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Question about KKK terminology

 
 
 
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Why do they KKK call their leaders by mythological terms like Grand Dragon, Grand Wizard ,Grand Cyclops, etc? Most people in the rural South shit their pants about stuff like Harry Potter
 
Because they were a bunch of hillbillies trying to sound cool and edgy in the late 19th century.
 
What's the big deal? If you dress up in cosplay and run around in the field with your friends, you call yourselves dragons and wizards. That's just how LARPing works.
 
Tom Sawyer said:
What's the big deal? If you dress up in cosplay and run around in the field with your friends, you call yourselves dragons and wizards. That's just how LARPing works.
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Remember the movie Eurotrip? There should be a sequel where some Europeans come to America, and one of them is a LARPer who mistakes the Klan for some new friends and the scenario ends in a vehicle chase where everyone of the Klansmen has a car resembling the one from the Duke's of Hazard.
 
Originally the KKK was a scam. Of course they came up with fancy labels!
 
They originally referred to themselves as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Alot of their initial terminology was steeped in medieval imagery (or what passed for medieval imagery in 19th century pop culture), so you would have to know something about the culture to get the reference. Dragons, knights, wizards, etc... all references to King Arthur fables and romanticized knights and dragon slayer imagery.

It's sort of like how modern white supremacists invoke, say Bane from "Dark Knight Rises" or have all these clever acronyms to describe their enemies. Or when you hear a white supremacist on 4chan talk about someone being "redpilled," meaning they took the red pill and broke out of the Matrix-like fantasy of all the races being equal. A hundred years from now, people who never saw The Matrix and have no idea what the fuck a "redpill" is will probably be asking why the lowest ranked contributors to Stormfront were sometimes referred to as "redpills."
 
Crazy Eddie said:
They originally referred to themselves as the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Alot of their initial terminology was steeped in medieval imagery (or what passed for medieval imagery in 19th century pop culture), so you would have to know something about the culture to get the reference. Dragons, knights, wizards, etc... all references to King Arthur fables and romanticized knights and dragon slayer imagery.

It's sort of like how modern white supremacists invoke, say Bane from "Dark Knight Rises" or have all these clever acronyms to describe their enemies. Or when you hear a white supremacist on 4chan talk about someone being "redpilled," meaning they took the red pill and broke out of the Matrix-like fantasy of all the races being equal. A hundred years from now, people who never saw The Matrix and have no idea what the fuck a "redpill" is will probably be asking why the lowest ranked contributors to Stormfront were sometimes referred to as "redpills."
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I'd say the first one makes perfect sense even out of context. White Supremacy goes hand in hand with the Crusader Mythos so it makes sense that the original WS's would model their organization off a knightly order (With refferences to grandmasters and the like)

Admittedly I had at first assumed a red pill referred to republicanism as a whole (Featured as being the 'red' party in American politics) and that the matrix refference was just a clever secondary thing.
 
In the Nineteenth Century people loved to dress up and give themselves funny names - see our National Eisteddfod, which was just about antithetical to the KKK in values. The difficulty with the 'States nowadays is that historical nostalgia has got itself mixed up with some sick buggers who desperately need treatment, like some of the sillier English tories.
 
Yes, it was an age of secret societies. The Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Copperheads, good and bad, everyone had a secret society.
 
Sarpedon said:
Yes, it was an age of secret societies. The Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Copperheads, good and bad, everyone had a secret society.
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Actually, it was the age of societies, or to be exact, fraternal orders. Those you mentioned the most prominent, because they had national organization. In the 19th century, there were limited options for a man's evening leisure in a city or town. After supper, he could sit around the house, go to a saloon, or join a lodge. Some lodges were temperate, some had a bar, but it was a place to play cards, dominoes, or whatever, for a couple hours, without the wife worrying about where you were.
There were hundreds of local lodges across the country. Some were based on labor unions or trades. There were a lot of volunteer fire departments which created their own lodge. Men could belong to as many as a dozen or more. Each had their own costumed initiation ritual, based on the Bible, Greek mythology, Norse mythology, etc, all designed to impress the initiate of the solemness of their vow of loyalty and fealty to their brother lodge members. Along with the metaphors of the ritual, came the ranks and titles of the lodge's officers.

The Klan's peculiar nomenclature was not really all that unusual for the time.
 
Bronzeage said:
Sarpedon said:
Yes, it was an age of secret societies. The Masons, the Odd Fellows, the Elks, the Copperheads, good and bad, everyone had a secret society.
Click to expand...

Actually, it was the age of societies, or to be exact, fraternal orders. Those you mentioned the most prominent, because they had national organization. In the 19th century, there were limited options for a man's evening leisure in a city or town. After supper, he could sit around the house, go to a saloon, or join a lodge. Some lodges were temperate, some had a bar, but it was a place to play cards, dominoes, or whatever, for a couple hours, without the wife worrying about where you were.
There were hundreds of local lodges across the country. Some were based on labor unions or trades. There were a lot of volunteer fire departments which created their own lodge. Men could belong to as many as a dozen or more. Each had their own costumed initiation ritual, based on the Bible, Greek mythology, Norse mythology, etc, all designed to impress the initiate of the solemness of their vow of loyalty and fealty to their brother lodge members. Along with the metaphors of the ritual, came the ranks and titles of the lodge's officers.

The Klan's peculiar nomenclature was not really all that unusual for the time.
Click to expand...

Fraternal Orders also gave ordinary working men an 'outside world' in which people cared about them, as employers had long ceased to do, seeing them only as things to buy as cheaply as poossible. My Mother used to describe how, as a girl, she used to go past a lodge of the Ivorites, the Oddfellows or such, and almost always see a notice saying 'Brawd wedi marw' (A brother has died) and be overwhelmed with sorrow for this incredibly unlucky family!
 
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