Ben Klassen
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Ben (Bernhardt) Klassen (1918 — 1993) was a former Florida State Republican Legislator and the founder of the white supremacist Church of the Creator (COTC).
Klassen was born in the Ukraine to a Mennonite family. At the age of six, he moved with his family to Herschel, Saskatchewan (in Canada). He attended the German-English Academy (now Rosthern Junior College). In 1968, he moved to Florida to work for George Wallace's presidential campaign. In 1973 he founded the original Church of the Creator (COTC) which changed its name to the World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) in 1996 when Matthew F. Hale was elected as its Pontifex Maximus, or Head Priest, and later to The Creativity Movement (TCM) in 2003 after a trademark dispute with the TE-TA-MA Truth Foundation. He attracted several hundred white supremacists as members from the US, Canada, Sweden, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, and South Africa.
Klassen first popularized the term Racial Holy War (RaHoWa) within the white supremacist movement. He also consistently called Black people "niggers" in public discourse as well as in the literature of the WCOTC, as opposed to many white nationalist leaders who use relatively more polite terms for the aforementioned race in public. For example, the 7th commandment of the WCOTC's "16 commandments of Creativity" openly uses the word "nigger".
Klassen committed suicide in 1993 after the death of his wife, by overdosing on sleeping pills. In his suicide note, he made reference to his book The White Man's Bible, which describes suicide as "an honorable and dignified way to die for any ... of a number of reasons, such as having come to the decision that life is no longer worthwhile."
Klassen was the author of several books - Nature's Eternal Religion (1973), The White Man's Bible (1981), Expanding Creativity (1985), A Revolution of Values Through Religion (1991) and many others.
