Posted on 06/09/2012 7:07:21 PM PDT by Travis McGee
Years after the racism of The Turner Diaries inspired Timothy McVeigh, the Patriot Movement has embraced a new bestselling series. J.M. Berger reads closely to see what they say about race and government in America.
An American Nazi Party volunteer recently produced a three-minute online video promoting the group’s platform. It spotlighted issues like the national debt, gas prices, domestic oil drilling, and America’s wars.
Almost as an aside, it mentions affirmative action. And despite some provocative imagery, the video never mentions the words Jew or black, or any related ethnic slurs. A white nationalist blogger praised the video for not “spamming people with inane Holocaust statistics or endless dry arguments over whether or not gas chambers existed.” Many militia groups now explicitly tell would-be members that they can’t also belong to a hate group. Racism just doesn’t sell like it used to.
The paint is peeling on the mythical age of white hegemony that once provided a strong backbone for the Patriot movement, a diverse collection of loosely connected anti-government groups and ideologies that motivated Timothy McVeigh and many others.
Groups under the Patriot umbrella have often, but not always, embraced racial politics. The movement’s origins were heavily influenced by racist activists such as white nationalist William Pierce, author of the infamous 1978 novel The Turner Diaries, a dystopian novel about a racist revolution, which inspired a slew of imitators and successors.
Since the 1990s, some within the movement have tried to sideline or redefine its racial politics—whether out of sincere conviction or to avoid an inconvenient stigma—and focus on other issues such as gun rights, survivalism, individual liberties, traditional morality, and Constitutional hyper purity.
This process has gone far enough to suggest the outlines of what a post-racial Patriot movement might look like. Consider Enemies Foreign and Domestic, a Patriot-themed novel self-published by former Navy SEAL Matthew Bracken in 2003. Known to fans as EFAD, it’s the first in a trilogy of political thrillers. The plot goes like this: A rogue ATF agent stages a terrorist attack and blames it on an alleged racist militia (which turns out to be neither racist nor a militia). The attack is used as a pretext for repressive gun seizures by misguided liberals, while the ATF villain foments more trouble, killing innocent gun owners, and framing them as racist terrorists. In response, a series of individuals and small groups rise up to carry out acts of resistance and/or terrorism, culminating in a direct confrontation with the villain.
While spotlighting several Patriot memes, the first book in the trilogy has an almost militant multicultural drumbeat. EFAD’s heroes come from almost every imaginable ethnic background—white, black, Arab and Jewish. Between its serviceable writing and self-inoculation against charges of racism, EFAD is probably as close to a mainstream recruitment tool as the Patriot movement could hope for.
During February and March of this year, Bracken made the book available for free as an Amazon Kindle e-book, and several Patriot blogs and Twitter feeds spent significant time promoting it, resulting in a brief stint as the No. 1 free Kindle book on Amazon. The idea was to break into the mainstream of conservative media (talk radio and the like). That effort fell short, but an online posting by organizers said more than 30,000 copies were downloaded.
EFAD represents a sharp break from its Patriot Lit forefathers, most infamously Pierce’s The Turner Diaries. That book has inspired at least dozens of admirers who tried to realize its concept of a revolution born from a campaign of terrorism, Timothy McVeigh among them. Told from the first-person perspective of a terrorist named Earl Turner, “Diaries” drips with racial animus from its opening pages, in which “negroes” armed with baseball bats forcibly disarm white Americans to enforce a repressive gun control bill. This inspires a general uprising targeting the government, Jews, and blacks and culminates in the use of nuclear weapons to ethnically cleanse New York, Washington, D.C., and Tel Aviv. White encampments are constructed in what remains of the United States; “race traitors” (such as those who intermarried with minorities) are summarily lynched.
In short, it is not a pleasant book, either for its values or its mind-numbing prose, reading more like a nasty after-action report than a story. Despite its limitations, The Turner Diaries spawned a legion of badly written dystopian future tales of race war, which are distributed online and in self-published tomes. Unlike EFAD, The Turner Diaries and many of its imitators preach exclusively to the racist choir, aiming to inspire existing racists to action rather than trying to attract new blood for a broader anti-government movement. But EFAD’s depiction of a racially egalitarian, pro-gun, anti-government groundswell may be more evolution than revolution. The trilogy’s second and third books Domestic Enemies: The Reconquista released around 2006 and Foreign Enemies and Traitors in 2009—continue to separate racial hate and love for liberty, but they do so while drawing ever deeper from the well of white racial paranoia.
Book two describes the takeover of the American Southwest by illegal immigrants, specifically Hispanic racists out to reclaim their historic lands from the “gringos.”
This dramatic shift toward racial politics is offset by the fact that the book’s major protagonists are all brown people, from a Lebanese Arab heroine to a half-Cuban FBI agent to a crypto-Jewish-Hispanic-American former journalist. (The author’s olive branch to people of color does not, incidentally, extend to Muslims, gays, college professors, or people with piercings).
Book three, featuring a corrupt president who invites foreign mercenaries to run rampant on U.S. soil, sees Bracken’s continued stipulations against racism slowly but surely shouted down by the arrival of Earl Turner’s world. After an earthquake demolishes Memphis, black refugees turn into a seething mob of gang-rapists and cannibals—characterizations that feature memorably in The Turner Diaries—while urban blacks loot a path from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., where they demand and receive a new Socialist constitution engineered by a thinly veiled caricature of President Obama. The narrative disclaimers continue—one character condemns white racist killings in the chaos after the quake, and a battle-weary white racist girl near the end of the book accepts a hand of comfort offered by a black Army medic. But these and other moments of individual race grace are hard pressed to counterweight the vivid, lengthy depiction of African-Americans en masse as cannibal rapists directly responsible for destroying America’s Constitution.
EFAD perhaps illustrates both how far and how not-far the Patriot movement has come over the years. Inasmuch as the movement coheres, it has shifted from fairly open and aggressive racism to a more ambivalent, conflicted posture. It’s not uncommon for Patriot movement members to vehemently deny they are racists, even as they speak in hushed, reverential tones about Turner author William Pierce. Bracken doesn’t have that particular problem. In response to an email requesting an interview, he called The Turner Diaries a “racist screed” and insisted it brooks no comparison to his series, angrily declining to answer questions.
On the other hand, in a recent online posting, Bracken advised people who want to be safe from a possibly impending civil war to analyze where they live based on a spectrum of rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural—and lighter skin vs. darker skin.
Racism has been the Achilles’ heel of efforts to unify the Patriots for as long as the movement has existed, with different factions embracing wildly different views about whether to embrace it and to what degree. The Patriot subset that declines to accept racism continues to cope with the issue unevenly and defensively. As in mainstream politics, those who wish to participate or influence the direction of the movement face pressure to cater to the radical base.
The result is a muddled message in which racism may be vocally condemned, but race war is deemed inevitable. Traditional racist language is avoided as taboo, but racial stereotyping is seen as “facing facts.” It is a rarified vision of a non-racist “realism” that can alienate white nationalist insiders while looking to outsiders like a distinction without a difference.
That is actual doctrine on the left. They *define* racism to be only possible by white people.
Yes, I know that is insane, but the left is nothing if you remove its false assumptions about reality and inject truth. They lie all the time, to everyone and each other, because their only moral standard is: does this act advance our agenda?
That quickly degenerates into: does this act advance our power, my groups power, and ultimately, some leaders power. Thus, anything becomes morally acceptable.
“The paint is peeling on the mythical age of white hegemony that once provided a strong backbone for the Patriot movement,....”
BULL!!!!!!!!!!
Real patriotism has never been racist. Nor have real patriot groups. Even the John Birch Society was not racist.
This is a typical left-wing slime job, trying to equate patriots with racists. In their twisted little worlds, only people who reject American exceptionalism and western culture and Judaeo-Christian religion can truly be called non-racist.
Damn them left-handed gingers! The only way it could be worse is if they were your step-child too! ;)
“Bracken doesn’t have that particular problem. In response to an email requesting an interview, he called The Turner Diaries a “racist screed” and insisted it brooks no comparison to his series, angrily declining to answer questions.”
No, it wasn’t angry, but it was funny. Just remember,Burger ya can’t fix stupid : )
LOL!
” I can only hope that if such a horrid situation ever arose, morally and intellectually superior white lefties like this guy, would be the first to join their black inner city friends for dinner.”
Hmmmm..... : )
I read Enemies Foreign and Domestic. I had seen it for a long time and thought it would be a little hokey. I read history, classics, economics and then throw in a science fiction novel every third book for pure pleasure. I really enjoyed it and it almost reads like a template for what to do if this or that happens. I might pick the second one up if go backpacking this summer.
ymmmm. ;/
I spilt water on my keyboard so a lot of my signs don’t work anymore. No more smiles or frowns. For now.
What did Obama’s political mentor believe, at least back in his Weather Underground days, about the % of Americans who would need to be killed, since they would not accept re-eduation? Something like 10%?
If folks are prone to cannibalism during relative good times, how does Burger think they will act a month after they have eaten the last food product in their homes, and the supermarkets are all empty?
Right. They will hold hands and sing Kumbaya, and federal manna will fall from heaven. In Burger's fantasy realm.
And to write about another outcome could only be an exercise in racism.
It's like trying to explain free market economics to Leonid Brezhnev.
Yep. His screed was pitiful! An attempted character assignation for the pc crime of being realistic in a disaster fiction novel.
Reading about the cannibalism was horrifying but not out of the realm of possibility to me. He’d have liked the book had you made the cannibals white men from the city preying upon black victims on outskirts. He would have been orgasmic if you would have had the black racists randomly shooting whites and white-hispanics like that race evil guy Zimmerman!
I bet the self annointed anti-racist crusader has not gotten upset at all over the many whites that have been murdered and beaten by black racist mobs in the name of the Trayvon hoodie klan rallies conducted by his racist pals. That is real life racism and he poses as a crusader against racism. But he’s not really. He’s a typical white liberal racist. He adores racism as long as it is the right hate doctrines and colors and as long as his racists don’t kill him or one of his.
He did not get to you, I hope. I bet he has not written a novel. He’s pittifully catty. When seeds of creativity and self awareness blew through his neighborhood, he hid in his small little box so the seeds could not take root. I hope he sold a lot of books for you.
My grandmother on my dad's side came from Russia shortly before WW1, but a lot of family stayed behind. I've read some of the accounts of what happened to them during Stalin's purges of the 1930's. Horrific stuff that will give you nightmares. If a town or village tried to defy the government, the army was sent in to surround the village, cutting them off from food and medical help. If anyone tried to leave, they were gunned down. After a month or two the soldiers would move in, gather up the few survivors, and send them to gulags in Siberia. Ayers and his ilk would love to see something similar happen here in America.
Characterizing patriots as having a lust for race war is a reductionist smear which does disservice to the countless ardent Patriots who exist within minority communities, and who oppose race-based wars as much as the vast majority of white patriots do.
Most patriots see "race war" exactly for what it is: a tool which tis used to divide We the People against each other. The resultant lack of unity is the enemy's strategic goal.
If we see race wars in the future, it will mean that the Enemy is winning.
I need your assistance please. Now that I'm partially paralyzed below my armpits, I need to find another vocation. I'm trying to become a historical fiction and, or action adventure writer. It would be a great honor picking your enormously talented big brain. Would you be willing to speak with me by phone to help me along? I have Skype, so if you also Skype, we can discus the subject at some depth. FReegards, STD.
I agree, they would if they could. But that pesky 2nd Amd....
I especially liked how he called my prose “serviceable.” From a guy who wrote a non-fiction book that sold about 12 copies.
I agree. Such will be whipped up to “divide and conquer,” and to justify extremely harsh anti-freedom measures.
That’s the type of action it was intended to protect against. Like Admiral Yamamoto is supposed to have said when contemplating a possible invasion of the US mainland, “There would be a rifle behind every bush.”
I especially liked how he called my prose “serviceable.” From a guy who wrote a non-fiction book that sold about 12 copies.
This poor man’s sense of superority relies upon his ability to stay within the little box of political correctness with all it’s diversity racism, thought and creative limitations. When sucessful American white men laugh at the box and live and think within their own talent, creativity and truth, it’s scarey to them. The box is all they have. They count on the power of the door keepers to keep themselves revelant and proclaimed smart. And here you are crashing the party of annointed authors.
For obvious reasons, they can not compete with subversives which he calls ‘patriots’ - American-Americans - who exist and thrive outside the box. They can’t put you in a gulag. So they pretend that it is because you are not smart and talented enough to climb into the box of political correctness where you belong. Claiming your talent is simplistic - ‘servicable’ - and racist or evil, is a metrosexual’s cry for help. It’s so predictable. You should write a novel about it from a white male’s point of view...lefties as our modern day, knuckle draging, witch hunters.
” This poor man’s sense of superority relies upon his ability to stay within the little box of political correctness with all it’s diversity racism, thought and creative limitations. When sucessful American white men laugh at the box and live and think within their own talent, creativity and truth, it’s scarey to them. The box is all they have. They count on the power of the door keepers to keep themselves revelant and proclaimed smart. “
Correct. Berger’s analytical skills are “out of service” : )
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