This book has become sort of an obsession among my local circal of friends (not that they’re nazis, just curious). The rumor was: buy a copy, and you get added to a government watch list. The copies been around for months, but we’ve been seeing a lot more helicopters lately.
I haven’t read it yet, and I may never get around to it. But I have to confess a certain curiousity after reading this from Wikipedia:
At the time of his arrest, Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted for the Oklahoma City bombing, had a copy of The Turner Diaries in his possession. McVeigh’s bombing was similar to the event described in the book where the fictional terrorist group blows up FBI Headquarters.
The Order, an early 1980s white supremacist group involved in murder, robberies and counterfeiting, was named after the group in the book and motivated by the book’s scenarios for a race war. The group murdered Alan Berg, a controversial and outspoken Jewish talk show host, and engaged in other acts of violence in order to hasten the race war described in the book. The Order’s efforts later inspired another group, The New Order, which planned to commit similar crimes in an effort to start a race war that would lead to a violent revolution.
John William King was convicted for dragging James Byrd, an African-American, to his death in Jasper, Texas. As King shackled Byrd’s legs to the back of his truck he was reported to have said, “We’re going to start the Turner Diaries early.”
The suicide mission to bomb the Pentagon at the end of the book is eerily similar in some people’s minds to the suicide bombing of the Pentagon on September 11, 2001 by members of Muslim extremist group Al Qaeda. It has been suggested by some that the book only serves as a model of how a local grass-roots movement can overthrow a powerful and tyrannical central government, and that this has led to some groups that do not even agree with the white separatist/supremacist movement using it as a model or blueprint for revolution.
Wikipedia entry on the Turner Diaries.
Turner Diaries e-book.
