K R Bolton
700 Words
Over the past few days there has been much brouhaha over leaflets allegedly distributed around Tauranga, to an unknown extent.
The leaflets have received further attention – insofar as their distribution had reportedly occurred in April – because they provide the pretext for the Māori Party to make mirthful claims that Tauranga is awash with “white supremacists” and therefore the party cannot safely stand a candidate, while generating easy publicity for the party.
It seems that the leaflets refer to the Church of the Creator (COTC), or “Creativity Movement,” and advertise books by its late founder, Ben Klassen, a former Florida legislator who became wealthy as a realtor and the inventor of an automatic can-opener. Hence, what he lacked in followers he could compensate by being able to self-fund his books and periodicals, and construct a large “church” on land at which he committed suicide.
It’s NOT “Alright to be White”?
The leaflet that seems to be the basis of the outcry is headed “It’s Alright to be White.” It appears that, based on the reaction to the slogan, there is widespread opinion that it is not “alight to be White.” This evokes other questions as to where the actual, indeed pervasive, “racism,”- in addition to an unhealthy self-abnegation – reside, given that all ethnicities other than the New Zealand-European, are encouraged to identify with their heritage. The mildest expression of European identity is condemned as “white supremacy” (sic) in no lesser manner than the race-war doctrine of the COTC.
The leaflet in question retorted that White New Zealanders should not be ashamed of their heritage. Again, one might look askance at those who find such appeals to be expressions of “white supremacy,” and somehow intrinsically violent. It is, after all, unlikely that those expressing outrage have the foggiest idea as to what the COTC is, and what the books by Klassen advocate. The very fact that the leaflet is headed “It’s alight to be White” suffices to ensure histrionics. Whig-liberals such as Don Brash, Hobson’s Pledge, the Act Party and David Seymour have been subjected to precisely the same reaction.
Paul Spoonley has urged if not prosecution, then at least what seems to be a lynch-mob type mentality in calling for the distributor to be outed.
Not from the Right
However, the nature of this leaflet, I suggest, is lamentable from a Rightist perspective. The COTC slogan is RAHOWA (“Racial Holy War”), intended as the universal White counterpart to Jihad. Its appeal is to “nature’s finest,” the “White race,” its symbol is a “W” (White) topped by a Crown. Its utopian vision is to so diminish, somehow, the “mud races” (sic) that the world will one day be a White paradise. To this extent it is apocalyptic and messianic, but the doctrine of the COTC is materialistic, and avidly anti-Christian, professing Klassen’s definition of “nature’s eternal religion,” the title of his first book and COTC “bible.” Here there is really no room for a transcendent spirituality, and the ethos is social-Darwinism. Its race-doctrine is reductionist; predicated on the materialistic assumption that civilisations collapse through miscegenation, rather than generally via epochal decay.
“Creativity” is antithetical to the Right, belonging to an ideological path that is divergent. The actual Rightist ideological heritage established by Spengler, Burke, de Maistre, et al, did not have the slightest discernible influence on Klassen, but academic “experts,” journalists, race relations commissars, and political opportunists are not about to address any of that.
As for New Zealand, the COTC terminology (one cannot say organisation) has very sporadically, over the past four decades, emerged precisely in the manner of its present manifestation – as no more than letterbox drops by loners. The publicity it has generated does not reflect the reality, but then reality does not serve certain agendas, so myths must be maintained.
That the COTC exists in anything other than the imagination of one or two adherents (or provocateurs?) is unlikely, but it does provide Europhobic bigots with a rationalisation for pontificating on “threats” that do not exist, justification for the repression of legitimate expressions of Euro-New Zealand self-defense, and a much-needed example of “white racism” for the human rights commission annual report.
The European New Zealander 