Blood and Honour
LEADER: Ian Stuart
USUAL AREA OF OPERATION: Central and Western Europe, Australia, and the United States
OVERVIEW
Blood and Honour is a white-power skinhead organization that uses music to spread its political views. The group is a loosely based network that claims no political affiliations and no leadership. Calling itself a leaderless resistance, the group seeks to recruit and educate youths regarding their worldview of white supremacy through various publications, CDs, and most notably, concerts.
The group was founded by Ian Stuart Donaldson (known as Ian Stuart) in 1987. Stuart, who started as a punk musician, moved more toward the skinhead music movement as his music career progressed. However, his involvement with the skinheads led him to be rejected and unable to play the venues that he played as a punk musician. As such, Stuart found other outlets that were more agreeable to his political ideology. While playing at these underground concerts, Stuart performed an original song called "Blood and Honour." The phrase, once used by members of Hitler's Youth, inspired the name of the organization that would use music to spread its message of white supremacy throughout Central and Western Europe, Australia, and the United States.
HISTORY
Blood and Honour stemmed from the white-supremacy skinhead music movement called "Oi!" Prior to its formation, the National Front, an extreme right-wing nationalist political movement provided venues, recordings, and literature used by the white supremacy movement under the name Rock Against Communism. Under Rock Against Communism, bands, such as Ian Stuart's Skrewdriver, No Remorse, and Brutal Attack, were managed through the organization of the White Noise Club and White Noise Records. The music groups' performances, largely at underground concerts and festivals, began to generate revenues for Rock Against Communism, as well as for the National Front. However, by 1986, the National Front split apart, which ended the White Noise Club. Ian Stuart and other musicians discovered that the White Noise Club had cheated both bands and concertgoers. Ian Stuart's disillusionment with the leadership of the White Noise Club and the National Front led him to create a new umbrella organization for his music movement called Blood and Honour.
In 1987, Stuart called for a meeting among the skinhead movement leadership with the goal to create a new coalition that would be self-sufficient and independent. By July, the group had officially declared itself and its goals. Believing politics would hinder the progress of the movement, Stuart insisted on no political affiliation. Stuart, and the High Command made up of band members, would direct the group by providing assistance to units in the areas of venue organization, security, and propaganda—to include magazines and Internet operations. As such, July of 1987 saw the inaugural publication of the magazine, Blood and Honour.
As followers of Stuart and Blood and Honour established their own bands, including hatecore, racist hardcore punk, and racist metal, the groups began to create an international base. Groups of supporters with active members numbering 30 or more were granted "division" status and smaller groups were granted "sectional" status. The first division appeared in Australia and the movement then moved throughout Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Serbia, Germany, and the United States. However on September 14, 2000, the German government banned Blood and Honour from operating within its borders.
Recently the group has experienced discord regarding the extent of its political affiliations. Max Hammer, the pseudonym of the official web site host, writes that the Blood and Honour has actually split between the moderates and the militants. According to Hammer, the moderates believe that Blood and Honour is an organization of musicians who can assist the national socialist parties promote their ideology. The moderates favor using the profits generated by the musicians to fund the political movement. The militants, on the other hand, promote a sister organization called "Combat 18" to act as the armed wing of the movement. The militants believe that Blood and Honour, itself, was created as a political power, and resent those who use the movement for fame and fortune.
LEADERSHIP
IAN STUART
Although Blood and Honour advocates a leaderless resistance, Ian Stuart is looked to as the founder of the movement. Stuart was born on April 11, 1958, in Poulton-Le-Fylde, England. He began his musical career with several friends from grammar school. The group, known as Tumbling Dice, mainly played Rolling Stones' songs. After being heavily influence by punk music, Stuart reformed the bank in 1977, and renamed it Skrewdriver. As Stuart began to write more of the band's songs, the group shifted once more toward Oi!, or white-supremacy skinhead music. By mid 1978, the band's ideology, and being labeled as a National Front band, led to it being boycotted from playing venues in London, or being recorded.
By 1980, Stuart had totally transformed Skrewdriver into a skinhead band and developed ties with Rock Against Communism, a music organization with ties to the extreme right-wing National Front. However in 1986, the National Front split under allegations that some within the organization were taking advantage of bands and concert-goers. One year later, Stuart would take the lead in the formation of Blood and Honour.
Stuart would continue to perform his music and meet with others in the skinhead movement, at home and abroad. In doing so, he created the groundwork for the spread of his music and political ideology internationally. In 1993, he died in a car accident, which many of his supporters suspect was caused by the British Security Services.
Most of the present day leadership operates under pseudonyms. An example of this is Max Hammer, who hosts the official Blood and Honour web site.
KEY EVENTS
- 1987:
- The group was founded by Ian Stuart Donaldson (known as Ian Stuart).
- 2000:
- The German government banned Blood and Honour from operating within its borders.
PHILOSOPHY AND TACTICS
Blood and Honour acts as an umbrella organization to connect small groups of white supremacist skinheads through music, propaganda, and the Internet. The group believes that music can be a tool for change. It is the expressed goal of Blood and Honour to bring down the rule of their enemy, whom they call, the "Zionist-occupation governments." Upon the destruction of these governments, members of Blood and Honour wish to establish a new order based on their principles of white supremacy. The members of the group fear that the migration of foreigners into their countries is creating a scenario in which whites will be the minority. The group attempts to subjugate others by promoting the belief that other ethnic groups are physically and intellectually inferior. Their propaganda includes guides to organization as well as leaflets on holocaust denial.
PRIMARY SOURCE
White Pride Worldwide: The White Power Music Industry Is Helping to Drive the Internationalization of Neo-Nazism
Close to 500 racist Skinheads gathered in a small town outside Atlanta last October for Hammerfest 2000, the largest white power music concert held that year in the United States. While headliner bands Brutal Attack, Hate Crime and Extreme Hatred played furious "hatecore" music, men dove from the stage into a mosh pit of raging, tattooed Skinheads.
Georgia newspapers didn't cover the concert at all, and local authorities didn't show up at the remarkable gathering in Bremen, Ga., either. For neo-Nazi Skinheads, though, the show was world famous.
Hammerfest 2000 drew fans from Austria, Canada, France, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain, as well as from across the United States. Four bands flew in from Britain for the weekend. The concert culminated months of worldwide networking by sponsors Panzerfaust Records and Resistance Records, the premier neo-Nazi music labels in the U.S.
The growing white power music industry, now valued at millions of dollars in annual sales, is not just the largest source of money and recruits for the Western world's most dynamic racist revolutionaries. It is also astonishingly international.
Thanks largely to the Internet and cheap air fares, racist music has spread over the last quarter-century from Britain to the rest of Europe and on to the United States.
Today, racist compact discs might be recorded in Poland, pressed in the United States and sold via the Net in Sweden. A German neo-Nazi might see his favorite American band at a concert in Switzerland.
In many ways, this remarkably violent music is accomplishing for the radical right what decades of racist theorizing didn't: It has given Skinheads and many other extremists around the world a common language and a unifying ideology—an ideology that replaces old-fashioned, state-based nativism with the concept of "pan-Aryanism."
"In the last decade, white power music has grown from a cottage industry to a multimillion-dollar, worldwide enterprise," says Devin Burghart of the Center for New Community, which has studied this music extensively.
"Along the way, the music scene has created international ties where there were none, and has inspired an ideological pan-Aryanism that has broken down the walls between racist groups."
It has also spawned a culture of violence.
In internecine disputes, neo-Nazis in the music industry have been willing to stomp each other with boots, to beat each other with baseball bats, and to torture each other with hammers. They have hired hit men and burned down buildings. Racist music fans have bombed children and bludgeoned people with iron pipes; they have drowned homosexuals and executed police officers.
In Europe, where such music is generally illegal, governments have started deporting racist aliens, raiding white power CD caches, and ban ning neo-Nazi music organizations. Such pressure has driven racist music underground even as profit margins have shot up—and increasingly, it has made the United States, with its unusual First Amendment protections of even neo-Nazi speech, a haven for the racist music business.
PICKING UP TEETH
The violence begins with the music. "You kill all the niggers and you gas all the Jews," George Burdi sang with his band Rahowa, short for Racial Holy War. "Kill a gypsy and a commie too. You just killed a kike, don't it feel right?"
"Goodness gracious, Third Reich."
And it is contagious. "The concerts were crazy," recalls Burdi, a former neo-Nazi who now says he has left the movement. "Friends would beat each other up and then laugh about it afterwards, with their eyes swollen shut and their noses broken and picking their teeth up off the ground."
Such blind anger might not appear conducive to starting a moneymaking business or even building up an extremist political organization. But the foundations are there and growing.
Internet-based "radio" shows stream racist music around the world at all hours of the day. In the U.S., racist music from 123 domestic bands and 229 foreign ones is available on-line from more than 40 distributors, according to the Center for New Community.
The leading U.S. label, Resistance Records (started by Burdi in 1993), reportedly expected to sell 70,000 CDs last year, meaning more than __BODY__ million in potential gross revenue. Industry profits go to political neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance and Hammerskin Nation.
The anger and violence that characterize racist Skinhead groups like the Hammerskin Nation may actually help the cause. "All too often we turn [our anger] against ourselves," writes Resistance owner William Pierce, who heads up the National Alliance, America's premier neo-Nazi organization.
"We need to give a proper direction to that anger … [Resistance Records will distribute] music of defiance and rage against the enemies of our people…. It will be the music of the great, cleansing revolution which is coming."
'RUNNING THE SHOW'
If white power music is big business in the United States, it is even bigger in Europe (where it is largely illegal)—and especially in Eastern Europe. Interpol estimated in 1999 that the European neo-Nazi music industry was worth $3.4 million a year, and it has only grown since then.
With the cost of producing a CD little more than $2, Interpol said profit margins were better than for selling hashish.
In Poland, some racist bands sell as many as 30,000 albums, comparable to successful local pop bands. In that country of 39 million people, there are 15,000 individuals intimately involved in the racist Skinhead scene, according to Rafal Pankowski of the Polish anti-fascist group Never Again.
Though there is no reliable count of the American racist Skinhead scene, it is at most a fraction of that size—in a country with seven times as many people.
In Germany, before the neo-Nazi music organization Blood & Honour was banned last year, there were about 180 white power concerts a year—or one every other day—according to Antifaschistische INFO-Blatt (AIB), a German anti-fascist organizations. In Sweden, a 1997 survey showed that 12% of young people aged 12 to 19 listened to white power music "sometimes" or "often."
Racist music is found in every one of Europe's 30 countries, but it is especially widespread in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Serbia and Slovakia, among others.
Perhaps most frightening is that racist Skinhead culture, which has always sought the extreme, has even come to seem normal in places. In Germany, where the neofascist National Democratic Party (NPD) has openly sold white power music for election funds, racist Skins boast fully call some neighborhoods "National Liberated Zones"—no-go areas for any foreigners, blacks or Jews who want to avoid a beating or worse.
"White power music has reached far beyond the hard core of the neo-Nazi movement," said a representative of the German anti-fascist AIB, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. "In some places, neo-Nazis are running the show."
After moving from Britain two years ago, the largest, best-organized and most influential European white power music organization is now headed by Erik Blücher of Helsingborg, Sweden. Blood & Honour (B&H) publishes magazines, organizes concerts, distributes music, and has links to neo-Nazi political parties throughout Europe.
The primary B&H label, Ragnarock Records, is run by Blücher from Sweden, but there are at least 10 other labels associated with B&H, according to Stieg Larsson of the Swedish anti-fascist group Expo.
An American branch of B&H was active in California and Minnesota in the 1990s, but went dormant several years ago until this spring. Today, it has chapters in California, Georgia, Ohio and Texas.
Trying to maximize distribution, the California chapter now sells a sampler CD of white power music at what it says is cost. Many of the international B&H Web sites are registered on a server in Alaska.
B&H is active in most European countries, but is strongest in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Switzerland and throughout Scandinavia. The group had a large presence in Germany until it was banned last fall, after simultaneous government raids on the homes of 30 members.
Since then, German B&H has organized concerts in the nearby Czech, French, Swiss and Hungarian border regions. German officials said Blood & Honour was guilty of "the poisoning of minds and hearts."
Source: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2001
Blood and Honour seeks to use white power music to attract and set in motion young people within their cause. The group uses concerts, rallies, and the Internet to link like-minded people and to promote their publications. The group also promotes a leaderless resistance, believing that it will result in more personal initiative. Some within the group advocate the use of violence, believing that they are at war. Ian Stuart, himself, was imprisoned during the mid 1980s for assaulting a black woman. Propaganda guides include field manuals and links to the militant wing of the movement.
OTHER PERSPECTIVES
Blood and Honour and Oi! music are identified by the Anti-Defamation League as the recruitment machine used by racist skinheads. The League expresses that hate music, such as Oi!, has become a significant aspect of the white supremacy movement. By providing a source of income, by attracting young people, and by promulgating a subculture of hate, groups such as Blood and Honour are ensuring the perpetuation of the movement and a rise in the threat of racially motivated violence. The Economist asserts that no discourse is possible because, "when interviewed, they say little, standing arms crossed, fists clenched, eyes burning."
SUMMARY
For close to 20 years, Blood and Honour has been the umbrella organization used to promote the ideology of white supremacy throughout Europe, Australia, and the United States. Following the model created by founder Ian Stuart, member divisions and sections use concerts and propaganda to attract young people into their groups. Although banned in Germany, groups in Eastern Europe and the United States continue to operate.
