Church of the Creator: Creed of Hate
As Klassen cranked these writings out, the COTC name
grew within the white supremacist
movement -- particularly among its youngest and most violence-prone adherents
-- throughout the '80s By the start of the next decade, 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."
COTC's growth was attributable in part to the
simultaneous, though only temporary, decline of
Tom Metzger's
White Aryan Resistance (WAR) organization.
which throughout the '80s exerted the
greatest influence among neo-Nazi skinheads, as it again
does today. In 1990, an Oregon jury found
Metzger and his son John liable for inciting a group of
skinheads to murder an Ethiopian immigrant.
The civil suit was brought on behalf of the victim's family
by the Southern Poverty Law Center and
ADL") As a result, the Metzgers were ordered to pay a $12.5
million penalty. They also suffered a loss
of prestige in the skinhead underworld when an investigation
of their finances during pre-trial
discovery revealed that they had used WAR funds to purchase
personal items, such as the elder
Metzger's toupee. COTC reaped the benefits of this
disenchantment, picking up substantial new
membership from former WAR chapters.
As COTC's membership swelled, so did its rhetoric of
violence (as well as the number of violent
acts, detailed elsewhere in this report, allegedly committed
by COTC members). Klassen -- quite
possibly fearing a civil suit similar to the case against
Metzger -- spent much of 1992 looking for a
successor to take over the Church. In September 1992, the
Asheville, North Carolina, Citizen-Times
reported that Klassen had sold the COTC compound for
$100,000 to
William Pierce.
Pierce, a former officer in George Lincoln Rockwell's
original American Nazi Party, is the head
of another neo-Nazi group, the
National Alliance. His
connection with Klassen came as no surprise:
like Klassen, Pierce is a recluse, living on a 346-acre
West Virginia compound he calls the
Cosmotheist Community. Moreover, like Klassen, Pierce is a
bitterly hateful opponent of
Christianity.
According to an unsolicited mailing sent to subscribers
of Racial Loyalty in April 1993, Pierce
once told his followers, "Any Alliance member who is also a
member of a church or other Christian
organization which supports racial mixing or Zionism should
decide now where he stands, and should
then resign either from his church or from the Alliance."
Prior to their formal real estate transaction,
Klassen had promoted his fellow white supremacist by
advertising two grisly Pierce novels in Racial
Loyalty, The Turner Diaries -- which provided the blueprint for
a series of terrorist acts in the 1980s by
the Order, an offshoot of the National Alliance and the
Aryan Nations -- and Hunter, the sequel to
The Turner Diaries.
In March 1993, Pierce announced that he was putting up
the COTC property for sale again, this
time asking for $299,900. To date, no one has responded to
this offer.
The
original plaintext version
of this file is available via
ftp.
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Growing Recognition in the Hate Business