White power skinhead
White power skinheads, also known as racist skinheads and neo-Nazi skinheads (but derided as boneheads by anti-racist skinheads),[1][2] are members of a neo-Nazi, white supremacist and antisemitic offshoot of the skinhead subculture. Many of them are affiliated with white nationalist organizations and some of them are members of prison gangs.[3] The movement emerged in the United Kingdom between the late 1960s and the late 1970s, before spreading across Eurasia and North America in the 1980–1990s.
Definition[edit]
Skinheads[edit]
Scholar Timothy S. Brown defines the skinheads as a "style community", that is to say a "community in which the primary site of identity is personal style", which allows innovative configurations to be made in new geographical and cultural contexts, or around opposing political ideologies – as in the dichotomy between racist and anti-racist skinheads.[4] From a group perspective, John Clarke, a professor who studied skinheads in the 1970s, has noted that the "skinhead style represents an attempt to recreate the traditional working class community, as a substitution for the real decline of the latter which started in the 1960s."[5]
White power skinheads[edit]
According to Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg, the white power skinhead movement, which emerged within the skinhead subculture from the late 1970s onward, can be defined by "racism; proletarian consciousness; an aversion to organization, dismissed in favor of gang behavior; and an ideological training that began with or is based on music." They have mostly emerged from working-class backgrounds, except in Russia, where they have mostly emerged from the educated, urban middle class.[6]
History[edit]
Origins in England[edit]
The original skinhead subculture began in the United Kingdom in 1968–1969, probably in London and Southeast England,[7] more specifically in the East End of London according to Clarke.[8] It had heavy British mod and Jamaican rude boy influences, including an appreciation for black music genres like rocksteady, ska, and early West Indian reggae.[9][10][11] The particular lifestyle and aggressive look of skinheads was a self-declared reaffirmation of the traditional working class puritanism and gender roles – in fact "a stylized re-recreation of an image of the working class",[12] which seemed threatened in their views with contamination by the permissive and hedonistic culture of the British middle-class in the 1960–1970s.[12][13] For instance, the defining skinhead short haircut mostly emerged in reaction to the perceived shift in men's styles away from traditional masculinity, which was embodied by the "middle-class, peace-loving, long-haired student" of the hippie movement.[1]
The identity of the 1960s skinheads, however, was not based on white power, neo-Nazism or neo-fascism, even though some skinheads had engaged in "Paki-bashing", i.e. violence against Pakistanis and other South Asian immigrants.[14][15] Even so, black West Indians ("Caribs") were also involved in skinhead gang attacks against South Asian immigrants,[14][10] and the violence has been interpreted by Alexander Tarasov as a social conflict caused by the new presence of South Asian traders and shopkeepers within a community of white and West Indian poor factory workers.[10] Clarke similarly notes that areas where skinheads became the most prominent were "typically either new council housing estates or old estates being either developed or experiencing an afflux of outsiders", either Commonwealth immigrants or middle-class whites in search of affordable housing.[16]
The leading politician Enoch Powell and his inflammatory 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech gave a public voice to widespread anxieties concerning non-white immigration and the "threat" which was supposedly posed by South Asian immigrants.[17] Although there is "little agreement [among scholars] on the extent to which Powell was responsible for racial attacks",[18] the speech may have helped unleash "Paki-bashing" violence against South Asian immigrants, which was referred to as "skinhead terror" by The Observer in April 1970, with the "Paki-bashers" simply being referred to as "skinheads" in many contemporary reports.[19][20] By the early 1970s, the reggae scene had ceased to be simply a "party music" and, under the influence of Rastafarism, got closer to community-oriented themes like black liberation and African mysticism, which participated in alienating some white proletarians from the community.[21][22][23] In 1973 white skinheads launched a violent melee in a night club, chanting "young, gifted and white" and cutting the speakers as the West Indian disc jockey was playing Young, Gifted and Black by Bob and Marcia.[24][22]
Emergence of the white power skinheads[edit]
The skinhead scene had mostly died out by 1973. Around 1977, a second wave started to emerge from the disintegration of the punk subculture, which was radicalized as "street punk" when some of its members accentuated its aggressive character.[10][25] Although the punk movement emphasized nihilistic and narcissistic values instead of the working class heritage, their opposition to the middle and upper class, the adoption of Nazi imagery by some punks to maximize shock value, and the development of an underground network of punk fanzines, inspired and facilitated the parallel emergence of a racist skinhead subculture.[13] The latent right-wing and anti-immigrant leaning, present within the skinhead movement since the late 1960s, became progressively dominant in the United Kingdom, fuelled by the job crisis, the economic decline, and an increase in immigration during the late 1970s–early 1980s.[22] By the early 1980s, the white power skinhead subculture had spread across most of Britain, largely "through face to face interaction among the fans at football matches."[26][27] The cartoon character Black Rat, created in 1970 by French artist Jack Marchal, was adopted by young neo-Fascists in various European nations and became an essential marker of the fringe culture.[25]
Music played a key symbolic role in the political polarization of the skinhead subculture.[28] Marchal recorded a French rock album named Science & Violence in 1979, and German students of the neo-Nazi party NPD formed the first German nationalist rock group in 1977.[25] A new music genre, Oi! – a contraction of "Hey, you!" pronounced with a Cockney accent – emerged as a skinhead version of punk rock in the late 1970s, contrasting with the sometimes multiracial bands of the left-wing and unpolitical skinhead resurgence, which rather drew influence from the original Jamaican ska roots of the late 1960s.[29] Coined as a nickname for the new genre by British journalist Gary Bushell in 1980, "Oi!" soon became synonymous with "skinhead".[17] Unlike many of their followers, however, early Oi! band members were generally not neo-Nazi or even affiliated with right-wing organizations, and they increasingly distanced themselves from some of their fans, who contributed to recurrent riots at concerts.[30]
In July 1981, the "Southall Riots" were sparked when hundreds of skinheads were welcomed at an Oi! gig which was performed in a predominantly-Asian suburb of London. Some skinheads began to attack the neighboring Asian stores, and 400 Asians later responded by burning the venue with paraffin bombs while the skinheads were fleeing with help from the police.[31] The event led to a moral panic in Britain and the skinhead subculture was firmly associated with right-wing politics and "white power music" in the public's opinion by 1982.[32] According to Brown, some lyrical themes of Oi!, such as social frustrations, political repression and working-class pride, were common to other genres such as country music or blues, but others like violence ("Aggro", for 'aggressiveness') and football hooliganism "could be easily interpreted in extreme right-wing terms."[33] The phrase "all cops are bastards" was popularized among some skinheads by the Oi! band The 4-Skins' 1982 song "A.C.A.B."[34][35]
Ideology[edit]
The central themes of white power skinheads revolve around "the ethnic war which will be waged in the future and the denunciation of a global Jewish conspiracy to promote miscegenation" (see White genocide conspiracy theory).[89] The white power skinhead movement is generally associated with neo-Nazism, in part, this is due to its origins in the National Front and the British Movement, along with the presence of former Nazis (especially former members of the SS) who mentored members of nascent German racist skinhead groups in the 1980s–1990s. Historian John F. Pollard contends that "the racist skinhead ideology is fundamentally neo-Nazi in inspiration."[90] Camus and Lebourg also argue that although not all racist skinheads can be classified as 'neo-Nazi', neo-Nazism remains hegemonic in the far-right skinhead movement.[89] Scholars concede at the same time the difficulty of separating the public use of the provocative and subversive aesthetics surrounding Nazi symbols from actual belief in, and commitment to, Nazi ideology.[90][89]
The early-20th century Judeo-Bolshevik and Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theories have since evolved into the idea of a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), which claims that Jews secretly control the governments of Western states.[91] Their attitude toward the Holocaust ranges from outright denial to minimization of the death toll, and even to glorifying the event in the lyrics of white power bands such as No Remorse or Warhammer.[92][note 3] Nazi theories of Slavs as Untermenschen ('sub-humans') have been largely abandoned in favor of a more "inclusive" concept of white supremacy.[91] American neo-Nazism and white supremacism largely helped "crystallize" the Nazi imagery and have had a powerful influence on the worldwide movement, as evidenced by the popularity of David Lane's Fourteen Words and William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries, which some Combat 18 leaders regard as their "Bible".[93][89]
According to Camus and Lebourg, the Nazifying imagery of white power skinheads was "at first largely provocative", and sometimes a way for the proletarian youth "of responding to the sacralization of the memory of World War II".[89] Pollard also notes that "adolescent rebellion", involving a desire to be different by rejecting prevailing societal norms by using shocking imagery (like the wearing of Nazi regalia by motorcycle gangs in the 1960s and punk rockers in the 1970s), probably plays some part in the decision to wear neo-Nazi or racist symbols, or even to adopt the ideas they embody.[94] References to Nazism have also been less significant in countries like Italy or Hungary, where fascist figures like Benito Mussolini and Ferenc Szálasi still exert a strong cultural influence on the local far-right.[92]
Lifestyle[edit]
Puritanism[edit]
White power skinheads see both the permissive society and the sexual revolution as "perversions", and they generally promote an image of "clean-living, drug-free, heterosexual, working-class males". Homophobia and rejection of any form of drug-taking (except tobacco and alcohol) are common traits found across skinhead groups. According to historian John F. Pollard, this "puritanical" stance takes its roots in the anti-permissive way of life of the original skinheads who rejected the mod and hippie subcultures.[95]
A central element of this puritanism is the skinhead idea of "naturalness"; their aim is to "eliminate all abnormalities like, homosexuals, lesbians and other kinds of 'sick' and 'deviant' people". Skinheads' opposition to abortion partly results from a backlash against feminism and the sexual revolution, and from a paranoid anxiety about the demographic decline of the white race embodied in the widespread slogan "9 per cent", meaning that only 9 per cent of the world's population is white by their own calculations.[96]
Women are a minority among the white power skinhead movement. In Britain, France and Germany, they rarely attend events. Female presence at gigs is however more frequent in Italy, and entire families have been seen attending the Aryan and Nordic Fest in the United States.[96] Despite a widespread misogynistic culture and a general absence of commitment to female equality, some skinhead women have rejected the traditional gender roles and can act as aggressively as their male counterparts.[97]
Marginality[edit]
Skinheads present themselves as an excluded or martyr group repressed by the "police state" of liberal democracies. Blood & Honour and Combat18 have promoted conspiracy theories about the death of Ian Stuart Donaldson, suggesting that he was the victim of a political "assassination". The common skinhead motto "hated but proud" expresses the closed, excluded, but feared lifestyle of white power skinheads.[88]
Music groups
Films
Video games