Chapter 4: The Present World and Jewish Domination
It is no exaggeration to say that William Pierce held the Jewish people of the world responsible for virtually every misfortune the white race faced in the post-WWII period. An American Dissident Voices listener once wrote Pierce and asked why he seemed to be so fixated on the Jews and their supposed misdeeds. 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. (qtd. in ADV 12/11/99 1)
Pierce felt that the ultimate goal of the Jewish conspiracy was the extermination of the Aryan race. It was only the Aryans, with their 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 (qtd. in Griffin 2001 307).
Pierce believed that the aim of the Jews was to spiritually weaken whites, making them less likely to perceive the deliberate plot that was being enacted against them. Miscegenation would be the Jew’s final and ultimate weapon, destroying the white race through interbreeding with other ethnic groups (Attack! 20 6). With the white race annihilated, there will be no way for the Creator to become self-aware, and the Jews will rule over a world of docile, mixed-raced persons. Pierce saw the Jews as evil personified, and their existence provided a counterforce of unredeemable darkness to his vision of white purity and goodness.
Of course, Pierce believed that the Jews would never mount this attack on the white race by open or honorable means: “The motto of Mossad, Israel’s principal agency for state-sponsored terror and assassination, is ‘By way of deception shalt thou do war’ but, in fact, that is the principal that governs the relations of Jews as a whole with the non-Jewish world” (qtd. in Resistance 16 23). In fact, the conspiracy is so deeply hidden that even many Jews are not fully aware of it. When the protagonist of Hunter protests that his kindly Jewish dentist could not possibly be involved in such an evil plot, another character corrects him:
Your Jewish dentist pays his taxes too, with his contributions to the United Jewish Appeal. He may not be in the front lines with the fellows from B’nai B’rith, but you can bet that he does his part on the home front in lots of little ways. He votes for politicians who vote for your taxes to be sent to Israel. He writes letters with the right slant to the editor of the Washington Post...
Or maybe your dentist is one of those really rare Jews who doesn’t pay a bit of attention to what B’nai B’rith tells him and doesn’t even buy Israel Bonds. He still thinks of himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people—the Jewish nation, the Jewish race, whatever you want to call the damned thing—is at war with our people, make no mistake about it (Macdonald 1998 72-73).
All of this makes the Jews in some ways a rather convenient enemy. If the problems of the modern world could be traced to a more general cause, such as the alienating effects of technology or a basic character flaw in the nature of all of humanity, the correction of the underlying problem might seem insurmountable. In Pierce’s worldview, the solution to the world’s problems is straightforward and relatively easy to remedy. If the Jews are removed from white society (and preferably from the world as a whole), humanities’ (and the Creator’s) major obstacles will disappear with them.
“Who Rules America?”, a thin booklet issued by Pierce through his National Vanguard book company, is the key recruiting text of the NA. If one orders products or simply requests information from the group, this booklet is always included in the reply. It is periodically updated, and focuses its attention on the alleged Jewish control of the Western media. The booklet’s introduction describes the huge amount of influence the owners of major media outlets have on public opinion. It is claimed that these individuals for the most part hail from the same ethnic group:
And who are these all-powerful masters of the media? As we shall see, to a very large extent they are Jews. It isn’t simply a matter of the media being controlled by profit-hungry capitalists, some of whom happen to be Jews. If that were the case, the ethnicity of the media masters would reflect, at least approximately, the ratio of rich Gentiles to rich Jews. The preponderance of Jews in the media is so overwhelming, however, that we are obliged to assume that it is due to more than mere happenstance (NA 2000 3).
The main body of the text is an exhaustive listing of the owners and managers of the major newspaper, magazine, and television companies in the United States. All the individuals mentioned are, of course, Jewish. Pierce believed that this gave the Jews a tremendous amount of power over the opinions of white America: “The mass media gives us our image of the world and then tells us what to think about that image. Essentially everything we know—or think we know—about events outside our own neighborhood or circle of acquaintances comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, and our television” (Ibid. 2). Given the evil nature of the Jews and their quest for world power at the expense of the white race, Pierce considered the control of the media by the Jews to be the most threatening problem facing whites today: “My point is that the media are in fact destructive of our values and our society and our civilization. My point is that the media, because they are dominated by Jews, work to advance the Jew’s interests, not our interests, and that their interests are opposed to ours. That’s supremely important. That’s the most important thing of which our people should be aware” (qtd. in ADV 3/23/02 4).
In this belief, Pierce is applying one of the classic strains of extremist thought: nothing happens by accident. The obvious interpretation of the American media is that it exists to serve its own interests. If a media source slants a news story in a certain direction, it is doing so because it believes that that is what its audience wants to see, or perhaps what its corporate owners and advertisers would like to see. If the personal bias of a media owner or manager does slip into the reporting, it is more likely to reflect that individual’s political viewpoints rather than an explicitly racial ideology. But to Pierce, all Jewish persons operate from a racial viewpoint. They do not represent their own personal interests, but the interests of the Jewish people in general. Therefore, the slanting of news stories is not a random or personalized event, but part of a great plan of action. There are powerful forces at work in the universe, some acting for good, others for evil. The media, like everything else, is a part of that tremendous struggle. The fact that it is (in his mind) controlled by the forces of evil was intolerable to Pierce.
Much of what Pierce tried to accomplish with the NA was to provide a media outlet for white Americans that was not corrupted by the influence of the Jews. To that end, he established a newspaper and a radio program that spread what he considered to be news important to white persons. Pierce also dabbled in other media in an attempt to spread his pro-white message. As noted, he saw Resistance Records as being a potentially powerful tool to transmit National Socialist ideals to young persons. Near the end of his life, Pierce produced a recruitment video for the NA, complete with dramatic music and slick computer graphics. One can suppose it was meant to be shown by NA recruiters to persons who did not have the time or inclination to read Pierce’s books or articles. The NA even produced a comic book intended for distribution to high school students. It relates the story of “White Will”, an Aryan teenager who stands up to the Jewish influence at his school.
Pierce saw the Jewish influence in American culture as extending beyond the limits of the news-reporting organizations. In his view, Jewish interests either directly or indirectly controlled all of the major entertainment outlets in the U.S. This manipulation of the entertainment industry enables the Jews to control which artists gain prominence, and also control what those artists produce:
Even though the majority of the “artists” on the pop-culture scene are still White Americans, they are employees of an industry which is completely dominated by Jews and which, for reasons of its own, has chosen to selectively promote trends and fads which are foreign to the American majority.
The net effect of this alien influence has been cultural chaos. It has largely alienated [white] Americans from the great cultural heritage handed to them by their ancestors in Western Europe and left them culturally rootless—a people, in fact, with no true culture, particularly the generation born since World War II (qtd. in Strom 34).
This form of Jewish control is viewed as being particularly insidious in that it targets young whites who most likely do not yet read the newspaper or watch the evening news. Their young, impressionable minds are corrupted at this early age, making them more docile for further manipulation as they grow older.
One of the most repulsive Jewish corruptions of popular culture, in Pierce’s view, could be seen in the music industry. Commenting on the efforts of Sumner Redstone (the owner of the cable music channel VH1) to promote rap music, Pierce wrote:
Redstone’s aim—and the aim of the Jewish media bosses generally, whether they’re in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, is to alienate young White people, to uproot them, to destroy their sense of racial identity, to confuse them, to make them forget their traditions and history, and to persuade them to mix with Blacks and other non-Whites. That’s why Redstone promotes rap music so heavily. His ultimate aim is to destroy our people, our race. And because I’m trying to counter that with Resistance Records, he calls me a “hater” and calls the music I distribute “hate rock” (qtd. in ADV 3/2/02 1).
Pierce believed that the efforts by the Jews to cause young whites to look at black persons as being “cool” would lead to them adopt black culture, and would legitimize miscegenation.
Pierce saw this Jewish influence as extending even into supposedly independent artistic areas such as painting and sculpture. Pierce, like his idol Adolph Hitler, considered modern trends in the fine arts to be degenerate: “Western man’s artistic sense, once soaring and uplifting, seems to have withered, darkened, and become cancerous in the twentieth century. His urge towards beauty and truth seems to have degenerated into a morbid fascination with ugliness, an irresistible desire to be distracted, amused, deceived” (qtd. in Strom 34). Pierce would have liked to have seen white artists return to more classical and uplifting subjects, such as landscapes and portraits, which he felt had a positive effect on the race (Ibid.).
It is interesting to contrast Pierce’s interpretation of the bias in the American media and the decline in popular culture with that of the American conservatives. They too see a conspiracy at work in the media, but ascribe it to a political bias (liberalism) rather than a racial one. Some on the fringe of the conservative movement even ascribe a deliberate plan to the degradation of popular culture in the U.S. They describe it as “cultural Marxism”, an attempt by the left to break down the traditional moral values of the nation and reduce individualism, thus making the imposition of Marxist economic policies more palatable to the masses (Berkowitz 5). Most conservatives, however, still consider the decline in artistic standards to be simply a matter of bad taste on the part of liberals. Consistent with his extremist mindset, Pierce could not accept the idea that this decline was occurring as a result of something as random as personal preferences. He saw it as being a part of the great struggle for the soul of the universe. And so of course, the decline must be caused by the source of all evil and discord in the modern world: the Jews.
In Pierce’s conception of an ordered universe, men and women have their distinct roles to play. Men are the explorers and innovators; women should enjoy a protected and isolated status, staying at home to raise the children (Griffin 2001 355). Pierce believed that if one tampered with these natural inclinations, a dysfunctional society would result. (It is of course rather ironic that Pierce lived off of his wife’s income for several years.) Pierce held that white men in the United States had become much too feminine in their orientation, and that their freedom had suffered as a result: “When I’ve talked about this subject in the past, I’ve characterized the freedom-lovers as masculine and the security-lovers as feminine because under natural conditions men are a bit more willing to take chances and try new things and want to keep their options open, and they are also a bit more concerned with general principals, and women are a bit more concerned with the security of home and hearth...”(qtd. in ADV 7/28/01 1). Even more dangerous is the threat of feminism. Pierce saw the women’s rights movement as being potentially fatal to the white race:
...I have pointed out that the reason feminism is important is not that it has made many women neurotic and has made many men as well as many women unhappy, but that it is race-threatening...Feminism has drastically lowered the White birthrate: it is now well below the replacement rate, and the race will die out if the birthrate is not raised once again above the replacement level...Feminism takes women out of the home and puts them into the workplace. Feminism leads women to choose careers other than motherhood. Feminism, all by itself, will destroy us unless we stamp it out the way we would an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease: ruthlessly and thoroughly (qtd. in ADV 7/14/01 2).
Behind the feminist movement, Pierce saw the familiar instigator: “...every time I’ve talked about feminism at any length I have pointed out that the principal promoters of this ideology have been Jews...the feminist movement would have remained on the fringes of our society, populated mostly by lesbians, if it had not been for the enthusiastic and continuing support of the Jewish mass media, which made feminism Politically Correct on college campuses” (Ibid.). Once again, Pierce attempts to tie any social movement he considers to be detrimental to the purpose of the Creator to the Jews. In his mind, the feminist movement could never have arisen from the legitimate wishes of women to achieve a more equitable society. It is instead a part of the great conspiracy, deliberately instigated by the Jews to forward their own nefarious interests.
Pierce’s views on the roles of women and men in a properly functioning society were reflected in the structure of the NA. Pierce stated that the group’s membership was twenty percent female, but women were noticeably absent from the leadership ranks of the organization. If one skims through the back issues of Attack! and National Vanguard, it can be seen that almost every original article or colum was written either by Pierce or by a male NA member. The women who were employed at the NA compound performed such menial work as secretarial services or typesetting for Resistance and National Vanguard. This exclusion of women was consistent with the culture of American National Socialism, in which female leaders are virtually unknown, and women who are members of such groups are expected to stay silent and keep a low profile. The state of gender relations in the NA has not changed since Pierce’s death.
Although he excluded them from any position of responsibility or leadership the NA, Pierce did make use of women from both inside and outside of his organization when it suited his purposes. The early issues of Attack! were replete with images of nude white women, usually for the stated purpose of displaying the beauty of the white body. The practice had been dropped by the time Pierce changed Attack! into the more respectable National Vanguard. When Pierce took control of Resistance Magazine, he added a color center section featuring photos of “Proud Aryan Women”. The pictures are typically of young, attractive ladies, often sporting skinhead tattoos and clothing. The flirtatious element of these photos is fairly obvious. Pierce, like many other extremists, would sometimes resort to the implied promise of access to attractive women in an effort to woo male converts.
Pierce saw human sexuality as a positive thing, so long as it occurred between a man and a woman of the same race (NV 89 16). He was not particularly attached to traditional mores regarding sexual conduct: The protagonists in both The Turner Diaries and Hunter are depicted as engaging in premarital sex within committed relationships. But Pierce felt that the concept of sexual pleasure had been perverted by Jewish interests in the West through their control of popular entertainment, education, and the pornography industry (Attack! 4 2). When criticizing Sol Gordon, the author of a sex education book aimed at young persons, Pierce wrote:
In his view, since the sole purpose of sex is personal pleasure, anything which may titillate a jaded hedonist is A-O.K.—anything at all.
He subliminally puts across the idea that the individuals involved in a sexual relationship have no responsibility beyond themselves. The interests of society simply don’t count. Sol would probably have a stroke if anyone suggested to him that the primary function of sex is the breeding of the race and that purely personal considerations ought to be subordinate (qtd. in Strom 48).
Pierce believed that the institution of marriage had been similarly corrupted by the Jewish-implanted concept of individualism: “The problem was that our people had already accepted most of the basic Jewish premises. Our criterion for choosing a marriage partner was happiness—happiness!—either ours or our children’s” (qtd. in ADV 7/27/02 5). Given that sex exists to serve the purpose of the Creator, it is a sacred duty, not an activity to engage in simply for ones’ own pleasure. Marriage should be looked at in a similar light, being arranged in the interests of propagating valuable genetic lines rather than being concerned with the compatibility of the partners. Although he did not directly address the subject in his published wittings, we can assume that Pierce would have disapproved of divorce, preferring to place the integrity of the white family above the needs of the individuals involved. Given Pierce’s five failed marriages and his failure to produce children after the first, these beliefs take on a rather ironic tone.
Pierce saw the increasing societal acceptance of miscegenation and homosexuality as being the ultimate expressions of this slide into sexual decadence. Pierce’s loathing of miscegenation has already been described. He objected to homosexual behavior (at least among whites) for the same reason: As gays and lesbians produce no children, they do not advance the Creator’s purpose, and lower the already declining numbers of white persons on the planet. Pierce objected to these perceived perversions for moral as well as practical reasons:
The act of a man and a woman intended to engender a healthy, White child should be viewed as a sacramental act...Even when a sex act is not specifically sacramental—i.e., not intended to produce children—it ought not to be of a nature which clashes with sacramental sex or which tends to undermine or distort the basic view of sexual activity.
Thus, bestiality and homosexuality are beyond the pale, just as interracial sex with a sterile partner (or involving contraception) is. Such acts cannot engender defective or mongrel offspring directly, but they must inevitably poison the ethos of a people which permits them—and this will lead in turn to the abandonment of the primary taboo and then to racial decline (qtd. in NV 89 16).
Evidence of homosexual conduct was considered to be grounds for dismissal from the NA (NA membership application, 2).
This strong stated aversion to homosexuality is common in the American far right. In fact, accusations of homosexual behavior are often used in white supremacist circles in attempts to discredit personal rivals. (Such accusations were made against Pierce himself in The Deguello Report, an essay penned by an anonymous white supremacist in 1976 [Kaplan 402]). It is probably best not to address the subject of homosexual activity in the white supremacist movement here. Sufficed to say that the occurrence of secretly gay men joining white racist groups is far from unknown (Ibid. 62).
Pierce held that the result of this Jewish-inspired cultural slide has been the moral softening of American whites. He remarked that: “[White] American men and women today are softer, weaker, less reliable, less willing to accept responsibility, less patriotic, less able to endure discomfort and hardship, less willing to postpone gratification, and more willing to tolerate weakness and corruption in others than they were in the past” (qtd. in Free Speech 9). This weakness prevents whites from taking the hard stands they need to in order to stave off their race’s demise. For instance, Pierce often advised his white South African friends that they needed to either sterilize or expel the black population of their country in order to maintain their power. Pierce said that his friends rejected this advice, calling it too cruel. Pierce saw this as a weakness, brought on in this case by the universalist teachings of the Christian faith (ADV 8/18/01 4).
Pierce of course believed that the white race was genetically the most disciplined and hardest working one on earth. He held that the source of the current weakness afflicting whites could be traced to the Jewish-inspired soft parenting techniques that became popular in the post-WWII years. Even more disturbing, this terrible system of child raising was being passed on to the younger generations: “The raising of children in America has become feminized, softened. Spankings and other forms of corporal punishment are out. In fact, the prevailing attitude among White parents today is that any sort of punishment or denial is a bad thing. Disobedience no longer merits a whipping or the withdrawal of an allowance. Disrespect to a parent no longer earns a hard slap across the face and being confined to one’s room for a few days. Self-indulgence in children actually is encouraged today” (qtd. in Free Speech 4). Pierce perceived each generation as being a bit more lackadaisical than the last; he foresaw this downwards spiral as ending with the total debasement of the white race, and its eventual extinction.
Pierce, like Hitler, saw the modern world as a reflection of nature. Just as animals struggle with one another for their survival, the different races of humanity struggle against each other towards the same end. To emerge victorious in this great battle, a people must be ready to act ruthlessly towards their opponents. In a 1929 speech, Hitler made his violent ambitions clear: “If men wish to live, they are forced to kill others. The entire struggle for survival is a conquest of the means of existence which in turn results in the elimination of others from these same sources of subsistence. As long as there are people on this earth, there will be nations against nations and they will be forced to protect their vital rights in the same way as the individual is forced to protect his rights” (Cohen 410). Pierce shared Hitler’s social Darwinism. He feared that the white race as it currently exists lacks the strength and the brutality to survive against the onslaught of the Jews and their non-white puppets. Many of the policies he advocated within the NA were designed to produce a vanguard of mentally and physically fit persons; men and women who would be strong enough to take control of the crumbling social order when the time came.
This softening of discipline among the white population helps to explain why the revolution has not occurred already. Most whites, even if they were able to perceive the reality of the current situation, would prefer to retain their personal comfort rather than risk their own well being by joining a revolutionary group. As the character of Earl Turner notes: “Life is uglier and uglier these days, more and more Jewish. But it is still moderately comfortable, and comfort is the great corruptor, the great maker of cowards” (Macdonald 1990 64). This level of comfort will dissuade whites from taking any sort of moral stand against their oppressors, even if that oppression becomes extreme:
What is really precious to the average [white] American is not his freedom or his honor or the future of his race, but his pay check. He complained when the System began busing his kids to Black schools 20 years ago, but he was allowed to keep his station wagon and his fiberglass speedboat, so he didn’t fight...
That, unfortunately, is our average White American. We can wish that it weren’t so, but it is. The plain, horrible truth is that we have been trying to evoke a heroic spirit of idealism which just isn’t there any more. It has been washed right out of 99 per cent of our people by the flood of Jewish-materialist propaganda in which they have been submerged practically all of their lives (Ibid. 101).
Turner questioned whether a revolutionary movement could ever be forged from such a people: “...how could our people—how could White Americans—be so spineless, so crawling, so eager to please their oppressors? How can we recruit a revolutionary army from such a rabble?” (Ibid. 79). Pierce came to the conclusion that the majority of whites could never be awakened by rational appeals. He felt that the only way to force the white population to join his cause would be through the revocation of their comfort, and the destruction of their materialist way of life.
As should be clear from the quotations above, Pierce had little respect for the average white American. His hatred extended not only to Jews and racial minorities, but to most whites as well. He often referred to them in his essays as “lemmings”, “Joe Sixpacks”, or “Sally Soccermoms”. Pierce considered them to be unworthy of the liberty he sought to give them. As the character of Turner put it: “If the freedom of the [white] American people were the only thing at stake, the existence of the Organization could hardly be justified. [White] Americans have lost their right to be free. Slavery is the just and proper state for a people who have grown as soft, self-indulgent, careless, credulous, and befuddled as we have” (Macdonald 1990 33). This is an interesting point of view that sets Pierce apart from most of his white supremacist contemporaries. Traditionally, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan portrayed themselves as being maintainers of the status quo who acted in the material interests of the white community as a whole. Even today, more mainstream racists such as Pat Buchanan couch their appeals in terms of benefiting the white majority, using such issues as illegal immigration and affirmative action as their selling points. Pierce was not interested in improving the lives of the majority of white Americans. He was set on fulfilling the purpose of the Creator. Pierce did believe that the lives of whites would improve after the revolution, but this was of secondary importance. He rejected the white utilitarianism of most of the racist right in favor of a program of religious fulfillment, even if that fulfillment made the lives of whites considerably more unpleasant in the short term. Given this stance, perhaps Pierce should not have been surprised that his organization was never able to expand its membership past a small number of devoted followers.
When one considers his belief in the complete Jewish control of the media and the moral weakness of whites in contemporary America, Pierce’s objection to democracy becomes fairly obvious:
The influence of the mass media on this more feminine and impressionable electorate—an influence which has become overwhelming in this century with the development first of radio and then of motion pictures and television—has made a mockery of the whole concept of democracy as a system of government by the mass of the people who make their choices on the basis of their own innate values and attitudes. The masters of the mass media can and do manipulate the emotions and the opinions of the public on every issue of importance to themselves. They can and do set the political fashions of the day. They can and do form the image in the mind of the public of every candidate for public office...What we really have is an oligarchy, and the oligarchs are the people who own and control the mass media. Through the manipulation of public opinion and the images of candidates, the mass media constrain the flow of public policy within boundaries chosen by their masters (qtd. in Griffin 2001 383).
But even if the Jewish control over the media were to be broken, democracy would still be a farce: “...democracy is a hoax. The majority never has ruled and never will. A minority always rules, because only a minority of men have the capacity for independant thought and action; the rest are capable only of thinking and acting with the herd” (qtd. in NV 112 4).
This belief in the aristocratic principal (that is, that only a select few have the competency to rule) is central to the ideology of National Socialism. It holds that just as some races are more intellectually advanced than others, some men (and when discussing leadership positions it is always men) are more morally and intellectually gifted than the majority. At the top of the hierarchy is the Leader, a man so ethical and wise that he naturally rises to the apex of society and justly rules from there. Hitler of course thought of himself in these terms. It is likely that William Pierce did so as well.
Democracy was distasteful to Pierce for another reason. He was a monist, a religious fanatic. In his mind there was only one truth in the universe, the truth of Cosmotheism. All other belief systems, even those that preached racial separation, were in error. One of the key elements in a functioning democracy is the competition of differing ideologies in the political process. But if Cosmotheism is in fact the only ideology based on reality, than why should other beliefs be allowed expression? Why should lies be tolerated? Pierce believed in free speech, but only for “the truth” (qtd. in NV 87 5). As he and his followers were the only persons who fully understood the purpose of the Creator, was it not just that they should suppress all other voices? Democracy, with its pluralist structure, is inherently detrimental to this purpose, and therefore would not be permitted to exist in the new order. Rather, it would be replaced with an organic state, a state that exists only to fulfill the destiny of the universe.
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. (qtd. in ADV 12/11/99 1)
Pierce felt that the ultimate goal of the Jewish conspiracy was the extermination of the Aryan race. It was only the Aryans, with their 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 (qtd. in Griffin 2001 307).
Pierce believed that the aim of the Jews was to spiritually weaken whites, making them less likely to perceive the deliberate plot that was being enacted against them. Miscegenation would be the Jew’s final and ultimate weapon, destroying the white race through interbreeding with other ethnic groups (Attack! 20 6). With the white race annihilated, there will be no way for the Creator to become self-aware, and the Jews will rule over a world of docile, mixed-raced persons. Pierce saw the Jews as evil personified, and their existence provided a counterforce of unredeemable darkness to his vision of white purity and goodness.
Of course, Pierce believed that the Jews would never mount this attack on the white race by open or honorable means: “The motto of Mossad, Israel’s principal agency for state-sponsored terror and assassination, is ‘By way of deception shalt thou do war’ but, in fact, that is the principal that governs the relations of Jews as a whole with the non-Jewish world” (qtd. in Resistance 16 23). In fact, the conspiracy is so deeply hidden that even many Jews are not fully aware of it. When the protagonist of Hunter protests that his kindly Jewish dentist could not possibly be involved in such an evil plot, another character corrects him:
Your Jewish dentist pays his taxes too, with his contributions to the United Jewish Appeal. He may not be in the front lines with the fellows from B’nai B’rith, but you can bet that he does his part on the home front in lots of little ways. He votes for politicians who vote for your taxes to be sent to Israel. He writes letters with the right slant to the editor of the Washington Post...
Or maybe your dentist is one of those really rare Jews who doesn’t pay a bit of attention to what B’nai B’rith tells him and doesn’t even buy Israel Bonds. He still thinks of himself as a member of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people—the Jewish nation, the Jewish race, whatever you want to call the damned thing—is at war with our people, make no mistake about it (Macdonald 1998 72-73).
All of this makes the Jews in some ways a rather convenient enemy. If the problems of the modern world could be traced to a more general cause, such as the alienating effects of technology or a basic character flaw in the nature of all of humanity, the correction of the underlying problem might seem insurmountable. In Pierce’s worldview, the solution to the world’s problems is straightforward and relatively easy to remedy. If the Jews are removed from white society (and preferably from the world as a whole), humanities’ (and the Creator’s) major obstacles will disappear with them.
“Who Rules America?”, a thin booklet issued by Pierce through his National Vanguard book company, is the key recruiting text of the NA. If one orders products or simply requests information from the group, this booklet is always included in the reply. It is periodically updated, and focuses its attention on the alleged Jewish control of the Western media. The booklet’s introduction describes the huge amount of influence the owners of major media outlets have on public opinion. It is claimed that these individuals for the most part hail from the same ethnic group:
And who are these all-powerful masters of the media? As we shall see, to a very large extent they are Jews. It isn’t simply a matter of the media being controlled by profit-hungry capitalists, some of whom happen to be Jews. If that were the case, the ethnicity of the media masters would reflect, at least approximately, the ratio of rich Gentiles to rich Jews. The preponderance of Jews in the media is so overwhelming, however, that we are obliged to assume that it is due to more than mere happenstance (NA 2000 3).
The main body of the text is an exhaustive listing of the owners and managers of the major newspaper, magazine, and television companies in the United States. All the individuals mentioned are, of course, Jewish. Pierce believed that this gave the Jews a tremendous amount of power over the opinions of white America: “The mass media gives us our image of the world and then tells us what to think about that image. Essentially everything we know—or think we know—about events outside our own neighborhood or circle of acquaintances comes to us via our daily newspaper, our weekly news magazine, our radio, and our television” (Ibid. 2). Given the evil nature of the Jews and their quest for world power at the expense of the white race, Pierce considered the control of the media by the Jews to be the most threatening problem facing whites today: “My point is that the media are in fact destructive of our values and our society and our civilization. My point is that the media, because they are dominated by Jews, work to advance the Jew’s interests, not our interests, and that their interests are opposed to ours. That’s supremely important. That’s the most important thing of which our people should be aware” (qtd. in ADV 3/23/02 4).
In this belief, Pierce is applying one of the classic strains of extremist thought: nothing happens by accident. The obvious interpretation of the American media is that it exists to serve its own interests. If a media source slants a news story in a certain direction, it is doing so because it believes that that is what its audience wants to see, or perhaps what its corporate owners and advertisers would like to see. If the personal bias of a media owner or manager does slip into the reporting, it is more likely to reflect that individual’s political viewpoints rather than an explicitly racial ideology. But to Pierce, all Jewish persons operate from a racial viewpoint. They do not represent their own personal interests, but the interests of the Jewish people in general. Therefore, the slanting of news stories is not a random or personalized event, but part of a great plan of action. There are powerful forces at work in the universe, some acting for good, others for evil. The media, like everything else, is a part of that tremendous struggle. The fact that it is (in his mind) controlled by the forces of evil was intolerable to Pierce.
Much of what Pierce tried to accomplish with the NA was to provide a media outlet for white Americans that was not corrupted by the influence of the Jews. To that end, he established a newspaper and a radio program that spread what he considered to be news important to white persons. Pierce also dabbled in other media in an attempt to spread his pro-white message. As noted, he saw Resistance Records as being a potentially powerful tool to transmit National Socialist ideals to young persons. Near the end of his life, Pierce produced a recruitment video for the NA, complete with dramatic music and slick computer graphics. One can suppose it was meant to be shown by NA recruiters to persons who did not have the time or inclination to read Pierce’s books or articles. The NA even produced a comic book intended for distribution to high school students. It relates the story of “White Will”, an Aryan teenager who stands up to the Jewish influence at his school.
Pierce saw the Jewish influence in American culture as extending beyond the limits of the news-reporting organizations. In his view, Jewish interests either directly or indirectly controlled all of the major entertainment outlets in the U.S. This manipulation of the entertainment industry enables the Jews to control which artists gain prominence, and also control what those artists produce:
Even though the majority of the “artists” on the pop-culture scene are still White Americans, they are employees of an industry which is completely dominated by Jews and which, for reasons of its own, has chosen to selectively promote trends and fads which are foreign to the American majority.
The net effect of this alien influence has been cultural chaos. It has largely alienated [white] Americans from the great cultural heritage handed to them by their ancestors in Western Europe and left them culturally rootless—a people, in fact, with no true culture, particularly the generation born since World War II (qtd. in Strom 34).
This form of Jewish control is viewed as being particularly insidious in that it targets young whites who most likely do not yet read the newspaper or watch the evening news. Their young, impressionable minds are corrupted at this early age, making them more docile for further manipulation as they grow older.
One of the most repulsive Jewish corruptions of popular culture, in Pierce’s view, could be seen in the music industry. Commenting on the efforts of Sumner Redstone (the owner of the cable music channel VH1) to promote rap music, Pierce wrote:
Redstone’s aim—and the aim of the Jewish media bosses generally, whether they’re in Hollywood or on Madison Avenue, is to alienate young White people, to uproot them, to destroy their sense of racial identity, to confuse them, to make them forget their traditions and history, and to persuade them to mix with Blacks and other non-Whites. That’s why Redstone promotes rap music so heavily. His ultimate aim is to destroy our people, our race. And because I’m trying to counter that with Resistance Records, he calls me a “hater” and calls the music I distribute “hate rock” (qtd. in ADV 3/2/02 1).
Pierce believed that the efforts by the Jews to cause young whites to look at black persons as being “cool” would lead to them adopt black culture, and would legitimize miscegenation.
Pierce saw this Jewish influence as extending even into supposedly independent artistic areas such as painting and sculpture. Pierce, like his idol Adolph Hitler, considered modern trends in the fine arts to be degenerate: “Western man’s artistic sense, once soaring and uplifting, seems to have withered, darkened, and become cancerous in the twentieth century. His urge towards beauty and truth seems to have degenerated into a morbid fascination with ugliness, an irresistible desire to be distracted, amused, deceived” (qtd. in Strom 34). Pierce would have liked to have seen white artists return to more classical and uplifting subjects, such as landscapes and portraits, which he felt had a positive effect on the race (Ibid.).
It is interesting to contrast Pierce’s interpretation of the bias in the American media and the decline in popular culture with that of the American conservatives. They too see a conspiracy at work in the media, but ascribe it to a political bias (liberalism) rather than a racial one. Some on the fringe of the conservative movement even ascribe a deliberate plan to the degradation of popular culture in the U.S. They describe it as “cultural Marxism”, an attempt by the left to break down the traditional moral values of the nation and reduce individualism, thus making the imposition of Marxist economic policies more palatable to the masses (Berkowitz 5). Most conservatives, however, still consider the decline in artistic standards to be simply a matter of bad taste on the part of liberals. Consistent with his extremist mindset, Pierce could not accept the idea that this decline was occurring as a result of something as random as personal preferences. He saw it as being a part of the great struggle for the soul of the universe. And so of course, the decline must be caused by the source of all evil and discord in the modern world: the Jews.
In Pierce’s conception of an ordered universe, men and women have their distinct roles to play. Men are the explorers and innovators; women should enjoy a protected and isolated status, staying at home to raise the children (Griffin 2001 355). Pierce believed that if one tampered with these natural inclinations, a dysfunctional society would result. (It is of course rather ironic that Pierce lived off of his wife’s income for several years.) Pierce held that white men in the United States had become much too feminine in their orientation, and that their freedom had suffered as a result: “When I’ve talked about this subject in the past, I’ve characterized the freedom-lovers as masculine and the security-lovers as feminine because under natural conditions men are a bit more willing to take chances and try new things and want to keep their options open, and they are also a bit more concerned with general principals, and women are a bit more concerned with the security of home and hearth...”(qtd. in ADV 7/28/01 1). Even more dangerous is the threat of feminism. Pierce saw the women’s rights movement as being potentially fatal to the white race:
...I have pointed out that the reason feminism is important is not that it has made many women neurotic and has made many men as well as many women unhappy, but that it is race-threatening...Feminism has drastically lowered the White birthrate: it is now well below the replacement rate, and the race will die out if the birthrate is not raised once again above the replacement level...Feminism takes women out of the home and puts them into the workplace. Feminism leads women to choose careers other than motherhood. Feminism, all by itself, will destroy us unless we stamp it out the way we would an epidemic of hoof-and-mouth disease: ruthlessly and thoroughly (qtd. in ADV 7/14/01 2).
Behind the feminist movement, Pierce saw the familiar instigator: “...every time I’ve talked about feminism at any length I have pointed out that the principal promoters of this ideology have been Jews...the feminist movement would have remained on the fringes of our society, populated mostly by lesbians, if it had not been for the enthusiastic and continuing support of the Jewish mass media, which made feminism Politically Correct on college campuses” (Ibid.). Once again, Pierce attempts to tie any social movement he considers to be detrimental to the purpose of the Creator to the Jews. In his mind, the feminist movement could never have arisen from the legitimate wishes of women to achieve a more equitable society. It is instead a part of the great conspiracy, deliberately instigated by the Jews to forward their own nefarious interests.
Pierce’s views on the roles of women and men in a properly functioning society were reflected in the structure of the NA. Pierce stated that the group’s membership was twenty percent female, but women were noticeably absent from the leadership ranks of the organization. If one skims through the back issues of Attack! and National Vanguard, it can be seen that almost every original article or colum was written either by Pierce or by a male NA member. The women who were employed at the NA compound performed such menial work as secretarial services or typesetting for Resistance and National Vanguard. This exclusion of women was consistent with the culture of American National Socialism, in which female leaders are virtually unknown, and women who are members of such groups are expected to stay silent and keep a low profile. The state of gender relations in the NA has not changed since Pierce’s death.
Although he excluded them from any position of responsibility or leadership the NA, Pierce did make use of women from both inside and outside of his organization when it suited his purposes. The early issues of Attack! were replete with images of nude white women, usually for the stated purpose of displaying the beauty of the white body. The practice had been dropped by the time Pierce changed Attack! into the more respectable National Vanguard. When Pierce took control of Resistance Magazine, he added a color center section featuring photos of “Proud Aryan Women”. The pictures are typically of young, attractive ladies, often sporting skinhead tattoos and clothing. The flirtatious element of these photos is fairly obvious. Pierce, like many other extremists, would sometimes resort to the implied promise of access to attractive women in an effort to woo male converts.
Pierce saw human sexuality as a positive thing, so long as it occurred between a man and a woman of the same race (NV 89 16). He was not particularly attached to traditional mores regarding sexual conduct: The protagonists in both The Turner Diaries and Hunter are depicted as engaging in premarital sex within committed relationships. But Pierce felt that the concept of sexual pleasure had been perverted by Jewish interests in the West through their control of popular entertainment, education, and the pornography industry (Attack! 4 2). When criticizing Sol Gordon, the author of a sex education book aimed at young persons, Pierce wrote:
In his view, since the sole purpose of sex is personal pleasure, anything which may titillate a jaded hedonist is A-O.K.—anything at all.
He subliminally puts across the idea that the individuals involved in a sexual relationship have no responsibility beyond themselves. The interests of society simply don’t count. Sol would probably have a stroke if anyone suggested to him that the primary function of sex is the breeding of the race and that purely personal considerations ought to be subordinate (qtd. in Strom 48).
Pierce believed that the institution of marriage had been similarly corrupted by the Jewish-implanted concept of individualism: “The problem was that our people had already accepted most of the basic Jewish premises. Our criterion for choosing a marriage partner was happiness—happiness!—either ours or our children’s” (qtd. in ADV 7/27/02 5). Given that sex exists to serve the purpose of the Creator, it is a sacred duty, not an activity to engage in simply for ones’ own pleasure. Marriage should be looked at in a similar light, being arranged in the interests of propagating valuable genetic lines rather than being concerned with the compatibility of the partners. Although he did not directly address the subject in his published wittings, we can assume that Pierce would have disapproved of divorce, preferring to place the integrity of the white family above the needs of the individuals involved. Given Pierce’s five failed marriages and his failure to produce children after the first, these beliefs take on a rather ironic tone.
Pierce saw the increasing societal acceptance of miscegenation and homosexuality as being the ultimate expressions of this slide into sexual decadence. Pierce’s loathing of miscegenation has already been described. He objected to homosexual behavior (at least among whites) for the same reason: As gays and lesbians produce no children, they do not advance the Creator’s purpose, and lower the already declining numbers of white persons on the planet. Pierce objected to these perceived perversions for moral as well as practical reasons:
The act of a man and a woman intended to engender a healthy, White child should be viewed as a sacramental act...Even when a sex act is not specifically sacramental—i.e., not intended to produce children—it ought not to be of a nature which clashes with sacramental sex or which tends to undermine or distort the basic view of sexual activity.
Thus, bestiality and homosexuality are beyond the pale, just as interracial sex with a sterile partner (or involving contraception) is. Such acts cannot engender defective or mongrel offspring directly, but they must inevitably poison the ethos of a people which permits them—and this will lead in turn to the abandonment of the primary taboo and then to racial decline (qtd. in NV 89 16).
Evidence of homosexual conduct was considered to be grounds for dismissal from the NA (NA membership application, 2).
This strong stated aversion to homosexuality is common in the American far right. In fact, accusations of homosexual behavior are often used in white supremacist circles in attempts to discredit personal rivals. (Such accusations were made against Pierce himself in The Deguello Report, an essay penned by an anonymous white supremacist in 1976 [Kaplan 402]). It is probably best not to address the subject of homosexual activity in the white supremacist movement here. Sufficed to say that the occurrence of secretly gay men joining white racist groups is far from unknown (Ibid. 62).
Pierce held that the result of this Jewish-inspired cultural slide has been the moral softening of American whites. He remarked that: “[White] American men and women today are softer, weaker, less reliable, less willing to accept responsibility, less patriotic, less able to endure discomfort and hardship, less willing to postpone gratification, and more willing to tolerate weakness and corruption in others than they were in the past” (qtd. in Free Speech 9). This weakness prevents whites from taking the hard stands they need to in order to stave off their race’s demise. For instance, Pierce often advised his white South African friends that they needed to either sterilize or expel the black population of their country in order to maintain their power. Pierce said that his friends rejected this advice, calling it too cruel. Pierce saw this as a weakness, brought on in this case by the universalist teachings of the Christian faith (ADV 8/18/01 4).
Pierce of course believed that the white race was genetically the most disciplined and hardest working one on earth. He held that the source of the current weakness afflicting whites could be traced to the Jewish-inspired soft parenting techniques that became popular in the post-WWII years. Even more disturbing, this terrible system of child raising was being passed on to the younger generations: “The raising of children in America has become feminized, softened. Spankings and other forms of corporal punishment are out. In fact, the prevailing attitude among White parents today is that any sort of punishment or denial is a bad thing. Disobedience no longer merits a whipping or the withdrawal of an allowance. Disrespect to a parent no longer earns a hard slap across the face and being confined to one’s room for a few days. Self-indulgence in children actually is encouraged today” (qtd. in Free Speech 4). Pierce perceived each generation as being a bit more lackadaisical than the last; he foresaw this downwards spiral as ending with the total debasement of the white race, and its eventual extinction.
Pierce, like Hitler, saw the modern world as a reflection of nature. Just as animals struggle with one another for their survival, the different races of humanity struggle against each other towards the same end. To emerge victorious in this great battle, a people must be ready to act ruthlessly towards their opponents. In a 1929 speech, Hitler made his violent ambitions clear: “If men wish to live, they are forced to kill others. The entire struggle for survival is a conquest of the means of existence which in turn results in the elimination of others from these same sources of subsistence. As long as there are people on this earth, there will be nations against nations and they will be forced to protect their vital rights in the same way as the individual is forced to protect his rights” (Cohen 410). Pierce shared Hitler’s social Darwinism. He feared that the white race as it currently exists lacks the strength and the brutality to survive against the onslaught of the Jews and their non-white puppets. Many of the policies he advocated within the NA were designed to produce a vanguard of mentally and physically fit persons; men and women who would be strong enough to take control of the crumbling social order when the time came.
This softening of discipline among the white population helps to explain why the revolution has not occurred already. Most whites, even if they were able to perceive the reality of the current situation, would prefer to retain their personal comfort rather than risk their own well being by joining a revolutionary group. As the character of Earl Turner notes: “Life is uglier and uglier these days, more and more Jewish. But it is still moderately comfortable, and comfort is the great corruptor, the great maker of cowards” (Macdonald 1990 64). This level of comfort will dissuade whites from taking any sort of moral stand against their oppressors, even if that oppression becomes extreme:
What is really precious to the average [white] American is not his freedom or his honor or the future of his race, but his pay check. He complained when the System began busing his kids to Black schools 20 years ago, but he was allowed to keep his station wagon and his fiberglass speedboat, so he didn’t fight...
That, unfortunately, is our average White American. We can wish that it weren’t so, but it is. The plain, horrible truth is that we have been trying to evoke a heroic spirit of idealism which just isn’t there any more. It has been washed right out of 99 per cent of our people by the flood of Jewish-materialist propaganda in which they have been submerged practically all of their lives (Ibid. 101).
Turner questioned whether a revolutionary movement could ever be forged from such a people: “...how could our people—how could White Americans—be so spineless, so crawling, so eager to please their oppressors? How can we recruit a revolutionary army from such a rabble?” (Ibid. 79). Pierce came to the conclusion that the majority of whites could never be awakened by rational appeals. He felt that the only way to force the white population to join his cause would be through the revocation of their comfort, and the destruction of their materialist way of life.
As should be clear from the quotations above, Pierce had little respect for the average white American. His hatred extended not only to Jews and racial minorities, but to most whites as well. He often referred to them in his essays as “lemmings”, “Joe Sixpacks”, or “Sally Soccermoms”. Pierce considered them to be unworthy of the liberty he sought to give them. As the character of Turner put it: “If the freedom of the [white] American people were the only thing at stake, the existence of the Organization could hardly be justified. [White] Americans have lost their right to be free. Slavery is the just and proper state for a people who have grown as soft, self-indulgent, careless, credulous, and befuddled as we have” (Macdonald 1990 33). This is an interesting point of view that sets Pierce apart from most of his white supremacist contemporaries. Traditionally, groups such as the Ku Klux Klan portrayed themselves as being maintainers of the status quo who acted in the material interests of the white community as a whole. Even today, more mainstream racists such as Pat Buchanan couch their appeals in terms of benefiting the white majority, using such issues as illegal immigration and affirmative action as their selling points. Pierce was not interested in improving the lives of the majority of white Americans. He was set on fulfilling the purpose of the Creator. Pierce did believe that the lives of whites would improve after the revolution, but this was of secondary importance. He rejected the white utilitarianism of most of the racist right in favor of a program of religious fulfillment, even if that fulfillment made the lives of whites considerably more unpleasant in the short term. Given this stance, perhaps Pierce should not have been surprised that his organization was never able to expand its membership past a small number of devoted followers.
When one considers his belief in the complete Jewish control of the media and the moral weakness of whites in contemporary America, Pierce’s objection to democracy becomes fairly obvious:
The influence of the mass media on this more feminine and impressionable electorate—an influence which has become overwhelming in this century with the development first of radio and then of motion pictures and television—has made a mockery of the whole concept of democracy as a system of government by the mass of the people who make their choices on the basis of their own innate values and attitudes. The masters of the mass media can and do manipulate the emotions and the opinions of the public on every issue of importance to themselves. They can and do set the political fashions of the day. They can and do form the image in the mind of the public of every candidate for public office...What we really have is an oligarchy, and the oligarchs are the people who own and control the mass media. Through the manipulation of public opinion and the images of candidates, the mass media constrain the flow of public policy within boundaries chosen by their masters (qtd. in Griffin 2001 383).
But even if the Jewish control over the media were to be broken, democracy would still be a farce: “...democracy is a hoax. The majority never has ruled and never will. A minority always rules, because only a minority of men have the capacity for independant thought and action; the rest are capable only of thinking and acting with the herd” (qtd. in NV 112 4).
This belief in the aristocratic principal (that is, that only a select few have the competency to rule) is central to the ideology of National Socialism. It holds that just as some races are more intellectually advanced than others, some men (and when discussing leadership positions it is always men) are more morally and intellectually gifted than the majority. At the top of the hierarchy is the Leader, a man so ethical and wise that he naturally rises to the apex of society and justly rules from there. Hitler of course thought of himself in these terms. It is likely that William Pierce did so as well.
Democracy was distasteful to Pierce for another reason. He was a monist, a religious fanatic. In his mind there was only one truth in the universe, the truth of Cosmotheism. All other belief systems, even those that preached racial separation, were in error. One of the key elements in a functioning democracy is the competition of differing ideologies in the political process. But if Cosmotheism is in fact the only ideology based on reality, than why should other beliefs be allowed expression? Why should lies be tolerated? Pierce believed in free speech, but only for “the truth” (qtd. in NV 87 5). As he and his followers were the only persons who fully understood the purpose of the Creator, was it not just that they should suppress all other voices? Democracy, with its pluralist structure, is inherently detrimental to this purpose, and therefore would not be permitted to exist in the new order. Rather, it would be replaced with an organic state, a state that exists only to fulfill the destiny of the universe.
posted by Henry Garfield at 7:47 PM
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