Blood and Politics (14 page)

The Zarephath-Horeb camp was an odd permutation on an old American tradition, utopian communities, with one significant exception: church services were held with a Bible in one hand and an assault rifle in the other.
¹¹
The precision metalworking machinery was used to build silencers and transform semiautomatic rifles into fully automatic machine guns. The CSA also produced homemade hand grenades and claymore-type land mines. A truck frame became the embryo of an armored personnel carrier. Weapons of every description were cached around the camp like sacks of wheat for a future famine. Light antitank weapons, known as LAW rockets, dynamite, and military-style plastic explosives were hidden. So was a thirty-gallon barrel of cyanide and forty thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins, or Krugerrands, the currency of the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was the most heavily armed and militarized of the survivalist compounds of that period.
¹²

The impressive division of economic labor, tools, and weapons might have made the settlement a haven for superrational
Übermenschen
endowed with a supply of white genes for future generations. That was William Pierce’s prescription for survivalist communities, and several National Alliance members had taken survivalist training.
¹³
But the CSA was ultimately a heavily armed and criminal commune for cultists.

Atop this gunpowder dung heap sat James Ellison, like a combination guru and
Gruppenführer
. Originally from Illinois, Ellison attended four years of Christian Church seminary, but he did not graduate.
¹⁴
In 1970, at age twenty-nine, he came to the Ozarks and established a supposedly Bible-based, but not yet Christian Identity, church in Elijay, Arkansas. Six years later, with a mortgage from the Campus Crusade for Christ, he moved his congregation of thirty souls to the 224-acre camp. Ellison’s top lieutenant was Kerry Noble, also from Texas but twelve years younger. They gathered acolytes from among the region’s spiritually dissolute.
¹⁵

These were not the university-educated souls at the Institute for Historical Review. One woman joined Ellison’s church in Elijay when she was just twenty-three years old, for example, and then later, after a divorce,
moved onto the encampment with her three children. She dutifully turned over her possessions and money, as well as welfare checks, around seven thousand dollars’ worth. Another young man, suffering from heavy drug use and marital problems, thought camp life could straighten him out. A third joined after a history of drug dealing and alcoholism. And a fourth, who eventually deserted the cause, told the Arkansas state police: “The problem with half the people out there . . . when they jump up and threaten to run off,” they had no place to go. Nevertheless, some did leave the camp before it became a destination with no return.
¹⁶

Like cultic figures elsewhere, Ellison dressed his total control over other people’s lives in biblical language. On one occasion, he instructed a follower to learn the “mind of a servant” and rub his feet every day for six months. In another instance, Ellison declared a male camper “spiritually dead,” so that he could then “marry” the man’s “former” wife. The woman, the daughter of a Lutheran minister from Minnesota, acceded to the demand. Already married himself, Ellison lived for a time with two wives and eleven children, all in the same cabin.
¹⁷

It is useful to compare Ellison’s relationship to his followers with that of other movement leaders. Willis Carto, for example, maintained a financial stranglehold on his organizations but left the personalities of his employees intact. William Pierce’s ideological grip was fierce, but he wanted strong cadres with intellectual and technical skills, rather than weak and dependent subordinates. David Duke, whose refracted television appearances were the source of his charisma, thought cults were tremendous fund-raising opportunities.
¹⁸
But he still depended on mailed appeals, not blind obedience, to raise money. While none of these men operated an open, democratic organization, neither the Klan nor National Alliance nor Liberty Lobby was a cult. Ellison, by contrast, relied on the slavishness of his followers and their absolute devotion to him as a leader. To make the insanity complete, Ellison claimed to be descended from the biblical King David and had himself anointed King James of the Ozarks.
¹⁹

During the early 1980s the CSA maintained good relations with other survivalist-type groups in the Midwest. The Christian-Patriots Defense League, or CPDL, headquartered across the state in southern Illinois, also adhered to the Christian Identity doctrine. But instead of a cult, it served as a loosely structured amalgam of paramilitary enthusiasts.
²⁰
The CPDL promoted an idea called the “Mid-America Survival Zone,” with the Appalachian Mountains and the Colorado Rockies as imagined borders. The CPDL argued that the middle of the country had the best
chance to survive a nuclear war or communist invasion. It was an ambiguous quasi-military concept, with its racialism implied rather than explicit. At private three-day festivals on the estate grounds of its founder, a thousand people typically camped in trailers or tents, one indication of the movement’s drawing power in the Midwest. Vendors sold white supremacy as if it were the next great consumer gadget. Workshop attendees learned that Jews sponsored both race mixing and the Antichrist media. Although a few sessions were aimed at women and some children were present on the grounds, these fests were not actually family affairs. At the fests’ end, a small group of men stayed for paramilitary instruction by a retired army lieutenant colonel, crawling through brush and shooting at targets.
²¹

These events attracted recruiters of various types looking for new followers. William Pierce sent several university students to sell literature one year, while they took the paramilitary training course. Willis Carto’s
Spotlight
tabloid reported favorably on these affairs, and Liberty Lobby sent speakers.
²²
For several years, squads of Ellison’s CSA soldiers, dressed in camouflage uniforms with assault rifles slung across their backs, provided “security.” Here they exuded power and prestige, in contrast with the depraved position they occupied at their commander’s feet.

Despite the similarity of the two organizations, the Christian-Patriots Defense League broke with the CSA after the July 1982 festival and took the unusual step of explaining its decision in a six-page letter to supporters. “In the beginning Mr. Ellison’s intentions were proper, . . . but as time progressed they altered and changed to the point where now he may well be engaged in practices and actions that could endanger his entire unit, plus set the stage to bring public reproach and damage to the overall patriotic effort nationwide . . . Some who have lived there honestly state and believe it could eventually evolve into a Jim Jones type of tragedy unless numerous changes are made.”
²³
Apparently, cult-like behaviors were not popular among racists and anti-Semites either.

Despite this particular breach, Ellison kept his ties with other Identity believers in the region, chief among them Robert Millar, who ran a similar commune-compound dubbed Elohim City. As in Zarephath-Horeb, Elohim City’s residents named their acreage to symbolize their identification with biblical Israel. Also like Ellison’s compound, it was near a state border, six miles up a dirt road where the eastern edge of Oklahoma joins northwestern Arkansas in the Ozark Mountains. A collection of self-constructed cabins and trailer homes settled on one corner of four hundred acres, gardens were cultivated, and livestock grazed
on the balance of the land. As self-sufficient as possible, residents also operated their own sawmill and construction company, in addition to a transcontinental trucking fleet. For eight hours each day, Elohim City’s full-time residents collectively homeschooled their children. They also attended daily religious services at noon in a white-domed church with polyurethaned walls. Although random visitors were unwanted, the few reporters who gained acceptance were shown the homespun buildings with great pride.
²⁴

If they considered society around them rotten and doomed for destruction, the campers at Elohim City and the CSA’s Zarephath-Horeb all fervently believed they would survive and ultimately see God. By contrast, Willis Carto and William Pierce thought of survivalism in decidedly less ethereal terms. For Carto, it served as another mass-market opportunity, and Liberty Lobby cashed in on the phenomenon early and often. For William Pierce, survivalist events became an opportunity for National Alliance cadres to sell literature and find new recruits.

Pierce wasn’t concerned about human existence per se. Rather he worried about “the preservation of [white] genes during a time of racial decay.”
²⁵
To ensure this preservation, he needed to influence the larger survivalist movement’s direction. As usual, he began with a cold-eyed analysis. “One can recognize three distinguishing traits in the survivalist,” Pierce’s
National Vanguard
opined. The first was a strong “personal identity”; the second was a “will to survive”; and the third was “alienation from the present society.” Despite this positive assessment, Pierce also looked for weak spots. The “largely individualistic approach” bothered him the most.
²⁶
Survivalists were interested in self-preservation (like professionals practicing “lifeboat ethics”), rather than the advancement of the white race. Here Pierce sharply distinguished himself from the survivalists. And his criticism of survivalists turned on the same point as his negative assessment of conservatives: individualism was a curse in both instances, he believed.

Actually, Pierce was no more a survivalist than Lenin was a trade unionist.
²⁷
In his mind, mass movements such as survivalism needed to be transformed by an infusion of white racial consciousness. He argued that the individual home bomb shelter should be abandoned in favor of building entire “survival communities” large enough to defend themselves and create an economic division of labor among those who lived there. He urged these encampments to become self-sufficient with food, fuel, arms, and tools. Pierce could have been describing the Zarephath-Horeb
settlement and the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord, but he wasn’t. Pierce was most emphatically not a believer in the Christian Identity doctrine or in any Christian doctrine.

William Pierce believed that all of Christianity, including the Christian Identity professed by the Christian-Patriots Defense League, the CSA, Elohim City, and the like, was a useless, and ultimately destructive, myth. Even if Ellison and company believed that Jews were the embodiment of Satan on earth, Pierce argued that Christian Identity was incapable of producing the “ethic” necessary for total victory. According to his take, Christian values provided white people with no protection from the Jews and did little to assert white racial goals. To prove his point, Pierce argued that “the Jewish tribal deity, Yahweh (Jehovah) . . . also became the deity of the Christians.”
²⁸

By Pierce’s reasoning, then, Christianity served as an instrument of domination and as an impediment to the liberation of white people. They could buy all the Freeze Pak food they wanted, and they could shoot up Silhouette City from dawn to dusk. But as long as they worshiped “Yahweh,” they would never reach their racial destiny. Always Pierce saw a genetic first cause. He argued that there were racial differences between the pre-Christian northern Europeans and the peoples of Asia Minor, where Judaism and Christianity were born. Because of these racial differences, the religions of the Middle East—Judaism and Christianity (and by extension Islam)—did not fill the spiritual requirements of northern Europeans. Christianity was thus incompatible with the true racial instincts of white Europeans.
²⁹

Pierce’s discourse on history, genetics, and religion was, for him, a fight over first principles. Other activists also steeped in the doctrines of classical National Socialism shared this critique of Christianity, including Christian Identity. Some embraced Norse mythology and Odinism as an alternative. A few elevated Adolf Hitler to the status of a prophet or demigod. Pierce created a doctrine he called Cosmotheism, and an entity called the Cosmotheist Community Church, and won tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service.
³⁰
By both personality type and tactical design, Pierce wasn’t particularly strident about these kinds of philosophical differences. He was most interested in the prospects for a “resurgent White racial community.”
³¹

In the early 1980s, intentionally creating all-white communities no longer seemed like an academic question. Unlike the Klan, which still kept one foot in the southern town square, groups such as the CSA lived
separately from the rest of society, even mainstream white society. As they grew, these groups created their own system of institutions and allegiances, becoming, in effect, a white nationalist enclave at war with the multiracial state they called the Zionist Occupied Government, or ZOG. If the CSA proved to be the most militarized of these outposts, then Aryan Nations served as its central political address.

July 11, 1982.
Twenty-eight men affixed their names with seals, another thirty signed on, and a notary made it officious, if not official. In a six-page charter, an imagined community, Nehemiah Township, was dedicated to the proposition of “Christian Self-Government” and the “preservation, protection and sustenance of our Aryan Race.” Among the signatories were personalities from organizations across the white supremacist spectrum.
¹
This township was not a plan for local control. Neither did it imply that just the government in Washington, D.C., was illegitimate.
²
Instead, it was conceived as an alternative to all forms of existing governments—local, state, and federal. Here was a white Christian nation-state, free of all non-Aryans and race traitors.