by Andrew Macdonald 5 страница

Katherine and I have talked about this, and, just as we are unwilling to regard our growing relationship as purely sexual, bearing no obligations, neither are we inclined to formalize it yet. For one thing, we still have a lot to learn about each other. For another, we each have an overriding commitment to the Organization and to our unit, and we must not lightly do anything which might infringe upon that commitment.

Nevertheless, we'll have to resolve things one way or another pretty soon.

The Turner Diaries

Chapter VII

October 23, 1991. This morning is my first chance to write since Katherine and I picked up the munitions in Maryland last week. Our unit has carried out three missions in the last six days.

Altogether, the Organization is held responsible for more than 200 separate incidents in different parts of the country, according to news reports. We are really into the thick of a guerrilla war now.

Last Monday night, Henry, George, and I raided the Washington Post. It was a quick thing, requiring little preparation, although we did argue for a few minutes ahead of time about the way it should be done.

Henry was for going after personnel, but we ended up wrecking one of their presses instead. Henry's idea was that the three of us should force our way into the newsroom and editorial offices on the sixth floor of the Washington Post building and kill as many people as we could with fragmentation grenades and machine guns. If we struck just before their 7: 30 PM deadline, we would catch nearly everyone in.

George overruled that maneuver as being too risky to be carried out without detailed planning. Hundreds of people work in the Washington Post building, and the sounds of grenades and shooting on the sixth floor would probably bring a lot of them swarming into the stairwells and lobby. If we tried to come down on the elevators, someone could pull the main switch on us, and we'd be trapped.

On the other hand, the Post's pressroom is visible through a big plate-glass window from the lobby. So I rigged up a makeshift bomb by taping a hand grenade to a small anti-tank mine. The whole thing weighed about six pounds and was quite awkward, but it could be thrown about 50 feet like an oversized grenade.

We parked in an alley about 100 yards from the main entrance of the Post. As soon as George had disarmed the guard, Henry blasted a huge hole in the pressroom window with his sawed-off shotgun. Then I pulled the pin on the grenade-mine contraption I had rigged and heaved it into the rollers of the nearest press, which was just being plated up for the night's run.

We ducked behind the masonry parapet while the bomb exploded, and then Henry and I hurriedly threw half-a-dozen thermite grenades into the pressroom. We were all back in the all before anyone had even come out onto the sidewalk, and so no one saw our car. Katherine, of course, had done her usual magic with our faces.

The next morning the Post appeared on the streets about an hour later than usual, and home subscribers missed their papers altogether, since the early editions had been skipped, but the Post was otherwise apparently none the worse for wear. We had substantially damaged only one press with our bomb and smoked things up a bit with our incendiary grenades, one of which set a barrel of ink afire, but the Post had lost virtually none of its capacity for spreading its lies and venom as a result of our efforts.

We were quite chagrined by this outcome. It became clear to us that we had foolishly taken a risk far out of proportion to any advantage which could have been reasonably expected.

We have resolved that, in the future, we will undertake no mission on our own initiative until we have carefully evaluated its objective and convinced ourselves that it is worth the risk. We cannot afford to strike the System simply for the sake of striking, or we will become like an army of gnats trying to bite an elephant to death. Each blow must be carefully calculated for its effect.

Henry's idea of attacking the Post's newsroom and editorial of fices seems much better in retrospect. We should have held off for a few days in order to work out a sound plan which would have really crippled the Post, instead of rushing into our halfassed raid on its presses. All we really succeeded in doing was putting the Post on guard and making any future raids much more hazardous.

We did redeem ourselves a bit the morning after the raid, however. Surmising that the editorial staff had spent most of the night in their offices writing new copy about the events of the evening and would, therefore, be at home sleeping late, we decided to pay one of them a visit.

After looking over the newspaper, we settled on the editorialpage editor, who had written a particularly vicious editorial against us. His words dripped with Talmudic hatred. Racists like us, he said, deserve no consideration from the police or any decent citizen. We should be shot down on sight like mad dogs. Quite a contrast with his usual solicitude for Black rapists and murderers and his tirades against " police brutality" and " overreaction"!

Since his editorial was an incitement to murder, it seemed to us only appropriate that he be given a taste of his own remedy.

Henry and I rode a bus downtown and then waved down a taxi with a Black driver. By the time we pulled up in the editor's driveway in Silver Spring, the Black was in the trunk-dead.

I waited in the taxi while Henry rang the bell and told the woman who answered that he was delivering a package from the Post and needed a signed receipt. When the sleepy-eyed editor appeared at the door in his bathrobe a few moments later, Henry literally blew him in half with two blasts from the sawed-off shotgun he had been carrying under his jacket.

On Wednesday all four of us (Katherine drove the car) completely destroyed the Washington area's most powerful TV transmitter. That one was hairy, and there were moments when I didn't think we were going to get away.

It is still not clear what effect all our activity is having on the general public. For the most part they are just going about their affairs as they always have.

There have been effects, though. The National Guards of a dozen states have been called up to reinforce local police forces, and there are now large, around-the-clock guard details stationed outside every government building in Washington, the major media of fices in a number of cities, and the homes of hundreds of government officials.

Within a week, I suspect, every Congressman, every Federal judge, and every Federal bureaucrat from the assistant-secretary level on up will have been assigned a permanent bodyguard detail. All the sandbags, machine guns, and khaki uniforms that one is beginning to see everywhere in Washington cannot help but raise the consciousness of the public-although I'm sure the situation is much less dramatic out in Iowa than it is here.

Our biggest difficulty is that the public sees us and everything we do only through the media. We are able to make ourselves enough of a nuisance that the media can't afford to ignore or belittle us, and so they are using the opposite tactic of deluging the public with distortions, half-truths, and lies about us. For the last two weeks they've been giving us a non-stop roasting, trying to convince everyone that we are the incarnation of evil, a threat to everything decent, noble, and worthwhile.

They have unleashed the full power of the mass media on us; not just the usual biased-news treatment, but long " background" articles in the Sunday supplements, complete with faked photographs of Organization meetings and activities, discussions by " experts" on TV panel shows-everything! Some of the stories they've invented about us are really incredible, but I'm afraid the American public is just gullible enough to believe them.

What's happening now is reminiscent of the media campaign against Hitler and the Germans back in the 1940's: stories about Hitler flying into rages and chewing carpets, phony German plans for the invasion of America, babies being skinned alive to make lampshades and then boiled down into soap, girls kidnapped and sent to Nazi " stud farms. " The Jews convinced the American people that those stories were true, and the result was World War II, with millions of the best of our race butchered -by us-and all of eastern and central Europe turned into a huge, communist prison camp.

Now it looks very much like the System has again made the deliberate decision to build up a state of war hysteria in the public by representing us as an even bigger threat than we really are. We are the new Germans, and the country is being wound up psychologically to lick us.

Thus, the System is cooperating more fully than we could have imagined in arousing the public's consciousness of our struggle. What is unnerving about it is my strong suspicion that the top echelons in the System aren't really that worried about our threat to them and are cynically using us as an excuse for carrying through certain programs of their own, such as the internal-passport program.

Our unit was assigned the general task-right after the FBI bombing-of combating the media in this area by direct action, Just as other units were assigned other arms of the System as targets. But it is clear that we can't win by direct action alone; there are too many of them and too few of us. We must convince a substantial portion of the American people that what we are doing iS both necessary and proper.

The latter is a propaganda task, and so far we haven't been very successful. Units 2 and 6 are primarily responsible for propaganda m the Washington area, and I understand that Unit 6's people have strewn out tons of leaflets in the streets; Henry picked up one from a sidewalk downtown yesterday. I'm afraid that leaflets alone can't make much headway against the System's mass media, though.

Our most spectacular propaganda effort here occurred last Wednesday, and it ended in a major tragedy. The same day our unit blew up the TV station, three men from Unit 6 seized a radio station and began broadcasting a call for the public to join the Organization's fight to smash the System.

They had pre-recorded their message on tape, and they boobytrapped the doors to the station, after locking all the station employees in a supply closet. They intended to make their getaway while the tape was being broadcast, hoping that the police would think they were still inside and would lay siege to the place with tear gas-thus giving them half an hour or more of air time.

But the police arrived sooner than expected and stormed the station almost immediately, trapping our men inside. Two were shot to death in the ensuing fight, and the third is not expected to live. The Organization's message was on the air for less than 10 minutes.

Those were the first casualties we've suffered here, but they just about wiped out Unit 6. Their survivors, two women and a man, have moved into our place temporarily. With one of their members in the hands of the police, they had to abandon their own headquarters immediately, of course.

With it we lost one of the Organization's two printing presses in the Washington area, although we were able to clear out most of their printing supplies and lighter equipment. And we gained their pickup truck, which will really be handy if they stay here.

October 28. Last night I had to do the most unpleasant thing that I have been called to do since joining the Organization four years ago. I participated in the execution of a mutineer.

Harry Powell was Unit 5's leader. Last week, when Washington Field Command gave his unit the assignment of assassinating two of the most obnoxious and outspoken advocates of racial mixing in this area-a priest and a rabbi, coauthors of a widely publicized petition to Congress requesting special tax advantages for racially mixed marned couples - Powell refused the assignment. He sent a message back to WFC saying that he was opposed to the further use of violence and that his unit would not participate in any acts of terrorism.

He was immediately placed under arrest, and yesterday one representative from each unit under WFC-including Unit S- was summoned to judge him. Unit 10 was not able to send anyone, and so 11 members-eight men and three women- met with an officer from WFC in the basement storeroom of a gift shop owned by one of our " legals. " I was Unit l 's representative.

The officer from WFC stated the case against Powell very briefly. The Unit 5 representative then confirmed the facts: Powell had not only refused to obey the assassination order, but he had instructed the members of his unit not to obey either. Fortunately, they had not allowed themselves to be subverted by him.

Powell was then given an opportunity to speak in his behalf. He did so for more than two hours, interrupted occasionally by a question from one of us. What he said really shook me, but it made our decision easier for all of us, I am sure.

Harry Powell was, in essence, a " responsible conservative. " The fact that he was not only a member of the Organization but had become a unit leader reflects more on the Organization than it does on him. His basic complaint was that all our acts of terror against the System were only making things worse by " provoking" the System into taking more and more repressive measures.

Well, of course, we all understood that! Or, at least, I thought we all understood it. Apparently Powell didn't. That is, he didn't understand that one of the major purposes of political terror, always and everywhere, is to force the authorities to take reprisals and to become more repressive, thus alienating a portion of the population and generating sympathy for the terrorists. And the other purpose is to create unrest by destroying the population's sense of security and their belief in the invincibility of the government.

As Powell continued talking, it became clearer and clearer that he was a conservative, not a revolutionary. He talked as if the whole purpose of the Organization were to force the System to institute certain reforms, rather than to destroy the System, root and branch, and build something radically and fundamentally different in its place.

He was opposed to the System because it taxed his business too heavily. (He had owned a hardware store before we were forced underground. ) He was opposed to the System's permissiveness with Blacks, because crime and rioting were bad for business. He was opposed to the System's confiscation of firearms, because he felt he needed a gun for personal security. His were the motivations of a libertarian, the sort of self-centered individual who sees the basic evil in government as a limitation on free enterprise.

Someone asked him whether he had forgotten what the Organization has repeated over and over, namely, that our struggle is to secure the future of our race, and that the issue of individual freedom is subordinate to that one, overwhelming purpose. His retort was that the Organization's violent tactics are benefiting neither our race nor individual freedom.

This answer proved again that he didn't really understand what we are trying to do. His initial approval of the use of force against the System was based on the naive assumption that, by God, we'll show those bastards! When the System, instead of backing down, began tightening the screws even faster, he decided that our policy of terrorism is counter-productive.

He simply could not accept the fact that the path to our goal cannot be a retracing of our course to some earlier stage in our history, but must instead be an overcoming of the present and a forging ahead into the future-with us choosing the direction instead of the System. Until we have torn the rudder out of its grasp and thrown the System overboard, the ship of state will go careening on its hazardous way. There will be no stopping, no going back. Since we are already among rocks and shoals, we are bound to get scraped up pretty badly before we find any clear sailing.

Maybe he was right that our tactics are wrong; the reaction of the people will eventually answer that question. But his whole attitude, his whole orientation was wrong. As I listened to Powell I was reminded of the late-19th century writer, Brooks Adams, and his division of the human race into two classes: spiritual man and economic man. Powell was the epitome of economic man.

Ideologies, ultimate purposes, the fundamental contradiction between the System's world view and ours-all these things had no meaning for him. He regarded the Organization's philosophy as just so much ideological flypaper designed to catch recruits for us. He saw our struggle against the System as a contest for power and nothing more. If we could not whip them, then we should try to force them to compromise with us.

I wondered how many others in the Organization thought the way Powell did, and I shuddered. We have been forced to grow too quickly. There has not been sufficient time to develop in all our people the essentially religious attitude toward our purpose and our doctrines which would have prevented the Powell incident by screening him out early.

As it was, we had no real choice in deciding Powell's fate. There was not only his disobedience to consider, but also the fact that he had revealed himself to be fundamentally unreliable. To have one of us-and a unit leader, at that-talking openly to other members about trying to find a way to compromise with the System, with the war just beginning… There was only one way to deal with such a situation.

The eight male members present drew straws, and three of us, including me, ended up on the execution squad. When Powell realized that he was going to be killed, he tried to make a break. We tied his hands and feet, and then we had to gag him when he began shouting. We drove him to a wooded area off the highway about 10 miles south of Washington, shot him, and buried him.

I got back a little after midnight, but I still haven't been able to get to sleep. I am very, very depressed.

Chapter VIII

November 4, 1991. Soup and bread again tonight, and not much of that. Our money is almost gone, and there still hasn't been anything from WFC. If our pay doesn't come through in the next couple of days, we'll have to resort to armed robbery again-an unpleasant prospect.

Unit 2 still has what seems to be an unlimited supply of food, and we'd already be in a much worse way if they hadn't given us that carload of canned goods a month ago-especially since we now have seven mouths to feed. But it is just too dangerous to drive up to Maryland for our food supply. The chances are too great of running into a police roadblock.

That is the most noticeable-and to the public it must be by far the most irritating-consequence to date of our terror campaign. Travel by private automobile has become-at least, in the Washington area-a nightmare, with enormous traffic jams everywhere caused by the police checks. In the last few days this police activity has increased significantly, and it looks as if it will remain a regular feature of life for the foreseeable future.

So far, however, they haven't been stopping pedestrians, bicyclists, or buses. We can still get around, although less conveniently than before.

Oops, there go the lights again. This is the second time this evening we've had to break out the candles. Until this year, the worst power shortages have occurred in the summer, but it's November now and we're still stuck with the " temporary" 15 percent voltage reduction they imposed in July. Even this perpetual " brownout" isn't saving us from an increasing number of involuntary blackouts.

It's obvious that somebody's profiting from the power shortage, though. When Katherine was lucky enough to find some candles at one of the grocery stores last week, she had to pay S1. 50 apiece for them. The price of kerosene and gasoline lanterns has gone out of sight, but the hardware stores never have any of them in stock anyway. When I next have some free time, I'll see what I can improvise in that direction.

We have been maintaining the pressure against the System during the past week with a lot of one-man, low-risk activities. There have been approximately 40 grenade attacks against Federal buildings and media facilities in Washington, for example, and our unit is responsible for 11 of them.

Since it is now virtually impossible to enter any Federal building except a post office without a complete body-search, we have had to be ingenious. On one occasion Henry simply pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade and then slipped it down between two cartons on a big pallet of freight waiting outside the freight door of the Washington Post, wedging it so that the safety lever was held in place by the cartons. He didn't wait around, but news reports later confirmed that there was an explosion inside the Post building which killed one employee and seriously wounded three others.

Most often, however, we have used grenade-throwers improvised from shotguns. They give us a maximum range of more than 150 yards, but the grenade always explodes sooner than that unless the delay element is modified. All one needs to use them effectively is a place of concealment within about 100 yards of the target.

We have fired from the back seat of a moving auto, from the restroom window of an adjacent building, and-at night- from a patch of shrubbery in a small park across the street from the target building. With luck one can hit a window and get an explosion inside an office or a corridor. But even when the grenade bounces off an outside wall the explosion shatters windows, and the shrapnel keeps people jumping.

If we keep it up long enough we can probably force the government to shutter all the windows in Federal buildings, which will certainly help raise the consciousness of Federal workers. But it is clear that we can't maintain this kind of activity indefinitely. We lost one of our best activists yesterday-Roger Greene, from Unit 8-and we are bound to lose more as time passes. The System must inevitably win any sort of war of attrition, considering the numerical advantage they have over us.

We have talked this problem over among ourselves many times, and we always come back to the same stumbling block: a revolutionary attitude is virtually non-existent in America, outside the Organization, and all our activities to date don't seem to have changed this fact. The masses of people certainly aren't in love with the System-in fact, their grumbling has increased steadily over the past six or seven years as living conditions have deteriorated - but they are still far too comfortable and complacent to entertain the idea of revolt.

On top of this is the enormous disadvantage we suffer from having the System controlling the image of us which reaches the public. We receive a continuous feedback from our " legals" on what the public is thinking, and most people have accepted without hesitation the System's portrayal of us as " gangsters" and " murderers. "

Without some sort of empathy between us and the general public we can never find enough new recruits to make up for our losses. And with the System controlling virtually every channel of communication with the public, it's hard to see how we're going to develop that empathy. Our leaflets and the occasional seizure of a broadcasting station for a few minutes just can't make much headway against the non-stop torrent of brainwashing the System uses for keeping the people in line.

The lights have just come on again-now that I'm ready to hit the sack. Sometimes I think the System's own weaknesses will bring about its downfall just as quickly without our help as with it. The incessant power failures are only one crack among thousands in this crumbling edifice we are trying so desperately to pull down.

November 8. The last few days have seen a major change in our domestic affairs. The population in our shop increased to eight last Thursday, and now it's down to four again: myself, Katherine, and Bill and Carol Hanrahan, formerly of Unit 6.

Henry and George have teamed up with Edna Carlson, who also came to us after Unit 6's disaster, and with Dick Wheeler, the only survivor of a police raid on Unit I l 's hideout Thursday. The four of them have moved to a new location, in the District.

The new arrangement has us better divided along functional lines than before-as well as solving the personal problem which had been worrying Katherine and me. We here in the shop are now essentially a technical-services unit, while the four who left are a sabotage-and-assassination unit.

Bill Hanrahan is a machinist, a mechanic, and a printer. Until two months ago he and Carol operated a printing shop in Alexandria. His wife doesn't share his mechanical genius, but she is a reasonably competent printer. As soon as we get another press set up here, her job will be to produce many of the leaflets and other propaganda materials which the Organization clandestinely distributes in this area.

I will continue to be responsible for the Organization's communications equipment and for specialized ordnance. Bill will assist me with the latter and will also be our gunsmith and armory-keeper.

Katherine will have a chance to exercise her editorial skills again, to a limited extent, in that she will have the responsibility for transforming the typewritten propaganda we receive from WFC into camera-ready headlines and text for Carol. She will be able to use her own discretion in making condensations, deletions, and other changes necessary for copyfitting.

Bill and I finished our first special-ordnance job together yesterday. We modified a 4. 2 inch mortar to handle 81 mm projectiles. The modification was necessary because we have so far been unable to pick up an 81 mm mortar for the projectiles which we grabbed in the raid on Aberdeen Proving Ground last month. One of our gun-buff members, however, had a serviceable 4. 2 inch mortar which he had kept hidden away since the late 1940's.

The Organization is planning a very important mission in the next day or two, in which the mortar will be used, and Bill and I were under pressure to finish the job on time. Our main difficulty was in finding a piece of steel tube of the right I. D. to weld inside the 4. 2 inch tube, since we have no lathe or other machine tools at this time. Once we found a supplier for the tube the rest was fairly easy, and we are proud of the result-although it weighs more than three times as much as an 81 mm mortar should.

Today we did a job which was simple enough in theory but which gave us more trouble in practice than we had anticipated: melting the explosive filler out of a 500-lb bomb casing. With a great deal of straining and swearing-and with several good burns from the boiling water we managed to splash all over ourselves-we got most of the tritonal explosive from the bomb into a variety of empty grapefruitjuice cans, peanutbutter jars, and other containers. The work took all day and exhausted everyone's patience, but now we have the makings for enough medium-sized bombs to last us for months.

I think that I will find Bill Hanrahan a congenial comrade-in-arms for carrying out our unit's new duties for the Organization. (We are now designated Unit 6, and I am in charge. ) Certainly the new living arrangement here is more congenial for Katherine and me, now that we are sharing OUR building with another married couple instead of with two bachelors.

I just wrote " another married couple, " but, of course, that was a slip of the pen, since Katherine and I are not formally married. In the last two months-and particularly in the last two or three weeks-however, we have experienced so much together and become so dependent on one another for companionship that a bond at least as strong as that of marriage has developed between us.

In the past, whenever one of us had an Organizational assignment to carry out, we usually contrived to work together on it. Now such collaboration will not require any contrivance.

It is interesting that the Organization, which has imposed on all of us a life which is unnatural in many respects, has led to a more natural relationship between the sexes inside the Organization than exists outside. Although unmarried female members are theoretically " equal" to male members, in that they are subject to the same discipline, our women are actually cherished and protected to a much larger degree than women in the general society are.

Consider rape, for example, which has become such an omnipresent pestilence these days. It had already been increasing at a rate of 20 to 25 per cent per year since the early 1970's until last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that all laws making rape a crime are unconstitutional, because they presume a legal difference between the sexes. Rape, the judges ruled, can only be prosecuted under the statutes covering nonsexual assaults.