Electronic Tribes: The Virtual Worlds of Geeks, Gamers, Shamans, and Scammers

CHAPTER 14. Brotherhood of Blood: Aryan Tribalism and Skinhead Cybercrews

I n 2005, law enforcement agencies reported the presence of 21,500 youth gangs in the United States; more than 730,000 teenagers and young adults now hold official status as gang members.1 Overwhelmingly, American youth gangs are classified as “delinquent” because their purpose, and their members’ bond, centers around for-profit criminal enterprise.2 MS-13, Gangster Disciples, Crips, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, and a host of other gangs control much of America’s illicit economy, trafficking drugs and prostitutes, and coordinating complex, new-age criminal schemes like identity-theft rings. Violence, of course, pervades gang life. With multimillion-dollar black markets at stake, today ’s gangs fight turf wars with automatic weapons. New members are violently “jumped in” to prove their mettle as soldiers. Rivals are “taken out” with deadly force. For members of delinquent gangs, violence is the bloody price of doing business. But for the small minority of American youth gangs classified as “ideological,” violence is a political statement.3 United by their “whiteness ” and motivated by the aims of the larger, adult white supremacy movement, racist skinhead gangs, or “crews,” are perhaps the most notorious ideological gangs on the contemporary American scene.4 In 2004, forty-eight distinct racist skinhead gangs, many with splinter crews in several regions, were active in the United States. Because most crews operate semicovertly, exact membership numbers cannot be known; however, monitoring agencies estimate that gangs like Hammerskin Nation and National Socialist Skinhead Front now count at least several thousand young people as official members.5 Even more white youth hover near the crews, sharing their “white pride” philosophy, if not yet CHAPTER 14 Brotherhood of Blood: Aryan Tribalism and Skinhead Cybercrews jody m. roy 230 Cybercrime and Counterculture the right to wear the colors of the brotherhood of blood, a right usually earned by committing acts of violence against racial minorities.6 In this chapter, I explore how virtual communication is changing the actual behavior of skinhead gangs and the racist youth who identify with those gangs. Following a survey of the formation and function of skinhead gangs within the American white supremacy movement, I describe the vast electronic community of radical racists that has evolved since 1995, and how “cyberhate” generally has strengthened and, in some ways, unified the movement. I then offer specific analysis of samples of electronic communication among members of two of the movement’s dominant, but discordant camps: Christian Identity and Creativity. I isolate distinguishing traits of Aryan tribalism revealed within their rhetorical battles. Finally, I assess an ominous phenomenon enabled by cyberhate: the skinhead “cybercrew,” youth indoctrinated into profound levels of hatred by virtual tribal mentors, but operating outside the control of actual gang leaders. The American Hate Scene By the 1960s, the American white supremacy movement was defined by two distinct brands of organized racism: the domestic, neo-Confederate lineage of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the European, neo-Nazi lineage imported by George Lincoln Rockwell’s National Socialist White People’s Party.7 Both impulses offered full-service hate groups for adult racists, and even adult role models for racist youth, but failed to offer teenagers a clearly defined organizational role within the movement . However, a trend unfolding within British youth culture was about to collide with American racism: the skinhead gang phenomenon would be born of the collision. As the “mod” subculture swept across Britain in the 1960s, some working-class youth took offense at both the drug use and the androgynous hairstyles and fashions flaunted by mod-mavens like Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger. In protest, “hard mods” shaved their heads and uniformed themselves in classic workers’ attire: Ben Sherman shirts, Levi’s jeans, Doctor Marten steel-toed boots, Alpha MA-1 flight jackets, and thin braces, or suspenders. They zealously opposed the popular recreational drug use of the era, preferring to socialize as their fathers had, over beers in the pubs and in the stands during local soccer matches. Within just a few years of the onset of the hard-mod trend, most larger Brotherhood of Blood 231 British cities were home to several hard-mod “crews,” bands of young men from the same lower-income neighborhoods who rallied around particular soccer teams. Rival hard-mod crews brawled often, cementing their notoriety as some of Britain’s toughest, most violent youth. When the punk rock craze took over the London club scene...