Blood and Politics (33 page)

Like other ideological white supremacists, Peters self-conciously conflated race with nation, believing that those who were not white (and Christian) were “aliens” rather than first-class citizens. Unlike others, however, who drew their reasoning from National Socialist or Dred Scott Americanism sources, Peters justified his beliefs almost entirely by his reading of scripture, and his source of authority was available to anyone in the pews with his or her hands on a Bible. Identity believers contend that understanding the racial identity of the ancient “people Israel” is the key to understanding everything else. In their hands, the Bible is both a history of the Twelve Tribes of Israel and a prophecy for the future of their genetic offspring. As such, Identity theology is rooted in a nineteenth-century phenomenon known as British Israelism.

British Israelism was a creature of the British Empire, a period of unparalleled power for the Anglo-Saxon island. This “ism” retold the story of ancient Israel’s division into two kingdoms after King Solomon’s reign. In the northern kingdom, then known as Israel, ten of the twelve tribes lost themselves in the customs of the surrounding non-Hebrew peoples. Approximately 150 years before the first Temple fell in 585
BC
the northern kingdom was completely conquered by the Assyrians, and the newly subject people were exiled. These ten tribes, the Lost Tribes of lore, then supposedly migrated north and west into Europe, according to this doctrine. The southern kingdom, composed of the tribes of Benjamin and Judah, which had been conquered and carried off to Babylon, returned to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea only to be dispersed also into northern Europe.

This supposed migration was described in one British Israelist publication in a quick paragraph: “When the people of the Northern Kingdom went into Assyrian captivity, they did not remain there. During the subsequent dissolution of the Assyrian power through its involvement in foreign wars, the people of Israel escaped in successive independent waves, leaving the land of their captors when the opportunity came to do
so. Under different names (Scutai, Sak-Geloths, Massagetae, Khumri, Cimmerians, Goths, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, etc.) they moved westward into the wilderness, across Asia Minor, then into Europe and eventually into the Scandinavian countries and the British Isles.”
¹⁷

From the British Isles and northern Europe it was a quick hop over the Atlantic to North America, and the United States and Great Britain are linked, according to this dogma, by a common biblical prophecy. The blessings of Joseph, the favorite of Jacob’s sons, are supposedly national destinies passed through his two sons. Manasseh, a “company of nations,” is supposedly the United States. Ephraim is Great Britain. It is their birthright to be the wealthiest, most powerful nations, dominating and colonizing the world by divine right. The white man’s burden, it turns out, had been mandated three thousand years before Rudyard Kipling.

“This included territorial expansion and a multitudinous seed,” one magazine tract argued. “. . . Now that’s the worth of our identity with Israel. It establishes our claim to the great things God said should be Israel’s in the latter days . . . It explains why the Anglo-Saxon-Celtic nations have been the only successful colonizers; why they possess the gates of their enemies . . . why the United States occupies the position it does.”
¹⁸

In this fashion, British Israelism explained why Britain developed an empire and the United States became a superpower. In short, it was a set of ideas that rationalized power and privilege. The Identity doctrine, by contrast, developed after World War Two, during the period of decolonization and the political emergence of the Third World and the United Nations. Great Britain lost its colonies in Asia and Africa and no longer possessed the gates of its enemies. In the postwar period, white supremacy in the United States was hammered by Supreme Court decisions, a vibrant black freedom movement, and a change in the civic attitude toward civil rights. Wilmot Robertson described this same transformation as the “dispossession” of the white majority. Identity thus became a theology that explained this dispossession (while promising a grand redemption in the future). In this reading of scripture, Aryan Israel’s enemies now possess
their
gates. And looming large in this construct is Satan, a metaphysical rival to the Lord and an all-powerful force or personage able to directly sway events on earth.

Satan. Beelzebub. Diablo. In John Milton’s
Paradise Lost
he is one of God’s angels, who rises in rebellion with one-third of the hosts and loses
a great battle on the plains of heaven. Alas, poor Lucifer once vanquished is thrown into hell’s grasping pit. Goethe’s Mephistopheles must first ask the Lord’s permission before tempting Faust with promises beyond comprehension. In the end, Mephisto’s realm is not a glowing celestial orb, but the rotting proverbial dungheap of yore. In the Hebrew reading of the Bible it is the people of Israel’s own loss of faith—the worship of false gods—that undoes them. Jews do not blame Satan for the ten tribes’ adopting Assyrian ways and becoming lost. When Satan appears in the Hebrew Bible, he is a provocateur, making his argument to God but with no direct power on earth. He is a tease, but he is not equal to the Lord and cannot remake God’s creation. The devil in the Book of Job, for example, only confirms God’s power in the end. If the devil is a second-rate, subordinate character in the Hebrew reading of scripture, he is just the opposite in the hands of Christian Identity. And Peters’s Satan is “the Jew.”

Where did Peters’s Satanic Jew come from? Such a question never entered the deliberations of those, like William Pierce, who did not adhere to any of Identity’s concepts. For them, Jews were simply a distinct species, a biological genus forever at war with Aryandom. That was that. For Carto, Jews were (alternatively) an alien virus infecting Western Civilization or engineers of a grand “Zionist conspiracy.” It mattered little to Carto where Jews came from, only that they should go back there. Identity believers, on the other hand, had to find the Jew as Satan in the same place they found themselves as Aryan Israelites, the Bible. Without Adolf Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
or Francis Parker Yockey’s
Imperium
as guides, Identity discovered everything and everyone in its Bible.

Actually, while Identity believers all share the same view of themselves as the progeny of Israel, they remain divided over the exact nature of Satan and the Jews. Within the movement, the different points of view are often referred to as “Two Seed” and “One Seed.” Both camps of course seek to explain the modern status of Satan through an explication of his origins in the Bible. Two seeders believe Satan and the Jews are consanguine, whereas one seeders believe that Jews are a “mongrel race” that resulted from interbreeding with other peoples. Both tendencies teach that a supposed enmity between Jews and white people (Christians) started with antagonisms between biblical brothers. Nevertheless, the disagreement within the movement about the nature of a Jewish Satan is real. Two seeders believe that Jews are the descendants of Cain, who murdered Abel; one seeders believe that Jews are descendants of Esau, whose birthright was given to his brother Jacob. For those outside the white supremacist movement, trying to comprehend this part of Christian Identity theology may seem like an unnecessary distraction
filled with biblical arcana. Yet Christian Identity as a whole cannot be fully grasped without understanding the difference between naming Cain or Esau as the first embodiment of the Jewish Satan.
¹⁹

This distinction is a central difference among Identity followers. According to one leading preacher, “the doctrine of seedlines enables the believer in Yahweh to build a conceptual vision of all Scripture.”
²⁰
Since scripture is the foundation of their worldview, this difference takes on added significance, including practical and tactical consequences. The one seeders are mostly mainstreamers like Peters. The two seed camp is composed primarily (but not exclusively) of vanguardists.

For two seeders, Satan makes his first biblical appearance as the snake in the Garden of Eden. By most non-Identity interpretations, the snake convinces Eve (and, through her, Adam) to disobey God’s command and eat from the Tree of Knowledge. For many Christians, this is the moment of original sin. But Identity followers believe the Satan snake encounters Eve and impregnates her. At the same time, Eve is pregnant by Adam. Eve is thus carrying two seeds: Satan’s and Adam’s. Remember Cain and Abel were considered twins. In this story, Satan’s seed produces Cain. And Adam’s seed produces Abel. Cain is evil incarnate, the personification of Satan himself. And it is Cain himself whom two seeders regard as the father of the Jews. Satan thus now walks upon the earth in the personhood of the Jews, and it is through their evil deeds that Satan manifests his wickedness. Again, remember the Book of John, where Jesus is talking about the Jews in
Chapter 8
Verse 44: “Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in truth, because there is no truth in him.”
²¹

According to this doctrine, Jews are thus genetically predetermined to be the embodiment of Satan on earth, just as white people are to be the children of God. By stressing the story in the Garden, two seeders push the determining moments of racial history back to the beginning of time and the origin of life.

One seeders, on the other hand, believe that both Cain and Abel are sired only by Adam. Peters, for example, contends that although Cain is obviously evil for murdering Abel, the two brothers aren’t racial antagonists.
²²
Instead, enmity between Jews and (Anglo-Saxon) Christian Israel purportedly derives from the conflict between Jacob and Esau.

According to the Hebrew reading of the Bible, Esau was the oldest son of Isaac and by tradition was to be his father’s heir. While Esau is a hunter, his younger brother, Jacob, tends the fields at home. Upon returning home exhausted and hungry from a hunt, Esau implores his
brother to feed him. Jacob gives him a bowl of pottage, but only after Esau trades his birthright inheritance for it. Jacob then receives the blessings that were to go to Esau. Jacob later takes the name Israel, or “wrestler with God.”
²³

Christian Identity’s one seed believers pick up the story at this point and contend that Jacob-Israel became the genetic father of the “Anglo-Saxon-Celtic and kindred peoples.” By this same telling, Esau’s descendants, also known as Edomites, are supposedly the first incarnation of the Jews. These Edomite-Jews intermarried with non-Aryan tribes, which violated God’s Law. And they became a Satanic
force
, even if the
personhood
of Satan didn’t reside within them.
²⁴

According to this one seed story, the Satanic nature of Jews is not derived from the personhood of their supposed father. But it is no less immutable for that. Jews cannot shed their Satanic character by becoming Christians, as the Catholic Inquisition in Spain forced many Jews to do. The one seed doctrine does not include a nonracist version.
²⁵

Among one seed Identity adherents, the Satanic nature of the Jews is regarded as unchanging and unchangeable and considered biologically derived and racial. One of Pete Peters’s acolytes, Charles Weisman, from Minnesota, explicated this problem in great detail, leaving no room for a nonracial view of the Jews to emerge within any Identity camp. He frequently spoke at Peters’s Bible camps and wrote the booklet
Who Is Esau-Edom
? to explain his views. According to Weisman, the descendants of Esau and Jacob “were regarded by God as two different nations or racial groups.”
²⁶
They acted differently in public, had dissimilar worldviews, and obeyed different moral codes. These differences, he argued, were based not on differing cultures or environment but on genetics. “This contrasting and conflicting ways and thinking between Jews and the white European is not artificial or a result of their environment,” Weisman wrote, “but is based on the nature of their physical constitutions.”
²⁷

According to this biological determinist argument, these differences, symbolized in the Bible, are genetic and unchangeable, a sign of God’s hatred of the Jews.
²⁸
“God’s hatred of Edom is not a temporary thing but is perpetual,” Weisman says of the Jews.
²⁹
Accordingly, Christian Identity believers conclude that Jews have a “hereditary hatred” for Christians and white people.
³⁰

Although Pete Peters and Charles Weisman reject being identified with Hitlerism, Identity theology rings with many of the same themes as Hitler’s secular anti-Semitism. In
Mein Kampf
, Jews were painted as the source of both capitalism and communism; they allegedly provoked
international war to destroy Aryans and parasitically sucked the life from others’ culture. Weisman located the same nonsense in his Bible.
³¹

Despite the seeming omnipotence of Satan in Christian Identity doctrine, Pete Peters did not cede to the Jews total power over the white race’s sorry condition. Rather, he believed Jews prevailed because white people had failed to obey God’s Law. “God has told His people they must obey that Law or suffer the curses that come from disobeying it,” Peters wrote. Once again mixing biological determinism with religious mythology, he concluded: “This is a genetic reality, i.e. the curses of disobeying God’s Law follow His people wherever they go, from generation to generation. One of those curses involves alien people, that is, people of races other than the Israel people (today we use the term minorities rather than aliens) rising above and oppressing God’s people.”
³²

In Identity parlance, strangers and aliens are scriptural terms for people who aren’t considered white Israelites. Peters and others use biblical language to transform religious differences between the ancient Hebrews and other tribes into racial-national differences between peoples today. These racial-national differences are then supposedly codified by God into mandates to maintain strict racial segregation.