There is clearly a shift that takes place after the first half of the Turner Diaries. The first ten chapters highlights the struggle of the Organization while also showing us the building momentum of its members. After Turner is initiated into the Order, however, his conscious is completely shifted and membership in the Organization explodes. To the outside reader, it’s almost as if Turner has been brainwashed. In my last post, I mentioned that throughout the brutal acts of the Organization, the author reminds us that Turner is still human and periodically feels guilty. However, after Turner’s initiation into the order, it seems as though he went from 99% evil to 99.99%. I understand the issues of qualifying something as “evil” (as was mentioned in some of our posts). Perhaps, a more objective way of describing Turner’s transformation would be to say he lost any sense of morality and literally does not feel guilt any longer.

After killing two white women, Turner writes in his diary: “In thinking over Saturday’s events, what surprises me is that I feel no remorse or regret for killing those two White whores. Six months ago I couldn’t imagine myself calmly butchering a teen-aged White girl, no matter what she had done.” After he is caught temporarily by the FBI and essentially tortured, he proclaims “I have lost all fear of death.” While Turner is undergoing this transformation, so is the Organization as a whole. They become more heavily involved in larger-scaled attacks, cutting out food and water supplies, and of course taking control of nuclear weapons. The “Day of the Rope” is a pivotal moment that clearly highlights the newly warped sense of Turner’s morality. I thought I saw an ounce of sympathy when Turner admits that he “was thoroughly disgusted” by the beating of a prisoner. However, soon after he explains that this disgust is because in his eyes, the Organization “must maintain a public image of strength and uncompromising ruthlessness in dealing with the enemies of our race.”

After a 19 year old girl pleads with the murderers not to kill her for sleeping with a black man, Turner claims that there is a “total lack of any healthy or natural morality” in the society he lives in. Of course, Turner is judging them the same way I judged him a few sentences ago. But, he is not only judging them. Turner has his own individualized moral scale, just as we all do, and the white women he murdered simply do not fit his standards of a morally upright person. Also, Turner’s view of morality is more totalized as he explains that “we are all responsible, as individuals, for the morals and the behavior of our race as a whole.” This totalized concept of morality does not stray far from the logic that we find in the Book of Revelation. According to this final chapter of the New Testament, there will be lukewarm Christians, Jews, non-virgins and others who all deserve to feel the wrath of Jesus. In both texts, there is a clear bifurcation of the human race in which there is only one group that deserves to be saved. There seems to be only two sides of the moral scale and one can not fit any where in between. This idea of morality is what propels him to become a “martyr” for the white race in the final suicide act of the novel.

I hesitated to write this post because the concept of morality is very complex and it quickly becomes evident how biased our conception of morality is. However,  I think it’s interesting to analyze the molding of Turner’s morality from a regular member of the Organization to a full-fledged suicide-bomber.