All You Need Is Hate

By ADAM COHEN

On first listen, the rock band RaHoWa's song When America Goes Down sounds like any bad hard-core-rock ballad. The lyrics are cheesy high school poetry: "Will our 'twained lives split asunder?/ Will our love submerge and drown?" The vocals are often mumbled and atonal. And the instrumentals have all the professionalism of a Wayne's World guitar riff. But it's not every love song that features verses in which a man assures his beloved that "the color of our skin" will become "our uniform of war"--or every rock group whose name is short for Racial Holy War.

RaHoWa's Cult of the Holy War CD, with its rants urging whites to kill "vile, alien hordes" and destroy the Jews, is typical fare for Resistance Records, the world's leading purveyor of "hate-core" music. Some other hot titles from Resistance's catalog: Nordic Thunder's Born to Hate and Centurion's Fourteen Words. The 14 words? "We Must Secure the Existence of Our Race and a Future for White Children," as the CD jacket helpfully notes.

Resistance was a struggling hate-music label when William Pierce, perhaps America's leading neo-Nazi, bought it two years ago as a recruiting medium. Pierce, head of the white supremacist National Alliance, has been a pioneer in developing multi-media hooks to ensnare young people in his hate brigades. He has used magazines, leaflets, short-wave radio, the Internet, even hate comic books. He has also used novels: Pierce, a onetime Oregon State physics professor, is best known as the author of The Turner Diaries, a bloody tale that may have inspired Timothy McVeigh.

Even though it now operates out of a 400-acre West Virginia compound, Resistance has global lineage. The label was founded outside Windsor, Ontario, by a Canadian neo-Nazi skinhead. In 1999, after it was purchased by Americans, Resistance bought a Swedish label, Nordland Records, doubling its musical inventory.

Resistance's sales are strong overseas, where hate movements--and hate music--are on the upswing. Among the label's top markets: France, Greece, Poland and Germany--despite German hate-speech laws. The Resistance website reflects the label's internationalist bent, promoting a concert in Bologna, Italy, with hate-rockers from across the Continent, and an "Adolf Hitler Memorial Gig" in Serbia.

Pierce, 67, believes music can be the most effective method for attracting young people. It's a mass medium, and one that can reach the unsuspecting. No one is going to read one of his books or pamphlets, or even tune in to one of his radio shows, unless he or she is in the market for hate. "But people turn music on not because they are interested in the message, but because they like the sound," he says.

Resistance Records' catalog is heavy on rock, but it has branched out into genres such as "hate country" and "hate folk" music. It has a website and an Internet radio station, Resistance Radio. Whatever the music's propaganda value, hate-group monitors believe Resistance may be bringing in more than $1.5 million in annual revenues, perhaps three times as much as when Pierce bought it. "He's making money hand over fist," says TJ Leyden, a onetime hate-rock promoter who today consults for the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Task Force Against Hate. The Wiesenthal Center believes Resistance is a major funding source for the National Alliance.

For all his success with Resistance, Pierce has some qualms. Not about the lyrics calling for killing blacks and gassing Jews--he's fine with that. But Pierce, who listens to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, knows that by selling rock he is further exposing white youth to what he regards as "black music." Rock 'n' roll has black roots, he says, and it was Elvis Presley and "the media" who brought it into the white mainstream.

So isn't Pierce worried that Resistance is polluting the nation's Aryan culture--one of his favorite charges against his enemies? No, he sighs, the damage is already done. "We've had a couple of generations of Americans raised on rock music," he says. If you want to reach young people now, he says, you have to use black music to do it.

Yet Pierce, who writes in The Turner Diaries about an overthrow of the Federal Government and the institution of a new "Aryan" regime, anticipates a day when Resistance Records' music will fade away. "I don't know who will end up being the Minister of Culture after the revolution," he says. "But I would hope we would salvage the best of our European traditions." In other words, cue up the Beethoven.

Pierce consoles himself that at least he has drawn the line at rock. Suburban white kids may be snapping up rap CDs, but Pierce and Resistance Records take pride in not contributing to the trend. "To introduce white kids to rap," Pierce says, "would be an abomination."