Blood and Politics (59 page)

Comparisons between these two most important cases demonstrate that white nationalists had learned from their own past, a sure sign of the reflexive self-consciousness that separates living social movements from stick figure data. At the same time, the federal government seemed to have remembered little from its loss in Fort Smith and acted as if it were determined to repeat itself in the Weaver case.

Weaver’s supporters rallied for the defense at the trial’s opening, for example, just as protesters had in Fort Smith. In contrast with the marchers in Arkansas, however, Weaver’s supporters in Boise displayed no anti-Semitic imagery on their placards. The new tone evinced at Estes Park held sway instead. One quiet woman held a picket sign reading
WHO STANDS TRIAL FOR MURDERS OF VICKI AND SAM WEAVER?
The poster board of another gentleman in a sportscoat and tie read,
THE MOST DESPICABLE CRIMINALS ARE THOSE WHO WEAR A BADGE. FREE WEAVER AND HARRIS
.
While the rallies for the defense at Fort Smith had largely been organized by one Klansman, Thom Robb, supporting Weaver became an imperative across almost the entire movement. In addition to the Boise picket, others rallied at federal courthouses in Philadelphia and in Van Nuys, California. Further, Carto’s
Spotlight
, which had published little about the sedition defendants, ran Weaver coverage front to back, issue after issue. Skinheads from Utah joined Christian patriots from Oregon in the courtroom seats behind Weaver’s defense table. White nationalists had not shown such internal cohesion since the movement’s reemergence in the mid-1970s.

In Boise the defense successfully turned the deaths of Vicki and Sam Weaver into a prima facie case of government wrongdoing. Weaver’s attorney showed jurors bloody photos of Sam and Vicki, had them handle the FBI sharpshooter’s rifle, then asked them to imagine the screaming coming from the cabin. The prosecution’s evidence might have been able to address the initial shootings on Ruby Ridge: of the dog, Federal Marshal William Degan, and even young Sam Weaver. But the image of mother Vicki’s head blown off while she was holding her ten-month-old baby could not be erased by any mountain of testimony about her belief in a final battle between good Aryans and evil race mixers.

Additional self-inflicted blunders undermined the case against Weaver. The government tried to introduce photos of “reconstructed” evidence, in an almost unbelievable display of prosecutorial arrogance. After the FBI had taken apart and removed certain materials from Ruby Ridge, it realized that it would need them for trial. So the feds brought them all back to Ruby Ridge and reassembled them for picture taking, a clear violation of the rules of procedure. Further aggravating their case, the FBI failed to provide other (discoverable) evidence to the defense in a timely fashion. The judge angrily levied an initial fine of $3,240 against the government.

Finally, the disaster on April 19 at Waco burned the prosecution’s case completely to the ground. Televised images of government tanks attacking civilians, flames, smoke, and death compounded the growing unease that law enforcement officials had turned from defenders of the public order into unrestrained thugs. Weaver’s judge instructed jurors not to watch or read the coverage. But at least twice during the proceedings, Weaver’s defense attorney deftly introduced a comparison of FBI conduct on Ruby Ridge and the horror at Waco, binding the two events into a single mental picture.
³

Parallel to the battle in the courtroom, a subtle contest for the moral high ground had implications far beyond Randy Weaver’s immediate
fate. Weaver’s attorney, as well as a number of white nationalist cadres, attempted to change the words the public used to identify Randy Weaver. They argued that this hapless ridge sitter was a harmless “white separatist,” not a dangerous “white supremacist.” Weaver’s attorney of course had an immediate interest in portraying his client as an innocent victim. And if Weaver was just a “separatist” who wanted to be left alone, then the movement of which he was a part became a white separatist movement by extension. He was thus just one more dispossessed white male victim of affirmative action and multiculturalism. David Duke’s Kluxers, after all, did not hate anyone. They just loved white people. Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby claimed it was populist and nationalist and oft asserted that white nationalism was a beneficent twin to black nationalism. William Pierce’s National Alliance cadre, skinheads, and a host of others also claimed that they were white separatists rather than white supremacists.
⁴
What was wrong with wanting to be
white
anyway and just living, working, eating, and going to the water fountain with just
white
people?

Weaver’s supporters started this exchange over nomenclature during the first days of the siege in Idaho, and these efforts were reflected in the regional media at the time. In one early article in the Boise-based daily newspaper
The Idaho Statesman
, ran the headline “Friends Say Weaver a Separatist, Not a White Supremacist.” The text quoted one of Weaver’s friends on the topic. “A supremacist believes the only race to have rights to life is the white race,” the friend decided. A separatist, on the other hand, believes in “staying separate with his faith and his race.”
⁵
As a counterpoint to these claims, the
Statesman
simply closed the article with the self-evident observation that “members of the Aryan Nation white supremacist group” were supporting Weaver.

Later, when reporting on Weaver’s first postsiege court appearance, the
Statesman
continued to describe Weaver as “a devotee of the Christian Identity Movement which combines Old Testament and white supremacist beliefs,” a statement of uncontestable veracity. But Weaver’s attorney used the occasion to claim that when the case finally went to trial, the issue would be government misconduct, “not whether this man believes in separatism, or his religious views.”
⁶

The attorney’s statement turned out to be true enough, as far as it went. But the government indictment contended that Weaver’s beliefs had lead to his actions. According to prosecutors, Weaver and Harris intended to advance “their views of ‘white’ or ‘Aryan’ supremacy or separatism and the political, social, and economic ascendancy of persons of a ‘white’ or ‘Aryan’ background.”
⁷
By arguing that Weaver’s actions had been motivated by his white supremacist ideas, the government
placed the exact nature of his beliefs at the center of the government’s case. It then simply became a matter of the defense attorneys’ countering the prosecutors’ description of Weaver’s motivations. Thus the defense team was pushed by the logic of the case to claim that Weaver was not a “supremacist” at all. At one point they even asked the judge to stop government prosecutors from publicly referring to it as a “white supremacist case.”
⁸
Weaver was simply a “separatist,” the defense told reporters.

As the case finally came to trial, and the prosecution’s case collapsed under the weight of its own mistakes, the ambiguity dropped out of media coverage. Weaver became an unadulterated “separatist.” If the indictment alleged that Weaver’s “white supremacist” beliefs were the premise motivating a conspiracy, then the government’s failure to prove the existence of a conspiracy undermined the premise. “The government’s image of Mr. Weaver as a political extremist bent on armed conflict has been eclipsed by courtroom revelations,” one reporter concluded even before the verdict was reached.
⁹

After eight weeks of prosecutorial misfires and a sharpshooter defense, the judge dismissed two of the multiple charges against Weaver and Harris and sent the rest of the case to the jury. Twenty days of deliberation later, on July 8, came the verdicts: not guilty of murder and conspiracy. Harris walked away completely free. Weaver was convicted only on the original gun charge and of failing to appear for trial the first time around. By anyone’s account, Weaver had won and the government had lost.

The not guilty verdict sealed Weaver’s claims in cement. If he had been convicted of murder, subsequent efforts to paint him as a benign white separatist might have failed. But the jury had decided that there were no plans for Aryan domination. In effect its decision made it official: Weaver was a separatist who had truly just wanted to be left alone. And media coverage of the trial and the verdict sealed the less loathsome description in the public mind.
¹⁰

This change in nomenclature became an enduring legacy of the Ruby Ridge tragedy, part of a larger posttrial shift best understood in comparison to the period following the verdict at Fort Smith. After the seditious conspiracy trial, David Duke–style mainstreaming rose to the fore, pushing guns and gunmen into the background. By contrast, following the Weaver case, government agents, rather than Aryan bandits, were regarded as heartless killers.
¹¹
A renewed drive for mainstream acceptance was paralleled by a rise in mass gun-toting militia militancy. A sector of Christian nationalists began intersecting with white nationalists. A new cohort of militants again robbed banks and killed for their cause.
While these actions took place and were recorded in newspaper headlines, a second sequence of events occurred outside the public’s view. A new generation of Aryanists took the stage and shaped their own cultural institutions while the older generation quietly lost control of the movement and began to die out.

August 8, 1993.
In the numerology of Hitler worshipers, the number 8 stands as a symbol for the letter
H
, the eighth letter of the alphabet. Thus the salutation “Heil Hitler,” or “HH,” is represented by the number 88, and like the number 33 for Ku Kluxers, National Socialists are fond of using the symbol like a secret handshake. Following suit, in past years at the Church of the Creator camp in North Carolina, the eighth day of the eighth month, August 8, was a day for special celebration.
¹
But on this day in 1993, the camp’s seventy-five-year-old founder, Ben Klassen, swallowed multiple bottles of sleeping pills and committed suicide. It was a quiet end to a long career, first at the center of resistance to desegregation and then at the furthest edges of the white supremacist movement. During his last years, Klassen helped empower Generation X skinheads, those born between 1965 and 1980, setting the stage for the emergence of a white power music business in the United States. At the same time, Klassen’s suicide revealed a weakness inherent in the movement as a whole, which was built around individual personalities (like Klassen), rather than formalized through institutions. The strategic wisdom gained by years of activism as well as the organizational power and accumulated assets was difficult to transfer from one generation to the next.

Benjamin Klassen was born in 1918 into a Mennonite colony in the Ukraine, then a region ravaged by war and revolution. His family immigrated first to Mexico in 1924 and then to a German-speaking Mennonite community in Saskatchewan, Canada. He taught school for a brief period and later studied electrical engineering at the University of Saskatchewan. Klassen claimed he first read Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
in the original German at the age of twenty and became, in his words,
“political.” After World War Two he moved to South Florida and made money in the real estate market. Like other white-ists of his generation, including William Pierce, he joined the John Birch Society in 1963. Klassen won a seat in the Florida legislature in 1966 from Broward County and subsequently became the state chairman of Governor George Wallace’s American Independent Party, then at the center of de jure segregation’s last defense.
²
In 1968 Wallace received 624,000 votes in Florida (part of his 10 million votes nationwide), an indication that Klassen was not alone in his public sympathies.

Despite Wallace’s relative success, Klassen felt “a key ingredient” was missing from the right wing at that time. He resigned from both the Wallace party and the Birch organization the following year.
³
During the same period that Klassen enlarged the fortune he had made in Florida’s booming real estate market, he also searched for a philosophy that matched his own. Finding none, he decided to invent a “religion.” He named it Creativity.

As a theology Creativity was uncomplicated. Whatever “benefited” the white race, Creativity deemed good because it regarded the white race as “Nature’s finest creation of all time.” (The
N
in “Nature” was always capitalized in Klassen’s alphabet, as were the
W
in “White” and the
R
in “Race.”) Jews were “the most sinister and dangerous parasites in all history.” Neither precept particularly distinguished Klassen’s Creativity from the other ideologies floating around his end of the spectrum. What made Klassen’s Creativity unique was its explicit and rabid opposition to Christianity of all types—from mainline Protestantism and Catholicism to the Reverend Pat Robertson–style fundamentalism to the Identity variety. Despite agreement on much else, in Klassen’s eyes Identity Christians—with their claims to be the actual (racial) descendants of the biblical tribes of Israel—were just wannabe Jews. Over time it was this anti-Christian mania that gave Klassen’s “church” its own legs and walked the former Bircher out to the white rim of the universe.

In the early 1980s Klassen moved to Otto, North Carolina, a village nestled into the Appalachian Mountains five miles north of the Georgia state line on Highway 23. That tristate area of Appalachia—western North Carolina, northern Georgia, and eastern Tennessee—remains a beautiful and remote region, hidden away from large metropolitan areas. It is also home to significant pockets of white supremacists. Klassen and his wife, Henrie, turned their twenty-plus-acre tract into a headquarters complex, with an additional “church” cum office and apartment building. From this base, Klassen announced that Latin would become the language of the new white religion and anointed himself its Pontifex Maximus (supreme leader). He self-published books and produced a
periodical, but his writings tended toward the scurrilous and vulgar, and he found few converts at first. At this point his Church of the Creator remained without structural form and was devoid of any motivating idea other than an Aryanist opposition to Christianity. By Klassen’s reckoning, Christianity was a “Jewish creation . . . an unholy teaching designed to unhinge and derange the White Gentile intellect and cause him to abandon his real responsibilities.” Klassen concocted his “religion” as a substitute doctrine, in which salvation rested with Nature (with a capital
N
) and the doctrines of Adolf Hitler.
⁴