Other Worlds: The Turner Diaries, Chapter 19

Other Worlds: The Turner Diaries, Chapter 19Show more

Chapter Nineteen.

June 27, 1993. So, I finally have my orders! It's to be California
for me during our big summer offensive. At first I was very
disappointed that I won't be able to go back to Washington, but the
more I consider the implications of some of the things I was told
this afternoon, the more I'm convinced that the real focus of our
activity in the next few weeks will be on the West Coast. It looks
like I'll be in the thick of things there, and that will be a welcome
change from all this classroom work, at least.
Denver Field Command summoned me and six of my pupils to a
meeting today on two hours' notice. We were told almost nothing,
except that I and four of the others are to be in Los Angeles by
Wednesday night at the latest. The last two were given a
destination in San Mateo, just outside San Francisco.
I protested immediately and vehemently: "All these people have
been trained especially to attack specific targets in this area. And
they've been trained as teams. It doesn't make sense to break them
up now and send some of them to California, when they can be so
much more effective here. If they are sent away, our whole
program for the Rocky Mountain area will be jeopardized."
The two DFC officers at the meeting assured me that their
decision had not been made capriciously and that they are fully
cognizant of the validity of my objections, but that more pressing
considerations must prevail. I finally forced them to reveal that
they had received an urgent order from Revolutionary Command
to transfer every activist they could spare to the West Coast
immediately. Apparently other field commands all over the
country have received similar orders.
They were reluctant to say more, but from the emphasis they put
on our deadline for reporting to our California destinations, I
strongly suspect that things are set to blow sometime next week.
I did accomplish one thing this afternoon:
I arranged to have Albert Mason, who was to go to San Mateo but whose presence
here is really essential to the success of the operations planned for
this area, swapped for another man.

But I had trouble gaining even
that concession. I insisted on knowing exactly what criteria had
been used in selecting the men to be transferred. It turned out that,
except in my case, there were two: infantry combat experience and
rifle marksmanship-which makes it look like they want snipers and
barricade fighters out on the Coast, rather than saboteurs and
demolition experts.
Al, it is true, qualified as an "expert" with the rifle when he was
in the service, and he spent three years as a squad leader in
Southeast Asia. (Note to the reader: Turner is referring to the so-
called "Vietnam War," which had been over for two decades at the
time but which played an enormously important role in laying the
groundwork for the Organization's later success in dealing with the
System's armed forces.) But he has also been my best pupil here.
He is the one man I spent time with explaining some of the newer
military gadgets we expect to acquire in our raids on the arsenals
around here. He is the only one I am sure will be able to use the
new M-58 laser range finders, for example, and teach our mortar
teams how to use them too. And he is also the only one here to
whom I taught enough basic electronics so that he can rig up the
radio-controlled detonators which are an essential part of our plan
for knocking out the highway network in this area and keeping it
knocked out.
Only when I pointed out these things to DFC did they agree to let
Al stay here. We then spent half an hour going over a list of all the
other activists here before we found one I thought could go to
California in Al's place without jeopardizing things here and who
also satisfied their criteria.
My impression is that everything we planned for this area is still
"go," and it is still considered important for us to achieve our
objectives here, but the really critical theater of operations will be
the West Coast.

We are approximately doubling our manpower
there with these last-minute transfers, but we are doing it in such away that at least most of the operations planned for other areas can
go ahead, though with fewer personnel.
Well, we only have 48 hours to drive more than 1,000 miles, and
there's no telling how many checkpoints we'll be stopped at. The
others will be by to pick me up in about two hours, and then it'll
take me at least four hours to pack my gadgets in the car so they
won't be found if we're searched. I think I'll take a quick nap now.
July 1. Wow! Are things tense here! We arrived yesterday,
around one in the morning, after a trip I'd just as soon forget. The
others are dispersed to their assigned units, but I'm staying with
Los Angeles Northwest Field Command temporarily, in a place
called Canoga Park, about 20 miles northwest of Los Angeles
proper.
It is apparent that the Organization is much more solidly
entrenched here than elsewhere, simply from the fact that there are
eight different field commands in the Los Angeles metropolitan
area, whereas one suffices for most other major cities in the
country. That would indicate an underground membership here in
the 500-700 range.
Mostly, I've been catching up on my sleep since I arrived, but the
other people here don't seem to be doing any sleeping at all.
Couriers are constantly coming and going, and conferences are
being held at all hours. This evening I finally buttonholed someone
and got at least a partial briefing on the situation.
A simultaneous assault on more than 600 military and civilian
targets all over the country has been scheduled for next Monday
morning, July 4. Unfortunately, however, one of our members here
was picked up by the police on Wednesday, just a few hours before
our arrival. It seems to have been just a fluke. He was stopped on
the street for a routine identification check, and the cops became
suspicious about something.

Since the man is not in the Order, he was neither prepared nor
under an absolute obligation to kill himself if captured.
The great worry for the last two days has been that, under torture, he will
reveal enough of what he knows to tip off the System to the fact
that a major assault is scheduled for Monday. Then, even though
the authorities won't know just which targets we plan to hit, they'll
tighten up security everywhere to the point that our casualties will
be unbearably high.
Revolutionary Command has two choices: silence our man before
he can be interrogated, or reschedule our entire offensive. The
latter choice is almost unthinkable: too many things have been
carefully arranged and synchronized in detail for next Monday to
allow the date to be advanced, and a postponement might run into
months-with enormous risks attendant on having so many people,
already primed for Monday, knowing so much for so long.
So it was decided yesterday to act on the first choice. But even
that presents a major problem: we can't hit our man here in Los
Angeles without risking blowing the cover of one of our most
valuable legals, a special agent in the FBI's Los Angeles office.
That's because the prisoner is being held in a location which is
supposed to be a big secret. If we raid the place, they'll only have;
half-a-dozen people to suspect as the one who leaked the
information to us.
The System's customary procedure when they pick up one of our
people is to perform only a very cursory interrogation in the field-
just enough to determine whether there is any indication that the
prisoner is connected in any way with the Organization. If there is,
then he is flown back to Washington for a thorough working over
by their Israeli torture specialists. And the latter is what we can't
afford to let happen.
The interesting thing in this particular case-and the thing which
has kept Revolutionary Command in a state of agonized indecision
for two days now-is that the FBI has been holding the prisoner
here, instead of flying him back to the Washington headquarters
Thursday morning, as soon as they suspected they had an
Organization member. No one seems to know exactly why, not even our FBI legal.

It may just be an instance of organizational
inefficiency on their part. Or perhaps they're bringing an
interrogation team out here from Washington this time, contrary to
their previous routine.
Anyway, RC has decided to hold off on the hit and see what
happens. If no move is made to put the prisoner on a plane for
Washington or to interrogate him further here within the next 36
hours, the problem will be solved; any information the System
extracts from him will come too late to interfere with our Monday
schedule. But if a transfer or an interrogation seems imminent
before Sunday afternoon, we're prepared to launch a lightning raid
on the FBI's secret prison here, even at the risk of losing our inside
man in the local FBI office, whose information in coming months
can be invaluable to us.
As for me, I still don't know why I'm here or what I'm supposed
to do, and I'm not sure anyone else does either. I was just told to
wait.
Well, I guess we're really facing a major test again, like we did in
September 1991. It just seems incredible to me that the
Organization is actually launching an all-out assault on the System
in two days. The total number of men we can put on the firing line,
for the whole country, can't be more than 1,500, despite the very
rapid gains in recruiting we've made in the last few months.
Altogether-including our support personnel, our female members,
and our legals-our strength can't possibly exceed 5,000 people, and
I'd estimate that nearly a third of them are concentrated here in
California now. It just seems unreal- like a gnat planning to
assassinate an elephant.
Of course, we're not expecting the System to collapse Monday. If
it did we wouldn't know how to cope with the situation, because
the Organization is still far too small to take over the running of
the country and the rebuilding of American society.

We'll need an
infrastructure 100 times as large as we have now to even begin
tackling that job.What we will do Monday is escalate the conflict to a new level
and forestall the System's latest strategy for dealing with us. We
really have no choice in the matter; if the Organization is to
survive and continue growing under the very difficult
circumstances which have been imposed on us, we must maintain
our momentum-especially our psychological momentum.
The danger in not constantly escalating the war is that the System
will find a new equilibrium, and the public will become
accustomed to it. The only way to maintain the present influx of
recruits is to keep a substantial portion of the public
psychologically off balance-keep them at least half convinced that
the System isn't strong enough and efficient enough to wipe us out,
that we are an irresistible force, that sooner or later the war will
sweep them, too, up in it.
Otherwise, the worthless bastards will take the easy way out by
just sitting back to see what happens. The American people have
already proved that they can shamelessly continue their crass
pursuit of pleasure under the most provocative conditions
imaginable - so long as new provocations are introduced gradually
enough for them to become accustomed to them. That's our
greatest danger in not acting.
Besides that, however, the political police are continually
tightening the screws. Despite our extraordinary security
procedures, they will eventually succeed in penetrating the
Organization and wrecking us-if we give them time. And it's
becoming harder all the time for us to move around without being
picked up. Very soon now, the new internal passport system which
we wrecked more than a year ago will be back on the tracks, twice
as mean as before. I don't know how we'll survive when that
becomes operational.

Thinking back over the last two years, though, it's amazing that
we've survived even until now. There have been a hundred times
when I didn't know how we'd be able to last another month.
Part of the reason we've been able to make it this far is something
for which we really can't take credit-and that's the inefficiency ofthe System.
They've made some bad mistakes and failed to follow
up on a lot of things which could have hurt us badly.
One gets the impression that except for the Jews, who are really
burning the midnight oil in their efforts against us, the rest of the
System is a bunch of clock-watchers. Thank "equal opportunity"-
and all those liberals in the FBI and in the Army-for that! The
System has become so corrupt and so mongrelized that only the
Jews feel at home in it, and no one feels any loyalty toward it.
But a bigger part of the reason is the way we've adapted to our
peculiar circumstances. In just two years the Organization has
learned a whole new way of existence. We're doing a number of
things now which are absolutely vital to our survival but to which
we had given almost no thought two years ago.
Our interrogation technique for checking out new recruits, for
example; there's no way we could have lasted this long without
that, and we didn't develop it until we absolutely had to have it.
What we would have done without Dr. Clark to work out the
technique, I don't know.
And then there's the matter of false identities. We had only the
vaguest ideas about coping with this problem when we first went
underground. Now we have a number of specialized units who do
nothing but provide nearly foolproof false identities for our
activists. They are real professionals, but they've had to learn their
rather gruesome trade in a hurry.
And money-what a problem that was in the beginning! Having to
count our pennies affected our whole psychology; it made us think
small.

So far as I know, no one in the Organization had ever given
any serious thought to the problem of financing an underground
movement before the problem became crucial. Then we learned the
counterfeiting trade.
It was providential that we had someone in the Organization with
the requisite technical knowledge, of course, but we still had to set
up our distribution network for getting the counterfeit bills into
circulation after we'd printed them.
In just the last few months this accomplishment has made an enormous difference for all of us.
Having a ready supply of cash -
being able to buy whatever we need instead of hijacking it, as in
the old days-has made things much easier. It has given us greater
mobility and greater safety.
There's been a certain element of luck in our success so far, and
there's no doubt that Revolutionary Command has been doing a
pretty good job of generalship. We've had good planning, a good
strategy-but, more than that, we've shown the ability to meet new
challenges and solve new problems. We've remained flexible.
I think the history of the Organization proves that no one can
make a fixed plan for a revolution and then stick to it. The future is
always too uncertain. One can never be sure how a given situation
will develop. And totally unexpected things are always happening-
things that no planner, however thorough, could have foreseen. So,
in order to be successful, a revolutionary must always be ready to
adapt to new circumstances and take advantage of new
opportunities.
Our record in that regard is reassuring, but I cannot help being
apprehensive about next week. I am sure we will knock hell out of
the bastards Monday. We will throw a good-sized monkey wrench
into the country's economic machinery if only half the things we
have planned come off successfully. And we will force the System
into a state of total mobilization, with the resulting psychological
shock to the general public.
But what then? What about next month and the month after that?
We're throwing everything we've got into next week's offensive,
and there is just no way we can keep up such a level of activity for
more than a few days. We are stretched too thin everywhere.
And yet my instinct tells me that the Organization is not acting
purely from desperation now. We are not making one, last,
desperate effort to wreck the System Monday. At least, I hope not.
If we make an all-out effort, then have to retrench when it fails-as
it surely will-the psychological effect will be as lethal for us as it
will be helpful for the System.
So Revolutionary Command must have something up its sleeve I don't know about.
I am sure the heavy concentration of our people
in California is a clue, but I can't figure it out.