Book review: An American's Dissident Voice

A book review by Andrew Hamilton, April, 2013

An American Dissident’s Voice

 

William L. Pierce
American Dissident Voices
Ed. Shane Webster
Melbourne, Australia: Politically Incorrect Press, 2011

This is a 1,666 page PDF file containing 290 transcribed American Dissident Voices (ADV) radio broadcasts—essentially spoken essays—by William L. Pierce (1933–2002), beginning with his seminal speech “Our Cause,” recorded in 1976, and ending with “Mossad and the Jewish Problem” (June 29, 2002). Its virtue is that it conveniently collects 290 essays into a single file. Previously, it was only possible to access these works piecemeal.

I downloaded the file a few days ago after finding it on a Christian Identity website. Unfortunately, the site is now offline. American Dissident Voices is also supposedly available at Scribd, which I find not a tremendously useful resource, but the page containing the title froze and would not load when I tried to access it. The point is, there is an electronic collection of Pierce’s ADV broadcasts floating around out there.

At present, audio versions of many Pierce broadcasts are available online. Archive.org contains 308 ADV broadcasts that can be listened to or downloaded, and the website of the National Alliance (NA), the white racialist organization founded by Pierce, also archives many broadcasts.

To access the latter, go to the National Alliance home page, place your cursor over the “American Dissident Voices” tab at the top, and click on “Recent Broadcasts” on the drop-down menu. Select any year up to mid-2002 to listen to individual broadcasts. Over the past year, the National Alliance website has frequently been down [It appears now to be down permanently]

Because pro-white material is so frequently censored or removed from the Internet, and pro-white organizations and websites do not last for long, those interested in listening to programs or saving audio or electronic text files should do so in a timely manner.

It is important to build upon the work of those who went before, rather than losing their arduous contributions to our cause through inattention and neglect, stupidly trying to reinvent the wheel every 10 years. We must know about the works of previous white thinkers and activists not solely through hostile, agenda-driven, racist secondary accounts by Jews, academics, and journalists, but directly from our own people.

William Pierce and American Dissident Voices

A Southerner of English, Irish, and Scotch Irish extraction, William Pierce was a professor of physics who left academia in the mid-1960s to join George Lincoln Rockwell‘s American Nazi Party and edit its ideological journal, National Socialist World.

After Rockwell’s assassination in 1967, Pierce joined the National Youth Alliance, which in 1974 became the National Alliance. He remained head of the National Alliance until his sudden, unexpected death from cancer in 2002. As with Rockwell, Pierce’s death occurred exactly when he began to gain some traction after years of often fruitless effort.

Jewish organizations, secret police agencies, and anti-white racists probably regarded William Pierce as the most serious threat to the System in the three decades prior to his death. He combined a fierce revolutionary mentality and sophisticated critique of the existing order with sustained efforts at building a militant, real-world organization.

Pierce was highly critical of Jews and their role in destroying the white race. It is probably fair to say that he hated Jews almost as much as Jews hate whites.

Pierce was a prolific and disciplined writer. His exceptional intelligence, unsurpassed work ethic, prodigious energy, extensive knowledge, and clarity of expression created a body of work that should be preserved for future generations. Unfortunately, most of it appeared in formats that today are not readily accessible.

Beginning in the 1990s and continuing until his death in 2002, he wrote and broadcast a new American Dissident Voices talk every week. ADV evolved into the major outreach tool of the National Alliance. More Americans probably became aware of William Pierce and the National Alliance through that radio program, and then over the Internet, than by any other means.

According to a biography written by University of Vermont professor Robert S. Griffin, The Fame of a Dead Man’s Deeds: An Up-Close Portrait of White Nationalist William Pierce (2001), ADV was the brainchild of National Alliance member Kevin Alfred Strom, a former broadcast engineer, who founded it in 1991.

American Dissident Voices, Griffin writes, “was Strom’s operation. He negotiated with stations, produced the tapes of the shows in a studio he set up on the second floor of the Alliance’s headquarters building [in rural West Virginia], and mailed the tapes to the radio stations for later broadcast. He also hosted most of the programs—Pierce handled about one a month.” Some programs consisted of interviews with Pierce.

Kevin Strom in 1991 in the first American Dissident Voices radio studio

“Strom published the scripts of the broadcasts in a monthly Alliance newsletter called Free Speech, and sold audio tapes of the programs through National Vanguard Books catalogs.”

The primary means of dissemination in pre-Internet days was via shortwave station WWCR (World Wide Christian Radio) in Nashville, Tennessee, although I recall also listening to the show over a different shortwave transmitter, WRNO in New Orleans. In the US, ADV was heard on some AM and FM stations, too.

This should provide an idea of how innovative some of our white predecessors have been.

Shortwave broadcasts cannot be heard with ordinary radios; a special shortwave receiver is necessary to snag them from the ether. Shortwave broadcasts travel much farther than regular broadcasts. I used to listen to official (government) shortwave news shows from Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Some programs were in English, but Norway broadcast only in Norwegian.

According to biographer Griffin, Pierce took over the task of doing the American Dissident Voices broadcasts full-time in 1997.

Pierce’s weekly ADV essays total 1,666 pages here. This does not include any of his other writings, which were quite extensive. Griffin noted that Pierce was completely averse to recycling programs; he insisted upon producing a new show each week.

Unfortunately, electronic preservation, while preferable to no preservation whatsoever, falls short of the permanent preservation capabilities offered by print. E-texts are more cumbersome to read, whether on a computer or on a dedicated device such as a Kindle.

Moreover, rapid, unending changes in technology tend to cause enormous amounts of stored material to “disappear,” since it is impossible for most people to continuously update and convert their entire backlog to new formats. That is a full-time job in itself.

Years ago I already owned more than 1,200 books. How could I possibly have “updated” them if storage formats changed every three years?

Similarly, I have old family movies still on Super 8 mm film, and others on VHS videocassettes. But I no longer have access to a Super 8 projector or screen. And VHS has been superseded by DVDs (for playing or recording movies) and digital cameras. Now DVDs are themselves becoming obsolete.

Songs were formerly recorded and played on vinyl records, then 8-track tapes (ever heard of those?), audio cassettes, CDs, and are now stored and played in digital format.

If you are thoroughly familiar with William Pierce, American Dissident Voices, and National Vanguard magazine, you may not fully appreciate the difficulty of keeping his work alive and acquainting new people or new generations with it. Yet, a mere ten years after Pierce’s death, many people, even white nationalists, no longer know who he was, or know him only by name. This problem repeats itself across the entire spectrum of white thinkers who made invaluable contributions to our cause over the years.

The virtue of this particular American Dissident Voices PDF is that it collects all or most of Pierce’s ADV essays in one place in a file that is searchable. Previously, the essays were only available piecemeal.

It would have been nice if the editor had included the dates of the original broadcasts, but they were omitted. Also, although I cannot swear to the textual integrity of the contents, they appear to be accurate.

There is a Table of Contents providing the title of each essay and the page where it can be located. Although there is no Index, the Search function takes you directly to any essay, and can find specific words or phrases as well.

The essays might be somewhat dated because of a tendency to play off of current events. For example, during the Clinton Administration Pierce frequently castigated the President—who was, of course, a real turd.

Years ago I read two books from the 1930s collecting famous newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler’s columns from that time. They had become so outdated as to have almost no relevance. But Pierce typically illustrated or explicated fundamental principles, greatly minimizing this problem. And some essays are not related to current events at all.

Another feature of the ADV essays, each of which was slightly longer than 3,000 words, is that they were all written to fit a half-hour format. Though the ideas and prose are crystal clear, the subject matter is somewhat diffuse, or tends to wander more, than in essays and articles Pierce wrote specifically for print publication. The latter are more tightly constructed.

Conclusion

In a 1997 broadcast Pierce observed,

The process of social atomization, of deracination, of separating people from their roots and cutting the bonds to their natural communities so that they can become interchangeable units—human atoms—for building the New World Order is being promoted ruthlessly by the Jews and their collaborators. This process is genocidal, because it will certainly destroy us as a people, as a race, as well as destroying us as a nation. (“The Nature of Patriotism,” p. 203)

His view of the situation:

We should never think, "Well, I am only one person. What I do or don’t do isn’t important. I can’t make a difference by myself."

 

That kind of thinking is wrong. We can make a difference. Courage is contagious. It spreads from person to person.

 

And it is powerful. One courageous truth-teller can back down a thousand cowards and liars and hypocrites.

 

There has never been a time in the long history of our race when we were more in need of a few honest men and women, a few people of courage and integrity. There has never been another time when a few good men and women had the opportunity to make such a big difference as they can make right now. (“Brainwashing in America,” 1995, pp. 48–49)