Many will have noticed the news item yesterday “Jury: Sniper Mastermind Should Get Death,” but of course a trial is only to look at “guilty or not,” it does not intend to go into the background reasons less so the sociological “beliefs” that might have led to the actions taken by the sniper team.

In the United States, movements can be found that advocate that African Americans properly should be named Ethiopians (African Orthodox Church, Rastafarians, and others), Moors (the Moorish Science family), Jews (various black Hebrew organizations), Nubians (the Ansaaru Allah Community), Bilalians (American Muslim Mission), and Chemis (PAIN). The most successful movement of this category is the Nation of Islam, which, in identifying blacks as the Original Black Asiatic Man, is an early proponent of this tradition.

The person suspected of being the sniper took on the name “Muhammad” and was a security guard at the Nation of Islam Million Man march in Washington. But as reported from Chicago, The Nation of Islam Oct. 29 claims now that the depth of the suspected sniper’s commitment to the Nation of Islam may not be as deep as he himself suggests.

But for example in case of the “Zebra Killings” the press reported that they were initiated by a Nation of Islam subgroup the “Death Angels.”

Similar was said about ex US soldier Timothy McVeigh and White Religious Nationalist groups of which his membership was confirmed in the 2001 book by Ron Ronson “Them.”

Documents and testimonies found by the Guardian and the Star Tribune of Minneapolis show that neo-Nazi paramilitary groups and Aryan supremacists declared their intention to launch a “war” against the government in Oklahoma , under the nose of the FBI.  And hinted at in Behold a Pale Horse, a book full of neo-Theosophical teachings and conspiracy theories published in 1991 by an ideologue of the militia movement, William Cooper. His book is one of the manifesto of the militia movement.

Earlier already in the US racism pervaded various spheres of organized thought, including American nationalism and religion. Racism was at the heart of the country, part of its very foundation. It was not disputed, other than among groups at the margins of society.

Black, and White Extremists Groups

White supremacy was truly a way of life, the “natural” order on which civilization rested.  Scientific racism was established in learned academic circles, racism was part of the conventional Christian denominations, it was a chief principle in the judicial system, it was the upholder of decent morality and it organized the social space of society.  White religious racism only emerged as a systematic deviant theology to form the basis of a separate nationalist quest following the gradual and painful deconstruction of institutionalized white supremacy and the subsequent inclusion of blacks as part of the American “nation.” Its formative period coincided with the first attacks on racism as state sanctioned law and the norm of society. Initially, it held a largely conservative outlook, which successively was pushed further out to the margins. During the past few decades it has become increasingly more radical and revolutionary, as a diminishing number of white radical racialists believe that there is something left to conserve. Its present resurgence and international pan-Aryan networking seems to be connected to the process of globalization, and its adherents are today interconnected in a global, though uneasy, network.

Christian Identity can be described as the recasting of the older British- Israelite creed on white racial nationalist, anti Semitic, and, largely, National Socialist grounds. British-Israelism took shape in England at the latter part of the nineteenth century.  Inspired in part by seventeenth century Puritan teachings and the visions of British naval officer Richard Brothers (1757-1854), who claimed to be a direct descendant of King David, British-Israelism identifies the Northern European, and by extension white American, nations with the lost tribes of Israel. It differs from Puritan beliefs in claiming not only a spiritual, but a genealogical identification with the Chosen People of God. This makes Europeans the principal actors of the Bible and thus implies an ambiguous relationship with the Jews, who would be either relatives or masquerading impostors. British-Israelism proper generally resolved this tension by identifying Jews with the House of Judah. This conclusion led British- Israelites to enthusiastically support early Zionism as it would mean a reunification of the two Kingdoms in the Holy Land, which was then a British protectorate.

Alarmed by Zionist demands for an independent Jewish state which in effect would ruin the British-Israelite project of world salvation, a latent anti - Semitism transpired, voicing doubts as to the Jews’ true identity. This negative attitude would be greatly accentuated on American soil, where British-Israelism metamorphosed into Christian Identity. Early proponents of the new gospel in America were M. M.  Eshelman, minister in the Church of Brethren and author of The Two Sticks or the Lost Tribes of Israel Discovered (1887), and J. H. Allen, whose Judah’s Scepter and Joseph’s Birthright (1902) became a bestseller, spreading British-Israelism in Adventist and Bible study groups, and it is still widely read in Identity circles.

Though separate congregations were established in the United States, British-Israelism mainly gained ground as a theological tendency among individual ministers and laymen of conventional denominations, who were bound together in loose networks or associations. Its theology was, of course, not all that new in a land incorporating an (analogous) “New Jerusalem” identity as part of a national creed. Mormonism had already taken this notion a step further, claiming a genealogical connection between its adherents and biblical Israel.

Struggling with its relationship to the Jewish people, Mormonism, like British-Israelism, in general adopted a philo-Semitic position, although schismatic groups have developed a virulent anti-Semitism on par with Christian Identity.

The formative period of Christian Identity could roughly be said to be the three decades between 1940 and 1970. Through missionaries like Wesley Swift, Bertrand Comparet and William Potter Gale, it took on a white racialist, anti-Semitic, anti-Communist and a far-right conservative political outlook. Combined with the teachings of early disciples Richard G.  Butler, Colonel Jack Mohr and James K. Warner, a distinct racist theology was gradually formed. Whites were said to be the Adamic people, created in His likeness. A notion of a pre-earthly existence is found in an important substratum, teaching that whites either had a spiritual or extraterrestrial pre-existence. Blacks were either preAdamic soulless creatures or represented fallen, evil spirits, but they were not the chief target of fear and hatred.  This position was reserved for Jews. The latent anti-Semitism found in British-Israelism rose to prominence. Jews were, at best, reduced to mongrelized impostors, not infrequently identified with Eurasian Khazars without any legitimate claim to a closeness with God, and at worst denounced as the offspring of Satan.

While many Identity Christians interpret this relationship between Jews and Satan as a spiritual bond, many Identity theologians advocate a more literal blood-line linkage. Most renowned is the two-seed theory, according to which Eve not only gave birth to Adam’s son Abel, but also to Satan’s son, Cain, after having been seduced in a more down-to-earth manner.  The subsequent murder of Abel was thus not a fratricide, but the first attempt to exterminate God’s children. Whites and Jews are thus representations of the divine and the diabolical on earth, locked in an eternal combat now approaching its predestined end. This opposition could be accentuated into philosophical dualism, like in the teachings of Robert Miles, who taught that God and Satan represented two primal forces that used earth as a battleground to which they had sent down armies of look-alike races, angelic soldiers of light versus darkness, in  their quest for cosmic dominion. An accentuated apocalyptic consciousness pervaded Christian Identity, whose adherents awaited a future more uncertain than most prophecy-believing millenarian mainstream Christians.

In general, Christian Identity gave no room for the “rapture,” the miraculous physical escape from the impeding world destruction common in fundamentalist Christianity. On the contrary, Identity believers understood their task in terms of the Old Testament, in which God used his people as combat soldiers. There was to be a global war, and true believers had better to be prepared for the coming onslaught in which evil would be exterminated by the army of God, led by “General Jesus.” Thus, a militarized white racial religion took hold in the United States.

Identifying the Teutonic-Anglo-Saxon-Celtic-Scandinavic peoples with the lost tribes of Israel strengthened the sacred dimension of the American project. This was the Holy Land, taken by “divine conquest,” as God, as in the Old Testament, mandated His People to “go in and kill every human being and possess the land.

White Americans were of Marmaseh, prophesied to become a “great nation,”  which in effect made the American “nation” racially exclusive by divine command.  Identity logically held the Articles of Confederation and the original Constitution to be biblical documents. The extent to which Mosaic law would be followed in all its pedantic details varied among Identity congregations, from the strictest observance-including circumcision of male children-to a more conventional Christian understanding, claiming that Aryan Jesus had made the ritual ordinances unnecessary. Many chose Hebrew names for their children and celebrate Sabbath, Passover, and other Jewish holidays.

British-Israelism was soon followed by the Theosophical Society  with a clear Aryan supremacy theory, that also claimed the US would be the seat of the future, ( 6e Aryan “sub-”) race, the Teutonic being the momentarily leading, (5e Aryan “sub-”) race.

Like the other two groups Theosophy will have high on its banner that Humanity is “one” Brotherhood, as long everybody knows who the “elder brothers” are and where the various “sub –races” stand. One of the two major spokespersons for the “White Brotherhood” made this clear in the  “Mahatma Letters” to Newspaper editor A.P. Sinnet Koot Hoomi in British India: “The highest race (physical intellectuality) is the last sub-race of the fifth—yourselves the white conquerors. The majority of mankind belongs to the seventh sub-race of the fourth Root race,  Chinamen and their off-shoots and branchlets (Malayans, Mongolians, Tibetans, Javanese, etc., etc., etc.) and remnants of other sub-races of the fourth  and the seventh sub-race of the third race. All these, fallen, degraded semblances of humanity.”  (The Mahatma letters, have their own internet search engine at: http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/psearch.htm )

According to this teaching the President of the Theosophial Society A. Besant wrote: “Colonial expansion and territorial conquest as a migration of races for the ultimate enrichment of the Fifth Race.  This sweep of time, measured in aeons and evolving land-masses, dissolves the political immediacy of imperialism. The race of Teutons, the fifth sub-race of the Fifth Race, is now spreading over the world, has occupied greater part of North America, driving before it the old Atlantean stock; it has seized Australia and New Zealand, remnants of still more ancient Lemuria, and the poor relic that dying Race are vanishing before it. High is it rearing its proud head over the countries of the globe, destined to build a world-wide Empire, and to sway the destinies of the civilization.”  See: Annie Besant, The Pedigree of Man (Benares and London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1904), pp.  150-51.

To recapitulate the evolutionary scheme briefly as presented in theosophy: the first two races are distinguished from the succeeding three in that they are self-born and sexless, their evolution being coterminous with the formation of land masses and oceans. Sexuality, differentiation, and identity commence with the third root-race. The disclaimer that the term root-race has no connection with the ideas associated with ethnic groups or racial strains” is immediately nullified by the very language of classification and hierarchy. See: Geoffrey Barborka, The Story of Human Evolution (Madras: Theosophical Publishing House, 1979), p. 18.

Even without further detail, the admission that each race is associated with a particular homeland makes a mockery of the disclaimer.

Despite individual differences between theosophists, there is remarkably little divergence in the evolutionary scheme they present. In fact, the impression of a lack of originality evoked by their common discourse works eerily on the reader, who is made to feel that this new mythology is virtually interchangeable with science, so strongly is its content fixed and closed to interpretation.

During the 1925 Jubilee Convention, the Theosophical Society declared as one of its aims the establishment of a World Government (Ransom, A short History of the TS ,1950, p. 23.) and a “World Teacher” was appointed with leading members of the TS publicly announced to be the reincarnation  of the twelve apostles.

But although Theosophy  made claims like all cycles “end with destruction,” as did also later Aum Sinrikyio (Tokyo Sarin gas attacks), this is not an (esoteric) Buddhist belief, but rather is inspired by the Apocalypse in the Bible. Many scholars have analyzed the teachings of the TS and came to the conclusion that they are a mythologization of ideas characteristic of late nineteenth century Europe and the “Mahatma Letters” should be seen as a fraud.

The different theories explaining the various races on earth in Theosophy have proven able to be combined in multiple variations, without altering the basic theme of a cosmic combat between forces of good and evil represented on earth in human form.

Later Identity ministers, notably Pete Peters, Mark Thomas, Bob Hallstrorn and Michael A. Hoffman II, would continue the path of radicalization. The formative years coincided with the rise of the black civil rights movement and the subsequent transformation of American race relations. Segregation was a painful process for many white racialists, who found themselves in opposition to a federal government that at times did not hesitate to force its will against whites in a racial conflict. Black Power grew as a dynamic force, and a series of violent race-motivated upheavals struck fear in many American hearts. Affirmative action was viewed as reversed racism, and for the first time many white Americans found a racially motivated system to their disadvantage.

Immigration laws that had restricted the bulk of new Americans to racial kin were altered to pave the way for a huge influx of Latin American and Asian migrants. Were white Americans to become a minority in their own country? The defeat in Vietnam added to the confusion. For the first time in American history, a war did not end in a victory. Unable to explain how the largest military power in the world could be so embarrassingly beaten to -the ground by a small nation, the betrayed-by-their-leaders theory took hold as a viable explanation and was recycled in an endless stream of movie productions.

All these traumatic social tribulations contributed to the mental universe of the second generation Identity adherents. During the 1970s and 1980s, the far right went through a process of increasing radicalization.

Where the earlier generation had been mainly conservative and reactionary, revolutionary sentiments now proliferated as the federal government gradually emerged as the enemy of the white race. During this time, Christian Identity became widely diffused in National Socialist and right wing extremist circles as a religious rationale for racialist thought. Most of the more prominent leaders were either Christian Identity ministers or passed through Christian Identity. Identity become a unifying element in the otherwise fragmented and in-fighting American radical right. Through ministries managing to stay slightly above the complex intrigues, yearly gatherings during the 1980s were held at Miles’ Mountain Church in Flint, Michigan, and Pastor Butler organized Aryan world congresses at his Church of Jesus Christ, Christian at Hayden Lake, Idaho. The latter headquarters, Aryan Nations, also became a symbol for a separatist tendency that called for whites to establish a secessionist state, mostly, though not exclusively, placed in the northwestern United States.

Christian Identity also pervaded other significant movements of these decades, notably the radical localist Posse Comitatus, which refused to accept any federal authority as constitutionally legitimate. The military impetus gave rise to armed compounds of Christian congregations at which were held survivalist training for Armageddon.

Militarism was also a distinct feature of the second category of white religious nationalism that rose in the 1970s and 1980s. Not all white racialists were content with the Jewish identity claimed for Aryans.  Christianity was held to be both alien and superstitious, negating the “law of nature” as well as logical reasoning. Ukrainian-born Ben Klassen founded the Church of the Creator (COTC) in 1973 in an effort to develop a creed based on the concept “race as religion.” Creativity sharply ridiculed Identity doctrine, questioning why any sane white man would “break [his] neck to distort history” only to pose as “a descendant to such trash” as the ancient Hebrews.

Klassen states that there is no historical evidence that the Ten Tribes of Israel ever existed and got lost, and if they did-good riddance!

With at times brilliant sarcasm and irony, Klassen confronts all “spook believing” creeds with the iconoclastic fervor of a nineteenth-century atheist.
Christianity was described as a destructive force, created in an effort to reduce the warrior spirit in the nature of the white man. In Nature’s Eternal Religion (1973), The While Man’s Bible (1981) and RaHoWa: This Planet Is All Ours (1987), a kind of religious dimension was added to a -namely secular socio-Darwinism. Based on “nature’s law,” a vision is outlined of the white man as a realized Nietzschean superman.

These anti-Christian teachings resulted in a falling out between COTC and Identity leaders and distanced Klassen from much of the Klan. Strongly opposed to the federal government, described as composed of race traitors in the pocket of conspiring Jews, the COTC organized the White Brigades at its to North Carolina, headquarters. Followers were invited for a couple of weeks at a time, learning “survival skills, martial arts and how to use [military] weapons.“ 

Crativity split following its leader’s suicide, but an attempt at reviving the COTC led by Pontifex Maximus Matt Hale came in 1996 from its 7ew headquarters in Illinois.

The 1990s is characterized by a further radicalization of white racialism. The removal of the Soviet bloc as a distracting enemy allowed a clearer focus on the United States’ government as the force of evil.  President George Bush’s talk of a New World Order was interpreted as confirming the white racialists fears of a conspiracy to establish a one-world government.

Irrespective of whether this was interpreted in Identity terms as the prophesied global reign of the anti-Christ, or understood in more secular terms, the conclusion that white Americans were to be subjugated was clear. Federal violence, symbolized by the 1992 killing at Ruby Ridge and the burning flames of Waco in 1993 left no doubt in believers’ minds about what should be expected.

During an eleven-day siege of white separatist Randy Weaver’s remote Idaho cabin, under the pretext of his arrest for a minor firearms violation, federal agents first killed his teenage son and then shot his wife to death when she went out with their baby in her 3nns. In Waco, Texas, a 51-day federal siege of the Branch Davidian communal settlement ended in disaster on April 19, 1993, with nearly 80 sect members consumed in flames. (See The Spotlight Newspaper  and Rense.com, for patriot supportive accounts)

The paramilitary culture merged with mistrust of the government to give birth to the militia movement.  Soon, different militias of various sizes and durations mushroomed in the United States, preparing to defend the remnants of American liberties. Though far from all of them harbor explicit white racialist world-views, many of them, like, for example, the Oklahoma White Militia, do. Mistrusting media, government agencies and other channels of public information, conspiracy theories experienced new heights, informing concerned citizens about various schemes ranging from secret federal concentration camps in which freedom lovers would be rounded up, to a satanic cabal involving presidents, international bankers, and congressmen, who met in secret for cannibalistic and necrophilic rites.

It seemed as if America as a white nation had irrevocably lost federal recognition. Whites appeared to be “the only people on the face of the earth that have no national state.”

The separatist imperative was voiced by the Aryan Nations in their Declaration of Independence, which was “unanimously adopted” on March 12, 1996. “The United States and its ‘New World Order’ has as one of its foremost purposes, the eradication of the white race and its culture.” Its object is to establish “absolute [global] tyranny.” “Appealing to the supreme God of our folk” the representatives of the Aryan people therefore “declare that the Aryan people of America, are and of rights ought to be, a free and independent nation.”

In the 1990s another white nationalist religious impetus came into the limelight: Odinism. With roots in the occult and/or pagan tendency of German National Socialism, early American Odinist writers like Else Christensen and the New Age-inspired pagan revival of the 1970s and 1980s, Odinism made its breakthrough among America’s white racialists. It attracted Christian Identity believers “who flirted with Identity because it was simply the only racial theology out there,” (20) as well as anti-Christian Creativity adherents who felt the slogan “our race is our religion” did not carry far enough. “There must be something more to it.”

For another example see how  Theosophic Society leaders believed  in gathering up the various (hierarchical) angels,  and used rituals as a means to 'speed up evolutionary' processes.

Odinism, or Wotanism, is a concept used to denote a racially exclusive understanding of pre-Christian Norse religion, or Asatifi. Asatru is a polytheist tribal religion, more akin to Native American traditions than to monotheistic Christianity. Whereas the omnipotent and omniscient God of Christianity is of a nature fundamentally different from His creation, no such unbridgeable gulf separates the realm of the Gods and Goddesses in Asatru from this world.

Asatru is a self-experienced spiritual path whereby man can reconnect with the divine within and with the animated universe in this world and beyond.  Through ritualization it is thought possible to connect with the spirits of the land, the ancestors and the guardian forces of nature. Leaders of the rites, the male gothi and female gythia, are not priests in the Christian sense and are invested with authority by the kindred (congregation) only if they prove themselves worthy in terms of knowledge and spiritual growth.  Rather than being obeyed and/or prayed to, the Gods and Goddesses are invoked and invited as participants in the communal rituals, blots, that follow the yearly cycle of nature.

Many travelers on the Nordic Path in addition practice meditation, runic yoga or rune divination techniques. The polytheist perception of divinity is reflected in the Asatru belief in multiple souls and multiple destinies. Though many variations exist here, generally it is said that one soul goes to the abode of the dead while another soul departs to the abode of the yet unborn to await his next reincarnation or recurrence. Many Asatruers believe that this follows family lines, and here we touch on an aspect that opens up to racial speculation. Although “race” is a late concept in the history of mankind and was unknown to the ancient pre-Christian Scandinavian cultures, its modem practitioners can hardly avoid its present-day reality.

The Asatru revival has much to do with a search for roots and identity, in a similar manner in which many black Americans search for their African roots or Native Americans want to honor their traditions. This may or may not merge with racist ideas, and it should be emphasized that modem Asatru encompasses a broad spectrum of adherents, and far from all of them are inclined toward racialist ideologies. In its position on race, it ranges in a continuum from the radical racialist pole of Odinism to the anti-racist pole of many kindreds organized in the Ring of Troth network.

In the middle are found two of the larger networks, the Asatru Folk Assembly and the Asatru Alliance, whose spokespersons try to distance themselves from either pole. Mike Murray of the Asatru Alliance describes it as the ethnic religion of Northern European peoples, (23) and Stephen McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly advances the concept of meta genetics as an avenue for embracing an ancestral faith without falling into the trap of negative racism.  An analysis of the Asatru pagan revival in contemporary United States falls outside the scope of this study.

Representing more than a hundred congregations, or “kindreds,” operating in the United States and abroad, the racialist Odinist tendency is propa-ated by groups and federations such as the Odinist Fellowship, Wotan’s Folk and Rook. Dissatisfied with the multiracial reworking of the American “nation,” Odinism aims at “reaching deep into the ancestral past” to reconnect with the “roots of our race” in order to redevelop a lost “folk consciousness.

Asserting that each race has a genetic pool of spiritual identity, Odinism believes that “all Aryans today retain an element of Wotan consciousness,” a revival of which  would liberate the white man.

The Bruder Schweigen is a small closely united group of underground activists, known as the Order.

Led by Robert Mathews, the Order initiated in the early 1980s an armed struggle for the liberation of the Aryan race. Following a series of an-nored car robberies and the 1984 assassination of Alan Berg, a liberal Jewish talk radio host in Denver, a dramatic man hunt took place which culminated in Mathews’ death and the subsequent capture of the militants. David Lane was sentenced to 190 years, but says that he does not regret anything: “I was only doing my duty and obeyed the will of the higher powers, just as I do now in the greater plan the Gods seem to have for me.” During the years that have passed, the Order has grown in significance and David Lane is not infrequently referred to as the Mandela of the white revolution.