Judgment at Jolicoeur

>> Anti-racist troops use intimidation to subvert a skinhead concert

by JACQUIE CHARLTON

It's a serious business, suppressing racist rock concerts. Death hovers over the whole mission. "Don't put my name or even a physical description of me," says "Mark" of Anti-Racist Action Montreal (ARA), the group which this weekend drove a handful of white supremacist music fans away from their Ville-Émard meeting place. "I swear to God, my life is in danger if these people find out who I am."

"These people" being the white supremacist community of Montreal and beyond. Last Saturday, they had arranged to hold a clandestine "white power" concert with six racist bands, the Vinland Hammerskins, Aggravated Assault, the Blue-Eyed Devils, Excessive Force, Involved Patriots and Vinland Warrior, who play songs with titles like "Eternal Jew" and "Nigger Nigger." Like-minded people interested in attending the concert were instructed via the Internet to meet at Jolicoeur metro station Saturday at 6 p.m., where they would be given further information on the site of the concert. According to ARA, racist rock fans from all over Canada and the United States were coming to Montreal for the show.

Roughly 100 ARA members and hangers-on, overwhelmingly dressed in punk attire, were there at the Jolicoeur station to meet them. The action began around 6 p.m. when the first concert-goer, a beefy young skinhead (or "bonehead," as the ARA people call them) wearing a "Guinness for strength" T-shirt came in a side door, leading a Rottweiler. A murmur went through the crowd and suddenly the young man and his dog were surrounded. The crowd shouted "Allez vous-en, ostie de boneheads!" and spat at them and succeeded in driving out both the man and his dog.

A threesome were the next to be hounded out--a neat young skinhead and two black-clad women this time, arriving on the metro platform. By now the atmosphere had turned into something approaching a hunt, and they watched for each new arrival as if he or she were a fox venturing out of a leafy glade. While the two racist women were flippant and bitchy with the screaming crowd, the young man perhaps knew more about violence and was visibly scared, and began to repeatedly wipe his face as he and the women were forced back to the turnstile.

By now, there was something a bit discomforting about watching a 100-strong hostile crowd spit at and hound a nervous, hand-holding couple (these two were the last of the racists; they and two others had to be hurriedly ushered into a station storeroom by police to protect them from the crowd). The doubts surfaced, for this observer at least: aren't these confrontational tactics just going to build resentment on the other side? Wouldn't it just make more sense to ignore this group, whose members even the ARA qualifies as marginal, ill-educated and poor?

"That's what we thought with the last Nazis," one of the anti-racists answered dryly. And as reports of the concert's aftermath trickled in, it became clear that the cult of violence among racist skins is something different than that of ordinary gangs. After the Saturday evening confrontation in the metro, for instance, some punks at Loonies Bar on St-Laurent were threatened by a handful of racist skinheads (Loonies management says there were four; police say nine or 10). The ensuing scuffle left $400 in damages and one participant needing X-rays for a head injury. And an e-mail sent to the ARA in the wee hours of Monday morning promised more violence: "We've ignored you for the most part since your arrival in Montreal this summer. But you had to come and provoke us at Jolicoeur metro... Remember that for every action there is a reaction. Our reaction on Saturday night was only a beginning... Whatever doesn't destroy us makes us stronger."

You can't take on these people lying down, ARA's Mark insists. These were people, he says, who were about to listen for three hours to groups urging them to kill blacks and Jews. "When we confront them, they focus their anger on us and this keeps them from desecrating synagogues and beating up black people." And indeed, nobody ended up coming to the concert, says Mark. An informer from within the white supremacist camp passed on the information that the racist bands who had come all this way to play ended up singing only to each other on Saturday night. "They lost thousands of dollars," says Mark. "I'd much rather not have to do this type of thing, but it's effective."