4

“They’ll Take Away Our Birthrights”

How White-Power Musicians Instill Fear of White Extinction

Kirsten Dyck

Fantasies of racist violence often appear in the lyrics of white-power and neo-Nazi music.1 For instance, Jocke Karlsson, frontman of the Swedish band Pluton Svea, in a 2001 song called “Hail the Swastika” sings lyrics professing to fight daily for “the existence of the white race” and telling “Niggers and Jews, gooks and communists” that they “have to pay.”2

Listeners who are unaccustomed to hearing songs full of blatant racism might be shocked by this celebration of the Holocaust, not to mention Pluton Svea’s violent threat that non-whites “have to pay!” The racist violence inherent in “Hail the Swastika” is certainly one of the most obvious features of the song. Yet upon further examination, this lyric excerpt displays not only an ethos of violent racism and aggression but also a sense of fear that the white race is under threat. The idea that whites must fight for “existence” on a day-to-day basis suggests that their racial and political enemies are putting the white race’s future in jeopardy. In fact, many musicians who participate in the international web of contemporary white-power music—including not only Pluton Svea but also groups from European-descended populations around the world—have used song lyrics to proclaim that without intervention from white-power activists, the white race is in danger of disappearing in the near future.

This chapter will illustrate how and why white-power bands have adopted a form of rhetoric that centers on a fear of white extinction. To explain why this rhetoric matters to white-power musicians and their fans, as well as why it should matter to people who do not usually interact with white-power music, this chapter will show how white-power musicians link the fear of white extinction to a purported Jewish world conspiracy. What follows is an analysis of the goal of this conspiracy rhetoric, arguing that white-power musicians use fear in their songs both to justify violence against racial “Others” and to subvert others’ claims to racial victimhood. This chapter will also explore how white-power musicians’ rhetoric of white racial extinction relates to wider issues of racism and inequality in the Western world. It will examine the premise that the fear inherent in white-power songs is a manifestation of racism that is present in the mainstream as well as on the radical racist fringes of Western society.

White Extinction and Jewish World Conspiracy Theory

To many scholars of colonialism and European history, the idea that peoples of European descent are in danger may seem strange. Centuries of European colonial violence and exploitation have devastated many non-European groups, giving Europeans and their progeny control of the majority of the world’s physical and financial resources.3 However, when white-power musicians discuss the idea of white extinction, they are typically referring to something other than the processes of naked violence and cultural obliteration European powers have used for centuries against indigenous populations under colonial control. Rather, white-power musicians and their fans tend to perceive the threat of white extinction lurking in the mundane world around them, seeing risks for whites not only in violent attacks from racial Others but also in social structures and interpersonal interactions that might seem for people outside white-power circles to have nothing to do with racial conflict.

While not all white-power believers share the same racist ideologies, one central anti-Semitic conspiracy theory does appear consistently in the lyrics of white-power music. This theory of Jewish world conspiracy links issues such as immigration, pornography, drug abuse, non-white criminality, white race mixing, white prostitution, and white anti-racism. Their belief in this conspiracy stems directly from the century-old Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged, anti-Semitic redaction of a non-racist nineteenth-century French text that first appeared in the wake of the 1905 Russian Revolution.4 The Protocols claimed to be the minutes of a secret meeting at which Jewish leaders discussed a plan to take over the world by seizing covert control of international media and financial institutions. Despite reputable studies as early as the 1920s which determined that the Protocols’ provenance was illegitimate, anti-Semitic movements, including both Hitler’s original Nazi party and subsequent neo-Nazi groups, have cited the text as proof of an evil Jewish world conspiracy.5

The Protocols-descended conspiracy theory that appears most often in white-power music developed among neo-Nazi ideologists in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Racist activists of that time, such as Eric Thomson, were frustrated with the fact that since the end of World War II, mainstream public opinion in many Western countries had shifted away from overt racism. Thomson and others took the turn-of-the-century racist conspiracy theory they found in the Protocols and updated it. They suggested that whites were beginning to accept non-whites as equals not because non-whites and whites could ever be real equals but rather because Jews had succeeded sometime after World War II in implementing the Protocols’ clandestine control strategies.6 These writers argued that the increasing multicultural tolerance among European-descended populations derived simply from the fact that Jews were controlling institutions such as the international media and banking conglomerates, national governments, the United Nations, and the World Bank and then using this power to convince unsuspecting whites to act against their racial self-interests.7 Thomson’s term for the Jewish conspiracy was the Zionist Occupation Government, or ZOG, although other white-power ideologists have used phrases such as New World Order to refer to similar constructs.8

The period in the late 1970s and early 1980s when ZOG theory first appeared as a popular element of international white-power ideology was also the window of time when contemporary white-power music first arose as a coherent and transnational phenomenon. The music originated in England under the leadership of seminal racist oi! punk bands such as Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, and No Remorse. By the mid-1980s, white-power bands had begun to appear across western Europe, North America, Australia, and South America, in some cases even taking hold in eastern Europe before the fall of the Iron Curtain. Many of these bands quickly abandoned the old-style, ultra-nationalist rhetoric of their parents’ generation in favor of a more transnational form of neo-Nazi philosophy. The updated version included ZOG theory as one of its core tenets. The bands played together at international white-power music festivals that sometimes drew four-digit crowds. They produced their music on white-power music labels that could gross hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, although exact sales figures are often impossible for researchers to find because musicians, distributors, and fans are often leery of providing such information to outsiders, given that many white-power songs express political sentiments that are illegal or semi-legal in many countries.9 This growing cadre of premier 1990s white-power bands, like Germany’s Landser, the US’s Bound for Glory, and Russia’s Kolovrat, began to argue that all individuals of European descent really belonged to one nation and that the future of that white nation would be uncertain until whites could purge racial Others from the earth.10

Key aspects of ZOG theory began to enter white-power song lyrics during this period. Songs during the 1990s began to say that all whites needed to come together as one nation to fight their common Jewish arch-enemy. For example, the lyrics to the 1999 song “Forked-Tongue Lies” by the Canadian white-power heavy metal band Battlefront draw on both medieval ideas of Jewish greed and Third Reich tropes of Jews as vermin and predators. The song, which appears on the same Battlefront album as a cover of the Skrewdriver song “One Fine Day,” dwells on fear that the ZOG conspiracy is trying to exterminate the white race. One verse, for example, suggests that Jews are inherently greedy: “Greed flickers in their eyes.” The next lines attribute a “master plan of white genocide” and planned destruction “of our kind” to Jews, who, according to Battlefront, “call themselves the New World Order.”11

Here, Battlefront suggests that Jews want to commit genocide against whites to claim the resources white populations currently control. By characterizing Jews as snakelike, “[w]ith a serpent’s smile and forked-tongue lies,” the band references Third Reich propaganda materials and draws on the common image of the snake as both untrustworthy and predatory. This metaphor supports the band’s allegation that because of Jewish avarice, dishonesty, and aggression, Jewish community leaders want to concentrate resources in their community by destroying Jews’ racial competitors. Partly as a result of this lyrical content, “Forked-Tongue Lies” and other songs on the Battlefront album Into the Storm have received favorable reviews from white-power music fans who post on internet message boards like the Stormfront community. A prolific Stormfront CD reviewer who identified himself by the username JU-87, the serial number of the World War II–era German Stuka fighter plane, wrote a 2006 review of Into the Storm that stated, “This is a very tasty release [ . . . ] Too bad this band was yet another ‘one day fly’, like we use to say in the Netherlands [ . . . ] (8.5/10)” [sic].12

Despite positive fan response, however, this song makes several problematic assumptions. Most glaring, it assumes that a Jewish world conspiracy exists, a supposition that does not appear to match the reality of world power structures. Jewish world conspiracy theories are, however, non-falsifiable; in other words, no one person or organization can observe all Jews all the time to give absolute proof that Jews cannot be conspiring to take over the world, so no amount of counterevidence will be enough for some diehard believers. Also, the song’s lyrics talk about biological racial categories as immutable, suggesting that all members of these immutable racial groups share fixed social and moral characteristics; natural scientists have long demonstrated that the concept of race, unlike the concept of biological descent, actually rests almost entirely on ever-changing social constructs, not immutable biology.13 Moreover, the idea that Jews view whites as their enemies is problematic, too. It presupposes that whites are the strongest and noblest race of humans. If so, whites would be the key obstacle to Jewish world domination and therefore the natural primary targets for Jewish aggression. Neo-Nazis, however, suggest that whites are naturally superior to all other groups of people. How could Jews pose such a serious threat to whites if whites are naturally superior to Jews? The song addresses this paradox by positing that successful Jewish control and white genocide could only be achieved by methods that are underhanded, deceitful, and covert. Overall, then, the ZOG rhetoric in Battlefront’s “Forked-Tongue Lies” and many other white-power songs about Jews rests on flawed conceptions of the world, some of which the band addresses directly and some of which it leaves unexamined.

Neither Battlefront’s “Forked-Tongue Lies” nor Pluton Svea’s “Hail the Swastika” establishes in any detail, however, how white-power musicians fit non-white races other than Jews into their conception of a Jewish world conspiracy. Whereas supporters of ZOG theory tend to view Jews as intelligent adversaries, albeit evil ones, most of the musicians refer to other non-white groups like Africans, Asians, Latinos, and Roma/Sinti as stupid, genetically inferior, and improperly evolved. These traits are not characteristics one would normally associate with groups of people who might pose any significant risk to the white race if one assumed that the white race really were superior. Yet ZOG theory has a place for these groups, too.

Take, for instance, songs by the prominent 1990s white-power band Nordic Thunder, which morphed into an even more influential Delaware-based band called Blue Eyed Devils after the murder of Nordic Thunder’s lead singer, Joe Rowan. Members of Blue Eyed Devils actually claimed in a Resistance magazine interview to have once played a concert to an audience of 2,600 fans in Germany, and their 1999 album Retribution was hailed by Resistance as a CD whose “thirteen tracks of uncompromising hatecore [racist hardcore punk music] will get you ready for the racial revolution.”14 On a 1994 Nordic Thunder album, the band discusses the relationship between Jews and non-Jewish “Others” in the song “The Truth Will Set You Free.” One verse describes “Niggers running wild, backed by Jewish greed,” as well as what the narrator perceives as the “corrupting” theory of the melting pot, “devised by the Zionist pigs to destroy the white man.”15

In this verse, Nordic Thunder insinuates that non-Jewish racial “Others” constitute a threat to the white race because greedy Jews are “backing” them. The idea is that Jews are using these non-Jewish, non-white groups as pawns in their efforts to “corrupt” areas that would normally belong to whites. This stanza says Jews are advocating that whites assimilate and interbreed with genetically inferior non-Jewish racial Others in a racial “melting pot” that will dilute the supposed purity, power, and dominance of the white race. As in the lyrics to Battlefront’s “Forked-Tongue Lies,” Nordic Thunder’s lyrics use the metaphor of Jews as disgusting animals to remind listeners that even if Jews are intelligent and cunning, one should still view whites as the superior race. The idea that Jewish masterminds are controlling the behavior of other non-white groups allows supporters of ZOG theory to maintain a crucial idea: that non-Jewish racial Others still pose a threat to whites in the fight against ZOG, even if Jews remain the white race’s arch-enemies. Under ZOG theory, non-white non-Jews become the unwitting minions of Jewish greed, unable to achieve cultural sophistication or political power on their own and dependent on the Jewish world conspiracy for advancement at the expense of whites.

In another example, the 1999 song “Loss of Identity” by the Australian band Fortress uses imagery of Jews as snakes (“[t]he New World Order tightens the coils”). The lyrics argue that genocide against whites is occurring because of both Jewish-controlled non-white immigration and Jewish-derived taboos against overt racism: “equality dogma” and “massive immigration.”16

In this song, Fortress implies that white genocide is being accomplished through “government-sanctioned,” lenient immigration legislation. As a result, say the lyrics, whites are losing the resources that should be their “birthright.” This premise ignores the fact that Australia had been ruled by an indigenous Aboriginal population for thousands of years. Settlers from Europe and elsewhere immigrated to Australia for increased economic opportunity, displacing the Aborigines.

Many white-power musicians, like those quoted above, argue that ZOG is destroying the white race by means of a wide range of government policies from different Western nations. Members of the Ukrainian white-power band Sokyra Peruna, for example, responded to an interview question about the 2004 Ukrainian election crisis by saying, “Both of the candidates have many different features, but one they have in common—like twin brothers—is that Yanoukovich and Youshchenko are puppets in the hands of Zionist puppeteers. The only reason this pair was allowed in the elections is that both of them have faithfully served their Jewish masters for years [ . . . ] We should not let the Jews turn our homeland, which was granted to us by our glorious ancestors, into a battlefield for the war of different Jewish clans.”17

In the same issue of Resistance magazine, a member of the German band Anger Within likewise told interviewers, “The ‘German’ government is no topic of my interest; it’s part of a system that was installed in ‘Western countries’ to destroy them in culture and race.”18 When a government passes legislation that seems to conflict with white-power goals, then, individuals who agree with the sentiments of musicians like these can say that this legislation is proof of ZOG’s evil power. ZOG theory becomes an explanation for almost anything these musicians fear about contemporary Western society, from overbearing law enforcement to non-white enfranchisement to anti-racist education in public schools. To them, this is why centuries-old racist structures should remain in place. The fear of white extinction thereby helps to justify the use of violence to safeguard the white race from imminent destruction.

Fear of White Extinction as Motivation and Justification for Racial Violence

Several of the songs discussed so far imply that whites should respond to the threat of the ZOG conspiracy with violence. The Pluton Svea lyrics quoted at the beginning of the chapter say that the struggle against racial Others is a daily battle. Battlefront’s song gives whites two choices in the face of ZOG: “fight or die.” References to struggle and fighting are often found in white-power music. Lyrics often use the fear of ZOG and white extinction to justify violence against racial and ideological “Others,” as if such violence is self-defense. In this line of thinking, whites are the victims of racism and genocide, and violence against racial Others is therefore a reasonable response to the threat.

The purpose of such music, at the most basic level, is often to attract new followers for white-power groups and ideologies. This is evident from the writings of the late William Pierce, founder of the once-prominent US neo-Nazi group the National Alliance and former owner of Resistance Records, which was the biggest white-power record label in the world under Pierce’s leadership in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In the Winter 2000 issue of the label’s glossy Resistance magazine, Pierce stated: “We want resistance music to be much more available, not just from Resistance Records, but in record stores and everywhere else that people buy music. We want to bring it out from under the counter and put it on display. We want millions of young, White Americans and Europeans to make resistance music their music of choice, instead of the Negroid filth churned out by MTV and the other Jewish promoters of anti-White music intended to demoralize, corrupt, and deracinate young Whites.”19

During his lifetime, Pierce’s label distributed thousands of white-power songs and albums that urged new listeners to take up racist activism in an effort to preserve what Pierce saw as a dying way of life. Although Pierce died in 2002 and Resistance Records then underwent several management upheavals that included one long-term closure, new owners recently reopened the business, selling albums through an internet store. One of the groups whose music is still for sale on the Resistance Records website is the British neo-Nazi oi! punk band Skrewdriver, which, according to most scholars, was the first and most important band to have played white-power rock music.20 Lyrics in “Eyes Full of Rage” include calls to “[stand] up for our nations” and “stand against the traitors.”21

The song never explicitly names the white race’s enemies. However, the singer openly advocated neo-Nazism during his lifetime, working to forge links between white-power bands and neo-Nazi political organizations. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Ian Stuart Donaldson, who died in a 1993 car accident, used his connections in the music scene to make friends with veterans of Hitler’s SS.22 In a 1988 interview, Donaldson even stated, “Eventually there will be a race war and we have to be strong enough in numbers to win it. I’ll die to keep this country pure and if it means bloodshed at the end of the day, then let it be.”23 Like the songs discussed previously, the lyrics of “Eyes Full of Rage” say that someone is stealing the land that should be a white “birthright” and that the “white rights” undergirding “life as once we knew it” are in imminent danger. The song urges whites to “stand up” and “sacrifice” for “our nations” and “our rights.” It urges the listener to fight anyone who jeopardizes the white-dominated social structure.

Although Skrewdriver’s music is several decades old, white-power music distributors such as Micetrap Records still list Skrewdriver albums among their bestsellers.24 Skrewdriver songs have served as the inspiration for decades of new songwriters who support violent retribution against racial Others. For instance, the US band Youngland uses the fear of white extinction as a reason for advocating sweeping violence against non-whites in the 2003 song “I Wanna See the Day,” which was originally written by the Welsh white-power musician Billy Bartlett.25

The lyrics to this song, written for Youngland by Bartlett, argue that the presence of “mud” in “our land”—referring to the racial slur “mud people,” a common derogatory phrase for non-white non-Jews among white-power activists—justifies waging holy war on the “evil plague” of non-whites who are supposedly usurping land and resources from deserving whites. Bartlett here draws on a racist variant of Scandinavian revival paganism in suggesting that “the hammer of mighty Thor” will help whites in their race war against Jews and other non-whites. By deploying neo-pagan symbolism such as the hammer of the god Thor, Bartlett and Youngland allege that whites deserve by reason of both innate racial superiority and divine provenance to inherit land that has historically belonged to people of European descent—again ignoring the fact that European settlers in recent centuries stole the land that has become Youngland’s home country, the United States, from indigenous groups who had previously controlled it for millennia. In this conception, whatever method white-power activists must use to “rid these lands from the evil plague” of Jewish-controlled non-whites becomes acceptable because a divine figure wills violence. Suggesting that white-power groups are fighting absolute evil with the absolute good of a pure-white, European-derived deity like Thor thereby lends their white-power cause a sense of significance beyond mere bigotry. Because most listeners condone self-defense more readily than they do wanton ideologically motivated attacks on innocent victims, construing racist violence as a divine mission to eliminate a serious threat is an important rhetorical device that helps white-power musicians like Bartlett and Youngland argue the virtue of their cause.

Bartlett’s imagery in “I Wanna See the Day” is meant to be compelling. It is meant to incite listeners to action. Of course, one might dismiss the violence in such songs as simply the toothless blustering of a few lunatics who have no impact on the rest of society. Regrettably, however, over the past several decades, individuals with links to the white-power music scene have carried out numerous violent attacks. For example, during the 1980s, Skrewdriver frontman Ian Stuart Donaldson assaulted an elderly Nigerian man, a crime for which he spent a year in prison.26 In the early 1990s in Norway, members of a small, neo-Nazi black metal circle murdered two people. They also committed numerous arsons, going so far as to burn down the twelfth-century Fantoft wooden-stave church in Bergen to protest the presence of the purportedly foreign, Jewish-derived Christian religion in Scandinavia.27 Between 2000 and 2006 in Germany, a neo-Nazi terrorist cell assassinated nine immigrants working at fast-food restaurants around the country, a series of events that featured in a 2010 song by the German neo-Nazi band Gigi & die braune Stadtmusikanten. A macabre twist was that the song was released a full year before the German police or mainstream public discovered that any of the murders had connections to neo-Nazi groups, leading German courts to sentence frontman Daniel “Gigi” Giese to a seven-month suspended prison term and several fines for the crime of inciting racial hatred.28 In another incident, in the summer of 2011, just months before the German killing spree made headlines in Europe, seventy-seven people died in a two-pronged terrorist attack on left-wing political organizations in and around Oslo. The man responsible was a Norwegian, Anders Behring Breivik, who professed in a personal manifesto to be a fan of a female Swedish neo-Nazi singer who performs under the stage name Saga.29 Then, in 2012, Wade Michael Page killed six people and wounded four others in an attack on a Sikh temple in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.30 Page had been frontman for the white-power band 13 Knots and had played bass for both Youngland and Billy Bartlett’s band Celtic Warrior. In fact, Page had been the bassist on Youngland’s 2003 album Winter Wind, which included the aforementioned “I Wanna See the Day.”

Clearly, individuals with ties to white-power music have committed numerous acts of ideologically motivated violence. It is important to note that this link does not mean that white-power music caused any of these attacks. Clinical researchers have only begun to study the complex connections between music and human violent behavior, meaning that while the correlation between white-power music and violence may appear to be strong, it remains impossible to prove that racist music was actually the main factor that triggered white-power musicians and fans to harm themselves and others. Nonetheless, white-power songs remain important ideological statements, providing a crucial lens into the multifaceted world of recent white-power thought. The fact that white-power musicians place so much emphasis on the fear of white extinction, as well as the fact that some of them later go on to commit extreme acts of violence against the racial and ideological Others they have threatened in the lyrics to their songs, suggests that for contemporary white-power and neo-Nazi musicians and fans, the fear expressed in their music represents a powerful motivator to violent action.

Conclusion: Why Their Fear Matters

The fear-driven rhetoric of white extinction, one of the most prominent justifications white-power musicians use to excuse violence in their song lyrics, is a key factor in explaining why some individuals are willing to harm seemingly innocent victims. This link between violent rhetoric and real-world violent actions alone should be enough reason to argue that white-power musicians’ rhetoric of fear ought to matter to the mainstream public. However, this is not the only reason why white-power musicians’ fears should matter to people who might otherwise have nothing to do with white-power music. In fact, white-power musicians’ racial and racist anxieties overlap strongly with attitudes that many individuals who consider themselves non-racist also hold. To understand why white-power musicians continue to attract new fans with their rhetoric of fear, as well as why members of the white-power counterculture keep committing spectacular acts of violence, one must examine how mainstream racism in many Western countries interacts with the more visible racism of white-power groups.

Most European-derived societies tolerate overt acts of interpersonal racism, such as violent racist attacks and the use of racial slurs in anger, to a far lesser degree than they did in the pre–World War II era. As a result of civil rights movements in Europe and many of its former settler colonies, mainstream populations in countries like the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, and Australia typically consider overt white-power racism taboo. However, this newfound focus on multicultural tolerance belies continuing issues with subtler forms of racial prejudice and discrimination among European-descended populations. In some cases, public commentators use the rhetoric of multiculturalism to argue that non-whites no longer have any cause to complain about interpersonal or structural racism, using this rhetoric to dismiss reports of continuing racism as it actually exists. In other cases, mainstream publics are willing to tolerate racist humor and stereotyping from entertainment and news media like US professional wrestling television shows, which often give wrestlers racially stereotyped personae—such as the African American wrestling team Cryme Time, which reinforces the misconception that African American males are fundamentally predisposed to criminal activity. Mainstream demographics in some countries may even support supposedly non-racist policies that are actually designed to target specific minority groups, like France’s 2011 “burqa ban” law that claimed to outlaw all religious garb in public places but was in reality constructed primarily to target Muslim women who wore traditional head and face coverings.31 Many of the individuals who espouse such practices would consider themselves to be non-racist or even anti-racist to the degree that they oppose the kinds of overt racism that emanate from organized white-power and neo-Nazi groups. However, the pervasive racist rhetoric mainstream Western societies are willing to tolerate in public discourse falls on a spectrum with and does not stand in opposition to more extreme forms of racist discourse such as those that appear in white-power music.

At a basic level, white-power musicians’ fear of white extinction is really a fear that European-derived populations will lose the privileges they have amassed through centuries of unjust enrichment. White-power musicians might complain that whites are swiftly losing their birthright to non-whites, but this allegation does not match the reality of wealth or power distribution in the contemporary world. In the United States, for instance, a 2009–2010 study found that at the rate the racialized income gap was then closing, the difference in income between US citizens of European and African descent would only disappear in 634 years, a longer span of time than has passed since Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas.32 Despite the progress civil rights movements have made toward eliminating racial disparities such as the black/white wealth gap in the United States, whites both in the United States and elsewhere truly do bear privilege both statistically and anecdotally. Nonetheless, even people who bear phenomenal privilege in an absolute sense may view small relative changes in social status, such as the shift in Western popular opinion away from overt racism and toward surface-level multicultural tolerance since World War II, as sincere threats to individual and group well-being.33 Slight shifts in racial dynamics have been enough provocation to convince a small percentage of whites in many Western countries to participate in white-power music and other forms of racist activism even though they know they are violating mainstream standards of multicultural decency. Far more than this, however, white-power musicians’ relatively extreme fears of white extinction and white genocide reflect fears that circulate widely in many mainstream European-descended populations—fears that the West in general and that whites in particular might continue to lose social status and political power to new immigrants, national minorities, and populations in developing countries.

White-power musicians’ fears of white extinction really matter, despite the fact that white-power music is a small niche genre, because they represent a particularly visible and pronounced manifestation of mainstream fears. Simply put, white-power music scenes would no longer continue to attract new fans or performers if safeguarding the future of white privilege no longer mattered to anyone. Although mainstream Western societies may now marginalize white-power musicians and other racist activists, the racist rhetoric one finds in white-power music developed out of ideas that helped establish Europe and a few of its settler colonies as leaders in world politics, finance, and mass culture. Examining the rhetoric of fear in white-power music as part of a wider problem with racism in the West, then, provides a window not only into the violent rhetoric of today’s semi-legal web of organized white-power hate but also into the fears and anxieties of many people who profess to be non-racists. Thankfully, however, this view also suggests that if Western societies address structural racial inequality and mainstream racism as the root causes of white-power and other so-called extremist forms of racism, it may be possible, albeit profoundly difficult, to create a truly tolerant future in which the ideas of race mixing and white extinction no longer frighten anyone.

Notes

Bibliography