The Cure for Hate: A Former White Supremacist's Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion
320
The Cure for Hate: A Former White Supremacist's Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion
320Paperback
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Overview
The Cure for Hate paints a very human picture of a young man who craved attention, acceptance, and approval and the dark place he would go to get it. Tony McAleer found an outlet for his teenage rage in the street violence of the skinhead scene. He then grew deeply involved in the White Aryan Resistance (WAR), rising through the ranks to become a leader, and embraced technology and the budding internet to bring white nationalist propaganda into the digital age. After fifteen years in the movement, it was the outpouring of love he felt at the birth of his children that inspired him to start questioning his hateful beliefs. Thus began the spiritual journey of personal transformation that enabled him to disengage from the highest levels of the white power movement.
This incisive book breaks commonly held stereotypes and delivers valuable insights into how regular people are drawn to violent extremism, how the ideology takes hold, and the best ways to help someone leave hate behind. In his candid and introspective memoir, Tony shares his perspective gleaned from over a thousand hours of therapy, group work, and facilitating change in others that reveals the deeper psychological causes behind racism. At a period in history when instances of racial violence are on the upswing, The Cure for Hate demonstrates that in a society frighteningly divided by hate and in need of healing, perhaps atonement, forgiveness, and most importantly, radical compassion is the cure.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781551527697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Arsenal Pulp Press, Limited |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2019 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Ultraviolence
I waited nervously as the ticket line inched forward, the crowd slowly shuffling to the entrance. I anxiously looked up and down the line, as I didn’t know anybody there. Kiva, the stylish punk girl I had met at a party when I had come home from Scarborough College for Christmas break, who had told me about the show, was nowhere to be seen. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two big skinheads walking from the entrance down the line in my direction. The “small” guy was about five eleven and 160 pounds, and the big one was five eight and 220 pounds! Both were sporting freshly shaved heads, so close only a razor could do it, and matching blue bomber jackets. As for me, I was a lightweight at five nine and 135 pounds sopping wet.
They got closer. The small one elbowed the big one and nodded in my direction. The larger skinhead had Dr. Martens, but the smaller one was wearing combat boots. They stopped right in front of me. I began to feel a sense of dread. I had encountered people like this before in England. Skinheads both enthralled and scared the shit out of me, with their very predictable unpredictability and their fearsome thirst for violence.
“What size are your feet?” the big guy asked, eyeing my Dr. Martens hard.
“Seven and a half,” I answered.
It was an outright lie, but I knew why they were asking, and I was literally shaking in my boots. If my shoe size matched either of theirs, like some dark and twisted Cinderella story, I was going to get robbed and have to go home in my socks. (Docs were harder to come by in Vancouver than in England in those days.)
After a tense moment, the big one elbowed the small one. “They wouldn’t fit you anyways,” he said, shaking his head and motioning for him to follow.
As they rounded the corner of the building and headed into the alleyway, I let out a huge sigh of relief, realizing I had just escaped what probably would have been the beating of a lifetime. Little did I know at the time that those two skinheads would become my best friends. You see, my bullying survival strategy was to befriend the bully and become the bully. There was safety, I believed, in the eye of the hurricane.
My heart was finally slowing as I stood outside the New York Theatre on Commercial Drive, an iconic rundown building now beautifully restored and no longer host to all-ages punk shows. The excitement, curiosity, and impatience I had been feeling before the Dr. Marten incident returned. Black Flag with Henry Rollins was to be my initiation into the Vancouver punk scene. I had been to concerts before, big names like Van Halen and the Kinks, but there was no rebellion in that music. Their lyrics did not call out to my soul with the chorus of a hundred voices just like mine. Their sound wasn’t dripping with venom and contempt for the system, that righteous anger resonating with the rage that was burned like an ember at the very core of my being. I may not have been consciously aware of the internal source of all that anger (the betrayal, the humiliation, and the beatings), but I could feel it when it was awakened and stoked by the raw driving guitars supporting the disgruntled voices of this lost generation of youth. The music was powerful, the message accessible, and the chorus hard to resist. Wild in the streets, I felt like I belonged to a group, to a rebellion, to a resistance, to a movement when I sang along to the lyrics.
Finally, I had reached the front of the line. Inside the theatre, I stood nervously in the shadows and took in the crowd. It was like a scene from the Island of Misfit Toys—these people were the different, rejected, and discarded. I looked around at all the unique expressions of nonconformity in clothing, hairstyles, and makeup. The perfectly spiked hair, foot-long green mohawks, shaved heads; the tartan skirts and torn fishnets; the buttons, badges, and safety pins—just a bunch of kids escaping the mainstream society that didn’t accept them. We were the misfits. On the eve of attending my third high school in four years, I had finally found a place where I felt welcome, accepted, and at home.
By the time Henry Rollins took the stage, the atmosphere was electrifying, and the packed crowd moved and swayed, undulating as one, with the hot dank smell of booze and sweat dripping from the walls. Rollins’s performance was intense, his bulging veins growing more prominent as he poured angst from the stage. The music was the soundtrack to our rebellion, and it gave us fuel. This was about us. Here, on that summer night on Commercial Drive, the New York Theatre became the one place where no matter who you were, you belonged.
With my ears ringing, I slipped out into the night. My clothing, damp from dancing and sweating in the mosh pit, quickly started cooling and providing relief to my overheated body. I left early to escape the attention of the two skinheads. I had dodged a bullet earlier, but I still wasn’t safe as I got on the bus to go home. At home, with my eyes closed and my headphones on, it was like there was a riot right inside my bedroom and all my friends were there.
***
Over the following weeks, Kiva introduced me to a new circle of friends. It wasn’t long before I met the skinheads from the Black Flag show who almost rolled me for my Docs. But we bonded quickly because of my slight English accent (enhanced by my desire to fit in at boarding school and because I was teased for my “American accent”) and knowledge of skinheads from my time England, and the three of us became the best of friends.
Elmo (the small one) and FiFi (the big guy) were feared and respected everywhere they went. I tagged along to parties and saw lots of local bands, like DOA, Death Sentence, and House of Commons (HOC), to name but a few. I loved the live shows because of the energy and angst. The ever-increasing volume of the crowd as they grew restless with anticipation while waiting for the moment the band would step onstage, the moment when all the pressure and pent-up energy was released. Then the crowd let out a raucous roar! Feedback from the amps pierced the silence as the band started in full tilt, dropping right into the driving hard-core punk guitars that urged on the raw, gritty screaming vocals. That was the moment when everyone lost control. Every other week I would go to a show to get my fix of this excitement and contagious energy, something that I had never experienced before and that compelled me to dive in head first.
Looking back, those early few years look so innocent compared to what was to follow. There was a time when punks and skinheads could swim in the same pond, go to the same shows and parties, but there was always tension. We skinheads would build a crew and feed our adrenaline-fuelled need for violence by responding over the top to the slightest provocation or sign of disrespect, because in our world, respect was everything and the slightest dis was enough to kick things off. The desire to be provocative was at the centre of it all.
My new high school for the final two years until graduation was a public school. The teachers at Prince of Wales didn’t seem to care what you did as long as you didn’t disrupt the class. There were a few teachers I managed to provoke, however. Madam Schenkel, the French teacher, had the students choose a French name from a list to be used in class. My choice was Adolphe, from near the top of the list, and I deliberately dropped the e when doing work on the chalkboard. My provocations were driven by the desire to offend at this point, as skinheads had adopted the symbols of the far right without serious attention to the ideology. Mr Carlson, the social studies teacher, had me sitting at the back of the class surrounded by a buffer of empty desks so that I couldn’t disturb my neighbours with my wisecracks. Despite this, the general attitude at the school was a little more laissez-fair than I was used to. As parents weren’t cutting cheques to the school, there wasn’t as much effort from the teachers or the administration to ensure results. And without teachers invested in forcing me to succeed, there wasn’t much for me to rebel against, so I took my rebellion out into the streets and embraced Vancouver’s burgeoning skinhead scene.
I was searching for identity and a place to fit in, and when I first returned to Vancouver from England, that identity was much more punk than skinhead. Although I was hanging out with Elmo and FiFi, before I bought my first bomber jacket, my boarding school tweed blazer, adorned with nickel-sized pins and badges from all my favourite punk bands, was my jacket of choice. Although I was drawn to the skinhead lifestyle, left-wing and anarchist politics were my initial interest, as reflected in my preference for bands like Crass and DOA. Without a school to push back against, the wider world drew my focus, and in my provocative way I even did a school project on the Squamish 5, a left-wing anarchist group that bombed the Dunsmuir power station in British Columbia, causing $5 million in damages, and set of a bomb at Litton Industries in Toronto, which manufactured parts for cruise missile guidance systems.
At this time, there were no cows too sacred to gore. In my irreverence, I rebelled against everything and everyone. If it was something that had value to the majority of people, it was a target for my ridicule and contempt. The punk side of me revelled in rejecting the system and anything associated with it through my childish antics. Everything was swirling around in a giant pool of confusion, hypocrisy, and the search for identity.
As this tug-of-war between identities played out, the intense English working-class skinhead culture started to feel more real and resonate with me the most. Although my new identity as a punk was thrilling, it wasn’t enough. In the days and weeks between shows, I was listening to more and more skinhead music that Elmo passed my way. “Oi! Oi! Oi!” by the Cockney Rejects, as well as “Chaos” and “Sorry” by the 4-Skins were songs that grabbed me. You see, I was no longer searching for an identity but a way of life. The punk identity was open to so much interpretation and creativity, but the skinhead lifestyle had rules, structure, and expectations, so I knew exactly what I had to do to belong, to fit in, and to gain that brotherhood and acceptance I craved. At sixteen, I had no clue who I was, but I did know that I wanted some of that same fear and respect that Elmo and FiFi got. With them, I felt safe, safe in the eye of the hurricane. I was no longer torn between identities. I knew who I was becoming—or so I thought.
At that time, I was too busy putting on the masks, the emotional armour of disconnection, and the projection of illusions to know much of anything. The main mask I wore for the longest time was, as I call it, “Dark Tony.” This was the mean, angry, nasty, insensitive version of myself. Dark Tony represented all the hate and anger in me, in contrast to Little Tony, who was the light, my essence, the sensitive, shy, bright, and soft little boy who had been hurt in my childhood. Mean and vicious, the bully ego protected the bullied.
When we are children, we are authentic and open, until it’s no longer safe for us to be that way. As we grow older, we compartmentalize our lives, putting up shields and wearing many masks to disguise who we are. This is especially true when we don’t like who we are. We wear some masks to hide, and we wear others to project to the world someone we aren’t. I wore many shields and masks, and I invested incredible amounts of energy and time in living those masks. At the beginning, feeling rejection and its accompanying pain stung like hell, so I became accustomed to using all of my self-control to conceal my hurt and project the image of a person with no feelings. Those feelings were blocked and diverted before they had a chance to overwhelm me. Diverted to an isolated compartment. After a while, the diversion becomes more automatic and less conscious, until we no longer feel the pain. We become just numb enough so that we are never overwhelmed by it. The more we avoid, the more numb we become.
To dull the pain I felt, I self-medicated, and booze became my medicine of choice so that by sixteen or seventeen, I was a teenage drunk. Hurling myself into drunkenness every weekend for an entire year was my goal, which I had no problem achieving. I would often drink myself legless, waking up feeling bruised from getting in a scrap, with no recollection of the previous evening’s events. I would start drinking and having fun like everybody else, and then, after four or five drinks, like in a relay race, the baton would be handed off to Dark Tony. After that came the race to drink to oblivion, and it was there where my rage found no restraint, where I could commit acts of violence I would never do sober.
Another mask I wore was about projecting violence and inspiring fear. The more violence I was involved with, the easier it became, the more normal it felt. The intimidating skinhead dress code, followed up by our aggressive and hostile behaviour, gave off a visible message of “Don’t mess with us, as we won’t hesitate to get violent.” Understandably, people were fearful and intimidated (not everyone; mainly those who didn’t speak the language of violence in their daily discourse). Although many of my crew were every bit as ferocious and frightening as their image and reputation suggested, my strength was my brain, not my brawn. Much like the puffer fish or the porcupine, I projected a threat much greater than the reality.
The human mind is capable of incredible intellectual gymnastics to rationalize our behaviour. I’ve always needed there to be a justification before lashing out, whether that was a comment, a look, a threat, or even a perceived threat, no matter how tiny. I wouldn’t tolerate cruelty to animals, but people? Everybody was guilty of something.
The music I listened to also gave me permission, justification, and the frame of mind not only to commit violence but to embrace it as a lifestyle. Some of my mates had been introduced to that violence long before Oi! music was ever on the scene, when they were younger and often on the receiving end. Oi! music not only resonated with that raw aggression and anger but amplified it. For me, the violence was a learned behaviour, whereas my skinhead buddies came by their toughness naturally. I hadn’t grown up in a rough neighbourhood, having to dodge blows from parents or siblings, where hitting back was second nature. Quite the opposite. I had a sheltered upbringing and was entering the world of violence by choice. If I was to have their protection, I needed to have their respect. And to earn their respect, I would have to join in all of the violence that they committed, which I did most willingly. I was late to the party and had a lot of catching up to do in my late teens. Through this exchange, I received acceptance when I had felt unlovable, attention when I had felt invisible, and power when I had felt totally weak. I’m not minimizing my role in any of the violence that I initiated or was involved with. This was what I got out of the violence, how it served me, how I used it despite not having the greatest fighting ability. Competent, yes, but a skilled streetfighter? Compared to many of my comrades, the answer is no.
I remember my first fight.
Elmo and I arrived at a party not far from my parents’ house that was in full swing, but it was invite-only and they weren’t letting anybody in, especially not us wearing our skinhead uniform of Dr. Martens, bomber jackets, and shaved heads. Some guy and his buddy at the door, drunker than we were, started to get mouthy and belligerent.
I can’t remember who made the first move, but there was some pushing and shoving, and Elmo and I squared off with the two door guys. The mouthy guy swung and missed my nose by an inch, so I swung back, but I missed too! He missed because he was drunker than me, but I missed because I was clumsy and inexperienced.
The adrenaline was pumping. I felt anxious, with fear and excitement welling up from within. My hands took two fistfuls of his hair, pulling his face down to meet my rapidly rising knee. I did this five or six times as my excitement grew. I was winning!
Then he pulled away, shook his head, and in a slurred voice said: “Nooow you’rrre fffuckin’ dead!”
OH SHIT! I thought. This wasn’t like in the movies. He was supposed to go down, not get angrier!
We exchanged several blows, and he started to get the better of me. That’s when Elmo stepped in, clobbering him after leaving his buddy rolling on the ground holding his face.
Eventually, the guy on the ground was pulled into the safety of the house as partygoers began to spill out the front door to see what was happening. We weren’t going to push our luck. Leaving before we were badly outnumbered, we disappeared into the darkness of the alley at the end of the block.
Wow! What a buzz. The rush of adrenaline and testosterone pulsing through my veins. It lasted maybe twenty minutes, but it left me feeling like I had never felt before. Alive, humming, and excited. I became addicted to the violence, the fighting, the domination over another human being at any cost, and the sense of power from the fear that was created. For the first time in my life, I was not on the receiving end of abuse or pain—I was the one doling it out. That was freedom. Once I had experienced the adrenaline rush and excitement that came with my first real taste of violence, it wasn’t long before I was all in and fighting almost every weekend. The contrast between school life and weekend life was extreme.
The kids at my preppy school hated me. In response, I put on the mask of not giving a damn, of coming across as totally cold and emotionless. This was a self-defence mechanism, a survival skill. The truth is, rejection hurt like hell and to avoid the pain it was necessary for me to control the rejection, to rationalize why these people didn’t matter, were fake, posers, or whatever label I could give them to justify the controlled demolition of real and potential relationships. I blew up relationships left and right, the second I got a whiff they were going sideways. Even if inside I felt sadness, guilt, or even grief, outside I displayed a lack of caring, the absence of remorse, and intentional cruelty.
At first, these internal feelings were powerful and the mask of not caring was awkward, as it went against my humanity and my true nature, suppressing my most sensitive inner self. But by assuming the mask over and over, the sense of awkwardness went away, the mask became more and more comfortable, and the suppression became more and more automatic. The mask I wore occasionally, when required, became a permanent part of my identity. And while the masks were on and the shields were up, I would’ve seemed like a sociopath.
Elmo and I would go to their parties knowing we were not welcome and skull beers, chugging them in one go, under the glares of preps and jocks as tensions grew to the point where even the hosts called the cops. As we built our own crew (many of the new skinheads were punks we had previously beaten up, and Elmo was particularly good at getting them to join the dark side), it wasn’t long before we didn’t need to hang around other groups to socialize.
One day, when I was walking between classes, I got into a snarly exchange with Rob, a stocky, nuggety, very muscular guy reminiscent of the dwarf king from The Lord of the Rings movie. The exchange resulted in Rob drilling me right in the solar plexus, halting my ability to breathe. I keeled over, gasping for breath, unable to draw in air, and hoping that was the end of it. I had no chance of winning against Rob, so, afraid of an even greater beating, I didn’t hit back. Standing there in fear and cowardice, struggling for air as that sick feeling in the stomach when you’re winded started to recede, I spat out, “You are a dead man!”
“Whatever,” he said, walking away to class, leaving me holding my stomach and cursing him.
His older brother, who was in grade twelve, watched the whole thing go down, walked up to me real close, stuck his face in mine, and slowly said, “Ha! I beat skinheads up for fun on weekends” and walked away.
Really? I thought. We’ll see about that.
When the rest of my crew heard about this claim, the decision was quickly made for everyone to pay a visit to Rob and his brother the Friday three weeks after the altercation. On Wednesday, I walked into my school with an aluminum baseball bat in one hand and my school bag in the other (of course I also had a baseball and glove for plausible deniability). Something was going down. The school with abuzz with rumours of retribution, but no one was supposed to know the appointed day except for a handful of friends. Still, word got out.
Friday rolled around and the nervous energy of excitement and anticipation was nearly overwhelming. At 2:45 p.m. a stern voice came over the school loudspeaker and said, “Tony McAleer, come to the principal’s office immediately!”
A little unease crept in as I walked into his office and took a seat. Putting on my feigned look of innocence with a dash of smugness, I waited for him to speak.
“Your friends are here,” he said.
“What friends?” I replied incredulously.
“Rob and his brother, Richard, have already been taken home by the police. There will be no trouble today.”
Inside, I was doing cartwheels that the threat of our skinhead crew had sent them packing with a police escort, signalling a victory of sorts.
“You can go now,” the principal said.
Quickly following his instructions, I rushed to my locker and grabbed the bat and bag. I ran from the side exit of the school across the soccer field towards the twenty or so of my skinhead mates who had shown up. Within a few minutes, there were 150 students standing at the school side of the residential T-intersection, curiosity clearly the draw. Most were gawkers, certainly not intending to engage in a mass brawl. We knew that if we charged that crowd, at least half would be terrified and run away.
As we debated what to do, about fifteen Greek guys from the next school over turned up wearing black jeans and black tank tops and started showing off their kickboxing skills,. The dynamics had changed and a recalculation was in order.
Moments later, the first squad car showed up, followed quickly by another, screeching to a halt with officers exiting both cars. Without hesitation, most of us handed our weapons to girlfriends or threw them in the bushes. My bat and bag disappeared until the next day.
Again, recalculation. The police presence meant a stalemate. The police told us to move on, as the Greeks had joined the front of the school crowd. We began to move away from the intersection as an ever-increasing number of police arrived and restored order. We reached the end of the block, turned the corner, and started to walk the short half block to busy Arbutus Street and the bus stop that was around yet another corner. The police were going to make sure we got on that next bus and left the area.
Suddenly, around the corner from the bus stop and behind us (most of us were walking backwards, facing the police and protesting our innocence) came eight East Indian guys, their leader wearing a turban, from John Oliver, a high school in the east end with a tough reputation. They were ready for a fight. Clearly, the word had gotten out far beyond my school. In the meantime, four more squad cars arrived. Now we had a problem, or should I say we had multiple issues as we began to close ranks to withdraw from the area. There were now eight squad cars and two paddy wagons in attendance. The cops told us to beat it and continued herding us around the corner, right into the East Indians, who were now between us and the bus stop. As we passed the East Indian gang, they challenged us to fight. The police seemed to give them a nod of encouragement, which was not a good sign for us because we figured we would be arrested if we responded in kind.
The leader of the East Indians walked up and took a swing at FiFi, the largest of our group, with brass knuckles, leaving a mark on FiFi’s face. FiFi backed up, pulled a club from inside his jacket, and struck back with the foot-long piece of wood a blow to the leader’s head, which was softened by his turban. After a few reckless swings, the police, at full strength, intervened and both groups quickly disengaged before anything got too out of hand. The bus arrived shortly thereafter, and we were allowed to get on and leave. Not the outcome we had expected.
After the crazy events of that afternoon, nobody at my school ever messed with me again. I was flush with the feeling of being feared and the safety that comes with intimidation. People at my school may not have respected me, but they feared me, which felt better than respect at the time. The twenty skinheads (there were also Chelseas, skinhead girls nicknamed after their short haircuts) who showed up came in from the suburbs, skipped school, took the day off work, and made the effort to be there for me in a way that told me that I mattered, that they cared. The appearance of rival gangs and the heavy law enforcement presence that came to confront us signalled that we were to be taken seriously. That was my narcissistic perspective at the time anyhow, but the feeling of power could not be ignored.
Until this point, I hadn’t felt as powerful or as feared, and it was intoxicating. This was something the punk scene couldn’t offer and essentially put an end to that tug-of-war. Even though it was a false sense of power, I couldn’t resist the accompanying feeling of safety, the feeling of belonging and of acceptance in the skinhead crew. In those years, solid friendships were formed and proven over and over through violence and blood. We were bonded by our wounds, and we found acceptance and brotherhood through our scars of rejection, and safety in our loyalty to each other, which was often proven on the street. We had our own rules, our own code to follow to earn each other’s respect. Here I also found a way to connect with my father through what I later learned was a false bond.
False bonds are beliefs, actions, or attributes of our parents or others that we copy to curry favour or to create symmetry with them so that we may be more likable and receive more attention, acceptance, or approval.
The skinhead identity checked many of my father’s boxes: Ultra British and jingoistic. Grew up in Liverpool’s Catholic slums. Loved football, the kind you play with your feet, not with your hands. Loved drinking, in particular, English ales. For me, ale wasn’t just an alcoholic beverage, it was a passion, a dedication, a lifestyle, and a potential profession. In grade twelve, one of my career choices seriously under consideration was, drumroll please, brewmaster studying at Edinburgh Polytechnic. My dad would’ve been so proud.
None of this was conscious, of course. Sure, I was conscious of my father’s influence on me on an intellectual level but blind to my deep desire and longing for his attention, acceptance, and approval. A yearning that I continued to feel for most of my adult life.
My parents, however, hated my new, evolving identity. My dad had spent his entire life trying to escape his working-class origins. Skinhead wasn’t the outcome they had wanted from a private and boarding school education. The punk subculture was creative, rebellious, and, to them, a phase, but the skinhead subculture was a lifestyle. Throw in the Oi! soundtrack and a splash of A Clockwork Orange for flair, and that was our identity. The ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange wasn’t just a depiction in a book or a movie; it became a lifestyle, and we were the textbook definition of life imitating art, in the bowler hats we sometimes wore, the tattoos, and the canes we carried whose only real purpose was for beating people. Mine concealed a large test tube that could hold seven ounces of hard liquor.
Just about every weekend we went through the same routine of parties and punk shows, alcohol, and fighting. The modern form of skinhead culture was a mix of Oi! music (born out of the punk scene), football hooliganism, and of course, heavy drinking. Oi! music maintained the working-class roots of a decade earlier but, with the punk sound and energy, became the soundtrack of the football terrances (soccer stadiums that were standing room only and the cheapest seats for working people). It was in these spaces that national pride and jingoistic chanting became infused and mixed with the extreme nationalism of a political nature. Through these rituals, we proved our loyalty and courage to each other over and over again, even though we often behaved in a most cowardly way. At this point we wore the badges and trappings of white supremacy without having fully absorbed and internalized the ideology. Much like a kid who listens to heavy metal and wears pentagrams but hasn’t delved into Statanism or ritualistic magick. At the live shows, punks and skinheads still co-mingled in a somewhat uneasy truce as skinhead numbers started to grow, and the ultra-nationalism and racism were worn more like a badge than an identity, but that would soon change. Although we were definitely a nuisance to public order, there was one ingredient missing to turn the knob to eleven and make us truly dangerous. That was white power music. White power music would transform us from wearing provocative badges and slogans to internalizing an ideology as identity.
The arrival of a band named Skrewdriver laid a path that changed everything.
Skrewdriver, with its iconic English singer Ian Stuart Donaldson (known as Ian Stuart), didn’t always sing racist music, opening in its early days for bands like Motorhead, the Damned, and the Boomtown Rats. Chiswick Records signed the band in 1976 to cash in on the second wave of punk and the growing skinhead scene inspired by punk band Sham 69. Skrewdriver’s music was raw, working class, and violent. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that it became influenced heavily by the National Front, Britain’s far-right political party.. As violence at shows between National Front skinheads and anti-racism skinheads (Rock against Racism, red skins, and other left-leaning fans) was becoming a problem, bands were asked to declare which side they were on. Bands like Sham 69 denounced racism, whereas Skrewdriver embraced it and were dropped by their label. Ian Stuart re-formed the band and in 1982 released the single “Back with a Bang!”
One cold winter Saturday afternoon, while walking across the Georgia Viaduct to Commercial Drive in Vancouver’s east end, Elmo handed me his Walkman portable music player and said, “Check this out.” He placed the foam-covered earpieces over my head and pressed the play button.
From the first drumbeat in the intro to the heavy bass riff that came in just after, I was electrified at the energy, the lyrics, and the vocals of that song. This was the best skinhead song I had ever heard. Elmo eventually made me a cassette tape with a recording of their original album, which I listened to over and over again. In 1983, they released the single “White Power!” which would blow the door open on the racist music scene. Although most record labels turned their backs on white power music, Rock-o-Rama records in Germany had no problem with it, and the floodgates opened as all the racist bands without a label now had one.
One cannot underestimate the impact of this kind of music on recruitment and preparing a whole generation of racist skinheads to move from random chaos to politically focused disorder. These young men and women became pre-indoctrinated and primed to be introduced to the older, more organized white nationalist organizations. There was also the appeal of the taboo nature of the music, as nobody had dared record lyrics like this before. The music was energized by the politics, and in turn, the politics became energized by the music. We were matching the march of skinhead culture in the UK into the hands of far-right groups like the NF step for step. This music was an essential driver moving the skinhead scene towards inevitable contact with organized racist and white supremacist groups, but it also divided skinheads. Not all skinheads were racist and the appearance of this music marked the beginning of what would become a deep division among skinheads, eventually leading to their total alienation from the punk scene.
At the time of the after-school conflict, our skinhead crew was probably the most cohesive it ever was. Some were racist, adopting the fascist National Front beliefs and listening to white power music; others were more traditional skinheads, who liked ska and reggae, in the spirit of the movement’s origins in 1969. Some were a bit of both, but we were skinheads first. We slowly became fractured, as we no longer listened to the same music together. Until this point, the National Front piece was more like part of the uniform, as nobody was in direct contact with any political groups yet. The casual, lazy sort of political extremism that a person adopted to belong and be accepted. Just like there were political stances a person took as part of being a punk but dropped once they grew out of that phase and moved on.
Entering grade twelve, however, that changed for me. I was taking a heavy academic course load, and some subjects drew more of my interest than others. History 12, which covered early-twentieth-century Europe, Weimar Germany, the Third Reich, and World War II, was for me the obvious choice. The way my brain works is that when an activity, career, or body of knowledge catches my interest, I go all in with tunnel vision until I understand or practise it at an above-average level. Part of the reason for this is the ego stroke and recognition that comes from knowing more about a subject than anyone else in the room. Combined with a good memory and years observing the intellectual banter around my dad’s bar, this really set me up for success (or failure, depending on how you look at it). While earning praise from some, this behaviour sure annoyed the hell out of a great many more. By the time my history class got into Weimar Germany and the rise of the Third Reich, my deep dive had begun and I was going well down the rabbit hole.
What started as being provocative, wearing buttons and pins with swastikas and other white nationalist symbols, led people to start challenging my beliefs. Regularly, I found myself defending my position to people who thought it would be a walk in the park to refute my ignorance. When the skinhead in front of them started quoting the percentage increase in the consumption of meat and butter in Germany in the prewar years as a result of National Socialist economic policy, or the drop in the unemployment rate for those same years, they were often left on the back foot and speechless. Regardless of how smart someone is, it is very difficult to debate someone who is completely prepared for the exchange you’ve just stumbled into.
For me, it didn’t stop at winning. There was a need to keep going until the person had been humiliated. Sometimes a person would come up to my buddies and me and start to ridicule or tease us, often with a crowd behind them, cheering them on and laughing. My strategy was to go along in self-deprecation, get the crowd on my side by making fun of myself but be twice as funny. Once I had won over the crowd, they could be turned on the person who launched the original insult. There was always ample opportunity to hone my cutting wit and skills of persuasion. Brawn wasn’t my first weapon of choice; my intellect and my tongue were, and I was able to talk my way into or out of just about any conflict.
More often than not, my tongue would get us into conflicts in the most provocative way possible. One night, I was drinking and enjoying a punk show with Elmo, Fifi, and a few others at the Pennsylvania Pub, a dive bar on Vancouver’s skid row. When the band finished, Elmo and I, semi-drunk and uncomfortable with the silence, stared at the open mic and then at each other. With a nod, we moved in unison towards the small stage. “National Front!” and “White Power!” we chanted into the mic as the massive crowd began to stir and object. Sine we were getting a rise, we continued our provocation until the first chair was hurled in our direction. Game on! We started brawling, with chairs and bottles flying.
As usual, we were outnumbered, but we relied on the fact that we embraced the violence. This was a calculation we would use over and over again. We counted on the fact that 100 percent of our crew were fully committed to the battle, whereas far fewer of the opposition were willing to pay the price. This was the psychological advantage we had when fighting as a group, and we exploited it over and over again. I remember reading Mein Kampf in which Hitler describes a political event in a hall in Munich that a group of Communists tried to break up. There were only six or eight SA Stormtroopers on hand, but they leaped into action like a pack of wolves, fighting so intensely as a group against seemingly impossible odds and beating the Communists back and out of the hall. When I read those passages, it immediately resonated with me and I became more consciously aware of the tactical advantage we could employ. We saw ourselves like that pack of wolves, like those SA Stormtroopers. This was the fantasy element to our violence.
Suddenly, the lights from a couple of police cars responding the melee were shining outside the pub. It was time to leave. I ran towards the exit behind the stage. Pushing through the crash doors to make my escape into the alleyway, I ran straight into a big burly cop, who grabbed me by my green bomber jacket. Half-drunk, I tried to twist and squirm away, but his grip was unbreakable.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“Home,” I said, in the hope of being released.
“Can I search you?” he asked as a formality, knowing he was going to search me anyway. His partner started to search me, which was fine because my pockets were empty. As I stood there with both arms behind my head, his hand went deeper and deeper into my jacket, and I remembered that there were big holes in the pocket, as the officer was now elbow deep.
“What have we here?” the officer queried, as he pulled a throwing star made out of nails from deep inside the lining of my coat.
Damn, I had forgotten about that. Having been found with a weapon while coming out of a bar brawl at the age of sixteen, I was promptly handcuffed and driven in the paddy wagon the three blocks to the police station.
When the wagon stopped, I was escorted out the back into the alley behind the station and led into the elevator. My mind was racing as the elevator door opened on the third floor and I was led to a counter to be processed. My pockets were emptied and the contents placed in a plastic bag as I answered the questions necessary to fill out my charge sheet.
“How much do you weigh?” the officer asked with a stern gaze.
“I don’t know” I replied.
Suddenly, I felt two hands grip me by the ribs just under my armpits and lift me off the floor. “A buck thirty-five,” the voice behind me declared, before returning my feet to the floor. A not-so-subtle reminder that I was now playing a grownup’s game.
When the ritual was finished, they put me in a cell by myself and on suicide watch, since I had been charged with possession of a prohibited weapon. I was terrified, thinking my life was over and my future prospects had been dealt a fatal blow.
But because my father was a doctor and this was my first offence, a letter from a good lawyer was all it took for me to get a diversion and avoid a record. This scare cooled things down for a bit, but the violence would continue.
One night, four or five of us went down to English Bay to drink. We chose some park benches in the dark near the Aquatic Centre, where the only illlumination came from the moon in the clear sky and what little light came from the streetlamps fifty yards away. The Aquatic Centre parking lot was a cruising spot for gay men. That was why we had picked that place in the dark, off the beaten track, and with plenty of potential targets. As men walked by we would call them names, throw empty beer cans at them, and utter whatever vulgarity we could think of to provoke them into a response that would invite our escalation to violence. Rarely would we simply attack a stranger for no reason and without warning—there always had to be a cause, even if we had to manufacture that excuse ourselves.
So there we were, throwing out the lures, waiting for a bite, and we finally got one. After the empty can bounced off his back, he turned around and told us to fuck off. Well, now we had the disrespect, the provocation for a beating we needed, and we leaped to our feet.
“Get him!” someone yelled.
The young man bolted away from us, and we followed in hot pursuit. He was fast and we weren’t gaining any ground as we chased him towards the Aquatic Centre and through the parking lot. On the other side of the parking lot was a construction site and we followed him there, trying to see where he had gone, as he had disappeared into the darkness of what could only be described as a crawl space about three and a half feet high. We couldn’t get at him in the blackness, but we could hear him scrambling and scurrying in the cramped space. After pondering what to do next, we started searching the rough ground for small rocks.
Reminiscent of kids at the lake in summer skipping stones across the water to see whose would go the farthest, we carefully chose our rocks and lined up our shots, listening carefully for any audible clue as to his position. Throwing my first stone, I listened intently as it skipped along the ground until it hit a concrete wall. Clack, clack, clack were the sounds that came out—I had missed. About every fourth or fifth stone that was thrown, however, generated a howl of pain as the rock struck its mark. With each scream, we celebrated like we were scoring a goal or hitting a home run, until our target finally found a position in the cramped space where he was safe. No longer rewarded by the sounds of terror, we got bored and wandered off in search of new entertainment.
That memory still haunts me, and I carry a healthy shame about what we did, what I did, that night. You see, I knew what it felt like to know something terrible was about to happen and there was nothing you could do about it. I knew what it felt like to be trapped and completely powerless to stop something terrible from happening, yet I still did it to others. I inflicted what I had suffered onto others. I will never forget the cruelty I committed that night and am horrified to think of the impact it had on that young man’s life.
What shocks me most is my state of total disconnection from my own humanity and the rest of humanity that made possible the events of that evening (and the many, many others that followed).
Somebody asked me once, “How did you lose your humanity?”
“I didn’t lose it,” I replied, “I traded it for acceptance and approval until there was nothing left.”