Comrades, the voices of the dead battalions
Of those who fell, that Europe might be great
Join in our song, for they still march in spirit with us
And urge us on that we gain the national state
Chorus:
The streets are still, the final battle has ended
Flushed with the fight, we proudly hail the dawn
See over the streets, the White man's emblem is waving
Triumphant standards of a race reborn
Blood of our blood, spirit of our spirit
Sprang from that soil, for who's sake they bled
Against the vested powers, Red front, and massed reaction
We lead the fight for freedom and for bread
(Repeat Chorus)
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
People who we trusted, again have let us down
Jailing men of this country for fighting for our land
We will fight forever, until the end releases us
We will never submit to a six point master plan
(Repeat Chorus)
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail the new dawn!
Hail!
This is a list of notable neo-Nazi bands.
This is an incomplete list, which may never be able to satisfy particular standards for completeness. You can help by expanding it with reliably sourced entries.
Landser
Macht und Ehre
No Remorse
Prussian Blue
RaHoWa
Skrewdriver
Skullhead
Stahlgewitter
Honor
Kolovrat
Der Neutempler-Orden oder Ordo Novi Templi (ONT) war eine völkisch-religiöse Organisation. Er wurde 1900 von Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels in Wien gegründet.[1] Lanz, dessen angehängter Adelstitel nach heutiger Kenntnis frei erfunden war, nutzte diesen Orden, um seine Ideen, die er zunächst als „Theozoologie“ oder „Ario-Christentum“ und ab 1915 als „Ariosophie“ bezeichnete, zu verbreiten. Der Orden verband christliche Frömmigkeit mit modernen Begriffen der Rassenkunde und der Eugenik.
Lanz war kurz zuvor aus dem Zisterzienser-Orden ausgetreten und knüpfte bei der Namensgebung seines eigenen Ordens an den mittelalterlichen Templerorden an. Sein Interesse an den Templern wurde durch das zeitgenössisch populäre Motiv der Gralsritter in derneuromantischen Musik und Literatur von Richard Wagner, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer undFriedrich Lienhard geweckt. Zudem waren die Templer eng mit den Zisterziensern verbunden;Bernhard von Clairvaux, der Begründer des Zisterzienserordens, hatte auch die Ordensregeln der Templer verfasst und lobte diese später für ihren Einsatz bei den Kreuzzügen.
Um die Zeit seiner Ordensgründung herum entwickelte sich Lanz zu einem entschiedenenRassisten, der in der „arischen“ Rasse die höchststehende Rasse sah, die sich seit Urzeiten in einem Abwehrkampf gegen niedere Rassen befinde.[2] Auf diesem Hintergrund entwarf er die Vorstellung, dass die Templer das Ziel gehabt hätten, im gesamten Mittelmeerraum ein arisches Großreich zu errichten.[1] Die brutale Verfolgung der Templer durch die römisch-katholische Kirche ab 1312 interpretierte er als einen Triumph rassisch Minderwertiger, deren Ziel es sei, die Herrschaft und Reinerhaltung der arischen Rasse zu untergraben. Zudem war er davon überzeugt, dass die Kirche seit dieser Zeit die wahre christliche Lehre, als deren Kern er eben seine Vorstellungen eines Rassenkampfes betrachtete, unterdrückte. Seinen eigenen Orden sah er daher als einen Neubeginn des über die Jahrhunderte hin unterbrochenen Kreuzzugs gegen niedere Rassen.
1907 erwarb Lanz die kleine Burgruine Werfenstein bei Grein in Oberösterreich als Priorat des Ordens.[3] Im selben Jahr publizierte er ein Programm des Ordens, in welchem er ihn als Vereinigung von Ariern beschrieb, deren Ziele darin bestünden, das Rassenbewusstsein durch genealogische und heraldische Forschung, durch Schönheitswettbewerbe und durch die Gründung rassisch vorbildlicher Staaten in unterentwickelten Regionen der Welt zu fördern. Für den Orden entwickelte er eine eigene Liturgie und Zeremonien. In den Ordensregeln wurde festgelegt, dass nur blonde und blauäugige Männer beitreten durften, die zudem weiteren Kriterien des Ariertums genügen mussten, welche Lanz in seiner Schriftenreihe Ostara dargelegt hatte. Innerhalb des Ordens wurde eine Hierarchie eingerichtet, die sich nach der (vermeintlichen) rassischen Reinheit richtete. Am Weihnachtstag 1907 hisste Lanz auf dem Turm seiner Ordensburg zwei Flaggen: eine mit dem Wappen derer von Liebenfels, einem vermutlich um 1790 ausgestorbenen Adelsgeschlecht, als dessen Nachkomme er sich ausgab, und eine mit einer Swastika(Hakenkreuz), einem damals in der völkischen Bewegung beliebten Symbol.
Ab 1908 wurden auf Werfenstein öffentlichkeitswirksame Feste veranstaltet.[4] Etliche hundert Gäste reisten auf der Donau, an der die Burg liegt, mit dem Dampfschiff an und wurden mit Kanonenschüssen empfangen, um anschließend im Burghof ausgiebig zu feiern. Dies fand große Resonanz in der nationalen Presse und förderte das Interesse an Lanz’ Publikationen.
Lanz arbeitete weiter an den Zeremonien und verfasste andächtige Gesänge und Verse.[5] Die Burg ließ er u.a. mit weihevollen Darstellungen Hugo von Payns’, des ersten Großmeisters der Templer, und mit Darstellungen der „Äfflinge“, die in seiner Theozoologe als die Herkunft der niederen Rassen galten, dekorieren. 1915 und 1916 erschien in zwei Teilen ein Neutempler-Brevier, das Lanz mit anderen Ordensbrüdern verfasst hatte. Es enthielt Psalmen und Lobgesänge, die an die christliche Tradition anknüpften, aber Christusanflehten, die arische Rasse zu erlösen und die niederen Rassen auszulöschen.
Bis 1914 beschränkten sich die Aktivitäten des Ordens auf Wien und Werfenstein, und er hatte nur etwa 50 Mitglieder. Nach dem Kriegbegann er jedoch zu expandieren, und es wurden etliche Stützpunkte in Deutschland und in Ungarn, wo Lanz sich seit 1918 aufhielt, eingerichtet.[6] Der maßgebliche Organisator dieser Renaissance des Ordens war zunächst Detlef Schmude.[7] Er hatte schon 1914 ein zweites Priorat in Hollenberg bei Aachen gegründet und übernahm bald nach seiner Rückkehr von der Front praktisch die Rolle des emigrierten Lanz. Sein Priorat in Hollenberg blieb allerdings ein Provisorium, für das nie ein passendes Gebäude gefunden wurde und das er 1926 auflöste. Inzwischen gab es jedoch zwei neue Priorate: eines in Wickeloh nahe dem niedersächsischen Uelzen und das Priorat Marienkamp, das Lanz selbst gegründet hatte und das ab 1926 seinen offiziellen Sitz in einer Kirchenruine aus dem 13. Jahrhundert am Nordufer des ungarischen Balaton hatte.[6][8]
In finanzieller Hinsicht verdankte der Orden sein Überleben in der Nachkriegszeit dem Wiener Industriellen Johann Walthari Wölfl.[9]Dieser war ein begeisterter Leser der Ostara und bot Lanz beträchtliche Geldmittel unter der Bedingung an, dass man ihm das Priorat Werfenstein anvertrauen würde. Er erhielt dieses Amt und ermöglichte anschließend durch seine Zuwendungen ein Aufblühen der österreichischen Sektion des Ordens. Wölfl trug neben Lanz wesentlich zur weiteren Ausgestaltung der Liturgie des Ordens bei.
In den 1920er Jahren gab es eine Initiative, die von Angehörigen des Hollenberg-Priorats ausging und sich zum Ziel setzte, ein Priorat in Norddeutschland zu errichten.[10] 1926 erwarben einige Ordensbrüder alte Erdwälle in der Nähe des Ostseebades Prerow, die als Hertesburg bekannt waren. Man errichtete dort eine Holzkirche und weihte diese 1927 als Hertesburg-Presbyterium ein. Dieses fungierte als ein Zentrum der Ordensaktivitäten, bis das Gelände 1935 dem Darß-Nationalpark zugeschlagen wurde. Ebenfalls 1927 wurde die Ruine Dietfurt im Weiler Dietfurt, nahe dem hohenzollernschen Sigmaringen, als Priorat eingeweiht.[11]
1932 gründete Wölfl in Wien den Lumenklub, der personell eng mit dem ONT verflochten war und dessen Ideologie einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit nahebringen sollte.[12] Der Klub diente auch als Zentrum zur Anwerbung von Mitgliedern für die ab 1933 in Österreich verboteneNSDAP. Im Zusammenhang mit dem Lumenklub stand auch die Ostara-Rundschau, die Wölfl ab 1931 herausgab und die der internationalen Kooperation radikal-rechter Gruppen dienen sollte.
Seinen Höhepunkt erreichte der Orden um 1930 mit etwa 300 bis 400 Mitgliedern. Gegen Ende der 1930er Jahre wurde er wie alle anderen religiösen „Sekten“ in der NS-Diktatur aufgelöst.[13]
1942 gründete Lanz in dem ehemaligen Ordenspriorat Petena bei Waging am See, Oberbayern, mit seinem früheren Ordensbruder Georg Hauerstein den Vitalis-Neutemplerorden. Dieser akzeptierte auch weibliche Mitglieder und war bis 1973 aktiv.[6]
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke sieht die Bedeutung des ONT „mehr in dem, was er ausgedrückt, als in dem, was er erreicht hat. Er kann als Symptom diffuser Unzufriedenheit genommen werden, dessen eigene Mischung typischer Sorgen, Interessen und Lebensstile in klarem Zusammenhang mit den unterschwelligen Ängsten innerhalb der österreichischen und deutschen Gesellschaft stand. Seine elitären undendzeitlichen Antworten auf diese Ängste vervollständigten den genozidischen Impuls.“[14]
A coup de grâce (pron.: /ˌkuː də ˈɡrɑːs/; French: [ku də ɡʁɑs], "blow of mercy") is a deathblow to end the suffering of a severely wounded person or animal.[1][2] It may be a mercy killing of civilians or soldiers, friends or enemies, with or without the sufferer's consent. It may also be the final event that causes a figurative death:[2] The business had been struggling for years. The sharp jump in oil prices was the coup de grâce.
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An example, in war, is humanely killing a suffering, mortally wounded soldier for whom medical aid is not available. Another example is shooting the heart or head (typically the back of the skull) of a wounded, but still living, person during an execution. In an execution by firing squads, a coup de grâce may be administered if the first hail of gunfire fails to kill the prisoner. A near-beheadingto quickly end a samurai's agony after seppuku is another instance.
Der Krieg by Franz von Stuck
Burzum (/ˈbɜrzəm/; Norwegian: [ˈbʉːrsʉːm]) is the musical project of Varg Vikernes. Vikernes began making music in 1988, but it was not until 1991 that he recorded his first demos as Burzum. The word "burzum" means "darkness" in the Black Speech, an artificial language crafted by J. R. R. Tolkien. The project quickly became prominent within theearly Norwegian black metal scene.Vikernes recorded the first four Burzum albums between January 1992 and March 1993. However, the releases were spread out, with many months between the recording and the release of each album. In May 1994, Vikernes was sentenced to 21 years in prison for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth and the arson of three churches.
While imprisoned, Vikernes recorded two dark ambient albums using only synthesizers, as he did not have access to drums, guitar or bass. Since his release from prison in 2009, he has recorded a further three black metal albums. Burzum is one of the most influential acts in black metal; in Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, director Sam Dunn described Vikernes as "the most notorious metal musician of all time"
WESTERN ECONOMIES ARE again attracting increased numbers of immigrants and asylum seekers from developing countries. Meanwhile, existing
ethnic minorities claim a greater political and economic stake in their host
states. The resulting pressure on native lower-income groups is giving rise to
a new politics of white identity, which finds violent expression in white power
music. Bound for Glory, Skullhead, Svastika, Battle Zone, Violent Storm,
Celtic Warrior are just a few of the white power bands that regularly tour Europe and perform at venues packed with hundreds of skinheads in Valencia,
Stockholm, Rome and Bremen. A CD release of the British band No Remorse
is entitled Barbecue in Rostock, a gloating reference to the notorious arson attack on a German refugee hostel in August 1992. The lead singer, a skinhead
called Jacko, his whole torso covered with tattoos of snakes, spiders and
swastikas, belts out hateful lyrics laced with threats to murder the “wogs,”
“pakis” and “Yids.” There are presently at least several hundred bands in Western and Eastern Europe that act as recruiting sergeants for the racist far right
among the alienated young, and possibly there are as many again in the
United States, Australia and New Zealand.
A violent mood of racist extremism, intolerance and misanthropy is
widely current among certain sections of urban white working-class youth.
Much of this aggression is a compensation for feelings of personal inadequacy
and failure. A high proportion of skinheads come from broken families, have
low educational achievement and seek both identity and peer recognition
within a skinhead group. Youngsters with a sense of inferiority in an increasingly skilled and automated society can find relief in the abuse and assault of
other races, immigrants, even the elderly and disabled. They feel frustration
and resentment at the apparent indulgence of liberal elites toward ethnic minorities. Community politicians are seen as demanding and receiving ransom
payments from a guilt-ridden liberal society, which appear to perpetuate the
dependence of an unassimilated underclass. The new misanthropes regard
blacks in the United States, colored immigrants in Europe and even disabled
people as a growing burden upon the resources of a teeming and polluted
193world. Hitler cults and ideas of Aryan identity are finding new audiences
among white working-class youth beset by an increasing sense of disenfranchisement in multiracial Western societies.
Both the skinhead movement and white power music have their origins in
Britain, where urban youth gangs have continuously been in fashion from the
1950s onwards. Teddy Boys, Mods and Rockers, Hell’s Angels each in turn created a cult of distinctive clothing, gang feuds and rebellion against their
parental generation. The skinhead movement first emerged in 1968–69 when
young males adopted the uniform of shaven head, turned-up jeans worn with
braces and heavy toe-capped boots. Tattoos were also favored, with a preference for shocking or gruesome motifs. Intolerance and aggression, menacing
behavior and physical attacks were their trademark. While not originally
linked with any neo-Nazi groups, both the National Front (NF) and the
British Movement (BM) began to recruit the skinheads as street-fighting
troops in the 1970s.
The Nazi music scene in Britain was the offspring of this alliance. From the
mid-1970s onward, left-wing and anti-fascist groups had used popular music
to mobilize the young against the advance of the NF. Impressed by the success
of this “Rock against Racism” movement, the NF mounted a counter-offensive called “Rock against Communism” (RAC), which sought to propagandize
skinheads through gigs and large events, fan magazines and star performers.
Ian Stuart Donaldson and his band, Skrewdriver, swiftly emerged as one of
the NF’s chief assets in promoting this racist, anti-Semitic music. Born in
1958, Stuart came from a middle-class background in Blackpool. His first
band, The Tumbling Dice, formed in 1975 and was renamed Skrewdriver in
1977. Reacting against the left-wing milieu of the punk groups, with whom
he often shared venues, Stuart joined the NF in 1979 but initially found that
he was losing his following. However, with the effective retreat of the NF from
electoral politics after its defeat in the 1979 election, the stage was set for the
NF to attract more marginal, violent support.1
Once Skrewdriver was reformed in 1981, it began to attract large attendances and helped transform RAC into a buoyant youth organization. In the
following year, the “Political Soldier” faction of the NF, under the leadership
of Nick Griffin, Derek Holland and Patrick Harrington, set up White Noise
Records to produce and market Skrewdriver’s music. This new elite NF leadership, steeped in the tactics of the fugitive Italian terrorists and the doctrines
of Julius Evola, saw the skinheads as a pool of paramilitary irregulars who
would appear legally independent of the NF but in reality serve as their
ground troops for street battles, football hooliganism and racial attacks in
inner cities. To cultivate this alliance, the NF regularly held spring and sum-
194 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALmer gigs for Skrewdriver and other bands on the Griffin family farm at Huntingfield in Suffolk, which were attended by hundreds of skinheads. The annual Yuletide gig of the White Noise Club held at a large pub in Morden in
southwest London acted as a high point in the Nazi music calendar and attracted a large following from across Europe during the mid-1980s.2
Music and song have always possessed an extraordinary power to articulate myth and sentiment. This militant youth culture, exulting in gut feelings
of anger, aggression and xenophobia, has been particularly susceptible to fascist myths of patriotic revolution, anti-communism and racial identity. Stuart himself once observed that a pamphlet is read only once, but a song is
learned by heart and repeated a thousand times. Skrewdriver’s lyrics fulfilled
this role and became the common refrain of thousands of skinheads and
young neo-Nazis across the world: “We are Mother Europe’s sons . . . I want
my freedom in this world today” (Mother Europe’s Sons); on German reunifi-
cation,“Once the land so proud and free until the war: the shame came down
on Germany—Deutschland, and now you’re one land: free once again” (One
Land); “So many lives have been wasted ...with half of Europe ruled by the
red beast, while the other half were fooled to thinking they were free, as kosher
power ruled at every feast” (Europe on My Mind); “New order, our time will
come” (Our Time Will Come).3
However, in late 1987 Stuart and the former BM skinheads under the
leadership of Nicky Crane broke with the NF following disagreements over
money and politics. Stuart and the skinheads increasingly resented the NF’s
condescending attitude toward them, and it was claimed that thousands of
pounds were owed to the bands and the record company. Stuart and Crane
then founded the Blood and Honour network as a rallying point for racist
skinheads and followers of the white power bands. Within Britain this network acted as Stuart’s own music company for the production and distribution of new recordings, songbooks and a fan magazine, Blood and Honour. However, over the next half-decade, Blood and Honour, backed by the
growing international reputation of Stuart and Skrewdriver, acted as a powerful inspiration to fascist skinheads in both the United States and continental Europe. After Stuart was killed in a car crash in September 1993, his
organization was swiftly taken over by the Sargent brothers and their neoNazi paramilitary group, Combat 18, which subsequently established Blood
and Honour “franchises” in Norway, Sweden, France and the new states
of Eastern Europe, including the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and
Serbia.4
More than fifteen years since the relaunch of Skrewdriver, there were by
1995 at least twelve white power bands with a hardcore following of about five
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 195hundred Nazi skinheads in Britain. Combat 18 played a major role in the organization of gigs and derived substantial income from the performances and
recordings of the bands No Remorse (London), Sudden Impact (London),
Chingford Attack (London), The Order (London), Warlord (London),
Razor’s Edge (West Bromwich), Avalon (Coventry), Celtic Warrior (Cardiff)
and Storm Section (West Country). Founded in 1991 as a pan-Nazi initiative
of Harold Covington, the leader of the NSWPP in the United States, Combat
18 combined the tactics of a protection racket with organized crime in its
drive to control this lucrative business in Britain, Sweden, France and the
United States. Combat 18 also established I.S.D. Records besides the Blood
and Honour network as a recording company and promoted the publication
of several skinhead magazines including Blood and Honour, Blood and Honour Scotland,British Oi! andRampage. Some bands remained outside the C18
fief, including English Rose (Leicester), Squadron (South London) and Paul
Burnley’s breakaway No Remorse, which has made joint recordings with
Svastika of Sweden.5
The skinhead scene is a major feature of militant neo-Nazism in Germany
and expanded dramatically after reunification. With about two thousand
committed Nazi skinheads and as many as double that number of supporters, Germany may be the largest and best-organized Nazi music market in
Europe. There are at least fifty bands with a public profile, including a number that have already existed for more than a decade. Endstufe, founded in
1984, claims to have sold more than 100,000 CDs of its recordings, while Asgard, Holsteiner Jungs, Kraftschlag, Noie Werte, Radikahl and Störkraft have
also found an international following. The Nazi skinzineRock Nord has a circulation of about 10,000 copies, and there at least thirty further fanzines with
circulations between one hundred and ten thousand copies. Throughout the
1980s, distribution was dominated by Rock-A-Rama Records of Cologne,
but following its official suppression in 1993, this market position was taken
by Funny Sounds of Düsseldorf, though there are at least six other record
companies. All together, the German Nazi music companies produce more
than one hundred new CDs each year with a turnover of more than one million DM.6
The growth of the German skinhead movement was related to several
acute domestic problems. In the dilapidated eastern regions of the former
German Democratic Republic (DDR) there was growing mass unemployment, economic misery and the difficulties of adjusting to capitalism and
competition. But these problems were compounded by a further strain,
namely, the arrival of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers from strifetorn and underdeveloped countries taking advantage of Germany’s liberal
196 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALconstitution at a time when Britain and France were tightening their immigration policies. Throughout the early 1980s, the number of applicants for
asylum in West Germany had remained around 30,000 to 50,000 per annum,
but this figure began to skyrocket by the end of the decade with 121,318
(1989), 194,063 (1990), then 256,112 (1991) and over 400,000 in 1992.7
Politicians appeared helpless, and reception centers and asylum hostels
mushroomed across the country, in some cases nearly doubling the size of the
local community. While the economic uncertainty and large-scale factory
closures in the east had fueled xenophobia, this reaction was exacerbated by
the new regions having to take their “fair share” of the country’s arriving asylum seekers.8
Germany wore an ugly face in the period between 1991 and 1994, with
skinhead groups roaming the towns in search of immigrant and asylumseeker victims. Violence toward the refugees (Gypsies, Kurds, Romanians,
Africans, Tamils) soon spilled over against the country’s long-standing Turkish and Yugoslav guest-worker population (and the much smaller North Vietnamese, Mongolian and Mozambique groups in the former DDR). The riots,
arson attacks and murder at Hoyerswerda (September 1991), Rostock (August 1992), Mölln (November 1992) and Solingen (May 1993) were only the
most conspicuous flashpoints of mayhem. Overall, the number of reported
violent attacks attributable to the far right increased by 400 percent, from 270
in 1990 to 1,483 in 1991. In 1992 the number had risen to 2,639, a 77 percent
increase over the previous year.9
Although the number of neo-Nazi and rightwing extremist organizations remained steady at around sixty-five groups,
their membership rose from 4,300 to 5,600 between 1990 and 1993. However,
the additional number of militant extremists outside formal organizations,
especially skinheads, reached 6,400 in 1992, and it was also evident that these
extremists were very young. Until 1985, the median age of those involved in
extreme-right violence was about twenty-seven, but it was barely over nineteen in 1991–93, with many juveniles in the early and mid-teens in the skinhead movement.10
German police, social workers and teachers were universally overwhelmed
by the growth and ferocity of juvenile violence. The skinheads armed themselves with baseball bats with which they mercilessly beat their helpless victims, often to death. Arson attacks on hostels, explosions, and shootings became commonplace with a fatality on average every three weeks.11 The sheer
outnumbering of police coupled with tacit approval among German citizens
for the attacks against foreigners created a situation in which the state was
hard-pressed to control an epidemic of neo-Nazi juvenile delinquency. The
crucial role of the skinhead and Nazi music scene in first attracting youngsters
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 197into the far-right milieu was quickly recognized by the German government.
Fanzines with titles such as White Power,Glorreiche Taten,Möh—der Glatzenreport, Proißens Gloria and Skinhead-Zeitung incited racial hatred and violence while offering tips on organization and law evasion. Meanwhile, the
Nazi music bands propagated the racial war on foreigners: “Battledog, the
beast of German blood, bad times coming for the scum,” sang Störkraft.12
The Nazi skinhead scene is also very active in Sweden, tracing its origins to
British inspiration. In 1985 Tommy Edwards, a Liverpool NF skinhead,
helped establish a local branch of RAC in Södertälje, an industrial town south
of Stockholm. His Swedish contacts, Peter Rindell and Göran Gustavsson,
began publishing Streetfight, a “patriotic” skinzine which gave a heavy profile
to English skins and their bands, especially Ian Stuart’s Skrewdriver, for which
Swedish tours were arranged in 1987 and April 1989. Blood and Honour together with the Swedes then launched a new extremist political skinzine Vit
Rebell, proclaiming a “white revolution without mercy” and calling for a
Swedish stormtroop to make an armed onslaught against Zionists, capitalists
and communists. In its second and third issues the magazine threatened that
this race war was about to be unleashed in Sweden. American neo-Nazi and
Christian Identity apocalyptic were manifest in discussions of Ben Klassen’s
Church of the Creator and Ian Stuart’s enthusiastic recommendation of
William Pierce’s The Turner Diaries andA Candidate for the Order by Michael
Hoffman II, Ernst Zündel’s biographer, as both books “really give inspiration
to white revolutionary nationalists.”13
Although the Swedish authorities suppressed Vit Rebell at the end of
1989, the Swedish Nazi skinhead movement grew from five hundred in
1991 to more than three thousand in 1995. In that year there were eight
Nazi murders and a high level of public disorder. The white power bands,
including Storm, Odium, Totenkopf, Division S, Spandau and Vit Aggression, are chiefly based in Stockholm and Gothenburg. Large concerts were
held during 1994 and 1995 in Stockholm and Alingsås, the latter in conjunction with the largest Nazi demonstration organized in Sweden since
1945, when about six hundred supporters from Scandinavia, Germany
and Britain gathered to hear Svastika, No Remorse and Celtic Warrior on
30 April 1994. Some five hundred participants from the same countries
and the United States watched Asar, Swastika and Squadron perform at
one of the largest rock cafés in central Stockholm in August of that year,
and another concert featuring four bands was held in the capital in February 1995. Videocassette recordings of these and many other performances are marketed by Freedom Videos in Britain; such availability greatly
enhances their propagandistic effect over time.14
198 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALAt least five record companies in Sweden produce racist music for the skinhead market, ranging from Last Resort in Stockholm, Ultima Thule (the band
of this name had gained a large following by 1994) in Neköping, Svea Music
in Askersund, Ragnarock in Helsingborg and Nordland, which publishes its
own skinzine Nordland as well as records and videocassettes under the label
88. Other scene periodicals include Valhall(Gothenburg),Viking Order and
Skinzine Norr. Both Nordland and Valhall work closely with Resistance
Records, the largest Nazi music supplier in the United States. As in Germany,
there are now some signs that the authorities are combatting the growth of
this Nazi youth movement. During 1996 many arrests took place, followed by
internal dissension among the Swedish skinheads, whose numbers have
meanwhile dropped to around two thousand.15
Both France and Italy also generated highly active Nazi skinhead movements. French bands included Bifrost, Stormcore and All Spyz, while the leading skinhead organization was the Charlemagne Hammerskins (CHS), run
by Hervé Guttuso, who was aligned with Combat 18 and lived in Britain. The
CHS published a series of national and regional skinzines, including
W.O.T.A.N. (Will of the Aryan Nation), Terreur d’Élite, 88/14 (Gironde),
Death before Dishonour (Calais) and Une Balle dans la tête (Montpelier).
Other figures in the French Nazi music scene included Greg Reemers, who ran
the skinzine Viking. After breaking with Combat 18, he produced Sang et
Honneur as the flagship of an independent Blood and Honour section in
France. Other French skinzines include Un Jour Viendra, Militants Blancs,
Blitzkrieg, Rêve de Gloire and Eostre.
16 In the late 1980s there were several
thousand Nazi skinheads in France, but now there are far fewer and many
signs that the Black Metal music scene has become a more favoured target for
Nazi politicization.
After the founding of the Veneto Front Skinheads in the mid-1980s, Italy
witnessed the rise of numerous Nazi skinhead bands, including ADL 122,
Peggior Amico, Corona Ferrea, Nomina Dresda, Legione dell’Odio, Soluzione
Violenta and Supremazia Bianca. Although discouraged by the passing of the
Mancino Act against the incitement of racial hatred in 1993, the skinhead
groups have returned to prominence with an umbrella organization in the
north called Azione Lombarda Skinhead 88. There are also a number of commercial operations with shops in Rome, Milan and Bologna selling badges, Tshirts, records and videos. Italy has also hosted some of the largest international white power rock concerts in Europe. Over the August bank holiday of
1991, hundreds of revolutionary nationalists from all over the continent
gathered near Bassano del Grappa, significant as communist partisan territory in the closing months of the 1939–45 war, to hear Peggior Amico and
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 199Skrewdriver give a concert called “Return to Camelot.” Peggior Amico and
Skullhead from Consett on Tyseside put on a show for a massive skinhead audience at Grottaferrata near Rome in May 1992.17
Nazi skinheads first appeared in the United States in 1984, clearly patterned on the dress and behavior of the British model. By the late 1980s there
were some one thousand across the States, but by the mid-1990s their numbers had grown to about four thousand, with a larger group of over ten thousand sympathizers. The Anti-Defamation League, a watchdog group monitoring Nazi and anti-Semitic activity, published its first report in November
1987 and has since produced six more on this growing racist menace. The
1993 report recorded a dramatic increase in the number of murders committed by Nazi skinheads, with twenty-two killings in the preceding three years,
the victims chiefly being Hispanics, blacks and Asians. Skinheads also committed thousands of lesser crimes including stabbings, shootings, thefts, synagogue desecrations, street disorders and mayhem. There is no single national
skinhead organization, but rather loosely linked networks of gangs that affiliate under such names as American Front, Northern Hammerskins, Confederate Hammerskins, Aryan Resistance League and SS of America. These in
turn have occasionally formed local alliances with the Ku Klux Klan, White
Aryan Resistance, the Church of the Creator, and such Christian Identity
groups as Aryan Nations.18
White power music has been a vital driving force in forging American
skinhead identity through records, CDs, songbooks and zines that provide
band interviews, eulogies of Nazi heroes and the dissemination of symbols
and ideology. Founded in 1994, the Detroit-based record company Resistance
Records dramatically upgraded the Nazi skinhead scene with a high-quality
music production and a glossy magazine Resistance (1994–), which runs to
more than sixty pages. Bands that have recorded with Resistance Records include Aggravated Assault (Atlantic City), The Voice (Pennsylvania), Centurion (Milwaukee), Bound for Glory (St. Paul), Max Resist and the Hooligans
(Detroit), Nordic Thunder (Delaware) and Beserkr (Oklahoma). Their violent hate-rock albums carry such titles as Crush the Weak, Born to Hate, Behold the Iron Cross and The Voice of Our Ancestors, while their cover artwork
features Viking warriors, German soldiers in World War II battle scenes and
Nazi rallies. Resistance Records maintains a slick marketing operation with
credit card sales and a website that features visuals and sound clips of selected
albums.
The founder of Resistance Records was George Eric Hawthorne, a young
Canadian of Italian descent now in his early thirties, whose real name is
George Burdi. Brought up a Catholic, Hawthorne early rejected the univer-
200 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALsalism of Christianity, immersed himself in Nietzsche and was attracted to an
ideology of white supremacy. In Toronto he assisted the Holocaust revisionist Ernst Zündel at the Samisdat offices and became a local chapter leader of
the Church of the Creator, a radical religious organization founded by the
Ukrainian-born Ben Klassen in 1973 that deifies the white Aryan race. A
chance encounter with a tape of Hail the New Dawn by Skrewdriver revolutionized Hawthorne’s conception of the white revolutionary movement. Popular music, the sound of his own generation, would bring youth, vitality and
aggression to a movement previously supported by middle-aged and elderly
reactionaries. In 1990 he founded his own band, RAHOWA, its name derived
from the Church of the Creator motto “RAcial HOly WAr,” which released its
first major album under the title Cult of the Holy Warin 1996.19
Resistance publicized the ideology of white power to a growing readership
of music fans. Launched in spring 1994 with a five thousand circulation, the
magazine first featured interviews with American and European bands, including Aryan, Svastika, Centurion, Nordic Thunder, Bound for Glory and
Das Reich. By the second issue, circulation was up to ten thousand and
Hawthorne’s editorials dilated on the coming white revolution and racial
will to power. Articles embraced varied topics, including anti-racism, political correctness, the “genocide against the white race,” David Duke’s impressions of India, the Swedish white power scene, and a paean to Robert Jay
Mathews, the founder of the terrorist Brüders Schweigen group, or The
Order, killed by the FBI in 1984.20 National and cultural traditions are emphasized with a Celtic festival favorably compared with the “artificial, prepackaged, soda-pop culture” of the pastless present. Against what it sees as
the multiracial eclipse of Aryan ancestry, RAHOWA “resurrects the spirit of
ancient Europe,” while Hawthorne and its other members are proud of their
Scottish, Germanic, Balt and Slav origins.21 History is also prominent, with
features on the racist and populist ideas of Jack London, Charles Lindbergh
and a youth memoir of the Russian front by a Dutch Waffen-SS man in his
seventies.22 Nordic and Third Reich imagery jostles with anti-black and antiJewish cartoons.
Hawthorne’s white revolutionary racism and the American Nazi skinhead
movement represent a desperate negation of the rapidly changing racial demography of the United States. Since the early 1980s, affirmative action and
positive racial discrimination coupled with fast increasing levels of non-European immigration and the rise of a black underclass have dramatically revised the image of a predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon America. Hawthorne
and other white power groups regard desegregation and multiracial policies
in Western countries as the secular outcome of Christian sympathy for the
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 201weak, disadvantaged and inferior. Their pro-white racism is thus overlaid by
a trenchant critique of Christianity, which is also a legacy from the biological
monism and “laws of nature” preached by the Church of the Creator.
Hawthorne and his skinhead supporters believe that they are now fighting for
the very racial survival of the European races against a flood of colored peoples both across the world and in the formerly white countries that now have
growing colored populations.23
In Hawthorne’s view, the white race must now abandon the “false morality” of Christianity, which causes it to act against its own interest in tolerating
the growing numbers and power of other races. Any liberal or humanitarian
hostility to white power is interpreted as weakness, cowardice or guilt, fostered by a treacherous (Jewish) media campaign preaching tolerance, integration and racial harmony. This ideology is underpinned by the superman
mythos of Friedrich Nietzsche and the “law of the jungle” taken from Social
Darwinism. The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche’s trenchant rejection of Christianity
written in 1888, is now current as an anti-Christian manifesto among white
power activists in America and Europe. Here Nietzsche juxtaposes the will to
power against Christian moralizing: “What is good?—All that heightens the
feeling of power....What is bad?—All that proceeds from weakness. What is
more harmful than any vice?—Active sympathy for the ill-constituted and
weak—Christianity.” Page after page, Christianity is relentlessly stigmatized
as a pitiable antithesis to the tonic emotions enhancing the feeling of life; a
myth offering spiritual consolations in place of tangible gains; a contradiction
of all natural urges toward assertion and victory.24
Ragnar Redbeard is another major inspiration to the white power movement in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. His classic work,Might
Is Right; or The Survival of the Fittest, first published in Chicago in 1896, outlines the case for Social Darwinism, with scathing attacks on Christianity,
democracy and socialism.25 For Redbeard, the natural world is a world of unremitting struggle, the natural man is a warrior and the natural law is tooth
and claw. In this war of all against all, there are only a small number of victors
strong enough to conquer and make the rules. The great mass of people have
no initiative and are born to be subjects and slaves. Redbeard heaps scorn
upon Christianity:“A god begging his bread from door to door!—A god without a place to lay his head!—A god executed by order of a stipendiary magistrate!” All collectivist politics, with their sentimental appeal to the masses, are
but the humbug of the agitator who desires to rule and enrich himself through
the State, just as the priest once did through the agency of the Church.26
The white power bands mobilize these trenchant Social Darwinist ideas
against the tolerance of left-wing and liberal values. They believe that white
202 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALAmerica is now a hostage to its colored populations where an affluent society
seeks to appease its growing underclass. They oppose the welfare support of
single black mothers with large families, which is seen as only encouraging
their proliferation. Life, they argue, is a ruthless competition for scarce resources. Every individual, clan and tribe must secure its territory and propagate itself in order to survive; liberal societies are fated for extinction with
their positive racial discrimination and never-ending subsidy of racial enemies, the weak and infirm. In an interview, Hawthorne extravagantly praised
Redbeard’s poem about war, arms and power.27
Might was Right when Caesar bled upon the stones of Rome
Might was Right when Joshua led his hordes o’er Jordan’s foam
And Might was Right when German troops poured down through Paris gay;
It’s the Gospel of the Ancient World and the Logic of To-Day.
The Strong must ever rule the Weak, is grim Primordial Law -
On earth’s broad racial threshing floor, the Meek are beaten straw -
Then ride to Power o’er foeman’s necks let nothing bar your way:
If you are fit you’ll rule and reign, is the Logic of To-Day.28
While racism, right-wing extremism and violence were originally confined
to white power music, the misanthropic zeitgeist later caught on against the
brutal percussion and deafening crescendos of black metal music. In their
recordings, performances and fan magazines, some of these groups brazenly
display motifs of racial hatred, misanthropy, apocalyptic destruction, fascism
and Nazism. Black metal music derives from the heavy metal genre which included such well-known commercial bands as Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden,
AC/DC, Kiss and Motörhead, beginning as early as the 1970s. These groups
also flaunted “Gothic” motifs of death and darkness, but in the case of black
metal this “nightside” symbolism has often developed into a complete philosophy of negation. Formed in 1981, the Danish band Mercyful Fate was an
early representative of black metal, led by the practicing satanist, King Diamond, who performed with a demonic mask of black and white face paint.
The British band Venom was formed in Newcastle, England, in 1980 to offer
fans a coarse fare of anti-Christian blasphemy and satanic posturings. The
Swedish band Bathory (named after the homicidal sadistic Hungarian countess of the seventeenth century) started up in 1983. By the end of the 1980s, the
genre was beginning to mix its transgressive satanism with Norse mythology
as a “dark” pre-Christian native tradition.29
In the mid-1980s a new wave of satanic black metal began in Norway. Inspired by Venom and Bathory, Øystein Aarseth founded his band, Mayhem,
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 203in Oslo in 1984. Soon after changing his name to Euronymous, Aarseth relaunched his own record label and opened a music shop called “Helvete” (the
Norse word for hell). In his songs and in his life-style, Euronymous cultivated
a philosophy of nihilistic hatred, colored by the brooding, depressive morbidity often associated with the negative side of the Scandinavian psyche. A
circle of black metal fans and performers gravitated to this dismal cellar with
its satanic decor, and new Norwegian bands called Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved and Arcturus were formed. The groups Satanel and Darkthrone followed in 1990. Scandinavian folklore, grotesque monsters and a malignant atmosphere provided an uncanny background to their cacophonous music
with obscene satanic and nihilist lyrics. Wearing black clothes and white face
paint, Euronymous’s demented and anti-social rants were matched by the
other groups’ profane acts involving blasphemy and aggression before shockhungry audiences. Very shortly, these fantasies of slaughter and apocalypse
were followed by genuine mayhem, with suicides, feuds and murders.30
In 1991 Satanel split into two bands, Burzum and Immortal. Burzum was
the musical vehicle of a young Norwegian ex-skinhead, Kristian Víkernes (b.
1973), who called himself Count Grishnackh after one of the evil “orc” characters in J. R. Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy The Lord of the Rings, while Burzum
meant “darkness” in the orc language. Víkernes also legally changed his given
Christian name to Varg, Norwegian for wolf. He wrote morbid lyrics about
night, Jesus’ death, and the coming of Christianity as an enervating plague
among the heroic northern peoples in his CD release Filosofem. Having introduced a devil-worshiping cult into Norwegian black metal, Euronymous
and Víkernes began to proclaim their readiness to commit outrages. On 6
June 1992 the beautiful old wooden stave church of Fantoft, one of Norway’s
architectural treasures dating from the twelfth century, was burned to the
ground by arson. By January 1993, fire attacks had occurred on at least seven
other major Norwegian stave churches. Víkernes was subsequently convicted
of the murder of Euronymous in August 1993 and of three of the church arsons; he was sentenced to twenty-one years in jail. Sensational publicity during the trial period guaranteed Víkernes the media role of an arch-satanist.31
While in jail, Víkernes began to formulate his nationalist heathen ideology
using materials from Norse mythology combined with racism and occult National Socialism. These essays were published in various underground publications and inFilosofem, a neo-Nazi magazine published by Vidar von Herske,
another member of Burzum, who had migrated to France. Víkernes’s articles
typically revolved around esoteric interpretations of myths in the Edda, with
discussions of Odin, his magical ring, ravens and wolves. Víkernes identified
himself with Wotan or Odin: “I am his flesh and blood, his soul and spirit; for
204 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALI am his posterity and the archetypes in our race are his.” Other articles focused on Norse cosmology and magical practices.32With his increasing racial
nationalism,Víkernes sees himself as a successor to Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian political leader who headed the collaborationist government during
the Nazi occupation of the Second World War. In particular, Víkernes is interested in Quisling’s mystical doctrine of “Universism,”which combines pantheism with a Nietzschean will to power. He has also written a bookVargsmål,
underlining his role as chieftain of his Norwegian Heathen Front.33
The black metal scene has since exploded into an international phenomenon, with hundreds of bands in Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany,
Austria and the United States. With names such as Bathory, Possessed, Slayer,
Sodom, Enslaved, Moonfog, Soulgrind, Ragnarok and Helheim, the groups
cultivate a dread image with black clothes, long hair and white facial “corpsepaint.” Performances are wild and frenzied and the magazines are filled with
skulls, ravens, werewolves, runes and magical sigils. America’s leading black
metal magazine,Descent, published in Seattle, focuses on dark and occult topics alongside interviews with Storm, Blood Axis, Allerseelen and Sol Invictus.
In Norway itself, Andrea Meyer-Haugen publishes Horde of Hagalaz as “the
voice of northern witches, warlocks and warriors,” to express “myths and
magic of the cold, northern heathen ground and the understanding of the
dark side of human nature.” An explicit link to Nazi ideas is often present.
One Australian group, Spear of Longinus (inspired by Trevor Ravenscroft’s
Spear of Destiny), describes its music as “Nazi occult metal” and features pictures of Himmler’s Wewelsburg castle on its fliers. The New Zealand zine Key
of Alocerincludes articles on Nazism and satanism, while Trumpeter of Evil in
Holland has glorified the Dutch SS.34
George Eric Hawthorne was eager to foster the links between black metal
and white power music, with special praise for the groups Burzum, Storm,
Moonspell and Graveland. Resistance has run features on the Norwegian
black metal scene and on the Polish group Graveland. Stephen O’Malley, editor of Descent, reviews the Scandinavian bands, their personalities and occult-Nordic outlook with an opening quote from Varg Víkernes: “I am naturally affiliated with ‘Nazism,’ for it is based on our archetypal values. . . . Too
bad the holocaust is a lie. . . . Burn what you spurn, strife is life. Lay waste to
the Jew’s world.”35Darken, the leader of Graveland, dresses as a medieval Polish warrior, praises Hitler, and foretells the rebirth of an “Aryan Pagan Empire.” His views are unabashedly fascist: the pagan spirit underlies all reaction
to Christianity, democracy and technical civilization, where money takes the
place of gods. The Holocaust was the culmination of this reaction. Yet modern politicians, he claims, try to deprive Europe of its true traditions and
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 205identity. Graveland awaits the resurrection of buried archetypes and their terrible vengeance:“The Pagan Spirit sleeps in every one of of us, it is very strong
but dormant. Once awakened, it shall resent and destroy that which denied it
life all these centuries.”36
The black metal scene in Germany also acquired a Nazi wing. The band
Absurd was formed by sixteen-year-old Hendrik Möbus (aka Jarl Flagg Nidhoegg) and two others in Sondershausen in the former East Germany. Styling
themselves as leaders of a local satanic cult, the three murdered a classmate,
Sandro Beyer, in April 1993. While Möbus served an eight-year sentence for
murder, Graveland released the Absurd tape Thuringian Pagan Madnesswith
a cover photograph of Beyer’s gravestone, thus garnering the group further
notoriety in the Nazi black metal scene. Released on parole in August 1998,
Möbus stated that Beyer was killed as a “race defiler,” thereby emphasizing the
band’s Nazi politics.37 Möbus aligned himself further with the Norwegian
black metal Nazi movement by becoming head of the German branch of Varg
Víkernes’s Heathen Front, which now has chapters in Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands and the United States. Möbus also
founded Darker than Black (DTB) Records and cultivated links with the Saxonian Hammerskins, resulting in DTB reaching a distribution deal with Germany’s Hate Records, one of the largest white power music promoters in Europe. In October 1999, the German authorities raided DTB Records. Möbus
was already serving a short prison sentence for displaying Nazi symbols; as a
result of his part in DTB, he was sentenced to a further eighteen months. At
this point Möbus went on the run, only to resurface in the American Nazi underground the following summer.38
The widening influence of this nihilist, satanic subculture is evidenced by
the Black Circle, a loose network of national socialist black metal bands. For
the anniversary of Hitler’s birthday in 1999, Absurd produced a CD in collaboration with an American Nazi band called Birkenau, named after the Nazi
extermination camp. Möbus also contributed to a CD medley of Nazi black
metal music entitled Night and Fog in association with the bands SS1488
(Austria), Kristallnacht (France), Fullmoon, Wineta and Thunderbolt (all
from Poland). While Wineta proclaims its opposition to “niggers, Jews and all
other sub-human mongrels,” Kristallnacht’s leader “has spent time in ZOG
controlled prisons for his beliefs and cadaver desecration.” In 1998 Jon
Nodtveidt, the Swedish singer of the band Dissection, was jailed for the murder of an Algerian man in Gothenburg. The Russian Black Metal Brotherhood
has meanwhile emerged in the East and claimed responsibility for a variety of
criminal acts.39 Founded in 1993, Misanthropy Records in Suffolk, England,
produces a dozen black metal bands through its own label and distributes a
206 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALfurther fifty. As the principal promoter of Varg Víkernes’s Burzum material,
Misanthropy has a website linked to the Heathen Front and the German neoNazi Thule Netz. Misanthropy has close links with Stephen O’Malley, editor
of Descent, and also distributes industrial music by the American band Blood
Axis and the Austrian project Allerseelen.40
The Oregon-based industrial musician Michael Jenkins Moynihan (b.
1970) and his group Blood Axis have released a CD entitled The Gospel of Inhumanity (1995). The cover picture is taken from the apocalyptic painting
Der Krieg by the nineteenth-century German Decadent artist Franz von
Stuck. It shows a naked warrior with a banner over his shoulder riding a black
horse across a field littered with human corpses. The music and lyrics celebrate the realization of a violent will-to-power. Highlights include readings
from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and spoken excerpts from
writings of Charles Manson and the fascist poet Ezra Pound. Reviews hail the
piece as full of brute force, esoteric wisdom and a call to arms: “the infernal
shadowside of pagan Europe.” Some idea of Moynihan’s political affiliations
may be gleaned from an interview in Aorta, an esoteric fascist booklet series
edited by the writer-musician Kadmon of Vienna. Here he speaks of his interest in Mithraism, the martial religion popular among the Roman Legions
combining “the harsh reality of struggle and spiritual light.” He is fascinated
by the mythos of the Archangel Michael as a violent solar deity rather than as
a Christian saint and interprets Charles Manson as a Gnostic and a kindred
spirit of the Nazi philosopher Alfred Rosenberg. Both are claimed as champions for recognizing the “polar symbiosis of creation and destruction.”41
Moynihan’s first musical project Coup de Grace lasted from 1984 to 1989,
combining violent electronic recordings with illustrated booklets. In 1988 he
brought out a special edition of Nietzsche’s The Anti-Christ and became interested in Charles Manson and the Californian Church of Satan. These stations mapped his exploration of a pagan philosophy based on nature, race
and a blood mystique. In 1989 he founded Blood Axis, taking as its symbol the
Kruckenkreuz, which had been used by Jörg Lanz von Liebenfels as the symbol of the Order of the New Templars; the cross was also used by the Austrian
Vaterländische Front and later became the national emblem of Austria under
the regime of Chancellor Dollfuß. He has also collaborated with Boyd Rice,
an industrial musician, who is both a priest in the Church of Satan and a
member of Bob Heick’s American Front of Nazi skinheads. In 1992, under his
imprint Storm, Moynihan published a complete anthology of James N.
Mason’s militant articles from Siege, the periodical of the National Socialist
Liberation Front, which called for terrorist attacks on the “Jewish powerstructure” of the United States.42
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 207In his Universal Order, a bizarre cult that has even alienated many American Nazis, Mason idolizes Manson as the outlaw hero who long ago declared
war on the “system” by murdering Hollywood celebrities. Given Manson’s infamous reputation as a convicted mass killer serving a life sentence, he also attracts black metal satanists as an “establishment” demon or taboo figure.
Moynihan has since conducted a major interview with Charles Manson in jail
that appeared in a popular metal magazine.43 Moynihan also has extensive
European links. While running Coup de Grace, he lived for part of the time
in Antwerp and toured Germany and Holland. He is also co-editor of
Filosofem, published by Vidar von Herske in France. His own articles in the
journal have included essays relating Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian to
Gnosticism and fascism, as well as a study of the runes and the cosmic significance of the “Wolfsangle” or Eiwhaz-rune, which serves as the emblem of the
Black Order, an international neo-Nazi sect, since renamed the White Order
of Thule.44Moynihan has since highlighted the far right and racist affiliations
of black metal in his book, Lords of Chaos (1998), co-authored with Didrik
Søderlind, which features extensive interviews with members of the Norwegian and German bands concerning their church burnings, murders, neo-paganism and Nazi ideas.45
The Austrian industrial musician Kadmon (Gerhard Petak) has attracted
an English and German-speaking following through his tracts on themes of
paganism, mysteries and fascism in the Aorta series. Topics have included
Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising, inspired by the English magician Aleister
Crowley; the Romanian fascist leader Corneliu Codreanu; the blood lamp
cult of Alfred Schuler in Munich around 1900; the mystical side of the SS as
represented by Otto Rahn’s quest for the Holy Grail at Montségur; the ancient
cult of Mithras; and Karl-Maria Wiligut, Heinrich Himmler’s private magus
on matters of ancient Germanic spirituality. Individual tracts have also been
devoted to Moynihan and Blood Axis and to Norwegian black metal, which
Kadmon relates to Scandinavian Oskoreimischief folklore.Aortahas been followed by a new series Ahnstern, with tracts on the Austrian UFO engineer
Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958), Ernst Jünger and his Great War novels.46
Kadmon is inspired throughout by a dark romanticism, the occult and mythical and chthonic elements of European culture.
Through his music label Allerseelen, Kadmon has released the Gotos=
Kalenda verses that Wiligut had originally dedicated to Himmler in 1937.
Kadmon’s logo is the “Black Sun,” the circular sun wheel of twelve sig-runes
at the Wewelsburg. This symbol has become widespread among neo-Nazi
youth in Germany and abroad as a more esoteric sign than the common
swastika. Moynihan and Kadmon have issued a joint recording, Walked in
208 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALLine/Ernting, which features the stomp of soldiers’ marching boots and Wiligut lyrics. Kadmon has given Moynihan many ideas and images from German fascism and militarism, including Wehrmacht battle scenes, Ernst
Jünger’s verse, Waffen-SS graves with rune stocks and Lanz’s New Templar
Kruckenkreuz. Kadmon’s European influence is also evident in Moynihan’s
plans to publish a translation of Julius Evola’s Men among Ruins and a selection of Wiligut’s runic writings.47
Other American bands are less esoteric in their references. Of the several
hundred black metal bands across the States, a significant minority flirt with
Nazi and fascist ideas. A group called Ethnic Cleansing has released two EPs
under the titles Piles of Dead Jews andHitler Was Right, with shouted hate ditties about non-whites and the state of the nation. The satanic band Acheron,
led by Vincent Crowley, has released a CD entitled Hail Victory; Crowley also
edits a zine,Order of the Evil Eye, and is a member of the Church of Satan. Bob
Heick, the American Front leader, has also recorded cassettes under the name
Robert X. Patriot with the White Devil Conspiracy. Boyd Rice and his band
NON have a CD, Might!, an interpretation of Ragnar Redbeard’s misanthropic classic with electronic cacophony and grating frequencies. The American black metal scene is publicized by a number of magazines, including
Aaron Garland’s Ohm Clock (Las Vegas) and Beau Lippincott’s Warcom
Gazette(San Jose), which contain long interviews with bands on their satanist
and Nazi philosophy as well as many pages devoted to reviews of music
recordings and other zines in the underground scene. Crude Social Darwinism jostles with obscenity, nihilism and fantasies of mass destruction.
The potent attraction of the black metal underground to alienated youth
was demonstrated dramatically by the school massacre at Littleton near Denver, Colorado, on 20 April 1999. On Hitler’s birthday, Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold, both aged eighteen, unleashed a blood bath at Columbine High
School with automatic weapons and pipe bombs. After their four-hour rampage of indiscriminate shootings and explosions, twelve fellow students and
a teacher lay dead, many more were wounded, and the two assailants had shot
themselves. It subsequently emerged that the two young killers were members
of a school clique known as the Trenchcoat Mafia, which affected long leather
coats, listened to black metal music, and indulged a fascination with the occult, evil, Nazism and Hitler. This behavior was apparently motivated by their
hatred of the school’s mainstream culture of money, popularity and success,
epitomized by its star football team members (“jocks”) and academic high-
flyers. The killers’ favorite metal musician was Marilyn Manson, a transvestite
shock-rocker who took his name from Charles Manson with all its associations of rebellion, murder and mayhem. Marilyn’s records included such
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 209songs as “Antichrist Superstar,” while other lyrics celebrated grenade explosions, suicide and evil.
Although members of the clique were generally among the brighter students at the school, their disaffection from the mainstream led them to embrace transgressive modes of conduct as a token of their alienation. In their
yearbook entry, members inscribed the message, “Who says insanity is crazy?
Insanity is healthy.” The Trenchcoat Mafia’s marginal identity found powerful
expression in black metal and “Gothic” (darkside) music. Besides the leather
coats, some members wore T-shirts with far-right and pagan insignia. The
preoccupation with guns, death and Hitler were all so many statements of a
profound rejection of the comfortable, liberal American mores of the Denver
suburbs. Students at the school recalled how Harris during the past year wore
black clothes in a Gothic style, affected to speak German, and was obsessed
with anything about the Nazis and the Second World War. Harris had also set
up his own website with descriptions of how to make pipe bombs, referring
to a “chilling day to come”; he also published a song by the German band Kein
Mitleid mit der Mehrheit (No Sympathy with the Majority), which said,
“What I don’t do I don’t like. What I don’t like I waste.” The school massacre
evidently represented Harris and Klebold’s real-life enactment of anti-social,
destructive fantasies fueled by a sense of failure and backed by Marilyn Manson’s lyrics of doom, satanism and suicide.48
Another episode of Nazi fantasy and gun obsession concerned three young
Britons who traveled to America and committed suicide in February 1996.
Jane Greenhow and Ruth Fleming were both students at Leicester University,
where they met Stephen Bateman, a young man working at a local company.
A love triangle formed and they later shared a house in Andover, Hampshire.
In January, the trio flew to Detroit. Fleming and Bateman traveled right across
the States before shooting themselves in a suicide pact on 21 February at a
shooting range in Mesa, Arizona. Greenhow shot herself several hours later in
a separate incident on the shore of Lake Shasta in northern California. Subsequent investigations revealed a mysterious trail of clues linking the victims
to neo-Nazi groups. There had been local talk in Andover of their traveling to
a neo-Nazi training camp in the United States. Neighbors recalled their wearing Nazi-style uniforms and boots and listening to far-right music; an SS cap,
Gestapo trousers and two toy German tanks were later found on the premises,
while gun catalogs and photos of people in black military-style uniforms were
left behind at their London hotel. Greenhow left behind eighty to one hundred pages of writing revealing her dedication to neo-Nazi and citizens’ militia causes and bemoaning German defeat in the Second World War. The presence of Resistance Records in Detroit added further circumstantial evidence,
210 WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METALwhile a Combat 18 magazine published an obituary. While no crime was
committed, one can only speculate at the morbid fantasy and alienation that
led these young people to their death.49
The authorities are increasingly conscious of the power of Nazi music
bands to incite racial hatred and violence. In April 1995 George Eric
Hawthorne was convicted for the assault of an anti-racist protestor after the
disruption of his concert in Ottawa, and he was sentenced to one year in jail.
Resistance Records continued trading, but in April 1997 the Anti-Defamation
League successfully brought pressure to bear and Michigan State and Canadian police closed down the operation in Detroit and in Ontario, confiscating
all stocks of CDs and tapes. Bunkruptcy loomed, but William Pierce of the
National Alliance intervened by buying the company, refinancing the operation and reestablishing it under Erich Gliebe’s management at his own base
in Hillsboro, West Virginia. Pierce sees white power music as a powerful element in his campaign to influence a younger generation against multiracialism. “There is a growing revolutionary spirit among our young, creative musicians,” says Pierce,“and they need a medium to express themselves.”50Given
Pierce’s own creative expression in the violence-filled pages of The Turner Diaries, with their graphic accounts of race war in the United States, his distribution of albums such as Crush the Weak,Born to Hate,Behold the Iron Cross
andThe Voice of Our Ancestorsleaves no doubt as to the message he is broadcasting.
William Pierce also demonstrates the close interaction between the white
power and the black metal underground music scenes. Describing his plans
for Resistance Records, Pierce announced his intention of broadening the
spectrum of “White resistance music” to include such genres as Gothic and
black metal, while the spring 2000 issue of Resistanceran an article “Is Black
Metal a White Noise?” This article featured Hendrick Möbus, leader of the
German black metal band Absurd, who had already served a five-year prison
term for murder and was again on the run from German justice. It transpired
that Möbus had flown to the United States in December 1999 before shuttling
between Nathan Pett, the publisher of Fenris Wolf, a fanzine combining esoteric Nazism and paganism, in Spokane, Washington, and the White Order of
Thule, a similar outfit in Richmond, Virginia. In early 2000 Pett affiliated his
fanzine to the Pagan Front, a coalition of organizations, record labels, bands
and individuals promoting the Nazi black metal underground. In June 2000
Möbus arrived at Pierce’s National Alliance headqaurters in Hillsboro, West
Virginia, and stayed for two months. During his stay, Möbus helped Pierce secure entry into the black metal scene in the United States and Europe, involving a deal with Cymophane Records, an American-Swedish black metal label
WHITE NOISE AND BLACK METAL 211with access to mainstream distribution channels. Möbus was arrested by the
U.S. Marshals’ Service at Lewisburg, West Virginia, on 29 August 2000, and
Pierce promptly helped him apply for political asylum and fight extradition
to Germany.51
Skinhead gangs, white power and black metal bands are a youth phenomenon dominated by young males between the ages of fifteen and the late twenties. As such, these social groups are notoriously volatile, constantly forming,
breaking up and re-forming. Strong leadership, personality clashes and opportunistic alliances largely dictate their growth and development. Organizational links with neo-Nazi parties and groups are likewise tenuous and fluid.
Ian Stuart’s break with the National Front and the formation of the independent Blood and Honour network prefigured the recurrent fission and assertion of autonomy in the skinhead and Nazi music scenes. However, the
neo-Nazi co-option and infiltration of this youth subculture was never intended as an organizational strategy to boost their own card-carrying membership. Their aim is to broadcast racism and contempt for liberalism and
democracy among a new constituency of alienated white youth. From this
point of view, the skinhead movement, carried by its concerts, recordings and
zines, has proved a hugely effective ideological asset for the international Nazi
underground. Nietzschean anti-Christianity, Social Darwinism, racial intolerance and white supremacy are now the common passwords in a right-wing
youth culture that extends through North America, Europe and Australasia.
By entering a youth culture that has subsequently generated its own distinctive media of music and magazines, neo-Nazism has achieved a popular outreach among the young generation on an international scale.
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