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Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Wed Jan 06, 2016 3:19 pm
by Sounder
Parafascists (foot soldiers) murder people, big money fascists pay for parafascists to murder people. Those same big money fascists pay PR firms to spin the public into believing that they are good guys on the side of freedom and democracy, as was done in the Ukraine and done with the white hats in Syria.

The larger concern should be with the fascists that fuck up and fuck with the psyches of folk on a grand scale, rather than the poor sot that has already had his psyche driven into cycles of hate.

Leverage man leverage.


The big boys provide encouragement to both 'sides' so as to keep focus off of themselves. But who destroys all these sovereign nations? Right, the neoliberials. So now, is George Soros a neoliberial, or if not, what is he or how is he any different?

Is George Soros a noeliberal, AD?


Yes the OK's may be used in some Gladio operation, and when they are, be sure to not consider that the real operators were OB's rather than OK's.

One certainly doesn't want to give up that cheap buzz provided by our prescribed three minutes of hate.

Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Wed Jan 06, 2016 3:32 pm
by stefano
Soros is not a 'neoliberal'. He's a liberal in both the economic sense (championing unrestricted movement of goods and capital) and the political sense (championing unrestricted movement of people and calling for minimal restrictions on social and political freedoms). Why's he coming up again?

Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Wed Jan 06, 2016 10:57 pm
by tapitsbo
Good point stephano - Soros is certainly only one individual amongst a vast firmament of players. It would be helpful to focus more on the ideas at play... If we are talking personalities Soros is interesting but far from the most flagrantly psychopathic

Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 12:45 pm
by American Dream
http://idavox.com/index.php/2016/01/17/ ... i-concert/

Scotland Antifa Vow to Stop October neo-Nazi Concert

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Bound for Glory

Among others, the show features U.S. bands Bound for Glory, Brassic (who played an Oi! Fest in NYC last year), and is sponsored by the neo-Nazi network Blood and Honour.

Common Space

ANTI-RACISTS have responded with anger to news that an undisclosed 800 capacity Edinburgh venue is to host what neo-nazi organisers are billing as Scotland’s largest ever ‘white power’ metal gig.

Trade unionists and student campaigners have vowed to oppose the miniature festival, which will feature several racist bands from the far right skinhead subculture, headlined by leading US racist metal outfit ‘Bound for Glory’.

Anti-fascist monitoring group Hope Not Hate, which uses agents within the far right scene to monitor the activities of violent hate activists, has revealed that the gig has been organised by former figures within ‘Blood and Honour’ – a notorious neo-nazi organisation which has hosted large white power gigs throughout Europe and North America.

Hope Not Hate has also warned that hundreds of neo-nazi’s from across Europe are planning to travel to Scotland’s capital to attend the gig.
Suki Sangha, vice chair of the Unite union’s black, Asian and ethnic minority committee told CommonSpace trade unionists and anti-racists would oppose the gig.

She said: “We will oppose this “white power” gig and anyone who prides themselves on promoting the dangerous ideas of Nazism, hate and division.”
“Across Europe we are witnessing the rise of xenophobic policies in parliament translate into racist and fascist attacks on the streets.

“The trade union movement in Scotland has a long history of opposing the toxic ideology of the far-right which if give a platform will lead to more violence and abuse in our communities.”

NUS Scotland black students’ officer Sanjay Lago said: “Scotland, and the student movement, has a long history of rejecting the bigotry, hate, and violence that groups like this stand for.

“With the refugee crisis growing, and the ever present threat of hate-crime, it’s never been more important to challenge these fascist ideologies, rather than giving them a form of platform.

“We need to be absolutely clear that these kind of disgusting messages are not welcome in Scotland, and I hope that we see people uniting in our rejection of this event. Scotland is a proudly diverse and welcoming country, and we stand proudly proudly in solidarity with all those campaigning to protect those principles and against groups like this.”





See also: Activists vow to stop a major Nazi hate gig in Edinburgh

http://linkis.com/org.uk/G7bN9

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Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Mon Jan 18, 2016 1:03 pm
by jakell
Now that's how to generate publicity... say it's going to be massive and attract loads of Europeans prior to the event, thus boosting the numbers and attracting those who are up for a fight, the music being secondary (or even irrelevant).
Watch now for posters from 'Scottish antifascists' to reinforce the internet campaign.

I suppose they will be playing on stages**, so all the anti's have to do is scupper those who might provide these, thus ensuring 'no platform'. They can still play on the ground though.

An amusing jape might be to bring felt tip pens so that one can draw designs on the heads of any baldies who stand in front of you.

**ETA. On rereading I notice is hints at a fixed size venue, so my 'free festival' image doesn't work. (shouldn't be too hard to track down as they know the capacity)

Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Tue Jan 19, 2016 1:55 pm
by American Dream
Institutionalizing Lone-Wolf Terrorism: How Fascist Organizations Inspire Mass Violence

Shane Burley I Society & Culture I Analysis I September 21st, 2015

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As Mulugeta Seraw and a friend hopped out of their ride's car, they didn't notice the pack of three skinheads wearing tight Levi's tucked into leather boots, laces tied from toe to ankle. The gang were members of East Side White Pride, affiliated with the larger White Aryan Resistance. Seraw was a student who had come to Portland, Oregon from Ethiopia, likely expecting Portland's long reputation of diversity and liberal values. It has another history, one that is caked in the KKK revival in the Northern USA and would later be marked by white expansion and gentrification. When the three men saw him on the corner of SE 31st and Pine street, a flurry of racial slurs were thrown before they took a baseball bat and caved in his head. This was just one of the many violent attacks that marked the war on the streets of Portland in the 1980s and 90s, where Antifa and anti-racist skinheads went literally up in arms with Volksfront, Hammerskin Nation, and other white pride gangs. The blood was visible on the corner of that street for weeks, and some swear you can still see it at night.(1)

This story resonates as we are inundated with recent horrors like the Dylan Roof massacre of nine church-goers after reading the Council of Conservative Citizens website, or the two men who beat an older hispanic man in south Boston after listening to Donald Trump's speech of racial arson.

The radical right can fundamentally be dropped into two camps. There are the above ground operations that focus on propagating "ideas" or political programs. These would be things like the "HBD" scientific racist organizations like American Renaissance, Mankind Quarterly, and the Pioneer Fund. There are the neo-fascist cultural and "radical traditionalist" organizations like Traditionalist Youth Network, Occidental Observer, and The National Policy Institute. There are vague political parties and organizations like the American Freedom Party and Council of Conservative Citizens, but the time that formations like these had any mainstream power has shortly passed. There are many other subdivisions of these, but in most of them you are likely not to hear the N-word or see many iron crosses or swastikas.


Continues at: http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/insti ... orism.html

Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Wed Jan 20, 2016 6:34 pm
by American Dream
Subcultures, Pop Music and Politics: Skinheads and “Nazi Rock” in England and Germany
Timothy S. Brown
Journal of Social History
Vol.38, No.1 (Fall 2004)


ii. From England with Hate: Skinhead goes to Germany

The skinhead subculture that was transmitted to Germany was not the original, but the revival. The style was first brought to West Germany by British soldiers during the punk era of the late 1970s, but it was only during 1980-81 that a real skinhead scene began to develop. As noted above, the skinhead revival that grew out of the punk movement in England developed in association with new musical genres, the most important being “street-punk” or Oi! music. Rejecting the alleged art-school pretensions and commercialization of Punk Rock, street-punk bands like Sham 69, Cocksparrer, and the Cockney Rejects played a raw, stripped-down version of rock ‘n roll that attracted a huge skinhead following. In their use of shouted refrains and audience participation, these bands drew on elements of the traditional “pub sing-along,” and it was from the most common of these refrains–“Oi!” (a cockney greeting)–that the new movement received its name. Coined as a moniker for the new movement by Sounds magazine journalist Gary Bushell in 1980, the term “Oi!” quickly became synonymous with “skinhead.”

By 1980, this also meant synonymous with “right-wing.” The reasons for this are complex. The skinhead movement of the 1960s was not explicitly political, but it foreshadowed, in a number of areas, the politicization of the late-seventies revival. As is well-known, skinheads were accustomed to victimizing Asian immigrants, and as Roger Sabin has shown, they received little discouragement from adult society. (16) So-called “Paki-bashing” was merely a physical expression of the racist animosity of the larger society. (17) The sixties were a period of what might be called a racist consensus in Britain, with repeated legislation to curb immigration and increasing attempts by the conservative and radical right to turn immigration into an election-winning issue. (18) Leading politician Enoch Powell lent respectability to racist views when, in April, 1968, he spoke of the possibility of a race war if immigration was not curbed. (19) Powell’s warnings gave voice to a widespread anxiety about immigration, an anxiety that was being exacerbated at the time by a media frenzy over the “threat” posed by the immigration of Asians being expelled from the former colony of Kenya. (20) Powell’s speech also gave aid and comfort to neo-Fascists and helped to fuel the rise of the newly-founded National Front. (21)

In this atmosphere, the relationship between black and white youth began to turn sour as well, and the loss of the relatively short-lived symbiosis between the reggae genre and the skinhead subculture was a factor in the latter’s decline. By 1970, as reggae increasingly moved outside of the West Indian community, the honeymoon occasioned by the skinheads’ infatuation with the music was giving way to turf battles between black and white kids over the control of key clubs. More importantly, by 1971, reggae was changing, slowing down, and adopting new themes. Under the influence of Rastafarianism, the music increasingly began to deal with mystical notions of Africa and black liberation that had little to do with the “party music” that reggae had been. Combined with a rising spirit of black pride–exemplified by Bob and Marcia’s “Young, Gifted and Black”–the shift in focus began to make the music less congenial to young white aficionados of “skinhead Reggae.” In one emblematic instance, young skinheads responded to the playing of “Young, Gifted and Black” by cutting the club’s speaker wires and launching a violent melee to chants of “young, gifted, and white.” (22)

As an attempt to establish a “defensively organized collective” around a mythic image of proletarian masculinity, skinhead involved an embracing, and even an amplification of, the prejudices of the parent society. It was very easy for this stance to “dissolve,” in the words of Dick Hebdige, “… into a concern with race, with the myth of white ethnicity, the myth, that is, that you’ve got to be white to be British.” (23) The skinhead subculture thus possessed a right-wing potential, a potential that came to the fore during the revival of the late-1970s–early-1980s. Economic decline, scarcity of jobs, and increased immigration intensified latent racist and right-wing attitudes in British society during the seventies and eighties, and the skinheads reflected these prejudices in exaggerated form. With their reputation for violence and patriotic-nationalist views, skinheads were seen as a particularly attractive target for recruitment by the radical right. The National Front renewed its efforts to win the support of working class youth, founding the Young National Front in late-1977. The openly-Nazi British Movement did the same, and with its emphasis on street combat, was particularly attractive to skinheads. (24) Right-wing skins probably never made up a majority, but by 1980, the sight of bomber-jacketed “boneheads” giving the “Sieg-Heil!” salute at Oi! gigs was common, and by 1982, the skinhead subculture was firmly cemented in the public mind as right-wing.

A key event in establishing the notoriety of the skinhead scene, and one which represented the symbolic dovetailing of music genre and subculture, violence and racism, was the so-called “Southall riot” of July, 1981. The riot took place at an Oi! gig at the Hambrough Tavern in the predominantly-Asian Southall suburb of West London. Southall was a main area of Asian immigration and therefore a prime target for provocations by the National Front. Southall had previously (April 1979) been the scene of a days-long confrontation between police and Asian youth after anti-racism activist Blair Peach was killed during a demonstration against a National Front march. (25) The alleged failure of the authorities to adequately investigate Peach’s murder left a legacy of resentment that was exacerbated by frequent incidents of “Paki-bashing.” Featuring performances by three well-known Oi! bands, The Business, The Last Resort, and The 4 Skins, the gig was seen as the last straw by young Asian locals, who put a stop to the performance by burning the venue to the ground. Large numbers of skin-heads were arrested in the ensuing melee, and the press moved quickly to brand the entire skinhead scene as a stronghold of the extreme right, despite the fact that the National Front had no direct involvement with the gig. (26) The resulting “moral panic” was fueled by public dismay over the second of two Oi! compilation albums released by Sounds magazine at the urging of journalist Gary Bushell. The first, Oi! The Album, had helped to launch the Oi! movement in November 1980. The second album, released only a couple of months before the Southall riot, carried as its title the unfortunate pun Strength Through Oi! (a play on the name of the Nazi-era leisure-time organization Strength Through Joy). The album also featured on its cover a photograph of Nicky Crane, a well-known skinhead who also happened to be the organizer for the British Movement in Kent. The album was not financed by the extreme right, nor were the bands represented on it necessarily right-wing, but the right-wing connotations of the title and cover art, taken in conjunction with the violence at Southall and the resulting charges of skinhead fascism in the press, solidified the right-wing reputation of the skinhead scene and Oi! music.

Whatever the political outlook of Oi!–most of the band members protested vigorously against being tarred with the fascist brush, and Gary Bushell went to great lengths to clear the Oi! name in the pages of Sounds–the music played an important symbolic role in the politicization of the skinhead subculture. By providing, for the first time, a musical focus for skinhead identity that was “white”–that is, that had nothing to do with the West Indian immigrant presence and little obvious connection with black musical roots–Oi! provided a musical focus for new visions of skinhead identity. (27) With the emergence of Oi!, a skinhead, could, in theory, completely avoid or negate the question of the subculture’s black roots. In practice, few did so, on the one hand recognizing that ska–like boots and shaved heads–was a fetish item of skinhead identity, and on the other, seeing no reason to deprive themselves of the enjoyment of the music and social scene around ska gigs. Nor was the lyrical content of Oi! without potentially right-wing implications. Although some of its themes–working-class pride, repression, and the bad luck of the down-and-out–gave it much in common with other genres like country and the blues, others–like violence (“Aggro”) and soccer hooliganism–could easily be interpreted in extreme right-wing terms. In providing a musical expression of skinhead identity that was exclusively white (and, unlike punk and ska, almost exclusively male), and in foregrounding violence as a pillar of the working-class lifestyle, Oi! provided a point of entry for a new brand of right-wing rock music.

As Oi! came to signify “white music,” the relationship between cause and effect was reversed: rather than skinheads adopting right-wing beliefs and expressing them in music, musicians with right-wing beliefs began to adopt the skinhead scene–white, male, violent and patriotic–as a field for their self-expression. These musicians brought new musical influences to bear on Oi!, creating a hybrid form of “skinhead rock” that would maintain its affiliation with the scene long after it ceased to bear any resemblance to the “street punk” sound out of which Oi! developed. Two key bands–Skrewdriver from England, and the Bohse Onkelz (“Evil Uncles”) from Germany–exemplify this process. Although different from each other in crucial ways, the two bands represent critical points of articulation between the Nazi rock genre and the skinhead Oi! scene out of which it developed, and illustrate the process by which new identities were created through the process of cultural transmission. London’s Skrewdriver was the earliest and most influential of the “Nazi rock” bands. Its leader, Ian Stuart Donaldson, did more than anyone else to forge connections between right-wing rock music and the skinhead scene, and between the skinhead scene and the radical right. An ardent admirer of Adolf Hitler, Donaldson’s understanding of the skinhead subculture had little to do with skinhead reggae or the black-white connections from which it sprang, a fact that is hardly surprising given that Donaldson was a musician with right-wing views long before becoming a skinhead. (28)

Donaldson set up vital links for the burgeoning right-wing rock scene in two directions. First, he single-handedly forged a connection between the skinhead scene and the extreme right in Britain, forming the National Front-financed “White Noise Club” (WNC) to release right-wing bands, and releasing his own “White Power” single on the label. Second, he signed a contract with a German label, Rock-O-Rama, to release WNC bands in Germany, and when a split in the National Front led to a souring of relations between NF and the White Noise Club, he continued his association with Rock-O-Rama by founding “Blood and Honor,” a magazine and umbrella organization for right-wing skinhead bands. Skrewdriver released a string of albums on Rock-O-Rama, bringing the right-wing skinhead sound directly into Germany from 1982. Skrewdriver helped build the English-German connection in other ways, touring with one of the best-known German bands, Dusseldorf’s Storkraft. Further, the organization founded by Donaldson opened a German chapter–Blood and Honor/Division Deutschland–which came to play an increasingly important role in promoting right-wing skinhead concerts in Germany in the 1990s. Aside from these practical links, the brand of music Ian Stuart Donaldson helped pioneer looked to Germany as a spiritual home. Not only did Skrewdriver gigs resemble Nazi rallies, with hundreds of shaved-head skins shouting Sieg Heil as Donaldson held forth from the stage, but White Noise Club and Blood and Honor bands reveled in historical and mythical imagery associated with Nazi Germany, WWII, and Norse mythology. A close friend of Donaldson’s, Kev Turner of the band Skullhead, dabbled in Odinism. As much as Donaldson and others like him considered themselves “English patriots,” the vision of white identity they championed was constructed in relationship to a mythic-historic past that was less English than German.

Far less explicitly political, and much less activist than Skrewdriver, Frankfurt’s Bohse Onkelz attached themselves to the skinhead subculture in Germany and went on to play an early role in cementing the link between right-wing nationalism and the skinhead scene. Although never a Nazi rock band in the vein of Skrewdriver–they never openly embraced ideas of “white power” and distanced themselves from the skinhead subculture as their popularity grew–the Onkelz laid the groundwork for the radicalization of the German skinhead music scene. (29) Like Skrewdriver, the Bohse Onkelz were not originally skinheads. The Onkelz formed as a punk band in 1979, with multi-colored hair that would have made them anathema in the later skinhead scene. Yet unlike most punk bands, which tend to express at least implicitly left-wing views, (30) the Onkelz earned a reputation as a right-wing racist band, above all because of their song “Turken Raus” (“Turks out”). By the time of the release of their first album on the Rock-O-Rama label in 1984, the band members had adopted the skinhead style and achieved a strong following in the Frankfurt skinhead and soccer hooligan scenes. (31)

Like other bands that emerged in response to the importation of the skinhead subculture, the Onkelz looked to England as a source of identity. The brand names forming the stylistic core of the skinhead scene–[Dr. Martens] boots, Fred Perry and Ben Sherman shirts–were English, and early German skinheads even adopted the Union Jack as a symbol of their allegiance to the subculture. (32) As the German Skinhead scene grew, it began to reflect specifically German outlooks and concerns, but the importance of the English elements of style on which the scene was based were never far from the surface. A number of the songs on the Onkelz first album, Der nette Mann, draw an explicit connection between the (originally) English elements of style and key motifs of skinhead identity. In “Singen und Tanzen”, getting ready for the weekend involves “shining up the black Docs”, and looking in the mirror to admire a shaved head and “Fred Perry, freshly ironed.” In “Stolz,” the elements of style are combined not just with skinhead pride and fearlessness, but with “Germanness”:

One of many with a shaved head
You don’t hang back because you have no fear
Shermans, Braces, Boots, and Jeans
German flag, because (you’re) proud
(33)

This “Germanization” of the skinhead subculture–which would be carried much further by the Onkelz’ successors–represented an articulation of key elements of the English subculture with existing German attitudes. The foreignness of the skinhead style was attractive, but its meaning in the German context arose in the process of transmission. The image of manliness, hardness, and togetherness represented by the skinhead “look” took on an entirely different meaning in light of German history, and the simple patriotism espoused even by “unpolitical” skinheads in England was a statement of an entirely different kind in Germany. In “Deutschland” the Onkelz sing:

The twelve dark years in your history
Don’t destroy our ties to you
There is no country free of dirt …
Here we were born, here we want to die
Germany, Germany, Fatherland
Germany, Germany, the land of my birth
(34)

This song, and the soccer hooligan song “France ’84”–in which the Onkelz look forward to German dominance in a coming contest against France–were deemed unconstitutional by the German government, which banned Der nette Mann in August 1986. (35)

Although the ban helped to solidify the Onkelz’ reputation as “Germany’s most prominent Neo Nazi band,” (36) the Bohse Onkelz were, nevertheless, not a “Nazi Rock” band, properly speaking. As Farin and Seidel-Pielen point out, the Onkelz’ reference in “Deutschland” to the Third Reich as “twelve dark years” would be considered treason by the wave of explicitly National Socialist bands that followed them from the end of the 1980s. (37) Yet, the Bohse Onkelz paved the way for later, more radical bands. They became a point of articulation between the concepts “skinhead” and “right-wing,” communicating the basic elements of skinhead identity to a wide audience while linking them to a nationalist (German) message.

The Onkelz, along with Skrewdriver, also became a point of articulation at the level of genre, marking a shift toward a distinctive style of skinhead rock that had little to do with ska and Oi! Whereas the original Oi! music was punk rock at its most basic, incorporating shouted refrains reminiscent of the old cockney pub sing-a-long, the “Nazi rock” pioneered by bands like Skrewdriver and the Bohse Onkelz came closer to heavy metal. (38) Metal was a perfect vehicle for this right-wing “message rock,” as Klaus Farin observes: “The metal sound was more clearly structured, contained more bombastic elements and more opportunities to integrate mid-tempo pieces and even ballads (unthinkable in Oi! punk) in order to make it easier to understand the lyrics.” This change in style, argues Farin, mirrored the “change in mentality” represented by right-wing rock music. (39)

Once set firmly in a nationalist German mode, the skinhead rock pioneered in West Germany by the Onkelz became a site on which increasingly-radical themes of ethnic identity could be developed. The decisive phase of this development came in the wake of German reunification, a period in which socioeconomic stresses and latent ethnic tensions created an atmosphere conducive to right-wing violence. These tensions were fueled on the one hand by the influx of asylum seekers from war-torn, post-Communist eastern Europe, and on the other by the latent problem of immigrant labor in German society. (40) Like England, both East and West Germany turned to immigrant labor in the period after WWII. But unlike England, which could draw on former colonial subjects with full rights of citizenship, the two Germanies turned to (ostensibly temporary) non-citizen labor. In West Germany the Gastarbeiter (“guest workers”) who arrived in the 1960s and 1970s came largely from Germany’s historic ally, Turkey. (41) In East Germany, the government turned to labor from the socialist Third World countries, above all Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, and Mozambique. (42) In neither Germany was there any question of granting citizenship to these migrant laborers; citizenship was based not on length of residence, but on blood. In the wake of reunification, with areas of the former East Germany hard-hit by unemployment and shaken by social dislocation, the official fiction that migrant laborers were not permanent residents but temporary “guests” began to become increasingly frayed. (43)

It was against this background that a new wave of bands arose from the end of the 1980s to express the outlook of a generation of young German men drawn to the radical right and the skinhead scene. The content of the songs expressed a world-view that revolved around fetish items of skinhead identity (shaved heads, boots, bomber jackets, tattoos), the celebration of allegedly “proletarian” behaviors–drinking, shouting, having casual sex, fighting, etc.–and a sort of politics organized around a mythic German nationalism and ethnic-racist notions of “blood and soil.” The fusion of subcultural style and political radicalism is encapsulated in a lyric from the band Endstufe: “Dr. Martens, short hair, that’s Aryan, no doubt about it! Down with mixed-blood, because that doesn’t do the fatherland any good!” The resulting identity–expressed in terms at once threatening and pathetic, full of bravado yet highly pessimistic–was organized in opposition to a list of enemies. The skinhead Feinbild (44) included foreigners (above all asylum seeking refugees), the “left” (defined as punks, anarchists, and hippies), and homosexuals. (45) Turks and other “non-Aryans” were depicted as the source of criminality in Germany society, responsible, above all, for drug offenses and sex crimes. This “law and order” outlook, as Klaus Farin has pointed out, had little in common with the anarchic and anti-authoritarian attitude of early British Oi! punk, but instead expressed the fears and prejudices of the petit bourgeoisie. “Law and order” became a code for racist and anti-foreigner attitudes. (46)

The symbols of this right-wing-extremist identity were drawn from the past, not of the neighborhood pub and football match, but of German chauvinism, militarism, and National Socialism. Right-wing bands–bands with names like Freikorps, Stuka, Sturmwehr, and Landser–expressed a nostalgia for the days of the Third Reich, a longing after the bittersweet “romance” of lost campaigns, a celebration of the “glorious deeds” of the grandfather generation. Only a handful of the right-wing bands were explicitly National Socialist–in the sense of praising Hitler and the Third Reich–but all looked to some Germanic past as a mythic site of heroic identity. This goes as well for bands–like Asgard, Nordwind, and Schlachtruf–that adopted fantasy themes from Norse mythology, substituting “Odinism” for “Hitlerism,” and turning “Vikings” into “defenders of the white race.” The songs of these bands express a “politics of the lost cause,” a pathetic cry against the fate of a Volk overrun–just as the grandfathers or tribal ancestors had been–by an “Asiatic horde.” (47) The dangers of the modern “horde”–made up above all of asylum seekers–is expressed in countless songs: “Say the magic word: Asylum, No one can save us, we’re going under, the boat is beginning to sink …” (Commando Pernod/”Asyl”); “Soon the asylum seekers will be our masters, Parasites, that’s what they are, work, that’s what they don’t want” (Stuka/”Parasiten”); “What was built up over forty years they destroy in a couple of days” (Radikahl/”Flut”). (48) These expressions of a “rightwing victim mentality” (49) are wedded to a “masculine hero complex,” (50) in which the misunderstood proletarian loser is transformed into a savior of the fatherland. Drawn from the same social strata as their fans, the right-wing skinhead bands supply a soundtrack by and for adolescent males living, as Peter Merkl puts it, “in a world of fantasized raids, imagined glorious deeds, and nostalgic machismo that could hardly be farther from the real threats to them or to anyone else.” (51)

This fantasy world was linked with the all-too-real wave of terror anti-foreigner violence which gripped Germany from the late 1980s, reaching a peak in 1992-3 with the arson murders in Moln and Solingen and continuing at a steady but less-dramatic pace up to the present. (52) As the recent trial of three youths accused of murdering a Mozambiquian immigrant demonstrates, “Nazi rock” supplied the soundtrack for this violence. (53) The trial established that the attackers had shouted out the lyrics to the song “Sturmfuhrer” by the skinhead band Landser immediately before the attack. The members of Landser are themselves currently on trial, charged with forming a criminal conspiracy, inciting hatred, and violating laws against distributing National Socialist propaganda. (54) Yet if an earlier wave of measures aimed at Nazi rock bands is any indication, the prosecution of Landser may not have the hoped-for result. The publicity generated by state measures against the band Storkraft in the early 1990s only widened the field in which anti-foreigner ideas could circulate. (55) The media, notes Klaus Farin, vaulted Storkraft, “a third-class amateur rock band,” into the public eye “to the extent that practically every 14-year old in the country had to get an album by this ‘ultra-hard’ band if he didn’t want to be totally uncool.” (56)

This increase in public notoriety helped shape the further development of the skinhead scene; just as the Southall Riot and the “Strength Through Oi!” album helped to cement the right-wing reputation of the skinhead subculture and Oi! music in England at precisely the moment they were being transmitted to Germany–decisively influencing the form they took there–media attention focused on right-wing-extremist rock music and anti-immigrant violence in Germany helped radicalize the scene by winning new recruits who were attracted as much (or more) by the right-wing and anti-foreigner reputation than by the niceties of skinhead style and music. The change in the character of the scene caused by this process of “deviancy amplification” fueled further change by driving turnover in membership. After the killing of two Turks in Hamburg in 1985, for example, many older skins left the movement in disgust, opening the way for the process of identity formation to be controlled by the newcomers. (57) The social and political character of the skinhead subculture in Germany was further altered by the infusion of skinheads from the former East Germany at the beginning of the 1990s. The skinhead subculture had developed along largely parallel lines in the two Germanies before 1989. But just as in the case of the transmission of the subculture from England to West Germany, the transmission from West to East Germany was driven by media reports focusing on right-wing violence. The ready availability of a pre-packaged form (shaved heads, bomber jackets, boots, violence) and content (racist, anti-foreigner) was a highly attractive means of youth rebellion–especially in the “anti-fascist state” (58)–which attracted newer and younger recruits. (59) These new skinheads–some as young as 14 years old–had little connection to the original sources of skinhead identity, musical or otherwise. Their introduction into the skinhead subculture with the fall of the wall had a diluting effect; to them, being a skinhead had more to do with being a hard and violent young German nationalist than it did with listening to the same music and wearing the same clothes as English skinheads had done in 1969 or 1977. (60)

Thus through movement–successive removals from the source producing new subcultural and musical iterations of the original–new meanings were created that reflected back and influenced the development of the whole. Through a leap-frogging process of “communicative linkages”–re-siting skinhead style and music in a new spatial and temporal location–the meaning of “skinhead” could change from someone who admired black music and who could (at least in theory) socialize with blacks, to someone who could be plausibly seen marking Rudolf Hess’ birthday, or even firebombing Turkish women and children. To be sure, the right-wing “bonehead” and the Nazi rock band were born in England; but it was in their new location that they could articulate with currents of xenophobia and racism, fueling a campaign of racist murder and evoking a deep and chilling historical resonance.

iii. A Style of Politics or a Politics of Style? The Struggle over Skinhead Identity

The increasing role of skinheads in violence against immigrants makes them a sought-after constituency for right-wing extremist parties in Germany. Yet the origins of the skinhead phenomenon in a youth subculture organized around fashion and music makes such recruitment problematic, and not just because it is inherently difficult to bind disaffected and frequently alcohol-besotted young men into a disciplined regimen of rallies and demonstrations. Youth subcultures–organized as they are around an internal logic that reconfigures select commodities or elements of style into symbolic weapons against the dominant society–are inherently unstable; the meaning of the elements that signify membership are, as we have seen, open to interpretation.

This is particularly true of the skinhead subculture, and in order to understand why it is useful to think about one of the key concepts that has been used to explore how the various elements of subcultural identity fit together, that of homology. A subculture is homologous when all the elements of identity–music, fashion, drugs, politics–combine to form a unified whole. The classic homologous subculture is the hippie movement of the 1960s and ’70s. Here, everything–drug use (“dropping out” of society in the search for altered states of consciousness and corresponding new modes of relating to the world), clothing (favoring relaxed standards of personal appearance as an antidote to the business “uniforms” of the capitalist “rat-race,” and exhibiting a preference for natural fabrics as a rejection of the perceived artificiality of industrial society), and hair length (signaling, again, the identification with nature and “the natural”)–expressed and reinforced the hippie world view. The history of youth subcultures can, to an extent, be interpreted as the history of the search for homology. The skinhead subculture, like the others, tends in the direction of homology: the short hair and sturdy clothing portray an image of proletarian manliness which expresses and reinforces an exaggerated conservatism of outlook; the practice of violence is an exaggerated “proletarian” response to the presence of the Other; the chief drug–alcohol–is a perfect fit with the “traditional” mores supposedly expressed by the subculture. Yet, the homological fit at the level of world-view is partial at best. The skinhead “look”–unlike, say, the hippie look–is open to more than one meaning. There is, as noted earlier, a rudimentary kind of politics encoded in the skinhead style; but the governing conceit of the skinhead “style community” is that to be a skinhead means to dress sharp, have fun, listen to good music, and go to parties. The introduction of right-wing politics into the style community–something that occurred, for reasons discussed above, to this particular youth subculture at a certain historic conjuncture–created a situation in which it was impossible for members to share an unproblematic identity, especially when a key focus of identity–music–expressed diametrically opposing points of view and assigned diametrically opposed meanings to the same fetish items of identity. It is, in other words, precisely the skinhead subculture’s inability to be homologous that makes skinhead identity a site of conflict. (61)

It is then hardly surprising that the politicization of the subculture in a right-wing direction has not been achieved without resistance. Indeed, forces within the movement have sought to combat the subculture’s association with the radical right, emphasizing, on the one hand, the movement’s multicultural roots (with their implied anti-racism), and on the other, the supposed original purity and authenticity of skinhead style and taste (alleged to exist in a purely aesthetic realm outside of politics). These two potentially-contradictory impulses come together in the most central focus of efforts to take back skinhead identity from the extreme right, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice, or S.H.A.R.P. Founded in New York City in 1986–the same year that Skrewdriver records began to be imported into the US–S.H.A.R.P. was brought to the UK by Roddy Moreno, owner of Oi! Records, and frontman for the Oi! band The Oppressed, after a trip to the States. It subsequently moved to Germany where it became a focus of attempts to re-site the skinhead subculture in a cultural, rather than political, space. The idea behind S.H.A.R.P. was quite simple: “S.H.A.R.P. skins” professed no political affiliation, they merely insisted that the original skinheads had not been racists, pointed out that appreciation for Jamaican culture had been central to the formation of skinhead identity, and argued that, therefore, no true skinhead could be a racist. In practice, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice did come to fill a “left-wing” function, partly because racist skins accused S.H.A.R.P. skins of being leftists, and partly because S.H.A.R.P.’s policy of allowing non-skinheads to join meant that punks and anarchists–to the scorn of most skinheads–often joined S.H.A.R.P. as a means of fighting Nazis. S.H.A.R.P.’s refusal to embrace any politics–other than being anti-Nazi–meant that its battle to reclaim skinhead identity had to be based on culture. Thus the counter-offensive against the “Nazification” of the scene of which S.H.A.R.P. was the most vocal proponent was organized more around style than it was around politics. The reaction against right-wing extremism was as much a reaction against bad style as it was against bad politics; the two were seen to be, in a way, the same thing. This was a reflection of the nature of the skinhead subculture as a “style community.”

In the final analysis, attempts to retrieve a uniform skinhead identity based on aesthetics is bound to fail, because the processes by which the skinhead subculture and its music are transmitted–temporally and spatially–transform their meaning in ways that prevent recuperation into any Ur-skinhead identity. This putative identity is left behind as successive iterations of subculture and genre carry ever further away from their roots and articulate with new influences. In Germany, powerful socio-historical influences work against the “cosmopolitan” outlook advocated by S.H.A.R.P. Not least among these is the effort of entrenched right-wing extremist parties to woo violent skinheads. The neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) has been particularly active in proselytizing among skinheads and has enjoyed some success in forging connections to skinhead groups, particularly in the former Eastern territories. If these efforts fall far short of the establishment of a disciplined street-fighting force like the one possessed by the Nazis in the Weimar Republic, the appearance of NPD leaders in public flanked by groups of skinheads nevertheless illustrates just how hopeless are the efforts of skinhead purists to maintain a unitary, apolitical identity for the subculture. (62)

The relationship between the established radical right and the skinhead subculture remains provisional, but there are signs that the two overlapping scenes are beginning to grow together. A recent (2002) government report notes that the boundaries between the skinhead and neo-Nazi scenes are becoming “hazy,” and speaks of the creation of skinhead/neo-Nazi “hybrid cultures.” (63) Significantly, music plays a key mediating role in this process. An increasing number of right-wing concerts have been organized by the German branches of international skinhead organizations like Blood & Honor and Hammerskins, (64) and these concerts, increasingly secret and better organized, have more and more been linked to neo-Nazi demonstrations. (65) Right radical organizations have increasingly been getting into the music business, recognizing that record sales can allow them to make money and win recruits at the same time. (66) Government observers of the radical right emphasize the key importance of concerts as sites of recruitment in a scene otherwise lacking in structure, and like to refer to music as “Gateway Drug #1” for bringing youth into “the violent milieu.” (67)

The rhetoric of music as a dangerous “drug” is a long-standing and familiar one in conservative discourses on popular music and youth culture; but when the German government uses it in reference to skinheads and Nazi rock, it is groping toward a metaphor for a new phenomenon, one that involves not only “politics” but the intersection of politics and grassroots culture, popular music and racism, violence and fashion. And in this case the links between youth culture and dangerous behavior are real. The lyrics of bands like Storkraft and Landser make up part of a discourse that links the skinhead scene with the extremist, violent right. Nazi rock acts to dissolve the bonds that hold skinheads together as a “style community,” creating new bonds where politics, not style, is preeminent. Nothing illustrates this change more clearly than the phenomenon of the so-called “new skinheads” who–in dropping all or most vestiges of the skinhead look in order to fit into society and pursue their politics more effectively–cease to be “skinheads” at all. (68) When Storkraft sings “We’re Germany’s real police, we’ll make the streets Turk-free,” it is a rallying cry for people who want to do exactly that, whether they happen to dress like skinheads or not.



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Re: "No Platform for Fascists"

PostPosted: Fri Nov 11, 2016 1:33 pm
by coffin_dodger
only 600 to go