Blood and Politics (61 page)

This was a males-only world. In just a handful of the many scene photos were women present. A few advertisements did picture romanticized graphics of long-haired, Valkyrian blond women, noticeably unmarred by tattoos and the paraphernalia of skindom. Outside the fantasies of the magazine, however, few of these idealized women associated themselves with the “black metal mafia” men glorified on the pages inside. In one article, a writer lamented the interracial dating habits of high-status blond beauties. “It is my belief that interracial matings are the result of a desire for self-annihilation,” he argued. And with an almost Spenglerian flourish, the writer lamented the decay of “white” civilization and values. It was unlikely that the tattooed, shaved head readership seriously regarded such metaphysical musings. But its inclusion signified the publication’s strategy of combining music madness within a broader cultural enterprise.

Small forays were made into the universe of liberal concerns. One
magazine article critiqued the “Politics of Meaning,” a set of ideas generated by liberal Jewish writers for the magazine
Tikkun
. Another writer revisited the author Jack London and the white racial socialism he had advocated a century before.
¹¹
These pieces showed that the
Resistance
team was listening to the cultural babble around them, but they did not signify any genuine intervention into those larger discussions. Similarly, one article described the demographic changes due in the next fifty years and repeated the white nationalist mantra about becoming a new racial minority in a “third world” country. But
Resistance
did not plot any new strategy in that regard, and it did not revisit the topic for any further serious discussion.

By Burdi’s account, Resistance Records tapped into the essence of white generational revolt. Skinheads felt betrayed by their elders, he wrote in
The Spotlight
. In an attempt to explain his followers to Carto’s readers, he described young people scarred by a “society in decline” and guilty of being born White (with a capital
W
). They had spontaneously rebelled against black rap music and the white “effeminates” on MTV. Like the Vikings of old, he wrote, skins were “semi-nomadic tribes who lived to plunder and wage war.” They might not be able to raise up a civilization, he argued, but their “violence-laced brand of music” was “born from souls of a generation preparing for Ragnarok [a world-destroying battle between the Norse gods and the forces of evil] once again.”
¹²

Statistics showed that these would-be Nordic warriors did in fact engage in an uncommonly large number of violent incidents. Although there were fewer than four thousand white power skinheads in the core of the subculture at the time Burdi launched the magazine, they committed thirty-two politically or racially motivated killings between 1987 and the end of 1994, according to documentation provided by the Center for New Community, a small civil rights organization in Chicago. These murders were brutal and personal, even if many of the victims were randomly chosen. Ten were the result of beatings, and ten were stabbings, crimes in which the perpetrators often found themselves covered with blood. Even shootings were up close, rather than instances of faraway sniping. By the end of 2001 the number of murders had reached fifty-one. These killings were only the smallest part of the violence committed by white power skins, and untold numbers of assaults, arsons, and other crimes went unreported to the police.

It became a commonplace for reporters, human rights activists, and cops all to refer to skinheads as the “street warriors” of the “hate” movement, a designation that reduced the subculture down to its violent expression. Some law enforcement professionals tended to treat these shaved head youths as if they were gangs, white versions of the Crips or
Bloods, and gang intelligence units in some cities were used to monitor the activity of all young people, sometimes hopelessly confusing racist and antiracist skinheads and both subcults with punks. A corollary view considered them of note only as the obedient street soldiers of older, established organizational bosses—disciples, not leaders; followers, not innovators. One criminologist declared that skinheads had developed only through the direct intervention of adults, not through the medium of subcultural self-discovery.
¹³

The ganglike rituals practiced by a number of the crews, however, were secondary to the culture and style modes from which the skinhead phenomenon had sprung. Hairstyles, dress, and tattoos had initially defined skinheads. As the subculture matured, a more generalized system of beliefs and icons came to sustain it. Music and myth bound together these pockets of alienated white youths. As an autonomous social rather than criminal phenomenon, skinheads existed in their own social milieu with a distinct leadership and organizational impetus. These Gen Xers developed their own political style and counterinstitutions. And at the heart of this subculture beat the bands and their music. In this regard, Burdi’s magazine played an outsize role.

Prior to the formation of Resistance Records, skinheads in the United States and Canada depended largely on their European counterparts to provide recorded music. In Britain enterprising skinheads had already seized control of their own music business. American white power bands, by contrast, had languished in their suburban garages. The would-be stage performers practiced, drank beer, and waited. One or two groups toured the skin music scene in Europe. Others played an occasional outdoor fest or rally. A few ran small distribution outfits with catalogs of European imports: music tapes, T-shirts and Naziesque paraphernalia. The one standby, Scene Zines, proliferated as fast as copy-shops could turn cut-and-paste graphics into low-cost black-and-white newsletters. Before Internet use became commonplace, any white boy with an electric guitar and a post office box could reinvent himself into a newsletter warrior. Although several businesses catered to this set, none produced any homegrown music.
Blood and Honor
magazine published band news from Southern California. Skrewdriver Services in Colorado and Thunor Services in Georgia sold music from the U.K. and skinhead paraphernalia. Bound for Glory, a Minnesota band that had played at the Aryan Nations’ 1989 rally in Tennessee, recorded its own LPs in Germany, and the band sold them from a St. Paul post office box under the rubric of Wolfpack Services. Once Resistance Records formed, however, it drew energy and resources from across this spectrum and began taking in tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.

.   .   .

Resistance Records’ business success indicated the existence of a niche market in a political subculture ignored only at the larger society’s peril. Here twenty-something skinheads registered heavily. Nevertheless, it was still a small boutique taste, not a musical department store. In the realm of mainstreamers and electioneers, however, this demographic showed not at all.

As the skinheads aged, they came to more closely resemble other white nationalists. Some grew their hair out or dressed professionally for regular jobs in the economic mainstream. A select few learned the intricacies of national socialism and became competent propagandists. Like members of the movement as a whole, skinheads came from family roots across the class spectrum, and those like Burdi with upper-middle-class roots tended toward positions of visible leadership.
¹⁴

Nevertheless, the contrast between these Generation Xers and older parts of the movement remained sharp. Skinheads never became simply clay pots fired by their elders. Tom Metzger may have wanted to recruit skins to his banner, but he did not invent them. And as the conflict with a Bible-thumping Pete Peters in Tennessee had demonstrated, young activists pushed and pulled the older set in a generational contest of wills. If the young subculturalists (briefly) borrowed ideas or an occasional propaganda outlet, they also learned not to depend on their elders for organizational resources. Generational revolt within the white nationalist movement was not confined to the skin scene, however. Soon after Klassen’s suicide, a long-simmering dispute within the Institute for Historical Review broke out into the open. In this instance, it was the boomer-age cadres that staged a coup against the older Willis Carto.

October 15, 1993.
At a battle at the Institute for Historical Review’s offices in Costa Mesa, California, Willis Carto tenaciously ceded nothing without a determined fight. The pushing and shoving started just before noon. Mark Weber, the IHR’s journal editor and ambassador to Germany’s Holocaust deniers, was gone from the premises, along with three other (male) staffers. They were waiting for a prearranged meeting at their attorney’s office, supposedly with Carto. Meanwhile, at the warehouse the secretary was left in the offices and talking on the phone when she was accosted by an outsider. “I was sitting at my computer with my back to the warehouse door,” she later told police. “A strange man came up behind me and yanked the telephone out of my hand and pulled the chair I was sitting on back away from my desk. I asked who he was and he responded, ‘We’re taking over control.’ I said, ‘Do you mind if I finish this phone call, I have a customer on the line.’ He said, ‘No one is on the phone. That was us.’”
¹

Willis Carto, Elisabeth Carto, a locksmith, and a couple of thugs had entered the IHR’s offices surreptitiously while Mark Weber and his staff were out of the building. In short, the Cartos and their hired-hands were quickly trying to regain control of the premises. They started changing locks and copying computer data, grabbed the phone lines, and briefly detained the remaining staff. After Weber and the others discovered they had been tricked, they left the lawyer’s and rushed over to the institute offices, just in time to push their way through a door whose lock had not yet been changed. A battle began: the elderly Cartos and their thugs on one side, Weber’s would-be historians on the other. The scrappy Willis came at his opponents with a makeshift wooden club. The elderly Elisabeth waved a concrete doorstop. One of Carto’s hired
hands knocked Weber to the floor and began pummeling him. In response, one of the other IHR staffers pulled a gun. At that point the muscle started backing off. Willis and Elisabeth, however, would not stop charging at their former comrades. So one of Weber’s cohorts forced the elderly publisher to the door but did not succeed in pushing him completely out of the building. With one foot inside, Carto clung to the door while Elisabeth waved her doorstop like a character out of a Hitchcock thriller. Finally the police arrived, hauled off the Cartos, Weber, and his gun-wielding colleague. Weber’s two remaining associates resecured the offices. And the Cartos were officially shut out.
²

This failed attempt to take over the warehouse offices turned into one of the most humiliating defeats for Willis Carto in his decades of merchandising and mongering. The staff that he had once effectively directed had figured out how to seize control of the Legion for the Survival of Freedom, the parent corporation behind the Institute for Historical Review. Carto had controlled that corporation for almost thirty years. Now he was being unceremoniously pushed out the door—literally. All these combatants had until recently been on the same team, not using clubs or a gun against one another. They all had braved the disdain of historians and other keepers of the past in their self-described noble search for the truth. Now, by their own actions, they had reduced themselves to the status of back alley muggers. And the results had more far-reaching consequences—particularly on the fortunes of Willis Carto and his ability to eventually pass a legacy of his own making on to the next generation.

The dispute began at an editorial meeting between Carto and the senior staff on April 6, 1993. This session was “punctuated by loud and abusive” outbursts by Carto, according to a staff account of the meeting. He threatened and hammered on the table while trying to declare his intention to change the editorial direction of the
Journal of Historical Review
. He was tired of the sole focus on the Holocaust and wanted to join the parade of publications attacking “multiculturalism.”
³
By changing the political direction of the journal, Carto also aimed to shift the entire IHR enterprise. He planned to replace Mark Weber as journal editor with a writer described by the staff as a past “Nazi propagandist.”

Staff members began accumulating other complaints. They accused Carto of dragging the IHR into a swamp of fiduciary and legal trouble. Among other grievances, they cited Carto’s reckless disregard for copyrights. On several occasions he had reprinted protected book titles after a cursory copyright search. As a result, the institute had been sued and
forced to pay damages. The staff also claimed that Carto pursued worthless publishing projects, including a book aimed at Mel Mermelstein, the Holocaust survivor who had already been through two rounds of lawsuits with Carto and the IHR. The staffers were tired of fighting with Mermelstein. He had already cost them the ninety-thousand-dollar settlement, thirty thousand dollars in legal fees, and countless hours away from their main pursuit. During a second round of legal bouts in 1991, Carto had transferred the legion’s hard assets—inventory, furniture, etc.—to another corporation. The staff believed these transfers amounted to “fraudulent conveyances.”
⁴
Another lawsuit could possibly undo the entire corporate structure.

The staff also took umbrage at Carto’s plan to publish a “10-volume flagrantly pro-Hitler” biography by Leon Degrelle, a Belgian general in the Waffen SS who had lived in Spain since World War Two.
⁵
Carto planned to pay Degrelle twenty-two thousand dollars in advance royalties for each volume. In addition, the IHR would incur translation, printing, and advertising costs—a large expenditure that would cost money it did not seem to have.

Any objective observer would have to conclude that the staff’s sense of institutional responsibility certainly exceeded Carto’s, whose imperious decision making brought the legion ever closer to danger. Yet a certain irony underlay the staff’s description of these events: the same editors who had claimed that Nazi gassings had not happened complained about their journal’s becoming unscholarly. The man to replace Weber was a “past Nazi propagandist.” Degrelle was flagrantly pro-Hitler. These adjectives and adverbs were used by a crew anchored by former top cadres in William Pierce’s National Alliance, who had gloried in the bloody shadow of the Hitler henchman Otto Ernst Remer and whose journal routinely stepped onto the white side of scholarship. Nevertheless, the staff’s delineation of the fiduciary issues dividing the two camps was closer to the mark than the fulminations by Carto, who soon began describing Weber and crew as agents of the Israeli secret service and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. Faced with Carto’s implacable opposition, the staff began researching its options.