William Luther Pierce

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William Luther Pierce
Born September 11, 1933(1933-09-11)
Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.
Died July 23, 2002 (aged 68)
Mill Point, West Virginia, U.S.

William Luther Pierce III (September 11, 1933 – July 23, 2002) was the leader of the white separatist National Alliance organization, and a principal ideologue of the white nationalist movement. First educated as a physicist, he later worked with George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. He achieved notoriety as the author of a novel, The Turner Diaries (1978), written under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. He founded a religion he called Cosmotheism, which was an admixture of panentheism, White Nationalism and separatist world-views.

Contents

[edit] Background and education

Pierce was born on September 11, 1933 in Atlanta, Georgia. His father William L. Pierce II was born in Christiansburg, Virginia in 1892. His mother Marguerite Farrell was born in Richland, Georgia in 1910. Her family were part of the aristocracy of the Old South, descendants of Thomas H. Watts, the Governor of Alabama and Attorney General of the Confederate States of America.[1] Pierce's father once served as a government representative on ocean-going cargo ships and sent reports back to Washington.[2] Later his father owned an insurance agency and died in a car accident in 1942.[3] After his father’s death the family, which included a younger brother, moved to Montgomery, Alabama and then to Dallas, Texas.[4]

He did well in school, skipping one grade. His last two years in high school were spent in a military academy.[5] As a teenager his hobbies and interests were model rockets, chemistry, radios, electronics and reading science fiction.[6] He had hopes of one day becoming an astronaut.[7]

After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He injured himself when a four inch (102 mm) pipe fell on his hand and spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman.[8] Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Rice University in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics.[9] He worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before attending graduate school, first at Caltech and then the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1962.[9] He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.[10]

Pierce married five times. The first was with Patricia Jones whom he met while at California Institute of Technology. They were married in 1957 and had twins sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1962. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982.[11] Pierce remarried that same year to Elizabeth Prostel, whom he met in the National Alliance office in Arlington, Virginia. The marriage ended in 1985 when Pierce moved his headquarters to West Virginia.[9] Pierce married Hungarian Olga Skerlecz in 1986, a marriage which lasted until 1990. Olga left Pierce and West Virginia "for greener pastures in California".[12] Pierce then wed a woman named Zsuzsannah, who is also Hungarian, in early 1991. They met through an ad that Pierce placed in an Hungarian women's magazine. Zsuzsannah left him for Florida in mid-1996. His last marriage, which lasted until his death, was with another Eastern European woman whom he married in 1997.[13]

[edit] American Nazi Party

It was during this time at Oregon State ('62 - '65) when Pierce began to notice two social movements on campus that disturbed him:[citation needed] the civil rights and the Vietnam anti-war movements. Pierce saw the civil rights movement as a threat to the white race. Also, he believed the anti-war movement to be communist-inspired and led primarily by Jews. He had a brief membership in the John Birch Society in 1962,[14] but eventually resigned.

In 1966 he became an associate of George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. During this time he was the editor of the party's ideological journal, National Socialist World. When Rockwell was assassinated in 1967, Pierce continued to work with the group (this time officially becoming a member) which by then was renamed the National Socialist White People's Party (NSWPP). Pierce left the NSWPP and took control of the National Youth Alliance in 1970, which became the National Alliance in 1974.[9]

[edit] National Alliance

Main article: National Alliance (United States)

The National Alliance adopted the Life Rune as its symbol and this organization was to be a political vanguard designed ultimately to bring about a "white racial redemption". His Cosmotheist Community Church, which was to be the next step of this plan, was set up in the mid-1970s, alongside Pierce's political projects; the National Alliance, National Vanguard Books, and the weekly broadcast American Dissident Voices. In 1978 Pierce applied for and was denied tax exmeption claiming it from the Internal Revenue Service; he appealed and an appellate court upheld the I.R.S. decision.[9] In 1985, Pierce moved his operations from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346-acre (1.40 km²) compound in Mill Point, West Virginia for $95,000 in cash.[9] He called his new compound the Cosmotheist Community Church.[9]

Pierce's views have been characterized as a version of early twentieth century racial anthropology, but driven by spiritual, as well as scientific, beliefs, influenced by his previous association with Rockwell and his party. Others have noted the German Romantic roots that Pierce's ideas shared with Nazism and have observed similarities between the two ideologies: Pierce's plan for white divinity was similar to Adolf Hitler's vision for the Herrenvolk; also, his attacks against Jews as "parasites" on Gentile society, who would prevent the white (non-Jewish) race from reaching its destined godhood by replacing the white, Gentile elite with their own kind, echoed previous Nazi descriptions of Jewish traits and character. Dr. Pierce laid out his case in "Who Rules America" at the following link.[1]

When Pierce bought the West Virginia compound he called it the "Cosmotheist Community Church" and applied for Federal, state and local tax exemptions. However in 1986, the "Church" lost its state tax exemption for all but 60 (out of nearly 400 acres) acres and which had to exclusively used for "religious purposes."[15] The other 340 acres (1.6 km²) were for both the National Alliance headquarters and the National Vanguard Books business and warehouse, and were not ruled tax exempt. The Southern Poverty Law Center has characterized Pierce's religion as "an unsuccessful tax dodge".

After his death, the Board of Directors (BoD) appointed Erich Gliebe as the new Chairman. The National Alliance had a small power-struggle right after the death of William Pierce with Billy Roper, the Deputy Membership Coordinator being fired in September 2002. Billy Roper went on to found the group White Revolution. In August 2003 another internal disruption occurred with two members of BoD, firefighter Fred Streed and former economics professor Robert DeMarais resigning.

Gliebe appointed replacement Shaun Walker, but internal discontent grew over behavior alleged by members and unit leaders to reflect a "dangerous lack of sophistication or moral compass" on the part of Gliebe and Walker. In 2005, roughly 90% of members quit after Gliebe and Walker refused the terms of a petition circulated by essentially the entire peripheral leadership, demanding the handover of the organization to the National Alliance Executive Committee (comprising Roger Williams, Robert Pate, Charles Ellis, Kevin Strom, and Richard Lindstrom).[citation needed] A new organization National Vanguard, was launched [2], but lacked any clear or willing leadership despite the (ultimately merely nominal) cooperation of Kevin Strom and other prominent former NA figures.

During this last disruption Shaun Walker, then the Vice President and COO of the National Alliance, was appointed as the new Chairman and CEO. In June 2006, Walker was arrested for alleged Civil Rights violations and Erich Gliebe again assumed the leadership of the organization.


[edit] The Turner Diaries

Main article: The Turner Diaries

Pierce came to international public attention following the Oklahoma City bombing. Timothy McVeigh, was alleged to have been influenced by The Turner Diaries (1978), the novel written by Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald.[9] The book is a graphically violent depiction of a future race war in the United States, including a detailed description of the mass hangings of many "race traitors" and of any white women who ever had had sex with any non-Whites and in the public streets of Los Angeles, followed by the systematic ethnic cleansing of the entire city. The book, told through the perspective of Earl Turner - an active member of the white revolutionary underground - The Organization-culminates with Turner’s nuclear suicide mission, of which destroyed the military command at the Pentagon, and thus preventing any invasion of the Organization-controlled California.

The part most relevant to the McVeigh case is in an earlier chapter, when the book's main character is put in charge of bombing the FBI headquarters.[9] Some have drawn parallels from the book to the actual bombing strikingly similar to the Oklahoma City bombing that damaged the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killed 168 people in 1995.

The Turner Diaries also inspired a group of white revolutionary nationalists in the early 1980s calling themselves the Silent Brotherhood or sometimes simply The Order.[9] The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting and bank robbery, and supposedly gave money to the Alliance.[9] The Order's leader, Robert Jay Matthews, died in a stand off with police and federal agents on Whidbey Island in Washington when police finally firebombed his hideout. Other Order members, most notably the late David Lane, were all captured and sent to federal prisons, where they still continue to voice their support for white nationalism, Neo-Nazi and racially separatist ideals.

[edit] Cosmotheism

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Pierce adopted Cosmotheism[3] as his religion in 1978. In effect it is a form of panendeism, a belief that an impersonal God is the animating force within the universe. Moreover, Pierce's salutation of the "life principle" adumbrates the Greek Logos, his own professed agnosticism and his atheism regarding a Personal God notwithstanding.

Cosmotheism asserts that "all is within God and God is within all." It considers the nature of reality and of existence to be mutable and destined to co-evolve towards a complete "universal consciousness," or godhood. Cosmos means an orderly and harmonious universe and thus the divine is tantamount to reality and consciousness, an inseparable part of an orderly, harmonious, and whole universal system.

In his speech "Our Cause", Pierce said:

"All we require is that you share with us a commitment to the simple, but great, truth which I have explained to you here, that you understand that you are a part of the whole, which is the creator, that you understand that your purpose, the purpose of mankind and the purpose of every other part of creation, is the creator's purpose, that this purpose is the never-ending ascent of the path of creation, the path of life symbolized by our life rune, that you understand that this path leads ever upward toward the creator's self-realization, and that the destiny of those who follow this path is godhood."

Pierce described his form of panendeism as being based on "[t]he idea of an evolutionary universe … with an evolution toward ever higher and higher states of self-consciousness," and his political ideas were centered on racial purity and eugenics as the means of advancing the white race first towards a superhuman state, and then towards godhood. In his view, the white race represented the pinnacle of human evolution thus far and therefore should be kept genetically separate from all other races in order to achieve its destined perfection in godhood.

Pierce believed in a hierarchical society governed by what he saw as the essential principles of nature, including the survival of the fittest. In his social schema, the best-adapted genetic stock, which he believed to be the white race, should remain separated from other races; and within an all-white society, the most fit individuals should lead the rest. He thought that extensive programs of "racial cleansing" (mass expulsion) and of eugenics, both in Europe and in the U.S., would be necessary to achieve this socio-political program.

[edit] Final years

Pierce spent his final years living in West Virginia, where he hosted a weekly radio show, American Dissident Voices and oversaw his publishing, National Vanguard magazine, Free Speech and Resistance as well as books published by his book publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc and his record company, Resistance Records.

In 1996, in a rare event, Pierce appeared on 60 Minutes,[16] which the interviewer asked if Pierce was "crazy." Pierce was also asked if he approved of the Oklahoma City Bombing, and he replied "No. No, I don't. I've--I've said that over and over again, that I do not approve of the Oklahoma City bombing."

Before Pierce died he allowed Robert S. Griffin to live with him for a month with the result being the self-published work: The Fame of a Dead Man's Deeds (2001). The Southern Poverty Law Center derided the work as uncritical and "Much of Griffin's tome consists of tedious regurgitations of Pierce's own words."[17]

Pierce died of cancer on July 23, 2002 in the mobile home he had lived in for the last twenty years in West Virginia with his wife.[18] When he died he said that "Jews control[led] all the major news media"[4] and that therefore no honest reporting had ever been done about him.[5]

[edit] Published works

The following works were published under the pseudonym "Andrew MacDonald".

[edit] Sources

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ (Griffin2001:30)
  2. ^ (Griffin2001:31)
  3. ^ (Griffin2001:27)
  4. ^ (Griffin2001:28)
  5. ^ (Griffin2001:29)
  6. ^ (Griffin2001:31)
  7. ^ (Griffin2001:32)
  8. ^ (Griffin2001:34)
  9. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "William Pierce Biography", Anti-Defamation League, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-18. 
  10. ^ "Pierce, William L.". Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Modern Political Biography. (2004). Oxon Helicon Publishing Limited. 604. ISBN 978-1859862735. 
  11. ^ (Griffin2001:39)
  12. ^ (Griffin2001:39)
  13. ^ (Griffin2001:40)
  14. ^ (Griffin2001:83)
  15. ^ "The National Alliance: A History", Anti-Defamation League, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-18. 
  16. ^ "Critic's Notebook: For '60 Minutes,' New Dueling Voices", New York Times, May 24, 1996. Retrieved on 2007-09-18. 
  17. ^ "Sympathy for the Devil: A Vermont academic writes a fawning biography", Southern Poverty Law Center, Fall 2002. Retrieved on 2007-08-17. 
  18. ^ "William Pierce, 69, Neo-Nazi Leader, Dies", New York Times, July 24, 2002. Retrieved on 2007-09-18. 

[edit] External links