Last week, I posted about the ways I noticed Earl Turner falling into the identity of a dissociated, paranoid fundamentalist. I can’t say I was shocked by the fact that throughout the last half of The Turner Diaries  Earl only became more dissociated, remorseless, and absolute in his dualistic mindset, but it is so hard for me to imagine thinking or feeling the ways he expresses feeling that I had a difficult time processing everything I was reading. Furthermore, I was constantly reminded that this book is the creative work from the imagination of Andrew Macdonald. I still cannot believe that this imagining represents what he believed would be the means by which an ideal world would come into being.

Two sections of the end portion of The Turner Diaries were particularly uncomfortable for me to imagine. First, the description of the “Day of the Rope” and second, the final chapter and reflection by Earl about his percieved purpose. Both of these sections were difficult for me because I couldn’t help noticing that Earl failed to realize how he was indeed being used as a tool by the Organization and the Order. He didn’t see at all that his dignified and “heroic” role in the revolution, was no more important in the eyes of the powers of the Order than that of any other pawn they used to achieve their gains.

Earl describes the grueling conditions he and the others lived under, but he fails to recognize that the “teaching” he is doing is really indoctrination. He also fails to recognize that by living under the harsh conditions he lives under in the name of a higher purpose, are also leading him into a state of dependence upon the Order and Organization. In this way he is more like the “brainwashed” Liberals he so despises than he even realizes.

Immediately after witnessing mass executions in the name of establishing control and gaining more support for the Organization, a sight which Earl himself has trouble coming to terms with, though he does a good job of rationalizing in his own mind that these people had to die, Earl describes the newly “cleansed” area of California he is working in: “The air seems cleaner, the sun brighter, life more joyus”(171). I was stunned by this description. It completely solidified, for me, that Earl had become entirely dissociated, entirely unaware of a sense of ethical “right” and “wrong.” A state of being he comes into because his deep immersion into his service to the Order has led him to feel that there is undoubtedly absolute right, absolute wrong, absolute evil and absolute good.

Earl’s total submission to the ideals and goals of the Order, and the book’s Biblical tone, are only further emphasized as the book nears its end. Earl seems to rationalize the atrocities he witnesses by convincing himself that the world he lives in is well on it’s way to becoming a “New Jerusalem.” He even describes the society in California as, “…the beginning of a whole new world rising out of the ruins of the old”(174). He further rationalizes the necessity of the mass killings by explaining to himself, and to his expected future readers that those who have allowed the System to gain as much power as it has are guilty and foul beings who need to die to make way for a more pure and “correct” world order. He asks, “And are not folly, willful ignorance, laziness, greed, irresponsibility, and moral timidity as blameworthy as the most deliberate malice?”(196). A question reminiscent of John’s observations about the impurities of the “unholy” in Revelation.

Earl’s dissociation from himself, push him fully into a state of willful self-sacrifice. I felt oddly sympathetic for Earl in his final statements in the end chapter of the novel. It is incredibly sad to imagine someone who has lived their lives with so much hate and so much violence, coming to their life’s end unaware of the way that the actions they complete for the sake of what they believe whole-heartedly to be righteous, are being manipulated by the same kind of power hungry and unjust people he thinks he is fighting against. His final thoughts display his true belief in what he is doing. He is a man who has lost everything, and is clinging to the hope that he, as an individual can seek immortality in a grand act of sacrifice for his political and spiritual beliefs. It’s surprising and somewhat disconcerting, but Earl’s humanity in his final words shows through in a way that makes it hard not to feel for what it must be like to abandon one’s self for the sake of something one truly believes to be greater than the life of the individual.