I was up late one night channel surfing when I flicked across to SBS and started watching the Cutting Edge, a news documentary program and become really engrossed with that week's story, called "White Terror" which was directed in 2005 by Daniel Schweizer and was about the neo-nazi movement in Europe, in particular, the Blood and Honour network.
Using Wikipedia, I found out that Blood and Honour are a militant neo-Nazi network which was founded in 1987 in response to the Anti-Nazi League's Rock Against Racism organization and organised its own "Rock Against Communism" concerts. 1
The documentary argues that the veterans who had once identified themselves as part of the radical far-right extremists had all but gone and so the program brings to light and profiles the new ideologists that have emerged all over Europe, North America and Russia.
These new racists may not necessarily have shaved heads a la skinheads style, but they do have an entrepreneurial spirit which has seen the rise of neo-nazi corporations with the creation of music companies, event management businesses, publishing houses and magazines as well as websites.
What this documentary also highlights is that as the force of globalisation becomes stronger in this era of new information technologies, the internet becomes the neo-nazi’s best friend and is thus making it more efficient for them to organise and disseminate the seeds of hate propaganda and intolerance to cultivate and nurture a new breed of hate mongers.
The United States and Sweden have been deeply shocked to discover the chauvinistic attitudes of their youth inciting racial violence which has been distributed throughout the whole of the Western world as well as Russia and its neighbouring countries.
Earlier in July, Polish police working in conjunction with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation have blocked a neo-nazi website hosted by a server in the southwestern US state of Arizona which published blacklists of Polish gays, feminists and left-wing sympathizers. 2
The Paris based media rights watchdog, Reporters Without Borders has also warned the Polish justice ministry about the threatened safety of a dozen or so Polish reporters and journalists who have left-leaning political affiliations whose names are published on the Blood and Honour website.
Now if you think that is a shocking phenomenon only affecting the Northen hemisphere and contained within the European states, think again. The network has spread so far and wide that even Australia has its own division of Blood and Honour which is extremely worrying.
They are “part of an international community of White Racialists, promoting the cause of White Resistance through the powerful medium of music.” Music is the Skinhead movement's main propaganda weapon and its chief means of attracting young recruits.
A major aspect of Skinhead life is devotion to bands that play "oi" white power music, a hard-driving brand of rock and roll whose lyrics pound home a message of bigotry and violence. 3
While I do not think that it is healthy to give racist cults like these a platform to promote itself within this publication, and nor do I subscribe to their views, I also believe that it is important that we do engage in critical dialogue about these issues openly and address them face on.
Sometimes we may all feel overwhelmed by the world's woes and especially distressing to see such blatant overt racism being so prevalent so if you want to find out more on racism issues in Australia and beyond then please don't hesitate to get involved in things happening within your school/university community and beyond.
1 Wikipedia 2006, Blood and Honour Viewed 29/07/2006
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Honour>
2 SBS World News Online “Neo-Nazi Website Blocked” 6/7/2006
http://www9.sbs.com.au/theworldnews/region.php?id=...>
3 Anti-Defamation League 2001, Neo-Nazi Skinheads and Racist Rock:Youth Subculture of Hate, Poisoning the Web: Hatred Online Internet Bigotry, Extremism and Violence, US Viewed 25/07/2006
http://www.adl.org/poisoning_web/racist_rock.asp>
