Part One
A movie that came out in 2024, The Order, caught my eye recently because it looked as if it had to do with a book I wrote, so I checked it out.
The Order is about a real-life, six-eight member, racially committed white insurrectionist group in the northwestern U.S. called The Order led by a man named Bob Mathews that engaged in a brief flurry of nefarious activity—bombings, robberies, the killing of a Denver radio call-in host, counterfeiting—in the mid-1980s before winding up imprisoned or, in Mathew’s case, dead.
The Order, directed by Justin Kurzel from a screenplay by Zach Baylin, revolves around FBI agent Terry Husk, played by Jude Law, who travels to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho to track down The Order. Nicholas Hoult plays Mathews; Tye Sheridan is Jamie Bowen, a young local deputy that joins up with Husk; Jurnee Smollett (Jussie’s sister) is Joanne Carney, an FBI agent with an unexplained history with Husk, possibly romantic; and Marc Maron plays Alan Berg, the Denver radio call-in host. Husk, Bowen, and Carney are fictional characters, though the events in the film are based on historical fact. The Order was entered in the Venice International Festival, had a brief theatrical release, and found a home on the streaming platform Amazon Prime. It has received generally favorable critical reaction.
My connection to the film is a book I wrote in 2001 called The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce.1 Pierce (1933–2002) was a notorious racist/Nazi figure (“The most dangerous man in America,” the Anti-Defamation League called him) who founded and led until his death The National Alliance, a white advocacy or virulent white racist organization, depending on how you look at it. He is best known for writing the infamous and widely read—a half million copies sold—underground novel, The Turner Diaries,2 which has a prominent place in the movie. My Fame book, as I call it, contains a chapter on Bob Mathews.3 It isn’t listed as a source for the film, but I suspect that it was.
Bob Mathews
This writing isn’t a traditional review of the entertainment and artistic merits of The Order, though there is a bit of that. Rather, basically this is a consideration of how film and print differ in what they communicate about something or someone using the movie and Fame book to illustrate my points. Going that route, I believe it necessary to give over Part One to outlining basic facts about The Turner Diaries and Bob Mathews, as they provide the raw material for both the movie and my book.
The Turner Diaries takes place in the period from 1991 to 1999, which, since the book was written in the 1970s, is in the near future. It is made up of the diary entries of Earl Turner, a member of the Organization, a group that successfully wages what came to be called The Great Revolution in the United States against the corrupt, Jewish-dominated System resulting in a “cataclysmic upheaval,” a “New Era,” not only in America but all over the world.
Turner’s first diary entry: “Today it finally began! After all those years of talking—and nothing but talking— we have finally taken our first action. We are at war with the System, and it is no longer a war of words.”
The Turner Diaries makes explicit that the Organization is waging a struggle on behalf of the white race; this is a race war. “If the Organization fails at its task now,” the fictional Turner writes, “everything will be lost—our [white] history, our heritage, all the blood and sacrifices and upward striving of countless thousands of years. The enemy we are fighting fully intends to destroy the basis of our existence.”
The book describes Turner’s initiation into the Organization’s elite unit, The Order. He is given what looks like a monk’s robe to wear and stands in a circle with five similarly robed Organization members for the initiation ceremony. As members of The Order, they are the prime bearers of the Cause—the survival and progress of their race. He and the others swear allegiance to the Oath to the Cause and one another. The experience, Turner reports, “shook me to my bones and raised the hair on the back of my neck.” Now his life belongs only to The Order. “Today I was, in a sense, born again. I know now that I will never again be able to look at the world or the people around me or my own life in quite the same way I did before.” He describes the others who participated in the ceremony as “real men, White men, men who are now one with me in spirit and consciousness as well as in blood.”
Turner’s unit needs to raise cash, so they rob Berman’s liquor store and make off with 800 dollars. In the process, Earl bops a black employee over the head with an “Ivory special”—a bar of soap in a sock. His compatriot Henry slits Berman’s throat from ear to ear. When Mrs. Berman enters the scene, Henry lets fly with a jar of kosher pickles and down she goes “in a spray of pickles and broken glass.”
Turner’s unit isn’t alone doing this kind of thing and the Attorney General of the United States announces that the FBI is going to root out the Organization, which he describes as “depraved racist criminals who want to undo all the progress toward true equality that has been accomplished.”
The Turner Diaries is replete with violence from beginning to end against Jews and blacks and traitorous whites—detailed accounts of the executions, murder, of Federal judges, newspaper editors, legislators, and other System figures One example, an Organization member is near death in a Chicago jail, the doing of black inmates while the white authorities looked the other way. In retaliation, a member of the Organization blows off the head of the Cook County sheriff with a shotgun. When a spokesman for the Chicago Jewish community responds by describing the Organization as “a gang of racist bigots,” his head is chopped off with a hatchet.
Other examples of violence:
- The Washington Post offices are bombed and one of its Jewish editorial writers is blown in half with two blasts from a sawed-off shotgun.
- One of the Organization’s members is executed for refusing an assignment to assassinate a priest and a rabbi who have advocated race mixing.
- Mortar shells rain down on the Capitol in Washington D.C. killing 61 (“beautiful blossoms,” “magnificent spectacle”).
- A bazooka shoots down an airliner heading for Tel Aviv.
- Three young black males and one of the two white girls with them are killed with a crowbar. The other girl is shot and killed as she tries to flee.
- The Israeli embassy is mortared, leaving nothing but a burned-out heap of wreckage and killing all but a few of the 300 people inside.
- Houston is bombed, killing 4,000 and leaving much of Houston’s industrial and shipping facilities a smoldering wreckage. Later explosions close the Houston airport, destroy the city’s main power-generating station, and collapse two strategically located overpasses and a bridge.
- Blacks are shot at random all over the country amid shouts of “White power!”
- Execution squads shoot, stab, and beat Jews, whose bodies are found strewn on sidewalks, alleys, and in apartment building hallways.
- Jews and everyone who looks as if he has some non-white ancestry are marched off in columns on a “no-return” trek into a canyon.
- Nuclear blasts kill 14 million people outright in New York City, with another five million expected to die of burns or radiation.
- There is the “Day of the Rope.” Whites in Los Angeles who have “betrayed their race” meet their fate. Turner writes in his diary entry of August 1, 1993, “Today was the Day of the Rope. The night was filled with silent horrors: from tens of thousands of lampposts, power poles, and trees throughout this vast metropolitan area the grisly forms hang. At practically every street corner I passed this evening on my way to HQ there was a dangling corpse, four at every intersection. Hanging from a single overpass only about a mile from here is a group of about 30, each with an identical placard around its neck bearing the printed legend, ‘I betrayed my race.’”
Amid these acts or destruction and killing are what amount to lectures by Turner/Pierce on the state of the world:
- Liberalism is an infantile, pseudo-sophisticated, submissive worldview that is alien to white people. It is an “egalitarian plague.”
- Conservatism is a reformist mentality that either won’t or can’t come to grips with the deep futility of the current social arrangements and the need to build something radically different in its place.
- The women’s movement is an aberration promoted by the System to divide white men and women and thus set the race off against itself.
- Blacks have exerted an increasingly degenerative influence on white culture. In order to live in a wholesome way that is natural to whites, whites need their own living space, completely separate from blacks.
- Most Americans are drowning in a flood of Jewish/liberal propaganda in the media, the schools, and the churches, and don’t even realize it. They have become soft, materialistic herd animals, true democrats, without racial identity and loyalty and without heroic toughness and spirit.
- We need to dare to envision walking the streets and seeing only “clean, happy, enthusiastic, White faces, determined and hopeful for the future.” We need to imagine what it would be like if the streets were ours again.
One incident in the book, the truck bombing of the FBI Building in Washington, D.C., has received particular attention because many believe it inspired Timothy McVeigh in 1995 to blow up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in similar fashion.
After the FBI Building blast, Turner hears a moan and sees a girl about twenty years of age trapped in the rubble, half-conscious, her face smudged and cut, her leg broken, and with a deep gash in her thigh. He puts a tourniquet on her thigh wound and carries her out to the street. He then becomes aware of the moans and screams of dozens of other victims. He looks upon a woman, her face covered in blood and with a gaping wound in her head, lying motionless—“a horrible sight,” he writes. He later learns that approximately 700 people died from the blast.
“There is no way,” Turner writes, “that we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people. It is a cancer too deeply rooted in our flesh. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us—if we don’t cut this cancer out of our living flesh, our whole race will die. We are all completely convinced that what we did was justified, but it is still very hard to see our own people suffering so intensely because of our acts. It is because Americans have for so many years been unwilling to make unpleasant decisions that we are forced to make decisions now which are stern indeed.” The “unpleasant decisions” he refers to are in reference to the Jewish and black issues that threaten the preservation of a white America.
The last of Turner’s diary entries is dated November 9th, 1993. “It’s still three hours until first light, and all systems are ‘go’.” This is the day Turner will fly off in an old crop duster plane and, staying very low to the ground, destroy the Pentagon with a nuclear bomb. He will lose his life in the process but gain the recognition and gratitude of his race forever. He achieves a kind of immortality as one of the Great Martyrs of the Revolution. He will be honored by all of the generations to come for his enormous dedication, courage, and sacrifice, and for the gift of a grand new way of being that he and others like him made possible.
I began the chapter on Bob Mathews like so:
“The 1983 National Alliance’s annual convention was held in September in Washington, D.C., and Pierce invited a young mine worker from the Pacific Northwest by the name of Bob Mathews to give a talk. Mathews had been an Alliance member for three years and actively recruiting new members for Pierce’s organization among the farmers and ranchers and working people around where he lived in Washington State. Pierce asked him to tell the people at the convention about how that effort was going, as well as about the situation generally in his part of the country. Bob wrote out his speech on his dining table at home and flew out to Washington for the conference.
Pierce looked forward to Bob’s talk and publicized it in the monthly bulletin sent out to Alliance members. He included Bob’s picture and a short write-up on Bob’s recruiting activities. What Pierce didn’t know was what Bob had in mind to do. Bob had really taken to The Turner Diaries. He pored over every word in the book and gave it to his friends to read along with his highest recommendation. But the thing about Bob was that he wasn’t content to just read the book and agree with what it said. Bob was a man of action. He had a fire burning inside him; that is what people said about him. He was going to create an Order of his own like the one in the book and start a revolution like the one he had read about. Bob meant business.
Bob’s talk was awaited with a good measure of anticipation by the 100 or so in attendance at the convention because of the picture and write-up that had appeared in the Alliance bulletin. The Bob Mathews they saw at the podium that day was a boyish-looking man thirty years of age. He was about 5’7” and had a trim muscular build. He was good-looking with even facial features. His dark brown hair was short and parted to the side and tended to fall forward onto his forehead. Those who knew Bob said he had hazel eyes that shone with intensity and purpose—that was what you noticed about him when you looked at him, they said. Most people who came to know Bob saw him as a serious and forceful person and they liked him. Even those who detested his politics liked Bob the man. In pictures I have seen of him, he reminds me of an enlisted man home on leave or, another association that comes to mind, the young working-class fathers I see walking past the stores in a shopping mall with their wives, their young child in a stroller.
An audio tape exists of Mathews’ talk. His voice is youthful. There is a tension and fervor in his delivery that gives a sense of immediacy and electricity to the occasion:
“My brothers and sisters, from the mist-shrouded forested valleys and mountains of the Pacific Northwest I bring you a message of solidarity, a call to action, and a demand for adherence to duty as members of a vanguard of an Aryan resurgence and, ultimately, total Aryan victory. The signs of awakening are sprouting up across the Northwest, and no more than among the two-fisted farmers and ranchers. The task is not going to be easy. TV satellite dishes are springing up like poisonous mushrooms across the domain of the tillers of the soil. The electronic Jew is slithering into the living rooms of even the most remote farms and ranches. The race-destroying dogs are everywhere. In Metaline Falls, we have broken the chains of Jewish thought. We know not the meaning of the word ‘mine.’ It is ‘ours’: our race, the totality of our people. Ten hearts, one beat! One hundred hearts, one beat! Ten thousand hearts, one beat! We were born to fight and die and to continue the flow of our people. The future is now! So stand up like men and drive the enemy to the sea! Stand up like men and swear a sacred oath upon the green graves of our sires that you will reclaim what our forefathers discovered, explored, conquered, settled, built, and died for! Stand up like men and reclaim our soil! Look toward the stars and proclaim our destiny! In Metaline Falls we have a saying: ‘Defeat, never! Victory forever!’”
Bob’s talk received a standing ovation. He would be dead in a little over a year.”
Part Two
With Part One as background, Part Two compares how the movie and my book treated this material. My background is in education. I’m especially interested in how modes of communication, reading a book and watching a film in this case—particularly a mass-market film like The Order—can result in significantly different learning outcomes. Part Two will be a series of unconnected segments that I hope add up to something of worth.
I’ll start with what I take to be the movie’s version of Bob Mathew’s 1983 National Alliance talk. It’s midway through the hour-and-fifty-minute movie and the context is different, a gathering at the Aryan Nations enclave in northern Idaho. Bob is seated in the middle of a large audience listening to a talk by the Aryan Nation’s founder and leader, Richard Butler (1918–2004).
Butler holds up a Bible and says, “This book holds our birthright, but it is not taught in the schools or by our elected officials. The Promised Land is not for the Jews but rather for the true Israelites, the Caucasians, and you deserve to build that home now.”
Bob stands up. All eyes are drawn to him. Butler stops speaking. Standing tall, Bob states his mind.
Before going into what Bob said on this fictional occasion—I can’t imagine this actually happening—an observation about the casting of Nicholas Hoult as Bob Mathews.
Bob was a fairly short, boyish-looking, weightlifting-pumped, high school graduate, a working-class roughneck.
Actor Hoult is a Brit—mid-thirties, looks his age, around 6’2”, slight of build, somewhat effete (sorry), a pageboy haircut (why?)—who affects the general American accent used by the well-educated. He came off to me like an Oxford drama school graduate trying his best and doing pretty well with it, but I never believed him as Bob Mathews for a second and that got in the way of my engagement with this movie.
To Hoult/Bob’s talk in the movie. Compare it to the real National Alliance conference talk in Part One. Personally, I find a decent fit between the two, including the anti-Jewish references in the movie version, which must have taken some courage on the part of these filmmakers given who passes on their projects and signs their checks in the motion picture industry.
“Good morning my brothers and sisters. It’s an honor to be here with you. I’m proud. If you’re like me, I’m not sure how much more talk I can hear, because that’s all it is, isn’t it? Talk, talk, talk. Well, I, for one, have had enough of just talk. Now, I know how you feel. I do. You’ve lost your jobs, your dignity. I watched my father get knocked down again and again, and he never pushed back, and they tell you that that’s how it works. You just have to stand there and take it, one link at a time, one freedom at a time, but I won’t do it. It is time for us to fight. My friends and family, we’re here for you today because we want you to join us on a mission, putting words into action. Our brotherhood has broken the chains of Jewish thought and parasitical usury. We’ve stood tall against the coloreds who have soured our lands. We yeoman farmers are eating, breathing, sleeping, and growing together. We’ve become one mind, one body, one race, one army! We’re facing the extermination of our history, our very way of life! Will you sit back and allow the nation that our forefathers discovered, conquered, and died for be eradicated, or will you stand up like men and fight to survive? Kinsmen, duty calls. It is time to take the future all our families deserve! In Metaline Falls we have a saying. ‘Defeat never. Victory forever.’”
Bob receives favorable head-nodding responses from his rapt listeners.
* * *
An observation on how these filmmakers chose to tell this story in The Order.
One way they could have gone at it would have been to make Bob the central protagonist. The movie is about him: he does this, this, and this; we see things from his perspective; other people come into his life as he lives it. It begins with his National Alliance talk and ends with him being burned to death in a house surround by law enforcement. That’s how I organized the chapter on him in my book, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds. The chapter was about him. I brought in William Pierce for his take on Bob, but it was Bob’s story, not Pierce’s.
This is not the choice these filmmakers made. The central characters in The Order are fictional: FBI agent Terry Husk (Jude Law), Husk’s helpmate, local deputy Jamie Bowen (Tye Sheridan), and his fellow FBI agent Joanne Carney (Jurnee Smollett)—all of them superb in their roles, by the way. Bob Mathews is very present in The Order, but it’s Terry Husk’s (Jude Law’s) movie.
In my view, going that route muddied and complicated the movie’s story line. To what extent is it a true story and to what extent is it fictional? Really, The Order is two stories: one of them Bob Mathews’ and the other Terry Husk’s. It jumps back and forth between the two and doesn’t tell either of them completely. There is a hodge-podge quality to this movie.
Why this approach? To create a star vehicle for Jude Law, who is a producer of the movie? The belief that a police procedural would make the movie more interesting, compelling, audience-grabbing? Were there reservations about making a racist/antisemite like Bob Mathews the central protagonist? Audiences come to identify and sympathize with lead characters whatever they are like—Richard III, Scarface, anybody—and those currently green lighting movies aren’t going to take well to the prospect of somebody like Bob Mathews coming off looking good. Mathews types you backhand with KKK and Nazi associations and be done with them. Whatever the case, while The Order is a good movie as it is, I think it would have been an even better one if they had dared to make Bob its central character.
* * *
Soon after Bob returned home from his speech at the National Alliance convention, he gathered together eight men in a barracks-like structure he had erected near his mobile home. He said, “I’ve asked you to come here because I think we share a common goal.” Earlier, he had talked to them about forming an Order like the one in William Pierce’s Turner Diaries book, a group of kinsmen who would let their deeds do the talking for them. Bob’s goal was to carve out a part of eastern Washington as a homeland for whites, purged of Jews and minorities. They would use The Turner Diaries as a blueprint for getting that done.
Bob told the group that he had a plan. It involved robbing pornography stores and pimps, bombings, and counterfeiting money. It also involved assassinating both Jews and gentiles who were contributing to the destruction of the white race. “I’m telling you now,” Bob said, “if any of you don’t want to get involved in this, you are free to leave.”
No one left.
Both the movie and my book deal with The Order’s initiation ceremony. It might be useful to compare the two accounts.
My book, Bob talking:
“I’m going to ask each of you to take an oath that you will remain true to this cause. I would like to remind all of you what is at stake here. It is our children, kinsmen, and their economic and racial survival. Because of that, I would like to place a white child before us as we take this oath.” The six-week-old daughter of one of those present was placed in the center of the circle as a symbol of a Caucasian future they were about to pledge to create. She stared up at the figures looming above her in the glow of candles. The men clasped hands and recited an oath of loyalty and commitment to their race and cause that Bob had written:
I, as an Aryan warrior, swear myself to complete secrecy to The Order and total loyalty to my comrades.
Let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that should one of you fall in battle, I will see to the welfare and well-being of your family.
Let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that should one of you be taken prisoner, I will do whatever is necessary to regain your freedom.
Let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that should an enemy agent hurt you, I will chase him to the ends of the earth and remove his head from his body.
And furthermore, let me bear witness to you, my brothers, that if I break this oath, let me be forever cursed upon the lips of our people as a coward and an oath breaker.
My brothers, let us go forth by ones and twos, by scores and by legions, and as true Aryan men with pure hearts and strong minds face the enemies of our faith and our race with courage and determination.
We hereby invoke the blood covenant and declare that we are in a full state of war and will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea and reclaimed the land which was promised to our fathers of old, and through our blood and His will, becomes the land of our children to be.”
The movie’s treatment of the ceremony with the baby underscores that movies with their short running times compel keeping the pace up: condense things, keep it short, move it along. I could take all the time I wanted in my book. These filmmakers didn’t have that luxury—get the basic idea across and get on to the next scene.
In the movie, Bob speaking:
“As a free Aryan man, I hereby swear upon the children in the wombs of our wives to join together with those brothers in this circle, for we are now in a full state of war and will not lay down our weapons until we have driven the enemy into the sea. It is time to reclaim what was promised to our fathers and through our blood and His will, let it become the land of our children to be. May God protect us. Amen.”
That’s it.
* * *
A difference between my task and the filmmakers’ with The Order, I didn’t have to entertain. I could write with no compunction that Bob walked into a Seattle branch of Citibank and handed the teller a note and walked off with almost $26,000 dollars. Unfortunately, that action is not the most cinematic, so the filmmakers felt pressed to hype it. No notes to a teller. Masked men with automatic weapons burst through the bank door shouting and threatening and charging around. You’ve seen the routine in a number of movies.
An armored car robbery:
“Get on the fucking ground!”
“Get the fuck down!”
“Don’t you fucking move!”
“Don’t fucking move, bitch!””
“Move and I’ll blow your fucking head off!”
“Fuck! Fucking go!”
In reality, the bombs at a synagogue and porn theater did little damage, poof. It the movie, kaboom!
* * *
Speaking of “Don’t you fucking move,” the F-word gets a whole lot of play in this movie, as is does generally in the popular entertainment of our time. Apparently, it is considered a good way to give strength and credibility to speech as well as to the speaker.
An example of the F-word frequency in The Order. Jamie messed up in his and Terry’s attempt to capture Bob and the others during an armored car heist and Terry reams him out for it.
“Fucking hear me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! Cocksucker. Fuck me, man.”
At this point, agent Carney comes onto the scene and lets Terry have it—he hadn’t done a good job either. I picked up a subtext in this exchange of a minority woman putting a white man in his place, which is also a feature in popular entertainment these days.
“What a fucking shit show that was! You find the cars? Don’t ever fucking do that shit to me again. You’re not in the lead anymore, Terry. You don’t get to run off on your own without fucking telling me first!”
“There wasn’t time.”
“Bullshit.”
“I was with Jamie.”
“You were with Jamie? Well, how’d that fucking work out for you, huh? Considering you motherfuckers let the target get away.”
* * *
Though others are depicted in the movie, the only killing I know about that anybody in The Order committed was the murder of the controversial Jewish radio call-in host in Denver, Alan Berg. It later became the basis for the film Talk Radio directed by Oliver Stone.
One of The Order had lived in the Denver area and was very put off by Berg, who went off on monologues on the joys of oral sex, the flaws in Christianity, why whites are afraid of blacks, and how white women fantasize about sleeping with black men.
Bob and several others in The Order drove to Denver and ambushed Berg getting out of his car in front of his apartment late at night after one of his shows. One of the members of The Order, not Bob, started firing from close up. Bullets hit Berg in the face, neck, and torso. The garage door behind him splintered from the spray of bullets. When Berg was found lying face up in a pool of blood, the cigarette he had been holding was still lit. Autopsy reports couldn’t be sure how many shots there were because Berg was twisting at the time he was shot, although it was probably around 12 (the movie says 34). Two slugs struck near Berg’s left eye and exited on the right side of his neck. Others hit the left side of Berg’s head and exited from his neck and the back of his skull.
Berg and the killing of him was a couple paragraphs in my book. Berg gets a lot of time in the movie.
His exchange with a caller accompanies the opening credits.
“You’re saying Jews use the blood of Christian babies for, what was it?”
“Well, for their services, their rituals, their dinners, so they can take over the world.”
“For their dinners? Oh, okay, I see. So, do they serve it in cups, this Christian blood? Is it a drink, or is it more of a condiment, like gravy that we can pour over food? Because I’ve never been to one of these rituals, so I don’t know.”
“Are you making fun of me, you son of a bitch?”
“No, sir, not at all. You don’t need my help for that. I just want to know how I can take over the world, me. See?”
“You’re trying to bait me, but I’m just trying to answer your question, you dumb kike!”
“All right, that’s enough. Lot of antisemitism cooking here today. Thanks, caller, for that load of puritanical garbage. You know what my problem is with every fanatic fundamentalist, from the Catholics to the Orthodox, to the KKK. The one thing you all have in common, and you are too ignorant to see it, is that you are too inept to get by in the world, so your only recourse is to try and curtail the enjoyment of others. Well, there it is. It’s a great country, but we’re all still trapped in our minds. I happen to believe that most people are decent people. I really believe that. Until tomorrow at KOA, this is Alan Berg, and be safe.”
The scene shifts to three men—twenties, early thirties, it’s dark and difficult to see—in a car listening to Berg.
“Hey, gimme that bottle. You hear this shit?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“This fucking Jew, man.”
“Yeah.”
“Ah, fuck. Fuck him. He needs a couple of barrels in his mouth.”
About an hour into the movie, Berg on the air again.
“See, I just want to know what to do when I get to hell, because apparently, so you said, all my friends are there. So, I just want to know what I’m walking into.”
“See, there you go. You don’t get it ‘cause you’re just a kike. You’re making fun of something that’s sacred to Christians and you don’t get it.”
“Oh, okay, make it about Jews. What do you know about Jews? Jews to you people is some sort of mythological creature, some sort of beast. You don’t know anything about the Jewish people. It’s just an easy target, because you’re too afraid to see what’s in yourself, because you have somebody to blame for your life, because you can’t really blame the people that have put you in the position you are in, whether it’s a government that doesn’t care for you and has taught you to believe the alternative or it’s something within yourself. You can’t face yourself, so it’s the Jews, but the one thing you believe is that the only good Jew is a dead Jew. I hear this all the time. People say things are dirty, things are ugly, things are changing. They don’t like the new neighbor on their street. They don’t like the new synagogue in town. And when you hear this all day, you might think we are filled with hate, it’s almost irreversible. But this may surprise you coming from me, but I think it is actually decent. That’s why they call in, they want to talk. They want someone to connect with. I think people want to give love. They want to say, ‘You’re all right. Let’s sit together, let’s have a beer.’ But they are afraid they won’t get it back. But I think our better instincts will prevail, but it’s got to start somewhere. So I encourage you to do that tonight. Put some good out there, because our words, our ideas, that’s going to live on. That’s what matters after all. And that’s all for me, folks. This is Alan Berg, KOA Denver, signing off.”
Then Berg’s murder in front of his garage. Multiple shots fired. It’s late at night and dark and it’s tough to see exactly what happened. An aerial shot shows Berg’s dead body sprawled in the driveway. Terry later says, “They butchered the guy.”
* * *
The Turner Diaries book is repeatedly shown in the movie. I think the filmmakers do a fairly good job of describing its contents given the time restraints film imposes. The biggest criticism I have is they get across that Bob has taken on the grand task of the Organization in the book, to transform the U.S., when he had the far more modest aim of making eastern Washington State a place for white people to live in their natural way.
Terry and Jamie go back and forth describing what’s in The Turner Diaries to an unseen group that includes us in the movie audience. You can compare what they say with what I wrote about the book in Part One.
“The men who killed Alan Berg have splintered off from the Aryan Nations and formed a new group. They are responsible for a series of robberies and murders, and they are inspired by the doctrine in this book [holding up a Turner Diaries paperback]. They’re using this book as a map.”
“It tells a fictional story of a group of white separatists raging a race war against the United States government. There are six steps in the book. Recruiting, fundraising, training. Assassination is step five. Armed revolution. Large scale terror attacks.”
“Poisoning city water supplies, bombing federal buildings, seizing the Capitol.”
“Day of the Rope, when race traitors are hung.”
“There are plans to assassinate the president.’
“This terrorist group have a name?”
“In the book they are called ‘The Order.’”
* * *
The movie makes Bob a killer when in real life he wasn’t. Running from a Portland motel, he shoots Jamie in the chest. Blood pouring out of him, Terry leaning over him lying in an alleyway, we watch Jamie die.
In my book, I reported:
“Somehow Bob got out of there [the motel] and ran about two blocks down the street and got behind a concrete pillar next to an apartment complex. Bob later said it was at this point he decided to stop being the hunted and become the hunter. A couple of officers chasing him ran up to the pillar and Bob fired, wounding one of them in the shin and foot. Bob later claimed that he had at first aimed at the officer’s head, but when he saw that he was a white man he lowered his aim.”
My guess is that a central character dying in an alley in a blood-soaked shirt is more dramatic than an anonymous police officer getting shot in the shin and foot and that prompted the movie to have Bob take out Jamie in this fashion when nothing like it ever happened in real life. As far as I can see, there were no limits to poetic license in the minds of these filmmakers.
* * *
Toward the end of the movie, Bob makes it to a safe house—or so he thought—on Whidbey Island near Seattle.
He’s shown typing something. He hands its pages to a member of The Order.
“What’s this?”
“A Declaration of War.”
“Who am I sending it to?”
“Congress, the House of Representatives, the White House, The New York Times, The Denver News. Everyone.”
“Why?”
“It’s happening. The war has begun.”
“Fuck. There’s no fucking army. Everyone’s gone.”
“Cattle die, kinsman die, I too shall die. But one thing that I know that never dies. It’s the fame of a dead man’s deeds.”
I was taken by hearing the reference to the title of my book. It’s from an old Norse poem that William Pierce recited frequently, the idea being that what will live on after his death and give him the respect he doesn’t have now in his life are the positive memories of what he did with his life on earth.
The movie doesn’t deal with the substance of The Declaration of War. Here are excerpts from the book.
“It is now a dark and dismal time in the history of our race. All about us lie the green graves of our sires, yet, in a land once ours, we have become a people dispossessed.”
“By the millions, those not of our blood violate our borders and mock our claim to sovereignty. Yet our people only react with lethargy.”
“A great sickness has overcome us. Why do our people do nothing? What madness is this? Has the cancer of racial masochism consumed our very will to exist?”
“Our heroes and our culture have been insulted and degraded. The mongrel hordes clamor to sever us from our inheritance. Yet our people do not care.”
“Throughout this land our children are being coerced into accepting non-whites for their idols, their companions, and, worst of all, their mates. A course which is taking us straight into oblivion. Yet our people do not see.”
“Not by accident but by design these terrible things have come to pass. It is self-evident to all who have eyes to see that an evil shadow has fallen across our once fair land. Evidence abounds that a certain vile, alien people have taken control over our country.”
“All about us the land is dying. Our cities swarm with dusky hordes. The water is rancid and the air is rank. Our farms are being seized by usurious leeches and our people are being forced off the land.”
“They close the factories, the mills, the mines, and ship our jobs overseas. Yet our people do not awaken.”
“The Aryan yeomanry [small landholders] is awakening. A long-forgotten wind is starting to blow. Do you hear the approaching thunder? It is that of the awakened Saxon. War is upon the land. The tyrant’s blood will flow.”
“We will resign ourselves no more to be ruled by a government based on mobocracy. We, from this day forward, declare we no longer consider the regime in Washington to be a valid and lawful representative of all Aryans who refuse to submit to the coercion and subtle tyranny placed upon us by Tel Aviv and their lackeys in Washington. We recognize that the mass of our people has been put into a lobotomized, lethargic state of blind obedience and we will not take part anymore in collective racial suicide!”
“This is war!”
* * *
Something that didn’t make it into the movie that I considered important enough to include in my book was a letter Bob sent to a small weekly newspaper in Newport, Washington on November 25th, 1984, a couple weeks before his death.
“It is logical to assume that my days on this planet are rapidly drawing to a close. Even so, I have no fear. For the reality of life is death. I have made the ultimate sacrifice to secure the future for my children. As always, for blood, honor, for faith and for race.”
* * *
The climax of the movie: law enforcement, including Terry, has Bob surrounded in the Whidbey Island house. He’s alone. A SWAT team storms the house but is driven off by Bob’s shots through the floor from the second floor.
The lawmen set the house on fire. Terry goes into the burning house to try to get Bob to come out. No.
Bob gets into a waterless bathtub and dies in the flames.
What I wrote:
“On December 7th, the FBI had the Whidbey Island house surrounded. They’d caught up with Bob again. He was alone in the house. This time, they were going to be sure that he didn’t get away. One hundred agents surrounded the house. They cut off his electricity. They attempted to negotiate through a bullhorn. ‘Come out and we won’t harm you.’ Bob was having none of that. He wasn’t coming out of there. His hand mangled and throbbing [he was shot escaping from the Portland motel], he opened fire with an automatic weapon.
The standoff went on through the night and into the next day. By this time, the press had converged on the site. The FBI lofted in tear gas. Bob must have had a gas mask. He continued to fire—da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
They issued an ultimatum. ‘Give up or we’re coming in to get you.’
More automatic weapon fire from Bob.
At 3:00 p.m. on December 8th, a SWAT team went into the house. When they got inside, bullets rained down on them through the ceiling from the floor above. The SWAT team returned fire as they retreated.
Later that evening, after it had gotten dark, a helicopter flew over the house and dropped white phosphorous illumination flares onto the roof. The house ignited and flames shot one hundred feet into the air. Bullets came ripping through the walls from inside the burning house—Bob was still firing away! The agents kept down as the slugs whistled through the night air and split the trees above them.
Then everything was still.
The next morning, in the charred ruins of the house they found a body burned beyond recognition. Dental records determined it to be that of Bob Mathews.”
Endnotes
- Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce, FirstBooks Library, 2001.
- Andrew Macdonald (Pierce’s pen name; everyone knew Pierce wrote the book); The Turner Diaries, second edition, National Vanguard Books, 1980.
- 3. The Fame of Dead Man’s Deeds
1. White Male “Privilege”
