Blood and Politics (60 page)

Initial “church” activities consisted mostly of distributing a tabloid titled
Racial Loyalty
. The first edition was dated June 1983 and set the pattern for the next decade: twelve pages of fourteen-point type, almost all of it written by Klassen, punctuated by a few cartoons and a page of book advertisements. Over time the letters to the editor section grew, a sign that somebody somewhere was reading it, and a couple of contact addresses came and went. He bequeathed the title of Reverend on a few white souls. The tabloids and books were long on ideology and exhortations to violence, but short on reporting actual church-type activity. No summer Bible camps here. Business stayed slow.

During the early and mid-1980s most of the action at the Hitlerite end of the movement gravitated around the Aryan Nations–Klan–Posse Comitatus axis. All three organizations considered themselves Christian Identity. And their leadership failed to appreciate Klassen’s repeated gibes at worshiping “spooks in the sky.” Nevertheless, after Klassen hired a competent organizational secretary in 1988, the Church of the Creator’s footprint began to be seen with more frequency. Overseas branches developed in England, Sweden, and South Africa. And as the decade turned, a new generation of skinheads looking for an ideological home began to populate its ranks.

Klassen exhibited little taste for the youthful subculturalism of white power skinheads. Nevertheless, the interaction between Klassen and the skins worked to the temporary advantage of both. A segment of skins were drawn to Creativity’s explicit worship of Hitler, its open abhorrence of everything Christian, and its glorification of random violence. As Tom Metzger’s star dropped in the skinhead sky, and Kluxers such as Thom Robb turned toward Duke’s mainstreaming, overzealous and violence-prone young men joined the Church of the Creator. “RAHOWA,” short for “racial holy war,” became their battle cry. From Klassen, the skinheads inherited an organizational structure, a codified set of ideas, and a literature. From the skinheads, Klassen gained his first real constituents since the George Wallace campaign era. His
tabloid’s contact list grew quickly to thirty addresses and chapters in the United States and three in Canada.

Soon Klassen was the victim of his own success. In May 1991, one of his so-called reverends, George Loeb, shot and killed a black sailor, Harold Mansfield, in the parking lot of a Jacksonville, Florida, convenience store. After the Reverend Loeb was convicted in criminal court, rumblings that a civil suit might be filed against Klassen’s church threw a chill over the heated organizational growth. If the church was found liable for its reverend’s actions, the sailor’s family could possibly win possession of the twenty-acre campground. Compounding Klassen’s anxiety, his wife, Henrie, died the following January from cancer, sinking the surviving spouse into a prolonged period of mourning. Klassen began searching for a replacement Pontifex Maximus and started talking openly of suicide, which his own Creativity doctrine had long held to be a positive virtue. Of the two end-game tasks, finding an organizational heir proved more difficult than killing oneself.

The problem of organizational succession has remained unsolved for white nationalists. Most organizations are basically sole entrepreneurships, small family-owned businesses dependent on the energy and vision of their founders. Those that avoid repression by law enforcement agencies or survive the vagaries of insurgency rarely turn into self-sustaining institutions. A trade name, such as the Ku Klux Klan, may pass from generation to generation, but each Klan organization has reinvented itself at the turn of the historical wheel. Klassen was one of only a few with any organizational assets to pass on: a plot of land and an inventory of books worth thousands in a very specialized market.

Klassen alone had the authority to choose his successor. His first choice was a failed businessman, a Nebraska meatpacker then in jail for selling tainted meat to school lunch programs. In one article after another, the
Racial Loyalty
tabloid extolled the meatpacker’s racist virtues, as Klassen prepared his followers for their new führer. After the meat-packer’s release from prison, however, he turned the job down. As a brief alternative, Klassen enticed one of his loyal reverends from Maryland to move to North Carolina in expectation of taking over the remote camp. But just as quickly, Klassen changed his mind and sent the man home again. A letter from William Pierce to Klassen discussed this dilemma: “The failure of your plans . . . [for the meatpacker] must have been very disappointing,” Pierce wrote. “I hope that you do not act too hastily now and put your faith in people unable or unwilling to carry on in the right direction.”
⁵
Pierce and Klassen were not particularly close. They had corresponded off and on since the mid-1970s and had visited with each
other only a couple of times. They shared an ideological aversion to Christianity and a mutual admiration for Hitler, but as Pierce said, they had different styles of work. Nevertheless, in a series of quick decisions, Klassen sold his plot to Pierce at a price below market value, while turning over the remaining church assets—money and books—to a much-younger generation.

The future of Creativity resided with Generation X skinheads in large metropolitan centers rather than with middle-aged has-beens seeking refuge in the remote regions of Appalachia, Klassen decided. He was particularly impressed with a crew in Wisconsin, and he chose one of them, Mark Wilson, to take over as Pontifex Maximus. Wilson had solid entrepreneurial skills and was linked to skinheads across the upper Midwest and into Canada. For a brief moment, it looked as if Klassen would be the first leader from the World War Two generation to understand the potential brewing on the edge of the twenty-first century. But this anointment was not to be.

Soon after Mark Wilson had finished unloading three truckloads of COTC books brought from North Carolina to the new headquarters in Wisconsin, Klassen inexplicably backed down from his choice. He decided instead to go with a middle-aged chiropractor named Rick McCarty, who had recently endeared himself to Klassen and was appointed the new Pontifex. McCarty showed up in Wisconsin with his own truck and carried the books back to his home in Niceville, Florida, which he then named the new “international headquarters” of the Church of the Creator.
⁶

McCarty turned out to be the worst of both generations, just the type of person Pierce had warned about. Unlike Klassen, McCarty had no writing skills. The tabloid, once dense with type, now looked like every other low-rent racist publication: big headlines, small blurbs for articles, and many reprints from the daily press. And unlike Wilson, McCarty had no natural constituency and few established ties in the movement. It was almost as if McCarty had been dropped into the Church of the Creator in a clever counterintelligence operation aimed at wrecking the organization from the inside. Except that role belonged to a man called Joe Allen.

Mr. Allen announced in May 1992 that he had “been converted to the one and only true White racial religion structured toward the survival, expansion, and advancement of the White Race.”
⁷
Allen moved to Southern California, converted a warehouse space into a gym and office area, and started working with a group of Creator-allied skins calling themselves Fourth Reich Skinheads. “Rev. Allen has always been there for us,” McCarty wrote in a spring–summer 1993 edition of the new
lightweight
Racial Loyalty
, “call him.” No sooner was the ink dry on the tabloid than several of the Fourth Reichers were arrested, charged in a plot to murder Rodney King, the black motorist whose beating precipitated the Los Angeles riots. The skinheads also were charged with planning a machine-gun attack on a black church and a plot to send a letter bomb to an area rabbi. The conspiracy was uncovered by Reverend Joe, who was in fact an undercover FBI agent. In the end, McCarty’s lack of journalism skills and middle-aged distance from the young recruits was compounded by a shortage of basic street smarts—an inability to smell a cop when he met one. The two events—the conspiracy in California and the murder in Florida—added to Klassen’s declining morale. Within just a few weeks of the California indictments, he committed suicide.

A few months later, on February 22, 1994, McCarty tried to officially close down Klassen’s church. But two weeks after, the Southern Poverty Law Center, acting on behalf of the sailor’s family, sued the Church of the Creator as a corporation. McCarty failed to respond, and a default judgment of one million dollars was entered against the church by a Florida court the following April. A year after that, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued William Pierce for the profit he had made by selling the Klassen property originally purchased at below market value. Ultimately a judgment against Pierce was sustained in that case as well. And only a portion of the original Creativity book stock remained extant. Klassen had spent years as a sole proprietor. But he had failed to secure an organizational heir or safely pass his assets to the next generation of activists.
⁸
The Church of the Creator smoldered in ruins, its führer dead by his own hand.

While the tangible assets in Klassen’s estate went up in smoke, the young people who had joined his enterprise made their own marks on the walls of history. Chief among them were Mark Wilson, the twenty-something from Wisconsin whom Klassen once designated as his successor, and George Burdi. A self-obsessed product of Toronto’s tolerant upper-middle-class suburbs, Burdi liked to tell reporters that he tested at the “genius-level IQ” in the fifth grade and was an avid reader.
⁹
While still attending a private Catholic high school, he started learning his national socialist alphabet. In his mind, youthful vigor, music, and politics were bound up in a quasi-Nietzschean philosophy and a romantic idealization of Viking history. He assumed the pseudonym Eric Hawthorne, worked a stint at Klassen’s North Carolina headquarters, and served as the Church of the Creator’s chief Canadian representative. In 1989, at
the age of nineteen, he started a band known as RAHOWA (for Racial Holy War, one of Klassen’s slogans), and it was this persona that became the force driving the creation of the premier homegrown skinhead music company on North American soil.

Using contacts established through the Church of the Creator and a network called Northern Hammerskins, Burdi started Resistance Records with a combination of ideological zeal and basic business sense. He signed bands one by one to the label, arranged recording studio time and then a manufacturer for CDs and tapes. They sold and publicized their product through a combination of concerts, niche media, and hype.

The first Resistance Records Report, produced during the summer of 1993, was a black-and-white zine-style copy sheet entitled
Under the Hammer
.
¹⁰
It whispered a bit of in-house gossip, loudly announced new releases, and asked fans not to make bootleg copies of the recordings. “If you care about the future of White Power music,” it warned, “be fair and do the White thing—don’t dub your albums!” The profits were needed to pay the musicians. That summer, while Klassen was committing suicide in North Carolina, a Victory of Valhalla concert tour in Canada featured bands from Canada, three American groups, and a band from England. In addition, periodic gigs began at a clubhouse on Detroit’s west side. At a show called “Two Nights of Terror,” on December 31, 1993, and January 1, 1994, seven bands thudded through the evening, hailing the new dawn.

Before the Two Nights ended, Burdi and two other former Church of the Creator members from Canada, Jason Snow and Joseph Talic, officially affixed their names and registered Resistance Records Incorporated with Michigan’s secretary of state. Ten thousand shares of common stock, valued, they hoped, at one dollar each, were issued. Rumors circulated that the start-up capital had been siphoned off the Church of the Creator by Mark Wilson during his brief tenure as the Pontifex. But George Burdi always claimed that the initial money for his band RAHOWA to make a record had come from France and that low production costs and high profits had allowed the enterprise to grow rapidly after that.

Much like movement elders who had turned living room political hobbies into lucrative stand-alone businesses, the corporate principals created an institution out of producing and selling music to their Generation X cohorts. And as the white power music scene grew over the next years, those one-dollar shares increased in value. Resistance Records went from a young do-it-yourself operation to a full-line company. Wilson moved from Wisconsin to the Detroit area and served as Resistance’s
corporate agent. From a house in the suburbs he ran the business on a day-to-day basis. That spring it launched a twenty-eight-page promotional magazine, complete with high-quality graphics and a glossy cover with
Resistance: The Music Magazine of the True Alternative
across it. George Burdi, the Canadian, was editor.

Over the next three years
Resistance
became the most graphically innovative and stunning publication across the entire white nationalist movement. In these pages, Pat Buchanan was a virtual nonentity, and his Republican campaign went unmentioned. Neither Weaver nor Waco was mourned. The militia of the mid-1990s, with its invocation of an iconic red, white, and blue American patriotism, was out of place in this swastika-bedecked publication. Instead, articles puffed up bodybuilders and muscle tone. Bands playing “neo-pagan fascist hate metal” were celebrated. Thor and the Norse gods reigned supreme. Vikings strode like mighty men. And page after page featured pale male torsos dressed in dark tattoos.

The names of the bands told much of the story: Berserkr, Brutal Attack, Aryan, No Remorse, Vit Agression, and Bound for Glory. Rock and roll was retrofitted with a history of whiteness that excluded Elvis Presley’s debt to the original music of the Delta blues. One bandleader even claimed that the chords in his songs were derived from the music of Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic German composer. A lone folk singer, an anomalous figure in this crowd of hard rockers, was advertised as a misspelled “Bob Dillon for Ubermenschen.” The magazine’s fascination with the will to power was exceeded only by its smart sales technique, marketing and mayhem wrapped in a package that looked much like the hard-core metal magazines on the racks of downtown bookstores.