Race and racism

Copyright © 1999, Southern Poverty Law Center. http://www.splcenter.org
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NOTE: The articles below are reprinted from the Intelligence Report (Issue: Fall 1999) a publication of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

LOS ANGELES -- Inside the sprawling Men’s Central Jail here, photographs of tattoos on almost every body part cover the walls of the gang unit. There are swastikas, Celtic crosses, symbols of the white supremacist Aryan Brotherhood. There is even an X-ray of a homemade dagger concealed in the rectum of one inmate’s body.

An overweight, baby-faced 23-year-old is led in, chains clanking. Randall Rojas, a former member of the Nazi Low Riders (NLR), is accused of helping to murder a homeless black man four years ago -- a particularly grotesque killing that allegedly was followed by a 16-year-old girl’s boasts of having "played" with the man’s eyeballs.

In the hour that follows, Rojas talks about his past. His father, he says, was a white supremacist and completely absent parent. His mother, a longtime victim of spousal abuse at the hands of another man, largely ignored him. At 17, after years of drugs, beatings and trouble in school, he finally landed in juvenile hall for assault. After he got out, he found a new home with the Nazi Low Riders, a gang largely devoted to the drug business but with a white supremacist ideological overlay. Then, two years after the homeless man’s killing and while serving time for assault, Randy Rojas was charged with murder.

Rojas’ is a tale like so many others. Around the country, but especially evident in southern California, an underclass of white youths, in many cases buffeted by the winds of huge social changes and dislocations, is altering the face of American hatred.

Where are these young men, along with a few women, coming from? It is true that many youths come to the white supremacist movement propelled by no particular hardship. The Rev. David Ostendorf, head of the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based anti-hate group, says it is a "gross stereotype" to depict all racist youth as coming from deprived circumstances. Many are alienated, middle-class kids who are led to neo-Nazism through Web hate sites or other propaganda. But a far larger -- and, apparently, growing -- crop of white supremacist youth has sprung from the soil of socioeconomic discontent.

"There’s a lot of gangs, groups forming out there among the young," says Rojas, a young man who now says that he rejects white supremacy and has found religion instead. "It’s spreading. Even [graffiti] taggers are evolving into gangs. It is escalating."

Randy Rojas and others like him live on the edge of the country and of the economy, outside of the World Wide Web. They inhabit a bleak suburban world -- the so-called "edge cities" -- of aging strip malls and fast food restaurants. It is a world peopled, in part, by the downwardly mobile, those who are struggling to remain in the lower middle class and are often characterized by one-parent or dysfunctional families. Many of the children of these families have experienced racial conflicts in their schools, racially changing neighborhoods, reduced expectations and fears that the modern economy is leaving them behind.

"Edge cities are where hate crimes happen," says Jack Levin, a hate crimes expert at Northeastern University. "There are more hate crimes in the suburbs than in the city and it’s much more likely to happen where there’s an influx of minorities. But it doesn’t have to be the neighbor down the block. It could be the first Latino student in a dormitory, or a gay at a party, or the first Asian in the office. It’s happening in schools and work places. There are simply more threats and challenges to the advantages of white people."

Levin says that hate crimes, more than half of which are carried out by individuals under the age of 22, are very largely a furious backlash by young people.

"It’s protest by proxy," Levin says. "The real enemy can’t even be attacked because it’s an abstraction like global competition or downsizing. How much satisfaction can you get from attacking an abstraction? ... [Instead, hate criminals prefer to] attack a human face or put a dehumanized face on the enemy. It’s the old scapegoating thing."

While child poverty has been dropping in inner city and rural areas, it jumped 52% between 1975 and 1993 in the suburbs (in 1999, 19% of American children live in poverty, for the worst rate in the developed world). Income inequality -- which one study found is particularly marked in California -- has grown to levels not seen since the Depression, with the top 2.7 million people enjoying as much income as the bottom 100 million. (Executives made 419 times what factory workers did in 1992; in 1980, they made 42 times as much). Between 1973 and 1992, median income plunged by 47% for young families with children headed by a high school dropout. In the last 30 years, white male manufacturing workers with no college have seen a 10% to 20% drop in their buying power.

Family structure, and the support it provides children, is weakening, too. The U.S. divorce rate has doubled since 1960, with half of all marriages ending in divorce. During the same period, the number of children living without a father present went from 9% to 28%. Even children with two parents probably do not see much of them, as fewer and fewer families are able to survive on only one income and everyone works more. In the past 20 years, Americans have added 335 hours a year to their workload -- meaning they work 350 hours a year more than Europeans and 70 hours more than the Japanese. Kids are growing up alone, with one study showing pre-schoolers spend six hours a day watching TV.

While overall drug use has been declining, the use of methamphetamine -- a powerful drug that can stimulate violent tendencies -- seems to have been growing among whites, particularly those in lower-middle-class suburbs. This has helped draw increasing numbers of youths into the criminal underworld and, in many cases, prison. Once there, even many of those who had no former affiliations join gangs, typically racist organizations.

Overall, according to a July study by the Children’s Rights Council, California ranked 46th of 50 states as a place to raise children. High rates of child poverty, juvenile arrests, child deaths and teenage birth rates were among the factors used to rank states.

"I wouldn’t want to raise my kids in Southern California," says Zukowski, a 23-year-old parolee and self-described white supremacist. "There’s a lot of chaos, too much reality for any youngster. Gangs, violence, crime, a lot of negativity. No escape. It’s competitive, harsh, dog-eat-dog. Just look at how people drive on the freeway."

Or talk to Tobin, 24, another California skin interviewed by the Intelligence Report who asked that his last name not be used. His view of the world around him? "Chaos. Ultra-violence. The whole world is fucked. This is definitely the greatest nation in the world, and it’s going to shit. My race is slowly getting dragged into the mud."

Young white men like these seem to come mainly from dysfunctional families in a lower income bracket, part of a growing underclass (see related interview in this issue). They often start off as kids seeking an alternative family in a racist street gang and are drawn into crime through the drug culture and hate music (see related stories also in this issue). When they go to prison, as many do, they typically join racist prison gangs -- either predominantly criminal groups like the Nazi Low Riders or more overtly political ones like Hammerskin Nation (see story in this issue). Once back on the streets, these men, now seen as older heroes by many younger kids, recruit more youths into street affiliates of the prison gangs.

The parents of many of these young men originally moved to California seeking new opportunities -- but at the same time leaving tight-knit communities and social support systems that might have helped them through hard times. Many settled in edge cities -- like Lancaster, the L.A. suburb where Rojas’ family moved -- thinking the suburbs were a better place to raise their children. Often, things then went from bad to worse. In Lancaster, job losses in the aerospace industry caused a crash. In other edge cities, similar events occurred.

Milton Walker, a 43-year-old homeless black man, became such a victim one November night in 1995. Walker was found behind a McDonald’s restaurant in Lancaster, murdered by assailants using a 2-by-4 and a length of metal pipe. A participant, 19-year-old Michael Thornton, implicated Rojas and two others in the attack. Prosecutors say that immediately after the murder -- at around midnight -- some in the group went to a tattoo parlor to get the lightning bolt tattoos they felt the killing had earned them.

Rojas -- who expressed remorse although he declined to discuss the killing in detail -- says he was drunk that night, coming off an LSD trip and high on methamphetamines. He freely describes the childhood that apparently helped to make him what he is.

Rojas says he loves his mother. But then he speaks of the problems. "If I argued with my mom and she didn’t understand me, I’d get mad. And I’d find myself beating up other kids, or smoking, doing drugs, because I loved my mom and father so much. They wouldn’t listen and I would do these other things to make it bad on them. But it was bad on myself. I wanted them to see my feelings. My mom was young, 17, when she had me."

Rojas only saw his father a few times before he himself turned 17. Then he landed in juvenile hall for assaulting a skateboarder. After he got out, Rojas says that he and his father -- a man whose occupation Rojas now describes as "going to prison, drugs, rock and roll" -- finally "became real friends." He says they started doing drugs together.

"My father had a major influence on me. He had a lot of hatred inside him because my grandfather would get drunk and shoot at him with a gun to scare him. He had swastika tattoos and bolts. He always said he just didn’t like niggers. I got into this stuff to prove to him that I’m his son. And he doesn’t even write to me in prison. That really hurts."

Tobin, who grew up in San Luis Obispo, tells a similar story in an interview in the California Youth Authority. Like Rojas, he says, he came from a dysfunctional family, with an absentee father. His mother, Tobin adds, was a mentally ill alcoholic and drug addict.

An only and lonely child, Tobin at age 9 began hanging out with older Skinheads -- men who lionized working-class whites -- and taking drugs with them. "Their ideology seemed pretty good to me," he says. "I didn’t have a job when I was 10, but I was brought up working-class. They were white nationalists and proud of our heritage."

Tobin’s parents never married. When he was 20 -- after being arrested for armed robbery at age 15 and years in and out of the system for failed drug tests -- he tracked down his father through the Internet. He carried his dad’s phone number in his wallet for four years, afraid to call, until a friend finally contacted Tobin’s father for him.

"I didn’t know what to say to him, you know?" says Tobin, who was on parole until recently, when he was returned to the California Youth Authority for leaving the state without permission. "I was already grown up. It wasn’t like I needed a dad to help raise me or anything. But I was kind of afraid that I might talk shit to him.

Now, Tobin and his father are talking. Tobin sent a photograph to his dad, who told him that they looked "totally alike" and added that Tobin has Irish ancestors. But his dad is holding back -- he wants a blood test before he will fully acknowledge his son.

Stanley Zukowski speaks of his parents’ divorce when he was 5. He says his mother married three alcoholics in a row. "The screaming that went on for years really affected me," he says. "There was too much going on for any young guy’s head." Zukowski says his father died a year ago, and his mother moved -- leaving no forwarding address -- while he was in jail for assaulting a police officer at age 15. Now, he cannot find her.

The parents of Thomas Powell -- an incarcerated, 19-year-old Skinhead who has been in and out of the youth hall since 1995 for stabbing a black man and on drug charges -- are still married, although he spent some time in foster care. Powell says his father, who he claims introduced him to methamphetamines at age 13, taught him to hate.

"My dad would always say ‘fucking blacks’ and this and that," Powell recalled in a recent interview. "My dad hated them. That’s where a lot of it comes down from, you know? When you’re little, you’re always listening to your mom and dad."

Soon, these young men discovered the street. Typically, such youths, insecure from the start, begin slipping in school. Then they drop out and make friends on the streets while their parents work. Soon, they’re in a gang with others even less fortunate.

"A lot of street kids are looking for a family," Spokane, Wash., police Sgt. Greg Harshman says. "Maybe there’s an older guy at a beer party spouting hate stuff. The kids are just talking the talk... . [But] this guy supports them, gives them a place to sleep." In time, whether or not older people are involved, they join the alternative family.

Rojas remembers it well. "The feelings we had were so strong. We had more love for each other than any of us had for our own families. So we made a family of friends and it started going downhill from there. After a while, we just started hating a lot."

Like all the young men interviewed, Tobin sought desperately to construct a family, a history to give him roots. He found it in the white race. "I have a heritage, a culture, a past. My family. I’m proud of who I am, a white man of European descent.

A few youths like these are recruited by organized white supremacist groups. But far more are influenced by less explicitly political gangs like the Nazi Low Riders, which began as a prison-based gang but has come to have influence on the streets as well. In the case of Rojas and his friends, the person who influenced them was Willie Fisher, a kid who came out of jail and told others in Lancaster about the NLR.

Soon, Rojas and the others took the name of the Lancaster NLR for themselves -- although they never officially belonged to the real Nazi Low Riders— and the series of hate crimes they committed in the mid-’90s earned Lancaster the name, in some quarters, of "Klancaster." When Rojas was charged with the Walker murder, he already was serving time for beating a 19-year-old Hispanic man outside a 7-Eleven store. Ritch Bryant, another Lancaster NLR member charged in the Walker murder, was also already serving time, in his case for the screwdriver stabbing of a black high school student.

Many who get into trouble -- typically, through drugs or assaults -- are not overtly political when they enter the youth halls or the prison system. But once there, most youths are organized into race-based gangs, largely for self-protection -- and many of these gangs are explicitly white (or black, or brown) supremacist. Increased juvenile incarceration rates also mean that more young racists are being created in jails. And adding to the racially charged prison atmosphere is the fact that blacks typically outnumber whites.

"The black kids didn’t like us," Tobin says of the Paso Robles prison unit where he and Zukowski were the only whites. "There were like 100 people in there. The black kids would walk by us and look at us all crazy and talk shit from outside the door."

Some return to the street as members of racist criminal gangs like the NLR, dealing drugs and in other ways participating in the criminal underground. Others grow far more political in prison, joining serious revolutionary organizations like Hammerskin Nation or other old-line hate groups. (Interestingly, California authorities say criminal gangs like the NLR are the most dangerous.) And a few turn back, attempting to go straight.

Thomas Powell, who calls himself a "supreme white power" Skinhead, is not well-schooled in the American white supremacist movement, but he hopes to create his own racist group when he gets out. Stanley Zukowski speaks of Hitler as "an exceptional, powerful man," but he says he is against violence and he has managed to do well while on parole at his $40,000-a-year job as a refrigeration mechanic. Tobin, the most overtly political white supremacist of those interviewed, knows the movement well and says he will join forces with other revolutionaries once the race war begins. Randy Rojas, who faces a possible life term, has renounced the movement that birthed him.

The world these youths inhabit -- and the gangs they go on to create -- is probably seen most clearly in California, a state that has historically set trends for many others. Next year, California whites will become a minority for the first time in over a century -- a pattern other states will follow between now and 2050. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that some 8 million immigrants will move to the state by 2025. By that same year, 33% of the state’s population will be under 20, a percentage second only to Alaska.

But California is not alone. Already, similar white supremacist youth scenes -- and the kind of socioeconomic conditions that have helped to spawn them -- have appeared in the suburbs of south Florida, around Boston, in Portland, Ore., and Salt Lake City.

"California is where everything starts, including the Church of Jesus Christ Christian," Spokane’s Sgt. Harshman says of the neo-Nazi group now based in Hayden Lake, Idaho. "It got its anti-Jewish twist in California, just like surfboards, mopeds and bikinis were first there. It’s the trendsetter, especially west of the Mississippi."

If that is so, there are more heartaches ahead -- even for those who try to turn back from the racist gang life. That may be best exemplified in the case of Randy Rojas, who says he was introduced to religion by an inmate who is black. "I know it sounds sad," he says now, "but I am happy inside here. I’ve found God. I’ve found myself."

Rojas spends his time reading books on creative writing. He hopes to take a computer course while he is locked up. His dream, he says, is to become a youth counselor.

"I’d take them into a prison to talk to someone like me, who’s getting ready to do a life sentence, and scare them," Rojas says of the young people he would like to inoculate against the disease of hate. "Really tell them how it is. That is the most effective way. They need to see how they’re going to be. They need to look at the future."

More than 50 years after the end of World War II, Nazism is alive and well in the United States and Europe. But it is not the same ideology that millions of Americans fought against in the 1940s. Today, Nazism has been reconfigured for a new generation.

"The core, the germ, is the same, but it’s been entirely repackaged, specifically for American youth culture," says Frederick J. Simonelli, author of American Fuehrer: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party, which describes the postwar development of American Nazism. "We in the older generation keep looking for it to come back all laden with swastikas and storm trooper-type regalia. But it’s coming back as a youth rebellion, the kind of outlaw cult mentality that’s always been attractive to young people."

Gone are the Nuremburg-like mass meetings, the single hypnotic leader, the glorification of the Aryan race in awesome pageants of hatred. No longer is the ideology predominantly nationalist, one nation against the rest. The new Nazism is broader-based, more connected to youth culture and music, more mystical. It is, in many cases, explicitly linked to religion, from racist versions of Christianity to Norse paganism. Where German Nazis boasted of the "final solution," today’s fascists deny the Holocaust ever existed.

Rockwell, who was assassinated in 1967 by a disgruntled follower of his American Nazi Party, took the critical first steps in this revamping of fascist ideology. To start with, he coined the term "white power" and broadened its definition from the narrow German concept of the Aryan race, which excluded Slavs, Poles, Italians, Greeks and others. "It was a stroke of genius in this nation of European immigrants," Simonelli says. "Now, kids from [white] working-class immigrant households are told they are part of the master race. Tell that to kids who are emotionally insecure, with the normal problems teenagers have, add mental or family instability, and you have a formula for capturing a following."

Rockwell also understood that in order to flourish, postwar Nazism had to separate itself from the murder of millions of Jews and others. So he started to build the Holocaust denial myth that has become a central tenet of modern national socialists. Today, virtually all neo-Nazis insist that Jews dreamed up the "Holohoax" to manipulate Aryans.

Rockwell also divorced Nazism from atheism (although some German Nazis were pagans, most abjured religion), linking it to the then-obscure Christian Identity theology, an anti-Semitic belief system that is thriving today. "He believed nothing motivates Americans more than a religious experience," Simonelli says. "So he made hate holy."

Since Rockwell’s death, this process has continued. Now, neo-Nazi ideology is presented in association with Christian Identity (as at Aryan Nations, the Idaho-based group that uses Nazi symbols but calls itself Christian); Odinism and Asatrú, both variants of pre-Christian polytheistic theologies; and even cults like the World Church of the Creator.

The new Nazis, although far from uniformly, also have embraced and expanded the mysticism that is associated with such fascists as Savitri Devi, a woman who created a strange brew of Nazism and elements of eastern mysticism. Some have even incorporated tales of extraterrestrials. "Myths, pagan symbols, Eastern philosophies -- all part of the New Age phenomenon -- are being exploited, deformed and used to promote racist and fascist ideas," writes Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, an expert on Nazism and the occult.

The soundtrack for fascist revolution has changed, too. While the German Nazis adulated Wagner, today’s young neo-Nazis have rejected classical music in favor of white power rock ’n’ roll, which has become a key recruiting tool.

Finally, national socialism is less and less national. For most young neo-Nazis today, Hitler’s great mistake was in limiting his aspirations. Increasingly, national socialists on both sides of the Atlantic are "pan-Aryanists" who dream of a white super-commonwealth that would include most of Europe and North America, at a minimum.

"It’s all about power," Thomas Powell, a 19-year-old racist Skinhead serving time in California on drug charges, explains candidly. "All about ‘How can I get to the top and be the most powerful person around? How can I make him hurt because of how powerful I am?’ I guess that’s what a lot of people see in Adolf Hitler. He was really, really powerful, and they are like, ‘Well, you know, why can’t I be like that?’"

For decades, "heavy metal" music has been linked to Satanism and the occult. In the 1970s, this image was promoted by rock stars intent on buoying sagging careers with a little controversy. Now, what was once done for shock value and to sell records has evolved into a conscious attempt to spread neo-Nazi ideology among American youths.

Heavy metal, like all music, is constantly evolving and being reinvented. New generations build on the past, pushing the envelope of what is acceptable and adding new twists to the music and its message. Today’s new generation of metal bands, known as the black metal underground, is so extreme it makes Marilyn Manson look square. For those who want to turn teenage angst into hatred, this metal scene is a natural target.

"We want evil to gain more power in the world, and that we achieve through being evil," is the way that black metal poster boy Varg Vikernes put it. Vikernes practices what he preaches. A key Norwegian black metal figure, Vikernes is in prison there for beheading his best friend. He endorses fascism, child sacrifice and torture. In the 1990s, Vikernes and others in the Norwegian black metal "inner circle" were accused of inciting dozens of anti-Christian church arsons and carrying out attacks on gays and people of color.

Racially speaking, there is nothing "black" about the black metal music scene. Like heavy metal, most of its fans are white and suburban. Black metal got its name because it embraces darkness and evil. Its fans in general are turned off by Christianity and see society as destined for collapse, a deserving victim of its own goody-goody hypocrisy.

The music -- and its increasing identification with neo-Nazi ideology -- is important. While many adults find it hard to imagine being swayed by the lyrics of rock bands, the fact is that for many youths music does play just such a role. As dozens of people who have left the scene have testified, teenagers who listen to the songs hundreds of times actually are affected by the words. With the white supremacist lyrics echoing in their heads, a certain percentage of these still-forming youths are transformed into full-fledged haters.

"The music we listened to, how we talked, it got into your mind," says Randall Rojas, a 23-year-old in jail on a murder charge (see "Youth at the Edge" in this issue). "Then you’d start acting like that. You’d be doing speed and the lyrics would come into your mind, lyrics like ‘Eating your insides, rah, rah, rah, smashing your brains, rah, rah, rah.’ Real vulgar stuff. Hatred. I don’t think any young person should listen to that stuff. It will alter your mind."

Thomas Powell, 19, another California Skinhead and devotee of racist rock, describes it like this: "[T]hey talk about killing and they just pump you up, you know."

Words, for these youths, often become action. Among others, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris -- who murdered 12 of their classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado last April -- were said to have been influenced by this kind of music.

The majority of black metal fans, of course, are not threatening to burn down their neighborhood church and are not active neo-Nazis. Most are into it for the music, the style, the nihilism that seems so attractive to many a rebellious and alienated teenager. But solidly ensconced within the scene are neo-Nazis hoping to take advantage of the black metal fan’s penchant for the dark side to spread neofascist ideology. In addition to the concerts held in both Europe and the United States, these ideologues are using the World Wide Web to build connections and solidarity within the neo-Nazi youth scene -- a development that is deeply troubling because of the popularity of metal among small town youths.

Since the 1970s, metal has diversified from the power blues of Led Zeppelin into what are known as speed metal, death metal, grindcore and black metal. Some metal bands were offshoots of punk rock and promoted independent thought and action, while others appealed to the dark side, pushing the envelope in their lyrics, performances and lifestyles to the edge. Black metal has fully embraced this dark side.

Black metal emerged in the early 1980s, when the English band Venom coined the term. The band’s songs of Satan and evil inspired a generation -- to the chagrin, ultimately, of their creators. In 1992, Venom’s former leader Cronos, now a fitness instructor, spoke of his disdain for the violence of successor bands he helped to inspire. "They have crossed the line," he told Orcustus Magazine. But it was a bit late for regrets. Many of Cronos’ young fans, like Vikernes, had come to relish the evil that for Cronos was merely an act.

Musically, black metal has been called a teenage soundtrack to the battle between good and evil. The music has an atonal quality, blazing fast guitar riffs, violent nihilistic lyrics that are growled instead of sung, and ambient keyboard and synthesizer sounds. In appearance, the genre’s musicians have not strayed far from the traditional heavy metal look -- long hair and metal-studded leather jackets. Some don Viking attire, complete with robes, swords and other medieval trappings. Many others are into "corpse paint," the pallid black-and-white makeup popularized, among other places, in the movie "The Crow."

By definition, black metal bands are vehemently anti-Christian. Some follow this line because of their belief in Satan as a deity, while others see themselves as independent thinkers opposed to the supposed "sheep-like mentality" of Christianity. Others adhere to pre-Christian theologies like Odinism, Asatrú and other polytheistic pagan faiths.

Many in the scene are extremely well read. Most have attended or are in college, and they are quick to quote everyone from Heidegger to Shakespeare -- although the universal favorite is Friedrich Nietzsche. It is the combination of the "will to power" philosophy of Nietzsche and the ethnic nationalism that is often associated with the worship of pagan gods that first pointed some in the scene toward violent racism and anti-Semitism.

Over the past five years, black metal has grown exponentially in the United States, and with it a frightening group that promotes "black music for white people." Neo-Nazism, white power, hatred of Jews and people of color is building in the black metal scene and forging alliances outside of metal. The magazine of Resistance Records (see "Money, Music and the Doctor" in this issue), the one-time powerhouse label of the neo-Nazi Skinhead scene, has interviewed key players in the so-called National Socialist Black Metal Underground, known by its shorthand designation of NSBM Underground. In 1995, Resistance magazine introduced racist Skinheads to this new subculture. Four years later, no introduction is necessary. Neo-Nazi Skinheads and black metal enthusiasts have proven to be a fine match.

Nearly every U.S. racist music distributor, from Resistance to Panzerfaust Records of Minnesota and Tri-State Terror of Pennsylvania, now sells "White Death," a compilation that features racist Skinhead bands as well as neo-Nazi metal bands from Europe. Another example of the confluence of Skins and black metal is found in the racist Polish band Graveland, whose first album is "Heeding the Call of the Blood." Graveland is composed of a typical black metal enthusiast, corpse paint and all, and a Skinhead.

In the United States, the NSBMUnderground is led by an organization calling itself the Pagan Front, a loose coalition of music labels, bands, organizations and individuals from around the world. One of these music labels, Dungeons of Darkness, recently produced a compact disc entitled "The Night and the Fog: A Tribute to the National Socialist Black Metal Underground." Run by three students at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, Dungeons of Darkness is closely tied to Darker Than Black Records in Germany (run by Hendrik Mobus, who served time in prison for murder); to Tellurian Battleground Productions (run by an individual calling himself "Orcrist, the Jewslayer"); and to Breath of Night Records (based in Dekalb, Ill., and run by a student at Northern Illinois University who is working toward a doctoral degree in philosophy).

The Pagan Front, which communicates primarily via the Internet, has forged ties to the Heathen Front, an international organization in which Vikernes remains a key player. Through its Web page, the Heathen Front sells Vikernes’ racist and anti-Semitic book, Vargsmall, and provides a discussion group and a newsletter devoted to promoting its heathen -- or more accurately, neo-Nazi -- agenda. The "Vinland" (U.S.) chapter of the Heathen Front is led by James Mason, a one-time member of the American Nazi Party and present leader of the Universal Order, a cult-like group that sees Charles Manson in heroic terms as history’s second Hitler. Mason’s book on Manson was put out by the Portland, Ore.-based artist, writer and musician Michael J. Moynihan.

Moynihan -- who is the author of Lords of Chaos, a book on Vikernes and the Norwegian church arsons -- leads the black metal band Blood Axis, which has drawn anti-racist protests in the United States. Moynihan makes few bones about his views: "If fascism will restore some sense of order, discipline and responsibility to the world," he told Compulsion Magazine, "then I am all for it." Asked about the Holocaust, Moynihan told No Longer A Fanzine that "the number of six million [Jews murdered] is just arbitrary and inaccurate, and probably a gross exaggeration. ... It’s not as if I’d be upset to find out the Nazis did commit every atrocity that’s been ascribed to them. I’d prefer it were true."

"If I were given the opportunity to start up the next holocaust," he added, "I would definitely have far more lenient entrance requirements than the Nazis did."

• Denver resident Boyd Rice, founder of the band NON, is often referred to as the vanguard of the American black metal scene. Rice was an early member of the neo-Nazi Skinhead outfit American Front. He also has appeared twice on a cable television show hosted by Tom Metzger, leader of the neo-Nazi White Aryan Resistance in California.

• Pit, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based magazine that once covered the metal scene in a basically apolitical way, has taken to publishing uncritical interviews with neo-Nazis. In one, a band member who calls himself Kapricornus says, "Personally, I have never hid [sic] my National Socialist and Heathen ideology. ... All actions that eliminate Catholic churches or the plague of negroidial [sic] creatures in spilled blood is acceptable." Another musician predicts: "Auschwitz and Birkenau will be reopened under new management -- US!"

• Thomas Thorn, singer-songwriter for the black metal band Electric Hellfire Club, was asked by Seconds Magazine what he thought of church burnings. "I’m all for it," he replied. It’s no coincidence that we had a picture of a burning church on the first album. A lot of people will say, ‘That’s a horrible thing to say! There’s a history behind the architecture, if nothing else.’ Nobody said that when they [the Allies] were blowing up the Nazi eagles on top of the Reichstag at the end of World War II."

Today, it seems clear that white supremacists -- many of whom have recognized the power of music as a recruiting tool since the early 1990s -- are increasingly turning their attention specifically to the black metal scene. The misogyny, racism and homophobia inherent in much of black metal have proved to be fine starting points for the men who seek to spread neo-Nazi ideology. In the United States, as in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, extremists have managed to infuse much of the black metal scene with white supremacist ideas. What is disturbing is the extent to which they are succeeding. Black metal, along with other types of racist music, seems to be becoming an effective vehicle for racist hatred.

Eric K. Ward is the regional coordinator of the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious Harassment. Jonn Lunsford is a research associate of the Coalition for Human Dignity. Justin Massa is a research associate at the Center for New Community.

In the 1980 animated film adaptation of "The Wall," Pink Floyd’s rock anthem for angry youth, a little fascist character struts across a stage and rouses his followers to violence against minorities. The fans are portrayed in the film as a mass of marching twin claw hammers. Today, these crossed hammers signify the best organized, most widely dispersed and most dangerous Skinhead group known: Hammerskin Nation (HN).

For more than a decade, the conventional take on Skinheads by law enforcement, monitoring organizations and even some white supremacists was that they were little more than drunken street thugs, full of beer and venom and good to go with knife, bat and gun. They were seen as dysfunctional yobs stumbling in and out of jails and given to fighting among themselves -- brawlers who couldn’t be organized or controlled.

Aryan Nations’ Richard Butler tried. The Church of the Creator’s Ben Klassen tried. White Aryan Resistance’s Dennis Mahon tried.

Mahon learned the hard way when a handful of Skins stabbed him and beat him senseless at a Georgia get-together.

The hard-nosed, beer-swilling Skinheads weren’t much interested in rallying around a platform full of elder "Aryans" droning on about a white revolution somewhere in the vague future. They needed action. Immediately.

For them, it was far more satisfying to discharge violence helter-skelter -- not only on minorities, gays and anti-racists, but on each other as well. This uncontrolled behavior, combined with their shaved heads, steel-toed Doc Martens boots and bodies swimming with racist tattoos, made Skinheads easy targets for the cops.

"The seeds have sprouted and the youth have now become the adults," Hammerskin Press, the official publication of HN, said last fall. "Our enemies are seeing a movement far more advanced than the movement of 10 years ago. Camouflaged in society and rooted deep into the system, we’re no longer an easy target, but a revolutionary force."

The Hammerskins first appeared in the late ’80s as the Dallas-based Confederate Hammerskins and spread to Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. More namesakes followed: the Northern Hammerskins in the Great Lakes region, the Eastern Hammerskins in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the Western Hammerskins in Arizona and California. By 1989, HN emerged as the unifying organization for these dispersed groups. Within a few years, HN had become global, jumping from North America across the Atlantic to the east and the Pacific to the west. Today, HN has viable chapters in Australia, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Serbia, Slovenia and Russia.

Like outlaw motorcycle gangs such as the Hell’s Angels, HN has a strict recruitment policy that requires not only "face-time" with prospective members but a three-month probationary period. Going into the Hammerskins is not like joining most white supremacy organizations, which typically ask for little more than mailing in a cursory application along with a few dollars to a post office box.

But unlike criminal street gangs, HN has a focused and -- considering the crudity of other Skinhead propaganda -- relatively sophisticated political outlook.

"We can model ourselves to the next generation and pave a more positive road from our hardship and trials over the years," one HN publication suggests. "Teach by example is the most productive form of recruiting, not to mention, the safest! ... Not only are we in a Race struggle, but we’re in a Class struggle as well. This is something the reactionary right-wingers ... have failed to acknowledge. This is something we will continue to stress! We will continue to focus on race and economics. ... Avoid the Nationalists, Capitalists, Marxists, Left/Right, and Judeo-christian rhetoric, and labor with a Race First motto."

Loyalty to HN is paramount. Hammerskins are permitted to also join neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance or Aryan Nations, but they are Hammerskins first and always. As they declare: "hffh! Hammerskins Forever, Forever Hammerskin!"

Today, HN is led by matured young men, a number of whom have done serious prison time for violent crimes ranging from assaults and bombings to attempted murder and murder. Leadership in the HN does not stop behind bars: such Hammerskin "heroes" as Louis Oddo and Sean Tarrant command intense respect and wield influence far beyond the confines of their prison cells.

Since 1996, HN has vigorously and effectively recruited within juvenile correction facilities. Guided by disciplined ex-cons such as Jimmy Miller, an HN leader out of Mesa, Ariz., the Hammerskins are adept at reaching out to young men within the prison system and bringing them into the group. Miller, who went into adult prison at age 17 for a series of firebombings, has the kind of no-nonsense reputation that appeals to violent young offenders. He and two other Hammerskins once used a mat knife to carve a Hammerskin tattoo from the body of a Skinhead who had betrayed the group.

The other recruiting tool for Hammerskin Nation is the same as that for Skinheads worldwide: the white power rock concert. HN has sponsored at least seven of these since March of this year -- in Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas and Budapest, Hungary. Hammerskin-affiliated bands include many of the most popular white power bands: Max Resist, Midtown Boot Boys, Dying Breed and Bound for Glory.

With the number of European Hammerskins now exceeding 2,000 and the frequent trans-Atlantic travel of U.S. and European Hammerskin contingents, HN cannot be viewed as a provincial problem. British neo-Nazi fugitive Del Connor lived safely among his fellow Dallas Hammerskins for almost a year until he made an ill-advised return to England in June, where he was promptly arrested by British law enforcement. While in Texas, Connor, a former leader of the British neofascist group Combat 18, ran from afar an underground faction in the United Kingdom called the White Wolves. It is this group that claimed credit for three nail-bomb attacks in London this spring.

The international connections go further. Over the past year, law enforcement agents in Arizona, Florida and Texas have reported the presence of British and German Hammerskins among the ranks of their local Hammerskin units. What’s more, the European skins seem to be learning essential lessons from their U.S. counterparts.

German Hammerskins, the journalist Eike Wunderlich wrote in 1998, "are organized like a political party. [They] attempt to present themselves as an elite force of politically convinced and trained nazi skinheads. This politicization goes back to the US Hammerskins and their theory of ‘leaderless resistance.’ The organizational form adopted by the Hammerskins consists of single, decentralized, autonomously organized nazi cells united on the basis of a common commitment to national socialist ideology. The hitherto unreliable and loose structures of the skinhead scene have evolved into a more organized form, coordinated by ‘cadres,’ to create a much more political movement."

The German Hammerskin publication, Haase Attack, has a circulation of 1,000. And Wunderlich has reported that there are at least four other Hammerskin publications with equivalent circulations.

But the key to the Hammerskin Nation’s success thus far has been the American Hammerskins. Hammerskin Nation, the official publication for HN, comes out of Springfield, Mo. The HN web site, which also hosts the official German Hammerskin site, is operated from New Jersey. According to the British Hammerskins, HN expects to soon have its own Internet service provider, an expensive but highly effective tool that will allow Hammerskin Nation an unfettered presence on the global Web.

Arising out of Hammerskin Nation is a new generation of leaders on the white nationalist revolutionary front. Many of these leaders have survived the prison system and have come back to the streets more hardened, better disciplined and better educated than their predecessors on the racist right, most of whom have done nothing more risky than marching down the street with a swastika on their sleeve.

The Internet and inexpensive airfares have drawn the Hammerskins into a transnational movement that beats everywhere to the same pulse. Texas Hammerskins think nothing of flying to Budapest to attend a major meeting of HN. Nor do German Hammerskins have any problem showing up at a Hammerskin concert in deep East Texas.

With the exceptions of White Aryan Resistance’s Tom Metzger and the National Alliance’s William Pierce, the old neo-Nazi leadership has little relevance to this up-and-coming generation of racist revolutionaries. The "dinosaurs" of organized white supremacy (see "The Leaders" in this issue) are giving way to a leaner, meaner and smarter species of neo-Nazi, one that follows not the banner of the Third Reich but the twin claw hammers of the new pan-Aryan movement.