twentieth century. A dual movement lends au-
thority to the editor’s voice. First, he narrates the
future which is unknowable to the present day
reader and therefore beyond question within the
narrative’s logic. Second, he explains facts with
which his reader would already be familiar in or-
der to gain their confidence in his knowledge.
This technique strengthens the racist interpre-
tations that Macdonald will soon present to the
reader. Thus, when we reach the third note, we are
told that ‘‘ ‘Afro’ refers to the Negro or African
race, which, until its sudden disappearance during
the Great Revolution, exerted an increasingly de-
generative influence on the culture and life styles
of the inhabitants of North America’’ (59). After
building up his narrative capital, the text uses the
authority of empirical fact and future prediction
200 The Journal of American Culture ! Volume 32, Number 3 ! September 2009
gained by the editor to impose its ideological his-
torical interpretation. Pierce uses the authority of
Macdonald’s voice to slip racist propaganda into
the notes under the guise of factual information.
This transference of authority from empirical fact
to racist interpretation continues throughout the
editorial comments.
In fact, this third note is inserted just before
the first open act of racist violence in the novel.
Immediately after the note in which we are told of
the ‘‘degenerative influence’’ of African Ameri-
cans on white culture, Turner writes that he
grabbed [the ‘‘Afro’’] by the shoulder, spun him
around, and hit him in the face as hard as I could.
. . . Instead of shooting him, I straddled him and di-
rected three kicks at his groin with all my strength. He
jerked convulsively and emitted a short, choking
scream with the first kick, and then he lay still. . . .
Across the street two Blacks gawked and hooted. (59)
Since the historical objective voice of Macdon-
ald has judged blacks ‘‘degenerative,’’ Turner’s ac-
tions are justified by the narrative’s logic. In this
way, the notes naturalize Turner’s hate crime
while the narrative itself provides further evidence
for the ‘‘degenerate’’ nature of African Americans
through the blacks who ‘‘gawked and hooted’’—
obvious racial stereotypes.
If the Foreword and notes serve to lend weight
to the editor’s authority, then the Epilog works
by sealing off historical alternatives. The Epilog
says that ‘‘it was in the year 1999, according to the
chronology of the Old Era—just 110 years after
the birth of the Great One—that the dream of a
White world finally became a certainty’’ (210).6
Pierce is writing future history to establish its in-
evitability. As a propaganda strategy this seems
effective, for if the future is pre-determined in the
diegetic world, the reader can feel justified in em-
bracing the ideology which the text disseminates.
In addition, the framing narrative allows Turner’s
actions to take a proper place in the teleological
movement of history, directing revolutionary po-
tential toward only one ideological outcome.
In summary, the notes and framing devices of
the text are not merely employed to give Pierce’s
propaganda narrative the facade of a literary work;
instead, they are part of the propaganda strategy
that the novel uses in order to lend authority to
the editor’s voice and to fix a certain future for his
reader. These narrative techniques work in con-
junction with the diaries in order to reinforce the
novel’s ideology and close off alternatives.
Continuing the Propaganda
After the conclusion of the serial publication of
The Turner Diaries, Pierce self-published it as a
novel and began to sell it through his newly titled
tabloid National Vanguard. To this day the book,
sold predominantly at gun shows, is marketed
with a jacket that reads
What will you do when they come to take your guns?
Earl Turner and his fellow patriots face this question
and are forced underground when the U.S. government
bans the private possession of firearms and stages the
mass Gun Raids to round up suspected gun owners.
The hated Equality Police begin hunting them down,
but the patriots fight back with a campaign of sabotage
and assassination. An all-out race war occurs as the
struggle escalates. Turner and his comrades suffer ter-
ribly, but their ingenuity and boldness in devising and
executing new methods of guerrilla warfare lead to a
victory of cataclysmic intensity and worldwide scope.
(Turner)
Of course, the book really is not about Second
Amendment protection, but rather a virulent neo-
Nazi propaganda piece. The book’s jacket, added
after its publication as a novel, reveals the con-
tinuing evolution of Pierce’s propaganda strate-
gies. As Pierce notes ‘‘simply, the reader—or
television watcher or movie viewer or playgoer—
comes to identify with the protagonist. And once
that happens, you’ve got this person where you
want him’’ (Griffin 238). For Pierce, identification
is the key term for writing persuasive propaganda
fiction. He later uses identification to shift his
reader from a common concern with gun rights to
identification with the Aryan ideology. In addi-
tion, saying that the race war merely ‘‘occurs’’ is a
mischaracterization. When the novel opens, Turn-
er is already a member of the Organization, and he
has his guns hidden in preparation for exactly such
a war. The Organization is not the victim forced
into a race war, but its cause. Even the jacket of the
novel is a calculated attempt at persuasion. Once
again, one can see the roots of this bait and switch
 Hate, Narrative, and Propaganda ! Rob McAlear
at work in Pierce’s earlier Attack! issues. In issue
fifteen he tells his readers that the goals presented
when ‘‘organizing targets’’ are different from the
goals of the NYA because ‘‘their purpose is to in-
volve potential recruits in activism with a gut ap-
peal, activism that does not require the capacity
for organic thinking or an understanding of our
ultimate goal. . . . Once involved they can gradu-
ally be taught a new outlook’’ (‘‘On Goals’’ 6).
Pierce’s strategy is to get the readers to identify
with the protagonist at a ‘‘gut level’’ and then
change their worldviews to his ‘‘new outlook.’’
The novel’s back cover blurb evolved along
with Pierce’s propaganda strategies. The original
back cover of the book reads: ‘‘this nightmare is
coming true. Day by day conditions are coming
closer to the nightmare world in which Earl
Turner and his comrades struggle to overthrow a
tyrannical, race-destroying System . . . ’’ (Andrew
and Dennis). The original jacket places race at the
forefront of the book’s summary. After its publi-
cation, Pierce reviewed his own book in an issue
of National Vanguard. The review is glowing,
telling us that the book is ‘‘the best example yet’’
of a novel written in diary form, its ‘‘narration is
superb,’’ and it is ‘‘very tightly organized’’ (Blue-
print). The review also calls the book a ‘‘blueprint
for victory.’’ Interestingly, Pierce often repeated in
interviews that the Diaries was not a ‘‘blueprint’’
for Timothy McVeigh because the chemical make-
up of the bombs used in the novel and those at
Federal building were different (Griffin 162).7
More important than Pierce’s self-review is the
book summary appearing separately at the bottom
of the page which reads ‘‘Is the Turner Diaries
fiction—or a forecast of America’s future? Will
you be ready when the Equality Police knock on
your door in 1981?’’ (Blueprint). Again the mes-
sage of Aryan hate is at the forefront of this sum-
mary. In January of 1979 the novel is described as
‘‘a tale of white revolution at both the philosoph-
ical and gut level’’ (National 7). The phrasing here
echoes Pierce’s assertion in an early issue of At-
tack! that ‘‘gut appeal’’ is needed to win new re-
cruits (‘‘Goals’’ 6). Later summaries begin to de-
emphasize race, reading that ‘‘a race war is just one
of the outcomes’’ of the revolution (Book Sum-
201
mary). Over time the book’s description moves
from foregrounding racism to foregrounding gun
rights. By 1982, the book description takes on its
current form. Notably, the current description is
presented in the first issue of National Vanguard
that is printed in the glossy, magazine format that
it maintains to this day. This new format is char-
acterized as s ‘‘A More Effective Tool’’ for per-
suading its readers (‘‘Tool’’ 2). After The Turner
Diaries Pierce splits narrative and ‘‘fact-based’’
propaganda. Pierce’s narrative propaganda was
published separately while National Vanguard
was devoted to much the same content as early
versions of Attack! albeit now in a more developed
form and with others contributing.
Despite this separation, Pierce continued his
strategy of identification. His second hate novel,
Hunter (1989), is an unframed narrative that fol-
lows the protagonist on a racial killing spree.
Pierce’s commitment to spreading hate through
identification continued as he printed the poorly
received comic book The Adventures of White
Will (1990) and bought the white power rock la-
bel Resistance Records in 1999 (‘‘Money’’). Today
Pierce’s legacy of hate lives on after his death
through the continuing influence of both the Na-
tional Alliance and The Turner Diaries.
Pierce’s hate propaganda has proved to be in-
fluential both politically and historically. Despite
its repulsive content, The Turner Diaries contin-
ues to be widely circulated at gun shows and
within neo-Nazi groups. As a historical text, it
has been and remains one of the most widely read
hate propaganda narratives of our time. Our anal-
ysis of Pierce’s novel has historically situated its
propaganda strategies—as dreadful and manipu-
lative as they are—so the novel can be understood
as a propaganda text designed to convert its reader
to an Aryan ideology.
Notes
1. See, for example, Cullick and Zimmerman.
2. In later issues of National Vanguard, Pierce uses the term
pre-conditioning explicitly. See ‘‘Criteria for a White Future.’’
202 The Journal of American Culture ! Volume 32, Number 3 ! September 2009
3. This clarification is not altogether convincing given the great
number of similarities between the two works. Furthermore, The
Iron Heel is often found for sale on National Socialist Web sites.
4. The timeline for these events is shifted approximately ten
years in the future in the second edition of the novel. Since this is the
more common version of the novel, I use these dates here. The action
of the first edition takes place in the 1980s.
5. I draw this understanding of Burke from Crusius.
6. ‘‘The Great One’’ probably refers to Adolf Hitler who was
born April 20, 1889.
7. Pierce discusses his opinion of the Diaries’ influence on
McVeigh with Griffin on pages 161–64.
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