National Alliance's Chairman Dies
William Pierce, head of West Virginia's National Alliance and Resistance Records, died of cancer at the age of 69 in July. Pierce utilized every available tool to spread his message of racism, anti-Semitism and the need for a white revolution. Increasingly, he had used tactics specifically trying to recruit youth to his message.
Pierce, a former physics professor, got his start in the racist movement in the mid-1960s under George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. After Rockwell's assassination, Pierce became a leader of National Socialist White People's Party, the new American Nazi Party. Shortly thereafter, he left the party and got involved with the Youth for Wallace, an organization dedicated to electing George Wallace to the presidency. He and Willis Carto, another important player in the hate movement, transformed the Wallace group into the National Youth Alliance in 1968. Due to an internal struggle between Carto and Pierce, the group split into factions, one of which became Pierce's National Alliance.
Pierce expanded the influence of the National Alliance over the years. He started a racist book company called National Vanguard Books and began a weekly radio show called American Dissident Voices. In 1999, Pierce bought the white power music label Resistance Records as part of a strategy to indoctrinate youth into the white supremacist movement. Along with scores of albums by racist bands, Resistance Records has issued a video game called "Ethnic Cleansing." The object of the game is to save your city from "sub-human" people of color and their "masters" ö the Jews. The main character in the game can be dressed like a Ku Klux Klansman or a racist skinhead. The Southern Poverty Law Center estimates that Resistance Records brings in about $1 million a year.
Pierce became one of the elder statesmen of the racist movement, and his writings cemented his importance to it. Under the penname Andrew MacDonald, he wrote the Turner Diaries, which was published in 1978 and depicts a future race war being fought by white supremacists. In the novel, the race warriors finance their struggle by counterfeiting money and robbing banks. FBI Headquarters is destroyed by a truck bomb. These scenarios were later played out in real life.
In the early 1980s, The Order, made up predominately of National Alliance and Aryan Nations members, went on a crime spree that included robbing armored cars and assassinating Jewish talk show host Alan Berg. The Turner Diaries is best known as the blueprint used by Timothy McVeigh when he used a truck bomb to destroy a federal building in Oklahoma City. A eulogy posted on the National Alliance's website said that Turner was responsible for recruiting more people into the hate movement than any other person, publication or organization.