Warriors for the Cause

Millpoint, W.Va. — William Pierce lives on 346 acres of rolling land in the Appalachian Mountains, where he has worked very hard to build a church. His neighbors here in Pocahontas County say he fits the role of pastor well. Although he doesn’t enjoy drawing attention to himself, his speech is sharp and clear, and he knows how to drive home a point. He likes to write.

“He’s a real intelligent fella, that guy is,” says one county official. “A real intelligent man.”

Pierce and his followers call themselves the “Cosmotheist Community.” They have a built a two-story metal building to serve as their meeting place, and both the building and the land it stands on are tax-free — courtesy of federal and state tax exemptions granted to the group.

There is only one problem with this pastoral scene: William Pierce is one of the foremost neo-Nazi publishers in the nation, and the author of a novel depicting the wholesale “extermination” of blacks and Jews.

 

Day of the Rope

Despite his guise as “Cosmotheist pastor,” friends and followers of Pierce have known him for more than a decade as chairman of the National Alliance, a white supremacist group based in Arlington, Virginia. Since founding the Alliance in 1974, Pierce has published reams of hate material decrying what he calls “Jewish terror” and “black criminality.”

In 1978 — the same year the Cosmotheists received a tax exemption from the Internal Revenue Service — the Alliance published Pierce’s novel, The Turner Diaries, a chilling portrayal of a bloody Nazi takeover in the 1990s. The account includes a fictional “Day of the Rope” when blacks, Jews, and “everyone who even looked like he had a bit of non-White ancestry” are systematically killed. The white supremacists in the novel eventually use nuclear weapons to achieve their goal.

“I am sorry, of course, for the millions of White people, both here and in Russia, who died — and who have yet to die before we have finished,” says Earl Turner, the violent hero of the novel. “But innocents? I think not. If the White nations of the world had not allowed themselves to become subject to the Jew, to Jewish ideas, to the Jewish spirit, this war would not be necessary.”

It is not the size of his following that makes Pierce important. By all accounts his “select” group of Alliance members is relatively small, and his Cosmotheist community is reported to number less than a dozen. What makes Pierce significant is his role as a leading publisher in a neo-Nazi network intent on recruiting young people to form a new generation of right-wing extremists.

Pierce has made no secret of the reason he moved to the mountains of West Virginia. Speaking to 200 people at a conference of right-wing extremists shortly after he moved onto the land, Pierce said he hopes to use the land to “change the infrastructure of society” and “provide a totally new environment for our children.”

The “new environment” will take the form of an isolated rural commune of 200 to 300 members — white nuclear families only. Shut off from the rest of the world, the group will indoctrinate children, shaping not only their school work and curriculum , “but recreation — their peers — so that you have an opportunity to guarantee at every level that they will grow up with the right values and the right character.”

Sounding much like one of the many “back-to-the-landers” who drifted into the hilly Appalachian region during the 1970s, Fierce told his listeners he has “sort of a feeling about land — about the environment in which people live. If you’re out of the city, in closer contact with nature . . . this has something to do with shaping attitudes, with shaping characters.”

He has even advertised his new community in The Washington Post and Mother Earth News. The nondescript ad encouraged “healthy and hardy” women to apply for open spots in the fledgling project. Pierce is reluctant to discuss what kind of response the ads drew, but admits he was surprised to learn that Mother Earth has a “liberal tinge.”

 

“Liquidate the Enemies”

Pierce has a lengthy resume of right-wing credentials. He joined the John Birch Society in the early 1960s, after receiving his doctorate in physics from the University of Colorado. He was an assistant professor at Oregon State University until 1965, when he resigned from the job — and the Birch Society — taking a corporate position in Connecticut. There he met George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party.

“He became a friend of mine and I received guidance from him in the publishing field,” says Pierce, who served as editor of the Nationalist Socialist World, a quarterly published by Rockwell.

In 1970, several years after the party dissolved and Rockwell was assassinated, Pierce founded the National Youth Alliance. The NYA described itself as “a fighting movement” determined to “liquidate the enemies of the American people.” It became the National Alliance in 1974.

“The National Alliance, from the beginning, has put more emphasis on the written word,” says its leader. Indeed, Pierce has established himself as one of the chief propagandists for white extremists, eager to expose young people to “racially oriented” materials such as his. He says there is “an enormous market” for racist fiction like The Turner Diaries, and has even suggested designing ideological comic books for teenagers.

According to Pierce, the National Alliance has “become one of the two largest distributors of racial materials and books in the United States.” He said his own book is making “a nice profit for us, which has allowed us to fund other operations.”

Pierce believes that the profits and influence of his publishing will enable the movement to build “an infrastructure — one part of which has the capabilities for getting out the printed material at every level, so that every white person in the English-speaking world who is capable of being saved is exposed to this material on a regular basis.”

 

The Order

Although Pierce’s vision far outstrips his influence, his propaganda is more than mere words — it served as a practical and spiritual guide for a real-life terrorist group known as The Order that committed a series of bombings, murders, and armed robberies in the Pacific Northwest in 1983 and 1984.

Bob Mathews, the man who organized The Order, was an avid follower of Pierce. Mathews was living with his parents in Washington state and working as a recruiter for the National Alliance in 1983 when he began to dream of making the fictional violence of The Turner Diaries a reality.

Mathews even tried to imitate Pierce’s hateful rhetoric. “We are determined to put an end to race-mixing, homosexuality, oppressive taxation, gun controls, and the coddling of criminals! ” he wrote in one recruiting letter. “We of the National Alliance fully intend to reclaim what our forefathers discovered, explored, conquered, founded, settled, built, and died for.”

Using the book as a blueprint, Mathews organized a white supremacist group and unleashed a string of terrorist attacks. Members of the organization bombed a synagogue, held up several armored cars, and killed at least three people, including outspoken Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg. As leader of the group, Mathews had access to big-time cash, safe houses, and a war chest of sophisticated weapons.

“They patterned their whole operation after it,” said U.S. Attorney Peter Muller, who prosecuted members of The Order. “If you take the time to read through the trial transcript, and read The Turner Diaries, you see that the two practically mirror each other.”

The robberies netted $4 million, but only half of that has been accounted for. What happened to the rest of the cash will probably remain a mystery, but there is evidence to suggest that some of the money went to Pierce — and that Pierce may have used it to buy his tax-free land in West Virginia.

In November 1984, Bob Mathews told his friend Tom Martinez that he had personally given some of the holdup money to Pierce. What Mathews didn’t know at the time was that Martinez was working undercover as an FBI informant.

Martinez remembers meeting with Mathews in the Capri Motel in Portland, Oregon. Mathews was tired and jittery, on the run from federal authorities, and he rambled nervously from subject to subject. He told Martinez that he had given some of the holdup money to Pierce, and that Pierce had bought a piece of property somewhere to be used by “the movement.”

“He definitely talked to me about giving Pierce a lot of money and also about land that Pierce apparently purchased,” Martinez remembers. “But I didn’t ask him where it was or anything because, at the time, I didn’t think it was important.”

One month earlier, Pierce had closed the deal on the 346-acre tract in rural West Virginia — with $95,000 in cash.

Two weeks after meeting with Martinez, Mathews was killed in a fire and shootout with federal agents near Seattle. When 22 Order members were tried and convicted of arson and murder a year later, witnesses testified that some of the holdup money had been earmarked for Pierce.

Federal authorities say they believe large amounts of the money stolen by The Order went to national racist leaders, but they have been unable to prove anything in court.

“Testimony and evidence showed that Mathews went around the country giving various people money, but all that testimony was secondhand,” says a federal prosecutor working on the case. “Other members of The Order have firsthand information, but none of them are talking to us.”

A leading member of the Order — Bruce Carroll Pierce (no relation to William), identified as the trigger man in the murder of Alan Berg — reportedly told an FBI agent that the National Alliance chairman had received $50,000 from the holdups. He later recanted his confession.

William Pierce denies receiving any stolen money, saying he paid for the Cosmotheist property in West Virginia with $52,000 in stock and certificates of deposit from “private donors.”

 

A New Generation

Today, four years after the violence of The Order, Pierce shows little reluctance to praise Mathews. His newsletter once called the terrorist leader “a passionate man” who “took up arms against the enemies of his race.”

“I didn’t really know him well,” he said later. “I liked him and admired him.”

Most of Pierce’s new neighbors don’t often see his racist side. In fact, some are reluctant to believe he’s really a neo-Nazi.

“The people who feel he is not associated with it do not know the whole story,” says Pocahontas County Sheriff Jerry Dale. “But the percentage of people who know about him is high.”

Dale says he is concerned about Pierce’s past associations and survivalist-type hate rhetoric, and is “keeping an eye” on the Cosmotheist Community.

“Personally, as far as I’m concerned, black people or Jewish people or Hispanic people . . . they’re American too, and they have a right to live here,” the sheriff says.

Since reports of Pierce’s neo-Nazi connections have surfaced, federal officials have also been keeping an eye on him. Authorities have been considering a “retroactive revocation” of the Cosmotheist tax exemption, calling the religious group “blatantly racist.” West Virginia officials have already removed the state tax exemption on most of the property, but have allowed Pierce’s small church and mobile home to remain tax-free.

Losing a tax exemption, however, isn’t likely to slow up Pierce — not as long as economic hard times and political hard lines continue to create an atmosphere conducive to neo-fascist recruiting.

Tom Martinez, the former Order member turned FBI informant, says the genuine hardships of the world often breed feelings of powerlessness and frustration, making some people easy prey for the elitist, white supremacist movement.

“Leaders like Pierce are still out there indoctrinating,” Martinez says, adding ominously that the National Alliance is putting out material “to bring in new blood.”

Martinez links Pierce’s hate material to the surfacing of the Nazi Skinheads, a growing group of teenagers fashioning their own brand of racism and violence. Indeed, Pierce himself has made it clear that his goal is to recruit young people into the hate war against blacks and Jews — in his own words, “to train a new generation to pick up the torch and become warriors for our cause in the field.”

“In the final showdown,” he wrote, “there will be no other way but Robert Mathews’ way. No combination of clever lawyers, yuppies, and Joe Sixpacks will ever beat the Jews . . . but blood will, eventually.”