Hella Nation - Evan Wright [56]
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Butler was active in the far right causes, participating in dozens of cross burnings and neo-Nazi rallies. During this period, he came into contact with the Christian Identity teachings of Wesley Swift. Swift was an ordained Methodist minister who delivered sermons from the pulpit of his Hollywood, California, church that blended Nazi propaganda with Christian fundamentalism, science fiction and, perversely enough, myths of the Torah. From Swift came the basic tenets of Christian Identity: That the Hebrews were Aryan. That the Jews were spawned by Satan. That nonwhite races, called “muds,” belong in the animal kingdom. Only people of Aryan descent can claim to be God’s children, his chosen people.
In the Christian Identity telling of world history, the white man is the perpetual victim of a diabolical Jewish race. According to Butler and his flock, it was a Jewish trick claiming that Jesus was a Jew; he was an Aryan. The Israelites were not Jews; they were Aryans. Hebrew is not a Jewish language, it’s Aryan.
Butler cites from a considerable body of conspiracy literature—much of it printed by him on the Aryan Nations printing presses—proving that the Jews brought all the slaves to America, the Founding Fathers were anti-Semites and wanted to expel the Jews from America, and the Federal Reserve Bank and the United States Marine Corps are owned by Jews. It’s only fitting that the same printing press used to produce counterfeit money during the Church’s most overtly violent period in the 1980s also produced so many of these bogus historical documents. Some of these forgeries are spotted just as easily as the funny money was. An anti-Semitic speech attributed to Benjamin Franklin, for instance, uses phrases not found in the English lexicon until the 1930s.
In the coming war prophesied by Pastor Butler, most races—blacks and all the other “mud people”—will be spared from death, so long as they get out of America. The Jews are not so lucky. “If the Aryans win, there won’t be any more Jews,” Butler says.
A skinhead office boy enters and stands respectfully at attention to ask Butler a question about prison inmate correspondence. As the young skinhead leaves, Butler gives him a paternal smile. “The skinheads who come here, of course, resent. They resent what’s been taken from them by the Jew. But they’re not dressed like street bums coming out of a trashy ghetto. What they have on is clean, it’s good and everything is in perfect order. And they realize that picking on some little Jap or Chink isn’t the answer.”
He continues, “In America today, the children talk back, sass to get their own way and take drugs. Anyone who’s ever seen Triumph of the Will can see the decline of our youth by comparing the youth at a rock concert today to the youth in Triumph of the Will. There’s a stark difference. Our youth today dress in run-down shoes with their hats on backwards. Whereas the Germans were taught to dress up, to look like somebody.”
Pastor Butler lays the blame for the degeneration of social values on the Jewish influence in Hollywood, citing the movie Independence Day as an example. “A nigger and a Jew save the whole white race!” Pastor Butler says, outraged at the preposterousness of it.
Even lower than the Jews are traitorous whites, the “wiggers,” or “white niggers,” who sell out the race by promoting interracial sex. One of the worst “wiggers,” according to Pastor Butler, is Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, paralyzed by a round fired by white supremacist Joseph Paul Franklin, who later admitted he had been outraged by the “Peaches” pictorial in the May 1978 Hustler, which featured a black man screwing a white woman. Butler claims to have helped minister to Paul before his attempted execution of Flynt for being a race traitor, and also to possess inside knowledge of what transpired. He says, “I understand