Dr. William Pierce: Preparing the Way, part 2

purpose_of_the_state_william_pierceAmerican Dissident Voices broadcast of September 19, 2015

by Kevin Alfred Strom with
Malcolm P. Shiel, Editor

TO HONOR the late William Luther Pierce, whose 82nd birthday would have been last week, I commissioned Malcolm Shiel to create a new work based on media reports about Dr. Pierce, removing the mischaracterizations, falsehoods, and attacks — but keeping the facts, the background, the details, and most of all the words of the man himself. We now present part 2 of “Dr. William Pierce, Preparing the Way.”

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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.”

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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.

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You’ve been listening to part 2 of “William Pierce: Preparing the Way” on American Dissident Voices.

BANWWThe National Alliance has just published a brand-new edition of Building a New White World: What is the National Alliance?, which I will be proud and happy to send to each and every one of you who writes to me today. This 16-page, full-color magazine-format booklet — a great improvement over all previous editions — is an impressive introduction to the ideas and program of the National Alliance, and is the most powerful recruiting tool we’ve ever published. It’s a fitting achievement as we carry forward Dr. Pierce’s legacy. There is nothing quite like holding this new, beautiful publication in your hands — and passing copies along to those who need the answers we can give them.

For your copy of Building a New White World, order online or send $3 for one copy, 10 for $15, 25 for $30, 100 for $110, to National Alliance, Box 172, Laurel Bloomery TN 37680 USA. Make checks payable to National Vanguard Books.

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You’ve been listening to American Dissident Voices, the radio program of the National Alliance, founded by William Luther Pierce in 1970. This program is published every week at Whitebiocentrism.com and nationalvanguard.org. You can join and support us by visiting natall.com — or write to National Alliance, Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. We welcome your support, your inquiries, and your help in spreading our message of hope to our people. Once again, that address is Box 172, Laurel Bloomery, TN 37680 USA. Until next week, this is Kevin Alfred Strom reminding you to keep on thinking free.