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 boastfully 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."
'Trotskyists of the Right'
A bitter rift between racist and anti-racist Skins, still visible today, developed in the 1970s when British neofascist groups started recruiting from within the Skinhead movement. The Nazism of the newly "racialized" Skins shone through in their music.
One prominent early white power album was the 1981 release "Strength Through Oi!" -- an allusion to the Nazi slogan, "Strength Through Joy." The next year, Skrewdriver, the now legendary band led by Ian Stuart Donaldson, held the first of a series of white power concerts under the banner of "Rock Against Communism." By 1987, Donaldson was publishing the magazine Blood & Honour, named after the inscription on the daggers of Hitler's SS youth corps.
The international path that Skinheads blazed through Europe and North America in the 1980s gave them a reputation as the "Trotskyists of the right." After the first Skin groups arrived in the U.S. in the early 1980s, hate groups like Church of the Creator and White Aryan Resistance (WAR) began recruiting them in earnest -- seeing them, in the words of war chieftain Tom Metzger, as the "shock troops" of the revolution.
The first groupings in what would later become Hammerskin Nation, the best organized and most violent Skinhead group in the world today, emerged in Dallas by 1989. During the same period, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. Skinheads left a trail of ruthless beatings, stabbings and some 40 murders.
Skinheads even frightened other racists. According to White Noise, a publication of the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, long-time American Klan leader James Farrands said at the time that they were "garish-looking suckers. � I didn't want anything to do with them. � They're just scary."
Business was Booming
During Skrewdriver's heyday in the 1980s, several European labels sold white power music, often alongside anti-racist punk albums. But racist music didn't really take off until after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.
Extremists in the West, now lacking the external threat of communism, turned their fears inward to Jews, blacks, immigrants and their own governments. And in eastern Europe, the crash of communism didn't only mean the lifting of import controls on CDs. For millions of young people and others, it meant economic disaster, social instability, and an identity crisis that combined to make extremist politics suddenly appealing (See Reawakening the Beast).
Between 1992 and 1997, the racist music industry mushroomed. In Sweden, for instance, there was one white power concert held in 1992. In 1995, there were 20. White power labels were founded in many European nations, most significantly Sweden's Ragnarock Records and Nordland Records. Michigan-based Resistance Records, then controlled by Burdi and American Mark Wilson, became the largest American label and even produced its own glossy color magazine.
Business was booming. Burdi told the Intelligence Report that Resistance sold between 60,000 and 100,000 CDs and tapes in the three years ending in early 1997, with sales virtually doubling every quarter. He says that he could often pre-sell an album's entire first pressing to European distributors before a single CD had been produced.
Resistance had licensing agreements with over 40 labels across Europe, even in Lithuania and Bulgaria, Burdi says, and sent free tapes to the Afrikaner Resistance Movement (AWB), the largest neo-Nazi organization in South Africa. Burdi preached Resistance's simple business model religiously to anyone who would listen.
"When I started it was almost impossible for white power bands to sign a record deal," recalls Burdi. "Suddenly, it went from a couple of white power labels to a couple of hundred. � I let everyone use our stuff. After all, I was motivated by altruism."
"No More Brothers' Wars"
Today's racist Skins have a vision -- and it is a vision that is clearly picking up adherents and energy on both sides of the Atlantic. More and more, neo-Nazis around the world are seeing their movement in international terms, a cause that cannot succeed in one country alone. And the trans-Atlantic contacts spurred by the white power music scene have only served to intensify that view.
One recent article, posted on a Blood & Honour Web site, seemed to sum up these developments when it suggested that whites needed to "scrap the whole idea of nationalism for the sake of White racialism. � The term 'No more brother wars' [a white supremacist reference to wars between white people] can only be achieved through international cooperation and understanding between White people."
"The ideal," this writer adds, "is naturally a pan-Aryan army with divisions wherever White people dwell. � The days of pure patriotic xenophobia and imperialism are over. They have spilt enough Aryan blood."
