Other Worlds: The Turner Diaries, Chapter 1

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Chapter One.
September 16, 1991. Today it finally began! After all these years
of talking-and nothing but talking-we have finally taken our first
action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of
words.
I cannot sleep, so I will try writing down some of the thoughts
which are flying through my head.
It is not safe to talk here. The walls are quite thin, and the
neighbors might wonder at a late-night conference. Besides,
George and Katherine are already asleep. Only Henry and I are still
awake, and he's just staring at the ceiling.
I am really uptight. l am so jittery I can barely sit still. And I'm
exhausted. I've been up since 5:30 this morning, when George
phoned to warn that the arrests had begun, and it's after midnight
now. I've been keyed up and on the move all day.
But at the same time I'm exhilarated. We have finally acted! How
long we will be able to continue defying the System, no one
knows. Maybe it will all end tomorrow, but we must not think
about that. Now that we have begun, we must continue with the
plan we have been developing so carefully ever since the Gun
Raids two years ago.
What a blow that was to us! And how it shamed us! All that brave
talk by patriots, "The government will never take my guns away,"
and then nothing but meek submission when it happened.
On the other hand, maybe we should be heartened by the fact that
there were still so many of us who had guns then, nearly 18 months
after the Cohen Act had outlawed all private ownership of firearms
in the United States. It was only because so many of us defied the
law and hid our weapons instead of turning them in that the
government wasn't able to act more harshly against us after the
Gun Raids.
I'll never forget that terrible day: November 9, 1989. They
knocked on my door at five in the morning.

I was completely unsuspecting as I got up to see who it was.
I opened the door, and four Negroes came pushing into the
apartment before I could stop them. One was carrying a baseball
bat, and two had long kitchen knives thrust into their belts. The one
with the bat shoved me back into a corner and stood guard over me
with his bat raised in a threatening position while the other three
began ransacking my apartment.
My first thought was that they were robbers. Robberies of this
sort had become all too common since the Cohen Act, with groups
of Blacks forcing their way into White homes to rob and rape,
knowing that even if their victims had guns they probably would
not dare use them.
Then the one who was guarding me flashed some kind of card
and informed me that he and his accomplices were "special
deputies" for the Northern Virginia Human Relations Council.
They were searching for firearms, he said.
I couldn't believe it. It just couldn't be happening. Then I saw that
they were wearing strips of green cloth tied around their left arms.
As they dumped the contents of drawers on the floor and pulled
luggage from the closet, they were ignoring things that robbers
wouldn't have passed up: my brand-new electric razor, a valuable
gold pocket watch, a milk bottle full of dimes. They were looking
for firearms!
Right after the Cohen Act was passed, all of us in the
Organization had cached our guns and ammunition where they
weren't likely to be found. Those in my unit had carefully greased
our weapons, sealed them in an oil drum, and spent all of one
tedious weekend burying the drum in an eight-foot-deep pit 200
miles away in the woods of western Pennsylvania.
But I had kept one gun out of the cache. I had hidden my .357
magnum revolver and 50 rounds of ammunition inside the door
frame between the kitchen and the living room.

By pulling out two loosened nails and removing one board from the door frame I
could get to my revolver in about two minutes flat if I ever needed
it. I had timed myself.
But a police search would never uncover it. And these
inexperienced Blacks couldn't find it in a million years.
After the three who were conducting the search had looked in all
the obvious places, they began slitting open my mattress and the
sofa cushions. I protested vigorously at this and briefly considered
trying to put up a fight.
About that time there was a commotion out in the hallway.
Another group of searchers had found a rifle hidden under a bed in
the apartment of the young couple down the hall. They had both
been handcuffed and were being forcibly escorted toward the
stairs. Both were clad only in their underwear, and the young
woman was complaining loudly about the fact that her baby was
being left alone in the apartment.
Another man walked into my apartment. He was a Caucasian,
though with an unusually dark complexion. He also wore a green
armband, and he carried an attach_ case and a clipboard.
The Blacks greeted him deferentially and reported the negative
result of their search: "No guns here, Mr. Tepper."
Tepper ran his finger down the list of names and apartment
numbers on his clipboard until he came to mine. He frowned. "This
is a bad one," he said. "He has a racist record. Been cited by the
Council twice. And he owned eight firearms which were never
turned in."
Tepper opened his attach_ case and took out a small, black object
about the size of a pack of cigarettes which was attached by a long
cord to an electronic instrument in the case. He began moving the
black object in long sweeps back and forth over the walls, while
the attach_ case emitted a dull, rumbling noise. The rumble rose in
pitch as the gadget approached the light switch, but Tepper
convinced himself that the change was caused by the metal
junction box and conduit buried in the wall. He continued his
methodical sweep.

As he swept over the left side of the kitchen door frame the
rumble jumped to a piercing shriek. Tepper grunted excitedly, and
one of the Negroes went out and came back a few seconds later
with a sledge hammer and a pry bar. It took the Negro substantially
less than two minutes after that to find my gun.
I was handcuffed without further ado and led outside. Altogether,
four of us were arrested in my apartment building. In addition to
the couple down the hall, there was an elderly man from the fourth
floor. They hadn't found a firearm in his apartment, but they had
found four shotgun shells on his closet shelf. Ammunition was also
illegal.
Mr Tepper and some of his "deputies" had more searches to carry
out, but three large Blacks with baseball bats and knives were left
to guard us in front of the apartment building.
The four of us were forced to sit on the cold sidewalk, in various
states of undress, for more than an hour until a police van finally
came for us.
As other residents of the apartment building left for work, they
eyed us curiously. We were all shivering, and the young woman
from down the hall was weeping uncontrollably.
One man stopped to ask what it was all about. One of our guards
brusquely explained that we were all under arrest for possessing
illegal weapons. The man stared at us and shook his head
disapprovingly.
Then the Black pointed to me and said: "And that one's a racist."
Still shaking his head, the man moved on.
Herb Jones, who used to belong to the Organization and was one
of the most outspoken of the "they'll-never-get-my-gun" people
before the Cohen Act, walked by quickly with his eyes averted.
His apartment had been searched too, but Herb was clean. He had
been practically the first man in town to turn his guns over to the
police after the passage of the Cohen Act made him liable to ten
years imprisonment in a Federal penitentiary if he kept them.
That was the penalty the four of us on the sidewalk were facing. It
didn't work out that way, though.

The reason it didn't is that the raids which were carried out all over the country that day netted a lot more fish than the System had counted on: more than 800,000
persons were arrested.
At first the news media tried hard to work up enough public
sentiment against us so that the arrests would stick. The fact that
there weren't enough jail cells in the country to hold us all could be
remedied by herding us into barbed-wire enclosures outdoors until
new prison facilities could be readied, the newspapers suggested.
In freezing weather!
I still remember the Washington Post headline the next day:
"Fascist-Racist Conspiracy Smashed, Illegal Weapons Seized." But
not even the brainwashed American public could fully accept the
idea that nearly a million of their fellow citizens had been engaged
in a secret, armed conspiracy.
As more and more details of the raids leaked out, public
restlessness grew. One of the details which bothered people was
that the raiders had, for the most part, exempted Black
neighborhoods from the searches. The explanation given at first for
this was that since "racists" were the ones primarily suspected of
harboring firearms, there was relatively little need to search Black
homes.
The peculiar logic of this explanation broke down when it turned
out that a number of persons who could hardly be considered either
"racists" or "fascists" had been caught up in the raids. Among them
were two prominent liberal newspaper columnists who had earlier
been in the forefront of the antigun crusade, four Negro
Congressmen (they lived in White neighborhoods), and an
embarrassingly large number of government officials.
The list of persons to be raided, it turned out, had been compiled
primarily from firearms sales records which all gun dealers had
been required to keep. If a person had turned a gun in to the police
after the Cohen Act was passed, his name was marked off the list.
If he hadn't it stayed on, and he was raided on November 9-unless
he lived in a Black neighborhood.

In addition, certain categories of people were raided whether they
had ever purchased a firearm from a dealer or not. All the members
of the Organization were raided.
The government's list of suspects was so large that a number of
"responsible" civilian groups were deputized to assist in the raids. l
guess the planners in the System thought that most of the people on
their list had either sold their guns privately before the Cohen Act,
or had disposed of them in some other way. Probably they were
expecting only about a quarter as many people to be arrested as
actually were.
Anyway, the whole thing soon became so embarrassing and so
unwieldy that most of the arrestees were turned loose again within
a week. The group I was with-some 600 of us-was held for three
days in a high school gymnasium in Alexandria before being
released. During those three days we were fed only four times, and
we got virtually no sleep.
But the police did get mug shots, fingerprints, and personal data
from everyone. When we were released we were told that we were
still technically under arrest and could expect to be picked up again
for prosecution at any time.
The media kept yelling for prosecutions for awhile, but the issue
was gradually allowed to die. Actually, the System had bungled the
affair rather badly.
For a few days we were all more frightened and glad to be free
than anything else. A lot of people in the Organization dropped out
right then and there. They didn't want to take any more chances.
Others stayed in but used the Gun Raids as an excuse for
inactivity. Now that the patriotic element in the population had
been disarmed, they argued, we were all at the mercy of the
System and had to be much more careful. They wanted us to cease
all public recruiting activities and "go underground."
As it turned out, what they really had in mind was for the
Organization to restrict itself henceforth to "safe" activities, such
activities to consist principally in complaining-better yet,
whispering-to one another about how bad things were.

The more militant members, on the other hand, were for digging
up our weapons caches and unleashing a program of terror against
the System immediately, carrying out executions of Federal judges,
newspaper editors, legislators, and other System figures. The time
was ripe for such action, they felt, because in the wake of the Gun
Raids we could win public sympathy for such a campaign against
tyranny.
It is hard to say now whether the militants were right. Personally,
I think they were wrong-although I counted myself as one of them
at the time. We could certainly have killed a number of the
creatures responsible for America's ills, but I believe we would
have lost in the long run.
For one thing, the Organization just wasn't well disciplined
enough for waging terror against the System. There were too many
cowards and blabbermouths among us. Informers, fools,
weaklings, and irresponsible jerks would have been our undoing.
For a second thing, I am sure now that we were overoptimistic in
our judgment of the mood of the public. What we mistook as
general resentment against the System's abrogation of civil rights
during the Gun Raids was more a passing wave of uneasiness
resulting from all the commotion involved in the mass arrests.
As soon as the public had been reassured by the media that they
were in no danger, that the government was cracking down only on
the "racists, fascists, and other anti-social elements" who had kept
illegal weapons, most relaxed again and went back to their TV and
funny papers.
As we began to realize this, we were more discouraged than ever.
We had based all our plans-in fact, the whole rationale of the
Organization-on the assumption that Americans were inherently
opposed to tyranny, and that when the System became oppressive
enough they could be led to overthrow it. We had badly
underestimated the degree to which materialism had corrupted our
fellow citizens, as well as the extent to which their feelings could
be manipulated by the mass media.

As long as the government is able to keep the economy somehow
gasping and wheezing along, the people can be conditioned to
accept any outrage. Despite the continuing inflation and the
gradually declining standard of living, most Americans are still
able to keep their bellies full today, and we must simply face the
fact that that's the only thing which counts with most of them.
Discouraged and uncertain as we were, though, we began laying
new plans for the future. First, we decided to maintain our program
of public recruiting. In fact, we intensified it and deliberately made
our propaganda as provocative as possible. The purpose was not
only to attract new members with a militant disposition, but at the
same time to purge the Organization of the fainthearts and
hobbyists-the "talkers."
We also tightened up on discipline. Anyone who missed a
scheduled meeting twice in a row was expelled. Anyone who
failed to carry out a work assignment was expelled. Anyone who
violated our rule against loose talk about Organizational matters
was expelled.
We had made up our minds to have an Organization that would
be ready the next time the System provided an opportunity to
strike. The shame of our failure to act, indeed, our inability to act,
in 1989 tormented us and drove us without mercy. It was probably
the single most important factor in steeling our wills to whip the
Organization into fighting trim, despite all obstacles.
Another thing that helped-at least, with me-was the constant
threat of rearrest and prosecution. Even if I had wanted to give it
all up and join the TV-and-funnies crowd, I couldn't. I could make
no plans for a "normal," civilian future, never knowing when I
might be prosecuted under the Cohen Act. (The Constitutional
guarantee of a speedy trial, of course, has been "reinterpreted" by
the courts until it means no more than our Constitutional guarantee
of the right to keep and bear arms.)
So I, and I know this also applies to George and Katherine and
Henry, threw myself without reservation into work for the
Organization and made only plans for the future of the
Organization. My private life had ceased to matter.

Whether the Organization actually is ready, I guess we'll find out
soon enough. So far, so good, though. Our plan for avoiding
another mass roundup, like 1989, seems to have worked.
Early last year we began putting a number of new members,
unknown to the political police, into police agencies and various
quasi-official organizations, such as the human relations councils.
They served as our early-warning network and otherwise kept us
generally informed of the System's plans against us.
We were surprised at the ease with which we were able to set up
and operate this network. We never would have gotten away with
it back in the days of J. Edgar Hoover.
It is ironic that while the Organization has always warned the
public against the dangers of racial integration of our police, this
has now turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us. The "equal
opportunity" boys have really done a wonderful wrecking job on
the FBI and other investigative agencies, and their efficiency is
way down as a result. Still, we'd better not get over-confident or
careless.
Omigod! It's 4:00 AM. Got to get some sleep!