Sometimes the code 28 is used to represent Blood & Honour, derived from the second and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet, B and H, and the group uses Nazi symbolism. Its official website self-describes as a "musical based resistance network" and dubs its "global confederacy of freedom fighters" Brotherhood 28.
In the UK, the group used to organise white power concerts by Rock Against Communism (RAC) bands. It publishes a magazine called Blood and Honour. There are official divisions in several countries, including two rival groups in the United States. It is banned in several countries, including Germany, Spain, Russia, and Canada.
History
Blood & Honour was established in 1987 by Skrewdriver frontman Ian Stuart Donaldson, supported by and the bands No Remorse, Brutal Attack, Sudden Impact, and Squadron.[1] These bands were previously affiliated with the White Noise Club, a subsidiary organisation of the National Front responsible for organising Rock Against Communism concerts, operating the White Noise Records label, and publishing a zine called White Noise.[2]
Tensions between Donaldson and the leadership of the White Noise Club developed in 1987, as Donaldson felt that the White Noise Club was siphoning money out of the Rock Against Communism scene to use for the National Front's political campaigns.[3] Donaldson's Skrewdriver officially split from the White Noise Club in May of 1987, and several other bands within the scene followed.[4]
Blood & Honour was launched as an alternative to the White Noise Club in July of 1987, with the appearance of the first edition of Blood & Honour magazine. Copies were sent free of charge to members of the White Noise Club (Donaldson used contacts within the National Front to obtain their mailing list),[5] together with a note by Donaldson denouncing the White Noise Club as a "corrupt rip-off".[3] A concert to "launch" Blood & Honour was held at the St Helier Arms on the 5th of September, 1987, featuring performances from Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Brutal Attack, and Sudden Impact.[6]
By the end of 1988, Blood & Honour magazine was a quarterly that had grown from eight to 16 pages after a few issues. The magazine included concert reports, band interviews, readers' letters, RAC record charts and a column called "White Whispers". A mail-order service called Skrewdriver Services soon formed within its pages, selling items such as white power albums, T-shirts and flags; Loyalist music tapes; and Swastika pendants.[7]
The back page of Blood & Honour Issue Number 13 advertised a Skrewdriver concert in London on 12 September 1992. Posters and fliers were posted around the country, advertising the concert and listing a redirection point as Waterloo Rail Station. The night before the concert, Donaldson was attacked in a Burton pub. The next day, police closed down Waterloo Station and the tube station, preventing many people from reaching the redirection point. Hundreds more Blood & Honour supporters who had journeyed from abroad were turned back at ports in Folkestone and Dover. The Blood & Honour supporters clashed with anti-fascist protesters. Missiles such as bricks and champagne bottles taken from bins outside of South Bank restaurants were used during the ensuing riot. Battles ensued for about two hours until the police separated the two groups, and the concert proceeded in the function hall of the Yorkshire Grey pub in Eltham, South-East London. The incident got international media coverage and became known as the "Battle of Waterloo".[8][9]
In 1992, the newly formed Midlands division organised the annual Blood & Honour White Xmas concert. On 19 December, over 400 supporters gathered at a working men's club in Mansfield to watch No Remorse, Razors Edge and Skrewdriver perform. In 1993, the East Midlands division planned to stage an outdoor festival on 31 July. Donaldson was arrested and served with an injunction order not to perform at the concert. The venue was blockaded by the police, who seized amplifiers and confiscated sound equipment. It was the biggest police operation in the area since the Miners strikes in the early 1980s.[10]
Later that year, the East Midlands division organised a concert for 25 September. Three nights before the concert, Donaldson and a few friends were travelling in a car that spun out of control into a ditch. Donaldson and another passenger died, and other passengers had minor wounds. The following day, 100 Skrewdriver supporters travelled to the Blood & Honour social in the Midlands, unaware of the deaths.[citation needed]
Each year, on or near the anniversary of Donaldson's death, a large memorial concert is held. In 2008, a concert in Redhill, Somerset attracted widespread BBC, radio and newspaper coverage.[11][12] The memorial concert to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Donaldson reportedly was the biggest associated gig in the UK with between 1,000 and 1,200 people attending.[13][14] On the 23rd anniversary of the death of founder, Ian Stuart Donaldson, the annual memorial gig once again attracted international television and media coverage.[15][16][17][18]
Blood & Honour remains active in the UK but has contracted since its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s; researchers Matthew Worley and Nigel Copsey suggest that its membership consists mainly of “heavily-tattooed men in their fifties reliving their ‘glory days’ at occasional gigs in back-room pubs”.[19] As of 2019, the organisation organises up to fifteen concerts a year in the UK.[20]
Description and symbolism
The group is composed of White Nationalists and has links to Combat 18.[21] Its official website self-describes as a "musical based resistance network" and dubs its "global confederacy of freedom fighters" Brotherhood 28.[22]
Sometimes the code 28 is used to represent Blood & Honour, derived from the second and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet, B and H. Though different national chapters of Blood & Honour use different Nationalist symbols based on their location, common symbolic traits include the usage of a modernised Blackletter script, colours of the Nazi German flag, and other Nazi symbolism, including the Totenkopf Death's Head insignia of the SS-Totenkopfverbände and concentration camp units.[23]
International groups
There are official divisions in several countries.[21] In the United States, two rival groups claim the name: Blood and Honour Council USA and Blood and Honour America Division.[24]
In 1999, some Blood & Honour groups published support on their official websites for the Malexander murders in Sweden.[citation needed]
Blood & Honour Australia & the Southern Cross Hammerskins have been organising the annual Ian Donaldson Memorial concert in Melbourne since 1994. Reports by the media that the concert in 2019 was cancelled at the last minute were false, as it went ahead as it does each year without incident.[28][29][30][31]
A skinhead or skin is a member of a subculture that originated among working-class youth in London, England, in the 1960s. It soon spread to other parts of the United Kingdom, with a second working-class skinhead movement emerging worldwide in the late 1970s. Motivated by social alienation and working-class solidarity, skinheads are defined by their close-cropped or shaven heads and working-class clothing such as Dr. Martens and steel toe work boots, braces, high rise and varying length straight-leg jeans, and button-down collar shirts, usually slim fitting in check or plain. The movement reached a peak at the end of the 1960s, experienced a revival in the 1980s, and, since then, has endured in multiple contexts worldwide.
Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) are anti-racist skinheads who oppose white power skinheads, neo-fascists and other political racists, particularly if they identify themselves as skinheads. SHARPs claim to reclaim the original multicultural identity of the original skinheads, hijacked by white power skinheads, who they sometimes deride as "boneheads".
Ian Stuart Donaldson, also known as Ian Stuart, was an English singer and neo-Nazi. He was the front-man of Skrewdriver, a punk rock band which, beginning in 1983, became one of the first Nazi punk bands. Donaldson raised money through white power concerts with his Blood & Honour network.
The British Movement (BM), later called the British National Socialist Movement (BNSM), is a British neo-Nazi organisation founded by Colin Jordan in 1968. It grew out of the National Socialist Movement (NSM), which was founded in 1962. Frequently on the margins of the British far-right, the BM has had a long and chequered history for its association with violence and extremism. It was founded as a political party but manifested itself more as a pressure and activist group. It has had spells of dormancy.
Rock Against Communism (RAC) was the name of white power rock concerts in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and has since become the catch-all term for music with racist lyrics as well as a specific genre of rock music derived from Oi! The lyrics can focus on racism and antisemitism, although this depends on the band.
Anti-Racist Action (ARA), also known as the Anti-Racist Action Network, is a decentralized network of militant far-left political cells in the United States and Canada. The ARA network originated in the late 1980s to engage in direct action and doxxing against rival political organizations on the hard right to dissuade them from further involvement in political activities. Anti-Racist Action described such groups as racist or fascist, or both. Most ARA members have been anarchists, but some have been Trotskyists and Maoists.
The Hammerskins are a neo-Nazi group formed in 1988 in Dallas, Texas. Their primary focus is the production and promotion of white power rock music, and many white power bands have been affiliated with the group. The Hammerskins were affiliated with the record label 9% Productions. The Hammerskins host several annual concerts, including Hammerfest, an annual event in both the United States and Europe in honor of deceased Hammerskin Joe Rowan, the lead singer of the band Nordic Thunder.
Anthony Charles Wakeford is a British neofolk musician, who primarily records under the name Sol Invictus. He is also a member of the punk rock band Crisis and a co-founder of Death in June.
The Official National Front (ONF) was one of two far-right groups to emerge in the United Kingdom in 1986 following a split within the National Front. Following ideological paths that were mostly new to the British far-right, the ONF stood opposed to the more traditionalist Flag Group.
Nicola Vincenzo "Nicky" Crane was an English neo-Nazi activist. He came out as gay before dying from an AIDS-related illness in 1993.
White power skinheads, also known as racist skinheads and neo-Nazi skinheads, 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. 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.
Rock-O-RamaRecords was a Cologne-based German independent record label that operated between 1980 and 1994, established and run by Herbert Egoldt. Though initially dedicated to releasing and distributing left-wing or apolitical German and international punk and hardcore, Rock-O-Rama became a leading label for white power rock and Rock Against Communism from the middle of the 1980s. Following a 1993 police raid, Egoldt closed the label in 1994 under the threat of legal action from German authorities.
Skullhead was a nationalist Oi! band from the Newcastle area. It was part of the Rock Against Communism (RAC) movement.
Skrewdriver were an English punk rock band formed by Ian Stuart Donaldson in Poulton-le-Fylde, Lancashire, in 1976. Originally a punk band, Skrewdriver changed into a white power skinhead rock band after reuniting in the 1980s. Their original line-up split in January 1979 and Donaldson reformed the band with different musicians in 1982. This new version of the band played a leading role in the Rock Against Communism movement.
No Remorse are an English white power rock band formed in London in 1985. They were one of the most prominent neo-Nazi skinheads bands of the Rock Against Communism scene. The band was led by Paul Burnley between 1986 and 1996, and by William Browning and Daniel "Jacko" Jack from 1996 onwards, following a factional dispute within British white nationalist politics.
Clark Reid Martell is an American white supremacist and the former leader of Chicago Area SkinHeads (CASH), which was founded in 1985 by six skinheads under his leadership. This was the first organized neo-Nazi white power skinhead group in the United States. The group was also called Romantic Violence, and was the first US distributor of records and tapes from the English band Skrewdriver.
White power music is music that promotes white nationalism. It encompasses various music styles, including rock, country, and folk. Ethnomusicologist Benjamin R. Teitelbaum argues that white power music "can be defined by lyrics that demonize variously conceived non-whites and advocate racial pride and solidarity. Most often, however, insiders conceptualized white power music as the combination of those themes with pounding rhythms and a charging punk or metal-based accompaniment." Genres include Nazi punk, Rock Against Communism, National Socialist black metal, and fashwave.
The Nationalist Front was a loose coalition of radical right and white supremacist organizations. The coalition was formed in 2016 by leaders of the neo-Nazi groups National Socialist Movement (NSM) and Traditionalist Worker Party (TWP). Its aim was to unite white supremacist and white nationalist groups under a common umbrella. Originally the group was named the Aryan Nationalist Alliance and was composed of neo-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan and White power skinhead organizations.
"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" is a song from the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret, and the 1972 film of the same name, sung primarily by a Nazi character. It was written and composed by two Jewish musicians – John Kander and Fred Ebb – as part of an avowedly anti-fascist work; the nationalist character of the song serves as a warning to the musical's characters of the rise of Nazism. Nonetheless, "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" has been adopted by right-wing, neo-Nazi, and alt-right groups as an anthem.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
