Legacy of Hate

Murrah Building, 1995 -- Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

by blogSpotter
Who was William Luther Pierce III? If not for a racist diatribe written under his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald, he would be a crackpot white separatist who faded into oblivion along with his insane organization, “National Alliance”. Pierce was born in Atlanta in 1933, the son of Old South aristocracy – clearly a clan that hadn’t fully accepted the terms of Appomattox in 1865.

Pierce was bright in his schoolwork; he liked model rockets and skipped a grade in school. His first avocation was physics – he completed an undergraduate degree at Rice in 1955 and a physics PhD. from Boulder in 1962. He worked as a physics Associate Instructor until 1965, when his inner demons took hold, and he devoted the balance of his life to such diverse causes as the Nazi party, white supremacy and “Cosmotheism”. His family’s wealth probably afforded him the luxury of quitting an 8-to-5 job and redoubling his racist efforts.

Pierce was a white supremacist who was deeply concerned about interracial marriages and “racial apologists”. He dabbled with both the John Birch Society and the American Nazi party – he even became a leader in the Nazi organization for a brief time. Neither group devoted enough energy to the concept of racial cleansing in Pierce’s view – this prompted him to found his National Alliance (circa 1974), where he could give racial cleansing its “due”. In fact, Pierce was enough of an organizer that he created a mini-media empire; his deep pockets didn’t hurt either. He started a book publishing company, a radio program, American Dissident, and even a church to proselytize his poisonous ideas.

Pierce tried to get tax exempt status for his “Cosmotheist” church but was denied that by the IRS. His Cosmotheism was a sort of pantheism that featured a universal spirit which favored the white race. Neither his religion nor his radio show ever really caught fire. Pierce spent the final years of his life (he died in 2002 at age 68) overseeing his various productions and giving occasional speeches. His death would have been unremarkable in any way if not for the “seed” planted by his toxic tomes – The Turner Diaries (1978) and Hunter (1984).

Turner Diaries is a near-future sci-fi book which predicts race war and describes in detail the terrorist acts that “The Organization” (his fantasized group of white supremacists) perform to battle the Federal government. Hunter is a similar book describing a type of bounty killer that hunts mixed race couples. Both of these books were seized upon by radical right militia groups to give inspiration and even instructions to their members. At least two groups, Silent Brotherhood and The Order, used Turner Diaries as a guide. These groups were convicted of robbery and counterfeiting – acts that fall short of mass murder though reprehensible nevertheless.

When Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people bombing the OKC Murrah Building in 1995, he was found to be a fan of Pierce’s book. McVeigh’s self-defense was a garbled mix of patriotism and religious freedom (he hated the Fed’s handling of Branch Davidians a year or two earlier). Such a confused mind – why would McVeigh use this horrific, demented scrawl of race-ranting as his justification? Why would he even mention it to anyone? It had nothing to do with country love or religious freedom. Probably at the point where he was given a national audience, McVeigh had to change his narrative in hopes of gaining sympathy from the general public.

The irony isn't lost on me – I’m giving exposure to the author and his work with this very blog. It’s in the spirit of remembering the past to avoid reliving it. I give credit to my readers – we can say who, what and where without giving endorsements or “props” as they say now. Pierce was a disturbed man and his ideas were lunatic in nature; his Deep-South deep pockets enabled him to promulgate his lunacies to vulnerable, confused, self-loathing people all over America. Let us hope that if his writings endure at all, they endure as negative examples of racial paranoia gone wildly out of bounds.

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