Racist Book Makes Good Case For Censorship

If ever a book were begging for a bonfire, “The Turner Diaries” is it.

This goose steppers manifesto will raise more goose bumps than R.L. Stine ever could. It’s far more vile than Madonna romping nude in the aluminum-bound pages of “SEX.”

“The Turner Diaries” is as nasty as any porn.

It’s an ignorant, hateful thing that has inspired neo-Nazi trigger men, thugs and thieves.

The April 19, 1995, fertilizer bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building which took 168 lives mirrored action in the book, which depicts a similar bombing of FBI headquarters. Ex-Marine Timothy McVeigh, charged with the Oklahoma City bombing, is said to be such a “Turner” devotee that he once slept with a dogeared copy under his pillow.

But until now, the paperback that white supremacist William Pierce wrote in 1977 has been a difficult book to find, even in the publishing underground.

With its recent mass release from Barricade Books, booksellers - society’s traditional champions of First Amendment rights - can’t agree on how to handle “The Turner Diaries.”

In Spokane, managers at three of the four major bookstores say they will order copies of the book at the request of customers, but they won’t invest a nickel to keep the nasty work in stock.

Only B. Dalton Bookseller routinely will offer it on its shelves.

“We’re certainly not going to suppress it,” says Christopher Swartz, assistant manager at B. Dalton’s downtown store, 702 W. Main. “But we’re not going to buy 100 cases and make a floor display either.”

B. Dalton manager Laurel Net adds that the book should arrive in early June and will be placed in the fiction section.

She makes no apologies. “Redeeming social value is not what determines what goes on my shelves.”

The freedom to choose. That’s the idealistic core of any First Amendment argument.

Yet, in the real world, censorship happens all the time.

Newspapers set standards on what they will or won’t publish. Editors make tough decisions all the time. Libraries don’t always buy every book that comes along.

“We don’t like to censor, but at the same time we have to,” says Chris O’Harra of Auntie’s Bookstore, 402 W. Main.

“We have limited space, we have limited money, so why in the world spend it on something like this?” Why in the world? Especially when some of the profits from the book undoubtedly will go to finance Pierce’s neo-Nazi group.

“The book clearly has been used to promote domestic terrorism,” argues The American Jewish Committee’s Kenneth Stern, who in a letter asked national booksellers to not order “The Turner Diaries.”

Were the consequences not so tragic, this book would be comical for its amateur hour plot and hack writing.

The novel tells the story of the fictional Earl Turner. Turner is a member of the Organization, which starts a revolution in the 1990s after the Jewish-controlled “System” rounds up firearms from the citizenry.

The Organization fights back. Bodies pile up. A civil war develops and, in the end, the good whities kill off all those baddies: federal judges, minorities, Jews and those who have shamed the white race.

As ridiculous as it sounds, The Order - a splinter group of North Idaho-based Aryan Nations - used “The Turner Diaries” as a blueprint for brutality in the mid-1980s.

Members of The Order gunned down Denver radio host Alan Berg. They robbed armored cars, counterfeited money and staged several bombings before they were all arrested or killed.

Yeah, nobody wants to be called a censor. But why make it any easier for people to get hold of dangerous garbage like “The Turner Diaries?”

, DataTimes