Turner Diaries, The

The Story

The novel is written in the form of the diaries of a one-time electrical engineer, Earl Turner, supposedly unearthed near Revolutionary Headquarters in the one-hundredth year of the New Era. In the book's foreword, Turner is described as one of the “men and women whose struggle and sacrifice saved our race in its time of greatest peril.” The diaries describe a society that has completely deteriorated because of the powerlessness of its white citizens, as well as Turner's patriotic fight to take the country back from a government dominated by Jews, blacks, and other minorities. Turner begins as a rank-and-file member of a group called “the Organization” and is later invited to join a secret elite faction called “the Order,” which wages a war of political terrorism on the System. These acts of terrorism are designed to instigate a further crackdown on basic freedoms, thus creating an even more repressive environment, so that the Organization will gain sympathy and converts.

Turner's adventures begin on September 16, 1991, about two years after the notorious gun raids, in which the government, through the [Page 592]enforcement of the Cohen Act, confiscates everyone's guns. Resisters are forced underground, but key members, called “legals,” remain functioning in society and gathering information. To fund its operations, the Organization commits only “socially conscious” crimes—those against Jews or other minorities. Turner's unit is assigned a larger undertaking when the System begins issuing passports to all citizens. To thwart the System's plans, the unit blows up FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. The blast kills approximately 700 people and, because of the damage done to the FBI's infrastructure, causes a temporary halt in the issuing of passports.

Although he regrets the loss of innocent life, Turner laments, “There is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people—no way. It is a cancer too deeply rooted in the flesh. And if we don't destroy the System before it destroys us—if we don't cut this cancer out of our living flesh—our whole race will die.” Eventually the Organization takes over much of the West Coast by force. Those who survive are then subjected to the “day of the rope,” in which blacks as well as whites characterized as “race traitors” are hanged. “Race traitors” are those whites who either support minorities through their views and work or—particularly offensive to the Organization—are part of interracial relationships. Despite the looting and the cannibalism of desperate blacks, the landscape begins to take on a utopian character when surviving whites clean up their homes and property. The farms that have been neglected because of the migrant workers’ expulsion are eventually tended by young white children, eager to do their part for the region's recovery.

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