The Defender: “Pluralist” Answer to The Turner Diaries

Egads! Jewish and Black patriots defend America from Communist skinheads

by Dr. William L. Pierce

FOR THE PAST year and a half there’s been a Dell paperback series on the newsstands called “The Defender.” The first title in the pulp series, The Battle Begins, appeared in the late summer of 1988. The author, Jerry Ahern, then began churning out 50,000-word sequels every couple of months. As of March 1990 there were ten books in the series.

Categorized by Dell as “Men’s Adventure,” the series actually belongs to the relatively new genre of urban-terrorism fiction. In 1974 the film Death Wish launched an earlier, related genre by striking a responsive chord in millions of Americans exasperated by growing street crime, by the inability (or unwillingness) of the government to deal with it, and by the perverse sympathy for criminals shown by much of the controlled media. In that film a mild-mannered New York architect, played by Jewish actor Charles Bronson (né Buchinsky), becomes a vigilante, stalking and killing street criminals after his wife and daughter are savaged by a gang of them. But Death Wish is a non-political film, and it attempts also to avoid the race issue: Bronson, playing the part of a White man, guns down individual Black, White, and mixed-race criminals with equal enthusiasm. (ILLUSTRATION: New series of Dell paperbacks with urban-guerilla warfare theme portrays Blacks and Jews as all-American, flag-waving, pro-gun patriots, women as hard-swearing warriors, White skinheads as communist gangsters.)

“The Defender” series, in contrast, has plots in which a highly organized gang of criminals, directed and financed by foreign communists and assisted by liberal fellow travelers, attempts to destabilize America with a campaign of terrorism in order to seize power. The communist terrorists are opposed by the Patriots, a vigilante organization whose members are mostly patriotic combat veterans, moonlighting cops, and other red-blooded, public-spirited citizens fed up by the inability of the authorities to cope. The government, in fact, is treated ambivalently: not really on the side of the terrorists, but so raddled by liberalism that it cannot effectively oppose them either — more concerned, in fact, with halting the “right-wing” vigilantism than the communist-directed terrorism.

The fact that the Patriots must operate underground and are more in jeopardy from the legal authorities than from the terrorist gang they are fighting puts the novels of the Dell series in the urban-terrorism genre initiated in 1975 by the The Turner Diaries — in a sense. Like The Turner Diaries Ahern’s book have lots of violence and bloodshed, with both the good guys and the bad guys plotting their actions in candle-lit basements. There are other superficial resemblances, and one cannot but suspect that some of Ahern’s episodes were inspired by similar episodes in The Turner Diaries.

These superficial resemblances by themselves would not make “The Defender” books worthy of note. The writing is third-rate, the plots are unimaginative, and the action becomes boringly repetitious after a while, unleavened as it is by any real character studies, ideas, or thought-stimulating dialogue. What makes the series notable is that it apparently is a Jewish reaction to The Turner Diaries rather than an imitation. The “good guys” in the series — the Patriots — are as Affirmative Action a gang as could be imagined. Founded by a Black police sergeant, the group has more minority members — Blacks, Hispanics, American Indians, and Jews — than Whites. And the group’s women swear and fight just like the men; in fact, if anything they’re held up as better than the men.

The racial and sexual angle in “The Defender” series is carried to such lengths it sometimes seems almost a parody. The Blacks among the Patriots have Congressional Medals of Honor, are expert Kung Fu fighters, and have kids with Harvard Ph.D.s. There’s not an ordinary nigger among them. Many of the comrades-in-arms of these high-minded Black vigilantes are Jews, with names like Rudy Goldfarb, Randy Blumenthal, and Mitch Diamond — and just as typical of their race as the Blacks are of theirs, all right-wing gun lovers who deplore the liberal bias of the news media and become misty-eyed whenever they see an American flag.

The Patriots are befriended by a wonderfully warm-hearted group of people from the Mossad, Israel’s undercover assassination agency. These kosher butchers are portrayed by the author as the nicest sort of folks one could ever hope to meet, who supply the Patriots with arms out of a sense of gratitude for all that Americans had earlier done for Israel.

And the enemies of the American way of life — the terrorists used by the communist planners to slay and burn — are members of White youth gangs who have a suspicious resemblance to skinheads. At the beginning of the first novel in the series, Reefer, the “enforcer” in the principal gang, is described: “[His] . . . was a weak face . . . with acne pimples showing red on the upper lip . . . the hair blond and short at the sides. . . .” Reefer and his White pals like nothing better than to bomb synagogues and machine-gun children of any race. And, of course, they have ties to Arab “terrorists” in the Middle East.

Ahern’s books are aimed at the same would-be macho crowd that reads Soldier of Fortune magazine. Many of these readers are veterans of America’s All Volunteer Force who have already been influenced by the heavy doses of equality propaganda shoveled out by the Pentagon, and Ahern seems to regard his mission as more of the same. His formula is to sugarcoat his “Jews and Blacks make the best patriots” line with lots of red-blooded action and name-dropping of the sort which should appeal to armchair warriors: “He grabbed the Mark IV, Series 70 Colt . . .” or “. . . he produced a box of Federal 180-grain, jacketed, hollow-point, .44 magnums.” Ahern even gives brand names and models when mentioning holsters or knives.

About the only officially favored minority members that aren’t welcome among the Patriots are homosexuals, whom even the Pentagon’s egalitarian fanatics can’t stomach. And Ahern makes one other concession to the White male readership he has targeted: the one character among the multi-hued, coed Patriots who shows up in each book of the series and provides continuity is a White male. This character, the homologue of Earl Turner, is a history professor, former cop, and ex-Navy SEAL whose wife and children are murdered by the White terrorists. He is inducted into the Patriots by a Black friend and then goes underground to wage war on the skinheads and their protectors in the government.

The publisher of “The Defender” series, Dell Publishing, is a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. When the series was launched in 1988 the president and chief executive officer of the corporation was Alberto Vitale — although he left that post in November 1989 to become the head of Random House. Vitale, despite his Italian-sounding name, is a Jew.

The author’s ethnicity is unknown, although his surname, Ahern, is English. If we believe the name, then we have one more proof that there are some White men who will do absolutely anything for money.

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Source: National Vanguard magazine, No. 111, June–July 1990, pp. 15–16; transcribed by Anthony Collins