SELECK **** The National Alliance ****
**** Pierce's Cybernauts ****
The National Alliance (NA) was originally established as the "Youth for Wallace" campaign in support of the failed 1968 Presidential bid of Alabama Governor George Wallace. After Wallace lost, the group was renamed the "National Youth Alliance." In 1970, William Pierce, a former American Nazi Party official, joined the group, and in 1974 (around the time that David Duke founded his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan), Pierce took the reins and dropped the word "Youth" from the organization's name.
Now in his mid-60s, Pierce still leads the group out of a compound in West Virginia. Using the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald, he authored the novel The Turner Diaries, which details a successful world revolution by an all-white army, and the systematic extermination of Blacks, Jews, and other minorities. Many extremists regard The Turner Diaries as an explicit terrorism manual, and the novel is believed to have inspired several major acts of violence, including the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Pierce continues to encourage violence, viewing it as the ultimate solution to what he terms "the Jewish problem." His weekly radio program, American Dissident Voices (ADV), is rife with incendiary speech. Between his novels and his broadcasts, Pierce provides bigots with both an ideological and a practical framework for committing acts of mass destruction.
The National Alliance is currently the largest and most active neo-Nazi organization in the nation. In the past several years, dozens of violent crimes, including murders, bombings and robberies, have been traced to NA members or appear to have been inspired by the group's propaganda. At the same time, the organization's membership base has experienced major growth, with its numbers more than doubling since 1992.
The NA's current strength can be attributed to several factors: its willingness to cooperate with other extremists (such as David Duke); its energetic recruitment and other promotional activities; its vicious, but deceptively intellectualized propaganda, and a skillful embrace of the Internet.
A former physics professor at Oregon State University, Pierce was quick to understand the potential power of the Internet. Today, the NA's site is one of the best-organized and most informative hate sites on the Web. It promotes Pierce's Nazi-like ideology: biological determinism, hierarchical organization, an emphasis on will and sacrifice, and "a long-term eugenics program involving at least the entire populations of Europe and America."
In the section of its site entitled "What is the National Alliance?," the NA calls for the creation of "White Living Space" purged of all non-whites and demands the formation of a government "wholly committed to the service of [the white] race and subject to no non-Aryan influence." On the site, this section is reprinted in Swedish, Dutch, and German, as are French and German translations of The Turner Diaries and the text of selected ADV broadcasts in Swedish.
Also included on the NA's site are Pierce's anti-Semitic screed "Who Rules America" (a particular favorite among online bigots) and articles from the NA's print publications, Free Speech and National Vanguard. These documents contain familiar themes: America is in decline, its vital essence polluted by non-Aryans, and only the revolutionary program of the NA can save it.
Hate of non-whites runs through these pieces, but an extra dose of venom is reserved for Jews, who are cast as the source of all evil, driven by biological necessity to destroy "Aryan" society. Even when one of Pierce's articles blames America's presumed decline on the influx of non-Europeans, Jews are portrayed as the force responsible for this by spreading that most noxious of all ideas, "equality."
The NA Web site also features an online version of the NA's National Vanguard Books catalog, which offers an extensive selection of racist and anti-Semitic books, videotapes, and cassettes. These items are divided into categories such as "National Socialist Revolution"; "Race: Science and Sociology"; and an especially long list of materials concerned with "Communism, Zionism, Feminism, and the Jews."
Visitors can order books from the National Alliance by downloading a user-friendly order form from the NA site, printing it out, and sending it to the NA with payment. Additionally, "any White person (a non-Jewish person of wholly European ancestry) of good character and at least 18 years of age who accepts as his own the goals of the National Alliance" can apply for membership using the Web, by downloading and printing out a membership form and mailing it to the group. Users can also find items relating to a particular topic by plugging in key words to the site's search engine; over 250 items turned up when searching for the term "Jews."
Each week, Pierce's ADV radio program transmitted over nine AM or FM radio stations and on shortwave appears at the site on the day it has been broadcast on the radio. These broadcasts are stored in the site's archives for several months, ready to be listened to at any time, anywhere in the world.
NA sympathizers have also increased the group's exposure by using public Internet forums, sending unsolicited E-mail messages, and disrupting USENET newsgroups. In the "Reviews and Commentaries" section of the Web site for Amazon.com, visitors are invited to comment on books they have read. In at least two reviews (no longer at the site), NA supporters promoted their organization's message. Reviewing The Turner Diaries, one of these sympathizers urged other readers to "contact the author's organization, the National Alliance, and get involved in the struggle for self determination and freedom for our people." Another commentary lamented that whites who "just sit on their butts all day and allow the Jewish takeover of the U.S. to continue unchallenged really need to read the chapter called the 'Day of the Rope.' Everyone else who wants to fight needs to join the [NA]."
In October 1994, thousands of people in four states received an unsolicited E-mail message containing NA propaganda from an untraceable address. An action like this is considered a serious breach of "netiquette" (responsible Internet use). The NA disavowed this act but noted its interest in sending unsolicited messages in its newsletter:
It is easy to understand the temptation to [fraudulently use an E-mail account to send E-mail]...[Having] the right person's password can open up all sorts of possibilities for large-volume transmissions. It is important for the Alliance to continue to exploit the Information Superhighway fully. Persons accessible through various computer networks are usually professionals...and it [is] useful for us to saturate them with our message, whether they like it or not.15
A similar transmission of another National Alliance piece occurred in 1995, on the eve of the Jewish High Holy Days, and again in February 1998, when hundreds of people received an unsolicited E-mail message containing the transcript of Pierce's ADV program entitled "Bill, Monica, and Saddam." In it, Pierce claimed that by writing about the Monica Lewinsky affair, the "Jewish media bosses" harmed President Clinton, who "would do whatever they told him to do," but "had screwed up so many times that he had become a liability for them." Pierce also asserted that the United States would attack Iraq and aid Israel,
| 'We have organized members working as teams, not identifying themselves as Alliance members but going into these discussion groups and virtually taking them over,' Pierce explained. |
adding "the Jews would like to have us get rid of Saddam Hussein and cripple Iraq for them."
Those sympathetic to the NA have also targeted specific institutions, such as Southwest Texas University. In April 1998, three Black students there were charged with raping two white students at a dormitory party. The campus NAACP chapter voiced opposition to the charges and criticized school administrators for a "rush to judgment." In response, a National Alliance supporter sent 16,000 unsolicited E-mail messages to students and faculty calling on the NAACP to apologize to "victims of rape" and all white women. "The truth is," the E-mail read, "White people in this country are under attack by an ever-growing population of black criminals."
NA sympathizers have also posted thousands of messages to USENET newsgroups, seeing them as a way to broadcast their message widely. In its July 1995 Bulletin, the NA encouraged "the Alliance's seasoned cybernauts" to spread its Web site address "as widely as possible." That same year, ADL released Hate Group Recruitment on the Internet, a report that dealt in part with the activities of NA sympathizer Milton John Kleim. Kleim, self-described "Net Nazi Number One," flooded newsgroups with messages attacking Jews and non-whites, openly calling for authoritarian government and expressing admiration for William Pierce. In an article titled "On Tactics and Strategy for USENET," Kleim urged "cyber guerillas" to leave the safety of racist newsgroups and post specially tailored messages to mainstream newsgroups. For instance, in a group focusing on food, writers might push the "kosher tax" message, charging that kosher food supervision costs consumers money. Above all, Kleim encouraged USENET bigots to "repeat powerful themes OVER AND OVER AND OVER" and "systematically post the address for the [National] Alliance Website." During the O.J. Simpson trial, Kleim and other racists posted messages to the alt.fan.oj-simpson newsgroup declaring that white people are now victims and should not take it anymore. Many ended their messages with an advertisement for the NA Web site.
In a 1996 speech to the NA's Cleveland unit, Pierce described the NA's organized effort to dominate discussions in USENET newsgroups. He outlined the operations of an "Alliance Cybercell," a group of NA supporters active in USENET newsgroups. "We have organized members working as teams, not identifying themselves as Alliance members but going into these discussion groups and virtually taking them over," Pierce explained. These cell leaders "decide what discussion groups they want to get into...analyze the situation, analyze the types of propaganda that have been presented by the other side and we go in there and just tear them apart." Though Pierce encouraged online NA supporters to shift their recruiting activities from public debate to private discussions, one still finds NA members descending on USENET newsgroups and other public forums where they believe they might find sympathizers, spewing their hateful propaganda and inviting people to visit the NA Web site.
NA members correspond privately via E-mail not only with potential recruits, but also with each other. The organization claims to have established a "Rapid Response Team (RRT)," a group of NA volunteers who are contacted via E-mail to respond to special situations. According to the NA, this team serves many purposes, from gathering information to quickly alerting other NA members in their area when an "emergency" arises.
In a July 1998 ADV broadcast, Pierce asked:
What can we do to free ourselves from the Jews? What can we do to break their death grip on our mass media of news and entertainment and on our political system? How can we bring about an end to their racket of using us to extort money from the rest of the world for them?
William Pierce, like David Duke and Don Black, clearly sees the Internet as part of the answer to these questions, deeming it "the one medium where we are on an equal footing with CBS, NBC, and all the rest of them."
SELECK