Background Articles


In this section, we publish short articles that provide basic background 
information about little-known extremist events, actors, etc. that have 
recently made the news. The aim is purely to provide interested members 
with some background information, that might not be available in their 
local newspapers. However, it is not meant to include academic analyses 
that can be published in academic journals. Neither is it to include (purely) 
personal views on topics, or accounts on well-known or better-studied 
topics – such as the French extreme right, the Indian BNP, the Russian 
KPRF, etc.

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article, please respond directly to the author (email addresses are 
provided), as this section is not meant to become a discussion forum – 
those interested in a discussion forum, can contact Cas Mudde about the 
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Obituary William L. Pierce

By Simon Baalham, Oxford Brookes University

William L. Pierce, the infamous leader of the National Alliance, an 
American neo-Nazi organisation, died of cancer on 23 July 2002. By the 
time of his death Pierce had become the most notorious and influential of 
post-war neo-Nazi ideologues, not just in America but around the world. 
The vehicle for his influence was not modern technology, the media, 
charismatic leadership, or political propagandising, but his use of fiction. 
The Turner Diaries (1978) and Hunter (1989), both published under the 
pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, have been implicated in numerous acts 
of terrorist violence in both the US and Europe, and have helped shape the 
development of contemporary fascism. (This article will assume that 
Nazism and neo-Nazism are varieties of fascism).

Pierce was born on 11 September (subsequently a prophetic date) 1933 in 
Atlanta, Georgia. After attending Rice University he completed a doctorate 
in physics at the University of Colorado. He went on to teach physics at 
Oregon State University from 1962 until 1965. During this time of great 
upheaval in the US, politics increasingly occupied his attention. Pierce 
briefly joined the John Birch Society (an extremely conservative group 
mainly dedicated to fighting communism) but left soon afterwards after 
discovering that his extreme antisemitic views were generally neither 
shared nor welcomed. His views at the time were becoming more extreme 
in response to the social and political convulsions America was 
experiencing. Pierce left Oregon State University to work for Pratt & 
Whitney and moved to Washington D.C., where he came into contact with 
George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party (ANP). 
Although Pierce claimed that he never actually joined the ANP, he did 
become the editor of the National Socialist Alliance, a quarterly journal 
published by Rockwell's World Union of National Socialists (WUNS). 
After Rockwell's murder in 1967 Pierce became one of the principal leaders 
of the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP), the ANP's 
successor. 

In 1970 Pierce joined the National Youth Alliance (NYA), a far right 
political group which had grown out of the Youth for Wallace organisation 
that had failed to get Governor George Wallace elected president in 1968. 
After four years of bitter infighting the NYA disbanded with Pierce 
establishing the National Alliance (NA) in 1974. The NA acquired its own 
headquarters and large tract of land outside Hillsboro, West Virginia in 
1985. It was from this base that Pierce set about establishing the NA as one 
of the largest and most influential of the genuinely revolutionary neo-Nazi 
groups in the US. It also became commercially wealthy. 

National Vanguard Books (named after National Vanguard, the journal of 
the NA in which Pierce's two novels had initially been serialised) was 
founded to publish the novels. In 1991 it started producing audiotapes of 
the shortwave radio programme American Dissident Voices that Pierce 
produced. The advent of the Internet meant that this radio show became 
available worldwide. During the 1990s Pierce started travelling to Europe 
to attend conferences and seminars organised by sympathetic groups. The 
NA purchased the White Power Music record label Resistance Records in 
1999. This opened up a new and larger audience for Pierce's message. It 
also provides the NA with large profits with an estimated annual turnover 
of $1million.

However, for all of Pierce's organisational abilities in establishing and 
developing the NA, as well as its various commercial subsidiaries, it is his 
writing and its impact on the ideological developments of postwar fascism 
that has given this obscure man so much influence and infamy. The Turner 
Diaries has had the greatest impact; the FBI has referred to it as 'the Bible of 
the racist right'. Pierce recognised a need to polarise American society 
along racial lines in order to provide mainstream America with the same 
racialised view of the world that he and other neo-Nazis held. Pierce 
believed that the quickest way to achieve this goal was by outrageous acts 
of terrorism. In The Turner Diaries the first target to be attacked is a Federal 
Government building, an act chillingly replicated by Timothy McVeigh in 
Oklahoma. Sadly this is not the only act of terrorism provoked by his book. 

Pierce makes it quite clear in the book that acts of violence, murder and 
terror against Jews and racial minorities are not executed as a mere 
expression of hatred. They are deliberately calculated to provoke 
retaliatory action. Well aware of the power of revenge in entrenching 
hatred and distrust, Pierce realised that it could be used for his political 
goals. It is perhaps not insignificant that Pierce came to Britain in 1995 and 
spoke at the BNP's annual conference when one considers the replication 
of this dynamic last year in parts of Lancashire. Soon after The Turner 
Diaries was published a gang calling itself The Order began a rampage 
involving armed robbery, the destruction of a synagogue and murder. One 
of their victims was the notorious Jewish talk radio host Alan Berg. There 
have been numerous acts of violence over the last 25 years that have in one 
way or another been associated with Pierce's writing. Even in Britain 
Pierce's methods were reflected in David Copeland's campaign of terror in 
1999. 

The issue of miscegenation is dealt with during 'Day of the Rope', which 
succinctly sums up the punishment to be meted out for this perceived act 
of racial treachery. Pierce returned to it in his second book Hunter, which 
was significant not only because in it the main protagonist targeted mixed 
race couples, but because it offered a refinement in the methodology for 
performing revolutionary violence. Pierce realised an individual could 
single-handedly raise the political temperature with little chance of being 
caught. This actually coincided with Louis Beam's essay on leaderless 
resistance.

Pierce represented those that did not want to compromise their message of 
a contemporary version of national socialism. Unlike mimetic neo-Nazis, 
Pierce was able to understand fascism's quest for revolutionary change 
and apply it in a modern context. He understood that in conditions 
unfavourable to both a mass movement of the extreme right, as well as the 
futility of the pseudo-mimetic posturing of others (such as Gary Lauck), 
which usually only attract ridicule, a new approach was required in order 
to push the extreme right revolutionary agenda into mainstream political 
space. Unfortunately, he seems to have been rather successful. One can 
only hope that with his passing will go his ideas. Sadly this is a hope 
rather than a belief.