EXTREMISMThe Chilling Crime Spree of The Order – and Its Lasting Effect on Today’s White Supremacists
The new historical crime drama, “The Order,” starring Jude Law and Nicholas Holt, is being described as a riveting “cat-and-mouse thriller.” But for criminologists like us, the white supremacist extremism that takes place in the film is not a nod to a distant past, but a reflection of beliefs and rhetoric that still percolate on social media and inspire acts of terror.
Justin Kurzels’ new historical crime drama, “The Order,” starring Jude Law and Nicholas Holt, is being described as a riveting “cat-and-mouse thriller.”
But for criminologists like us, the white supremacist extremism that takes place in the film is not a nod to a distant past, but a reflection of beliefs and rhetoric that still percolate on social media and inspire acts of terror.
The film’s namesake, the real-life white supremacist group The Order, which operated in the early 1980s, laid the groundwork for many of the white power gangs that are active today.
The Order’s Origins
The Order, also known as Brüder Schweigen, which is German for “The Silent Brotherhood,” was founded in 1983 by Robert “Bob” Mathews, an avid antisemite and white supremacist who held anticommunist and conspiratorial, anti-government beliefs.
A lifelong member of the John Birch Society and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mathews joined the National Alliance, which was led by William Pierce, shortly after moving to the Pacific Northwest in 1974.
Pierce was arguably the era’s leading thinker in the white power movement and had authored “The Turner Diaries,” a dystopian work of fiction detailing a race war that became popular among the racist right.
At this point, Mathews also entered the orbit of another prominent figure in the white power movement, Richard Butler, while visiting Butler’s Aryan Nations compound in Hayden Lake, Idaho.
Butler was a patriarch of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian, a sect that was a racist and antisemitic perversion of mainstream Christianity. Each year, Butler hosted the Aryan Nations World Congress, a summit that brought together a potpourri of figureheads and groups from across the white power movement.
Shortly after the 1983 gathering, Mathews and eight other disillusioned white men – four of whom had served in the U.S. Armed Forces – formed The Order. Mathews wanted The Order to be the premier paramilitary strike force for the white power movement’s leadership. Their express purpose was to usher in a white supremacist society.
The Order was also a melting pot of white power ideology, with members recruited from the National Alliance, Aryan Nations, Ku Klux Klan, Christian Identity congregations, Posse Comitatus and the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord.
A blueprint for a Race War
Mathews was no stranger to paramilitary groups.
A decade earlier, he had formed the short-lived Arizona Sons of Liberty to repel the “fomenting communist revolution” in America, with fellow Birchers and Mormon survivalists.
