Those silly boys over at the World Church of the Creator/Rahowa are getting themselves into all kinds of trouble.
We warn you… this crap will turn your freaking stomach. (Oh, and it’s pretty freaking long too)
Backward Preamble.
I’m calling this a backward preamble as I’m writing this after I wrote
the piece on the Creators and their variants.
Frankly writing the article made me depressed, I tried to inject some
humour but it’s hard when you’re dealing with such humourless subject
material. I knew a bit about the creators before I started researching
it, but seeing the litany of appalling events that they have inspired or
have been done by their followers made me feel frankly nauseous.
I personally consider the creators one of the most dangerous and
depressing of all the groups lined up under the banner they call “White
nationalism”, we call it “race hatred”.
Why? Because they attempt, through the words of Ben Klassen, to present
a philosophy that glorifies the worst and basest acts of mankind, and
cloak it as a religion. By replacing God with the white race and using
the debased form of morality they espouse, eg., “what is good for the
White Race is the highest value and what is bad for the White Race is
the ultimate sin” they can justify random acts of violence and murder on
people of other races by saying they answer to a “higher authority” and
so go beyond conventional morality. It is a “religion” that gives
justification to mindless violence by racist psychopaths.
Most religions have a form of apocalypse or final reckoning, but the
creators go one step further than any other religion I know of, and are
actively working to bring about their apocalyse - the RaHoWa.
Small wonder the creators figure highly on the FBI list of terrorist
organisations.
Hell, calling them batshit is an insult to bat guano fetishists
everywhere, calling them fruitloops is an insult to anything fruity
with a hole in the middle etc etc.
They are highly relevant to the scene here in Australia /NZ because
there are individuals and groups in both countries that use this
perversion of religion to justify their hate crimes.
Rant over. read on….
In the beginning there was Ben Klassen.
Benny Klassen.
Born in the Ukraine in 1918 to a Mennonite (ironically Mennonites are committed to non-violence, non-resistance and pacifism) family as Bernhardt Klassen. When he was six, his family moved to Mexico, and two years later re-settled in rural Saskatchewan, Canada.
As an adult, Klassen taught elementary school in Canada, then worked as an electrical engineer in California. He also worked as a part-time inventor, reportedly earning a patent for an electric can opener in 1954.
In 1958, Klassen moved to Florida, where he became a successful real estate agent. The first indication of his political views came to light in 1965, when he was elected as a Republican to the Florida State Legislature. At the time, he had campaigned against busing and the federal government — conventional conservative positions of the day.
James Eddy, a Republican leader in the Florida House at the time, said of Klassen, “He was a good legislator…. Most of his votes were well-reasoned.”
After his legislative district was reapportioned by court order, Klassen ran unsuccessfully for state senator in 1967. He next served as Florida chairman of Alabama governor George Wallace’s 1968 independent presidential campaign. (Wallace was, of course, leading segregationist figure at the time.)
In 1973 he published “Nature’s Eternal Religion” and founded the Church of the Creator.
Creativitity’s big difference from any other religion on the planet revolves around their worship of the white race as the pinnacle of evolution, not god. Whites are the creators of civilization, and all others are its destroyers. The Creators slag off Christianity as a Jewish plot and are essentially atheistic, although they avoid the actual word in their writings.
In Klassen’s own words:
“We believe that in the battle for individual survival and the survival of our race, Nature tells us that any means is morally justified. Survival is all important, nothing else matters. In the matter of survival of our race, we take the firm position that any means justifies this end, and no price is too high.” (1981)
The “16 Commandments of Creativity” constitute the stated doctrine of the organization:
1. It is the avowed duty and holy responsibility of each generation to assure and secure for all time the existence of the White Race upon the face of this planet.
2. Be fruitful and multiply. Do your part in helping to populate the world with your own kind. It is our sacred goal to populate the lands of this earth with White people exclusively.
3. Remember that the inferior colored races are our deadly enemies, and that the most dangerous of all is the Jewish race. It is our immediate objective to relentlessly expand the White Race, and keep shrinking our enemies.
4. The guiding principle of all your actions shall be: What is best for the White Race?
5. You shall keep your race pure. Pollution of the White Race is a heinous crime against Nature and against your own race.
6. Your first loyalty belongs to the White Race.
7. Show preferential treatment in business dealings with members of your own race. Phase out all dealings with Jews as soon as possible. Do not employ niggers or other coloreds. Have social contacts only with members of your own racial family.
8. Destroy and banish all Jewish thought and influence from society. Work hard to bring about a White world as soon as possible.
9. Work and Creativity are our genius. We regard work as a noble pursuit and our willingness to work as a blessing to our race.
10. Decide in early youth that during your lifetime you will make at least one major lasting contribution to the White Race.
11. Uphold the honor of your race at all time.
12. It is our duty and our privilege to further Nature’s plan by striving towards the advancement and improvement of our future generations.
13. You shall honor, protect and venerate the sanctity of the family unit, and hold it sacred. It is the present link in the long golden chain of our White Race.
14. Throughout your life you shall faithfully uphold our pivotal creed of Blood, Soil and Honor. Practice it diligently, for it is the heart of our faith.
15. As a proud member of the White Race, think and act positively, be courageous, confident and aggressive. Utilize constructively your creative ability.
16. We, the Racial Comrades of the White Race, are determined to regain complete and unconditional control of our own destiny.
Klassen also coined the group’s catch-cry which has become infamous. RaHoWa, short for Racial Holy War.
In 1981 Klassen wrote his second book “The White Man’s Bible” and in 1982 he moved the headquarters for the COTC from Florida to 22 acres of land in Otto, North Carolina, building a personal residence, a three-story church, a small warehouse and a “school for gifted boys.” later that year the COTC is granted tax exemption from state taxes as a church.
In 1983 Klassen started a monthly newsletter “Racial Loyalty”. Klassen’s writings and movement gained impetus and following amongst mainly neo-Nazi skinheads seeking to justify their white supremacist beliefs with some kind of “theological” dogma.
In 1986 the first known act of violence by members of the COTC happens when Klassen’s security chief peppers the car of a Georgia couple who strayed onto the COTC grounds with 19 bullets. He gets 7 years in prison.
In 1988 Klassen, now 70, starts his long seach for a successor. He asks John Metzger, son of White Aryan Resistance founder, Tom Metzger to take over, which Metzger turns down because he doesn’t want to be “affiliated with a religion.”
In 1989 the COTC loses its state tax exemption on its property in NC.
By the start of the 90s, groups of neo-Nazi skinheads began congregating at COTC headquarters for indoctrination and weapons training.
According to a September 1992 article in Mirabella magazine, the “seventeen-acre landscaped compound…includes small-arms firing ranges, paramilitary barracks and other buildings…. Inside a large converted barn that serves as headquarters, church founder and leader, Ben Klassen… sits beneath a large painted portrait of Adolf Hitler, ‘The greatest leader the white race ever had,’ says Klassen…. Since 1990 groups of committed young men have traveled here for extensive political mining under Klassen’s tutelage. The recruits wear white berets or cowboy hats, live in the barracks and practice shooting with automatic weapons on the firing range. Many are older teenagers. ‘Exceptional boys,’ Klassen calls them.”
1990 Klassen declares that church leadership would change “at the top of every decade, on the decade” and announces that Rudy “Butch” Stanko then serving a six-year sentence for selling tainted meat will take over once he is released from prison.
In 1991 the crap really hits the fan when Harold Mansfield Jr, a black gulf war veteran, is murdered in a Florida parking lot by COTC “reverend” George Loeb and his wife, Barbara, by charging at him with a brick. George Loeb gets 25 years, non-parole, for this act. The official COTC line on this is “an act of self defence”.
Fellow COTC member Steve Thomas, who will later edit Racial Loyalty, is charged with aiding Loeb’s initial flight from Florida. Thomas had earlier served eight years for raping a Vietnamese woman, an incident upon which the movie “Casualties of War” was based.
In November, Macon County, N.C., officials revoke COTC’s tax-exempt status.
1992 was a bad year for Ben Klassen. His wife, Henrietta dies of cancer in January.
He then cancels Stanko’s planned inauguration as COTC’s “Pontifex Maximus” and names a Baltimore pizza delivery man Charles Altvater as his successor.
In June he changes his mind again, probably a good move, as Altvater decides in November of the same year to firebomb the house of a police chief who had his car towed. His new nominate is Milwaukee COTC “reverend” Mark Wilson, then 25.
Fearing a civil lawsuit as a result of the Mansfield murder, Klassen then sells the North Carolina compound to William Pierce of the National Alliance.
At the end of 1992 Klassen nominates yet another successor Richard McCarty, who finally takes over as nominal head of the COTC. His first act is to move the headquarters of the COTC back to Florida.
Under McCarty The COTC steps up their campaign against anybody that isn’t white.
In July ‘93, COTC Washington state leader Jeremiah Knesal, 19, and two other COTC members bomb the meeting hall of the NAACP in Tacoma, Washingtoon. Two days later, Knesal pipe bombs a Seattle gay bar. In his guilty plea, Knesal says the group also planned attacks on blacks and Jews.
In California that month, COTC-linked Geremy von Rineman and girlfriend Jill Scarborough are arrested in a plot to bomb Los Angeles’ largest black church.
On August 7th 1993, Klassen sets a precedent we would encourage for any of his adherents, pining for his dead wife, he overdoses on sleeping pills. In his suicide note, he made reference to his book The White Man’s Bible, which describes suicide as “an honorable and dignified way to die for any … of a number of reasons, such as having come to the decision that life is no longer worthwhile.”
The same year Toronto COTC leader and Rahowa band leader George Burdi helps form Resistance Records, based in Detroit, to record and market racist rock music.
In 1994 representing the family of Harold Mansfield, the Southern Poverty Law Center files suit against COTC in March, alleging the group is responsible for his murder. The family is awarded a $1 million default judgment when McCarty fails to contest the case.
With the death of the founder of COTC and the landmark judgement against them leaving them penniless, it was hoped this would be the last people would see of the Chrurch of the Creator. Unfortunately it wasn’t so.
Enter Matt Hale.
Matty Hale
23 year old, self styled “national leader” of the National Socialist White Americans Party, Matt Hale stepped up to the plate in July 1995, by dissolving his NSWAP and resuscitating the ailing corpse of the COTC, first calling it the “new” COTC and later the World Church of the Creator. Hale promoted himself to the old guard of The COTC as the “great promoter” Klassen had been searching for.
With the aid of some of the old stalwarts of the COTC Hale convenes a meeting in May 1996 and is elected Pontifex Maximus of the now WCOTC.
The rest of 1996, 1997 and 1998 sees members of the WCOTC committing acts of assault, attempted murder and robbery largely against random non-whites. The WCOTC gathers momentum but has not had any major publicity and the name remains relatively unknown outside of WN circles.
In May ‘98 Matt hale graduates from law school, passing the bar exam that summer. Later in the year, a state official rejects Hale’s application to practice law because of his “character and fitness.”
The Ben Smith affair.
At an April 1999 hearing, Illinois State Bar Association officials hear Hale’s appeal on the rejected law license. Among others, WCOTC member Benjamin Nathaniel Smith testifies on behalf of Hale, who Smith claims has kept him from violence.
Two months later, three Sacramento synagogues sustain arson attacks, and within days officials say they are looking at Hale’s group for possible involvement.
On July 2, the Illinois Bar Association again turns Hale down for a law license because of his neo-Nazi views. Within hours, Smith begins a three-day shooting rampage, killing two people, a black basketball coach and a Korean doctoral student, and wounding nine before shooting himself as police closed in.
Hale became a “celebrity”, his picture and story appearing in Time, Newsweek and almost every paper in the US.
From the spare room in his father’s house, the “world headquarters” of WCOTC, decorated with an Israeli flag doormat, Hale entertained television crews and gave interviews to the world’s print media.
Hale called Smith a “martyr for free speech” and a frustrated but well meaning “racialist”. For the victims of Smith’s attack he offered no condolences saying “WCOTC’s compassion was reserved for our own race.”
Here comes the judge
In 2000, the Oregon-based TE-TA-MA Truth Foundation filed a lawsuit against the WCOTC for using the term “Church of the Creator,” which the Oregon group had registered as a trademark. Te ta ma or the people of URI are a relatively harmless sect who seem to be largely a bunch of hippies. They registered the name in 1987, 14 years after Klassen had started the COTC but their registration was uncontested, so by law they have the rights to the name. They have a web page detailing the various lawsuits between them and the creators.
Early in 2002, the following judge ruled in favor of the World Church of the Creator. However, this decision was appealed by TE-TA-MA In a reversal of the previous ruling by a higher court, in November 2002, the onus fell on U.S. District Court Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow enforcing an injunction in favor of the TE-TA-MA group, barring the use of the name by Hale’s organization.
In December 2002 the group announced it was moving its headquarters to Riverton, Wyoming, which is the current base of the remnants of the creativity movement.
Hale refuses to comply with the Lefkow’s injunction and she orders him to show why he should not be held in contempt of court.
Matt Hale registered a trademark on the name “Creativity Movement” and changed the name of his organization to the Creativity Movement to avoid legal problems. However, there were still mentions of the name ‘Church of the Creator’ in the vast majority of the Church’s books which were published from 1973 to 1994 bringing more legal action against the organization for not removing those trademarked terms on the digitized versions of the book online.
On January 8, 2003, Hale was arrested and charged with trying to hire and direct his security chief Anthony (Tony) Evola to murder Judge Lefkow. Evola, an FBI informant who had been a member of the group for at least two and a half years, had instead notified law enforcement of the plot. Hale was arrested as he arrived at Chicago’s federal court for his contempt hearing.
A few days later, Judge Lefkow’s home address was posted on the white supremacist online bulletin board Aryan Update, which is overseen by infamous white supremacist leader Tom Metzger.
“I am a Creator and we intend to protest rather loudly in front of this Jewess’s house in the near future,” wrote the anonymous poster, who also provided Michael Lefkow’s work address.
Pictures of Lefkow’s husband and children also had been posted earlier by WCOTC member Craig Cobb of West Virginia, on Stormfront.
The creator’s website urged its members to “show the kike and nigger - loving judge that the jailing of . . . Hale will not stop our Church of the Creator!”
Hale was found guilty of four of the five counts against him on April 26, 2004.
On 25 Feb 2005, Judge Joan Lefkow returned to her home to find her husband Michael Lefkow, 64, and her mother Donna Humphrey, 89, dead in her basement. They had been murdered execution-style, each shot in the back of the head with a .22-caliber firearm. The murders came one month before Matt Hale was scheduled to be sentenced for trying to have the judge killed because of her handling of the earlier trademark dispute.
Police were unable to find a link between Hale and the man who confessed to the murders before his own suicide on March 9th, Bart Ross, a plaintiff in a medical malpractice case that Lefkow had dismissed.
Connection to the murder or not, Hale’s supporters posted publicly Judge Lefkow’s address and family details and invited every whackjob in the country to “have a go”.
On April 6th, 2005 Matt Hale was sentenced to 40 years for soliciting the murder of a federal judge and obstructing justice.
He is currently rotting in the administrative maximum section of the Florence, Colorado correctional complex. Often referred to as “supermax” the section of the Florence penitentiary in which Hale is being held isolates inmates from each other and the general population.
Hale, unfortunately, has become a cause celebre for white supremacists the world over who ironically cry “foul” and “injustice” at every opportunity. The Nazi Olsen twins, Prussian Blue, credit Matt Hale as their spiritual leader. Fits really.
Splits splits and banana splits.
Starting in 2001, the WCOTC began to suffer from internal splits and defections. In December 2001, Hale, described as a misogynist by some insiders, lost his two most important female activists. Lisa Turner and Melody LaRue, who led the Sisterhood of the WCOTC, up and quit the organization. Turner cited her mother’s failing health, while LaRue wrote cryptically that many of her reasons were “of a personal nature.” With other female former Creators, LaRue set up Hypatia Publishing on the model of the Sisterhood. Hypatia has a Web site and now publishes “Sisterhood” magazine.
Just a few months later, in March 2002, Hale expelled long-time Montana Creators Dan Hassett and Slim Deardorff, who had helped him win his Pontifex Maximus title back in 1996. Hale told followers that he’d sent the men $8,740 in WCOTC funds for safekeeping after the group was sued by the families of Ben Smith’s victims. (The civil suit was ultimately unsuccessful.) Hassett and Deardorff bought gold with the money, burying it near Deardorff’s Montana cabin. Hale said the men later claimed the cabin burned down and the money had been lost.
Enraged, Hale accused the men of embezzlement and “treason.” He charged that Hassett had threatened to inform on WCOTC members to the FBI. Deardorff, Hale added, was having “fatherly relations” with his two mixed-race children born before he joined the COTC and was thereby defiling the white race.
But Hassett and Deardorff had apparently been unhappy with Hale for some time when these events occurred. In late 2001, Deardorff had sent a private letter to William Pierce, then the leader of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, asking him if he might be interested in taking over WCOTC. Pierce declined. In May 2002, after Hale made his accusations, Hassett, Deardorff and three other Creators men who said they made up the Guardians of the Faith Committee that had once elevated Hale to leader fired back. They sent Hale a letter informing him that he was no longer WCOTC’s leader. Hale ignored the rebels, but Hassett and Deardorff started a rival Northwest COTC that has since rejoiced in Hale’s legal troubles.
Currently, Thomas Kroenke, appointed “Hasta Primus” or “Spearhead” of the WCOTC before Hale’s arrest, is running some of the group’s operations in Wyoming.
According to the ADL’s latest report on the creativity movement Creativity’s defeat in the trademark lawsuit over its name was a body blow that threatened its identity. Hale’s 2003 arrest was a decapitation. Together, the two events devastated Creativity, especially given Hale’s inability to lead the group from jail after the federal government, concerned that he might incite followers to violence, imposed severe communications restrictions.
The movement collapsed. Some formed independent Creativity cells, others left to join extremist groups like the Klan and White Revolution. The efforts of loyal members to reorganize or reenergize were largely unsuccessful.
In the two years since Hale’s arrest, there have been no public Creativity meetings, rallies, protests or literature distributions. Some Creators have been active online; while Creativity Web pages tend to be short-lived, Internet activity has kept the movement alive, and may help form the future basis for a reorganization of the group.
Creators downunder.
Like many other US-centric WN movements, we have our own local variants of Creators, here in Australia/NZ
Representing the mainstream WCOTC (he doesn’t like using the “Creativity Movement” tag) we have the Melbourne rep and probably only member: Reverend Patrick O’ Sullivan. He claims to be in touch with the main US group. Not user-friendly and liable to knife critics, as one person found out at a party in 1999.
An unique variant is the White Crusaders of the RaHoWa - founded by “The Reverend” Colin Campbell.
See here and here for previous stories we’ve done on these characters.
Information on Colin campbell or Elder Col. Campbell 3rd as he likes to be called nowadays is sketchy at best. He is a perpetual insomniac who regularly haunts the web at all hours with white power music blaring from his speakers (it sounded like Fortress)
One reference I did find pointed to him being an ex-satanist which sort of conflicts with the prime Creator belief of no god or afterlife, neither “pie in the sky” or “fry when you die”.
If you really want to be nauseated have a look at the Crusader kids site.
This group has adherents in both Australia and NZ. The most recent sighting being some ugly posters put up in Wellington, supposedly in support of the Cronulla riots.
Of course there is the sad irony that Baron von “I’m not a nazi” Hund (David Innes) happens to host his “white nationalist news” website courtesy of the WCOTR.
More recent evidence suggests that Colin and Baron’s relationship extends beyond basic webhosting interplay and that the two are quite chummy. Certainly, every email that we have ever sent to Campbell concerning Baron’s website has found it’s way to Innes’ inbox.
The recent DDoS problems encountered by FDB caused Baron to regularly email Mat Henderson-Hau for a gloat. Oh Baron was very chirpy and very chatty. However, he suddenly went silent when we forwarded him the link from the ‘Tiser concering his webhosts’ plans to “turn on their tormentors with a furious vengeance and destroy them down to the last man.”
Does David Innes agree with this latest batshit strategy from his friend and webhost Colin Campbell?
I’ll finish with some Klassen quotes which sum up creativity for me
“We gird for total war against the Jews and the rest of the goddamned mud races of the world - politically, militantly, financially, morally and religiously. In fact, we regard it as the heart of our religious creed, and as the most sacred credo of all. We regard it as a holy war to the finish - a racial holy war. Rahowa! is INEVITABLE.” (1987)
“We are in harmony with the Leadership Principle as expounded by Adolf Hitler and consider the former Nazi Party and governmental organization as a model structure for our own future development. We consider Hitler’s Nazi Germany between 1933-39 as the finest and most efficient society the White Race has ever produced… .” (1987)
What nice guys!
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