Albert Pike Founder of the KKK

Albert Pike besides being Supreme Master of the Freemasons also was head of the Knights of the Golden Circle that was later transformed into the Knights of the Klu Klux Klan (Klu Klux being Greek for circle).
___

Pike: creation of the KKK[/ b]

Patriotic nationalists continued Lincoln's economic program after the President's 1865 murder. Post-Civil War Reconstruction regimes in several Southern states, led by freed black slaves and allied whites, began to put through measures of industrial and agricultural development.

After Lincoln's death, a covert movement known as the Ku Klux Klan, beginning in 1867 in Tennessee, overturned the Reconstruction regimes with violence and riots, assassinating those loyal to the United States, torturing and killing black people who asserted rights which black and white Union soldiers had secured in the Civil War.

Many years later, when the criminals were no longer in danger of punishment for these crimes, some "inside stories" of the post-Civil War KKK were published, glorifying the Klan in order to re-create it in the twentieth century.

A few years after a United States national monument had been erected in Albert Pike's honor, the leading pro-KKK historian, Walter L. Fleming, disclosed and praised the kingpin role that Pike had played in the Klan's terror spree against U.S. law.[5] (An academic darling of the eastern elite, Fleming was considered the pre-eminent historian of Southern Reconstruction.)

Pike was the KKK's "chief judicial officer," Fleming wrote; Pike thus ruled officially over the Klan's internal disciplinary or counterintelligence department. In the KKK birth-state of Tennessee, Pike was the president of the Bar Association and publisher of the main racist newspaper.

But it was as "Sovereign Grand Commander" of the Scottish Rite, the recognized boss of the southern white freemasonic order, that Pike exercised the great clandestine power that welded the KKK together. Fleming cites Pike's masonic colleagues and Klan co-founders as the main sources for his KKK history.

Pike's successor as Scottish Rite masonic Grand Commander, Congressman James Richardson, introduced the 1898 House resolution authorizing the Pike statue; Richardson had been Speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives in the heyday of the Ku Klux Klan power in that state.

In defense of the Klan insurrection, Fleming writes that "the ex-Confederates . . . naturally [formed] secret associations . . . for self-defense." Fleming then furnishes European precedents for Pike's KKK: "the Carbonari of Italy, the Tugendbund and the Vehmgericht of Germany, the Klephts of Greece, Young Italy, the Nihilists of Russia, the Masonic order in most Catholic countries during the first half of the Nineteenth Century, Beati Paoli of Sicily, the Illuminati, etc." Such groups are "textbook cases" of the colonial and secret service tradition of manipulating "indigenous" people.

A Massachusetts tory, Pike went south to incite whites against the Union; he helped lead the Knights of the Golden Circle, which made armed, filibuster attacks against Mexico and Cuba, and organized the Southern secession. As a Confederate general during the Civil War, Pike was in charge of enticing American Indians to war on the United States; his atrocities and war crimes led to his arrest by the embarrassed Confederates, and an 1865 indictment by the United States for treason. Pike fled to Canada, remaining there under the protection of his sponsors until the heat was off.[6]

When Pike returned to the South, the old Knights of the Golden Circle logo was transmuted into the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan--the title taken from the Greek kuklos, or circle. Pike's Arkansas indictment for war crimes against American soldiers was swept aside by the power of Pike's own clandestine terrorist movement over the Southern justice system. Well known in European occult circles for his satanic writings, a sybarite of massive girth, Pike died in 1891. (Anton Chaitkin, March 20, 1998 issue of Executive Intelligence Review)
[link to www.larouchepub.com]