The excerpts in this article were taken from an article which appeared in the Sunday Los Angeles Times magazine on December 12, 1993. The article was called “Marketing Hate”, by Sarah Henry, and its main topic was the short-lived attempt by one Rick McCarty, to take Ben Klassen’s “Church of the Creator” and aggressively market it. It did contain some very interesting background information on Klassen which completely contradicts Covington’s insane portrayal of the man. I had read every issue of Covington’s slander sheet “Resistance” up to the time this article was published, so I am very familiar with Covington’s claims. Although I mever believed all, or even many, of his charges – who could? – I thought Klassen must be guilty of something. This article convinced me Covington is a completely unreliable liar who knows nothing about the people he defames.
For example, the source of Klassen’s money is revealed, something Covington never knew. Covington always claimed that Klassen stole his money, or was set up by Jewry as a front. In this fable, Klassen was given millions of dollars by Jewry to make a phony “racist” organization they controlled. The insanity of that claim is clearly revealed here.
Covington also never said that Klassen was married and had a family. I don’t know if Covington even knew that or not, but it’s a lot easier to slander someone as a “homosexual” if you never mention to people that the “homosexual” is married and has a child. While I’m not naive enough to believe that proves Klassen never did what Covington accuses him of, it certainly makes it far less likely. Would a man really start drugging and raping teen age boys at the age of 70, after 40 years of marriage? I doubt it, especially when there has been no critical examination of these claims, only their endless repetition by the proven liar Covington. Besides, Harold himself was the number two man to the proven Jew and homosexual, Frank Collin. Did Harold really know nothing about his fuhrer’s sexual tastes, as he claims? How do we know that Covington wasn’t participating in his fuhrer’s activities himself?
Read the relevant pieces of the article below and judge for yourself if Covington’s fables are true. The complete text of the article can be f ...
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ound at the Times website at
http://www.latimes.com. Search the archives for 1993 in the magazine section for the phrase “Church of the Creator” and you’ll find the article. It will cost you $1.50 to get the article, but you can read the whole thing for yourself from a publicly available source. Covington’s charges are always attributed to anonymous others whose existence can’t even be shown, let alone that they actually know what they are supposedly talking about.
Compare what Klassen did with his life to what the creep Covington has accomplished in his. Although I never liked Klassen’s “church”, or was a follower of his, I must say that Klassen is 1000 times more deserving of respect than Covington ever will be. Much of Covington’s hate towards Klassen is motivated by his venomous envy, especially for Klassen’s wealth. The same spite motivates Covington’s hate for Dr. William Pierce and the National Alliance. Covington hates anyone who has been more successful than he is – and it’s pretty easy to be more successful than Covington.
[Begin Times article excerpt]
“TO LEARN ABOUT THE ROOTS OF THE CHURCH OF THE CREATOR, ONE HAS to travel to western North Carolina, to the tiny rural town of Otto, just shy of the Georgia border. It’s a pretty place, dotted with wildflowers and surrounded by rolling hills. The community, too small to be incorporated as a city, consists of a couple of gas stations, a few craft shops, a home-style restaurant, post office, flea market and country music hall.
For more than a decade, it was also the home of Ben Klassen, founder and driving force behind the Church of the Creator. Klassen, who first registered the COTC in 1973 in Lighthouse Point, Fla., moved to Otto permanently in 1982. There, on his 22-acre property, he built a house of worship, an oddly shaped three-story church, complete with the COTC’s white-power insignia. He also built a small warehouse, for stockpiling the group’s extensive array of publications, and a little-used school for gifted (White) boys.
According to townsfolk, Klassen was intelligent, philosophical and quiet, a polite man who kept to himself. He lived with his wife and daughter in a large but simple A-frame home overlooking his church, in a secluded sub-development whose entrance bears the sign: PRIVATE ROAD, PROPERTY OWNERS ONLY, NO TRESPASSING.
But if Klassen wasn’t active in Otto, his ideas were well known around town. “I got along with Ben just fine. Now, I sure didn’t get along with his beliefs, but I figured he had a right to them,” says J. J. Ayers, a Klassen neighbor just back from Sunday service at the local Baptist church. “He’d get all stirred up about the Negroes and the Jews – he hated them. And he made that pretty clear,” adds the 79-year-old farmer. The community left him to his own devices. As one longtime resident of this dry Bible Belt county explained: “Our pastor told us just to sit still and not do anything and let God take care of it.”
Ben Klassen was born in Ukraine to German-speaking Mennonite parents. His family, described in his books as “early victims of Jewish Communism,” lived briefly in Mexico and then moved to Canada, where he earned a degree in electrical engineering and a bachelor of arts. In 1945, Klassen settled in the United States and became a citizen three years later. He had a varied career: He was a farmer, a schoolteacher, a nickel miner, an engineer, a realtor and a Republican state assemblyman in Florida for a short time. Klassen was also the inventor of one of the first electric can openers and, in later life, an accomplished oil painter. (Speculation over where Klassen’s money was made–he admitted pouring a small fortune into the COTC–is divided between the can opener and real estate.) But Klassen’s greatest achievement, he believed, was creating a religion for the white race, a group he dubbed “Nature’s Finest.”
Disillusioned by the ultraconservative John Birch Society, to which he belonged during the 1960s, and fed up with party politics after working on the 1968 presidential campaign of George Wallace’s American Independent Party, Klassen developed his own ideology. In 1938, when he was 20, he had borrowed “Mein Kampf” from the library. “The book . . . was to influence my life more than any other,” he wrote later. It took another 30 years, but it was at this young age that “the vague outlines” for his “full-fledged racial religion for the White Volk” began to take shape. That religion would become Creativity: a creed that maintains that one’s race is one’s religion.
“It is hard to tell at this point in history whether the Negroes, or the Mexicans, or the Cubans, or the Haitians are the biggest threat to the White Race in America,” wrote Klassen in a July, 1990, issue of Racial Loyalty. “The point is they all are, as are the . . . other mud races who are starving in their own countries and want to get on the backs of the White Man’s generous subsidy.”
Klassen was not, by most accounts, a charismatic leader. In public appearances, he favored a bolo tie with the COTC’s emblem and a Hitler-style mustache. But he was a prolific writer: During his 20 years as head of the COTC, he pumped out racist propaganda at a prodigious rate–more than 15 books, including the organization’s three sacred texts: “The White Man’s Bible,” “Nature’s Eternal Religion” and “Salubrious Living,” a guide to healthy habits for white warriors that he co-authored. Klassen also wrote many of the diatribes in Racial Loyalty, signing off with “For a Whiter and Brighter World, Creatively Yours.” Though Klassen didn’t know it at the time, his writings would later position the COTC as a front-runner in the new world order of racism. Some of his books are considered classics in today’s white-power movement, and Racial Loyalty is regarded as “good” hate literature both in the United States and abroad, where such publications are hard to come by; in Germany and Canada, for example, it is illegal. The paper has features like “Cupid’s Corner,” a matchmaking service for finding the right–white–mate: “White Men and Women, be fruitful and multiply! This planet is all ours!”
Although Klassen [rightly] claimed that his creation was a religion, he had mixed success convincing government officials of that notion. In 1982, when he built his church in Otto, the organization was granted tax exemption “as a bona fide nonprofit religious organization” from the North Carolina Department of Revenue – a “fact” Klassen cited repeatedly. What Klassen failed to make public, however, was that the state’s approval was contingent on a federal government ruling, and the IRS has no record of an exemption.”
[Text regarding Klassen’s tax exemption fight deleted]
“Along with the COTC’s problems, Klassen faced personal difficulties in 1992. His wife of many decades died after a long battle with cancer. In July, he sold most of his compound, including the church and school, to a former leader of the American Nazi Party. Although the Otto headquarters had never been a hive of activity, he firmly believed he had “succeeded in spreading . . . our creed and program to most of the racially conscious groups all over the world and our creed is now well rooted,” as he wrote upon his retirement.
During this past summer, the 75-year-old Klassen began work on his final project. He had registered a part of his remaining land for a burial plot and was seen clearing it. He went into town to arrange for his gravestone, and on his property he burned shredded documents and took other files to a landfill. On Aug. 7, Klassen quietly committed suicide. His daughter, who had been visiting her father, discovered that he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills. A suicide note – not made public – referred to a chapter in “The White Man’s Bible.” In the book, Klassen wrote: “Suicide (is) not dishonorable. Like the ancient Romans we believe that under certain circumstances suicide is an honorable way to die, rather than live on in shame, humiliation or captivity.” Speculation surrounding his suicide has swelled in recent months. Some say Klassen feared a lawsuit because of the wave of violent crimes by COTC members. Others say he was despondent over his wife’s death. Still others contend that it was a simple matter of his life’s work being done. Klassen would no doubt be pleased that his meticulous planning has resulted in an impressive memorial. On a fall day in Otto, his former property – a little shabby from neglect – is ringed by the reds, burnt oranges and golden hues that mark the changing of the seasons. Tucked between the church and Klassen’s home is a thin strip of grass–freshly mowed–that leads to his grave. A large, gray tombstone bears the Church of the Creator’s insignia, and beneath two carved roses bracketing Klassen’s name, and the years 1918-1993, is the inscription: HE GAVE THE WHITE PEOPLE OF THE WORLD A POWERFUL RACIAL RELIGION OF THEIR OWN.”
[End Times article excerpt]
Note: Harold Covington spent time in South Africa before settling in the United Kingdom for several years, where he made contact with far-right groups. In June 1992 Searchlight exposed his presence in Britain as a double agent, after which he fled to the United States.
More information on Harold Covington can be found at Setting the Record Straight: The Covington Files
