Robert E. Miles
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Robert E. Miles (Pastor Bob Miles), (deceased, 1992)
White supremacist leader from Michigan. A major "dualist" religious leader allied with the anti-Semitic political-religious tendency Christian Identity, including Aryan Nations. According to Miles, Earth was 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," white Aryans. [Barkun, 1994]. According to Barkun, "Despite the idiosyncrasies of his theology, the avuncular Miles functioned as a kind of elder statesman of the racial movement."
In 1971, Miles, then the grand dragon of the Michigan Ku Klux Klan, was arrested for conspiring to bomb school buses to stop the integration of public schools in Michigan.[1] He was later convicted and served his sentence.
Following the 1979 "Greensboro Massacre" of anti-klan activists in 1979, "a number of previously antagonistic White supremacist groups, including the Posse and various neonazi and Klan factions, began to discuss ideology and joint activities and to establish 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 the Michigan farm of pastor and former Klan leader Robert E. Miles, as well as the Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho, the site of Identity Pastor Richard Butler’s Church of Jesus Christ Christian." [Berlet & Lyons, 2000].
[edit] References:
- Michael Barkun. 1994. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press.
- Chip Berlet and Matthew N. Lyons. 2000. Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort. New York: Guilford Press.
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