SIUSLAW NEWS | WEDNESDAY, JULY 11, 2018 | 9A
INTOLERANCE from page 1A
“‘We have to kill them first,
this is war,’” he remembered
thinking. “We can’t be pumping
out the rhetoric over and over
again for years, and then be sur-
prised when someone goes and
attacks a child. As disgusted as
I was by this, I just said, ‘Little
ones grow up to be big ones.’ And
we cracked a beer. That weighed
upon me. It still does.”
Michaelis has gone through
the same journey as those boys
— angry and suffering.
Bully
“I had a pretty idyllic child-
hood,” Michaelis said. “I didn’t
have a lot of reason to lash out.
I think it had a lot to do with my
adrenaline habit. It was the most
powerful way to get a fix by mak-
ing other kids afraid of me.”
He was a smart child, reading
complex fantasy novels in second
grade. He was put in the gifted
program after scoring high on
standardized tests.
“I didn’t want to be gifted,” he
said. “I didn’t want expectations.
So, I thought, ‘I’m going to try to
make you not expect me to be
a golden boy who’s going to fix
anything. I’m going to break ev-
erything.’”
His first bullying victim was
his little brother, and he made
life miserable for him at an early
age.
Next came a kid on the bus
with thick glasses. Then more,
some with runny noses, others
he felt were “funny looking.”
It wasn’t just verbal taunts that
Michaelis doled out. There were
often beatings resulting in bro-
ken noses and black eyes.
“It was the thrill of punching
somebody,” Michaelis said. “But
getting hit was also a thrill. I
definitely enjoyed the idea of
dominating someone else.”
More than the physical vio-
lence, he enjoyed the reactions
he would get from the adults,
frustrated as to why he was lash-
ing out. They would pay atten-
tion to him, which he liked, but
the bullying was also an inciden-
tal path to get the thrill of creat-
ing anarchy.
“There were times when I
hurt kids so bad that I felt bad
afterwards,” Michaelis recalled.
“But once you start this process,
you get swept up in it. When an
adult pulls you off this kid, you
feel bad about beating him up.
But I didn’t have the courage to
acknowledge that. I didn’t want
to acknowledge that I did some-
thing wrong, so I would run off
to the next victim. I was suffer-
ing and I didn’t have a healthy
way to process that stuff.”
By 14 he was drinking. He got
into the punk rock scene and
would leave for days at a time to
see the bands play live.
One summer, he disappeared
for a month after trashing his
parents’ house from a house par-
ty. His parents found him, but he
refused to go back to school.
“They both loved me very
much, but they didn’t have any
idea how to control me,” Michae-
lis said. “So, they let me drop out
of high school. They tried very
hard to keep me in, but there just
wasn’t anything they could do.”
Soon after, he moved to Mil-
waukee, Wis., with a group of
punk rockers, living in a run-
down house. He then made the
transition from punk rocker to
white power skinhead.
Oi!
“I don’t want it to seem like
punk is some sort of gateway
drug to being a white power
skinhead,” Michaelis clarified.
He still loves the music.
Punk began in the 1970s, be-
coming popular with bands like
the Sex Pistols, The Clash and
the Ramones. But there were
subgenres in the music, one of
the most influential being Oi!
The music, fast-paced with
lyrics usually yelled, mainly ap-
pealed to working class youth,
angry and disaffected over ram-
pant unemployment in Britain.
Lyrics included topics of worker
rights, street violence and ha-
rassment by the police. It was a
battle cry to change a seemingly
broken system.
“To me, punk was about
breaking s—t, pissing people off
and lashing out. Wanton absur-
dity and destruction,” Michaelis
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Arno Michaelis used to be an angry young man, actively
involved in skinheads, the punk rock scene and, later, the
white supremacy movement.
social change. Michaelis hated
them.
“To me, punk was about
breaking s--t, not giving a s--t,”
he said. “The fact that the peace
punks got all activist made my
skin crawl.”
At the time, the peace punks
were boycotting Coors Beer for
allegedly racist hiring habits.
“They didn’t hire black peo-
ple, so they were calling to boy-
cott. I didn’t give a s--t one way
or another who didn’t get hired,”
Michaelis said. “I would spend
the extra couple of bucks to get
Coors just to piss off the peace
punks when I went to a punk
show. And I had a Coors hat that
I would wear all the time and
wave it in their face. I didn’t care
about the issue, but because peo-
ple were so upset about it, I was
like, ‘Coors is my drink. What
are you going to do about it?’”
He was a skinhead by this
point, but in the more tradition-
al, drink and fight way. He said
he wasn’t a racist, never thinking
about the issue. He was apoliti-
cal.
But when he heard the white
power band Skrewdriver, every-
thing changed.
A larger group of amorphous
skinheads in Milwaukee started
to galvanize, and soon he was
a white power skinhead — and
Michaelis’ contribution was
through music.
“Our first band was called
‘One Way,’” he said. “We had
a catchy tagline. ‘One way, the
right way, the white way.’”
Michaelis was the lead singer
and writer.
“It was simplistic, but we did
it very well. I wrote songs about
how Jewish people were taking
all our money, or by people who
didn’t want to work. We were
shouting about how white people
are better than anyone else,” he
said.
The peak of his music career
came
after One Way with a band
Peace Punks
called
Centurion, which sold
Aside for the minority white
20,000
copies
and has gained a
power punk, there were also
cult
status
in
the
white supremist
peace punks that lobbied for
said. “Bucking against every kind
of authority and refusing to be
controlled.”
In Britain, some of the most
ardent supporters of this music
were skinheads.
“They weren’t racist,” Michae-
lis said. “They were British kids,
some of whom were Pakistani
and some were from the West
Indies,” Michaelis said. “They
would all get drunk, shave their
heads so you couldn’t grab hair
in a fight, and then beat each
other up. They weren’t choir
boys by any stretch, but they
weren’t racists.”
Seeing a volatile group of
angry and fearful white men
seemed a fertile breeding ground
for the fascist European political
party The National Front, which
was able to move in and begin
heavily recruiting.
“They said the reason was that
jobs were so bad because of the
immigrants,” Michaelis said.
And as they groomed the skin-
heads, the Front also influenced
punk rock.
“The music recruited pissed
off white kids in the late ‘80s,
early ‘90s in a big way,” he said.
“The music was fast and aggres-
sive, coursing with testosterone
and toxic masculinity with lyrics
that really are offensive to civil
society.”
One of the bands to come out
of this era was Skrewdriver.
“It was then that a friend of
mine brought a Skrewdriver
tape, and I was like, ‘Where have
you been all my life!’” Michaelis
said. “It was good because of the
forbidden-ness of it. It repulsed
people. That really fit in with ev-
erything I was doing since I was
a kid. ‘You want to see how hor-
rible I am now? Sieg Heil!’ It was
a continuation of my youth.”
He also confessed that all of it
was really just an excuse to keep
drinking and fighting.
Stocks.
Bonds. CDs.
IRAs. Mutual
funds.
Hammerhead
During this time, Michaelis
and his band were embroiled in
multiple conflicts. They began
wars with anti-fascist (referred
to often today as Antifa) bands,
trashing their venues and stop-
ping the shows. There were
gang wars with black and Latino
gangs. And then there were other
skinheads.
“Any skinhead who didn’t
consider themselves a racist, we
called them a ‘baldy,’ implying
that they weren’t real skinheads,”
Michaelis said. “So, with my band
to rally around and a bunch of
‘baldys’ to go hunting for every
night, we just started growing ex-
ponentially.”
Many of the beatings were bru-
tal, and at times scared him. In
one fight, he was hit in the head
with a lead pipe, blood streaming
down his face. He lunged on his
attacker and began beating him
into unconsciousness.
“He was just a pulp, I was
pounding on his face and his
head,” Michaelis said. “I could
feel him trying to struggle at first,
and then the struggling got weak-
er and weaker, until his body was
limp. There was a part of me, this
deep voice inside, going, ‘This
guy is dying. You’re killing this
guy.’”
But he kept punching until a
friend pulled him off and warned
him that the cops were coming.
The incident was terrifying, but
also exhilarating, he admitted.
“It was one of the most glori-
ous moments of my life,” he said.
“That was my ‘legend’ of who
I was — what people would say
about me in hushed whispers.
That became my mythology and
people were afraid of me and this
holy terror. I wasn’t afraid of it all.
I was celebrating.”
But being a holy terror began
taking a toll. One friend went to
prison after shooting a kid who
did a drive-by at their home. It
was self-defense, but the attack
came because they were white
power skinheads.
“As we radiated hate, violence
and hostility into the world, the
world reflected it back to us,”
Michaelis said. “Instead of see-
ing that as a wake-up call, we
saw it as further evidence to val-
idate the ideology that we were
espousing. Instead of accepting
the consequences of our actions,
we blamed those consequences
on Jewish people, black people,
Latinos — It was everybody else’s
fault but ours.”
One Way broke up, so Michae-
lis started another short-lived
band called Hammerhead. This
led to his involvement with the
Hammerskins. After that band’s
demise, he created Centurion.
Along the way, he was becom-
ing more enmeshed in suprema-
cy culture, becoming a minister
in the Church of the Creator — a
white supremacist religion that
reveres the white race, looking to
create a holy war with Jews, Afri-
can Americans and “mud” races.
In this Saturday’s edition, Mi-
chaelis will talk about the views
of white supremacy, the reason-
ing behind it and what propo-
nents hope to achieve — includ-
ing plans to take over the Earth
through race wars. He’ll also ad-
dress the current controversies
surrounding white supremacists,
Antifa and how the cycle of intol-
erance can end in America.
“The United States has to sit
down for a truth and conciliation
process,” he said.
Michaelis, along with Kaleka,
will be speaking at the Presby-
terian Church of the Siuslaw,
located at 3996 Highway 101,
on July 15 at 6 p.m. for “Gift of
Our Wounds: Forgiveness After
Hate.” Pizza and refreshments
will be served at 5 p.m. The
event is free to anyone, but do-
nations will be accepted.
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world.
One of Centurion’s most popu-
lar albums was named “Fourteen
Words,” a reference to a phrase
coined by David Lean, former
leader of the white supremacy
group The Order.
After he was incarcerated for
murdering Jewish talk show
host Alan Berg, Lean penned
the manifesto 88 Precepts, which
described Lane’s philosophies on
politics and religion from a Su-
premacists point of view.
One of the most influential
phrases in Lane’s writing is the
14-word phrase: “We must se-
cure the existence of our people
and a future for white children.”
Another female centric version
states, “Because the beauty of the
White Aryan woman must not
perish from the earth.”
The shorthand for “Fourteen
Words” is just the number 14, but
it’s generally used in conjunction
with the number 88, as in 14/88.
“H” is the eighth letter in the En-
glish alphabet, with 88 signifying
“Heil Hitler” — or 88.
The music on Michaelis’
“Fourteen Words” album is a
cornucopia of straightforward
hate speech and white suprema-
cist code.
The first track on the album,
“The Planet is Ours,” begins
with a heavy metal riff on John
Williams’ “Imperial March,” the
theme used for Darth Vader in
the Star Wars films.
Shortly after, Michaelis’ grav-
elly, screaming voice overtakes
the already punishing guitars and
drums.
“We’ll drive the muds out of our
lands, we’ll crush the Jews back
into the sands,” he screams.
“Muds” refers to any group of
African, Middle Eastern or Asian
descendants.
“We’ll break the hold of the alien
powers, RaHoWa! This planet is
ours!”
“RaHoWa” is a common su-
premacist term for Racial Holy
War.
Another cut from the album
was the self-titled song, “Centu-
rion,” which describes RaHoWa
in more detail:
“N---er, prepare to burn! You
attacked our people and now it’s
your turn. You act so bold, but
we’ll slap you down. The legions of
hate will put you underground!”
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