Bernhardt "Ben" Klassen ( (<small>O.S. February 7, 1918</small>) – ) was an American white supremacist politician and writer who founded the Creativity new religious movement when he published the book Nature's Eternal Religion in 1973. Klassen was openly racist, antisemitic and anti-Christian and first popularized the term "Racial Holy War" (RaHoWa) within the white supremacist movement.
Klassen was a Republican Florida state legislator for several months, as well as a supporter of George Wallace's presidential campaign. In addition to his religious and political work, Klassen was an electrical engineer and he was also the inventor of a wall-mounted electric can-opener; he was also the co-founder of Silver Springs, Nevada. Klassen held unorthodox views about dieting and health. He was a natural hygienist who opposed the germ theory of disease as well as conventional medicine and promoted a fruitarian, raw food diet.
Early life
Bernhardt Klassen was born on February 20, 1918, in Rudnerweide (now Rozivka in Chernihivka Raion in Zaporizhzhia Oblast), Ukraine, to Bernhard and Susanna Klassen (née Friesen) a Russian Mennonite Christian couple. He had two sisters and two brothers. When Klassen was nine months old, he caught typhoid fever and nearly died. Due to the Russian Civil War, circumstances during his early childhood were quite difficult. When he was five, the family moved to Mexico, where they lived for one year. In 1925, at age six, he moved with his family to Herschel, Saskatchewan, Canada. He attended the German-English Academy (now Rosthern Junior College).
He married in 1946. They had one child, a daughter, born in 1951.
Entrepreneurship
Klassen established a real estate firm in Los Angeles in partnership with Ben Burke. Believing that his partner was prone to drinking and gambling, Klassen eventually bought him out and became sole proprietor. He hired several salesmen, including Merle Peek, who convinced him to buy large land development projects in Nevada. Klassen and Peek started a partnership called the Silver Springs Land Company, through which they founded the town of Silver Springs, Nevada. In 1952, Klassen sold his share of the company to Phillip Hess for $150,000 and retired.
On March 26, 1956, Klassen filed an application with the U.S. Patent Office to patent a wall-mounted, electric can opener which he marketed as Canolectric. It sold about 50,000 units. In partnership with the marketing firm Robbins & Myers, Klassen created Klassen Enterprises, Inc. In the face of competition from larger manufacturers that could provide similar products more cheaply, Klassen and his partners dissolved the company in 1962.
Political career
Klassen moved to Florida with his family in 1958. Klassen served Broward County in the Florida House of Representatives from November 1966 – March 1967, running on an anti-busing, anti-government platform. He campaigned for election to the Florida Senate in 1967, but was defeated. That same year, he was vice chairman of an organization in Florida which supported George Wallace's presidential bid.
Klassen was a member of the John Birch Society, at one point operating an American Opinion bookstore, but became disillusioned with the Society because of what he viewed as its tolerant position towards Jews. In November 1970, Klassen, along with Austin Davis, created the Nationalist White Party. The party's platform was directed at White Christians and it was explicitly religious and racial in nature; the first sentence of the party's fourteen-point program is "We believe that the White Race was created in the Image of the Lord." The logo of the Nationalist White Party was a "W" with a crown and a halo over it, and it would be used three years later as the logo of the Church of the Creator.
Less than a year after he created the Nationalist White Party, Klassen began expressing apprehension about Christianity to his connections through letters. These letters were not well received, and they effectively ended the influence of the Nationalist White Party.
Church of the Creator
In 1973, Klassen founded the Church of the Creator (COTC) with the publication of Nature's Eternal Religion. Individual church members are called Creators, and the religion they practice is called Creativity.
In 1982, Klassen established the headquarters of his church in Otto, North Carolina. Klassen wrote that he established a school for boys. The original curriculum was a two-week summer program that included activities such as "hiking, camping, training in handling of firearms, archery, tennis, white water rafting and other healthy outdoor activities", as well as instruction on "the goals and doctrines of Creativity and how they could best serve their own race in various capacities of leadership." In his ideology, Klassen disliked an "over-intellectualizing" of racial matters; one of the only other white supremacist writers he appreciated was William Gayley Simpson, the author of the 1978 book Which Way Western Man?
In July 1992, George Loeb, a minister in the church, was convicted of murdering a black sailor in Jacksonville, Florida. Fearing that a conviction might mean the loss of 20 acres of land worth about $400,000 in Otto, North Carolina, belonging to the church, Klassen sold it to another white supremacist, William Luther Pierce, author of the Turner Diaries, for $100,000.
Klassen appointed himself Pontifex Maximus of the church until January 25, 1993, when he transferred the title to Dr. Rick McCarty.
Views
Klassen was openly racist, antisemitic and anti-Christian. Klassen firmly opposed religion because he believed it was superstitious, and he described Christianity as a "Jewish creation" which was designed to unhinge white people by promoting a "completely perverted attitude" about life and nature. He rejected the afterlife as "nonsense". However, Klassen also criticized atheism because he believed it failed to offer a proper alternative philosophy and meaning from religion. He argued that man's morality and sense of purpose is based on the laws of nature and racial loyalty. Klassen believed that the white race was the sole builder of civilization and all of the advanced civilizations which existed in antiquity were created by white people but they were destroyed because they practiced miscegenation. He coined the phrase "my race is my religion"; he believed that white people were carriers of divine DNA.
Klassen wrote that those whites who he considered "race traitors" therefore committed "divine treason" and would die in the RaHoWa (Racial Holy War). Ben Klassen coined the term "Racial Holy War" (RaHoWa) within the white nationalist movement. The term RaHoWa became widely popular among various kinds of white supremacists, not just Creativity adherents.
Klassen was also a natural hygienist who promoted a back to nature philosophy that espoused fresh air, clean water, sunshine and outdoor exercise. He recommended a raw food diet which consisted of fruits and vegetables and believed that medicine and processed foods create cancer inside the body. Klassen wrote that food must be "uncooked, unprocessed, unpreserved and not tampered with in any other way. This further means it must be organically grown without the use of chemicals." aged 75. He left a suicide note; in it, he referred to a passage in his book The White Man's Bible, where he wrote that it was honorable to end your life if it was no longer worth living.
Klassen was buried on his North Carolina property in an area which he had previously designated "Ben Klassen Memorial Park". On his headstone the message "He gave white people of the world a powerful racial religion of their own" is inscribed.
After his death, he was succeeded as leader by Rick McCarty. The Church of the Creator experienced serious leadership problems for several years. Matthew F. Hale took over in 1995 and renamed it the World Church of the Creator. However, Hale was later sentenced to a 40 year prison sentence for soliciting the murder of a judge. Various smaller groups that practice Creativity still exist, and Klassen's ideas continue to influence the white supremacist movement.
Bibliography
- Nature's Eternal Religion (1973)
- The White Man's Bible (1981)
- Salubrious Living (with Arnold DeVries, 1982)
- Expanding Creativity (1985)
- Building a Whiter and Brighter World (1986)
- RAHOWA! This Planet Is All Ours (1987)
- The Klassen Letters: Volume One, 1969–1976 (1988)
- The Klassen Letters: Volume Two, 1976–1981 (1989)
- A Revolution of Values Through Religion (1991)
- The Little White Book (1991)
- Against the Evil Tide (1991)
- On the Brink of a Bloody Racial War (1993)
- Trials, Tribulations and Triumphs (1993)