1. Ben Klassen

My Own Spiritual Awakening
By Ben Klassen, Founder of Creativity

My parents were members of the Mennonite religion, a Protestant sect originating in Holland during the middle 1500’s. This faith was founded by a man named Menno Siemens, who, like Martin Luther, broke away from the abuses of the Catholic religion of that time, and was originally a Catholic priest.

The Mennonites were severely persecuted by the ever-loving and broad-minded Christians of the times, both the Catholics and the Lutheran Protestants. As a result, a large number of them were dispersed to several of the neighboring countries, klassen-photo_bw_sig_enhanced_quote250some settling for a while and then being driven further again. My ancestors originally came from Holland, and then moved to Prussia, where they settled for several generations. Due to hostility from the government, a large group of these moved into the unsettled area of the Ukraine, Russia. The year was 1804. There, like many pioneers that settled the West, my ancestors pioneered the wild steppes of Russia. Within a generation or two they were doing well and were becoming rather prosperous in comparison to the Russian peasants. By the beginning of World War I this particular small colony had grown to 58 small towns comprised of about thirty thousand souls.

They were a hard working and frugal type of people, intensely religious. They took good care of their own. By the beginning of World War I they had become an extremely prosperous island in a rather backward sea of peasants in that part of Russia. Their farms, their standard of living, their general well-being, and their educational level, was far above that of the Russians themselves. The Mennonites kept their native German language, they ran their own schools, and neither fraternized, socialized, nor intermarried with the Russians. In fact, they would no more think of marrying a Russian than the White Man in America would think of marrying a Negro.

Their prosperous and peaceful existence was shattered with the Russian revolution when a hellish reign of terror burst loose upon them. They hardly knew what hit them. Suddenly they were overrun by the revolution, were pulverized, robbed and looted. Many of them were murdered. Like millions of other Russians, many of my people starved to death in Stalin’s brutal program of forced famine. One of my own earliest recollections of this time is hunger and starvation.

By 1924 the situation stabilized somewhat and my father decided to take advantage of the situation to migrate.

We moved to Mexico. I think things were a little too wild for my mother there and just too uncivilized. In any case, by the end of 1925 we moved to Herschel, Saskatchewan, Canada, where some of my dad’s relatives had preceded us by a year.

I started going to public school that winter. I was eight years old. We were pretty destitute and my clothing situation was less than adequate. As I remember it, I nearly froze to death that first winter. On top of that I couldn’t speak a word of English. Things were rather rough.

Nevertheless, by the time I was twelve I had learned to speak English fluently and I had finished the first eight grades. Mennonites as a whole are quite religious. I personally was brought up in a fairly religious home and received a rather thorough grounding of bible studies at Sunday school. The Mennonites had no sooner settled at Herschel, when one of their first acts was to build a community church. We went to it regularly.

My mother’s religious influence upon me was strong and I was somewhat troubled by the ideas of heaven and hell, but not overly so. In my thirteenth year I had the opportunity to go to a German English Academy away from home, where I took the tenth grade. Besides taking all the full regular tenth grade curricula we were loaded down with extra German language subjects and religious instruction. It was at this time that my religious thinking began to crystallize somewhat.

One of the things that I particularly remember from this period is a nineteen-year-old fellow student who was taking the eleventh grade. He told me that he had been quite a rousing reprobate and sinner in his teenage years, but now he had gotten religion. He told me that he was now converted, and not only that, but he was born again, and gee, wasn’t it all wonderful. As these newly converted sinners always do, he did his utmost to try and have me converted also. I strongly resisted his effort.

The thing that he was particularly stressing was how wonderful it was, what great peace of mind he now had since he was born again in Christ, etc. Since he lived just a door or two down the hall in the same dormitory as I did, I had plenty of opportunity, of course, to observe his activities during the entire school year.

It soon began to appear to me that he did not have nearly as much peace of mind as he professed to have. In fact, it seemed like he had a lot more worries on his mind than did the rest of us. I observed that throughout almost the entire day his conscience was being racked by the question of sin.

I remember particularly one cold blustery Canadian winter night, at about one o’clock in the morning, his conscience began to get the best of him. The story came out that during the day he had told some friends, to whose house he had been invited, that he brushed his teeth up and down. As he lay in bed, his conscience began to nag him. He had lied to them. He really brushed his teeth cross-wise. So heavy did this weigh on his conscience that he got up in the middle of the night, jammed open the icy double storm-windows, crawled out, and walked two miles to his friend’s home in the middle of the night. There he rapped on the door, and awakening them out of their sound sleep, confessed to them that he had told them this dreadful, shameful lie.

This episode, among many others, did not at all convince me that these so-called born again Christians went around with more peace of mind than did any of the rest of us. On the contrary, it convinced me that they were guilt-ridden and conscience-stricken over trifles. I observed further that they were encumbered with a series of mental blocks in their normal thinking that severely interfered with their solving the problems of the day.

From there on out my interest in religion became less and less personal and more and more academic. When I was seventeen I first entered the University of Saskatchewan. One of the subjects that I studied that first year was Ancient History, covering most of the older civilizations. It was during this period that it became clear to me that there were a vast number of religions other than Christianity on the face of this earth. I realized that many had come and gone, and thousands of varieties of religion were still floating around today.

It began to put Christianity in a different perspective. It seemed to me that Christianity was just another man-made religion, albeit one of the major religions.

I began to look at the concepts of Christianity from a more analytical point of view, i.e. just what did it say, just what were some of its ideas and what evidence was there to substantiate these claims. Nevertheless, for me religion remained for decades an unresolved puzzle. For a long time thereafter I pursued the normal course of getting an education, getting married, and establishing myself in a business. Religion as such was of minor importance and I seldom ever went to church. I never did join the Mennonite church. When I was in my middle thirties I was somehow influenced to join a Presbyterian church and began to attend somewhat more regularly, although with very little enthusiasm. The fact was I was immensely bored in church and could hardly wait to get out after hearing the same nonsensical platitudes repeated over and over again, ad nauseum.

One day I discussed with my minister some of my ideas about religion and some of the questions I had in my mind. I told him that the whole thing didn’t make much sense to me. In the first place if God was such a loving God, why is it that he would create all these millions of people who according to the rules and regulations laid down in the bible, by and large, were all going to go to hell. I told him the whole thing seemed absurd to me. He was one of these liberal preachers also in his middle thirties at the time. What he told me came as a surprise to me. He said he had no way of answering that question, and if that was my belief, I should stick with it. He confessed that he was pretty unsure about the whole thing himself. Not much to my surprise, a few years later he left the ministerial profession and began to earn an honest living.

In the early 1960’s, then living in Florida, I became more and more concerned about the shameful way in which this country was being destroyed by the Jewish-communist conspiracy. When I was twenty years old I had already read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I was well aware of the Jewish role in the communist conspiracy, but like most Americans, I was occupied with taking care of my business activities and taking little or no part in the political affairs of the country, abdicating those to the scoundrels and the traitors. Nor did I know any activity or organization that I could turn to in order to do something, despite the fact that now I was becoming most desperately concerned.

It was at about this time that I first heard of the John Birch Society. I understood that they were “fighting communism.” After spending five dollars sending for an introductory packet and reading their literature, I decided to join.

For six years I labored assiduously and energetically within the confines of the John Birch Society before it began to dawn on me what the real nature of the Society was. In any case, I recruited dozens of members; for several years I headed up a speaker’s bureau sponsored by the Birch Society; I even opened an American Opinion Bookstore which sold, distributed and promoted books sponsored by the Society. In order that I could devote more time to this activity I even closed up my real estate business. In 1966 I was impatient with the Society’s program of “education is our only weapon” and I ran for the State Legislature.

It was at this time that I began to notice that something was curiously wrong with the Birch Society. Instead of whole-heartedly supporting somebody who openly came out as a Birch member and ran for public office, I noticed instead their support was going to some phony that wasn’t even a member and whose program would lead them down a dead end street. I furthermore noticed that the Birch members were the most pessimistic of all my supporters in prognosticating my chances of being elected. When I did get elected, they were the first to throw cold water on the event by coming up with such lame rationalizations as, well anybody could have done it in this election year, and it was probably a fluke, etc.

When I got to the Florida State Legislature and began to propose some radical opposition to the Jewish controlled Supreme Court and other matters, the Republican Party, on whose platform I had run, turned solidly against me and in the ensuing fight that developed I received next to no support from the Birch Society itself. It was at this time that the Supreme Court ordered a reapportionment election. In the next go-around I was defeated. My multitude of labors and strenuous efforts had accomplished little, both in the political activity and in the framework of the Birch Society. I came out of it, however, poorer in the pocketbook, but richer in experience.

I had learned two things: (a) that it is impossible to accomplish anything within the framework of the old political parties, and (b) that the John Birch Society was a phony.

However, I continued to stay in the Birch Society for some time thereafter, with the feeling that perhaps I was at least doing some good. The more I looked into it though the more it began to dawn on me that the whole Society was a smoke screen for the Jews. It began to become clear to me that their whole effort was designed to scatter the efforts of their members on a myriad of ineffective projects, keep them busy, keep them paying, but never, never let them so much as get to the root-cause of it all— the perfidious international Jewish network.

In 1969, after six years, I sent in my resignation to Robert Welch, the founder of the Birch Society, and demanded back my $1000.00 life membership that I had so foolishly given them a few years earlier. Of course, the chances of this Jewish outfit refunding my thousand dollars were next to nil. Instead I got a many paged letter from Welch giving me a lot of double talk and what a big mistake I was making in accusing the poor little innocent Jew of being behind this whole big communist conspiracy.

This was a rather important turning point in my life. Whereas I had been somewhat aware of the whole Jewish conspiracy for most of my life, I had been diverted by the Birch Society and had pushed those ideas into the background. Now I began to realize that the Birch Society itself was just another Jewish program to confuse the White people regarding both the cause of the conspiracy, and the cure thereof. I realized that the Society was something like a research group pretending to find the cause of yellow fever. Every time the researchers came to the inevitable conclusion that it was carried by the mosquito, the Top Brass would protect the mosquito, throw out the researchers, and start out all over again with a new team.

Now I began to realize that the whole basis of this age-old struggle was race. It was the Jewish race using all the weapons at its command, and it did have a huge arsenal to destroy, mongrelize and enslave the mongrelized product of the White Race.

At this time I had not yet suspected that their most powerful weapon of all was their skillful use of Christianity on the White Race. I decided to form a new political party polarized around the issue of the White Race. This I did, and formed the Nationalist White Party.

I had the immediate hostility of the Birch Society, which did not at all surprise me. What did surprise me now was I found that the strongest opposition came not from the Jews (as I had expected) but from the Christians. Every time we would discuss the issue of race, somehow or other Christianity and Christian principles would crop up so that in the end we wound up in a hassle about religion rather than trying to get down to the basic issue of the struggle against the Jews. This despite the fact that I had taken a pro-Christian stand. Continually I was told that the Jews were God’s chosen people; that the Negroes, too, were God’s creatures; that racial discrimination was un-Christian, that “our Savior” was a Jew, the bible said “I will curse them that curse thee, and bless them that bless thee,” etc., etc.

This was a surprising new development. Whereas up to this time, I had regarded Christianity as something rather innocuous, and perhaps a time-consuming nuisance, it now suddenly hit me like a bolt out of the blue that Christianity was one of the most powerful weapons that the Jews had in their arsenal.

Now I began to study the bible all over again and particularly focused on the Sermon on the Mount. To my surprise I found that it contained nothing but real bad, suicidal advice. Whereas before, I had heard and read all the bits and pieces of it, it had never occurred to me to examine what this kind of advice would do to a nation and to a race. Now I began to realize that such suicidal advice as “turn the other cheek,” “love your enemies,” “sell all that thou hast and give it to the poor,” “judge not lest ye be judged,” and “resist not evil,” was real suicidal advice.

I now dug deeper into it and I found that the so-called Apostles, as well as the man purported to be Christ himself, were all of Jewish origin. Strangely, though, they had never sold their suicidal ideas to the Jews— on the contrary, they had sold it to the greatest civilization of ancient times, namely the Romans.

Then a lot of other things began to fall into place. Looking at Roman history it became clear to me that whereas Rome had established a great civilization, had conquered the world, was completely supreme, that when Christianity hit it like a plague, it began to crumble and fall apart. And after studying the underlying suicidal ideas that Christianity had perpetrated upon the Romans, I could easily understand why the Romans no longer cared to defend their Empire, nor to meet their earthly responsibilities. It became clear to me why the whole great White Empire disintegrated under the influence of this new Jewish poison.

I now felt like an excited detective who unexpectedly had stumbled on the greatest mystery, the most sinister conspiracy in the history of mankind. I began to look more and more towards the eternal laws of Nature for the solution. I began to study the Old and the New Testament with feverish and renewed interest. I studied the history of the races— the great White Race, the Jews, the Negroes. I traced the rise and decline of civilizations. Like a detective, I began to feel that all the pieces, at last, were beginning to fall into place.

The more I dug into this, the more all the mosaic pieces began to fit together. I began to get a multitude of answers to questions that had eluded me throughout my life. Studying Nature’s laws, studying religions and studying history and adding this to the experiences of my own lifetime, I found that I had finally made a breakthrough. My search had been rewarded by a multitude of answers— including the big one— namely, what is our purpose in life.

The more I studied the Jewish plague, Christianity, religion, and the laws of Nature, the more compelling the solution thrust itself upon me. I suddenly realized that I had achieved a devastating breakthrough that was sweeping in its implications, compelling in its simplicity, and so overwhelmingly obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t seen the picture a long time ago. It became abundantly clear to me that what the White Race needed was a completely new approach to the whole problem of extricating itself from the sinister Jewish conspiracy. And in order to get this new approach it seemed overwhelmingly clear that what the White Race really needed was a new religion, a new philosophy of life and a new Weltanschauung. It also occurred to me that my whole life experience had taught me and prepared me to do this fundamental job, namely, of formulating the new religion that was so necessary to the survival of the White Race. It also became overwhelmingly clear to me that to found a new party based on race while trying to coexist with Jewish Christianity was impossible. Every weapon that we needed in such a struggle was already undermined and neutralized by the basic concepts of Christianity itself.

I began to discuss my ideas with friends. In short order, it seemed that they too could see the picture when it was laid out to them. Even some former “born again” Christians, to my surprise, did a complete turn about, and became exceedingly hostile to the Christian religion with which they had been duped and were won over wholeheartedly to the doctrine of loyalty to their race.

I argued and debated with Christian preachers. To my further surprise, I found them completely at a loss to explain the numerous basic questions I threw at them, and usually they became hopelessly trapped in their own set of lies.

I corresponded with former Kosher Konservative friends of mine and they, too, either conceded my position on Jews and Christianity, or were hopelessly driven to the wall.

It was then I decided to compile my creed into a book. I decided to formulate a new religion for the White Race that would lead it out of the quagmire of Jewish entrapment, out of despair and degradation, and into the bright light of greatness, to the heights of the wonderful destiny that Nature herself, in her great wisdom, had destined for this magnificent race.

From Chapter Twenty-Two of Nature’s Eternal Religion


About Ben Klassen:

Born of German-speaking parents in Russia in 1918, Founder Klassen and his family were early victims of the Communist terrors, from which they fled in 1924. He was brought up and educated in Canada, where he earned a degree in Electrical Engineering and also a Bachelor of Arts. He was a farmer, a school teacher, a hard rock nickel miner, an electrical engineer, inventor of the electric can opener, a realtor, and a Florida State Legislator in the United States of America.

His intense interest in the laws of Nature, Race and Religion polarized into a New Religion for the White Race, a task his wide and diverse background seemingly prepared him for over a lifetime.