“‘Tis with the Chalice that We’ll Defend Our Country against the Cross...” Analysing and Comparing the Contents of the Neo-Nazi Fanzine Skinformátor and the Utraquist Zine Kalich

Fanzines simultaneously reflected the subculture’s ideological cleavages, including those within the far-right branch itself (disregarding anti-racist or apolitical fanzines). As the racist skinhead subculture formed in the first half of the 1990s, it split into the more-or-less open neo-Nazis, on the one hand, and the so-called Utraquist skinheads, with their ideological amalgam of nationalism, racism and authoritarianism, on the other. The Utraquist skinhead groups are a unique Czech phenomenon; they have no international counterparts and have thus far received minimal attention. Therefore, the research question follows: In what ways are the publications of a selected neo-Nazi zine (Skinformátor, “The Skin-informer”) different from a selected representative of the Utraquist zines (Kalich, “The Chalice”)? In the following, I am going to focus on comparing the choice of topics and their elaboration in the two fanzines. It is not the goal of this paper to analyse the different categories of fanzine content in depth. My goal at this research stage is to identify the contrasts between the two fanzines as representatives of different approaches to politicising skinhead subculture in the far-right context.