"The Perils of Hobbyism" by Dr. William L. Pierce

"The Perils of Hobbyism" is a short essay from the National Alliance Bulletin of November-December 1992.

At the time, Will Williams had recently become membership coordinator of the National Alliance. Harold Covington was continuing personal attacks against Williams which he had undertaken originally as retaliation for "The Anatomy of a Hypocrite," a polemic against Covington credited to Williams and Ben Klassen that had been published by the Church of the Creator in March 1989.

Dr. Pierce's purpose was to warn the membership against being provoked into responding to Covington's wild claims about Williams or other members of the National Alliance (which he published in his free newsletter called Resistance), since Covington would use whatever information he could gather from responses as material for fabricating even more stories, which would, by dint of containing some elements of truth, carry some credibility, and therefore be all the more destructive.


Here is the passage where Dr. Pierce describes what Covington had done to the Church of the Creator:

Before he began writing to Alliance members, Covington spent most of his waking hours during the previous two years harassing a racially oriented organization headquartered at the time in North Carolina, the Church of the Creator, led by Ben Klassen. He wrote hundreds of letters, some ten pages or more in length, to members of that group asserting that Klassen was a Jew, a homosexual, a pederast, and a murderer.

Mr. Klassen may have some ideas about diet (people should eat only uncooked fruits and vegetables), language (we should adopt Latin as a universal European language), and other matters which seem odd to many people, but he most certainly is not a Jew, a homosexual, a pederast, or a murderer.

Because the Church of the Creator had very loose membership policies and attracted a large number of hobbyists, Covington was able to elicit many responses to his mailings and eventually built up a nearly complete membership list for the group. He also was able to keep the gossip in the group boiling at a destructive level. [...]

Covington's technique was to mix half-truths with outrageous lies which he simply invented.

Covington has had the audacity to claim that Dr. Pierce was his source for the rumor that Ben Klassen was responsible for the murder of a "Barry Edwards." Here we have it from Dr. Pierce himself that this was bunk. 

Covington has claimed that Dr. Pierce accused him in this essay of being a verifier. Careful reading will show that he does not.  The verifier seems to have been mentioned  simply as an example of how somebody who takes a less-than-completely-serious interest in White Nationalism might add profit to his hobby, compiling lists of names for some agency. What Covington did to the Church of the Creator, as Dr. Pierce describes it, went well beyond identifying members.

Dr. Pierce made a couple of insignificant errors: he referred to Frank Collin's defunct organization as the American Nazi Party.  Mainstream media often called it that, but the legal name was National Socialist Party of America. Also, Frank Collin was not born with the surname Cohn: it was his father who had made that name-change.


For clearer images click on these links and click again to enlarge the image:   
Perils of Hobbyism 1          Perils of Hobbyism 2          Perils of Hobbyism 3