Ben Klassen, "The Klassen Letters, Vol. 1" (1969-1976) [1988] & "Vol. 2" (1976-1981) [1989]

Ben Klassen was a prolific proponent of ‘White’ racial supremacy. In the early 1970s, he founded the Church of the Creator, a US-based organization devoted to establishing exclusive ‘white’ population of the globe, as well as elimination of Christianity and Judaism. Klassen also identified “Jews” as a ‘race’, and hoped for their elimination as well.

The stated purpose for this collection was to provide a record of the evolution in Klassen’s thinking, from the period where he first considered establishing a racially-oriented ‘religion’ through to the establishment of a World Headquarters for the group. During this period, he authored two books that outlined the Church’s philosophy, Nature’s Eternal Religion and The White Man’s Bible.

The Klassen Letters are, at their most basic, a project of blind hubris. Setting aside the philosophic and logical arguments that might be raised against Klassen’s ideology contained therein, the letters – as a collection of texts – are morbidly tedious. An editor could have trimmed the collection down to about a third of the 300 pages, eliminating the frequent repetition of whole paragraphs from letter to letter, which it appears Klassen adopted as almost stock descriptions of his beliefs. Additionally, Klassen includes his frequent solicitations to correspondents to distribute more of his books, as well as the minutiae of pricing and postage costs and procedures. From a social history perspective these details might be of some interest, but as a summary of a leader’s philosophical development they are distracting, at best.

The Klassen Letters do offer some useful information. Although more widely distributed, Klassen’s writing in the Church’s newspaper, Racial Loyalty, leaves some unanswered questions that the Letters resolve.

While Klassen never provides his readers with a clear, definition of who qualifies as ‘White’, in some of the letters he outlines why he is being evasive on this question. He notes (much to my surprise) that establishing a clear line between someone who is ‘white’ and someone who is not is difficult, due to ‘race-mixing.’ He suggests, however, that those who are ‘white’ know this fact incontrovertibly. He also suggests that details of who is ‘white’ can be resolved later, once the more immediate goal of overcoming global Jewish/Judaic dominance is achieved.

In the later letters, Klassen also advances an intriguing position with regard to self-education. Although a proponent of research and critical thinking (at least with regard to information gathered through the ‘mainstream media’), and as an author attempting to ‘educate’ his readers towards adopting a new point of view, Klassen recommends that readers must at a certain point arrive at a position and stop researching it – particularly if that research merely expands or supports the position already established – and move into action.