Blood & Honour is an international neo-Nazi network, founded in 1987 in the UK, which promotes fascist ideology through music. Ian Stuart Donaldson, singer of the band Skrewdriver, was the co-founder — along with the gay bonehead Nicky Crane — and its leader until his death in 1993. The network (which is split into two rival factions) organises gigs, sells CDs and other merch, raises funds for the neo-Nazi movement, and engages in other forms of political activism. B&H is proscribed in Germany and Spain, but active in Australia and many other countries.
Blood & Honour took its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth, Blut und Ehre. The code 28 is often used to signify ‘Blood & Honour’ (derived from the second and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet, B and H).
In 1993, B&H Australia was the first franchise to be formed outside of the UK: the person generally blamed for this being Scott McGuinness of now-defunct local band Fortress — Fortress supposedly played their final gig in 2007. This gig was one of the many annual gigs in Melbourne organised by B&H (and boneheads belonging to the Southern Cross Hammerskins) to commemorate the death of Ian Stuart Donaldson. Recent venues have been:
- 2008 : Beaconsfield Hotel, Beaconsfield
2007 : Melbourne Croatia Social Club, Sunshine
2006 : Birmingham Hotel, Fitzroy
2005 : Birmingham Hotel, Fitzroy
2004 : The Jam Tin, Cheltenham
The next B&H/SCHS gig is scheduled to take place in Perth on April 25, when the boneheads will be pissing on the memory of the Australians (and er, New Zealanders) who died fighting their hero Adolf Hitler. Like all other gigs organised by B&H/SCHS, while the date is advertised, the venue is not.
Anyway…
I was at a punk gig last night in Geelong, just checking out the local scene. I met a guy there that calls himself an “Aussie Pride” Skinhead and says he’s a part of Southern Cross Soldiers. His name is Sam, he’d be about 18. I want to suss him out, if he’s any good I’ll try and get a bit of a pro-White scene going on down here properly. I also met a guy, I think his name was Doug? Anyway, I was too pissed to remember exact details but he says he does vocals for Bail Up? If you or any of the other guys know this Sam guy, let me know your thoughts on him. I think he said he has mates that aren’t White, which I’m willing to tolerate, as long as he isn’t red, a druggie or a race-mixer.
He also says Indigenous Hate has pulled out of the ‘Fuck the ANZACs’ gig.
If correct, then the two bands scheduled to perform will be Quick & The Dead from Perth and Ravenous. Ravenous is a local Melbourne band, and closely associated with both Blood & Honour and the Hammerskins. Ravenous (and Deaths Head) member Jesse, a Hammerskin, maintains a channel on YouTube which, in addition to nutzi muzak, features two very brief cartoons featuring the decapitation and shooting of ‘Sheky’ the Jew. The band has also secured the co-operation of MySpace.
http://www.myspace.com/deathshead88
- Deaths Head is also notable for having provided local oi! band Bulldog Spirit with a drummer, Joel. Doug, the vocalist for Bulldog Spirit, is a big fan of mine, and it was in this spirit that he published what he claimed (erroneously) to be my work address on an online forum frequented by boneheads.
In addition to Ravenous (and Deaths Head), Jesse is also responsible for recently establishing a neo-Nazi distro called 9% Productions. It flogs muzak and sundry other items. See also : Nazi… sorry I meant… Noble Front (February 11, 2009) | Noble Front vs. ZOG (June 11, 2008) | Neo-Nazism in Germany: Music & Politics (March 5, 2009) | Neo-Nazi Muzak : Denmark, Germany… and Australia (August 29, 2008)
http://www.youtube.com/user/genocidal88
http://9percentproductions.com
http://www.bloodandhonouraustralia.org
http://schammerskins.org
It had never occurred to me that being a neo-Nazi would mean you have no respect for Aussie soldiers who fought against Nazis. I don’t think the Aussie Pride lads will tolerate this anti-ANZAC shit.
No… and yes.
Depends what you mean by the “Aussie Pride lads”.
Fascists — including of course neo-Nazis — have deep esteem for militarism. Inre the ANZACs, overwhelming emphasis is placed on WWI, Gallipoli, and the usual mythology surrounding The Birth of a Nation on blood-drenched Ottoman beaches. With regards Australian participation in WWII, this is generally regarded as a tragedy, but certainly not sufficient reason to repudiate Nazism. Rather, the general consensus is that the ANZACs — while remaining admirable — fought on the wrong side. It’s also the case that Nazi apologists frequently refer to those ex-servicemen who had Fascist and Nazi sympathies: Eric Butler may be the most famous Australian example.
So: on the one hand, deep respect for the ANZACs insofar as they embodied militarist values (and the ‘defence’ of White Australia); on the other, regret and sorrow over what is regarded as being a conflict internal to White Civilisation.
Toaf’s point is interesting. You’d think the smarter neo-Nazis would try to cash in on the unassailable status of the ANZACs. These guys have clearly failed Hitler 101.
Also, and this is rather off topic, do you have any thoughts on Marxism 2009? I ask as they appear to have dedicated a section to critique of anarchism. From what I can see, some of the points raised have been addressed on this site before, but I’m always eager to see a socialist/anarchist dialogue/deathmatch.
I certainly think Toaf’s point is relevant — and the smarter neo-Nazis do try to cash in. That said: self-described neo-Nazis are few and far-between; fascist ideology contains many contradictions, and most of its adherents, at least here in Australia, are chronically incapable of developing a means of overcoming these…
Re Marxism 2009: yeah.
‘A history of Anarchism – a Marxist critique’ by Colleen Bolger
4pm, Friday 10th April, Melbourne University
Reading List for Marxism 2009
Mick Armstrong, Is there anything radical about anarchism?, Socialist Alternative No. 117
Paul D’Amato, Anarchism: How not to make a revolution, ISR No. 3
Geoff Bailey, Anarchists and the Spanish Civil War, ISR No. 24
Lance Selfa, A life of controversy, ISR No. 34
Dunno if I’ll make it, but I expect at least one or two other anarchists may go.
I’m very familiar with this critique, first having encountered it maybe 20 or so years ago — I don’t think it’s altered substantially since the iSt was formed — and it tends to ultimately rely on the work of Hal Draper. His argument is usefully critiqued by Tom K in ‘Marxism, Anarchism, & the Genealogy of “Socialism From Below”’, Upping the Anti, No.2, 2006.
Mick Armstrong, Is there anything not counter-revolutionary and traitorous about Mick Armstrong?, Socialist Alternative No. 117.
Run to Paradise:
You anarchist crazy!
You are ultra-violent and in no serious sense part of the blogosphere. Just like your black bloc mates in Europe you simply exploit my blog for your own purposes.
Right throughout your commentary you have made clear your hostility to and contempt for other people. Today you have done all you could to disrupt this blog and you are hostile, abusive, threatening and ultra-sectarian towards other people on it.
The Australian blogosphere, fortunately, has not previously been blighted by the sort of black bloc anarchist activities which have had such a disastrous impact on blogs in Europe. You people are simply provocateurs that open up blogs to state censorship. In Europe, your ranks have been riddled by police agents and fascists.
What gives you a certain critical mass on slackbastard is the presence of considerable numbers of anarchists from overseas. One of my staff members from New Zealand said he recognises the handles of at least 40 NZ anarchists. He knows at least 20 of them by name. There are also a considerable number of black bloc anarchists from Europe. We know of people from Sweden, Germany and England. These people are like football hooligans who travel the world looking for blogs to comment on and violence.
On top of this, there are also a considerable number of commentators from interstate.
Because of the behaviour of you provocateurs the media and the law and order brigade are having a field day.
The left should offer no comfort to you crazies. We should do whatever we can to isolate you. You are wreckers. If you grow in Australia it will simply make it harder to build future blogs and websites.
Since THR is raising these matters… I was wondering whether you’d read Wobblies and Zapatistas by Lynd and Grubacic. It’s on my reading list, but it’s a bloody long list. If you’re interested, the authors were on ATG last year.
Oh, and on the Aussie Pride lads, I was thinking of the kind of blokes I run into at the Narellan Pub – southern cross stickers on the ute, southern cross tatts on the forearm, anti-immigrant attitudes. I don’t reckon the extreme message would wash with them. (Someone should tell ’em you can see the southern cross in Argentina, too…)
Hey Toaf,
I’m aware of the book; I ain’t read it, altho’ I’ve read other stuff by the two authors. (Thanks for the link.)
On the Aussie pride bizo: yeah. Nationalist and xenophobic sentiment may be necessary to neo-Nazi ideology, but they’re obviously not sufficient. These sorts of attitudes often sit in a sometimes uneasy alliance with support for trades unionism, and a sense of class solidarity. The ways in which the labour movement and the working class as a whole responds to such matters has a long and sometimes inglorious history; transnational labour mobility is of course a pressing issue in the context of ‘globalisation’, and the political responses to this have been varied. Much of organised labour, or at least the more ‘progressive’ elements, has recognised the importance of forms of transnational class solidarity — a project which has its own, sometimes quite inspiring, history.
What chances are there of contemporary Cabinet Ministers, and nearly all the members of the Queensland Parliament, pledging financial aid to striking London dockworkers?
Fuck-all, I’d hazard.
Of interest: ‘The Liverpool dockworkers’ strike 1995-98 and the Internet’, Chris Bailey [PDF] and Striking dock workers + revolting RTS types, Bristle KRS, February 4, 2008 [inc video]
Much of organised labour, or at least the more ‘progressive’ elements, has recognised the importance of forms of transnational class solidarity — a project which has its own, sometimes quite inspiring, history.
I think this point is at the heart of the problem. We have a GFC, and yet there’s every chance that the left will pass up on the opportunity to change the system.
I think there’s a serious economic argument to be made that the GFC could have been greatly mitigated, and possibly avoided, if workers in SE Asia had better pay and conditions. It might mean less consumption of cheap goods in the West, but nobody ever died from not having Chinese sunglasses or a Taiwanese DVD player. I can’t see too many politicans pushing for solidarity with Chinese workers.
A few points.
First, there is the nature of the GFC. This is typically portrayed as being triggered by the collapse of the US housing bubble in 2007, the effects of this collapse having then been magnified throughout the US banking and financial sector, and eventually the globe. The creation of this bubble is further blamed on lax (US) government regulation in the banking and financial sector generally; lax government regulation in this and other sectors of the economy being a product of the triumph of neoliberal ideology, which is generally recognised as having begun its ascent (in the West) in the late ’70s and early ’80s (while very similar programs were being forced upon various ‘developing’ and ‘Third World’ countries throughout the ’60s and ’70s via ‘structural adjustment programs’ administered by the International Mother Fuckers and the Whirled Bank).
I’m unsure why you believe that “the GFC could have been greatly mitigated, and possibly avoided, if workers in SE Asia had better pay and conditions”, or what might have been the consequences this might have had or will have for consumption patterns in the West (the relationship between the two being complicated by a range of other factors).
Secondly, there is the left and its response to these developments. The issues here are definition and scope. It might be worthwhile asking, in this context, what has been the response of the Australian left to the GFC? Assuming a fairly broad definition of the term ‘left’, this would include consideration of the response of the ALP and trades union movement (the political and industrial wings of the labour movement). On my assessment, these remain the main forums for left-wing ideas; there is relatively little ‘left’ political activity elsewhere in ‘civil society’, and a near-total absence of radical egalitarian movements in Australian society as a whole. In other words, and in summary, I’m not convinced that there’s much (of a) left to respond. Be that as it may, the most obvious — and in many ways most reasonable — response has been a reversion to more straightforwardly ‘Keynesian’ or ‘social-democratic’ economic measures: ‘social democracy from above’.
As ever, the really interesting political developments — from my perspective — stem from the grassroots, whether among the peasant and workers’ movements in South America or even some parts of Europe. Part of the problem, I think, is that discussion of “the opportunity to change the system” requires an understanding of what “the system” is; the degree to which ‘it’ is responsible for the current crisis; whether this system might be properly identified as being ‘neoliberalism’ or capitalism in toto; and what alternatives, both practical and theoretical, the left is presenting, to whom, and what social forces are able and willing to adopt such programs should they exist.
Speaking of taking action, a farking brilliant story from (where else?) France:
See also: João Bernardo, Seven theses on the present crisis, Revista Textos de Economia (vol. 11, nº 2, 2008), Departamento de Ciências Econômicas, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil).
Hear also:
THR, about this:
I think this point is at the heart of the problem. We have a GFC, and yet there’s every chance that the left will pass up on the opportunity to change the system.
Indeed. And it may be that TEH LEFT doesn’t recognise that the opportunity is there. More importantly, much of what passes for the left doesn’t really want to change the system, only to make it somehow “fairer”.
For that reason, I have to agree with @ndy that there isn’t much of an Australian left around at present. For mine, the left should see the current climate – in which the global economy swings from boom to bust – as an historic opportunity for the raising of class consciousness and education of revolutionaries. @ndy’s right: you don’t hear too many saying anything like that.
I like to think my view on China is not merely a Bird-esque, crackpot theory.
I accept your general characterisation of the GFC, and I would view the subprime collapse as the catalyst, and perhaps epicentre of the whole thing. However, I think more than the housing bubble and subsequent collapse need to be occurring for a GFC.
A guy on an Against the Grain podcast had an interesting stat on a recent episode, namely, that about 25% of the world’s workers were Chinese. We in Australia know that, well before the GFC, our own manufacturing sector was decimated by the outsourcing/relocation of firms to Asia. Whilst US firms have been exploiting the Central Americans for years, as have the big European countries been doing to the former Soviet bloc, SE Asia has remained the world’s sweatshop.
As regards the macroeconomic links between China and the GFC, an Australian right-wing econoblogger pointed to various factors leading to the crisis, including these two:
i) High rates of savings in China and among the oil exporters which – despite local investment booms – could not be absorbed entirely locally in the economies that gave rise to them and which therefore spilt over into international capital markets driving down global interest rates;
(ii) The long-term overvaluation of the US dollar (or equivalently the undervaluation of the Chinese currency) that facilitated the high rates of Chinese savings and which led to the debt-financed consumption-led boom in the US and other countries that was partly financed by resulting excessive balance of trade surpluses;
http://kalimna.blogspot.com/2008/10/end-of-free-market-fundamentalism.html
Both of these factors could, in my opinion, have been very different had Chinese manufacturing not been founded upon sweatshop conditions. This in turn may have meant that the subprime collapse had shorter-lasting, and more localised effects. The blogger cited above also neglects to mention China buying up US treasury bonds, and the mass-migration of rural workers to the cities.
Of course, all of this is rather speculative. I’m not an economist, and the discipline at times appears not dissimilar to tea-leaf reading.
Anyway, last year, we had talk that Australia’s resource boom (funded by China’s growth) would save us from recession. This may very well not happen. China’s growth, whilst still positive, has slowed, and poor conditions of work in the city, coupled with massive job losses, has started a wave of mass migration back to the countryside.
Look! Up in the sky! It’s Graeme Bird! It’s Plane Stoopid! No it’s… THR!
Seriously but.
“I think more than the housing bubble and subsequent collapse need to be occurring for a GFC.”
Agreed.
Re China:
Yeah, I understand your argument (I think). That is, the Chinese government has responded to declining foreign demand for Chinese manufactures by, in part, attempting to boost rates of domestic consumption. It is aided in this endeavour by the emergence in the last few decades (that is, since the death of Chairman Miaow in ’76 and following on from a series of economic reforms since then aimed at encouraging the growth of the private market) of a large urban middle class. Generally speaking, being the third largest national economy, whatever happens in China will have enormous effects upon the global economy.
So: “the GFC could have been greatly mitigated, and possibly avoided, if workers in SE Asia had better pay and conditions”?
To my mind, South-East Asia implies countries such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore and so on. But if China, Mongolia and so on are included in this definition, that’s obviously a massive number of workers, and a very large proportion of global labour. All things being equal, higher pay — that is, a higher proportion of profits on labour being returned to workers — translates into higher demand for domestic consumption of consumer durables (as opposed to profits being used for re-investment in financial speculation in, say, the US market).
Regarding Chinese foreign investment, much appears to have centred on the US economy. The same applies in the case of oil-producing economies in the Middle East. While Chinese foreign investment (that is, FDI) has grown enormously over the previous decades, OPEC countries (meaning: the elites which dominate and control these economies) have been investing heavily in the West for a considerably longer period. The costs to the US state of maintaining a policy of military Keynesianism and its prosecution of the decades-long Gulf War has also been an important, perhaps crucial factor in altering the overall terms of trade between the US (meaning: the US-based corporate and political elites which dominate the US and much of the global economy) and its allies/rivals.
In terms of historical periodisation, many argue that what we have been witnessing is the end of a period of global ‘neoliberalism’ the emergence of which dates back to the dismantling of the post-WWII Bretton Woods system in 1970s. Some argue that this cycle can be most properly understood by way of larger historical processes of labour composition.
Of interest in this context:
======
1.
‘Class conflicts in the transformation of China’, Aufheben, No.16, 2008 [PDF]
2.
‘Marx’s Crisis Theory as a Theory of Class Struggle’, Peter Bell and Harry Cleaver, The Commoner, No.5, 2002/1982 [PDF]
3.
Key Thinkers Series – Antonio Negri
Public Lecture
Professor Verity Burgmann
Thursday 30 April 2009 @ 05:45 pm – 07:30 pm
Prince Philip Theatre, Ground Floor, Architecture Building (bldg 133), Parkville
Antonio Negri, Italian political philosophy professor born in 1933, was prominent in the Autonomist workers’ movement in the 1970s and wrongly imprisoned for many years until 2003 for his alleged role in the Red Brigades’ terrorist activities. He has become the foremost exponent of ‘autonomist’ Marxism. Negri critiques classical Marxism for its emphasis on the power of capital and argues for a reorientation of Marxism to affirm the role of labour as an autonomous dynamic subject able to go beyond mere reaction to exploitation and take the offensive in ways that shape the class struggle and define the future. His ideas have inspired opponents of corporate globalisation, especially recent works such as Empire in 2000 and Multitude in 2004.
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The crisis of neoliberalism is also the crisis of social democracy. Articles from the UK journal Aufheben are especially useful:
‘Social Democracy: No Future? Introduction to Articles on the Retreat of Social Democracy’, No.7, 1998
‘The Retreat of Social Democracy… Re-imposition of Work in Britain and the ‘Social Europe”, No.8, 1999
Oh yeah.
On China.
See also:
China in Crisis: Reason to Panic?
Wildcat is also neat.
[For grumpy cat] Dirty steenky communist Alain Badiou on BBC’s HARDTalk, March 24, 2009:
On a somewhat related note, Saul Newman has written an Editorial on post-anarchism, the subject of the latest # of Anarchist Studies (Volume 16, No.2, 2008).
We seem to have moved some distance from a bonehead gig in Perth on ANZAC Day.
In that spirit: