Reichsrock

Kirsten Dyck

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574721
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

From rap to folk to punk, music has often sought to shape its listeners’ political views, uniting them as a global community and inspiring them to take action. Yet the rallying potential of music can also be harnessed for sinister ends. As this groundbreaking new book reveals, white-power music has served as a key recruiting tool for neo-Nazi and racist hate groups worldwide.    Reichsrock shines a light on the international white-power music industry, the fandoms it has spawned, and the virulently racist beliefs it perpetuates. Kirsten Dyck not only investigates how white-power bands and their fans have used the internet to spread their message globally, but also considers how distinctly local white-power scenes have emerged in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the United States, and many other sites. While exploring how white-power bands draw from a common well of nationalist, racist, and neo-Nazi ideologies, the book thus also illuminates how white-power musicians adapt their music to different locations, many of which have their own terms for defining whiteness and racial otherness.    Closely tracking the online presence of white-power musicians and their fans, Dyck analyzes the virtual forums and media they use to articulate their hateful rhetoric. This book also demonstrates how this fandom has sparked spectacular violence in the real world, from bombings to mass shootings. Reichsrock thus sounds an urgent message about a global menace.   

1

What Is White-Power Music?

On September 24, 1993, thirty-six-year-old Ian Stuart Donaldson died of injuries he had sustained the previous day in a Derbyshire, England car accident.1 Donaldson, considered the founding father of neo-Nazi rock music, had spent more than a decade working as an activist for the European white-power movement.2 At the beginning of Donaldson’s career, no such thing as “hate rock” and no coherent genre of contemporary “white-power music” existed. Today, online white-power music retailers like Micetrap Distribution, Label 56, and OPOS Records sell thousands of racist albums and concert videos. Many of these products pay tribute to Donaldson and his work. White-power music has developed into a global commodity that now expresses ideologies as diverse as Russian neo-Nazism, Brazilian white-nationalist separatism, and German nativism. The advent of readily accessible Internet technology has allowed pro-white racist groups from around the world to communicate more freely with one another than they did in earlier decades, marketing their music to sympathetic individuals who in previous generations might never have made contact with organized white-power activism, thereby facilitating the spread of white-power music to audiences that might not have discovered it otherwise.

Despite the influence of the Internet, white-power music and its complex ideologies still remain largely unknown in the English-language mainstream. Many readers of this book will have had little contact with white-power music due to the socially taboo, underground, niche-market, and occasionally even illegal nature of the genre in many areas. Some may even have been unaware of its existence. It is crucial, then, to address a number of important questions in order to introduce readers to this music and to explain its international appeal. How, when, and why did white-power music develop as a coherent genre of music in different geographical areas? How do white-power musicians in various places construct the racial categories of “insider” and “outsider” that are crucial both to racist ideology in general and to various localized racial hierarchies in particular? How do white-power musicians and fans in different areas interact with one another philosophically, intellectually, physically, digitally, and musically? How do outsiders to the movement react to white-power music? Perhaps most importantly, how do white-power musicians’ ideas reflect mainstream European-descended racial hierarchies today, and how does white-power music affect the societies around it? In answering these questions, I will explore how white-power music crosses and transcends boundaries such as national borders, language barriers, cultural differences, and historical divergences.

First, it is important to explain what I mean when I refer to the genre of music known as “white-power music.” While scholars have used many different terms to refer to the overtly racist music that emanates from neo-Nazi and white-power circles in western countries, for the purposes of this book, I have chosen to use white-power music because the idea of “power” or “empowerment” creates a clear distinction between the music of blatantly pro-racist groups and music that might inadvertently express racist goals, as could be the case with “white-supremacist music.” The term white-power music also encompasses non–rock ’n’ roll subgenres, such as hate folk and hard bass, which do not fall under the category of “hate rock,” another term I initially considered. White-power musicians often prefer to call this “white-nationalist music,” but some musicians whose work deserves consideration in a book on this genre—for example, Landser and other German neo-Nazi bands who have followed the hard-line ideology of the original Third Reich in viewing Poles and other Slavic groups as ethnically inferior to Germans—do not subscribe to the idea that all European-descended peoples should band together to form one coherent “white nation.” Thus, I use the term white-power music, with the caveat that authors with other research agendas might choose differently.

White-power music actually represents an umbrella category that encompasses many local music scenes and various types of pro–white racist music from around the world. Some of these scenes have little interaction with one another, and some participants may disagree with others about key ideological tenets. In other cases, members of scenes in different countries maintain close business and personal ties because they have deep affinities for each other. Scholars sometimes disagree about which groups, individuals, and scenes to consider within the purview of white-power music, but for the purposes of this book, I define white-power music as any music produced and distributed by individuals who are actively trying to advance what they view as a white-power or pro–white racist agenda.

White-power ideology tends to involve belief in Jewish world conspiracy theories, opposition to national governments and international power structures like the United Nations or the World Bank, and hostility toward sexual minorities and visibly non-white individuals. Nonetheless, it is important to remember that the constellation of white-power beliefs aligns itself differently in each white-power believer. This means that while the ideologies of some core white-power musicians overlap with one another, some do not. The only unifying ideology for all groups across the genre seems to be a shared belief in a Jewish world conspiracy that threatens to breed the white race to extinction via biological race-mixing and intermarriage with partners from non-white ethnic groups; most other aspects of white-power ideology are subject to discussion and disagreement among and between different white-power groups and believers. In other words, the world of white-power music today involves conversations among many different racist groups and individuals, not all of whom agree with one another’s interpretations of white-power ideology.

Strictly speaking, then, white-power music is not a “scene” or a “movement” in the same way that the Seattle grunge music scene of the early 1990s was a scene or the 1968 student movements were movements. In fact, it can be difficult to define what the social structure of white-power music really is, because existing terms seem inadequate. Christian Dornbusch and Jan Raabe have suggested that the term “white-power music network” might be appropriate here, but they caution that the term network carries its own set of scholarly baggage, which may make this term difficult to use as well. In concert with Dornbusch and Raabe, I propose the term “web” instead, in the hope that it will evoke the intricate sorts of brittle links and fissures that have defined white-power music since its inception.3 This is not to argue that all members of movements or scenes hold homogeneous worldviews, but rather to point to the structural differences between social constellations with clear geographical or philosophical centers and those that lack them. While the term web is likely to prove as unsatisfactory as its predecessors, it does denote an interconnected system of groups and individuals who may agree with one another on a few key points and work together when necessary, but who sometimes also maintain separate spheres of influence and differ in important regards.

Uses and Effects of White-Power Music on Fans

Regardless of socio-historical and geographical variations within pro-white racism across different countries and localities, white-power music performs several important roles for pro-white racist groups and white-power believers worldwide. Aside from generating money for white-power organizations, the white-power music industry can also disseminate ideology, voice the movement’s fantasies, and facilitate social bonding rituals. It is important to mention these social functions of music in general and white-power music in particular in order to demonstrate why white-power adherents bother to make music at all.

Musicians and fans of white-power music often tend to focus on creating community and building interpersonal relationships among European-descended individuals who might otherwise feel isolated. Several prominent figures in the world of white-power music have stated explicitly that they have used music’s community-building potential to unite racist sympathizers. For example, William Pierce—the late founder of the US neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance and the former owner of the white-power music label Resistance Records—discussed the role of music in white-power recruiting before he died, writing, “Through music I want to give [people] more awareness and a better understanding of what needs to be done. Music is truly a mass medium which reaches and influences everyone, not just those who are already politically committed.”4 As Pierce’s remark illustrates, a primary goal of Resistance Records was not just to entertain listeners or even necessarily just to earn a financial profit, but also to recruit new members for hate-based organizations. The same has also been true for many other white-power music producers, distributors, and musicians.

How effective white-power music actually is as a recruiting tool for organized hate groups is, of course, open for debate; statistics are difficult to obtain, because most white-power organizations do not publicize their membership rosters or other data. A long-term, interview-based research study on young participants in German right-wing extremist scenes by the Deutsche Jugendinstitut (German youth institute) found “dass ( . . . ) Musik keine initiatorische Rolle hatte” (that [ . . . ] music had no initiatory role [in recruitment]).5 Anecdotal remarks from white-power music fans who post messages to the Stormfront white-power forums on the Internet tend to belie the certainty expressed in the Deutsche Jugendinstitut report, expressing how white-power music in general and Ian Stuart Donaldson’s band Skrewdriver in particular facilitated many individuals’ introductions to white-power beliefs and activism. One Stormfront user, for instance, wrote in 2013 that “It was I.S.D. [Ian Stuart Donaldson] and Skrewdriver that made me start questioning European politics and made me realize how sick it is. Great inspiration to so many Europeans,” and another stated in 2014 that “A Skrewdriver record is what led me to read [Adolf Hitler’s 1925 manifesto] Mein Kampf eventually.”6 Whatever the case, it is clear that William Pierce and other prominent and long-standing members of white-power communities worldwide have intended for their involvement with the white-power music industry to recruit new members into their organizations, and that many members of white-power scenes worldwide believe the music should serve that purpose.

White-power music’s role in the cultures of various white-power scenes worldwide does not end, of course, after the initial recruitment phase of an adherent’s experience with white-power groups. An important part of white-power music’s role as a social organizing tool is its ability to provide adherents with “safe” contexts—what Pete Simi and Robert Futrell call “free spaces”—in which they can act out values that may run counter to those of the mainstream.7 In other words, white-power music can provide the fantasy of a world in which the movement’s values are already common currency. Concerts are obvious settings for these safe havens because of their face-to-face, community-building potential, but even the experiences of reading movement-related materials online and listening to recordings can make white-power believers feel less alone and more connected to a group of fellow sympathizers.8 This aspect of music in social movements is particularly important to individuals like white-power activists, for whom group membership bears a heavy social stigma in most western countries. Free spaces allow adherents to enact their values in situations that minimize opposing opinions, creating miniature versions of their ideal societies for short periods of time and helping to facilitate white-power identity formation. Free spaces can also help established white-power believers to teach new members of their groups about white-power ideology without subjecting them to tedious lectures or speeches.9 The white-power music web thus provides opportunities for developing and living not only white-power ideals but also entire identities based on racist ideologies. In this way, white-power music can help to sustain the movement by cultivating new generations of racist activists.

According to anti-racist scholars like Simi and Futrell as well as to prominent participants in the world of white-power music, then, music may help to keep white-power believers centered in their racist worldviews; this group-building and ideology-reinforcing potential is an important part of music’s role in nearly any belief community, and helps to explain why every human society in the world today makes some form of music. In fact, music’s effects on human behavior actually go even beyond these strictly social functions. While clinical research on music psychology remains in its infancy, investigations have already shown that music can influence the human autonomic nervous system—which controls bodily functions including sexual arousal, breathing, digestion, heart rate, and perspiration—and that music has an especially pronounced effect on how and when the human endocrine system, which controls hormone levels, releases the pleasure hormone dopamine and the stress hormone cortisol into the body’s bloodstream.10 When someone listens to a piece of music that he or she enjoys, he or she therefore experiences actual sensations of physical pleasure—although, of course, the same piece of music might engender the opposite physical reaction in a listener who prefers other types of music.

What this means for the study of white-power music and other forms of musical propaganda is twofold. First, white-power music does not have the power simply to “brainwash” unsympathetic listeners into believing in white-power ideologies, because listening to music that one dislikes actually tends to produce physical stress reactions. Second and equally, however, for some individuals—for instance, those who experience white-power music in the context of enjoyable social interactions with friends and loved ones, those who already agree with the political messages they hear in the lyrics to white-power songs, or even those who simply like the sound of the music—white-power music can have a powerful effect on physical and social experiences of the world.

Noting these physical effects and social uses of music helps to explain why people make and listen to political propaganda music in general and to white-power music in particular. Music affects our bodies, including our brains, in important and measurable ways. As a phenomenon with the power to influence how we interact with other people and how we feel within ourselves, music can function as an important tool for manipulating others’ behavior, even though it clearly is not an unlimited or fail-safe tool. White-power racists have adopted music as a propaganda strategy and as a social bonding mechanism for many of the same reasons and in many of the same ways as other groups have done historically, including, of course, the Third Reich and other violently racist totalitarian regimes, but also left-wing, anti-racist, and anti-authoritarian protest movements, such as the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War protest movements in the United States in the 1960s. Music is a medium that can, in at least some circumstances, attract new adherents to white-power ideologies, help existing believers maintain social ties with one another over long periods of time, and link believers in similar ideologies over long distances. For the purposes of this book, those long-distance linkages are critically important to understanding how the white-power music web operates not only in its localized, scene-based forms, but also in an international and transnational context.

Examining White-Power Music as an International and Transnational Phenomenon

The white-power music web, as previously mentioned, is a “structure” that lacks a clear geographical center. It consists of scenes and organizations scattered throughout the world, connected by many different types of digital and interpersonal ties. However, many of the key scholarly sources on white-power music thus far treat the genre as if the white-power music scenes in the authors’ home countries constitute the core or even the entirety of the white-power music web. Focusing on local or national white-power music scenes, of course, allows scholars to provide rich and valuable descriptions of white-power beliefs and practices in particular areas, but it can sometimes also leave readers with the mistaken impression that violently pro-white music is the province of one particular group in one specific area, rather than the product of long-standing, large-scale, transnational power imbalances that it really is. This book represents the first in-depth study of white-power music as a transnational rather than simply a localized phenomenon, helping to explain why racist political groups still continue to find support across the European-descended world during what is often mistakenly referred to in popular media as a “post-racial” era.11 With the exception Anton Shekhovtsov and Paul Jackson’s edited volume White Power Music: Scenes of Extreme-Right Cultural Resistance—which includes one of my own articles—the vast majority of the book-length scholarly writing on white-power music in English and German thus far focuses only on white-power music scenes in individual countries, spending little time exploring the international linkages among white-power musicians worldwide. Even in the Shekhovtsov and Jackson book, the individual chapters are mainly isolated national studies, most of which trace few comparisons or connections with one another. My study will add to this conversation by drawing these disparate conversations together, as well as by adding discussions of white-power music scenes in places like South America and Russia, which have received almost no attention from scholars who write in the genre’s two main research languages of English and German. By acknowledging the links among racist ideologies and racist hate groups in various western cultures, I hope that this book will provide scholars of white-power music with a stronger sense of the international white-power music web as a whole.

Contemporary white supremacy and its previous iterations have been fundamental elements of European-descended societies for centuries, even though many people living in Europe and its former settler colonies today would prefer to believe that racism no longer affects their societies in significant ways. Ignoring racism’s continuing influence will do nothing to explain how or why individuals become involved in white-power hate groups, nor will it help to determine why those groups develop in the first place. Understandably, many readers may find white-power musicians’ inflammatory rhetoric to be offensive. Readers may wish to dismiss the fans and practitioners of this music as idiots or antisocial lunatics. However, these reductionist views explain neither the attraction the music holds for its fans nor the influence it continues to exert over significant numbers of people. The white-power music web has grown rapidly since its birth in late-1970s England; this fact alone seems to suggest that western culture has not outgrown its racist, colonialist, or even genocidal tendencies. “Political correctness” and anti-hate-speech legislation may demand that the most overtly violent racist expressions be purged from public discourse, but one should not confuse superficial suppression of dialogue with the far lengthier and more difficult process of moving past such ideas in the public (sub)consciousness. It is for these reasons that this topic remains salient decades after many people wish or even believe the influence of violent racism essentially to have disappeared from most western societies. In fact, understanding why people play white-power music and how it influences its fans an...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. What Is White-Power Music?
• Chapter 2. The History of White-Power Music in Britain
• Chapter 3. The History of White-Power Music in Continental Western Europe
• Chapter 4. The History of White-Power Music in Eastern Europe
• Chapter 5. The History of White-Power Music outside Europe
• Chapter 6. Conclusion
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Select Recordings Cited
• Index
• About the Author