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Blood & Honour

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File:B&H.gif
Blood and Honour emblem.

Blood & Honour is a white nationalist music promotion network, founded in 1987 in response to the Anti-Nazi League's Rock Against Racism movement. It took its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth, Blut und Ehre.

The group organises neo-Nazi concerts and distributes records by Rock Against Communism (RAC) bands. Sometimes the code 28 stands for Blood & Honour, derived from the second and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet, B and H.

History

The origins of the organisation go back to the United Kingdom in 1977, with the creation of the Anti-Nazi League's Rock Against Racism music organisation. The National Front (NF) responded with its Rock Against Communism movement. By 1980, the reformed ex-punk rock band Skrewdriver relaunched the RAC movement.

With the aid of the National Front, gigs were organised under the RAC name through the White Noise Club (WNC), with White Noise Records releasing records. RAC grew throughout 1983 and 1984, with gigs regularly attended by over 600 people (Marshall, 1990), featuring bands such as Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, No Remorse, The Ovaltinees, Peter & The Wolves and Skullhead, promoted only by word of mouth.

File:Ian front.jpg
Blood and Honour's logo, featuring Ian Stuart Donaldson.

In 1984, white power skinheads from Britain and Europe attended several outdoor RAC festivals organised by WNC and the NF. With the release of Skrewdriver's Hail The New Dawn album on the German Rock-O-Rama label, the WNC gained an even larger audience.

The National Front split in 1986, which effectively saw the end of the WNC and its links to Rock-O-Rama. Around the same time, it was revealed that the WNC had been defrauding bands and concert-goers. Several bands left the WNC, including Skrewdriver, No Remorse, Sudden Impact and Brutal Attack. By June 1987, these bands launched a new white power music organisation called Blood and Honour, with a magazine of the same name. The official launch was in September 1987 at a London gig, with Skrewdriver, Brutal Attack, Sudden Impact, and No Remorse.

Blood & Honour accepts bands from National Socialist, nationalist, patriotic, anti-Communist and white power views. By becoming politically independent, it started supporting many different organisations. The late Ian Stuart Donaldson, singer of the band Skrewdriver, was the founder and one of the prominent leaders of Blood and Honour until his death in 1993.

There are several official divisions of Blood & Honour, such as in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Australia, Slovenia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Croatia. The German division was prohibited on September 14, 2000, as was the Spanish division in 2005 after the arrest and imprisonment of many of its main leaders. Several other countries continue to investigate their respective B & H divisions with a view to possible prosecution under hate speech laws.

References

  • White Noise: Inside the International Nazi Skinhead Scene. Edited by Nick Lowles and Steve Silver, London 1998. ISBN 0-9522038-3-9
  • Nazi Rock Star: A Biography of Ian Stuart By Paul London (aka Paul Burnley)
  • Spirit of '69: A Skinhead Bible. George Marshall, ST Publishing, 1990

See also

Official sites

Criticism

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