Ben Klassen in His Own Words, Part II:
Learning from the Prophet’s Problems

2,752 words

Ben Klassen (1918 – 1993)

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 here.

Prophet of RaHoWa

Frustrated by the bumbling of the Republican Party, and tired of Christian white advocates distracted by Genesis 12:3’s insistence that “God” would “bless” those who supported Jews and “curse” those that did not, Klassen decided to create his own religion. What he came up with was a non-deist faith whose purpose was to advance the white race. On this subject he wrote many things and put out a magazine called Racial Loyalty. His critical works are four books that outline his religious philosophy. They are:

• Nature’s Eternal Religion (1973)
• The White Man’s Bible (1981)
• Salubrious Living (1982) – (A book about health and wellness)
• A Revolution of Values through Religion (1991)

In this endeavor, he had to first get his ideas published. He launched his movement at a time when the media was wholly controlled by his enemies. The print media was not as fully Jewish-controlled in the same way as radio and TV, but many of the printing houses were hostile to his works. Klassen could get in the door to the manager of anti-Communist publishers, but the “born-agains” that owned them often refused to publish his material, causing delays. Additionally, the costs of publishing his books was appalling: print runs in the early 1980s cost around $20,000, at a time when the average new car cost $9,370.[1]

After careful consideration, Ben and Henrie Klassen decided to leave Florida and locate their church headquarters in Otto, North Carolina. This occurred at a time in their lives when most couples are ready to enter into a comfortable retirement. Ben and Henrie were grandparents, and slowing down. In their old age, they were embarking on the most difficult fight of their lives.

From a metapolitical standpoint, Klassen’s World Church of the Creator was a hit. His ideas have spread throughout the pro-white territories of the World Wide Web. One is free to agree or disagree with them, but one cannot ignore them if one is doing any sort of white advocacy. However, as Pontifex Maximus of his church, he ran into all troubles that could have been avoidable. Much of this is related in Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs.

Learning from the Prophet’s Problems

Problem A: Less than Stellar Employees

The problems Ben Klassen ran into are probably more related to the natural conditions of pioneering any sort of new religious and ideological territory than failings on his part. After all, Klassen’s career was extraordinary. He was so financially successful he was able to retire as a young man. From that situation he went on to successfully invent and market a product, be elected to public office, and make more money in real estate in Florida. His racial ideas, while radical, cannot be ignored.

His first problem related to the limitations of his pioneering work was having more problem employees than top talent during his active career as the church’s leader. Klassen writes in 1992, “I had damn few volunteers to choose from that were foot-loose and fancy free, could type and were dedicated to the cause, all of which is a dismal reflection on the disoriented state of mind in which the White Race was then, and still is.”[2]

White advocate Jared Taylor spoke of this phenomenon in a 2017 YouTube.com interview. After describing his “redpilling” and white advocacy work going back to 1990, Taylor says, “In the earlier days you met most unusual people because it took a very unusual frame of mind to look into those dusty corners of university libraries [where frank discussions of racial matters existed in print] and to be aware of the obscure PO Boxes [where one could get racially frank literature]. So they were always very unusual people. Now, you meet more and more perfectly ordinary (sic), they’re not particularly unusual, they don’t have sort of the odd kinks of the mind that the older race realists tend to have. They’re smart, hard-working, nice looking, attractive people who have just seen through the rubbish.”[3]

In the above statement, Jared Taylor is pulling his punches and being generous. Klassen’s church attracted con-men like a magnet picks up iron filings. Klassen wrote, “It seems ever since I started the Church of the Creator I repeatedly managed to become the target of some scam, and sometimes more than one con-man was working on me at the same time. Whether this just happened by coincidence, or whether JOG[4] was pointing them my way, I never did figure out, but it certainly seemed like I had become a prime target.”[5] Some employees also did little work and the drama of their personal lives became a distraction.

Klassen knew he was getting on in years so spent much time searching for a “Great Promoter” and a “White Financial Angel.” He found neither in his lifetime. In his search for a promoter, he wasted a great deal of time coordinating with charismatic and manipulative sociopaths locked up in prison who claimed to be white advocates. This matched the trend of problem employees described above.

Problem B: Location, Location, Location

Klassen sunk a great deal of capital into his church’s campus in the mountains of western North Carolina. In Trials… Klassen remarked that most of his neighbors were curious about his ideas and mostly friendly to his face. However, this friendliness masked the serious problems that developed due to the church’s location.

On the surface, the homogeneously white and rural location in the “conservative” Highland South would be a great pick for a new, explicitly pro-white church, however this was not the case. There are several interlocking reasons for this. The first is the nature of Southern Protestant Christianity. Like the proverbial Guns of Singapore that could only point one way, the Christians of the South can only project moral force in one limited direction. Practically applied, in this society, Southern Christians can only be against “racism” and for organized Jewish interests, or they can be for dead-end projects like the pro-life movement, “family values,” and the adopting Chinese baby girls swindle. Preachers in the area sermonized against his church, and the local newspaper wrote negative articles. (Meanwhile, Southern Protestants were called “racists’ no matter what they did.)

Framed in the metapolitical structure of the time and place, Klassen was, to put it simply, a living embodiment of “evil.” He was a big target smack dab in the center of the pre-sighted range of the Southern Protestant “Guns of Singapore.” The workers building Klassen’s church were shot at and had to bring their firearms to the site to be able to finish the job. After the church was built, it was vandalized, and the sign was hit by a shotgun blast. Klassen received hate mail, bomb threats, hostile trespassers, and prank phone calls. Other than a suspicious package thought to be a mail bomb, the police took much of the ruckus unseriously.

Klassen did recognize that his Christian neighbors would be hostile in theory. However, he didn’t realize the counterintuitive nature of ethnic struggles. This is the second problem with his pick of location. Those in homogeneous areas like Minnesota, western North Carolina, and Vermont[6] are often so insulated from non-white dysfunction that there is no understanding in such communities of why someone like Ben Klassen would come into their midst with an idea that the institution of Christianity damaged white racial interests. They didn’t even realize white racial interests were under threat. As a result, every local politician in the area could be hostile to Klassen and not lose a single vote.

Had Klassen organized his church in South Florida, Anglo preachers would, possibly, have sermonized against him, but the whites in the pews would have all had personal experience dealing with non-whites and their problems. With this in mind, in South Florida, The World Church of the Creator might have easily gotten a quiet, solid-as-bedrock, base of support. Had Klassen purchased property in the Poconos, he’d probably had done one better. Those with summer homes in that area would have had deep connections to New York City, quite possibly the city with the most red-pilled white population on this planet. It is also possible that had Klassen put his headquarters in eastern Pennsylvania and northwestern New Jersey, he’d have had an all-around better class of “walk-ins” supporting him.[7]

Problem C: Too Many Targets

Ben Klassen did himself no favors by picking too many targets. In his tribal struggle against Jews and non-whites, he also became a tax protestor, an anti-Mason, and an anti-Federal Reserve activist. His anti-Mason attitudes were probably correct in a European, French Revolution sense, but in the English Speaking World, Freemasonry is little more than a social club providing a place for retirees to get away from the wife and bicker with each other over trifles. Consequently, he was convinced the area’s lawyers were “hostiles” involved in the “Masonic Conspiracy.”[8] He thus caused himself unforced errors by disconnecting himself from the local members of the bar.

While he believed the Federal Reserve was an agency issuing counterfeit currency, Klassen kept a sharp eye on his personal stash of Federal Reserve Notes. This philosophical dissonance probably has much to do with the fact that the Federal Reserve (set up by the metapolitical efforts of agrarian, anti-Wall Street Democrats such as William Jennings Bryan) has survived a global depression, many recessions, two global wars, and many other crises to the point that calling it a counterfeiting scam is not rational.[9] It may be time to state Jewish control of the Federal Reserve is a problem, not the Federal Reserve itself.

However, his biggest “too many targets” problem was his tax protest. Because he didn’t file his taxes, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) was on to him, and that gave a desperate edge to his activities. Klassen had his money in five different banks, and his church also had a bank account. Because Klassen was in trouble with the IRS, he feared the IRS getting their hands on his deposits by garnishing his accounts. One of his employees, named Don Johnson, endorsed a bank in Chilton, Texas. Don Johnson claimed the bank was not under the jurisdiction of the State or Federal Government and had decades of experience keeping deposits safe. Unfortunately, it turned out the bank had been purchased by a swindler and Klassen lost much of his savings. In the end, Klassen thought the affair was, a, “…[T]ype of sting operation, designed to entrap and make destitute a certain group of citizenry they viewed as tax-protesters.”[10]

Don Johnson died of a heart attack shortly after the Chilton Bank fiasco, and Klassen came to believe that his employee may have been a plant to disrupt his activities all along. Additionally, Klassen later believed the name Don Johnson was probably false as it matched that of a popular TV character at the time. Additionally, Johnson knew a great deal about an obscure bank “out of jurisdiction” of the Federal and State governments, but purported to not know that bank had been purchased by con-artists around the time Klassen started to look to hide his assets.

Problem D: Competent Enemies

While Klassen was stuck with a large number of bumbling employees and unable to find a “great promoter” or “white financial angel,” his enemies moved on him with a ruthless efficiency. Klassen’s true ideological enemies consisted of the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, both of whom used the local Macon County, North Carolina authorities to further their aims.

His enemies used the tactics of the strong against the weak. If one has more firepower but is faced with an elusive enemy, the trick is to bait the enemy into exposing itself to the firepower. This happened on the night of June 13-14, 1986. Klassen’s chief typesetter and employee Carl Messick, titled by Klassen Hasta Primus (meaning spearhead) awoke to voices in the middle of the night. Fearing an arson attack, he called both Klassen and the sheriff’s department and then took a firearm and fired into the intruders’ car as the trespassers attempted to escape. It turned out the intruders were a Georgia couple, William and Patricia Trusty. They claimed to be looking to visit a local couple. Remember, in 1986, there were not any pro-white activists on the internet that could crowd-sleuth the Trusty’s background like today.

The SPLC’s report on the affair states that the “…[S]ecurity chief Carl Messick fires 19 shots at the car of a Georgia couple who strayed onto the COTC grounds.”[11] The SPLC intelligence report doesn’t mention that the Trusty’s “strayed” onto COTC grounds in the middle of the night. The Sherriff’s Department arrested Messick. The trial was another unforced error. Messick didn’t use a lawyer in his defense, but the alleged paralegal expert in the COTC, the aforementioned Don Johnson. Messick was sentenced to seven years. By Klassen’s account, Messick was one of the few competent employees, and his incarceration really put him behind.

Klassen’s movement was bankrupted by the SPLC legal trick of suing a pro-white organization after someone with “links” to it did an illegal act. In this case, a follower of Klassen shot a black sailor and Gulf War veteran in a road rage incident in 1991. A jury ruled in favor of the SPLC and The World Church of the Creator was destroyed.[12]

This tactic, where a follower of an extreme, pro-white group gets involved in a violent confrontation with someone else, and the SPLC swoops in with slick lawyers that seek a bankrupting judgement is effective. However, like the famous Highland Charge was effective against soldiers armed with matchlock harquebuses, but not more advanced flintlocks that were quicker to load and had a longer range, the SPLC’s tactic might not work in the future.

The SPLC’s bankrupt on behalf of tactic only works in a situation where the overwhelming preponderance of the public see the SPLC as a moral force. Additionally, a jury must be persuaded to give a big payout targeting an organization only thinly “linked” to the actual criminal, therefore the entire jury must be totally alienated from any pro-white idea. If pro-white metapolitical ideas seep into the culture, jury decisions will change. Additionally, this tactic can be used against the SPLC. For example, in 2012 a gunman named Floyd Lee Corkins II, who had links to the SPLC, shot up the Family Research Council after the SPLC labeled them a “hate group.”

Eternity

Klassen died in August 6, 1993 after deliberately overdosing on sleeping pills. He’d been contemplating suicide for a year or more following the death of his wife and he mentions his plans in Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs. As far as his movement, it did get a new “Great Promoter” named Matthew Hale, but this second Pontifex Maximus was tripped up by the same legal snares used on Carl Messick and Ben Klassen and has a much longer term in prison. Klassen’s grave is near Otto, North Carolina. Its epitaph says, “He gave the white people a powerful religion of their own.” It remains to be seen how Klassen’s ideas will turn out.

Notes

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1982/09/01/business/gm-lowers-prices-on-many-1983-cars.html

[2] Klassen, Ben Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs: A History of the Church of the Creator During Its 10 Year Domicile in the State of North Carolina, Coordinated with Biographical Details During the Same Period, Church of the Creator, Niceville, Florida 1993 Page 50

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07poccvnYOA (15:31 to 16:05)

[4] Jewish Occupation Governemnt

[5] Klassen, Ben Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs: A History of the Church of the Creator During Its 10 Year Domicile in the State of North Carolina, Coordinated with Biographical Details During the Same Period, Church of the Creator, Niceville, Florida 1993 Page 135

[6]Writing about how blacks severely alter the voting patterns of former far-left Socialist Party supporters in Wisconsin is Ryan Andrews, who wrote: “Population wise, the Great Migration of blacks to the north hit Wisconsin less than it did many others, but those who did arrive have formed a pocket of dysfunction and government dependence in the midst of the communitarian ideal… Wisconsin’s black population is concentrated in Milwaukee, which has now has the highest white/black segregation in the country and an extremely high degree of political polarization… in Wisconsin, the cities are blue, the countryside is purple, and the suburbs are deep-red…Milwaukee’s collar counties (i.e. the ones surrounding cities) went for Romney by two or three to one… http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-root-cause-of-scott-walker-black-migration-has-challenged-the-wisconsin-idea

[7] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/13/opinion/sunday/seth-stephens-davidowitz-the-data-of-hate.html

[8] William Luther Pierce was far less concerned about Freemasonry and the Federal Reserve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBoBI7y6qGM

[9] https://www.alt-m.org/2014/04/20/william-jennings-bryan-and-the-founding-of-the-fed/

[10] Klassen, Ben Trials, Tribulations, and Triumphs: A History of the Church of the Creator During Its 10 Year Domicile in the State of North Carolina, Coordinated with Biographical Details During the Same Period, Church of the Creator, Niceville, Florida 1993 Page 146

[11] https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/1999/church-creator-timeline

[12] http://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/20/us/supremacist-told-to-pay-black-family.html