Record Label Uses Rock to Spread Racist Doctrine

Pierce bought the company as a way of spreading his "message"

(RNS)-- When bands like the Angry Aryans and Blue Eyed Devils come to this city, you can't call Ticketmaster for tickets. They don't advertise on the radio. You won't find their CDs at record stores. They slip into town quietly. Their concerts are promoted by word of mouth and fliers. Maps are drawn up, directing people to an address where they can pick up further directions that will lead them to a secret location, usually a rented hall.

Inside, hard-driving rock blares for a crowd of about 200 racists, skinheads and swastika-tattooed music fans. Some give the Heil Hitler salute. They are mostly males in their 20s. All are white. The Angry Aryans, from Detroit, sing songs like "Let's Start a Racial War," "Asian Invasion" and "Race Mixing Is Treason." The Blue Eyed Devils, based in New Jersey, sing the violently anti-Semitic "Holocaust 2000": "We've heard your tales of persecution and we've listened to your lies/but this time it's for real/the final genocide." Next to the kegs of beer are two tables. One carries literature from the neo-Nazi National Alliance, called by the Anti-Defamation League "the single most dangerous hate group in the country." The other is loaded with CDs from the largest neo-Nazi white-power record label in America: Resistance Records..

The label, owned by the National Alliance, is based in Hillsboro, W.Va., but run out of the Cleveland area by Erich Gliebe. Gliebe, a former professional boxer and trainer, is ranked as one of the six rising stars of America's "radical right" by the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., which monitors racist organizations and has analyzed the National Alliance extensively in its Intelligence Report. Gliebe (pronounced glee-bee) signs new musical talent to Resistance while promoting existing bands and concerts. He also edits Resistance magazine, a glossy quarterly that promotes the label's bands and features articles like "Lies, Murder and Jews: The Columbine High School Massacre.".

Gliebe, 36, has led the Cleveland chapter of the National Alliance for several years. Aside from a brief conversation and some e-mails, he declined to be interviewed..

He is at the forefront of an expanding effort to use rock music to recruit young people to the National Alliance's racist cause. The music being peddled by Gliebe and his associates at Resistance Records is far removed from even the most obscure underground rock scene. Local clubs that willingly book devil-praising, death-metal bands won't have white-power acts..

They'll deal with Satan but not the National Alliance. The Alliance is run by William Pierce, "the most dangerous racist in the country," according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Jewish human rights organization named for the famed Nazi hunter..

Pierce wrote the 1978 racist novel "The Turner Diaries," under the name Andrew Macdonald. The book, considered the bible of right-wing extremists, follows a band of white-power radicals who overthrow the U.S. government. It also includes accounts of gruesome public hangings of white women who "defiled" their race by marrying Jews or blacks, and has tips on terrorism, weapons-stashing and how to make a 4,000-pound bomb. It inspired the terrorist group The Order, and copies of its pages were found in the car of Timothy McVeigh, the man convicted of bombing the Oklahoma City federal building..

Pierce, 66, a former college physics professor, founded the National Alliance in Washington, D.C., in 1974, moving its headquarters to Hillsboro in 1985..

He bought Resistance Records last year in hopes of reaching a younger crowd. "To me rock is atrocious," Pierce said recently. "But I bought Resistance Records because I thought it was a good opportunity to add a new medium for propagating my message.".

Resistance was founded in Detroit in 1993 by Canadian George Burdi, a k a George Eric Hawthorne, lead singer of the white-power band Rahowa (short for Racial Holy War). The label had modest initial success, selling, by some estimates, 50,000 CDs the first two years, but then stumbled. Resistance moved to California, then Washington, D.C., under new owners in 1998..

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