In one of the entries in his diary, Earl Turner writes, “How fragile a thing is man’s civilization! How superficial it is to his basic nature! And upon how few of the teeming multitudes whose lives it gives a pattern does it depend for its sustenance!” (86) This is just one of his many diatribes on how civilization in Americais decaying, destroyed from within by the cancer of liberalism and multiculturalism. His worldview fuels his belief that the Organization’s acts of terrorism and violence are justified; they are “forging the nucleus of a new society, a whole new civilization, which will rise from the ashes of the old” (111). It reminds me of the epigraph at the beginning of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. In fact, oddly enough, while reading The Turner Diaries, I often found myself recalling scenes from that movie. The violence against white people that Earl describes, which runs the gambit from physical and sexual assault to enslavement and murder, is reminiscent of the attack on Jaguar Paw’s tribe. The material decadence and the moral bankruptcy of the Mayan civilization (demonstrated in the scene where Jaguar Paw is about to be sacrificed, as the camera cuts from the plight of the protagonist to the orgiastic behavior of the crowd) is similar to that of the System’s. In essence, the message of both the book and the movie boils down to, “they deserved it.”

Following his capture and subsequent torture at the hands of the FBI, Earl becomes even more rigidly dualistic. The list of people who “deserve” to die expands from not only active participants in the System (black people, Jewish people, and the copers), but also other white people who don’t fall in line with the Organization’s ideology and agenda. In my previous blog post, I mentioned that Earl often felt remorseful when white people died as a result of the Organization’s terrorism. It made Earl, despite his disgusting beliefs, a vaguely sympathetic character. As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear that Earl’s doubts and sympathetic nature are “womanly handwringing” (77). The reader is supposed to celebrate Earl’s increasing radicalization; he is no longer the man who shook and stuttered for an hour after he killed a person. In the world of The Turner Diaries, a nuanced worldview, and the ability to empathize with different perspectives and experiences, is seen as a weakness.

Something that struck me while I was reading The Turner Diaries was how small the Organization’s forces were. Prior to the assault on the West Coast, their numbers were in the low thousands; as Earl mentions, they are a “minority of a minority” (87). Even if the population at large is dissatisfied with the System, they are still not willing to turn to the Organization. Thus, the Organization plans on mobilizing millions of Americans by terrifying them into action. By cutting off access to food, water, and fuel, the Organization sows widespread chaos, forcing people to either fight or die. The people (even white people!) go from being oppressed by the System and unaware of it, to being actively oppressed by the Organization that’s supposedly fighting for the future of their race. For readers who don’t buy into Earl’s ideology, it implies that the Organization is a fringe terrorist group that forces a relatively moderate population into submission. It is in stark contrast to the sense of victimization that fuels Earl’s actions, as well as the deification of the Organization and the Order apparent in the editor’s comments.