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 is a hybrid of White Racialism, pantheism, and eugenics.

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[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. He died in a car accident in 1942.[3] After the elder Pierce’s death, the family, which included a younger brother, Sanders, moved to Montgomery, Alabama and then to Dallas, Texas.[4]

Pierce 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.[2] He had hopes of one day becoming an astronaut.[6]

After finishing military school in 1951, Pierce worked briefly in an oil field as a roustabout. He injured himself when a four-inch (10 cm) pipe fell on his hand, and he spent the rest of that summer working as a shoe salesman.[7] Pierce earned a scholarship to attend Rice University in Houston, Texas. He graduated from Rice in 1955 with a bachelor's degree in physics.[8] 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.[8] He taught physics as an assistant professor at Oregon State University from 1962 to 1965.[9]

Pierce married five times. The first time was to Patricia Jones, whom he met while at California Institute of Technology. They were married in 1957, and had twin sons, Kelvin and Erik, born in 1962. The marriage ended in divorce in 1982.[10] 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.[8] Pierce married Hungarian Olga Skerlecz in 1986, a marriage which lasted until 1990. Olga left Pierce and West Virginia "for greener pastures in California".[10] Pierce then wed a woman named Zsuzsannah, who is also Hungarian, in early 1991. They met through an ad that Pierce placed in a Hungarian women's magazine. Zsuzsannah left him to move to Florida in mid-1996. His last marriage, which lasted until his death, was with another Hungarian woman, whom he married in 1997.[11]

[edit] American Nazi Party

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It was during his time at Oregon State (1962-1965) that Pierce began to notice two radical social movements on campus,[citation needed] the civil rights and the Vietnam anti-war movements. Pierce saw the civil rights movement as a threat to the white race. He also 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,[12] 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.[8]

[edit] National Alliance

Main article: National Alliance (United States)

The National Alliance adopted the life rune as its symbol. Pierce intended this organization 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 exemption, claiming the Internal Revenue Service was Jewish-controlled. Pierce appealed, but an appellate court upheld the I.R.S. decision.[8] In 1985, Pierce moved his operations from Arlington, Virginia, to a 346-acre (1.40 km2) compound in Mill Point, West Virginia he paid for with $95,000 in cash.[8] He called his new compound the Cosmotheist Community Church.[8]

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, which had to be exclusively used for "religious purposes."[13] The other 340 acres (1.6 km²) were for both the National Alliance headquarters and the National Vanguard Books business and warehouse, and were denied tax exemption.

After Pierce's death, the National Alliance entered a period of internal conflict and decline.

[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.[8] 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," including but not limited to any white women who ever had had sex with any non-Whites, 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, which destroyed the military command at the Pentagon, thus preventing any invasion of 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.[8] 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.[8] The Order was connected to numerous crimes, including counterfeiting and bank robbery, and supposedly gave money to the Alliance.[8] The Order's leader, Robert Jay Mathews, died in a stand-off with police and federal agents on Whidbey Island, Washington when police fired flares into his hideout igniting a fire. 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 and racially separatist ideals.

[edit] Cosmotheism

Pierce adopted Cosmotheism as his religion in 1978. In effect it is a form of panentheism, or it is an impersonal panentheism, or is a belief that an impersonal "creative spiritual force," i.e. "God," is the animating force within the whole universe.[vague]

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 panentheism 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 a personal godhood. In his view, the white race represented the pinnacle of human evolution thus far and therefore it should be kept genetically separate from all other races in order to achieve its destined perfection in a collective personal 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 publications, National Vanguard magazine, Free Speech and Resistance, as well as books published by his publishing firm National Vanguard Books, Inc. and his record company, Resistance Records.

In 1996, in a rare event, Pierce appeared on 60 Minutes,[14] during which Pierce was asked if he approved of the Oklahoma City bombing, and he replied "No. No, I don't. 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). Pierce died of cancer on July 23, 2002, in the mobile home in West Virginia he had lived in with his wife for the last twenty years.[15] When he died he said that "Jews control all the major news media"[citation needed] and that therefore no honest reporting had ever been done about him.[citation needed]

[edit] Published works

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

[edit] Sources

[edit] Further reading

  • Swain, Carol M.; Russ Nieli (2003-03-24). Contemporary Voices of White Nationalism in America. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521816734. 

[edit] References

  1. ^ (Griffin2001:30)
  2. ^ a b (Griffin2001:31)
  3. ^ (Griffin2001:27)
  4. ^ (Griffin2001:28)
  5. ^ (Griffin2001:29)
  6. ^ (Griffin2001:32)
  7. ^ (Griffin2001:34)
  8. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k "William Pierce Biography". Anti-Defamation League. 2007. http://www.adl.org/learn/ext_us/Pierce.asp?LEARN_Cat=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_America&xpicked=2&item=wp. Retrieved on 2007-07-18. 
  9. ^ "Pierce, William L.". Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Modern Political Biography. Oxon Helicon Publishing Limited. 2004. pp. 604. ISBN 978-1859862735. 
  10. ^ a b (Griffin2001:39)
  11. ^ (Griffin2001:40)
  12. ^ (Griffin2001:83)
  13. ^ "The National Alliance: A History". Anti-Defamation League. 2007. http://www.adl.org/explosion_of_hate/history.asp. Retrieved on 2007-07-18. 
  14. ^ "Critic's Notebook: For '60 Minutes,' New Dueling Voices". New York Times. May 24, 1996. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE4DD1E39F937A15756C0A960958260. Retrieved on 2007-09-18. 
  15. ^ "William Pierce, 69, Neo-Nazi Leader, Dies". New York Times. July 24, 2002. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FA0E14FD395C0C778EDDAE0894DA404482. Retrieved on 2007-09-18. 

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Luther_Pierce"
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