White power skinhead
[4] According to scholar Timothy S. Brown, the defining skinhead short haircut mostly emerged in reaction to the perceived shift in men's styles away from traditional masculinity, which was embodied by the "middle-class, peace-loving, long-haired student" of the hippie movement.
[9] It had heavy British mod and Jamaican rude boy influences, including an appreciation for black music genres like rocksteady, ska, and early West Indian reggae.
[20][21] By the early 1970s, the reggae scene had ceased to be simply a "party music" and, under the influence of Rastafarism, got closer to community-oriented themes like black liberation and African mysticism, which participated in alienating some white proletarians from the community.
"[27][28] The cartoon character Black Rat, created in 1970 by French artist Jack Marchal, was adopted by young neo-Fascists in various European nations and became an essential marker of the fringe culture.
[32] The event led to a moral panic in Britain and the skinhead subculture was firmly associated with right-wing politics and "white power music" in the public's opinion by 1982.
[33] According to Brown, some lyrical themes of Oi!, such as social frustrations, political repression and working-class pride, were common to other genres such as country music or blues, but others like violence ("Aggro", for 'aggressiveness') and football hooliganism "could be easily interpreted in extreme right-wing terms.
"[35][36] From the late 1970s the National Front (NF), a British neo-fascist party which was losing ground in electoral politics, began to turn toward the skinhead movement to obtain grassroots supporters among the working class.
[39][38] In 1987, a music festival was organized by National Front member Phil Andrewon on Nick Griffin's Suffolk property, and was attended by hundreds of racist skinheads from across Europe who gave the Nazi salute and sang along a chorus that demanded "white power for Britain".
Donaldson had become involved with the West German label Rock-O-Rama and felt the need to create his own global neo-fascist skinhead movement without any political party affiliation.
[37][26][41] The music promotion network quickly turned into the "major reference point for young neo-fascists and neo-Nazis throughout Europe who came to Britain to attend the gigs of Skrewdriver and other bands.
"[42] Even though skinhead violence helped damage the National Front's public image, the movement draw thousands of young people to neo-fascism and provided the party with a new medium to diffuse their message.
[49][50] Measuring the number of white power skinheads is made difficult by the lack of a formal and organized structure, the issue of overlapping memberships, and a tradition of silence which has been set up in an attempt to cultivate the mystique of their clandestine activities and prevent the police from estimating the size of local groups.
[53] In most European countries, the racist skinhead subculture became polarized on the far-right between 1983 and 1986, and shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 in Eastern Europe, where it has been particularly strong since the transition to capitalism.
[48] The white power music scene rapidly embraced the growth of the Internet, which allowed them to bypass local European hate speech laws and further develop their international networks.
[50] In Germany, the hard rock band Böhse Onkelz ('Evil Uncles'), formed in 1980 in Frankfurt am Main, lay the ground for the radicalization of the skinhead movement by connecting the music scene with right-wing nationalism.
[56] During the 1990s, the number of Neo-Nazi groups in reunified Germany skyrocket, with numerous unemployed young East Germans joining the white power skinhead movement.
Their size became noticeable by 1994,[60] in the atmosphere of chaos that followed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev's attempts at liberal reforms and rapid economic privatization.
[2] Contrary to most other countries, the Russian skinhead subculture has attracted members from all income levels,[68] and they have tended to come from the educated middle class in the urban centres.
[73] In 2004, the white power label Panzerfaust Records launched a "Project Schoolyard USA" to distribute sample CDs to middle and high students across the United States.
[75] A 2007 report by the Anti-Defamation League says groups such as white power skinheads, neo-Nazis, and the KKK have been growing more active in the United States, with a particular focus on opposition to illegal immigration.
"[53] Sarah Lawrence College journalist Chelsea Liu identified their fashion style as one possible reason for the decline, seeing it as "increasingly obsolete" and noting the alt-right's preference for casual clothing.
Early skinheads typically wore steel-toed combat boots or Doc Martens, thin red suspenders, Crombie coats, sheepskin bomber jackets, blue jeans, mohair suits, in addition to a shaved head or very closely-cropped hair.
[92] Their attitude toward the Holocaust ranges from outright denial to minimization of the death toll, and even to glorifying the event in the lyrics of white power bands such as No Remorse or Warhammer.
[92] American neo-Nazism and white supremacism largely helped "crystallize" the Nazi imagery and have had a powerful influence on the worldwide movement, as evidenced by the popularity of David Lane's Fourteen Words and William Luther Pierce's The Turner Diaries, which some Combat 18 leaders regard as their "Bible".
[94][90] According to Camus and Lebourg, the Nazifying imagery of white power skinheads was "at first largely provocative", and sometimes a way for the proletarian youth "of responding to the sacralization of the memory of World War II".
[95] References to Nazism have also been less significant in countries like Italy or Hungary, where fascist figures like Benito Mussolini and Ferenc Szálasi still exert a strong cultural influence on the local far-right.
[93] White power skinheads see both the permissive society and the sexual revolution as "perversions", and they generally promote an image of "clean-living, drug-free, heterosexual, working-class males".
According to historian John F. Pollard, this "puritanical" stance takes its roots in the anti-permissive way of life of the original skinheads who rejected the mod and hippie subcultures.
[97] Despite a widespread misogynistic culture and a general absence of commitment to female equality, some skinhead women have rejected the traditional gender roles and can act as aggressively as their male counterparts.
[89]These young proletarians turn neither to the left, which according to them is more inclined to defend the "immigrant delinquent" than "the hard-working white guy", nor to the [mainstream] right, whose conservatism is alien to their own mind-set and mode of life.
