Christian Identity grew from British Israelism(or Anglo-Israelism) of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This theology posited more than one seed of humankind, which seems to be another constant of racist thinking throughout the ages -- seeing mankind as divided rather than a single species, the easier to set superior races against inferior ones. Adam and Eve are believed to be the forerunners of the white race, but Eve was seduced by the serpent to create the Jews -- hence, the two-seed theory, meaning that the so-called "mud races" are fundamentally different from the progeny of Adam and Eve.
Christian Identity believes that the lost tribes of Israel are in fact the settlers of Britain and the Nordic countries, from where they went to America. Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan, and it is one of the great calumnies of the Jews to claim him as one of their own. In America, Wesley Swift was a leading originator of this theology in the mid-20th century, from whom, via the Church of Jesus Christ, Christian , it was transmitted to Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations, turning Hayden, Idaho, into the center of this theology. As is usually the case with white supremacist circles, this led to close interchange and dissemination of Identity beliefs in various branches of the movement.
While it is true that Christian Identity despises Christianity for its weakness in allowing interracial mingling, and in cohabiting with the mud races whose only aim is to end the purity of the white race, the same disdain toward Christianity is also true of the neo-pagan Teuton religions, who look back to the Nazi regime for validation of the material success of their theology. The true religion of Aryans is said to be their ancestral one, rather than the imposition of enervating Christianity, and a plethora of mystical rites -- using runes and symbols -- reinforce separatist neo-pagan theology. There may be a question about the extent to which Odinists are supremacists -- some in the Asatru religion believe that not only northern Europeans but all white people can claim paganism as their true religion -- but there is little question about Odinism's separatism.
In both Christian Identity circles (influencing in turn the Patriot movement) and among Odinists, the Pacific Northwest is often seen as the starting point for a regained homeland where neo-paganism can be practiced freely. Again, this theology returns the ordinary white person to the center of the moral universe, endowing him with an ingrained and undefeatable aristocracy. David and Katja Lane, and later their friend Ron McVan , ran the 14 Words Press to propagate Odinism. David continued his mission from jail, where he spent 22 years before his death in 2007 for his early 1980s militant role with the Bruder Schweigen-- or Silent Order, or to insiders simply the Order.
Finally, it would be remiss not to return to the aforementioned Ben Klassen, founder of the World Church of the Creator (COTC), or Creativity, which was taken over by Matt Hale after Klassen's suicide in 1993. Klassen's many writings propagate a religion that verges on the naturist, advocating a macrobiotic diet (true of many incarnations of white supremacy) and a relationship to the environment that borrows something from the leftist version of it that we know better.
The grand narrative of contemporary white supremacy
In the broadest sense, white supremacy is a populist movement. The conspiracy for leftists is an elite-driven globalization that creates inequality and makes minorities and poor people suffer inordinately, whereas the conspiracy for white supremacists today is the New World Order that operates through a centuries-old chain of international bankers and is determined to end the purity of the white race. The logic in each instance -- the conspiracy on the left and the right -- is parallel, and leads to similar resentment of elites, who have access to special knowledge not available to the ordinary person. On the extreme right it is a mythology of battle and leverage, of heroism and valor, of Robin Hoods and dark cabals, of the Illuminati and Freemasons, of the heartland American values of liberty and individualism under assault by a globalist conspiracy to introduce monotony and conformism. In a way, the grand narrative is simply a much exaggerated version of yeoman values such as a founding father like Jefferson would have advocated.
As the reality of the industrialized economy throughout the 20th century eroded the possibility of independent freeholding such as was possible during 19th-century America and earlier, the grand narrative became more and more powerful in shaping imaginations. We can hardly claim that the emphasis on race is an innovation, because this was a constant throughout our history of oppression of Native Americans (were the Mathers and other New England luminaries of the 17th century any less racist than those we wish to condemn to perdition today?), African-American slaves, and then Catholic and Asian immigrants, except that each of America's entanglements in foreign wars has provided increasing depth and circumstantial providence to the grand narrative.
I find it not coincidental that the KKK's great rebirth came in the 1920s, after we had "won" World War I, and that the peak of Bircherism occurred in the 1950s, soon after we claimed victory in World War II. Each major war is seen to have been brought about by international conspiracy, leading to the progressive diminishment of the rights of white Americans. It is perhaps easier to condemn a government that has been taken over by a secret cabal (as set out in the influential "Protocols of the Elders of Zion ," which were vigorously disseminated by Henry Ford, the leading founder of American industrialization, and which have in turn shaped the conspiratorial view of the Zionist Occupation Government , or ZOG, followed by those caught up in industrial decline) than to condemn our whole system of government, because to do the latter is to leave no way out, whereas to believe in a conspiracy is to set oneself up as a hero with a shot at salvation.
Are they just patriots in a besieged homeland?
Gordon Kahl , a member of the Posse Comitatus, became one of the leading martyrs of the white supremacist movement in the late 20th century, when he was killed in a fiery shootout in 1983. The Posse Comitatus, as noted earlier, does not recognize any jurisdiction larger than the county, and wishes to disobey federal functions such as taxation, banking, currency and all forms of regulation. The Posse is separatist, but not necessarily supremacist. It was during the farm crisis engendered by Ronald Reagan's monetarist policies in the early 1980s that the Posse took off. Kahl refused to pay his taxes (for income of less than $10,000) time and time again, eventually leading to a bloody confrontation, despite the doubts of certain local officials in going after him. It's possible to think of the Posse as an extremist manifestation of tax-resistance.
Robert Jay Mathews is probably the best-known martyr in the white supremacist pantheon. Allied with Aryan Nations, he decided to take matters to the next level by embarking on a revolutionary strategy of armed robberies and assassination of selected targets (such as Denver Nazi-baiting radio host Alan Berg, whom Mathews and his allies succeeded in killing). Caught after a major robbery of an armored car, Mathews met the same fate as Kahl, dying in a fiery shootout. Later, in the 1990s, the two most famous heroes of martyrology were Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and David Koresh at Waco, Texas, their families and supporters confronting extended standoffs ending in death.
I will take up the patterns of FBI dealings with white supremacists later, but we should note that the Posse Comitatus and the Patriot movement took hold in the midst of extreme economic crisis in the American Midwest. A sense of too much change (such as the urbanization and industrialization of the 1920s, or the reverse tendency of post-industrialization in the 1990s) brings out the white supremacist demons, but when there is an acute feeling of economic depression, as was the case during the 1980s and early 1990s, then the grand narrative becomes all the more important to explain why there aren't enough jobs and why certain distant people seem to hold all the economic power. In this narrative, affirmative action is a form of reverse discrimination against whites, aimed at the core philosophy of individualism, and the economic crisis faced by white Americans is just a stepping stone to their extermination.
Concluding thoughts about problems of definition
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