Counter-Currents
Remembering William Pierce:
September 11, 1933–July 23, 2002
Greg Johnson
1,263 words
William Pierce died ten years ago today. Pierce was an immensely influential and intensely polarizing figure. But ten years should be long enough for passions to cool and reflections to ripen. Thus to commemorate his passing we are publishing several articles this week which, we hope, will encourage a greater appreciation of his contributions to White Nationalism.
I also wish to draw your attention to some of Pierce’s best writings which I have reprinted on this website:
- “Conservatism or Radicalism?“
- “Dostoyevsky on the Jews” (Portuguese translation here)
- “Elites vs. Masses“
- “Rudyard Kipling: The White Man’s Poet” (French translation here)
- “The Measure of Greatness” (French translation here)
- “Miscegenation: The Morality of Death” (German translation here)
- “On Christianity“
- “On Liberty“
- “Our Cause“
- “Racethink“
- “Rockwell: A National Socialist Life“
- “The Roots of Civilization“
- “What is Racism?“
- “Why Conservatives Can’t Win“
- “Why the West Will Go Under“
Personal Reflections
I first encountered William Pierce’s writings in 2000. I believe that I first heard his name in March in connection to Savitri Devi: As editor of National Socialist World, Pierce created an abridgement of The Lightning and the Sun for the first issue. In later issues, he published excerpts from Gold in the Furnace and Defiance.
Some time later, on April 22, 2000, I purchased The Turner Diaries and Hunter from Dent Myers at his Wildman’s Shop in Kennesaw, Georgia. Frankly, I found them repulsive, The Turner Diaries in particular. Pierce may have been inspired by National Socialism, but his model of revolution was pure Lenin and his model of government pure Stalin. If he had the power, he would have killed more people than Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot combined. He epitomizes everything about the Old Right model that I reject: one party politics, totalitarianism, terrorism, imperialism, and genocide. At the time, I remarked that as a novelist and political theorist Pierce was a first rate physicist. I regarded him as a monster.
But when I heard that Pierce had a weekly broadcast, I wanted to hear the monster’s voice. “Hello!” I found Pierce’s radio personality angry and gruff but amusing. Occasionally, he talked about killing people, just to remind you that he was the author of The Turner Diaries. I don’t remember the topic of the first broadcast, but there was enough substance along with the lurid appeal, so I tuned in the next week. And the next week, and gradually, although I resisted every step of the way, Pierce did influence my thinking.
At the beginning of 2000, I was a Right wing intellectual. I rejected modern egalitarianism, liberalism, and capitalism based on classical political philosophy and the great critics of modernity and the Enlightenment from Vico to Rousseau, Hamann, Maistre, Herder, Nietzsche, and beyond. Although I had heard of the European New Right, I had not yet explored it. But I was deeply immersed in thinkers who influenced it, such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Evola.
I was racially aware and increasingly Jew-wise, but beyond the aesthetics, I was not attracted to National Socialism. It was Savitri Devi, oddly enough, who got me to take National Socialism seriously, although her initial appeal had as much to do with her eccentricity as anything else.
But all of this was on a rather rarefied intellectual plane. It was Pierce’s American Dissident Voices broadcasts that demonstrated the relevance of White Nationalist ideas, and specifically the Jewish question, to contemporary politics. I particularly benefited from his analysis of Jewish media power, both in his report Who Rules America? and in the new illustrations he gave every week.
Around the beginning of 2001, I decided to begin research for a new biography of Savitri Devi. (I hope to find time to finish it some day.) So I emailed Pierce and asked him about his interactions with Savitri Devi. To my surprise, he responded immediately. He told me that he would try to find his correspondence with her. (It never turned up.)
On the weekend of July 14 and 15, 2001, Mike Polignano and I visited Pierce at the headquarters of the National Alliance in West Virginia. We spent several hours together on Saturday afternoon. I taped an interview with him about Savitri Devi. (Sadly, the tape was lost.)
I think Pierce enjoyed talking to a fellow Ph.D. and voracious reader. He took special pride in showing us around his vast and impressive library. One of his prize possessions was an autographed copy of Madison Grant’s Conquest of a Continent inscribed to Adolf Hitler.
Pierce also introduced us to several National Alliance staff, including Billy Roper, an Australian named Robert Hawthorne, and his secretary Suzanne. He was obviously trying to sell us on the National Alliance, and he was doing a good job. But in the end there was a vast gulf between his vision and mine.
Pierce was relaxed, friendly, talkative, and funny. When I said “negroes” he said, “‘Negroes’? Is that what they call them in Georgia these days?”
There were, however, occasional flashes of the author of The Turner Diaries. He suggested, for instance, that Mike pursue his biology studies in graduate school so he could develop race-specific biological warfare agents. (Of course the Israelis are doing just that, so I guess he thought why not develop a White Death?) I thought of it as his Bond villain persona, complete with lap cat.
Pierce was completely unpretentious. His office was much smaller than his secretary’s. When I asked him for photocopies of the excerpts from Savitri Devi’s Defiance and Gold in the Furnace that he had published in National Socialist World, he cheerfully agreed, got up, and made the copies himself.
He told me he would ask Suzanne to make one more search for his correspondence with Savitri and asked us to stop by the next morning before we left town. The letters, alas, had not turned up. So we took photos with Dr. Pierce (and his cat Hadley) and bid him good bye. He was an extraordinary person, and I hoped we would meet again. But a little more than a year later, he was dead.
It was only after Pierce’s death that I discovered another side of his personality: the philosopher and religious thinker. In Minneapolis, I was given the books and papers of a deceased professor who had been involved with the American Nazi Party and its offshoots beginning in the early 1960s. The trove included correspondence with Pierce (signed Heil Hitler!), a complete set of National Socialist World, Pierce’s pamphlets on cosmotheism, a pretty much complete set of National Vanguard magazine, and even sheet music for National Alliance songs. Around the same time, Kevin Alfred Strom began publishing other philosophical and spiritual works at the National Vanguard site.
I found that Pierce had a deep feel for philosophical and spiritual questions and a first rate speculative mind. The angry man persona is not present in these writings. Instead, his prose is restrained, Olympian, luminous, sometimes even poetic. I have reprinted some of my favorites among these essays here. If you only read one essay by William Pierce, let it be “Our Cause.” I will share my thoughts on cosmotheism in another essay.
During our conversation on July 14, 2001, Pierce told us something that I will always remember. He loved physics, and he said that giving up academia was the hardest thing he ever did, but in the end, nothing could compare with the freedom to spend the rest of his life speaking the truth.
If you wish to share your thoughts and recollections of William Pierce, it is not too late. I will be putting up new essays all week.
27 comments
Pierce’s disturbing genocidal fantasies not only appear from his two novels, but also from his book “Who We Are”.
In a chapter about the ancient Greeks he had this to say :
“The Hellenes of Sparta and Athens both strove to keep their blood pure, but both ultimately perished. The only way they could have survived would have been TO ELIMINATE THE ENTIRE INDIGENOUS POPULATION, either through expulsion or EXTERMINATION from the areas of the Mediterranean world in which they settled”.
And about Alexander the Great :
“Alexander, for example, could have laid the foundations for a NORDIC EMPIRE which could have stood against the rest of the world – including Rome – forever.”
“…if, while conquering Asia, he had carried out a policy of TOTAL EXTERMINATION – then he could have colonized Asia with Nordic settlements, from the Indus to the Nile, and they could have multiplied and expanded into the empty lands without danger of racial mixing.”
I remember in one of his American Dissident Voices he told how he had advised white Rhodesians how they could “solve” their problems with Blacks by exterminating them all!
Further research in all his writings will surely yield more of such “gems”.
For me however it is a reason to reject the man.
Yes, Pierce’s views there amount to the claim that we have to exterminate the non-whites because otherwise, we’ll stick our dicks in them. He comes off as a kind of Bible Belt Stalin.
I’m puzzeled by this reply. It’s either some kind of sarcasim that goes over my head or it’s bad politics.
Saying non-whites have to be exterminated is unecessary. We just need to have seperate states.
We need to live in a temperate zone climate with more water than the Mid-East
(basically similar to Europe.) This would mean white’s would evacuate the lower quarter of the U.S., and blacks and others would evacuate our areas.
P.S. Thanks for the “The North American New Right” you sent. Haven’t had time to read more than the first 40 pages but that was well worth while.
Franklin Ryckaert:
I liked what you wrote about the single Jewish causers at TOO, and thanks to you I am reading Pierce’s Who We Are as well as ordering a copy of Kemp’s March of the Titans.
Thanks again.
But you are dead wrong on this one, Franklin. You simply have not lived at the middle of a sea of millions—literally—of Neanderthalesque browns with almost no whites (as I have) to understand Pierce’s wisdom.
I am tempted but won’t explain my ideas in a mere blog comment. Perhaps I’ll write a whole article on the necessity of a scorched-Earth policy after the Body Snatchers practically conquered the whole white world (hopefully as incisive an article as my “Gitone’s magic” who no one has dared to address yet). After all, our Cro-Magnon ancestors literally exterminated the Neanderthals, didn’t they?
Suffice it to say here that you et al must give up Christian and Secular Christian ethics. This, more than the Jews, is what’s killing us. See my entries on “axiology” at my blog to taste a bit of the flavor of what I might write.
@ Chechar:
I’m not sure what Pierce intended. I’ve read some of his writing on line and recall him mentioning that the average Jew was not a problem, but that their culture and their elites were deadly to us. This doesn’t sound like someone bent on extermination.
As to “The Turner Diaries” I’ve a copy somewhere. It was not a political program; it was a novel for heavens sake. Had Pierce written a non-fictional political tract of realistic white survival goals and tactics the media distribution and legal systems would have flushed it.
Pierce as noted linked up with Rockwell in the early sixties. I’ve read that Rockwell knew he could get no publicity let alone add space for recruitment unless he went the “Hollywood Nazi” route. Rockwell I’m informed made his tiny movement look terrible in order that the media would use him as good “Shock Porn” and as an educational example of what not to be.
But he would have, (and did) get the news of the existence of his group out. As they say, “there is no such thing as bad publicity” at least when you are struggling against the Jewish “Dynamic Silence” strategy.
Given that Pierce would have been influenced by Rockwell I think we can take the bloody nature of “The Turner Diaries” as more of the same tactic.
I’m not living in a sea on non-whites, so I’m not as stressed out and up tight as you.
We need to separate, not exterminate. And as Hitler noted you would find yourself opposed to the best whites if you tried extermination of political opponents, unless you could accomplish it in a very short time. Hitler seemed to be thinking ahead 10 years to the night he had a few hundred political opponents terminated.
Phil White,
I am not exactly talking of exterminating the Jews; of present-day tactics, or of PR: but of long-term strategical and ultimate goals. The fact is that even non-racialist peak oilers are saying that this world is for a maximum of 2 billion people and that 5 billion will die by the end of the century (“Nature has no qualms with genocide: and thus the petroleum induced human surplus of the 20th and 21st century will need to be culled to reach a peak oil.”)
This means that an unimaginably struggle for ever decreasing energy world supplies is about to happen in an ever increasing population growth later in this century. You can only imagine the ultra-ferocious nature that such competition will provoke, especially now that many third world countries are still joining the atomic club, including Muslim countries.
The 21st century, as Faye predicted, will be the century of Mars and Hephaestus. We must be prepared axiologically for the nightmare that is coming. This means taking Pierce’s fiction and non-fiction fantasies seriously. Incidentally, Franklin is right above about one single thing. Pierce’s held non-fictional views about “Neanderthal extermination” (that I am starting to publish in my blog, here).
Sorry Franklin: but I predict that those white nations who stick to the current deranged sense of decency that’s killing us—Christianity and neo-Christianity—will die later in the century.
If you don’t like to live among millions of “Neanderthalesque” browns in Mexico, why don’t you move to a majority white Latin American country like Argentina, Uruguay or Costa Rica instead of fantasizing about practising the “wisdom of Pierce” on the hapless Mestizos and Indios?What right have Spaniards anyway to live in majority Indian lands as their exploiting and oppressive overlords?
When the Europeans came to the Americas the part North of the Rio Grande was inhabited by one to two million Indians and Eskimos only, while in South America East of the Andes region only one million Indians lived. If Europeans had settled in those regions only and would not have been so stupid as to import millions of African slaves, there would be no racial problems today. But settling in densely populated areas and then fantasizing about the “need” to exterminate the aboriginal population makes no sense. And WHO but the white man himself has created the millions of Mestizos and Mulattos about whose existence he complains so much?
As for the Cro-Magnons having “exterminated” the Neanderthals in Europe, you have to see it more as an unequal competition for food in a cold area rather than a conscious genocide. Especially during the Ice Age food was scarce, hence only the more intelligent did survive. In the Middle East the climate was milder and the Neanderthalers survived. They were absorbed by the invading Cro-Magnons, hence to this day you still see Neanderthalesque types among Arabs and Jews.
As for an inevitable global race war because of Peak Oil, that Peak Oil idea is as much a Big Lie as JFK, Holocaust, 9/11, 7/7 and Global Warming, but you seem to have a preference for Big Lies especially if they are “official”. The Peak Oil Lie is invented by the big oil companies in order to keep the oil prices artificially high. There is in Alaska alone enough oil for the USA for a long time to come but it has been kept hidden.
For Whites to survive and florish no genocide is needed, the “wisdom” of Pierce be damned.
FR, how many times do Tribal leading lights like Sontag, Wise, Ignatiev, and many others have to publicly proclaim that they intend to liquidate all Whites before you believe them? The Jews do NOT intend to be ghettoized or “holocausted”. Ever. Again. Therefore they will and are, as Stoddard predicted, first half-drown us in a rising tide of color and then move in for a complete kill. This is a zero-sum game, and William Pierce understood it as such.
Of course I believe them and of course it is a zero-sum game, but how do you fight it?
Where is the white anti-immigration lobby that will reverse the 1965 immigration policy? Where are the white intellectuals who will sound differently from persons like Sontag, Wise or Ignatiev? Where are the pro-white equivalents of the ADL, SPLC, UCLA etc.? Where are the pro-white media, where is a pro-white film industry? Where is a pro-white conservative group that will take over the Republican party like the Jewish neo-cons did?
It still has not sunk down that this battle against the Jews has to be fought IN A JEWISH WAY. Fantasies about “necessary” genocides are useless, even if they come from a man like William Pierce.
Speaking of erudite White Nationalists, can we hear more about Revilio Oliver? From what little I’ve read, he seemed to have Pierce’s toughness without the overt brutality. I could be wrong though since I haven’t read enough of him.
Oliver especially nailed the problem with Christianity, the illegitimate son of Judaism.
I’d like to offer the following quotation from William L. Pierce for our collective edification: “Reality is that we are being pushed rapidly toward racial extiction. Reality is that the Jews are controlling the minds of a majority of our people for the specific purpose of keeping us headed toward extinction. Those are the real problems which we must deal with…Forget about ball games, the economy and whether a Democratic crook or a Republican crook should be elected later this year. Think about racial survival and racial freedom;that’s all that matters. Really, nothing else counts in the least.” (American Dissident Voices broadcast of Jan. 29, 2000-“Reality Check”)
Good choice. I admire how he always kept on message and always cleaved to the essential issue.
The problem of Pierce’s fascination with extermination goes beyond simple “christian morality” or “bad politics”. I’d rather ask the question, what sort of a man is it who can actually commit an act of mass extermination of mostly innocent non-combatants? The individual person who comes to Europe from North Africa on a boat, or sneaks into the US over the Mexico border, or comes to Canada from China has no interest other than trying to get a better life for themselves. Most whites realize this. Of course, when you have hundreds of thousands or millions of such individuals all coming in at once, problems are created. Most whites also on some level realize this. But what will be the effect on the psyche and spirit of the men and women who are killing, not “groups”, but individuals? What, I wonder, was happening inside the mind of the concentration camp guard who was actually able to force people who were screaming for their families and calling out to God to save them into gas chambers day after day after day? And is that really the sort of person we want to be looking up to, and who we want to be creating our future?
I’m reminded of the scene in one of Covington’s novels where a young National Socialist denounces his mother for having had relations with an Asian man in her youth, many years before. He does so knowing that she will be hung. Now in my eyes, and I think in most peoples’, a man who can sentence his own mother, the woman who bore and raised him, to death for nothing more than a youthful romance, is a man of such a character that I would want him exiled to the furthest ends of the earth. I would not allow such a man near my family and I would make sure he never attained any sort of power, for when a man can commit matricide like that, even “legal” matricide, think of what he can do to a fledgling white Republic. A nation which enables men like that to rise is breeding its own destruction.
When Arjuna was forced by caste and Divine command to war against his brothers, he did not glory in it and write novels about it. He wept bitterly.
For arguments sake, not that I belive in it’s application here, “I came not to unite but to divide, to pit brother against brother.” Or some such similar quote.
I share your feelings about that passage in Covington’s The Hill of the Ravens. But those feelings say nothing about the fierce war for the decreasing oil supplies that will be directly proportional to an increasing global population, as pointed above.
Recently I watched a documentary on a mice plague at Australia. Mice are friendly and extremely timid little creatures, but in vast numbers they start behaving differently. What shocked me the most was that, after they ate and depleted the whole of their surroundings and started to die out of starvation, they turned against themselves and started to cannibalize each other. Similarly, when the Romans entered Carthage after a long siege during the Third Punic War they were shocked to watch the semi-devoured bodies of little children by their own mothers (something worse than what you say above of the filicidal son) as a result of starvation too.
You have no idea of what is coming later in this century, Dominion. We better start being prepared with the slogan “Billions will die, We will win”.
@ Cechar:
O.K., I’ve read your “White Suicide Since Alexander” and “Extermination or Expulsion”
I agree that the world is likely moving into a more ethnocentric epoch. Robert Prechter wrote that as an aside in his 2002 “Conquer the Crash.”
Agreed we need to separate ourselves from non-whites and Jews.
But we are not firmly in the ethno-centric epoch yet. Caution suggests we stick to the “moderate “ tactics that work. That is explaining to our fellow whites that we are targeted for racial elimination by assimilation, and that the anti-whites aren’t bothering with Asia or Africa in terms of a final solution. I recommend whiterabbitradio.net.
Their sound bite is “Asia for Asians, Africa for Africans, white children’s countries for everyone” thus pointing out the self-evident hypocrisy in Jewish/Left anti-white behavior.
I think we need to listen to Sun Tzu “Know yourself and your enemy and you will not be defeated.”
To start with why are we such a tiny tiny ideological minority among the white population? I say it is because we here are all natural born xenophobes. Most people
apparently are nowhere near as obsessed with race as we are.
That is not to say we are wrong at this point. We exist for a reason. Xenophobes are a tribe’s genetic immune system. Most people, compared to us, are very mildly xenophobic. Similarly the immune system of a human body is a very tiny part of it’s over all structure.
I also worry that focusing on some supposed genetic defect in whites and philosophical defect in their “Christendom” religion is politically damaging to us. I agree there are apparently race differences in personality, but only to a degree.
White’s are not the only people who can be talked into suicide, as per the Jones Town massacre in Guyana. More than half of Jim Jones followers appeared to be black or mixed race with a few whites. Yet he talked 900 of them into mass suicide.
Hitler was not always right, but he did urge his followers not to get into fights over their Catholicism or Lutheranism. I agree. Anti-Christians/Neo-pagans should not drive off conservative whites by calling for “the final solution to the Christian problem.”
After all, if we destroy Christianity I guess there goes the whole “Christ Killers” thingy.
The Russian Empire with it’s establish Orthodox Church inconvenienced Jews enough that half of them emigrated to the U.S.
How did you hear about Wildman’s? Was that your only visit?
In Traveler’s Rest and Lauren’s, S.C., there are slightly similar stores, but where else?
I heard about him from the friend who introduced me to the whole racialist scene in Georgia. I went there many times.
Where is this phantom “scene” in Georgia?
Quick question to those who want to separate from non-whites rather than exterminate or drive them out the areas they’re now in. Are you OK with simply giving them the parts of the country that they are now the majority in? By the way, I don’t favor all out extermination. I would like to see mass deportations though. At least of all illegal aliens. I’m sure this would involve some bloodshed though. I’m even more certain that I’ll never see our pathetic government do anything like this.
Revolutions have never been won by intellectuals, but by men willing to get their hands dirty.
I realize this is probably retread, analyzed to death elsewere, but was Pierce “for real”? I have an inkling that he was some sort of ADL or similar organization construct, put there to convince the world that violent neo-Nazis are still a threat to humanity, and thus further demonizing any sort of WN–guilt by association again. Sort of like Chesterton’s “Man Who Was Thursday”, where the protagonist and antagonist turn out to be the same person.
Kullervo in blockquote:
Two part answer:
One, no, he went to great lengths to avoid being associated with “violent neo-Nazis.” Smart move, as the “violent neo-Nazis” are stunningly incompetent at violence, or, frankly, much of anything else.
Two, Covington mentioned a point someone John Tyndall? – made to him:
We will be allowed to do everything but organize into effective political organizations.
That is a lot closer to the heart of the matter.
An overview might be summed in an excellent quote from Alex Linder:
“For them to win, all they have to do is stop us from asking the right questions.”
Says it all.
I recently noted Randall Collins’ emphasis, in Violence: A Micro-sociological View (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), that few are violent, and fewer are competently violent. I should add that even fewer are intelligently violent. It should be noted that violent institutions — such as police forces, military forces, and martial arts academies — require a high degree of discipline and self-discipline on the part of their members. Indeed, these are the first things that are taught to members, for without them members are a danger to themselves and their fellows.
The capacity to be violent (a matter of disposition), to be competently violent (a matter of skill), and to be intelligently violent (a matter of direction and judgment) are qualities that rarely exist in a united and developed form. These qualities must be acquired and developed if violence is to be an effective and reliable tool. It is not surprising that violent institutions have high overhead and administrative costs (notably costs relating to selection, training, and organizational activities and structures) because of these things. It is also not surprising that violent incidents — particularly on the part of protagonists who lead an underground existence, such as criminals, terrorists, and guerrillas — are often characterized by ignominious blunders.
That said, mindless violence is one thing, mindful violence is another thing.
Its polite to add a warning before revealing any plot spoilers..
Regardless, interesting theory.
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