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This chapter examines the pitfalls of the growing Peoria music scene of the early 1990s, particularly the violence, destruction, and chaos that often ended shows prematurely, attracting police and negative press, and ultimately convincing venue proprietors to stop renting their spaces for punk shows. These clashes included racist neo-Nazis and anti-racist Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARPs), as well as less ideological factions.

Although it experienced moderate growth, by the early 1990s the church was in disarray and nearly collapsed after the death of Ben Klassen in 1993. This chapter covers these events. In the final years of his life, Klassen looked in earnest for a successor to replace him as Pontifex Maximus, the title he created to signify the leader of his church. His personal wealth attracted a number of unscrupulous individuals, who caused considerable dissension in the church. After many failures, Klassen thought he had found a suitable successor in Dr. Rick McCarty, a psychologist who practiced in Florida. Later, McCarty also faced mounting troubles aside from the death of Klassen. With Klassen's demise, the church entered a phase of rapid decline. However, a young Canadian would spread the message of Creativity to skinheads through the emerging genre of “white power” music.

This chapter examines two sites within the cultures of trauma: “shaved heads” and “marked bodies.” “Shaved heads” are a representation pertaining both to an image and to a style, resulting from a wide variety of social and political experiences outside of the context of the visual arts. “Marked bodies” are a representation that refers to the performative paradigm that developed within society and the visual arts, an aesthetic practice that is rooted deeply in cultures of trauma in accordance with larger political frames of destruction and violence. The chapter considers examples of shaved heads in history that inhabit the visual memory of culture, a memory of the history of war, domination, and colonization across whose pages bodies reach back to the Old and New Testaments and forward to the white power of skinheads.

This chapter examines the main varieties and trends in the development of national revolutionary organisations in Russia from the 1990s until 2010s: national Bolsheviks, national anarchists, national socialists (supporters of the ‘white revolution’), and national democrats. It shows how the genesis of the various Russian national revolutionary organisations is closely connected with the social and economic crises that have struck post-Soviet Russia: the Russian ‘ressentiment’ of the 1990s gave rise to the national Bolsheviks; the economic growth of the 2000s, accompanied by an influx of migrants, inspired the Nazi skinheads/national socialists; and the growth of protest sentiments, which in 2011–2012 erupted in the mass movement ‘For Fair Elections’, led to the emergence of the national democrats. However, after the annexation of Crimea, the authorities managed to intercept the agenda of the nationalist movement, subsequently splitting and weakening it.

The career of Aleksandr Sevast’ianov, a nationalist intellectual who became a leading apologist of far-right violence, is in focus here. In the first phase (1992–1997) of his revolutionary project, Sevast’ianov avoided overt statements on violence while he led the campaign against the repatriation of WWII ‘trophy art’. During the second phase (1998–2003), as leader of a radical nationalist party, he repeatedly affirmed his commitment to legality but hinted that violent militants also had a role to play. During the third phase (2004–2012), which coincided with a wave of racist killings committed by neo-Nazi gangs, he glorified this carnage as the beginning of a national revolution. During the final phase (2013–2016), Sevast’ianov shifted this framework to the Russian insurgents in the Donbas, whom he extolled as the vanguard of a revolution that would ultimately transform Russia itself.

This chapter focuses on films featuring neo-Nazi skinheads. The films Romper Stomper, American History X, and The Believer are examined and found to contain examples of characters who, despite their racism and violence, are depicted in a sympathetic light. The ideas of Martin Heidegger are draw upon to demonstrate that this sympathetic depiction is dependent upon the fact that the neo-Nazi characters are engaged in a struggle to understand and take responsibility for their authentic selves. It is argued that the backdrop of right-wing ideology serves, in these films, to provide the set of ideals against which the main characters come to define themselves. In the course of these dramas, the active, nihilistic struggles of the main characters eventually culminate in self-understanding and the acceptance of personal responsibility. In their tragic conclusions, these movies illustrate the consequences of actively struggling against, and being liberated from, ideals that are hollow.

This chapter explores the divergent reactions of punk scenes around the world to the changing forces of neoconservative/neoliberal politics and globalization. Some scenes embraced a new punk variant of the previous generation’s tiermondisme (“third worldism”), creating new alliances across the three worlds of the late Cold War era, along with new collaborations with reggae and hip-hop artists. Others, however, turned inward to an insular punk tribalism. Both were skeptical of the emerging global neoliberal order and often also participated in the politically ambiguous antiglobalization rallies that emerged in the 1980s and continued into the 1990s. By the mid-1980s, punk scenes around the world found themselves dividing along the lines of an emergent political spectrum, into warring factions of xenophobic reactionary skinheads and globally minded progressive punks. This divide was intensified by the overlying tension between bands that found market success and those that vehemently rejected any sign of it.

Europe lacks America’s legacy of slavery, but it has legacies of fascism, imperialism, and anti-Semitism as well as a less-welcoming attitude toward immigrants, particularly from Muslim countries. Violent white supremacy reemerged in Europe in the 1970s, in part accompanying the rise of the skinhead movement, and was often promoted via white power rock-and-roll, eventually spreading throughout Europe. For most of the Cold War period and the years immediately following it, most of the racial violence in Europe was low-level but constant, with assaults on immigrants particularly common in many countries. Law enforcement was slow to respond, often not acting until problems became acute.