11
The Order and Territorial Separation

As we saw in the preceding chapter, many political activities that are legally permissible may be transformed into illegal activities by individuals certain they are targets of a diabolical conspiracy. Believing that they face imminent disaster, they feel the need to strike out at the imagined adversary before it is too late. Many of the violent confrontations between Identity believers and law-enforcement personnel have arisen when Identity members perceived themselves to be encircled by enemies.

However, in addition to political activities that retain a potential for such violent transformation, Identity rightists have also advocated and occasionally engaged in conduct that is manifestly outside the realm of sanctioned politics. Two such types of activity will be examined here. The first is the organization and practice of guerrilla insurgency for the purpose of either igniting a popular struggle against federal authority or wearing that authority down in a war of attrition. The second is the widely publicized plan to organize an “Aryan” state in the Pacific Northwest that would achieve independence by seceding from the United States. Advocating such a scheme is, of course, protected by the First Amendment. However, it is virtually impossible to imagine its implementation without open rebellion.

The Turner Diaries

Both ideas have roots in a work of fiction, the underground right-wing novel, The Turner Diaries. While not an Identity work per se, it has circulated so widely and been cited so frequently and approvingly in Identity circles that its importance to the movement is unquestioned. While The Turner Diaries purports to be the work of one “Andrew MacDonald,” it was written by William L. Pierce.” Pierce received a doctorate in physics at the University of Colorado and taught briefly at Oregon State University. He worked for Pratt and Whitney before becoming an aide to George Lincoln Rockwell, the leader of the American Nazi party. After Rockwell’s assassination in 1967, Pierce became associated with the National Youth Alliance (NYA). The alliance grew out of the activities of Willis Carto, one of the best funded and most indefatigable right-wing organizers. In 1968 Carto had been instrumental in founding the alliance as an anti-Semitic outgrowth of a campaign organization originally associated with Governor George Wallace, Youth for Wallace. Once Carto had created the new NYA, it became increasingly strident in its racism and anti-Semitism. However, the NYA was itself unstable, for it quickly divided into one wing dominated by Carto and another dominated by Pierce. By 1971 the NYA had split. Carto’s faction was renamed Youth Action, and Pierce’s eventually, in 1974, shortened its name to National Alliance.¹

The Turner Diaries first appeared in serial form in the National Alliance publication Attack! between 1975 and 1978. The first paperbound version of the novel was published by the Alliance in 1978. The book purports to be a diary kept by its eponymous hero, Earl Turner, from the fall of 1991 until the period immediately before his death a little more than two years later. Turner finds himself repelled by new gun-control legislation (the novel’s fictional Cohen Act), by ever-more-drastic forms of racial integration, and by a variety of urban ills attributed to blacks and Jews. A reluctant revolutionary, Turner nonetheless eventually finds and joins a clandestine group, the Organization, dedicated to unseating the existing government. In time, he is also admitted to the Organization’s quasi-monastic inner circle, the Order. While The Turner Diaries concentrates upon the mechanics of insurgency rather than upon religious beliefs, just prior to his initiation into the Order, Turner states, “I understand the deepest meaning of what we are doing. I understand now why we cannot fail, no matter what we must do to win and no matter how many of us must perish in doing it. Everything that has been and everything that is yet to be depend on us. We are truly the instruments of God in the fulfillment of His Grand Design.” The initiation ceremony itself is an affair of robes, candles, and oaths, which leaves Turner feeling that “today I was, in a sense, born again.” After combat begins, he participates in the successful seizure of most of southern California, from which nonwhites are quickly expelled.²

The Organization has also seized Vandenberg Air Force Base, with its nuclear missiles. Turner’s assignment is to help carry a set of nuclear warheads to the outskirts of Washington. The racial enclave in California will be secured by emplacing nuclear weapons around the country, in areas still controlled by “the System,” and detonating a few to demonstrate their deterrent effect. In a final suicide mission, Turner flies a small plane armed with one of the warheads into the Pentagon. Thereafter, as an epilogue explains, the System begins to disintegrate, and in time, the Organization comes to control first North America and then Europe. In a genocidal assault on nonwhite areas of the world, “the Organization resorted to a combination of chemical, biological, and radiological means, on an enormous scale, to deal with the problem. Over a period of four years some 16 million square miles of the earth’s surface, from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific and from the Arctic Ocean to the Indian Ocean were effectively sterilized.” The Turner Diaries is not a Christian Identity tract. Indeed, Pierce made clear in a later novel, Hunter, that he held Identity in the same contempt as other supernatural religions. As one of Hunter’s characters puts it, “The reason they can’t recruit anyone but uneducated hicks is that their doctrine is crazy.” Notwithstanding Pierce’s low opinion of Identity, however, The Turner Diaries had great appeal to Identity readers, who saw it as another demonstration that the Jews are the enemy, victory is assured, and those dedicated to the racial struggle are doing God’s work.³

Pierce’s novel was in certain respects curiously similar to another work of political fiction, virtually contemporaneous with it but of a vastly different ideological character—Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, which has been to the radical environmental movement what The Turner Diaries has been to the racist right. Like Turner, Ecotopia purports to present a first-person account, in this case the notebooks of William Weston, the first outsider allowed to visit the new environmentalist country of Ecotopia. As in Turner, the secessionist nation was carved out of sections of the West Coast, in this case the northern as opposed to the southern section. Although the Ecotopians have no desire to kill their enemies, they too use nuclear means to assure independence: “It was … believed that at the time of secession they had mined major Eastern cities with atomic weapons which they had constructed in secret or seized from weapons research laboratories. Washington, therefore, although it … mined their harbors, finally decided against an invasion.” The parallels are all the more curious in light of the fact that Ecotopia was first published in condensed form in Oregon, Pierce’s former home, in 1975, the year in which the serialization of The Turner Diaries began. However, there is no way of knowing whether Callenbach’s Utopian novel influenced Pierce, or whether the two authors independently hit upon nuclear terrorism as the means by which small and militarily weak groups of dissidents could overwhelm or hold at bay vastly more powerful adversaries.⁴

Since The Turner Diaries is cast as a narrative, with only a few brief ideological digressions, it appeals to an audience that may agree about little else beyond the inferiority of nonwhites and the irremediable evil of Jews. Most attractive to its readers is the book’s scenario for attaining power, since it argues that a very small but highly committed group can compensate for its initial lack of numbers and resources by strength of will, stealth, and other attributes associated with unconventional warfare.

The Order

In September 1983, The Turner Diaries premises took actual form with the founding, in Metaline Falls, Idaho, of an organization most often referred to as the Order but more commonly known to its members as the Bruders Schweigen, or Silent Brotherhood (it will be referred to here as the Order). It was founded by Robert Mathews, a clean-cut young man originally from Arizona with a history of right-wing associations that began in high school. Mathews sought to create a small, tightly knit group with the will and resources to overthrow “ZOG,” the “Zionist Occupation Government.” This group would first require money and then arms to begin the campaign of guerrilla actions that would, in his view, eventually stimulate a mass uprising of the white population. To this end, the Order engaged in large-scale counterfeiting and armed robbery. In July 1984, members of the Order stole $3.8 million from a Brinks armored car in Ukiah, California. Mathews contributed significant sums to a number of right-wing causes and individuals, some associated with Christian Identity, including, it is thought, $10,000 for Dan Gay-man. The bulk of the money, however, was never traced or recovered. In addition to filling its coffers, the Order also engaged in other acts of violence, most conspicuously the murder in 1984 of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio talk-show host in Denver well known for baiting rightists on the air. Berg was a last-minute substitute for the original assassination target, Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. The FBI ultimately traced Mathews to Whidbey Island, Washington, where on December 8, 1984, he was killed in a dramatic shoot-out. The other members of the Order were apprehended during 1985 and 1986 and reached plea agreements with the government or were tried and convicted.⁵

This very brief description of the Order’s history raises three questions relevant in the present context. What was the relationship between the organization and the secret society described in The Turner Diaries? What was Robert Mathews’s own religious orientation? What was the relationship of the Order to Christian Identity?

There is strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that the Order was consciously modeled after the organization described in William Pierce’s book. Mathews had joined Pierce’s own organization, the National Alliance, in 1980 and is known to have spoken about the Diaries well before founding the Order. In the novel, the insurrectionist group referred to as “the Organization” contains within it “a select, inner structure” known as “the Order,” to which Earl Turner is admitted. Mathews told potential members that his organization was patterned after the fictional group, and handed out copies of the book to his members. James Aho traces numerous parallels between the fictional and actual groups, including the use of code names, the creation of “hit lists,” the execution of unreliable members, and the initiation of members through ritual oath taking. He concludes that the modeling was conscious, despite statements of some Order members to the contrary. Earl Turner’s oath taking is described in detail, but the text of the oath is not given. The Order oath, reproduced at one of the subsequent trials, leaves little doubt concerning the group’s goals:

The oath bears all the hallmarks of Mathews’s other brief writings, reaching as it does for an elevated style and an invocation of primeval themes. There is certainly nothing in it that contradicts Identity teaching, but neither is it a plainly Identity text, which raises the issue of Mathews’s own religious beliefs.⁶

A lapsed Mormon convert, Mathews managed to leave behind a blurred picture of his own religious convictions and loyalties. A Fundamentalist preacher, Bob LeRoy, records an interview with Mathews’s wife, Debbi, in 1989, in which she said that “her husband was not any special religion.” Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt, the most ambitious journalistic chroniclers of the Order, indirectly confirm this statement by describing Mathews’s religion as a private pastiche of elements drawn from numerous sources, including Odi-nism, the putative religion of pre-Christian Norse peoples, which they consider the dominant element. Others—notably his mistress, Zillah Craig, by whom he had a child—have been at pains to link him more explicitly to Identity. Craig was herself an Identity believer. Mathews told her he was as well, but Flynn and Gerhardt imply that he did so primarily to ingratiate himself with her. However that may be, Craig has maintained the position. In a 1991 television interview, when asked whether Mathews was a member of her church, she replied: “He did say that he’d been to Aryan Nations in Idaho. And their beliefs were similar to what mine are.” Mathews had briefly attended Richard Girnt Butler’s services, but seems to have let this connection lapse. However, after the Brinks robbery in Ukiah, when discussing the disposition of the loot, he told his members, in good Identity style, that “we must share what Yahweh has given us.” All that one can conclude is that Mathews had some familiarity with Identity, and sometimes represented himself as a believer, without evincing any continuing interest in either its doctrines or its churches.⁷

If there is uncertainty concerning Robert Mathews’s commitment to Identity, there is substantially less doubt concerning the Identity links of the Order’s members and sympathizers. When the organization was first detected by law-enforcement officials, they assumed that it was completely made up of Identity believers, although subsequent investigation revealed that this was not the case. Thus a memorandum from the Butte, Montana, field office of the FBI to “All Agents” on October 2, 1984, correctly attributed a string of western crimes to a single group, but misidentified the group. The memorandum traced both the crimes that had been committed and the goal of insurrection to the Aryan Nations and its religious affiliate, the Church of Jesus Christ Christian. Although a quarter of the Order’s recruits was ultimately made up of persons with Aryan Nations or Church of Jesus Christ Christian associations, the organization as such was never an arm of either. The Order eventually grew to almost forty members, although some individuals had relatively tenuous connections. In time, tensions arose between committed Identity believers and others in the organization. Mathews attempted to smooth these over (his invocation of “Yahweh” is best seen in this light), but in the end, he had to recognize the reality of the cleavage. Although the Order never split, it did divide into Identity and non-Identity wings. The Identity branch, consisting of sixteen men, women, and children, was led by Bruce Carroll Pierce, an Aryan Nations member.⁸

However, Aryan Nations was not the only Identity organization with which the Order maintained ties. Two key members of the Order, David Lane and Robert Merki, attended Pete Peters’s Church of LaPorte, an important Identity congregation. Through Lane, Robert Mathews met Zillah Craig, who had also attended services in LaPorte. Lane, who subsequently drove the getaway car in the Alan Berg assassination, brought Mathews to Peters’s church several times. He also wrote prolifically for the Identity press, both before and after his arrest. In a “statement to the world” on behalf of “the twelve loyal soldiers of the Holy Order of the Bruder Schweigen,” Lane restated the Order’s mission in Identity terms, incorporating the key concepts of a divine racial “seedline” that identifies God’s chosen and the battle between the divine seedline and the Devil’s Jewish progeny: “We declare our God-given right as descendents and members of the seedline who founded these United States to continue our racial existence … so that our people may fulfill the mission allotted them by the Creator of the universe.” Lane sees the Jews (“the devil’s children”) as very nearly omnipotent, controlling “the media, finance, politicians, government, and judiciary of almost all nations.” Yet notwithstanding his Mani-chaean vision of the world, he assumes that in the end God rather than the Devil will triumph. However, one detects in Lane, as in many other Identity writers, a deeper pessimism, a fear that their millenarian hopes will ultimately be submerged by a more powerful demonic principle.⁹

Once law-enforcement agencies and the courts had broken the Order, Identity writers outside the organization began to reflect on the experience. Some glorified it, treating Robert Mathews as a holy martyr to the racialist cause. In a eulogy published by Aryan Nations, Robert Mansker saluted Mathews as one of the first casualties in the “Final Battle,” a phrase frequently used by Identity to refer to the ultimate struggle between Aryans and Jews: “One hundred keys to heaven and they were all yours! Yahweh has surely Blessed thee above thy brothers and sisters! Now thou art in his Arms, thy battle fought and thy race run! Hallelujah.” Mansker assured Mathews that “we shall continue on…. We shall bring forth the Kingdom you so longed for, and we shall sit with thee in it.” Not all in Identity, however, were willing to heap such fulsome praise on Mathews and his followers. A strong dissent came from Dan Gayman of the Church of Israel, despite the fact that he had been a likely recipient of Mathews’s largesse after the Ukiah robbery.¹⁰

In the Church of Israel’s Articles of Faith, published in 1982, just before the Order was organized, Gayman had rejected the violence as an instrument of Identity ends: “We do not advocate, nor do we believe in the use of violence for any cause. We deplore all acts of terror and believe that they that live by the sword will die by the sword…. Christians do have a moral and Biblical right to keep and bear arms in defense of their lives and property.” After the unraveling of the Order, Gayman directly addressed it, speaking on behalf of the church: “This body of Christian believers [does] not believe in and would not condone crimes including counterfeiting, armed robbery, murder of law officers, and a variety of other crimes spawned by the ORDER and openly condoned and sometimes encouraged by a variety of militant organizations and groups throughout the United States.” Indeed, Gayman directly blamed the Order not only for its criminal activities but for weakening Identity organizations. While asking his readers to pray for the incarcerated Order members, he asserted that “no singular group in post World War II history has done so much to discredit, malign, and retard the growth of the Gospel of the Kingdom in North America.” Gayman’s criticism of the Order was also a thinly veiled attack on such movement rivals as Richard Girnt Butler, with whom so many Order members had been associated. Gayman, who testified as a prosecution witness at the Fort Smith sedition trial of right-wing figures in 1987, asked believers to “pray … for the ministers whose rebellious counsel caused them to take the path of unlawful resistance.”¹¹

A less direct repudiation of the Order came from the Association of the Covenant People, a British Columbia-based Identity organization with a significant following across the border in the Pacific Northwest. The association was a direct outgrowth of the British-Israel group in Vancouver that had played such a critical role in reshaping British-Israel doctrine in the 1940s and spreading it along the West Coast (a process described in chapter 4). In the fall of 1985, after the apprehension of Order members, the association found it necessary to respond to “recent media reporting on Para-Military and Neo-Nazi groups who call themselves ‘Identity’” Its statement identified it as “an autonomous body” with “no affiliation with any other organization.” As “a Christian scholarly society,” it declared itself “not aligned with any political persuasion” and protected under Canadian law to worship and express itself freely.¹²

Reactions to the Order episode clearly reflected a schism in the movement between groups oriented toward withdrawal, such as the Church of Israel, and those that took an activist stance, such as Aryan Nations/Church of Jesus Christ Christian. On the other hand, the breakdown between sympathizers and opponents of the Order was never so neat. Thus, there were numerous links between the Order and the survivalist Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord, some of whose members were affiliated with the Order and which provided sanctuary for some Order fugitives.¹³

The failure of the Order to accomplish more than a minimal fundraising goal and the comprehensive character of the subsequent prosecutions clearly had a chastening effect. Those who were not repelled because of moral scruples about violence concluded that, at least for the foreseeable future, recourse to guerrilla activity posed problems beyond anything suggested by The Turner Diaries. Perhaps not coincidentally, therefore, the years immediately following the collapse of Robert Mathews’s organization saw a burst of enthusiasm for another approach, equally ambitious but seemingly not directed at the violent overthrow of the government: territorial separation.

Territorial Separation

While the views of separatists diverge on certain points, all agree that short of overthrowing ZOG, the best path for the racialist right lies in somehow carving out a separate state. This new entity, referred to variously as the “Aryan Nation,” “white American bastion,” and “homeland,” is almost always located in the Pacific Northwest, although the proposed boundaries have fluctuated. In one sense, no doubt, the choice of the Northwest reflected accidental and expediential factors: the migration of some major Identity figures, such as Richard Girnt Butler, from California to the Northwest; the availability of cheap land in areas of low population density; and the absence of large Jewish and black communities. However, a sense of the area’s separateness appears to have developed independently of rightists’ political aspirations. Eckard Toy points out that in the nineteenth century for many in the East, “the exploration and acquisition of the Pacific Northwest renewed the national promise in a place far distant from the corrupting influences of slavery, immigration, Catholicism, and the factory.” In keeping with this tradition, white supremacists seemed to believe that within this region, they could definitively cut themselves off from everything they loathed in the larger American society.¹⁴

This sense of separateness was reflected in contemporary perceptions of the region by observers entirely removed from the white-supremacist ambience. In 1981, the reporter Joel Garreau sought to remap North America as nine distinct “nations,” each with special attitudinal, cultural, and economic characteristics that cut across state and provincial boundaries. Garreau’s mapping did not precisely match the territorial claims later made by Robert Miles, Richard Girnt Butler, and others, but it captured much of the sense of regional difference. Garreau saw the Pacific Northwest as part of two “nations.” One, “Ecotopia” (the name borrowed from the Ernest Callenbach novel discussed above), was a coastal strip of ecological activism stretching from Santa Barbara north to Alaska. The other, much closer to right-wing preferences, was a vast interior territory of great mineral resources but few people. Garreau, reminded of the Arabian Desert, christened it “the Empty Quarter.” Garreau’s Empty Quarter stretched from northern Arizona to arctic Canada and from just east of Seattle to the North Dakota border, and skirted the grain-growing areas of the Canadian prairie provinces to encompass northern Canada up to northern Quebec. Garreau recognized in this sparsely populated region something of the same blank slate that later attracted rightists: “It represents to a lot of people,” he found, “a freedom that is meaningful only when compared to the confines of the city.” The Ecotopia of Callenbach’s 1975 novel was in fact a good deal closer to Identity preferences: Washington, Oregon, and northern California, missing only the crucial Idaho panhandle where many Identity believers have clustered.¹⁵

Although Richard Girnt Butler advocated a territorial “homeland” as early as 1980, selection of the Northwest came later. Butler originally thought in terms of a midwestern location similar to John Harrell’s Golden Triangle. While Butler switched to a preference for the Northwest by 1986, the original suggestion for the Northwest appears to have come from the dualist pastor Robert Miles as early as 1982.¹⁶

Miles called his idea the “Mountain Free State.” Unlike Callenbach’s Ecotopia but like Garreau’s Empty Quarter, it avoided the coastal strip; Miles thought it too vulnerable to nuclear attack and too racially diverse. The Free State would contain “all of Washington, all of Oregon, all of Idaho except for the corner southeast of Pocatello perhaps because of the large Mormon population, most of Nevada and California north of Santa Barbara.” He also implied that “most of Montana” would be included as well. By 1985, however, Miles had changed his territorial demands to Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and (newly included) Wyoming. California and Nevada no longer figured in the plan, nor did Miles pay any attention to excluding the coastal fringe.¹⁷

However the territory was configured, it invited comparison with the Golden Triangle. In 1982, when Miles was more preoccupied with nuclear war, he sought to justify the Mountain Free State’s boundaries in terms of relative freedom from attack. Since he then assumed that U.S.-Soviet nuclear war was inevitable, he sought to anticipate “impact areas” and plot bands of potential radioactive contamination. He assumed the five principal impact areas would be Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and the Boston-New York-Washington megalopolis. After drawing impact circles and contamination bands, he concluded that the remaining areas would be “sanctuaries,” including both his Free State and Harrell’s midwestern Golden Triangle. His only reservations about the latter had to do with the possibility that in the postattack period, the Triangle would be a mixture of “strong state governments, many areas with chaos, and some Free State Republics.” Hence, the Golden Triangle was compatible with a Mountain Free State in the Pacific Northwest, since Aryan communities would develop in the Triangle, and possibly even in the South, and thus would open the possibility of collaboration among many independent white units.¹⁸

By 1985, however, Miles began to have serious doubts about the Triangle as a locus for homelands. The Golden Triangle “is intriguing but illusionary.” His change of heart appears to have been the result of a greatly diminished expectation of nuclear attack. If territories did not have to be evaluated in the context of a postattack environment, then they might appear very different. As far as the Triangle was concerned, it was too important for ZOG to give up “without a bitter and a protracted struggle.” Its lack of a geographically defined boundary made it militarily indefensible, and “it has no outlet to the sea,” a point Miles clearly regarded as a defect, suggesting that the newly configured Mountain Free State would include the Washington and Oregon coastlines instead of beginning thirty miles east of Seattle.¹⁹

In 1986, Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance (WAR) offered still another map, based on discussions at the Aryan Nations Congress that year, where Miles had spoken about his territorial plans. The WAR map gave the “White American Bastion” a vast domain: Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, California, large chunks of Utah and Arizona, British Columbia, Alberta, a corner of Saskatchewan, much of the Northwest Territories, and a bit of the Alaskan panhandle. On the opposite side of the country, ZOG was to be squeezed into Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, and small parts of New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. Most of the space between went to the “Nation of Islam,” this at a time when Metzger harbored ambitions of white separatists negotiating with black separatists over national dismemberment. The three domains were to be separated by ample buffer zones. Thus Metzger included all Miles had in both his plans, together with new territory in the Southwest and far north.²⁰

The territorial proposal has been strongly advanced by Identity rightists. This is true even in Miles’s case, since he regards his dualism as theologically distinctive but compatible with Identity. Yet the territorial imperative does not appear to flow from a distinctively religious position. Rather, a number of arguments have been made as justifications for this form of radical separatism.

Only Miles seems to have made any special point of seeking religious justifications, on the grounds that Aryan spirituality will be contaminated by contact with “earth worshippers,” that is, non-Aryans: “Our Faith, our very religious concepts, require that we be free to live in as natural an environment as is possible. If we are to be free, all peoples must be free. We can not be free of their influence unless they are free of ours. They must separate for their own sake…. Only the earth worshippers who came from the mud, direct and dust creations, and wish to bring everyone else down to that level, try to say otherwise.” “Racial freedom,” however, was deemed to be endangered not simply by contact with the impure and inferior but by the nature of modern political institutions. The state, by centralizing power and authority, intruded itself into personal life choices and thus made racial segregation impossible. Thus, whether Miles meant to say it or not, he argued that every significant political development since the Renaissance militated against his racial utopia, which he believed had once existed in a distant, premodern, European past when there were “only City-States and vast clan holdings in between.”²¹

The irony in Miles’s belief that state authority subverted racial purity is that other writers in the movement held out the prospect of statehood as a panacea. David Lane, obsessed by the belief that “Genocide of the White Race has been the aim and result of the American political entity,” insisted that unless there was a racial state in which Aryans “are the exclusive residents and governors,” the race would vanish. This implied not only the defensibility of borders but an elaborate apparatus for determining racial composition and rooting out the impure. The linkage of a racial state with racial survival pervaded Identity literature on the homeland.²²

There was also a sense of diminishing options, brought on by the Order’s collapse and the movement’s inability to significantly increase the size of its following. In his influential essay, “Common Sense,” Louis Beam, who moved from the Klan into Identity, observed that rebellion was futile. No conceivable armed action could prevail over the federal government. In like manner, he acknowledged that there was also no reason to believe the system would collapse from within. He had given up on prospects of depression, hyperinflation, or catastrophic default by debtor nations. In part, Beam’s unwillingness to entertain scenarios of economic disaster flowed from his belief that the Jewish conspiracy was too powerful and effective to permit it. Hence, the United States government would not be overthrown and would not collapse from within, a belief that led Beam to conclude, as though there were no other alternatives, that only statehood remained an option.²³

How such a radical restructuring of the American polity might be accomplished was an altogether different matter. Those on the racist right who entertained secessionist agendas remained extraordinarily vague about means. Whether for reasons of tactics or in reaction to the Order episode, they insisted that it would be accomplished peacefully. Robert Miles talked in nebulous terms about mass migration:

He elsewhere suggested that the territory would be voluntarily surrendered by the government as a way of getting rid of a minority so indigestible that five states would be a small price to pay for their departure. He spoke of “bringing in some 30 million more or less,” although no basis for the figure was presented, and it was most unlikely that the racial right, by even the most generous estimate, included more than 100,000 sympathizers.²⁴

A more common argument for the feasibility of separation was that it would somehow develop spontaneously from a pattern of migration. Louis Beam believed that the mere announcement of the separatist goal would produce a self-fulfilling prophecy: “Let the banner of a flowering renaissance of White Culture be raised, of Anglo-Saxon Law enforced, and Constitutional rebirth in the making, and the best of what is left in America will flock to it.” Coupled with a policy of maximum family size, “in one generation of child rearing—we will be in the majority” In any case, Beam said, “America already is being … partitioned.” That meant, in his view, that different ethnic groups already dominated different areas of the country and that the Aryan homeland would merely constitute one additional element.²⁵

Such scenarios paid scant attention to those already living in the putative homeland. Robert Miles acknowledged that most would choose to leave and should be allowed to “go in peace.” Should any wish to remain, non-Aryans among them would face a grim existence. The grim nature of this existence was suggested by the Aryan National State Platform, a proposed constitution. Citizenship would be limited to “Aryans (White Race.”; all others could live there “only under the custodianship of a citizen,” a status not otherwise defined. Even this servile condition would be closed to “hybrids called Jews,” who would be expelled after forfeiting their property. The killing of a white by a nonwhite would be a capital offense, and as a general policy, “a ruthless war must be waged against any whose activities are injurious to the common interest.” Media would be heavily censored and the educational system restructured to support the “White Aryan Heritage.”²⁶

The arguments in favor of such a racial state were fraught with internal contradictions. On the one hand, none who espoused it suggested that it be brought about by force, doubtless a response to the Order’s failure and to the federal prosecutions that followed. On the other hand, none of separatism’s advocates suggested even a minimally persuasive argument for its political feasibility, short of violence. Given the fact that the only remotely similar experiment in American history ended in a bloody military defeat, there is little reason to suppose that any subsequent central government would acquiesce in the detachment of a large and rich area. Nor was there any indication of why even an area with a majority of racialists (assuming migration could produce so unlikely a result) would be able to translate its preferences into law, much less political autonomy, given the gulf that separated their views from those of the country as a whole.

White supremacists presented the separatist option as a choice that lay within the system; that is, an alternative that could be pursued nonviolently through normal political channels. Yet the improbability of such a development suggested more complex factors at work. One possibility was that those who advocated separatism did so in the full knowledge that any serious attempt to pursue such a policy could lead only to open conflict, but chose for prudential reasons not to acknowledge the link between separation and violence. If this was the case, then the territorialists were simply continuing at a rhetorical level the policies of the Order, cloaking the invitation to violence out of fear of government reprisals. The other possibility was that the territorialists genuinely believed their goal could be achieved peacefully. If that were so, they were clearly out of touch with political realities, and so invited catastrophic disillusionment at some future time. At the moment, the internal evidence does not indicate clearly the relative weight of disguised aggression and self-delusion. Whatever balance might be struck between them, the potential for violence persists, either by those who would try to emulate the Order or by those frustrated by seeking an unattainable goal.

The territorial option was clearly beyond any foreseeable twist in the political process. With neither a mass base nor the prospect of securing one, and with the necessity of confronting central authorities fully capable of preserving public order, there was no conceivable prospect for a successful secessionist political program. Lacking the cultural cohesion of nationalist irredentist movements elsewhere, the racist right continued to nurture dreams of sovereignty that were beyond its capacity to realize and remained caught up in a cycle of extravagant dreams, frustration-releasing violence, and governmental suppression, which then engendered a new phase of speculation.

Identity and Politics

Millenarian movements carry inevitable political baggage, for the anticipation of total societal transformation implies that political arrangements too will be reordered. Millennialists vary, however, in the degree to which they regard the transformation as the result of outside forces, the efforts of believers themselves, or some combination of the two. Where there is a strong commitment to an imminent millennium (change now rather than in the distant future), and where a significant role is assigned to believers as participants rather than as spectators, the potential for a violent clash with authorities is considerable. Such groups usually maintain their commitments until they suffer catastrophic defeat, at which time they deflect their aspirations in safer directions: the millennium may be made more distant, the changes sought may be redefined as spiritual rather than physical, the role of human action may be deemphasized, or an institutional and ritual structure may be substituted for a program of social change. This is a pattern that can be found in many times and places where millennialists have faced defeat and disappointment—among the revolutionary millenarians of the Radical Reformation no less than among the Cargo Cults of Melanesia. Where, then, does Identity fit in this dialectic of confrontation and sublimation?

Christian Identity clearly believes that the Last Days are imminent, a characteristic shared with most millennialists in contemporary America. Unlike many of their fellow chiliasts, however, a high proportion of Identity believers adopt an active rather than a passive stance. While some, such as Dan Gayman, advocate watchful waiting, many others assign a “frontline” role to believers, largely for two reasons. First, rejection of the rapture means they must try to survive the rigors of the Tribulation, a period uniformly described in imagery of battle and conflict. Second, history up to and including the present is conceptualized in terms of race war. Where other millenarians may contrast the evil and corruption of the present with the perfection of the coming millennium, Identity attributes the evil and corruption to a conspiracy actively at work in the world and willing and able to defend itself. As the Tribulation approaches, the forces of evil are expected to push toward victory, with only a thin line of Aryan warriors left to defend the good.

As Identity theology developed, the forces of Satan were concretely identified with a Jewish cabal, so that the conspiratorialism of The Protocols of the Elders ofZion was subsumed under a more comprehensive concept of Satan’s struggle against God. As Identity writers have elaborated upon the conspiracy’s malevolence and cunning, its tentacles have been portrayed as reaching into virtually every sector of American life: the churches, the universities, the mass media, and, not least, the government. The federal government especially has come to be viewed as little more than an appendage of the Jewish-satanic conspiracy. Hence every action of the government is seen as sinister, duplicitous, and illegitimate. A worldview premised upon such ideas sees politics in confrontational terms, with choices that range from disengagement to struggle.

The political choices such a theology offers are necessarily limited. One is psychological disengagement, a kind of “inner emigration” in which the individual ceases to feel connected to political life and directs his or her energies to other pursuits. The intangible character of such behavior makes its incidence difficult to measure, but one suspects that a large number of Identity believers have taken this path. A more concrete manifestation of disengagement is survivalist withdrawal, described in the preceding chapter. While this permits a high degree of detachment from the political system, it is not without risks, as the history of the Covenant, Sword and Arm of the Lord demonstrates, for the line between feelings of detachment and encirclement can easily become blurred. Finally, there are the transformational options discussed in this chapter, such as armed conflict and territorial secession. These alternatives are not and will not be politically viable. Indeed, they are suicidal. Yet because they flow directly out of Identity’s millenarian sensibility and because they promise immediate (though temporary) psychological satisfactions, violence-producing outbursts will occasionally occur.

Among the least likely paths are those connected to pragmatic politics, such as participation in the electoral system. It is significant that those who have run for office have been individuals with Identity pasts (Metzger) or Identity associations (Duke and Gritz) but not current Identity believers themselves. Identity believers would have extraordinary difficulty in reconciling the norms of American politics, which emphasized incremental adjustment and coalition building, with Identity’s sense of apocalyptic expectation. Duke has, however, demonstrated that Identity associations themselves (not to mention a neo-Nazi past) are not a bar to electoral success at the local level, and that Identity believers will support a candidate deemed compatible with their social philosophy.

Finally, there is the question of whether the trauma of defeat can produce a fundamental political reorientation of Identity, as it has of earlier millenarian movements. Identity did in fact suffer significant defeats in the second half of the 1980s. The breakup of the Order has already been described. With it went most dreams of imminent revolt and insurgency. A few years later, in 1988, the federal government prosecuted thirteen major right-wing figures for seditious conspiracy, alleging they had plotted to overthrow the government and set up an Aryan nation in the Pacific Northwest, thus activating the territorial option by systematically violent means. Although there were non-Identity defendants, significant Identity figures were in the dock, including Richard Girnt Butler, Louis Beam, and Richard Wayne Snell, as well as some with close Identity associations, such as David Lane and Robert Miles. The Fort Smith trial, named after the Arkansas community where it was held, resulted in acquittals for all defendants, but the length, cost, and risks of the case clearly made an impact on both the defendants and the movement; and some have argued that Fort Smith, along with the Order proceedings, forced Identity in nonviolent directions.²⁷

There seems little doubt that the aggressiveness of law-enforcement agencies and prosecutors has significantly reduced the potential for future violence. However, the reduction seems the result not of a fundamental theological reorientation but of prudence and calculation. Identity appears not yet to have faced defeats so definitive as to force a basic rethinking of its orientation toward the political system. Some, like Dan Gayman, who testified for the prosecution at Fort Smith, have always rejected violence. For those who have not, however, the issue remains one of assessing risks, not of altering principles.

In any case, the potential for violence depends not only on Identity theology but upon the stance taken by authorities responsible for public order. The extent to which government decisions may control the outbreak and intensity of violence was driven home in 1993 at the sectarian compound of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. Although the Branch Davidians were unrelated to Identity theologically, their interactions with the authorities reproduced dynamics that can occur in Identity settings as well. The Branch Davidians were communal and separatist in their life-style, heterodox in their beliefs, and millenarian in their expectations about the future. They believed themselves to be living in an evil but doomed world, and, partly as a result, were heavily armed. The violence at the compound developed, however, because of miscalculations by federal authorities. A mistimed assault by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms on February 28, 1993, cost the lives of four agents. After a fifty-one-day armed standoff with the FBI, a final assault on the compound resulted in the fire that claimed the lives of nearly eighty Branch Davidians. However responsibilities are apportioned, it remains true that the violence was the result of a complex interaction in which both apocalyptic sectarians and governmental authorities possessed some measure of control.²⁸

A similar but less violent episode with Identity participants had already occurred in 1992. The Randy Weaver family, Identity believers, were besieged for eleven days in August 1992 by federal authorities seeking to serve a firearms-violation warrant. In the first two days of the standoff, a deputy U.S. marshal and Weaver’s wife and son were killed. Ironically, Weaver’s trial took place during the Waco episode the following year; he and a family friend who was present were acquitted of all but the original firearms charges. The Waco and Weaver episodes suggest that the potential for violence in Christian Identity depends upon both the beliefs and strategies adopted by Identity groups and the responses made by local and national authorities. In some cases (the Order is the clearest instance), Identity believers have been first users of violence as part of a revolutionary strategy. In other cases, such as the Randy Weaver episode, violence has been a by-product of government tactics, a consequence of misperceptions and miscalculations. Therefore, the potential for Identity-related violence in the future depends as much upon the responses made by law-enforcement agencies as it does upon changes internal to the movement.²⁹