HILLSBORO, W.VA. — Erich Gliebe’s racism was forged in the boxing ring.
“Blacks have thicker skulls,” said Gliebe, who called himself the “Aryan Barbarian” during his days as a professional boxer. “And my hands would hurt more after fighting a black than they would a white.”
Gliebe no longer confines his racial stereotypes to the boxing ring. He is applying them to what he calls a much more important fight – the fight for white power.
In that fight, Gliebe is the new chairman of the National Alliance, one of the country’s most powerful and potentially dangerous white supremacy groups, according to its critics. The group is based in a mountain hideaway two and a half hours from Roanoke.
Gliebe replaces William Pierce, the group’s influential founder and author of “The Turner Diaries,” a novel that some believe inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up the federal building in Oklahoma City.
Pierce died of cancer in July. The former physics professor was considered the guru of a neo-Nazi movement to create a society free of blacks, Jews and other “nonwhites.”
If the National Alliance survives the death of Pierce – and it appears that it will – the organization may soon undergo a transformation as its leadership passes from a bookworm to a boxer, from an intellectual content with the written word to a hands-on fighter determined to carry out the founder’s mission.
“Gliebe is a very different kind of leader,” said Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that monitors hate groups. “We’re replacing a physics professor with a boxer, and I think that says a lot.”
Gliebe inherits a sophisticated empire of hate – including a record company, magazine, book business and radio show – that Pierce spent 28 years building.
In a recent interview, Gliebe said the National Alliance is stronger than ever.
Membership is growing, he said, and the group plans to assume a higher profile, even building its own television studio, as it tries to shape the country’s race relations.
“I think Dr. Pierce was more of an idealist,” Gliebe said. “While I am more of a strategist.”
A white living space
There is no road sign, no listing in the Pocahontas County phone book.
Many people drive by on a country road, which offers sweeping views of the mountains and meadows of West Virginia’s Monongahela National Forest, oblivious of what lies tucked into the landscape.
For those who know the way, a rutted, rock-strewn road outside of Hillsboro leads to the National Alliance’s 400-acre compound. From the outside, it looks like a cluster of a dozen or so frame homes and metal-sided storage buildings.
On an October afternoon, Erich Gliebe is in the main office building, which bears the only hint of something unusual – a large, German-Scandinavian rune, the upside-down peace sign that is the logo of the National Alliance.
Clean-cut and wearing a dark suit, Gliebe eschews the tattooed, skin-headed image often associated with the white supremacy movement.
“We want to appear as mainstream as possible,” he said of the National Alliance, which reportedly has about 2,000 members. “Because basically we are normal, healthy, white Americans.”
Yet the goals of his group are anything but mainstream.
“We’re interested in a white government and a white living space,” he said. “A nation where we have a government that is looking after the interests of the white race and where it’s more or less made up of one racially homogeneous population.”
A National Alliance brochure describes it this way: “It means a society in which young men and women gather to revel with polkas or waltzes, reels or jigs, or any other White dances, but never to undulate or jerk to negroid jazz or rock rhythms. It means pop music without Barry Manilow and art galleries without Marc Chagall. It means films in which the appearance of any non-White face on the screen is a sure sign that what’s being shown is either archival newsreel footage or a historical drama about the bad, old days.”
Gliebe is vague on the details of how such a society might be created, where it would be located, and how it would be purged of “nonwhites.”
But the revolution need not be violent, he said. After all, he said, “the Berlin Wall fell down in a nonviolent way.”
In the view of the National Alliance, the country is already headed to self-destruction down a path of affirmative action, immigration, multiculturalism and other evils.
“What we need to be more concerned with is building an infrastructure so that when the present system does collapse, there will be something in place looking out for the best interests of the white people,” Gliebe said.
‘Multimedia hate-monger’
Evidence of the “infrastructure” is all around him.
About 15 staffers report to work every day at the National Alliance compound, which amounts to a cross between a racist think tank and a communications and entertainment business.
Inside a green, dome-roofed warehouse is the inventory of Resistance Records, a white-power record label that Pierce bought in 1999. The building’s shelves are stocked with CDs not sold in traditional record stores.
Heavy metal groups with names such as the Angry Aryans, Celtic Warrior and White American Youth turn out songs such as “Jewish Provocation,” “Land of the White” and “We’ll Keep Fighting.”
The music can be ordered from Resistance magazine, which recently ran this review of the Angry Aryans’ latest CD: “I’m so sick of liberal snots, Jewish pity parties, Negroid agendas, mongrel sulking, federal lackeys and bastard cops. To vent my just hatred, I blast my stereo to some Angry Aryans.”
Although Pierce detested the music, he recognized its value to his cause.
The record label brings in close to $1 million a year for the Alliance, according to Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center. Gliebe confirmed that figure, saying white-power music has become a powerful recruiting tool for the Alliance.
“Many young people today do not read books,” he said. “But they do listen to music, they’ve been brought up on rock music. And when they hear the message over and over and over again about how they should be proud to be white, that race-mixing is evil . . . after a while that message will become embedded in their minds.”
The Alliance also publishes a magazine, National Vanguard, and a book catalog that peddles works such as Pierce’s “The Turner Diaries,” Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and David Duke’s “My Awakening.” Also available is “The Bell Curve,” a controversial book about race and intelligence, and Alliance-produced leaflets with titles such as “The Beast as Saint: The Truth About Martin Luther King.”
For years, Pierce produced a weekly radio show, “American Dissident Voices,” that was carried by shortwave radio and some AM stations. The broadcast is now narrated by Kevin Strom, an Alliance member from Charlottesville who also edits the magazine.
Through music, books, radio and the Internet, Pierce was “the most sophisticated, multimedia hate-monger of anyone out there,” said Brian Levin, head of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University.
“As long as Gliebe doesn’t mess anything up, the organization will probably do fairly well on automatic pilot, because there’s so much of an infrastructure there,” Levin said.
Jerry Dale, who was sheriff of Pocahontas County when Pierce moved the alliance there in 1985, agrees with others who monitor the group on this: Pierce’s death does not spell the end of the National Alliance.
“On the day of his death, there was a lot of hand-slapping within the law enforcement community,” Dale said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. In the short term, we don’t know what could happen.”
Murder, mayhem and the Alliance
Any potential member of the National Alliance must sign an application attesting: “I am a White person of good moral character, with no ineligibility.”
Ineligible people are described as nonwhites, homosexuals, drug addicts, prison inmates and a final class more difficult to identify – would-be criminals.
“If any member discusses any illegal activity, or even hints at any illegal activity, we more or less show them the door,” Gliebe said.
Yet the Alliance has been linked to many acts of violence over the years.
Although Timothy McVeigh was not a member, he clearly was influenced by “The Turner Diaries,” Levin said. McVeigh sold the book at gun shows before eventually deciding to take photocopied pages of the book with him the day he bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
McVeigh is also known to have called the National Alliance compound in the days leading up to the attack, Dale said.
At the time, Pierce scoffed at the notion that McVeigh was inspired by his book, which chronicles the revolution of a band of white “patriots” who used a fertilizer bomb to blow up a federal government building just after 9 a.m. “It would be the height of folly to plan a bombing based on a novel,” he said.
But, Pierce told The Roanoke Times in 1995, “I can’t say I’d be upset [if there was a link]. I’d be surprised.”
Groups that monitor the National Alliance say Pierce was a master at suggesting – even encouraging – violence, all the while maintaining a safe distance from those who might find inspiration in his writings.
“He was a man who was very careful about what he said because he wanted to stay within the legal bounds,” said Marilyn Mayo of the Anti-Defamation League.
But in private messages, such as this internal newsletter cited by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Pierce was much more pointed: “All of the homosexuals, racemixers and hard-case collaborators in the country who are too far gone to be re-educated can be rounded up, packed into 10,000 or so railroad cattle cars, and eventually double-timed into an abandoned coal mine in a few days time.”
McVeigh was just one of many people influenced by the Alliance’s anti-government bent, Potok said.
In 1983, Alliance member Robert Mathews modeled his own group, The Order, from “The Turner Diaries.” The group was associated with a $4 million robbery from armored cars and the slaying of a Jewish talk show host in Denver before Mathews was killed in a 1984 shootout with the FBI.
Alliance members say the Jewish-controlled news media have unfairly linked them to murder and mayhem.
“Ted Bundy was an active member of the Republican party,” said Shaun Walker, the group’s western regional coordinator.
“When he became a serial killer, they didn’t portray the Republicans as the bad guys. So have we had a few people who have been oddballs, or criminal elements, or people that just take out their frustrations in a manner that we tell them not to? Yes, and we’ll probably always have that.”
Walker is equally dismissive of suggestions that the Alliance’s video game, Ethnic Cleansing, promotes racial violence.
Available for $14.98 from the Alliance Web site, the CD-ROM computer game puts the player in an inner-city neighborhood where blacks, Jews and Hispanics are the “bad guys” who must be shot. Monkey sounds can be heard when blacks are killed. The game’s final target is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Bob Hawthorne, an Alliance staffer who designed the game, recently demonstrated how to play.
“Good practice for the future,” he said after gunning down several black characters.
The game, insists Walker, is “as mainstream as you can get. There are all kinds of video games out there where the cops are the enemies and you’re killing the cops.” This one, he says, is no different.
Others disagree, including the Anti-Defamation League. Asked about that organization’s description of the National Alliance as dangerous, Gliebe responded:
“We’re only dangerous to those people who are afraid of the truth. And coming from the Anti-Defamation League, that’s quite a compliment.”
Taking the message public
For nearly 20 years, Boyd Thompson has lived a peaceful if uneasy coexistence with his neo-Nazi neighbors.
Thompson owns the land – and the road – that leads to the National Alliance compound. “I leave it [the road] in bad shape just to aggravate the bastards,” he said.
He never had any trouble from the group until shortly after Pierce died, when a few of its members tried to recruit his 12-year-old grandson. “They told him they could take him fishing and hunting and camping,” Boyd said.
Boyd said he told the Alliance members to leave the boy alone, and they did.
Critics of the Alliance say the encounter may foreshadow a larger change within the group since Pierce’s death. Under Gliebe’s leadership, the Alliance has become more aggressive in its recruiting and more willing to take its message public.
In August, Alliance members teamed up with skinheads and other hate groups to march outside the U.S. Capitol to protest American support of Israel. . It was one of the country’s largest white supremacy rallies in recent years, according to the ADL.
“We plan to be more organized,” Gliebe said. That includes more recruitment and distribution of leaflets and stickers similar to those the group handed out last year on the City Market in Roanoke.
At the same time, the Alliance is building a new meeting hall at its compound and will soon begin construction of a television news studio that will broadcast its take on the news of the day, most likely through its Web site at first.
“We plan to deal more with regional issues, perhaps affirmative action in areas where it’s a big thing,” Gliebe said.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Alliance has between 1,500 and 2,000 members, with 51 regional offices in 25 states. Gliebe declined to comment on those reports.
“We don’t have a million members yet,” he said. “But I would say we have millions of supporters out there.”
Potok disputed Gliebe’s claim that the Alliance is growing. One key organizer has already left the group, he said, and there appears to be a growing rift between skinheads and the more high-brow members favored by Pierce.
While the group’s membership is relatively small, Levin said, it would be a mistake to dismiss the Alliance as a fringe element unworthy of attention. “I think Pierce was less concerned about membership than he was about message,” he said.
“And I think the Alliance is a very dangerous group just on basis of the virulence and violence associated with its message.”