Douglas Mercer
February 23 2025
Continued from Pierce (Part Five)
Of course it was Oliver who really got me going on novel writing in the first place, I like to think I write in pretty straightforward English but still the kind of essays I write are not for everyone. I remember it was at a time when I was really seeking to expand my audience and reach and it seemed that I was sort of topping out. Some of course responded well but they were generally educated and had a good grasp of the fundamental issues—a better class of bigot as one of my many critics wrote. I was feeling frustrated that my efforts seemed be stalling and at a lunch I told this to Oliver. He said he had just the thing, that I should try my hand at writing novels.
Of course that kind of thing I knew nothing about but he said he would send me a book to show me what he was talking about. He said the thing was that the kind of people I was looking for were young White men in their twenties, the kind of men who were dissatisfied with the way things were going but had no framework to understand it. And what did these men enjoy? Probably not a four-thousand-word essay on how to improve our souls, as important as that is. No, what these men liked were dramatic creations of adventure and daring and, of course, plenty of violence and gore.
He said that if I could find the right model I could pour all of my thoughts and philosophy into a story with characters that they could identify with, that way the message would get out in its simplicity but without losing the overall viewpoint. It would be a way of sort of luring them in with the melodrama of the narrative and soon they are thinking along the lines and thinking of the issues you want them to. And if someone happens to get their head blown off in every other chapter, or the throats of our enemies get slit, well, then so much the better. He said it could be a way to have my cake and eat it too. Of course the upshot of all this is Turner, and when the time comes it’s sure to be the lead in my obituary. Which is just as well. Whatever anyone says about it it’s a hell of a novel. One day someone should make a movie out of it—it has a lot of those jump scares they tell me the people like so much.
Pierce asked me if I had read Franklin as he had asked me to and when I said yes he wondered what I thought. I told him that his was better, an improved version of it, but that his precursor holds up well enough. I asked him about the rumor that Oliver had written it and he said it’s possible, he never thought about it at the time and never asked his friend. He also told me that the talk is he himself had written another book called Serpent’s Walk but he did not—that was someone else. I said that when a man comes to certain point of fame he acquires a mystique and people want to project their fantasies on to them and legends accrue as they become names to conjure with. He said he did not know about that, but maybe I was right. Who knows, before I’m done maybe I’ll have written Huckleberry Finn.
***
The John Franklin Letters was written in I think 1959 and was set in 1972, so it sort of has the same frame and scheme of Turner, I took it and just sort of expanded it. It was a book which really did not talk too much about race though there were things implicit in it. It was the kind of book which someone who had Witness on his bed stand could have enjoyed, about tyrannical government and Big Brother. Though it did have part about a World Court which made it a crime to be discourteous to a negro—so it got in some of that. In the book the underground is called the Rangers and what in my book I call the System is called the Buros (short for bureaucrats). But really it’s the same old story of Bunker Hill, we always seem to go back to that, a group of dedicated men in small cadres deciding to put their lives on the line to resist a corrupt government and they break out the rifles.
In a way it’s kind of a myth, though I can’t think of a left-wing version of it, the states in their dystopias are always so monolithic like in 1984 or so technologically proficient as in Brave New World that resistance is impossible, and the bad guys win. Whereas in our version of the myth there is always hope but only through massive violence. Perhaps that’s because the other side can’t bear to be seen to be exalting our glorifying violence, it makes them squeamish. That differing mindset could, I suppose, be construed as an advantage.
I began Turner in the old fashioned way, just like Dickens did, just put out one chapter at a time, which I did in Attack! I always wanted to end each chapter with some plot twist or some violent explosion to whet their appetite and keep them coming back for more of the same. See, I turned out to be an old entertainer just like Rockwell! And I can tell you the response was overwhelming, it really surprised me, people seemed to love it and kept asking for more so I decided to keep going and ratchet up the more outlandish parts, give them the gore good and hard just like Oliver told me to. My only regret is that if I had known that in the end it would be a novel that would be published in book form I probably would have taken more time with it and written it better. The prose is serviceable alright, but I can’t say much more for it than that. Where I shined of course is in the buildup and the sensational mayhem.
I was tempted to ask him about Matthews and McVeigh but I decided to leave that for later. I did ask him about when after the bomb goes off Turner sees the mangled bodies and has a pang of grief. He said that was only natural, that despite what everyone thinks we are not monsters. It was he said that the world view that we have is just one that is so far beyond my experience that you can’t fathom it. He said that one of his best writers wrote a piece in Vanguard about how some scholars were beginning to talk about the “nazi worldview” and even the “nazi ethics” and the “nazi conscience.” It was amusing but the writer told how they were coming around to the idea that Adolf Hitler was after all a human being. Hard to get your mind round, right? It was that old stuff about whether or not they should publish that cute and cuddly baby picture of the Fuehrer, the nervous nellies were worried that if they did it would elicit sympathy and humanize him.
Well, I can tell you the National Socialist had a strong conception of what was wrong and what was right, and so do I. It’s what motivates us. And the irony is these professors who churn out the tripe about Hitler and myself will turn around next and tell us with a straight face that we live in what they call a post truth world, that it’s all just a matter of perspective. In the old days the head shrinkers called that cognitive dissonance. And I can assure you that whatever else anyone says about us that is not our problem. The fact is we believe that we face powerful and dangerous enemies who are bent on our destruction. And we fully believe that self defense is an old American custom. You can say we are misled but never call us insincere.
As you know in the novel Turner is sort of stand in for me, and at the same time he’s some kind of mythical figure like Beowulf slaying the dragon. It’s really the most basic of things, it’s good vs. evil, and the good guys are shown as heroic and courageous, submitting themselves to harsh privations in order win the war. I think by now the book has sold over half a million copies and that’s just from us, no way a book like this gets on the sites of the big booksellers, we are neither the land of the free nor the home of the brave.
And remember this is a book of fiction, it’s no blueprint, and I’m no master mind of violence, I suppose I could put a disclaimer at the beginning but my feeling is that none of us are children. What the novel was was an action packed thriller of the best kind, and as I wrote it just kind of grew and grew. I suppose in any work of fiction of this kind there is a tendency to make it as sensationalistic as possible, it’s what the people want after all, you have to draw them in. And in fact I am very proud of the passage where I write about the making of the bomb, that’s where my technical background really held me in good stead.
He then turned his chair around and zeroed in on the book and said see what you think of this:
I packed about four pounds of blasting gelatin into an applesauce can, primed it, placed the batteries and timing mechanism in the top of the can, and wired them to a small toggle switch on the end of the 20 foot extension cord. When we load the truck with explosives, the can will go in back, on top of the two case of blasting gelatin. We’ll have to poke two small holes in the walls of the trailers of the cab to run the extension cord and the switch into the cab.
That’s what they call taut, right? Not a word wasted. I’d like to see that fool Le Carre try that! It may not be a literary masterpiece but it’s a lot more than workmanlike, I’ll hold it up to any of the novels that come out today on its merits, it holds up strictly as work of fiction a lot better than that Grisham type nonsense you see on the racks in the stores or that Thistles and Thorns nonsense. But in any event I never wanted to be Ernest Hemingway, the project just took on a life of its own and the point was that it was a recruitment tool, and in that respect, it’s been highly successful.
***
I suppose you want to talk about Matthews and McVeigh. He asked me if my recorder was on and when I told him yes he leaned in and in his staccato-like voice read from notes:
The National Alliance has a hardline policy — no violence and no promotion of violence. Our organization has its eyes on eternity, and the enemies we deal with today are cosmic afterthoughts. So it’s best we keep our heads down, treat them as beneath contempt, and keep the powder dry. Bob Mathews and Timothy McVeigh took another route, not the hard and long and patient one that I extol but the one of sudden and apocalyptic fury. I see them of course as misguided, but on a more human level one can also see their tales as ones of courage and devotion — and their sagas are spellbinding. I take responsibility only for my own actions, but I refuse to cut them loose.
He joked that he had his lawyer write that up. And then he said Matthews and McVeigh, they try to put everything around my neck. He said the way thing have gone he would not be surprised if they haul him into court for the Lindbergh baby!
***
Well let’s take Bob first. Bob was a great guy, I knew him quite well, he was part of our organization and I wished to god that he had remained so. There is no telling what he could have done for us had he had more patience and kept his eyes on the long run. Bob was not at all what they like to portray the typical White Nationalist, he was an all-American guy, had a real boyish charm and innocence about him, he looked like Donny Osmond for crying out loud. The speech he gave at our conference was rousing and got the only standing ovation that day. But by then I could see that I was losing him, he was no hot head, but the picture he had of how things were was unrealistic. At bottom he was just a gung-ho guy, he just wanted to act, he took his motto as the future belongs to the man willing to get his hand dirty. That’s a decent perspective but it’s not mine.
And I can say this, what he achieved was impressive any way you look at it. Up until then what you had was some good old boys getting sauced up on liquor and taking the pickup truck to the black part of town and firing shots through the bar window. But the Ukiah heist alone shows that Bob was really getting his act together, there was a precision and professionalism about it that you have to admire. I don’t believe everything I read but they say his plans were far reaching, poisoning the water supply, attacking the power grid in Los Angeles, blowing up a the Boundary Dam.
No one can accuse him of thinking small. And the hell of it is if he had been more careful he just might have pulled it off. He was careless in his comrades and just like in Turner he had his blabbermouths and his traitors, and he left all sorts of incriminating evidence in homes and PO Boxes. And he himself dropped the gun in Ukaiah. If he had worked a little bit slower, who knows, maybe you’d be talking to him right now. And when the chips were down he was willing to take the consequences of his actions and go out in a blaze of glory. Really, it’s a salutary thing for our people, any way you look at it.
You could see that that was all I was going to get on The Order, but I figured I’d try. I knew that just as with slavery he saw the actions of Matthews as a blunder rather than a crime but I asked him if he considered it to be moral. Well, here’s the thing, that’s never been uppermost in my mind, if we added up the rights and wrongs of the whole thing we’d never get anywhere. Who shot first the Hatfield’s or the McCoy’s? Who knows?
But it’s always moral to defend your own people. You see for most people life is just a matter of getting along and trying to get some security and trying to live as pleasant a life as possible. Maybe if they are Christian they think if they are a good person they will get to go to heaven, but that’s about it. Perhaps if some of them think there is a real mystery to life they wonder about it but they figure it’s way beyond what they can understand.
But our world view is entirely different. We don’t think we are here to live a good life or be comfortable or to be rich. We see ourselves as in a long tradition of our race and we see things in what we like to call cosmic terms. And once you look at things from that perspective everything becomes different. The small rights and wrongs become unimportant, we think we are here in order to fulfill a destiny, the destiny or our creator. And we also believe that it is our race and our race alone who can achieve this ultimate aim. And when it comes to it we won’t let anything get in the way of that aim. Because we know if we fail the creator will simply move on and in eons of time he will find some other time, and some other place, and some other people. But the aim will reach fruition. You can bet your boots on it.
He told me he only had a few more minutes, he had to go write his Saturday speech so why didn’t he get on with McVeigh. He said that at one point McVeigh was buying Turner in bulk for ten dollars and selling them for five. He was a proselytizer! Getting the good word out you know. They say he’d carry it around like his Bible and tell everyone about it. And just like Bob McVeigh was a serious young man who was willing to put his life on the line for his people. I admire that, I don’t care what they say.
He did call here a few times and leave messages and that was a missed opportunity. I think how I wrote Rockwell and he was able to get me started. Who knows, if I could have spoken to or met Tim maybe I could have got him around to my way of thinking. I certainly was not able to with Bob but from what I know of Tim I think I might have had more luck. And was he influenced by Turner, well, I suppose that was the case, but if he had not been there’s no reason to think he would not have reached the same conclusion. You see he had been a super patriotic American and his time in Iraq made him see the illusion of all that. William Pierce was certainly not necessary to bring him to the light.
You know I read somewhere something that Sam Francis was supposed to have said about Oklahoma. Sam was a good solid writer for the White cause, a bit verbose and erudite to my taste, but still he would speak openly about White people and put his cards on the table. He actually worked with Buchanan and wrote for the so called respectable papers but once he began to tell the truth he was drummed out. I’ve read that he was in a newsroom when the news of Oklahoma came on and as everyone else stood there open mouthed he just said: So it begins. He meant the revolution but he was wrong, it did not begin in Oklahoma. It has been going on a lot longer than that and it continues to this day, that was only a salvo. But I can tell you this—and here he made sure that my recorder was still on—the Great Revolution remains underway and it will succeed. You can bet your boots on it.
***
Notes:
During my very last meeting with Pierce I asked him if Bob Matthews had given him a hundred thousand dollars. He just said that was all a long time ago in a land far far away, but that he did hope to soon read what I came up with. I did send him the manuscript a few months later and, until now, as far as I know, he is the only one who read it.
Continued at Pierce (Part Seven)
