Free A Song Called Youth by John Shirley Page B

Church theology preached. It is, in fact, a more refined version of the Christian revisionism taught by the Kingdom Message organizers who declared themselves to the public about 1983. That’s about when they began to rob banks and armored cars to finance their acquisition of automatic weapons and the other toys of right-wing “survivalists.” They called themselves “the Church of Jesus Christ Christian” or “The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord” or “the Aryan Nations” and they held that Jesus Christ was not a Jew, was in fact of Aryan descent; that Great Britain and the United States were the true promised land, the true Israel referred to in the Bible; that blacks and other minorities were mongrel peoples who had no souls and were of no greater spiritual worth than animals. And they maintained that Hitler has been unfairly vilified by the Jews; that the Holocaust never happened. In 1985 there were about 2,500 people in such organizations in the United States—chiefly in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California. Many of them were recruited out of prisons, always hotbeds of racism . . . Supposedly there were “several hundred-thousand” sympathizers scattered across the country. Some of the more enterprising members of the Identity Church realized that they looked like country yokels, which kept people who were otherwise sympathetic from taking them more seriously. So they formed a secret society, called the Secret Aryan Fraternity. They linked up with more public groups, like the Georgia-based Council of Conservative Citizens. Groups like these were paranoiacally cautious about publicity, and security. And, very carefully, the SAF and friends began to integrate their people into urban and suburban middle-class society; into colleges and country clubs and lodges and offices. They began to support political candidates, or mount their own candidacies—without ever honestly declaring their actual political stand. They played moderate or simple conservative—when in reality they were beyond merely “conservative.” They were social time-release capsules, moles, of sheer racial hatred. Predinger is believed by some to have been one of the SAF. It’s never been proven. It may be just coincidence that the SAF and the SAISC share the same first two initials. But it has been determined that Crandall’s father was a member of The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord . . . Summary: The SA’s general theological creed, its public creed, is ordinary Christian fundamentalism, with no overt racist tinge. Its Initiates are privy to the Identity Church’s Jesus-as-Aryan hardcore-racist variation. Initiates administer the general membership. The Initiates in turn are governed by the Second Circle.
    The Second Circle, the inner ruling council of the SA, is reported to have a more intellectualized racist vision that doesn’t insist on a belief in Jesus’ Aryan heritage. Jesus, for the Second Circle, is simply an arbitrary symbol chosen to represent genetic purity. The DNA molecule itself, twisted into a circle, is the Lord’s halo . . . 
    Politically, the SA’s private credo was, simply and bluntly: fascism.
    And we are not talking fascist here as a left-wing dilettante calls a war-hawk “a fascist,” as an insulting term, a mere pejorative. We are talking about definitive fascism. Predinger and Crandall were both, privately, admirers of classic fascist and racist demagogues, including Mussolini and Hitler himself. They were anti-Semitic and anti-black . . . 
    “Anti-black?” Hard-Eyes interrupted. “You said they recruited partly from third-world countries.”
    Dreamily, almost offhandedly, Smoke said, “Actually, they deceived certain black African military dictatorships into providing money and other forms of support. But they kept them in the dark about the real SA political goals. And they didn’t recruit soldiers from black countries.”
    Jenkins looked at Smoke in