Robert E. Miles
Robert E. "Pastor Bob" Miles (January 28, 1925 – August 16, 1992) was a white supremacist theologist and religious leader from Michigan.[1]
Biography
A major "dualist" religious leader, Miles allied himself with various groups that constituted the racist and anti-Semitic political-religious movement known as Christian Identity, including Aryan Nations, founding the Mountain Church of Jesus Christ the Savior on his property in Cohoctah Township.[2] Miles saw Earth as the site of a battle between a true God and a false god, with Jews acting as agents of the false God against the true "chosen people" that would be "white Aryans". According to the political scientist Michael Barkun, his dualistic theology was important despite its idiosyncrasies, and "the avuncular Miles functioned as a kind of elder statesman of the racial movement".[3]
In 1971, Miles, former Grand Dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan (KKK), was arrested for conspiring to bomb school buses in an attempt to stop the forced busing in Michigan. The media billed it as a "Klan trial" even though Miles had not been associated with the KKK for some time. He was later convicted and served his sentence.[4]
Following the Greensboro Massacre where anti-Klan communist activists were killed, "a number of previously antagonistic White Supremacist groups, including the Posse Comitatus and various Neo-Nazi and Klan factions, began having discussions about how they could formulate a common ideology. These different groups also conducted joint activities and even began establishing informal means of communication including computer bulletin boards and cable TV programs. Many of these groups embraced Christian Identity. Gradually, a White racist alliance emerged. Centers of this movement included Miles' Michigan farm, as well as the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, the site of Identity Pastor Richard Butler's Church of Jesus Christ Christian.[5]
In the early 1980s, Miles endorsed the Northwest Territorial Imperative in his seminar Birth of a Nation. According to him, White Americans constitutes a separate racial nation and urged white nationalists to establish a separate white state in the Pacific Northwest. "Let us go in peace", he wrote, "let us be considered a Racial Nation of Aryans."[6] Coupled with his increasingly anti-US government position, he was referred to as a "Klanarchist".[7]
References
- ^ Vinyard, JoEllen M. (2011-06-07). Right in Michigan's Grassroots: From the KKK to the Michigan Militia. University of Michigan Press. p. 278. ISBN 9780472051595.
- ^ "Former KKK leader Robert Miles dead at 67". UPI. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
- ^ Barkun, Michael (2014-02-01). Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. UNC Press Books. p. 116. ISBN 9781469611112.
- ^ Gardell, Mattias (2003-06-27). Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Duke University Press. p. 350. ISBN 9780822330714.
- ^ Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press.
- ^ Gardell, Mattias (2003-06-27). Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism. Duke University Press. pp. 112–13. ISBN 9780822330714.
- ^ Kaza, Greg. 1987. "Hitler's Klanarchist". Fifth Estate, #326 (vol. 22, #2), Summer 1987. pp 16, 28.
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