Timothy Mcveigh's The Turner Diaries

In 1995, Timothy McVeigh, and his accomplice Terry Nichols, created and detonated a bomb that killed 168 people and destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma. Following their arrest, evidence that McVeigh mimicked the attack based off the political fiction novel, The Turner Diaries, sowed the seeds for politicians to declare the novel a ‘terrorist handbook’. Ultimately, the novel does encourage acts of terrorism thought its detailed writing; however, the book does have a scarcity of political ideology that differentiates criminals from actual terrorists and it therefore not a terrorist handbook.

Unquestionable, the Turner Diaries does portray terrorist actions in the form of typical tactics and structures that does provide the ‘terrorist handbook’ identity as accurate. The novel details the construction of a bomb that is used by Turner's guerrilla unit at a FBI headquarters, killing hundreds and crippling the System’s intelligence operations. Guerrilla warfare, which is designed “to cause fear among civilians,” does indeed showcase how the Turner Diaries is a platform for terrorist actions.
Throughout the novel, a variation of contemporary terrorist tactics are used in order to instil fear into the populace. Armed assault, assassination, bombings and executions all aggravate tensions between the Order and the System, which parallels terrorist acts committed today. The use and deliberate detail of these tactics displays how while “reading a book might not drive [someone] to commit violence, but those who are inclined toward that type of crime gravitate toward it,” and therefore the Turner Diaries can be seen as a ‘terrorist handbook’ in that it “successfully leverages racial fears and resentments in the service of violence,” which is what prompted McVeigh to carry out the Oklahoma