Many of my recent posts have focussed on the tendency of Biblical writers and readers to re-write or re-interpret history to further their own agenda. This is a popular technique in the faith, but it isn’t a habit that’s just restricted to Christianity. Scientology is probably the most notable example of a religion that ignores actual history in favour of something their founder made up, but even L. Ron Hubbard’s mad sci-fi ravings pale beside the – ahem – “imagination” of Dwight York, founder of the religious/political movement of Nuwaubianism.

Like a strange mirror-image of the white-supremacist movement, characterised by the ignorant screeds of StormFront, Nuwaubianism promotes an alternative view of history in which “Nubians” are the master-race. Examining his defence of this position is tricky, since there appear to be several contradictory arguments which York uses interchangeably, ranging from the claim that white people were originally genetically-engineered soldiers, “created to fight other invading races, to protect the God race Negroids,” to the idea that Nubians are of extraterrestrial origin, descended from strange “Ether-9” beings with green skin (apparently, their green skin rusted in our oxygen-rich atmosphere, turning them brown). Alternatively, he also puts an ironic spin on the standard racist interpretation of the “Sons of Noah” myth, claiming that yes, black races were descended from Ham, via his son Kush, but that white races could also trace their ancestry back to Ham, via his leprous son Canaan. Then there’s the idea that white men are descended from dogs:

“The pale man originated from the Caucasus mountains, where there was very little plant life and not much means for salt. This condition forced him to rob the Nubian female of her chastity in order to keep his seed alive, it’s called integration. The Caucasian woman who was left in the mountains, resorted to lying with and having sex with beasts: such as the jackal, which is an ancestor of today’s dog. The phrase “dog is man’s best friend” came from this situation. The dog would lick the festered sores of the leper and clean them for him. His seed was kept alive because the Caucasian woman and the jackal mated. This is where you get people who possess an animalistic nature.” Dwight York, The Melaninite Children

It’s all a bit confusing: am I a science experiment gone wrong, an alien slave, a leper or a sort of hybrid dog-man? Please, Mr York, make your mind up – I’ll never get my family tree worked out at this rate!

Mind you, Dwight himself seems to be having some problems figuring out his own ancestry. His birth certificate shows he was born in Boston, although he claims to have been born in the Sudan. His father, according to said birth certificate, is David Piper York, although Dwight claims his real father is Al Haadi Abdur Rahman Al Mahdi, making him a descendant of Muhammad Ahmad, the Sudanese religious leader. Unfortunately, Dwight would also quite like to claim descent from “Ben” York of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, which is made rather tricky if he disowns David Piper York as his father. To get around the problem, York claims that his mother and “step”-father were actually second cousins, this granting him “Ben” York’s bloodline through his mother. Of course, given that Dwight York also claims to be an alien from the planet Rizq, one has to wonder how much all this geneology really matters… It’s handy that he comes from a different planet, since this grants him access to useful technology like the NIBIRU spacecraft, into which he is secretly collecting the 144,000 Chosen Few to train them for the upcoming war against Lucifer. The Nuwaubian Rapture has apparently been going on since 2003, although to date, nobody has noticed. A possible reason for this is that the extraterrestrials have been secretly beaming images into the heads of Hollywood filmmakers, so that their films can be used to discredit people who know the truth. Another explanation could be that it’s all a big load of bollocks. Guess which alternative the Nuwaubians prefer?

Listing the other insanities of Dwight York would take more space and time than I have available, but here are a few of my favourites:

• Disco music was invented by the devil
• Nikola Tesla came from Venus
• Aborted foetuses survive and live in the sewers, where they are being trained as an army
• The world’s heads of state are planning to flee to Mars when the Apocalypes kicks in
• York is the only human who still has a functional barathary gland, meaning that he has telepathic and telekinetic powers. Everyone else’s barathary gland has been disabled.
• Many African-Americans are actually descended from Native American Moors, who travelled to North America before the Pleistocene land bridges collapsed (about 15,000 years ago)
• Dr Seuss books serve as an indoctrination into Satanism

Today’s final fun fact about Dwight York: he may well be the most prolific child-molester in US history. When he was being prosecuted for fucking four-year-olds, prosecutors actually had to cut back the number of counts listed from over a thousand to around 200, since they felt the actual scale of his atrocities was too great for a jury to take seriously. He will be spending the rest of his life in a prison cell, although naturally his followers still claim the whole thing was a set-up, perpetrated by the white Satanists. Nuwaubianism does not look as though it will rot in jail with its founder, which is a pity, since a more abhorrent and dehumanising belief system would be hard to envisage.