Not exactly a roaring success for the Australian Protectionist Party in Newcastle on the weekend: just four anxious souls rocked up on Saturday to their protest against the Islamification of Newcastle, two of them party members. Spokesperson Nicholas Hunter-Folkes is pretty cool though; meathead held a sign reading “LISTEN TO THE MAJORITY NOT THE MINORITY” — all the while being outnumbered by a token number of counter-protesters.
D’oh!
Said one of two concerned local residents to attend the rally:
“We’re here to protest because we don’t I don’t like it I don’t [indecipherable] country being taken over by Muslims stupid politicians let them get away with everything it’s not right.”
A rally opposing a mosque in Elermore Vale was overshadowed by anti-racism protesters at Civic Park today.
But organiser Nick Folkes denied the Australian Protectionist Party was opposed to the mosque on race grounds.
Just four members of the party turned up to protest the proposed mosque.
The protectionist party handed out flyers with an image of a Muslim man holding a sign that said ‘‘Islam will dominate the world’’.
The flyer stated traffic and parking, 5am wake-ups, a drop in house values, migration into the area and extremist elements would be the effect of a mosque in the suburb.
A small group of anti-racism protesters stood behind the party armed with signs stating ‘‘It’s a cowardly racist who hides behind cars.’’
For unknown reasons, Perth plasterer Paul Innes has pissed off from convicted terrorist Don Black’s Stormfront website, for which august forum he was previously the token Aussie moderator (his place taken by a Damn Yankee). Presumably, Paul is too busy planting trees in his Pioneer Little Europe to persist in berating other bigots for misspellings… or something.
Otherwise, Canadian Holocaust denialist Paul Fromm is on tour, and will be speaking in Melbourne on December 11.
Bulgaria
Australian anti-fascist Jock Palfreeman’s appeal against his unjust sentence is continuing. Please consider supporting Jock. For moar details see the Free Jock site.
Radical right-wing skinheads have attacked in the Bulgarian capital Sofia two young Romas and, besides, one of them seriously injured. As the urban authorities informed on Friday, the attack occurred on the Thursday evening in a bus in the city center. The serious casualty has been delivered with a cranial break and a cerebral injury to the hospital, however, is not in mortal danger. The other victim has suffered no heavy injuries. Members Roma-[minority] have to suffer in Bulgaria from discriminations and are the purpose of violent raids over and over again.
Greece
Recent municipal elections in Athens witnessed widespread abstention–roughly two-thirds of the electorate didn’t bother to vote during a second round–and also an apparent swing to the left. In addition, for the first time a member of the neo-Nazi groupuscule Golden Dawn was elected. The ever-reliable and always-outrageous blog From the Greek Streets has loads moar on social struggles in the birthplace of democracy. Otherwise:
1/12/2010- A wave of violent attacks against immigrants by suspected right-wing extremists has put Muslims and the police on alert in rundown parts of Athens with burgeoning migrant populations. Immigrants have been beaten and stabbed near central squares, and several makeshift mosques have been burned and vandalized. In the most grievous attack, at the end of October, the assailants locked the door of a basement prayer site and hurled firebombs through the windows, seriously wounding four worshipers. “The attacks are constant — I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Naim Elghandour, who moved to Athens from Egypt in the 1970s and now heads the Muslim Association of Greece. “I used to be treated like an equal. Now I’m getting death threats.”
Poland
Swedish nutzi Anders Hoegstroem has plead guilty to stealing a sign from Auschwitz (Neo-Nazi pleads guilty to theft of Auschwitz sign, Digital Journal, November 26, 2010) and will spend some months of quiet contemplation in a Swedish prison for his efforts. Also in Poland, members of reich ‘n’ roll band Tormentia were subjected to some harsh criticism by music lovers while on their way to a gig in October.
Russia
Charles Clover has written a lengthy article for the Financial Times on ‘The skinhead terrorists’ (December 3, 2010). Paying particular attention to the murderous antics of one gang of boneheads called the ‘National Socialist Organisation’ (NSO) (aka ‘National Socialist Society’), Clover notes that it was likely funded by some VIPs, and functioned with the state’s blessings, which fact is also meant to be surprising rather than mundane (The Other Russia is one source that provides copious documentation of the Russian state’s otherwise unremarkable gangsterism; the recent Wikileaks of US State Department dox gives the official seal of approval). Clover quotes one former fascist leader who gets straight to the point:
…the problem that the authorities have with groups such as his is not their violence, but the prospect of the political competition they present. There is an implicit contract between bonehead gangs and the authorities under which the state turns a blind eye to violence by bonehead groups, in exchange for their not getting involved in politics.
As antifascist activists marked the fifth anniversary of the murder of the 20-year-old antifascist activist and punk musician Timur Kacharava on Saturday, they claimed that they are under increasing pressure from the police, while the threat of attacks from nationalist radicals has not decreased…
Other Russian antifa to have been murdered in the interim include Alexander Ryukhin (April 16, 2006), Ivan Yelin (January 15, 2007), Ilya Borodaenko (July 2, 2007), Ovanes Ajriumian (October 20, 2007), Fedor Filatov (October 10, 2008), Anastasiya Baburova and Stanislav Markelov (January 19, 2009) and Ivan Khutorskoy (November 16, 2009).
There’s a Union and Community Summer School next weekend (December 10-11, 2010) @ Melbourne Trades Hall. It’s a “public forum to build practical unity within the labour movement, for workers’ rights, social justice, economic democracy and environmental sustainability.”
Trade Union Membership as Proportion of Employees, 1912–2001:
Social Democracy: No Future?
Introduction to Articles on the Retreat of Social Democracy
Relating to the retreat
The question of how we grasp social democracy and its current retreat is now more than ever a practical one. The institutions of social democracy continue to be the focus of many contemporary struggles. In the UK context, this is exemplified in recurrent conflicts over privatization, employment rights and cuts in welfare spending. Hence we face the question of how we relate to these struggles: what do we want and how should we fight?
The question always arises because our immediate experience as proletarians of the institutions of social democracy is characteristically twofold. Consider the example of the welfare state. In the first place, the organs of the welfare state – benefits, health care, free education – present themselves simply as a means of survival. But our experience of such organs is also one of domination, control, objectification. These institutions do not belong to ‘us’; their processing of us often seems to be for alien and bureaucratic aims and purposes – for ourselves only as bourgeois citizens, or in the interests of ‘the public’, ‘the law’ or other such abstractions.
Leftists, emphasizing the first aspect of this immediate experience, campaign for the maintenance and extension of the conditions of the post-war settlement: full employment, the restoration of ‘trade union rights’, reversal of cuts in the health, education and benefits systems, plus a meaningful minimum wage. Yet ‘defence of the welfare state’ and the other leftist demands represent either adherence to reformist social democracy as progress or a misconceived and disingenuous strategy of ‘transitional demands’.
An anarchist or ‘ultra-left’ analysis often emphasizes instead the second aspect of our immediate experience of social democracy: social democratic institutions as control mechanisms. Some anarchist types claim that, without the welfare state, genuine forms of mutual aid will necessarily develop, and thus that we need not resist attacks on the welfare state. However, while it is undeniable that the welfare state has served to atrophy working class community traditions of mutual aid, given the present absence of growth of militant networks and organs of support, this kind of analysis is simply ahistorical posturing. The restructuring of the welfare state is taking place at the initiative of capital and the bourgeois state – albeit in response to previous rounds of working class struggle. This is a time of chronic weakness in the working class and revolutionary movement. Simply to accept the present programme of ‘welfare reform’ is a capitulation to the autonomy of global finance capital and its ideology of neo-liberalism – a force which is currently growing in self-assurance and audacity. This kind of account seems to see the working class as passive and in need of a good kick up the backside to get it to do anything – the more life-threatening the kicking the better. The present New Labour Government’s abandonment of social democracy will not in itself bring us closer to communism: only the self-activity of the proletariat can do that…
Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and “Nazi Rock” in England and Germany
Timothy S. Brown Journal of Social History
Vol.38, No.1 (Fall 2004)
Right-wing extremist rock music–so-called “Nazi rock”–is one of the most problematic of popular musical genres. Emerging from the skinhead youth subculture in Britain at the end of the 1970s, and spreading to the continent and across the Atlantic in the following decade, it has served as accompaniment to a rising tide of racist and anti-immigrant violence in Germany, and become a focus of recruiting for the radical right world-wide. Yet as a generic category, “Nazi rock” is inherently unstable. A phenomenon that is at once artistic and political, it sits uneasily across analytical boundaries. The area of overlap between music genre and political content is, for one thing, far from complete. Rightwing extremist ideas are not strictly confined to skinhead rock music, but have found their way into a variety of other musical genres and youth subcultures. (1) The spread of Nazi rock beyond its original social boundaries–it is no longer simply “skinhead music”–means that the genre and the skinhead subculture are, if still intimately linked, by no means synonymous. Conversely, the various genres that make up “skinhead music” are by no means exclusively right-wing. Although Nazi rock arose out of the skinhead subculture, the subculture is–as will be seen–heavily divided about the meaning and value of the genre. (2)
The original skinhead movement of the late-1960s was a multicultural synthesis organized around fashion and music. The first skinheads were offshoots of the British “mod” subculture of the early 1960s. The mod was stylish, dedicated to cultivating the right look; upwardly mobile, very likely the son or daughter of a worker moving up into the white-collar realm of the bank or advertising firm. Above all, the mod was a music fan, obsessed with dancing to American soul music at all-night parties. (3) From the 1960s, the split implicit in the mod scene–between its working-class origins and its upper-class pretensions; between its subcultural subversiveness and its obvious appeal for boutique-owners and advertisers–began to widen. With the mod subculture swerving ever closer to the commodified, Carnaby-street hippie style of “swinging London,” certain mods began to emphasize the more proletarian aspects of the look, cutting their hair shorter and replacing dandified suits and expensive shoes with jeans and heavy boots. These no-frills “hard mods” prefigured the arrival of the first skinheads. (4) Whereas appreciation for black culture–above all American soul music but also Jamaican ska–had stood at the center of the mod way of life, the skinheads took the connection a step further; their reference point was a local symbol of cool, young Jamaican immigrants who modeled themselves on the authority-defying “rude boy” of the Kingston ghettos. The clean, hard look of these transplanted “rude boys” fit nicely with the stripped-down elements of the hard mod style, and their evening wear echoed the earlier mod emphasis on expensive suits and nice shoes. But by far the most critical element in the symbiotic relationship between skinheads and black immigrants was music. Skinheads embraced the reggae music of Jamaican performers like Desmond Dekker as their own. Reggae artists and labels, in turn, actively courted the skinheads, producing songs and albums aimed at this young white audience. The resulting genre–“skinhead reggae”–fueled the rise of the skinhead subculture while jump-starting the careers of many Jamaican performers in Britain. The identity of the original skinhead was thus constructed in dialogue with black immigrants and organized around music created by black performers. (5)
The decline of the original skinhead subculture by the early 1970s, and its rebirth later in the decade under the influence of punk rock, opened the way for new influences. Not only did fresh musical genres arise around which skinhead identity could coalesce–above all so-called “street punk,” or “Oi!” music–but, for reasons to be discussed below, right-wing politics became fashionable and were embraced by increasing numbers of skinheads. This politicization–which became prominent at the end of the 1970s and reached a peak in the early 1980s–produced a crisis of identity in the skinhead scene. A schism developed between–on the one hand–right-wing skins ambivalent toward, or dismissive of, the subculture’s black roots, and–on the other–left-wing or “unpolitical” skins who upheld these roots as being central to skinhead identity. The conflict between the two sides in this debate became a struggle to define the essence of the subculture, a fight over authenticity. (6)
SAVAGE recriminations have begun over Labor’s shock state election loss, with a former insider launching an extraordinary attack on John Brumby and the ALP hierarchy.
George Droutsas, who was senior campaign officer in Victorian Labor’s head office from 2006 until last year, has told The Age that Mr Brumby surrounded himself with B-grade sycophants who refused to give him bad news or tough advice. He says voters regarded Mr Brumby as arrogant, dismissive and a poor listener who refused to hear genuine community concerns, including about dilapidated public transport, alcohol-fuelled street violence and rising electricity and water bills.
The decision to build Labor’s election campaign around Mr Brumby was a lethal mistake, turning the election into a referendum on him and the 11-year-old government’s record, Mr Droutsas says…
*Following the Liberals’ decision to put the Greens last, the Greens were fuct. The closest they came to winning a seat was in Melbourne, where law-talking guy Brian Walters got 31.83% of the vote, just under 4% behind Labor’s Bronwyn Pike (35.77%).
Hackers have destroyed over a dozen white supremacist websites, releasing private information on a variety of nazi, KKK, and other racist organizations. Private email correspondence, online forum and store databases, and thousands of home addresses and phone numbers belonging to known [fascist] leaders were posted on the defaced websites along with anarchist propaganda. The hackers have targetted a variety of different fascist groups, including Blood & Honour, Combat 18, the Creativity Movement, Vinlanders Social Club, Aryan Front, White Power Skinheads, the Empire Knights of the KKK, the National Socialist Movement, ISD Records, and more.
The released private email correspondence reveals a number of embarassing and often disturbing stories about top neo-nazi leaders in the US and is expected to cause infighting and disunion in the white supremacist scene. Some of the profiled nazis were involved in the military, have been to prison for hate crimes, have raped or molested people, or are just plain racist losers – making one wonder why such a supposed “master race” attracts some sick and disturbed people to their movement.
The release of personal identifying information (including full names,
addresses, phone numbers, passwords, and private pictures) gives anti-fascist researchers and activists a treasure trove of intel to work with, and is also sure to make the boneheads sleep a little less easy at night.
Confronting fringe nazi boneheads is just one front in the larger struggle
against the institutional racism which attacks colonized people in relation to land and labor. We are also fighting anti-immigrant “papers please” laws like SB1070, racist pigs in the police force like Joe Arpaio, John Burge and Johannes Mehserle, and the prison industrial complex which disproportionately targets people of color and the impoverished.
We won’t stop until everyone is freed from the gulags, until the fascists are driven off the streets, until the last capitalist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat. We will continue to use militant direct action to destroy that which stands in the way of us creating an egalitarian society free from racism, sexism, homophobia and all other forms of oppression.
‘Rock Against Communism’ (RAC) is the term given to a genre of racist, right-wing rock ‘n’ roll music popular with boneheads (neo-Nazi skinheads). It emerged in England in the late 1970s in the wake of punk rock and the music festivals celebrating ‘Rock Against Racism’. Rather than being concerned solely with opposition to ‘communism’, as a literal reading of the term would suggest, RAC music is closely identified with the promotion of (White) nationalist, neo-Nazi, racist (especially anti-Semitic), and violent themes. [1] Its leading proponent, until his death in 1993, was Ian Stuart Donaldson of the band Skrewdriver. [2]
RAC and bands advocating ‘White power’ or neo-Nazism have tended to have a very low profile in Australia, punctuated by periodic scandals in the tabloid media. [3] The political marginality of neo-Nazism reinforces this fact. The obscurity of the genre is further reinforced by the common desire of performers and followers to remain relatively anonymous, at least insofar as state and other authorities are concerned. Although not named as such, interest in the genre probably peaked with the release of Geoffrey Wright’s 1992 film Romper Stomper about a gang of boneheads in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray and a soundtrack which featured a number of RAC songs written specifically for the film.
Probably the first group in Australia to adopt a White racialist ideology–and thus become Australia’s first ‘Rockers Against Communism’–was Perth-based rock ‘n’ roll band Quick & The Dead. Other pioneering RAC bands which followed in Q&TD’s boots were White Noise, Open Season, White Lightning and, later, Fortress.
From the late 1980s, the genre has followed wider musical trends to incorporate hardcore and heavy metal within the overall rubric of promoting White racial consciousness. The 1990s was in some ways a fairly barren decade for White power music, but the 2000s have witnessed the emergence of a few more bands to add to the somewhat meagre roster, and the recent reformation of some of the older generation of bands (Q&TD, Open Season) may also inspire some of their younger fans to pick up an instrument.
Another key development has been technological, with the advent of the Internet bringing with it possibilities for communication and exchange that were not possible, or very much more difficult, prior to its emergence. [4] On the flip-side, the easy reproduction of digital music requires followers to sustain higher levels of financial commitment to the milieu, a commitment which generally only accompanies greater ideological fervour. Merchandising and live performance can augment sales of music to some extent, but the problem is ongoing, and reflects wider trends within the music industry as a whole.
Quick & The Dead
Quick & The Dead (Andrew Baird aka Andrew Bored: vocals / Murray Holmesaka Murray OHMS: bass / Mark Oakley: guitar / Andy McPherson aka Andy Priest: drums) formed in 1979 as Audio Damage (one of several names the band adopted), becoming Q&TD in 1981. Q&TD released two albums, one self-titled and the other Kickin’ Into 1982 (both on cassette), a 5-track 7″ EP (Another Violent Night) and a live album. The band’s ouvre has recently been re-released on a limited edition 4-disc compilation CD: The Intimidation is Intentional, Another Violent Night (Coldsweat Records).
After the band split in mid-1983, two members went on to form another ‘White power’ skinhead band named ‘White Noise’; bassist Murray Holmes went to England and joined Skrewdriver in 1984 (leaving again the next year), one of two Australians to play with the band at this time (along with guitarist Adam Douglas). This line-up recorded the seminal album Hail the New Dawn (for which Nicky Crane provided the cover). Q&TD reformed in 2007 in order to play the annual Ian Stuart Donaldson (1957–1993) memorial gig in Melbourne, Donaldson being both Skrewdriver vocalist and the driving force behind RAC in its earliest years.
White Noise
Formed in 1985 following the disbandment of Q&TD, White Noise (Jim King: vocals / Glen Sheridan: guitar) was known for a short time as ‘Final Solution’. WN recorded a few titles: several 7″ singles on the Street Rock ‘N’ Roll label (an imprint of German label Rock-O-Rama)–‘Sick Mind/Rebels’ (SR12, 1989); ‘Clockwork Violence/Head Kicked In’ (SR13, 1989); ‘Ace Of Spades/Thinking Of You’ (SR50, 1990); ‘On The Streets/Violence’ (SR51, 1990)–and the album The First Assault, also released on Rock-O-Rama (RRR 77) in 1988. Reckless Aggression (RRR 100) was a live album released in 1990. Panzerfaust Records released a compilation album in 1999 also titled The First Assault.
White Lightning
Make a stand for your great nation / Against the scum who are going to die. White Lightning released just the one album, We Rule, in 1988. It was re-released as Destiny on French RAC label Rebelles Européens (1987–-1994) in 1990 (RE332190). Although apparently collapsing in 1994, in 1995 Rebelles Européens made a short-lived recovery assisted by an Australian label, White League (White League released a handful of CD recordings before it too dissolved). Former guitarist ‘Aussie’ Nigel Brown (Broadsword, Celtic Warrior, Fortress, No Remorse, Raven’s Wing, Retaliator, Wolfseye), together with Billy (Violent Storm), re-recorded and re-released Destiny as We Rule on Welsh label ‘Independent Voice Records’ in 1998. Two of White Lightning’s other members–Chumley (vocals) and Simon (drums)–now play in the band T.H.U.G., and continue to perform some White Lightning material.
No Remorse formed in 1986. Vocalist Paul Burnley was born Paul Bellany, son of Scottish painter John Bellany. Bad luck seemed to follow the band around in the early ’90s. In 1992, they were scheduled to play a gig in Spain with Welsh band Violent Storm: three of its four members were killed in a car accident; vocalist Billy survived to record songs with Paul as Celtic Warrior. In 1994, No Remorse played a gig in Wisconsin (US) to commemorate the death in 1993 of Ian Stuart Donaldson. Following the gig Joe Rowan, a Hammerskin and vocalist with the band ‘Nordic Thunder’, was shot dead during an altercation at a petrol station.
Open Season
A short-lived (c.1988–1991) but well-regarded band from Sydney, Open Season released a few titles: a split 7″ with French band ‘Legion 88’ on the ‘White League Australia’ label (a continuation/imprint of French label ‘Rebelles Européens’) and the album Front Line Fighters in 1991, also on ‘Rebelles Européens’. The band played a number of gigs with Fortress (Phoenix Rising) and White Lightning in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. According to vocalist Jim: “In Sydney we had no trouble getting gigs, however in Melbourne it was slightly more difficult… only the one time a venue cancelled [on] us and that was when they [were] threatened to be blown up if we played. We still played that night but in another venue.”
Above: Demonstrators outside neo-Nazi group National Action’s short-lived HQ in the Melbourne suburb of Fawkner, 1997.
In 2009, Open Season reformed to play a few dates in Australia, including that year’s Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial gig, and a gig in April 2010 on the Gold Coast to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
Blood & Honour
In the late 1980s the local scene became organised under the banner of Blood & Honour, the organisation Ian Stuart Donaldson helped to establish in England in 1987 following clashes with the White Noise Club, the organisation the National Front had established to capitalise on the popularity of RAC. After Stuart’s death in a car accident in 1993, B&H was subject to further, even bloodier conflict between rival factions, one of which came to be aligned with the openly terrorist ‘Combat 18’. (Charlie Sargent, the former leader of Combat 18, is now serving life in England for the murder of a fellow fascist.)
B&H Australia was the first of many foreign franchises to be established by B&H, which has revived in recent years in the UK, but is also a strong presence in parts of Europe, North and South America. It was also in the late 1980s that the Hammerskins–a bonehead gang founded in Texas which soon expanded to other states and then overseas–was brought to Australia, where the gang is known as the ‘Southern Cross Hammerskins’. The two organisations have worked together closely during the last few decades, and established a hegemony over local boneheads that is only rarely challenged, most recently by another bonehead gang called Volksfront Australia (the parent organisation of which was established by boneheads in an Oregon prison in 1994).
Blood & Honour/Combat 18 has had an even more marginal presence in Australia. Its latest excursion into the public domain followed the conviction of one of its members for his involvement in a shooting incident at a mosque in Perth. Blood & Honour, Combat 18 and the Hammerskins have become proscribed organisations in a number of European countries (Germany, Spain, Portugal) over the last few years, but are legal associations in Australia.
Fortress
Repatriate, ship ’em out, send the bastards back / If they don’t fucking like it, it’ll be in body bags. Fortress were the mainstay of neo-Nazi rock ‘n’ roll in Australia in the 1990s, outlasting both Open Season and White Lightning but not being joined by many other bands until the end of the decade. Like a number of other Australian bands, Fortress proved to be far more popular in Europe than they were in Australia, although their extremist political views placed them in a different category to others.
The band kept the flame of RAC music alive throughout the 1990s, releasing a number of recordings and touring Europe. Originally known as Phoenix Rising, Fortress released their first, self-titled mini-album on the German Rock-O-Rama label (RR 130) in 1992. Their second album Seize The Day was released on Victory Records in 1993 (‘Victory Records’ being one of many substitute titles employed by Rock-O-Rama’s owner Herbert Egoldt (–2005) to avoid the various legal and political difficulties associated with releasing neo-Nazi music). Their third album Into Legend was released on Resistance Records in 1996 and their fourth and final studio album The Fires Of Our Rage was released on Great White Productions in 1999.
Vocalist Scott McGuinness also recorded albums as Dissident (A Cog In The Wheel and Unity Drum as ‘Dissident II’), Axis (Agitate) and Exxtrem (with members of German band Noie Werte). Scott was the vocalist for several other projects, including Garrison and Raven’s Wing. Garrison was recorded with the assistance of drummer Coz (aka Mark Howitzer) and touring English band Brutal Attack in 1996. (In a similar vein, members of touring Belgian band Kill Baby, Kill! recorded Garrison II with Deaths Head and Ravenous, released in 2008 on Strong Survive Records.) The Raven’s Wing album Through The Looking Glass was recorded for German label Destiny Records. Originally released in 1997, it was re-released by Rock-O-Rama in 2008, and featured the talents of ‘Aussie’ Nigel Brown, Keith (KK) Warslut of Deströyer 666 and Coz (again on drums).
Bail Up!
Originally based in Canberra later Melbourne, Bail Up! featured the talents of Damian on vocals and Rod on guitar. They played a number of gigs (including a brief tour of Europe) and released one album On The Rampage in 2002, a split with English band Battle Standard on Rampage Records (UK). Damian, however, is best known for having held the world record for the longest tattoo session:
The last 10–15 years has seen a relative decline in RAC as a specific genre and a proliferation of other musical forms employing similar themes. The most notable is heavy metal, especially black or thrash metal. The convergence of the two has produced a genre known as ‘National Socialist Black Metal’ (NSBM). [5] Generally speaking, however, racialist themes in heavy metal, where they exist, have been submerged in more general exhortations to misanthropy, Satanism and the glorification of violence. Thus, outside of the very few who self-consciously describe themselves as NSBM, relatively few bands adopt an explicitly racist or fascist identity, preferring to flirt with neo-Nazi imagery and racial symbolism. In Australia, bands such as Spear of Longinus (Brisbane) are the exception rather than the rule.
One, reasonably prominent band which has come under scrutiny for its links to racism and fascism is:
…Melbourne band Deströyer 666, which recently released their CD “Unleash the Wolves” through Modern Invasion Music (based in Frankston). Though their lyrics are carefully coded to avoid any obvious racial attacks, their inner sleeve thank-yous go to the members of Fortress, Squadron and Ken McLellan from Brutal Attack (the British bonehead group, formerly known as Dead Paki In The Gutter, toured Australia in 1996). Members from all of these groups recorded a mini CD together in Australia over two days last year entitled “Garrison”, also released through Nordland – an incestuous scene, it is.
How seriously the histrionics associated with metal acts should be taken is an open question. That said, heavy metal bands have on occasion been more than happy to share a stage and to raise funds for neo-Nazi groups: Deaths Head, Ravenous and Vomitor played a White Christmas B&H gig in Brisbane in December 2000 (Blood and Honour zine, No.21).
Apart from Spear of Longinus, few Australian metal acts have embraced NSBM. One-man band Arysk is another exception, as are (arguably) Abyssic Hate, Deströyer 666, Gospel of the Horns and Vomitor, although apart from some lyrical allusions and the collaboration of individual members in neo-Nazi recording projects–KK Warslut/Deströyer 666 (Raven’s Wing), Ryan Marauder/Gospel of the Horns (Deaths Head) and Mark Howitzer/Gospel of the Horns (Garrison, Raven’s Wing)–none of the latter are self-proclaimed neo-Nazis. A few metal bands who are explicitly neo-Nazi in political orientation are Deaths Head and Ravenous.
Deaths Head / Ravenous
Originally based in Brisbane, Deaths Head (1999) and Ravenous relocated to Melbourne in the early 2000s. Ravenous is–or was–Shannon (bass/vocals), Joel (drums) and Donovan (guitars). The band released one album, Blind Faith, on Midgard Records, in 2001.
Deaths Head is Andrew (guitar) Jesse (vocals–also Kilgore and Spatter Pattern) Ryan (bass–also Gospel of the Horns) and Joel (drums). The band has been one of the most prolific and long-lived of local RAC performers. Their first album Onslaught (2001) and second album Feast Of The Jackals were both released on US label Panzerfaust Records. (A demo tape called Hang The Traitors was released in 1999.) The band toured Europe in April 2003 playing gigs in France, Germany and Switzerland. Their third album Hatreds Disciples was released by North X Records in 2005, followed by a live album Metal Skin in 2006 and Kriegslied in 2008 on BHS Service. A Decompilation of the band’s songs was released on Moloko Plus last year and the band’s latest is a concept album titled Baldr on GKS33. (Deaths Head also released a split with Purification on Ingo Knauf’s German V7 Versand label in 2004.)
Viking Power Rock & Roll!
Music to save your soul / Viking power rock and roll. Blood Red Eagle were formed in Newcastle (NSW) by Douglas Schott. BRE has released several albums: The Warrior EP (Barracuda Records, 2003), An Evil Shall Break Forth (Viking Thunder, 2005), Return To Asgard (Barracuda Records, 2005 / Dim Records, 2008), Teutonic Atavism (Eigenproduktion & B&H Finland Magazine, 2005), Australiana (Pure Impact, 2005) and Burning Down The Churches (Free Your Mind Productions, 2007). Once closely associated with B&H and the SCHS, the band has been rejected by them and realigned itself with rival neo-Nazis in Volksfront. BRE have played shows in Australia, New Zealand and the USA.
Others
In 2001 the band Blood Oath garnered some media attention on account of the fact that its members were also members of an Australian Army unit 3RAR. [6] Originally the vocalist in the equally obscure Southern Cross before Blood Oath, Gideon later loaned his vocal talents to Code 13 (US). Brisbane band Honour Guard were about in the late ’90s and early ’00s. They released one album, titled The Beckoning Of The Blood. ZOG pulls strings destroying our lives / Laughing in your face my people will rise. More recently, Indigenous Hate formed in WA to play, but seem to have crashed and burned soon after launch. Ultraviolence is seemingly Adelaide’s only contribution to RAC, which is somewhat surprising given the relative popularity of National Action in that town.
Finally, an honourable mention must be made of Xenophobe from Napier, Aotearoa/New Zealand, New Zealand’s only neo-Nazi band on New Zealand’s only neo-Nazi distro, Blood Sacrifice Productions.
Gigs
Given the paucity of bands, gig are fairly rare, and when they do occur are organised in semi-secrecy to avoid legal and/or ‘political’ complications. The central event on the neo-Nazi calendar is the Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial gig, held every year in September on or about the date of his death. The first such gig was held in 1994; 2010 was the 17th year in which the occasion has been commemorated. Other gigs have been less frequent–to celebrate Adolf Hitler’s birthday (April 20), ANZAC Day (April 25), or for other reasons. As noted, all such gigs are held in relative secrecy, both in order to avoid harassment from media, police or anti-fascists (although none has ever been directly attacked) but also in order to avoid potentially negative repercussions for venues willing to offer neo-Nazis a platform. A list of recent ISD gigs and their line-ups include:
2003: Bail Up!, Blood Red Eagle, Deaths Head, Fortress, Ravenous
2004: BRE, Bully Boys (US), Deaths Head, Fortress
2005: Bail Up!, BRE
2006: Bail Up!, BRE, Ultraviolence
2007: Bail Up!, Final War (US), Fortress, Q&TD
2008: BRE, Kill Baby Kill! (Belgium), Ravenous
2009: Open Season, Ravenous (The Commieknockers)
2010: Blue Eyed Devils (US), Deaths Head, Open Season, White Knuckle Driver (US)
Distros
9% Productions
Run by and with the support of members of Blood & Honour / Southern Cross Hammerskins 9percentproductions.com derives its name from the supposed fact that 9% of the global population may be classified as ‘White’. 9% sells music, patches, pins, tees and other neo-Nazi merch as well as a handful of books and pamphlets.
Heathen Noise
Closely allied with Volksfront Australia, Heathen Noise is a relatively new distro based in Sydney.
Scythian Services
Ken Cratchley is–or was, until very recently–a member of the NSW Humanist Society‘s Committee of Management. He’s also a member of the ‘Christian Separatist Church Society’, [7] the Stormfront website (joining it in November 2002, where he posts using the handle ‘Pastor Bullets’) and runs a neo-Nazi music distro known as ‘Scythian Services’ (SS). Sydney-based band ‘Southern Storm’ have two albums on the SS label: Stormtroopin’ (2004) and Suden Sturm (2003), and have also released a split with ‘Runes of War’ titled It’s Time To Get Revenge On Our Enemies (2009) on US-based NSM Records. (SS also released the album Aryan Law by Runes of War.) According to the National Socialist Movement, Southern Storm features an Australian member of the neo-Nazi party (note that the NSM has entered into a very fruitful collaboration with the Phoenix, Arizona Police Department of late in a continuing war on illegal immigration). A song by Southern Storm appears on an ISD Records compilation released in 2004, a curious fact given that ISD Records was allied with Combat 18.
War Doctrine / White Noise Productions
White Noise Productions is a local promotion established in mid-2008 by Adamus Exul vocalist Gareth/Jack Sansom aka Mord (ex-Wood of Suicides bass/vocals). Originally intended to promote local metal acts, for unknown reasons Gareth decided in early 2010 to convert WN into a tool for promoting B&H and other neo-Nazi music. Gareth also manages local (non–racialist) band Perseverance and recently opened a (neo-Nazi) distro named War Doctrine which markets NSBM and other neo-Nazi agitprop (books, clothing, flags, etc.).
Notes
Three articles in the Australia/Israel Review provide further background reading on the Australian neo-Nazi music industry: The Music of the Nightmare by Allon Lee (December 2007), Sounds of Hate by Tzvi Fleishcher (August 2000) and Sounds of Violence by Michael Shannon (April 1997).
[1] “The decline of the original skinhead subculture by the early 1970s, and its rebirth later in the decade under the influence of punk rock, opened the way for new influences. Not only did fresh musical genres arise around which skinhead identity could coalesce–above all so-called “street punk,” or “Oi!” music–but, for reasons to be discussed below, right-wing politics became fashionable and were embraced by increasing numbers of skinheads. This politicization–which became prominent at the end of the 1970s and reached a peak in the early 1980s–produced a crisis of identity in the skinhead scene. A schism developed between–on the one hand–right-wing skins ambivalent toward, or dismissive of, the subculture’s black roots, and–on the other–left-wing or “unpolitical” skins who upheld these roots as being central to skinhead identity. The conflict between the two sides in this debate became a struggle to define the essence of the subculture, a fight over authenticity.
Music played a crucial role in this process in two ways. First, music appreciation–specifically, knowledge of the reggae classics around which the skinhead subculture was originally organized–became, for one group of skinheads, a litmus test for authenticity. Second, genre itself became a contested site. On the one hand, the skinhead revival of the late 1970s crystallized around a punk-infused revival of the Jamaican sounds of Ska (a precursor to reggae) centered on the Two Tone label and bands like the Specials and Madness. These multiracial bands were explicitly political in their support for racial unity centered on appreciation for music. Yet their fortunes were inextricably linked with the skinheads who embraced them, yet all-too-frequently wrecked gigs with politically-inspired violence. On the other hand, the skinhead version of punk rock–Oi!–arose to supply the basis for the creation of an explicitly political style of skinhead music. Although the majority of the Oi! bands considered themselves “unpolitical,” by providing an artistic forum for skinheads to express their own ideas, Oi! became a mirror of the left-right divide within the skinhead scene. It was out of this polarization that the genre of “Nazi rock” developed, and through it that successive iterations of the struggle for skinhead identity were played out.” Timothy S. Brown, ‘Subcultures, pop music and politics: skinheads and “Nazi rock” in England and Germany.’, Journal of Social History, Vol.38, No.1 (2004).
[2] See White Noise: inside the international nazi skinhead scene, edited by Nick Lowles and Steve Silver (Searchlight, 1998) for further information on the roots of RAC.
[3] The most recent example of which accompanied a gig on the Gold Coast in April 2010.
[4] An early analysis of some aspects of this is contained in Gareth Norris, Robyn Lincoln and Paul Wilson, ‘Contemporary comment: An examination of Australian internet hate sites’, ePublications@bond, Humanities & Social Sciences papers, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, January 2005 (PDF).
[5] See the Definitive Metal Family Tree from Sam Dunn’s 2005 documentary film Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey for further classification.
[6] See Admiral Barrie announce[s] team to investigate 3RAR, PM Archive / Nazi accusations against members of 3RAR, The World Today Archive / Army Battalion Identified As Having Neo-Nazi Links, AM Archive: ABC, December 19, 2000.
[7] “For many the means of interpreting the Bible is part of their argument that our society has been “corrupted” by the Jewish conspiracy throughout history. The Christian Separatist Church Society (CSCS) is one of these groups that subscribes to such beliefs. The CSCS proposes that because the King James Version of the Bible was originally written by Jews, it was meant to hide the actual truth. Instead of taking their scripture from such versions as the King James, New International, or Revised Standard Versions, they only recognize the Anointed Standard Translation (AST) derived from the Greek Septuagint, which is argued to be the earliest translation of the Bible from Greek to English. On the CSCS’s web site they quote numerous scriptures to support their claims that God advocates the hate and separation of all sinners, interpreted by many followers of such groups as minorities.” Wes M. Toole, Religious Extremism: Christian Right or Wrong (2000).
Bonus!
100 Per Cent White — A Diverse Production for Channel 4. Filmed, produced and directed by Leo Regan — is an excellent (Geraldine Doogue:) “fascinating” documentary film, examining the lives of several boneheads (including Neil Parish) 10 years after the filmmaker first encountered them, at a time when they were each actively involved in C18 and allied groups.
Inspired by a similar gathering in Sydney in April this year, the melbourne feminist collective is organising a conference to take place next year @ North Melbourne Town Hall over the weekend of May 28/29.
On Wednesday, December 15 @ Bella Union Bar @ Trades Hall, Cordelia Fine will be talking about her book Delusions of Gender: The Real Science behind Sex Differences. This will be “A fascinating event for science buffs and anyone interested in combating sexism”, apparently. You can also watch Cordelia @ Slow TV.
The Socialist Party’s Steve Jolly done well: 2,395 votes and counting — almost 10% of the total. This is moar than the totals of the five Socialist candidates combined: the Socialist Alliance’s Mitch Cherry (206 votes) in Bellarine, Trent Hawkins (310 votes) in Brunswick, Margarita Windisch (447) in Footscray and Ron Guy (339 votes) in Melton. The Socialist Equality Party’s Peter Byrne ran as an Independent in Broadmeadows and got 578 votes.
There weren’t any candidates from far right party’s running, but a transcendental and/or libertarian fascist did help launch the Sex Party’s campaign, so that’s something I guess.
The chant goes up: “what do we want? The right to protest!” At first, the cops give curt answers to the kids demanding to know why they can’t get through. Then they all seem to get some sort of signal, because suddenly the polite copper in front of me is screaming in my face, shoving me hard in the back of the head, raising his baton, and the protesters around me are yelling and running back. Some of them have started to shake down a set of iron railings to get out, and the cops storm forward, pushing us right through those railings, leaving twenty of us sprawling in the rubble of road works with cracked knees. When they realised that they are trapped, the young protesters panic. The crush of bodies is suddenly painful – my scarf is ripped away from me and I can hear my friend Clare calling for her son – and as I watch the second line of police advance, with horses following behind them, as I watch a surge of teenagers carrying a rack of iron railings towards the riot guard and howling to be released, I realise they’re not going to stop, and the monkey instinct kicks in. I scramble up a set of traffic lights, just in time to see a member of the Metropolitan police grab a young protester by the neck and hurl him back into the crowd…
See also : Far-right Freedom Party most popular among young Austrians: “Austria’s far-right Freedom Party has become the country’s second-most popular party. The party, which campaigns on an anti-immigrant platform, even ranks first among voters under 30, a new poll found” (Deutsche Welle, November 20, 2010).
The bloodstained Order of United Americans first appeared in New York City in 1844 and soon spread to Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Catholic churches had been torched now and then since the mid-1830s (actually black churches too, but not on account of religion). In 1834 a nativist mob had burned the Convent of the Ursuline nuns in Charlestown, Massachusetts. Now arson became endemic, climaxing in Philadelphia in 1844, when a mob of six hundred self-proclaimed American Republicans burned down St. Micheal’s and St. Augustine’s Catholic churches and torched many Irish residences. The rioting lasted three days, killing thirteen and wounding fifty. In Pittsburgh in 1850 a candidate running on the “People’s and Anti-Catholic” ticket won the mayoral race. During the 1850s Massachusetts and Connecticut enacted voter literacy tests in an attempt to curtail immigrant Democratic voting power. By the mid-1850s clubs of the Order of United Americans flourished in sixteen states.
Much early anti-Catholic violence was more or less spontaneous and poorly organized, driven by fear that the Irish would lower wages or increase crime. But nativism gained an important institutional basis with the founding in New York City, in about 1850, of the secret Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner. Members soon became labeled “know-nothings” because they customarily responded to queries about their order with “I know nothing”. Members had to be born men in the United States of native-born parents. Natives married to Catholics could not join. Know-Nothings had a broad agenda that differed according to their class and region.They especially hated Catholics, but they also opposed liquor and political corruption. In New England, they challenged the mass voting of immigrants for the proslavery Democratic Party.
In terms of their tactics, Know-Nothing clubs like the Order of United Americans and the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner traded on patriotism. Most local chapters took the names of founding fathers or heroes and battles of the American Revolution. A political party spun out of the Supreme Order of the Star-Spangled Banner was actually named the American Party. So patriotic a title encouraged members to brand opponents “anti-American”. In the Midwest, for instance, where Germans had settled and voted in large numbers, refugees from the European revolutions of 1848 almost automatically seemed anti-American on account of their suspected radicalism.
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
