In this class thus far, we have read and viewed some troubling things, but none on par with The Turner Diaries.  After reading some of it a few days back, I thought of that, and of course the reason, for myself at least, is the original-source nature of such a text (not sure if this is the correct terminology): this is not a text about anything, but rather was meant, to some people at least, to be a sort of manifesto.  In some cases, the Oklahoma City bombing notably, the manifesto was carried out.  Reading such a text as this can be quite disturbing, but ultimately, it teaches in a way a review, or other scholarly or journalistic work on a text cannot: it forces direct confrontation with such disturbing ideas, with no distance allowed, just the raw message, not distilled by a third party for easier consumption.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of The Turner Diaries is that it is ready-made to be a manifesto, insofar as it reads as an instruction manual for paranoid persons in surveilled times.  From the creation of weapons caches, to the construction of bombs, to a suicide mission, this text is all too apparently something meant to be made real.  The text is in its most clear manifesto modes in two key ways: first, when the narrative voice switches into detailed, list-giving instructions, and second, perhaps in an even more significant way, in those little parenthetical notes, meant to explain to “readers” dwelling in a future post-apocalyptic revolution, the awful peculiarities of the present day, and how they were (in most cases) overthrown by the organization.

Within the text, investment in character is important only so far as it places the reader within the manifesto.  It matters not so much that the text is read as novel, but that the reader is put into a mode of identification, a place where the time of the System is clearly the here-and-now, where that paranoid reader can be drawn in to identify with someone such as Earl Turner just enough to want to set in motion his plans, which are of course carefully fleshed out in the text.  It is what makes reading a text like this that much more unsettling than viewing a documentary, or reading academic review or a journalistic account of events caused by this text:  in reading the source of such paranoia and hate, there is no way to distance oneself, nor to dissociate the text from the destructive feelings and actions it has caused in its readers.  The hateful, paranoid language is right there, and it is purposeful: it is meant to cause a reaction in its readers, to bring on a kind of apocalypse, one that is driven by fear, anger, and hate.