Malcolm P. ShielWilliam Pierce

The Legacy of William Pierce

Today, on what would have been his 84th birthday, we honor William Luther Pierce, the founder of the National Alliance and of this online magazine.

IT IS SUMMERTIME in the last year of the 20th Century. Dr. William Pierce — novelist, philosopher, perhaps the world’s most influential White separatist — likes to look out from his mountain aerie and imagine the end of America as we know it.

First, the economy will sour. There will be riots in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit. Men and women will be dragged from their cars; there will be atrocities. Whites and Blacks will savagely battle each other in the streets. Forced to protect themselves, White Americans will at long last become radicalized around their Aryan heritage and rebel against the Jewish-controlled central government. Led by patriots who have studied Pierce’s works, Whites will establish their own temporary homelands. Ultimately, they will seize control of the smoking ruins and build a new White nation.

Pierce is holding up an article from the Forward, a weekly Jewish paper, attacking Pat Buchanan for having complimented Hitler on his “extraordinary gifts.” He says: “This is where the Jews really let their hair down.” He subscribes to nearly all the leading Jewish publications; they take up space on shelves next to copies of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, within sight of a painting inscribed to Pierce by Arno Breker, the Fuehrer’s favorite artist. In nearby rooms, National Alliance members and staffers — some of whom also live on the property — are busily stuffing envelopes with literature and pecking away on computers.

William Pierce
William Pierce

Pierce gives off an amiable, rumpled impression. A gaunt and gangly six feet four; wearing wire-rim glasses and denim jacket, the former physicist looks as if he had been up all night scribbling equations on the magnetic effects of solid-state physics, his former specialty.

On his desk sits the shiny red Membership Handbook of the National Alliance, the group that Pierce founded in the 1970s with the intent of reversing the “the racially devolutionary course of the last few millennia.”

At sixty-six, William Pierce is the courtly elder statesman and undisputed intellectual godfather of the White resistance. He is admired equally by rebellious teenagers and such veteran activists as David Duke. “He’s a brilliant writer, a true political dissident,” Duke says. “We take turns being named the most dangerous man in America by the Anti-Defamation League.”

Pierce is so venerated in part because he is tireless in promoting his vision of the future. To do this, he says, it has been necessary to circumvent Jewish control of the media. He is methodically establishing beachheads for his agenda through independent channels — on the Internet at natvan.com and natall.com, over the radio with a weekly half-hour broadcast called American Dissident Voices that reaches more than 100,000 listeners, and through his National Vanguard Books.

The Alliance’s publishing arm produces a number of its own works and also sells the expected canon — Mein Kampf, for instance; but in an effort to educate its readers in the ways of the enemy, it also distributes Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (“A masterful depiction of life in the Great Satan,” reads the catalog blurb. “Pure enjoyment.”), James B. Stewart’s Den of Thieves (“The purse-carrying [Ivan] Boesky is the epitome of the Jew”) and Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan of the Apes (“An Aryan baby is raised by an ape in the jungles of Blackest Africa”), among other well-known books.

Pierce’s expanding mail-order empire has prompted the Washington Post to describe him as running an “Amazon.com of hate.” Among the books sold is Pierce’s own The Turner Diaries, a novel he published in 1978.

bookJewish groups, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), like to accuse that book of inspiring the Oklahoma City bombing, for which Timothy McVeigh was convicted in 1995. Pierce denies any such credit. “McVeigh was upset about Waco,” he parries. “I can’t say what effect my book had on him. Anyway, the Bible has probably gotten people to do more things than The Turner Diaries.” He adds that McVeigh himself said that his bombing was in retaliation for the Waco Massacre. And McVeigh was no White racialist: He had a co-conspirator who was in an interracial marriage. “I never had any contact with him,” Pierce says, though curiously, in the hours before the bombing, investigators determined that McVeigh called the Alliance’s recorded message line seven times, never reaching a live person because the line is never answered live. Was McVeigh — or someone using McVeigh’s phone card — trying to establish a connection? “It sure looks that way,” says Kevin Strom, one of Pierce’s lieutenants who founded the Alliance’s radio show.

“Innocent people get killed in a war,” Pierce says, sighing. “Just think about the Allied carpet-bombing of German cities during World War II. That doesn’t change the strategic or tactical planning behind it. Oklahoma City was sort of inevitable. You can expect more of these things as the population becomes more alienated.”

To date, The Turner Diaries has sold more than 350,000 copies, according to the Washington Post, primarily through mail order and at gun shows, and, to a very small extent, through bookstores.

The Turner Diaries is a true underground classic, graphically reminding readers that before the “underground” was the spawning place for next season’s fashions and musical tastes, it was the hideout of hardened revolutionaries. As Mao’s Little Red Book inspired the Red Guards, as Uncle Tom’s Cabin aroused the abolitionists against slavery, so has Pierce’s fiction sparked the White resistance.

Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler

The Alliance is often described as a “neo-Nazi” organization, but Pierce, knowing the reflexive connotations of the word “Nazi,” says the proper term is National Socialist. He also says the Alliance is charting its own course, not aping any historical phenomenon, no matter how worthy: “I admire many things that Hitler wrote, many of the programs and policies that he instituted in Germany, but we do not blindly copy anyone else’s policies or programs. We’ve formulated our own program in view of the situation that we face here in America today.” He actually disdains those he calls “hobbyists,” who dress up in stormtrooper regalia, flex biceps tattooed with swastikas, and march around screaming “nigger” this, and “Jew” that. He wants an Alliance composed of successful professionals, the kind of folks who might otherwise head Boy Scout troops in their spare time. “The general image of ‘racists,’” — those highlighted by the Jewish-owned media — he says, “are these 400-pound women and guys who are missing teeth at a Klan rally. The National Alliance has never tried to appeal to those people. We can’t have a howling mob outside the city gates. We need people inside to open the gates. We want CPAs, high school teachers, engineers.”

William Pierce as a young child
William Pierce as a young child

William Pierce was born on September 11, 1933 in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the first child in his family, having a single sibling, a brother. When Pierce was eight years old, his father, an insurance salesman, was struck and killed by an automobile. Pierce had to help his mother make ends meet as a child, and he later claimed that these hard times helped him to develop a tough, self-motivating attitude that greatly influenced his development: “I think this external discipline; this external control — being forced over a long period of time to do things I didn’t want to do but that were necessary to do — helped me develop self-discipline. A lot of children these days never learn that. It’s amazing how many adults can’t do that. They can’t stick at a job they don’t want to do.” (Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds, 2001, p. 29).

Dr. Pierce and Hadley
Dr. Pierce and Hadley

As Pierce shuts off the computer, his cat, Hadley, a bluepoint Siamese, picks his way across the desk, growling as he goes and starting a landslide of insurrectionary documents. The animal, whose portrait graces the wall in a mini-gallery of cat shots, is the fourth incarnation of a Siamese named Harold, who kept Pierce company during the lonely days when he lived and worked in a cramped apartment, eating supermarket pizzas and writing The Turner Diaries. “I have almost a spiritual communion with cats — they’re graceful, they’re beautiful, and they forgive me for everything.”

In the lobby of the tiny post office in Hillsboro, Pierce’s wife Sevdi is waiting, flipping through a clothing catalog. She’s a pretty woman from Bulgaria who looks decades younger than Pierce, who is looking through two boxes of mail. There’s a copy of the Jerusalem Post, a Manila packet from a sympathizer in Zagreb, Croatia, and several stacks of letters, ten or fifteen to a bundle. “It’s the highlight of my day, seeing the membership applications arrive,” he says. On the drive back to the mountain, the Pocahontas County landscape spins by. This rural region astride the Allegheny Mountains in southeastern West Virginia is sparsely populated, with just 9,000 residents — of whom 8,932 are White.

Thomas H. Watts, Attorney General of the Confederate States of America and ancestor of William L. Pierce
Thomas H. Watts, Attorney General of the Confederate States of America and ancestor of William L. Pierce

When he began writing The Turner Diaries in 1975, William Pierce was a forty-two-year-old former physicist who had exiled himself a few years before from his former work in academia and the aerospace industry. He did so in order to lead the National Youth Alliance (reorganized as the National Alliance in 1974) and edit the organization’s newspaper, Attack!

He set up shop in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Crystal City, Virginia, living on fifty dollars a month in his office above a real estate agency. The telephone hardly ever rang. By day, he wrote. At night, he shared the bed with his epileptic cat, Harold. When not working, Pierce was a soul adrift, wandering through embassy parties at the invitation of a friend who worked in government, blending into the crowd at demonstrations, reading politics and sociology in the Library of Congress. He’d pore over racialist tracts published in the Twenties and Thirties, notice how they’d been checked out once every two decades, and think, “My God — is this what I’m going to give up my career for?” He was invisible, unanchored by domestic responsibilities, a spy with subversive ambitions at loose in the grand mansion of history.

William Pierce as a student at military school
William Pierce as a teenage student at Allen Military Academy

He had grown up in — as he puts it — an “all-White world” throughout the South: Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, and finally Texas. His father was a former merchant marine. His mother prided herself on being a direct descendant of Thomas H. Watts, who served in the Confederacy as a governor and as Attorney General under Jefferson Davis. Watts’ stern face stared down at the Pierce household from a framed fifty-dollar Confederate bill.

In those years, Pierce revealed a character both calm and kind. His younger brother Sanders remembers him as a gentle child: “When he was eight and another kid knocked his glasses off, Bill just got up and put them back on.” Pierce disliked it when his fellow cadets at Allen Military Academy in Bryan, Texas, went “coon conking” — driving past Black pedestrians and knocking them down with a pole.

Thomas Watts' portrait was featured on a Confederate $50 note, one of which was framed in Dr. Pierce's family home during his youth
Thomas Watts’ portrait was featured on a Confederate $50 note, one of which was framed in Dr. Pierce’s family home during his youth

When he arrived at Rice University in 1951, he studied physics and chemistry, a scholarship student among oil-rich frat boys. What he really wanted, however, was to be an astronaut. Growing up in the Thirties and Forties, he had become enamored of space travel even before it was a realistic possibility. He longed to see himself as a storybook hero, an outsider accomplishing great deeds against long odds — and, incidentally, winning the girl. As the first step in becoming an astronaut, he inquired about joining the Air Force but was told that his poor vision would prevent him from being a pilot.

So, instead of outer space, the would-be adventurer took off for graduate school — first to Cal Tech, then to the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he often slept in the lab on a folding cot next to the electromagnet. By the time he acquired his Ph.D. in physics in 1962, Pierce could look forward to a solid, even brilliant, career as a physicist. He was hired as a junior faculty member by Oregon State that same year. “He came and gave a collegial talk at the department and bowled us over,” says David Burch, a former colleague.

In the early Sixties, Corvallis, Oregon, was not an especially diverse place. One of his colleagues in the physics department was a young professor named Cliff Fairchild. Having been hired the same year, “he and I were naturally thrown together,” Pierce says. “We invited each other over to our houses. We drank together and so on.” To Pierce, there was only one exceedingly odd fact about Fairchild: He was married to a Black woman.

“I couldn’t understand why a White guy would pick a non-White woman, because to me they weren’t attractive. Still, my idea at the time was that marriage was a strictly private matter. But then they began having kids, and these kids were horrible-looking things. I said, ‘Jesus. Why should anybody deliberately have kids like that?’ I couldn’t have told you why I didn’t like this. Some people, they look at a piece of art and they say, ‘God, that’s ugly.’ But they don’t have a theory to fit the art into.”

His sense of aesthetics violated, Pierce became intolerant of the Fairchilds’ marriage. “I just slowly withdrew from them,” he says. “I didn’t have enough self-confidence to say to him, ‘What are you doing married to a non-White woman?’”

Now, thirty-eight years after he joined the faculty with Pierce, Cliff Fairchild is shocked to hear of this virulent reaction to his marriage. “Neither my wife nor I felt any animosity,” he says. “Bill Pierce never told a racist joke, and we’ve heard a few in Corvallis. We played bridge together, went camping with our families. There’s a photograph of us on top of a mountain in eastern Oregon with the Pierces, with me carrying my son in a backpack.”

George Lincoln Rockwell
George Lincoln Rockwell

One night in the mid-Sixties, Pierce watched a speech on television by George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party. “All these Jews and liberal activists in the audience were throwing tomatoes and pop bottles and trying to drown him out,” Pierce says. He was impressed by Rockwell’s cool as he dodged the debris and continued to speak: “He was facing an early example of political correctness.” He began a correspondence with Rockwell that led to friendship. “Rockwell was a very sane guy,” Pierce says. “No ego problems. Intelligent. An artist.”

Pierce was taken as much by Rockwell’s ideas about racial matters as he was by his manner. It occurred to him that he, too, might like to try his hand at writing about race. He left Oregon State in 1965 after three years on the faculty and moved his wife and sons to the East Coast, accepting a job in North Haven, Connecticut, as senior research scientist for the Pratt and Whitney aerospace laboratory.

His new, more lucrative position would allow him to set aside enough money so that he could someday write full time. He was staking everything on his conviction that history was with him, that he would become a brave pamphleteer in the footsteps of Thomas Paine prior to the first American Revolution. Eventually, Pierce decided that he would publish a journal of ideas. Rockwell said he had been thinking the same thing. He suggested that Pierce become the editor of a new journal — National Socialist World. The position would be unpaid.

“Oh, boy, that was a big jump,” Pierce says, “giving up a paycheck for a leap into the unknown.” He uprooted his family once again, settling in Virginia. When Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce asked himself, “What am I to do with my life now?” He decided, he says, to devote himself “to the service of the Life Force, as George Bernard Shaw would have said. Or, as Nietzsche would have said, to help prepare the way for the coming of the Superman.”

* * *

BY THE MID-1970s, William Pierce was convinced that the essays he was publishing in Attack!, the journal of the National Alliance, were having little effect. “I thought what I was saying was profound, earthshaking,” he says, laughing. “My God — it didn’t even make a ripple.”

RPO-typewriter1
Revilo Oliver

His friend Revilo Oliver, then a classics professor at the University of Illinois — and a longtime racial patriot — suggested that he try disseminating his views through fiction, as was done in didactic novels such as Jack London’s The Iron Heel.

And so, writing in longhand, Pierce began composing The Turner Diaries, the fictional diary of Earl Turner. The novel opens portentously:

“September 16, 1991: Today it finally began! After all these years of talking — and nothing but talking — we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words.”

The writing came easily. Pierce had finally tapped into perhaps his greatest capacity: his ability to dream. He portrays the protagonist, Earl Turner, as a soldier in an underground White army called the Organization that is fighting to bring down the Jewish-controlled federal government. Turner helps establish a White homeland in Southern California and eventually, heroically, sacrifices himself by flying a crop-duster armed with a nuclear warhead into the Pentagon. For his kamikaze attack, Turner is enshrined in the Record of Martyrs, his name memorized by grateful White schoolchildren, and his diaries made available to the general public in a special edition issued 200 years after the Great Revolution.

From 1975 to 1978, William Pierce serialized the narrative in Attack! and its successor, National Vanguard. The response astounded him: “I mean, people would call up the office, desperate. They’d say, ‘I missed the last issue — you know, installment fourteen. I’ve got to have it. I don’t know what happened!’ And I said, ‘Sorry — sold out.’”

With a serial that popular –creating more reader excitement than all the other works he’d published put together — putting the story into book form was obviously the right thing to do.

One of The Turner Diaries’ earliest and most passionate readers was Robert Mathews, a young man from Metaline Falls, Washington, who tried to launch an abortive White revolution in the mid-1980s. In 1983, before that attempt ever took place, Mathews delivered a fiery speech at a National Alliance convention in Arlington, Virginia. “My brothers, my sisters,” Mathews began. “From the mist-shrouded, forested valleys and mountains of the Pacific Northwest, I bring you a message of solidarity, a call to action, and a demand for adherence to duty… We have broken the chains of Jewish thought … Stand up like men and reclaim our soil! Kinsmen, arise! Look toward the stars, and proclaim our destiny!” It was essentially a call to arms — and, in fact, when the recorded speech was later sold by National Vanguard Books, it was given the title “A Call to Arms” and contained an introduction by Dr. Pierce.

At the convention, Pierce buttonholed Mathews. “I said, ‘Bob, people were really affected by your talk. But I guess I must disagree with you about the time for revolution being ripe, because I think most people are not ready to respond to a call to arms.’ But Bob disagreed with me. And then shortly after that, he dropped out of the Alliance and began doing his thing.”

Some have accused Dr. Pierce of receiving proceeds from Mathews’ revolutionary efforts. Asked if he ever received money from Mathews, Pierce jokes, “He paid his dues before he dropped out of the Alliance.” And that’s all.

William Pierce insists — and not just to the media, but to his members as well — that the Alliance is a legal, non-violent organization. From early on, he publicly discouraged and forbade illegal acts by members. In fact, the Alliance bars persons serving time in prisons or jails from joining — except in “extraordinary circumstances,” such as those charged solely because of their political or racial beliefs.

In the 1970s Pierce created the religion Cosmotheism, which embodied the spiritual beliefs at the root of his worldview. Cosmotheism is a form of panentheism, a belief which asserts that “all is within God and God is within all.” It considers the nature of reality and of existence to be continually evolving toward higher and higher levels of consciousness. Race-formation, racial separation, and eventual speciation are necessary parts of this continuous evolution.

In his speech “Our Cause” Pierce said:

All we require is that you share with us a commitment to the simple, but great, truth which I have explained to you here, that you understand that you are a part of the whole, which is the Creator, that you understand that your purpose, the purpose of mankind and the purpose of every other part of creation, is the Creator’s purpose, that this purpose is the never-ending ascent of the path of creation, the path of life symbolized by our life rune, that you understand that this path leads ever upward toward the Creator’s self-realization, and that the destiny of those who follow this path is godhood.

Pierce described Cosmotheism as being based on “[t]he idea of an evolutionary universe … with an evolution toward ever higher and higher states of self-consciousness.” His political ideas followed from this, and were centered on racial progress through self-selection, eugenics, and struggle as the means of advancing the White race toward what he sometimes called Higher Man. In his view, the White race represented the pinnacle of human evolution thus far — and therefore it should be kept genetically separate from all other races.

The Turner Diaries, first edition
The Turner Diaries, first edition

A Cosmotheist thread can be found throughout most of Dr. Pierce’s political writings, even in The Turner Diaries. In that book, the title character is inducted into an elite group of White revolutionaries called the Order. As a part of this induction, Turner is given a religious text to read that is simply called The Book. After reading it, Turner is awestruck, and comments that “We are truly instruments of God in the fulfillment of His grand design.” In 1998 Pierce expressed interest in writing a book on the subject of Cosmotheist theology, something he repeated to Professor Robert Griffin in 2001.

Pierce said that the ease of modern life has caused a deterioration of the race — a devolution. The elements of Nature, which enforce the law of “the survival of the fittest,” are held at least partly at bay by science and technology. Therefore today the unfit reproduce in greater numbers — effectively stopping evolution. In addition to the detrimental effects of modern civilization in general, Pierce saw Christianity as being one of the key factors that has stood in the way of the upward progress of our race. One of his objections was the non-Aryan origin of the religion. In a critique of the American conservative movement, he wrote: “The root of the problem …is that the religion of the Moral Majority is of alien origin. It grew out of a Jewish sect, and it was exported to Europe and Asia.” (quoted by Strom, 2003).

Pierce also felt that Christian theology contained elements that were inherently anti-racial (and therefore anti-evolutionary): “And then there is the universalistic message of Christianity. That we are all alike, that fundamentally there is no difference among people, that the only thing that counts is whether you are in or out of Jesus’ flock. It’s the ‘we are all one in Christ Jesus’ idea — man and woman, White and Black, Greek and Jew …All of that is fundamentally opposed to the evolutionary view that I have and which I think is necessary for progress.” (quoted by Griffin, 2001, p. 261)

In Pierce’s view, we are all connected to the universe itself, and therefore have a responsibility to try to improve the great whole of which we are a part. Pierce believed that monotheism, with its separate God and its promise of a great reward in the afterlife, encouraged people to withdraw from the physical world and “prepare themselves for heaven.” This clearly contradicted Pierce’s activist ideology, which stresses action to change this world, the real world, the only world there is — rather than waiting for the Almighty to “set things right in the final days.”

Christians are nevertheless allowed to join the National Alliance, and hundreds upon hundreds have done so. Pierce stated that approximately twenty to twenty-five percent of Alliance members are Christians (Swain and Nieli, p. 273). One can only assume that these are men and women for whom, in Pierce’s words, “race comes first.”

Those who favor the simple left/right dichotomy as a means of classifying political ideologies might be surprised to learn that William Pierce was a strong critic of the capitalist system. Pierce acknowledged that capitalism had done much to forward the technological advancement of the West (Strom, BANV, p. 14). But he suggested that capitalism would be an unsuitable economic system in a post-revolutionary world, given that it placed the self-interest of the individual above the well being of the race: “The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick-maker, of course, also have the all-too-human tendency of viewing the world in the light of their own parochial interests. The butcher’s feelings about what the price of pork chops ought to be are not half as likely to be based on what’s good for the community as they are on what’s good for his own pocketbook”

Pierce saw that the deepest evil in communism “was not that it took property away from those who had earned it or inherited it and gave it to those who had not; the evil was not that it discouraged individual initiative, or that it eventually made an economic basket case out of every nation on which it was imposed. The evil of communism was that it preached egalitarianism. It denied the differences in human quality among individuals and among races. Worse, it inverted the natural rankings of human beings. It appealed to the worst to bring down the best.” (American Dissident Voices, 7/14/01).

Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler

Dr. Pierce once referred to Adolf Hitler as “the greatest man of our era,” so it should come as little surprise to discover that he felt the Second World War had been won by the wrong side. In its time, the Third Reich, Pierce believed, had offered humanity its best hope for achieving the purpose of the Creator. Pierce saw the brutal destruction of National Socialist Germany as a turning point in human history. After the war, racialist ideals were denigrated by a hostile media and academic establishment, and Whites were taught to regard National Socialism in particular with vehement repugnance — and to regard virtually any assertion of White interests as “tainted” with “Nazism.” William Pierce felt that Hitler’s memory would live on nevertheless: “…what will count in the long run in determining Adolf Hitler’s stature is not whether he won or lost the war, but whether it was he or his adversaries who were on the side of the Life Force, whether it was he or they who served the cause of Truth and human progress. We only have to look around us today to see that it was not they.”

An American Dissident Voices listener once wrote in and asked Dr. Pierce why he seemed to be so fixated on the Jews. Dr. Pierce replied:

“You know, the reason I speak so often about Jews is not that Jews are my favorite topic; it is that the Jews, through their domination of our news and entertainment media, have a more powerful influence on public opinion and therefore our government than any other coherent group. Well, there’s more to it than that. Jews are not only more powerful than any other group, they are special in other ways as well: cleverer, more deceptive, more malevolent. Anyway, we cannot solve our other problems without first solving our Jewish problem. That is a fact. That is why I talk so much about Jews.”

Pierce felt that the ultimate goal of the Jewish power structure was the annihilation of our race. With mass non-White immigration, millions of “migrant” invaders, and a media-promoted “moral” paradigm of multiracialism and racial mixing in all formerly White nations, and only in White nations, it’s hard not to agree that he is right. It was only our race, Dr. Pierce teaches us, with our combination of unsurpassed intelligence and spiritual nobility, who posed any real threat to the Jewish desire for world domination:

“The idea, of course, is to exterminate us, to wage genocide against us, to leave us no opportunity to be among our own kind, no opportunity to feel a sense of kinship and belonging among our own people, no opportunity to organize and defend ourselves. They [the Jews] want to be the one and only self-conscious group on the Earth able to act intelligently in promoting their group interests, and then the world will belong to them. They’ve been pretty successful so far in their campaign against us.” (quoted by Griffin, 2001, p. 307)

Pierce believed that one aim of the Jews was to spiritually weaken Whites, making us less likely to perceive their genocidal plans. Miscegenation would be the Jew’s final and ultimate weapon, destroying the White race forever through irreversible interbreeding with other races.

Pierce held that with the modernization of Western society and the increased luxury that came along with it, another defect emerged in the White race: individualism. As he put it: ” … whereas 50 years ago most persons at least felt obligated to accept and pay lip service to society-centered, nation-centered, or race-centered mores, today there is often no comprehension or even awareness of any viewpoint but one of extreme individualism. Society, in the eyes of far too large a portion of the current generation of Westerners, exists to serve the needs of the individual, and that is all.” (Strom [ed.], Best of Attack and National Vanguard, p. 191).

Pierce further believed that this trend was not only damaging to society, but showed a lack of maturity on the part of the person in question: “There is in each of us a combination of infantile urges and more mature desires and needs. The infant seeks only to gratify himself and avoid pain. The well-developed man or woman has a more inclusive concept of ‘self” than that of the infant. He is concerned not only about his own needs but also about the needs of his family, his community, his clan, his nation, and his race.” (Strom [ed.], Free Speech, No. 2).

In the world of the American right, where William Pierce is sometimes wrongly placed, rah-rah “my country right or wrong”-style patriotism is still the norm. The American flag is waved proudly, and America is held up as being the greatest of the world’s nations. Pierce set himself apart from most of his rightist contemporaries by rejecting the historical image of America as being a paragon of moral virtue. He took the risk of alienating many potential supporters when he made statements such as the following, which described America’s involvement in the Second World War:

“There were a lot of decent Americans who fought in the war in Europe, anti-Communist Americans, and many of them don’t want to think about the fact that they fought on the wrong side …I believe that knowing the truth… is far more important than protecting our carefully-nurtured belief that we were on the side of righteousness. I believe that understanding how we were deceived in the past is necessary if we are to avoid being deceived in the future.” (quoted in Griffin, 2001, pp. 274-275).

To William Pierce, race counted — but not nationality. He said: “We in the National Alliance are not nationalists in the old-fashioned sense, in the sense of geographic nationalism. We don’t belong to the ‘USA, right or wrong’ crowd, which considers any featherless biped claiming U.S. citizenship, regardless of race, color, or creed as a compatriot. Our nationalism is really racial nationalism. Our compatriots are our fellow White men and women, our fellow Europeans, everywhere: in America, in Europe, in South Africa. Nationalism in our sense, racial nationalism, is still a relatively new thing as a political ideology, although it is based on instincts much older than any ideology.” (quoted. in Griffin, 2001, p. 377).

For William Pierce, the very concept of the “democratic process” was farcical. One of Dr. Pierce’s co-workers in the Alliance, David Sims, put it well: “Democracy is inferior to the dictatorship of the wise. A hundred ordinary people do not one navigator make. Any decision regarding a lifeboat’s course that emerges from a vote among a hundred untrained passengers has less worth than the opinion of someone who really does know how to read the signs of the sky by night and by day, by the sextant and the clock. And countries follow this same general principle. Although not everyone who claims to know what should be done really does know, the masses never do.”

If the purpose of the state is not to make sure that every single human within its borders has an equal vote and a job and a full belly, then what is it for? William Pierce told us the answer: “The purpose of the state is to fulfill the destiny of the Universe.”

* * *

Dr. Pierce decides to close up shop for the day and ride up to the top of his mountain. It takes a few minutes, the four-wheel drive bucking over the rugged road as dusk comes on.

The local-yokel Sheriff, Jerry Dale, who once said that Pierce was a “dangerous” follower of “George Norman Rockwell,” believes that Pierce selected this property because it is honeycombed with limestone caverns. “My personal opinion is that the caves were one of his most important criteria,” says Dale. “It all fits into his philosophy of a race war, and nuclear weapons, and the atmosphere being contaminated. And he and his survivalists, who have been trained, will go underground and live until the atmosphere clears up.”

The Land, July 2, 1984: Gerry Sykes, Alan Balogh, Kevin Strom, William Pierce
Exploring “The Land” for the first time, July 2, 1984: Gerry Sykes, Alan Balogh, Kevin Strom, William Pierce. Photographer: Jim DeWitt.

Pierce acknowledges that there are a couple of caves below his land but snickers at the bomb shelter claim. “It’s a misallocation of resources,” he says, “to have people out here digging foxholes. You can’t beat the military now. They could come in here with just one of their high-tech jets, drop a bunch of bombs and wipe us out in ten minutes.”

By the time Pierce reaches the mountaintop, it’s twilight, the air crisp and still. The countryside spreads out below, as beautiful as a Maxfield Parrish landscape. A few farmhouse lights gleam in the distance. A roadway winds its blue way across the valley. “You didn’t used to see lights when I first moved here,” Pierce says.

He stares out into the valley, sighs, and talks about what the big cities are turning into. “People cannot imagine what it’s going be like twenty-five years from now,” he says. “They can’t imagine how bad it’s going to be — groups of five, all armed with machine guns, to get from here to the corner grocery store, where they’ll have to open up a slot to see whether they’ll let you in. If we don’t do something, we’re going to be gone as a race.”

In the time he has left, he says, he hopes to “build a strong organization of fully committed lifelong revolutionaries.” He wants to write a few more books, including the one on Cosmotheism. Another, he says, will be “a practical guide on how to change the course of history.”

Does he believe he has changed the course of history?

“No,” he says. “Well, I mean, every sparrow that falls, every blade of grass changes history, but …” He pauses. “Maybe I’m that Roman soldier who stayed at his post while Mount Vesuvius was erupting,” he says. “Nobody came to relieve him, so he just stayed there.”

Then he turns to head back down the mountain.

* * *

Source: Malcolm Shiel

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Shaw Greene
Shaw Greene
15 September, 2017 8:20 am

Believe or not. We are under attack too. I’m South Korean. They started to bring in black people as a specially talented sportsman. A female black volleyball player and then today(9/15/2017) another black male basketball layer. The black basketball player is said to be a Korean citizen. Soon they will normalize this black immigration in every corner of our everyday life. It’s long been since they promoted homosexuality and feminism. These days, their screeching is getting louder and louder everyday. Looking at the picture of Dr. Luther Pierce, I just wish that we Korean should have a man like him. Almost all Koreans don’t know what’s really happening in US and Europe. We Koreans tend to believe what the Hollywood movie and CNN tells us because we were liberated by… Read more »

Will W Williams
Will W Williams
Reply to  Shaw Greene
15 September, 2017 3:26 pm

Thank you, Shaw. There’s no reason that race-minded Koreans cannot embrace Dr. Pierce’s teachings for your people as we racially loyal Whites have for ours. It’s the same with the best race-centered ideas of National-Socialism, when compared with other political ideologies. It’s a shame to see Korean people divided artificially between capitalist democrats and communists, sort of like Vietnam was. Makes no sense. Eventually Koreans will throw off foreign control and unite around common blood. It’s interesting to learn how sports are used in Korea for racial integration of Blacks into Korean society as sports have been used here similarly for full-blown racial integration since before World War II. Ideally, all of those Korean female golfers who have moved to the U.S. will find their way back to their homeland… Read more »

Shawn Greene
Shawn Greene
Reply to  Will W Williams
17 September, 2017 2:36 am

Thank you for your interest, Will. I should probably say ‘sorry’ first, because my people are used as a weapon against your people by the Jews to some extent. For a long time, we just believed that White people suddenly decided to accept other race as their neighbor and it’s from pure generosity and enlightenment. We just believed that it was your people’s own decision. Nobody knows that it was forced by the Jews and ‘Melting Pot’ was Jewish invention. These days only tiny group of people in South Korea including me started to notice it. There is an irony that we Koreans are now a target of that deception . The recent promotion of Black, South East Asian and Muslim immigration is supported by my own people who were… Read more »