A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:12 pm

American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:07 pm wrote:Jakell, I have told you many times that I don't want to talk to you. Please stop acting as though I do.


It's ok, I get this now, there's no need for you to keep on repeating it. I'm not 'acting' as the above though, just making comments for the record (those thread views are telling).

I suggest you put me on ignore. This won't help in the long run, but may help you relax for the time being.
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby seemslikeadream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:15 pm

American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 6:07 pm wrote:Jakell, I have told you many times that I don't want to talk to you. Please stop acting as though I do.



there's plenty of people here that don't want to talk to you or read your stuff ...but you keep on posting it...please stop acting like we do

but here's a thought ...keep all your fascism/anti-semitic/holocaust denying OP's in one thread like the rest of us do....one thread...one topic...I know you can do it ..you've got your mega thread..why can't you do the same for this crap?
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:25 pm

Sounder » Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:22 pm wrote:He could be quite useful as a case study if more folk would consider that tickling pretenses is an easy way to influence an audience.



The 'case study' is usually my last resort after other attempts at civilised engagement have failed, the results can come in handy when you meet the same situation again (this one is familiar)

I think I said in a different thread (something from my landscape gardening days) "if something is problematic, and you can't shift it, make a feature of it"
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:21 pm

Nick Griffin's sexual habits exposed on Question Time




http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 06874.html

October 22, 2009

10 things you should know about the BNP when you watch Question Time tonight
By Cahal Milmo and Kevin Rawlinson


1. Nick Griffin is a convicted racist who said Hitler 'went a bit too far'

The man who will achieve a first for the extreme right-wing in Britain by taking his place on the BBC's flagship debating programme tomorrow is a convicted racist who once said that Hitler "went a bit too far" and fraternised with the former leader of the Ku Klux Klan.

Since attending his first National Front meeting at the age of 15, the privately educated leader of the British National Party has been imbued with the doctrine and practice of the far right from an early age. He read 'Mein Kampf' when he was 13.

The 50-year-old father-of-four has been assiduous in recent years to distance his party from the thuggish, neo-fascist image of the extreme right. But his insistence that neither he nor his party are racist sits uneasily with his past. In 1998, he was convicted of inciting racial hatred for articles that denied the Holocaust and given a suspended nine-month prison term. While in the witness box, he said: "I am well aware that the orthodox opinion is that six million Jews were gassed and cremated and turned into lampshades. Orthodox opinion also once held that the world is flat."

2. Party's constitution is committed to restoring white supremacy in Britain

After two decades in which the party actively excluded any members from ethnic communities, Griffin last week accepted a review of its governing rules to allow black and Asian people to join its ranks after a legal victory for the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

But the 12-page constitution of the BNP remains unashamedly a manifesto for an ethnically cleansed nation. It reads: "The British National Party stands for the preservation of the national and ethnic character of the British people and is wholly opposed to any form of racial integration between British and non-European peoples. It is therefore committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent, the overwhelmingly white make-up of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948."

3. Send the Olympics back to Athens - and other flagship BNP policies

Alongside its pledge to offer Britain's ethnic minorities voluntary repatriation and its leader's description of Islam as a "wicked and vicious faith", the BNP has tried to broaden its electoral appeal with a raft of new policies.

In the 2008 London Assembly elections, the party took its "send them back" theme a stage further by offering to repatriate the 2012 Olympics. Its manifesto read: "We... believe that the Olympics should be held in Greece on a permanent basis. That is their birthplace and it is wrong for athletes to be forced to roam the world like homeless vagrants looking for a new venue each four years."

Griffin has long warned of the risk of a civil war in Britain sparked by racial tensions. In 2005, the party's general election manifesto called for adults who had completed a certain amount of military service to be "required to keep in a safe locker in their homes a standard-issue military assault rifle and ammunition". To this list has now been added the return of the birch for juvenile offenders and hanging for paedophiles, rapists, drug dealers and murderers.

4. Billy Brit: mascot that glorifies Powell

"In 1912 a lion was born./Enoch was his name./A gentleman. A British hero./Through truth, the man found fame./He gave a speech called 'Rivers of Blood'./And never gave up the fight./Enoch Powell spoke for me and Enoch Powell was white".

So sings Billy Brit, the official mascot of the youth wing of the BNP, during a campaigning video for the 2009 European elections.

Aimed at children as young as eight, the flame-haired puppet features in videos posted on YouTube and the BNP website reciting a series of "educational poems". Children have been sent photographs of Billy or encouraged to download his picture along with a comic, 'The Comet', delivered to "all you eight- to 12-year-olds out there who love your country".

Youth members of the BNP are invited to regular camps where they discuss ideology and are encouraged to perform up to eight hours of "political activism" each month.

5. Encounters with the Ku Klux Klan in America

In 2000, Nick Griffin travelled to the US to address an organisation called the American Friends of the BNP. Members of the group included David Duke, at the time leader of the Ku Klux Klan, and James W Von Brunn, a white supremacist who killed a security man in an attack on Washington's holocaust museum earlier this year. During Griffin's visit, he outlined his blueprint for making his party electable by dropping its lexicon of "racial purity" and Jewish conspiracies: "The BNP isn't about selling out its ideas, but we are determined to sell them. Basically, that means to use saleable words such as freedom, identity, security, democracy."

Griffin continued: "Once we're in a position where we control the British broadcasting media, then perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say, 'yes, every last one must go'. But if you hold that out as your sole aim to start with, you're not going to get anywhere. So, instead of talking about racial purity, we talk about identity."

6. Griffin's pride in his 'strong, direct link to Mosley'

With more than 900,000 votes cast in its favour in the European elections, the BNP insists it is part of mass politics. Founded in 1982 by John Tyndall, the party grew from a schism in the National Front, of which Nick Griffin was, at one point, national co-ordinator.

Griffin joined the BNP in 1995 and, by 1999, had taken over as leader, deposing Tyndall. Griffin, who was introduced to the works of the 1930s British fascist leader Oswald Mosley from his grandfather's bookshelves, is unabashed about tracing his political DNA back to an avowed admirer of Hitler. He told one interviewer: "There is a strong, direct link from Oswald Mosley to me."

7. The party membership that dare not speak its name

The BNP has been regularly rocked by internal disagreements and security breaches, including the leak of its entire membership list by a disgruntled former activist.

As part of the overhaul of its image - described by Nick Griffin as "put the boots away and put suits on" - and efforts to thwart entryists, the party adopted a system of secure emails and secret rendezvous points as well as embarking on a recruitment drive beyond its blue-collar heartland. The success of the campaign was revealed in 2006 when it was disclosed that Simone Clarke, the principal dancer of the English National Ballet, was a member.

Two years ago, a dispute over the actions of three senior party figures led to the resignation of more than 50 local and national officials. In November last year, the BNP suffered a further blow when its 10,000-strong membership list was published on the internet. The revelation led to the dismissal of at least three police and prison officers.

8. The Italian terrorist Griffin names as an influence

In August, Griffin cited Roberto Fiore - a convicted criminal and member of the Italian terrorist group implicated in the 1980 Bologna bombing that killed 85 people - as an important influence on the party. Mr Fiore was sentenced in absentia to 10 years in prison in 1985 for his membership of the political wing of the party. His conviction has since "timed out" under Italian statute of limitation laws, allowing him to return to his homeland where he is leader of far-right party Forza Nuova. He recently took up the European Parliament seat vacated by Benito Mussolini's granddaughter, Alessandra.

9. David Copeland: London nail-bomber and BNP member

In 2007, London nailbomber and former BNP member David Copeland was sentenced to a minimum of 50 years in prison for setting off three explosives, killing three people and injuring 139 others. Other BNP criminals include Ian Hindle and Andrew Wells, convicted of having sex with a child and engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child respectively. Former BNP candidate in Coventry Roderick Rowley was sentenced to 15 months in prison after admitting to fourteen charges of making, distributing or possessing obscene images of children.

10. Some of those other members who have resorted to aggression

In 2006, Kevin Hughes, election agent for the BNP Redditch councillor David Enderby, was sentenced to 30 months in prison - reduced to 24 on appeal - for assaulting an Iraqi asylum seeker.

Earlier this year, pensioner John Jones was convicted of racially aggravated threatening behaviour after giving a Nazi salute on his way to a BNP rally in Derbyshire.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby Rory » Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:57 pm

Perhaps a relevant figure worthy of more attention in this thread. Where extreme nationalism, Islamism and the occult mix: With courtesy going to the talented and much missed, Mr Wells

http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... ation.html


In the mid-90s, in an essay entitled "Death Before Dishonour," British neo-Nazi political philosopher David Myatt wrote:

To live and act like an Aryan - that is, with nobility of character - means upholding and living by this principle of Death Before Dishonour. Nothing else is more important - not personal happiness, not personal love, not personal comfort and wealth. This principle expresses the spirit, or ethos, of the Aryan warrior, and to be Aryan means to live like such a warrior, for however short a time.

Also, in "The Divine Revelation of Adolf Hitler":

Quintessentially, the revelation of Adolf Hitler has rendered all other religions obsolete. For this is the first and most important revelation of the cosmic Being - of the purpose of the cosmic Being. Other religions now belong to the past; they are historical curiosities.... All these religions are earth-bound; they do not seek to fulfil a Destiny among the stars, bringing more life, more consciousness.

At about the same time, Anton Long, Grandmaster of the British-based "traditional" Satanic group the Order of Nine Angles, wrote:

We uphold human culling as beneficial, for both the individual who does the culling (it being a character-building experience) and for our species in general, since culling by its nature removes the worthless and thus improves the stock. Naturally, there are proper ways to choose who is to be culled - each victim is chosen because they have shown themselves to be suitable. They are never chosen at random, as they are never "innocent."

Two years ago, in "The Perspective of Islam," radical theoretician and al Qaeda apologist Abdul Aziz wrote:

The majority of Westerners condemn martyrdom operations on the basis of the Western perspective, using Western criteria, failing to understand the Muslim belief that this life of ours is only a means, a test, and thus failing to understand that many Muslims are willing to give up their own lives in order to do their Islamic duty, trusting as these Muslims do in the judgement of Allah.... Our life here on this planet we call Earth is only an opportunity - never to return - to gain entry into Jannah and that one of the best means to gain such entry is to strive, and if necessary die, in the Cause of Allah.

What do these people have in common? Everything. They - and many more, besides - are the same person. Let's call him, for simplicity's sake, David Myatt. But what he is, there's nothing simple about that.



Combat 18 is a neo-Nazi org formed in 1991 to provide hooligan muscle for the racist British National Party. (Its "18" numerically represents "AH," the initials of Adolph Hitler.) Myatt has described himself as its political philosopher.

There's much suspicion, on the both the left and right, that Combat 18 "was created by Britain's internal security service MI5 to discredit the BNP while acting as a honey trap, or sting operation, designed to attract the most violent neo-Nazis in Britain into a single organization, where they could be monitored more easily." Its leader, Charlie Sargent, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1997 for the murder of another member, was also an alleged Special Branch informant.

Combat 18 splintered, with Myatt founding the most radical faction, the National Socialist Movement, which remained loyal to purported informant Sargent.

In 1999 NSM member David Copeland conducted a racist nail-bombing campaign which killed three people and injured 129. Myatt's "A Practical Guide to Aryan Revolution" was particularly formative to Copeland's thinking. In a profile of Copeland, BBC's Panorama determined:

...the man whose ideas had more influence than most on Copeland was David Myatt from Worcestershire, founder member of the NSM and its first leader. He once said the Nazi movement needed people "prepared to fight, prepared to get their hands dirty, and perhaps spill some blood."

And though Combat 18 splintered under suspicion of members' motives and loyalties, it isn't quite finished yet being a bloody nuisance. A headline yesterday from Northern Ireland (where Combat 18 is reputed to be used by MI5 to infiltrate Loyalist paramilitaries): Neo-Nazis have threatened me, says Ulster assembly member John Dallat, who has received threats from Combat 18 to burn down his house and torch his office.



The Hexagon archives records an encounter with the unnamed leader of the "Order of Nine Angles" - apparently Myatt - who supposedly co-authored a book with associate "Christos Beest" which likened the ONA "to a modern equivalent of the German Thule Society, precursor of the Nazi Party and responsible for a number of assassinations of dissenters...the reader is lead to believe that the group are busy 'culling human dross.'"

Hexagon, while refusing to disclose the name of the leader, found "a nucleus of four middle aged men surrounded by up to ten younger aspiring acolytes, again all male. The group uses homosexual rites and although they may well have contact with the far right are highly unlikely to be capable of carrying out numerous murders as darkly hinted at."

In The Song of a Satanist, "Stephen Brown" - yet another Myatt pseudonym - writes:

Most Satanists cannot publish an autobiography, or even have a biography which relates their life in detail while they still live, for the simple reason that it would probably render them liable to prosecution by those asinine guardians of the even more stupid system of 'Law'. (Plus the fact that most wish to continue their sinister esoteric work in secret, to aid the sinister dialectic.) If this threat does not exist, then their life has not been Satanic enough.

Another demonstration of the convergence of fascism and occultism is found in the ONA's Temple 88, which is described as an instantiation of the "aryanist and national-socialist ideas/ideals of the Order of Nine Angles." The writings of "Temple 88" are recommended for higher initiates, having "reached the seventh stage (Saturn) of the septenary Tree of Wyrd," who are "assumed to be able to judge and understand why the usage of national-socialism and aryanism is implemented in the Order of Nine Angles ideological structure."

And what are the Nine Angles? A ceremonial means to manifest the "Dark Gods." And perhaps not surprisingly, here's where things get Lovecraftian:

The details that Lovecraft gives regarding 'calls' and rites are mostly fanciful and only in a few places does he inadvertently reveal the truth - for example, in his mention of the trapezohedron and 'Azathoth'. The key to travel along the passages between the star nexions is the Nine Angles and the key to the Nine Angles is the crystal tetrahedron which is activated by voice vibration. 'Azathoth' as described by Lovecraft, is a symbolic and distorted re-presentation of the intersection, in acausal space-time, of these astral star passages: a kind of galactic vortex or node. Those who journey there never return the same. Along the star passages the shells of long dead civilizations lie strewn. The Nine Angles (the key to contact both physical and astral) are re-presented in the septenary Star Game and it is through this symbolic re-presentation that the magick of the Dark Gods is made manifest. The rest, to the uninitiated, is sheer terror.

(Lt Col Michael Aquino has authored the Lovecraftian "Ceremony of the Nine Angles" for the Temple of Set, but disavows Myatt and the ONA's public embrace of human sacrifice.)

And since we've come this far, let's remind ourselves: according to the ONA, where do these "Dark Gods" reside?

The acausal universe itself may be described as that aspect of the cosmos bounded by acausal time and possessing more than three spatial dimenions; the causal universe may be described as that aspect of the cosmos bounded by causal, or linear, time and possessing three spatial dimensions at right angles to each other. The entities known to esoteric tradition as the Dark Gods are beings which exist in the acausal universe. Other such beings probably exist in the acausal realm, but the Dark Gods are known to us through having, at various times in our evolution, 'intruded' into our spatial universe.

As I've noted in an earlier post, the "acausal universe" recalls Michio Kaku's Parallel Worlds, in which he writes that "anyone who can tap into the fourth spatial dimension (or what is today called the fifth dimension, with time being the fourth) can indeed become invisible, and can even assume the powers normally ascribed to ghosts and gods." And interestingly, one of the things David Myatt may be said to be with some assurance is a student of physics.



In 2000 Myatt reputedly converted to Islam, and quickly became an advocate for al Qaeda "martyrdom operations." Though as he had often done, Myatt hid his previous associations by assuming an alias. He became "Abdul Aziz."

This story from February 16, 2003, entitled "Midland Nazi turns to Islam," was one of the first to make the connection between the "Koranic scholar," the neo-Nazi and the occultist:

A "Satanic Fuhrer" who urged neo-Nazis to fight a race war has turned full circle to become an Islamic fundamentalist.

Midland-based David Myatt, 51, was the political guru behind white supremacist group Combat 18 and has been the leading hardline Nazi intellectual in Britain since the 1960s.

Now the self-confessed Pagan and Adolf Hitler worshipper hails al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden as his inspiration and praises the World Trade Center attacks as acts of heroism...supporting suicide missions and urging young Muslims to take up Jihad.

"Turning full circle" always sounded to me like a lot of fuss to create the appearance of motion, while returning to one's starting point.



Is Myatt an agent provocateur, a shit-disturber who can't settle upon a radical philosophy, something more, or something less? It's difficult to assess motive, but consider that he has been arrested numerous times for such things as writing and disseminating "practical terrorist guides" on suspicion of conspiracy to murder. These cases have always been dropped due to "lack of evidence." Does he enjoy protection? The record is suggestive that he does. And if it appears so, then we should ask the next question: Why?

One Muslim internet user told the Sunday Mercury that Myatt, who has an IQ of 187, had convinced other users he was an Islamic scholar with his eloquent arguments backed with Koranic verses. He said: "After September 11 Abdul Aziz's messages started to become more extreme.

"But because he wrote with authority, many less-knowledgeable Muslims thought he was a holy man and began supporting his fundamentalist views. When his true identity was revealed by other users on the site, he changed his online name to Abdul bin Aziz and then al Haqq."

Myatt may seem to have flitted from one politico-religious philosophy to another, but there is a terrible thread of continuity and rigour through his life and writings that suggests he is much more than a disingenuous provocateur. Naziism and Islamicism have served, in turn, as modalities of disruption for what remains at core an occult working to sow general chaos and division - the necessary passage of "Helter Skelter" to break down the Old Order, before the founding of the New.

So again: whose interests are served by there being a David Myatt? Is he is own man - or men - or does he belong to someone else? Or is it something else - an intelligence service perhaps, or something, say, acausal?
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Mon Feb 10, 2014 11:19 pm

Yes- Myatt is very, very relevant. Sure he's a fringe character and in a certain sense, an idiot- but some idiots can be very useful, indeed.

Made me think also of this:


Wednesday, 17 July 2013

American Psychos: Fascist Hippies coming to Town

Guest post by Jack Dash

http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2013/07 ... oming.html

Image
"None of this had any real connection to integration or peace between races. Integration did not occur -- flight of the whites occurred. It was no secret that once blacks predominated in an area, the crime rate would soar and the streets would become dangerous to walk." Robert N. Taylor - Chronicles of Chaos, 2006

Booked to appear at a small venue called the Green Note in Camden, London on September 6th 2013 is a shadowy American folk duo known as Changes. Cousins Robert N. Taylor and Nicholas Tesluk started playing together in coffee houses of their native Chicago in the dusk of the 60s,in an America redolent with the bad vibes of the Manson Family's 'Acid Fascism' and as the hippy dream turned bum trip.

Taylor and Tesluk have a history of fascist involvement stretching back to the very early 60s, originating in their membership of the Chicago chapter of the Minutemen around 60-61, a vigilante militia group founded to combat what they saw as the communist threat to America. Here is Taylor in an interview with the fascist neofolk/industrial music magazine Stigmata in 2005 talking about the organisation and his significant role in it:
"Minutemen drew from the full scope of those on the right. From "Barry Goldwater" type conservatives, Objectivists and libertarians, anti-communists,constitutionalists, Christian Identity, neo-Fascists, Nazis, gun-owner advocates, etc.."

"My involvement in the Minutemen was considerable. I became a member of the newly formed organization at about 14 years old. I first was a member, then became the principle organizer and leader in the Chicago area. Then I became a member of the Executive council of ten as the director of intelligence. By the time I was 24 years old I was the editor of the organization's publication, On Target as well as the national spokesman for the group. My involvement lasted through most of the years of the organization's existence."

"What made On Target uniquely different from other anti-communist or right-wing publications was that in addition to articles and commentary on various current issues, it also contained names, addresses and phone numbers of its assumed communist and liberal enemies. Often literal dossiers on such people were featured. Combine the slogan, cross-hair masthead, and such detailed information on perceived enemies, and the potential threat was implied, without ever being actually stated."

"We have studied your Communist smirch, Mao, Che, Bhukarin. We have learned our lessons well and have added a few homegrown Yankee tricks of our own. Before you start your next smear campaign, before you murder again, before you railroad another patriot into a mental institution...better think it over. See the old man at the corner where you buy your paper? He may have a silencer equipped pistol under his coat. That extra fountain pen in the pocket of your insurance salesman that calls on you might be a cyanide-gas gun. What about your milkman? Arsenic works slow but sure. Your auto mechanic may stay up nights studying booby-traps. These patriots are not going to let you take their freedom away from them. They have learned the silent knife, the strangler's chord, the target rifle that hits sparrows at 200 yards. Only their leaders restrain them. Traitors beware! Even now the cross-hairs are on the back of your necks..."

The publicity for this upcoming tour makes reference to Italian facist philosopher Julius Evola, describing the evening as "An intimate evening of music for aristocrats of the soul" and calling the tour the 'Ride the Tiger World Tour', both taken from the title of one of Evola's books, Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul (published in 1961). Evola's fascism was esoteric and Brahminical, and although he had close ties with Mussolini and the Nazi Party in the 30s and 40s, he considered both to have failed the cause of fascism because they were too proletarian in ideology and structure. At the bottom of the poster is printed 'Kali Yuga' (the Age of Vice), a pointed reference to current era of the Hindu calender constantly referenced by fascists like Evola and esoteric Nazi Savitri Devi as a prophecy of the decline of world into decadence, reliance on technology, and descent into materialism and greed, as predicted in the Mahabharata Hindu scriptures written around 400 BC, and a favourite touchstone for post-Nazi fascism because of its place ancient Aryan history and its narrative of decline, a constant refrain of fascism. In the past Changes also toured under the banner 'Men Among The Ruins', the title of another of Evola's books.

The band were rediscovered by Michael Moynihan of Blood Axis notoriety in 1996, who then produced and released their next album on his Storm label alongside other far-right acts like Allerseen and David E. Williams. They quickly became revered in the scene as the progenitors of neofolk.

Austrian label HauRuck! started by comedy neofolk Stormtrooper Albin Julius rereleased Fire of Life in both LP and CD form in 2001, before releasing a new full length Changes album, Orphan In The Storm.

In 2005 they released an untitled CD with British fascist folk musician Andrew King (Sol Invictus, Brown Sierra) on the Portuguese Terra Fria label. King was recently sacked from another neofolk band Sol Invictus (a band with its own seriously fascist history) because he recorded a song by David E Williams called 'Wotan Rains On A Plutocrat's Parade', in which he amended the lyrics to make the song unambiguously racist and Nazi.

The event is obviously being promoted quietly so as to avoid the unwanted attention of anti-fascist organisations like Searchlight and Antifa. For example Michael Moynihan is referred to as "a friend" and not by name in the biography on the venue's site, presumably because of his own involvement in far-right politics. No mention of their history in the Minutemen is made , and they are presented as a straight-forward folk act. Tesluk talked about the unwanted attention of antifa protesters in the same Stigmata interview quoted above:

"As for the actual antifas congregated a block away, Douglas, of Death In June, walked over to confront them and they all faded away and acted like he was the invisible man. I passed them at least three times and they wouldn't even look in my direction. No one there was afraid of those punks."

The concert, featuring Death in June, a famous British fascist neofolk band, in Changes' hometown of Chicago, was cancelled in the end because the Jewish venue owner became aware of the bands' political affiliations.

Unlike many contemporary neofolk groups Changes seem relatively comfortable talking about their far-right politics, and specifically how with Moynihan's help they reached a young neofolk audience that includes plenty of radical traditionalists, Asatru practitioners, esoteric fascists, neo-Nazis and Third Positionists who are the natural audience for Changes' Eurocentric fascism:

"In the early to mid '70s the audiences were alright, but I doubt that most of them knew what our music was all about. The folk music scene was pervaded with leftists at that time, both as performers and as audiences. That has radically changed. It was as if Changes had to wait over thirty years to find the real audience it had been seeking all those years." Robert N. Taylor - Chronicles of Chaos, 2006

At the time of writing the tour will also include in concerts in Lithuania, Germany, Moscow and Hungary, Italy, Denmark, Austria, and Greece.

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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Tue Feb 11, 2014 7:04 am

Funnily enough, Nick Griffin's poor performance on Question Time did not contribute to the BNP's downfall, this was almost entirely due to internal infighting within the BNP which could be observed on certain internet forums as they all took potshots at each other in public.
The tried and tested 'they're all against us' motif worked quite well within the BNP concerning QT, and actually excused or even bolstered him in the eyes of members.

You posted the 'American Psychos' article about two weeks ago on here (the picture's a dead giveaway), and the repetition with hardly any context from you shows how disconnected you are with the actual subject matter.

Nevertheless, it would serve you well to concentrate on the American side of things, and then you might actually start connecting some dots. Your sudden and odd concentration on British stuff (my stamping ground as you know) also indicates that you are merely a careless C&P bot. It's not enough just to post stuff, you need to say why, and especially explain repetition
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:09 am

Great analysis which explains some of the phenomena exposed previously here from an anti-Fascist perspective, as in the closing paragraph:

One of the more prevalent opinions on this topic is: as long as these are just the quirks of some pseudo-eccentrics, we shouldn’t care. However, the danger of lies in a camouflaged and sneaking popularisation of ideas as concepts of the New Right can not be underestimated. Caught in the cul-de-sac of “straight” neo-nazi politics, the individuals involved in the far right and neo-folk switched to “metapolitical”, sub-cultural strategies. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to expose these actual connections, to prompt those in the “grey zone” to distance themselves, and especially to expose the actual arbitrariness and banality of fascist thinking.


The whole article is here:


From Subculture to Hegemony: Transversal Strategies of the New Right in Neofolk and Martial Industrial

Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial are two sub-categories of Industrial Music, which developed in the 1980’s. Industrial as such was a direction that – parallel to Punk Rock – worked with the latest electronics in order to create an aesthetic of futuristic noise machines of the late 20th century and research extreme zones of contemporary society and history. Throbbing Gristle already thematized concentration camps, serial killers, Aleister Crowley etc by using cut-up techniques of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin and thus with strategies of liberation from brain washing. Similarly, Cabaret Voltaire were said to wage a “propaganda war against the propaganda war” (Industrial Culture Handbook). With SPK this was combined with a critique of Psychiatry and a presentation of extremes of the body and death. In the 80’s there were agitational and critical bands such as Test Dept., Nocturnal Emissions and Bourbonese Qualk which were often associated with the ever broadening spectrum of “Industrial”. However, with Laibach the critique of totalitarianism became more ambivalent. This ambivalence was at first seemingly shared by Death In June, the band that in many ways was at the origin of what is now considered Neo-Folk and Martial Industrial.

Death In June has already been the subject of an article in datacide by Stewart Home.
Although the band’s name derives from the “night of the long knives” when the SA leadership and other elements in German fascism were liquidated by Hitler and the SS in June 1934, DIJ’s left wing origins as well as their collaboration with a number of musicians not suspected to have far right leanings seemed to suggest to followers of 80’s industrial that their use of fascist imagery had some sort of critical element to it. There was a romantic and fetishistic element to it and and when Tony Wakeford was sacked from the band (supposedly) for his membership in the National Front it seemed to show that indeed they were rejecting politics and their use of fascist themes and imagery was on the level of aesthetic provocation.

In the course of the late 80’s and throughout the 90’s a number of other bands flocked to the use of this strategy creating a small sub-culture heavy with far right symbolisms and content, sometimes more, sometimes less explicit and politically oriented. Although there is no doubt that this scene harbours a lot of entirely “unpolitical” elements, there are definite personal connections to some elements of the organized far right who are trying to use a “metapolitical” strategy of intervention to fight their fascist kulturkampf.

Right wing sub-cultures are still mostly associated with White Power rock, Skinhead and Oi!-music. This has historical reasons. Central in this is the band Skrewdriver around Ian Stuart Donaldson. The first couple of 7”s and the first album came out on the pub/punk rock label Chiswick Records in 1977. Lack of success however made the band dissolve twice until they reformed again in 1982 and released a 12” on Last Resort’s Boot and Braces Records and then a couple of 7”s on the National Front’s White Noise Records. By now they had become the quintessential White Power band and played numerous “Rock Against Communism” festivals, the NF-answer to the much more popular Rock Against Racism festivals at the time. In 1987, Ian Stuart fell out with Patrick Harrington and Derek Holland of the White Noise Club, the National Front’s “musical” arm, and founded his own Blood & Honour network, in which he played a leading role until his death in a car accident in 1993.

Two things have to be stated in our context here:

1. The ludicrous paranoid race hate ramblings present in the lyrics of Skrewdriver and a host of other like-minded bands that joined them just didn’t lead them anywhere in terms of commercial success, which is something Stuart by his own admission wanted to achieve.

2. With that avenue barred, this scene didn’t and doesn’t have problems outing themselves as National Socialists. To present their political ideas they can do without references to obscure authors of the “conservative revolution” or völkish occultists, and are quite happy to chant their primitive slogans undiluted.

The same is true with “National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM), the openly neo-nazi section of the Black Metal scene and certain White Power Noise Bands. There seems to be a competition to pronounce the most inhuman, brutal and anti-Semitic messages. Song titles as “Die Juden sind unser Unglück”, “Systematische Judische Vernichtung” (Deathkey), “Sieg Heil Vaterland”, “Europa Erwache!” (Der Stürmer), “The Whitest Power”, “Blood Banner SS”, “Juda Verrecke” (Streicher) are quite common.

With Neo-Folk and other outgrowths of the Industrial scene this is different. A great importance is attached to avoid being easily associated with the brown swamp. Their attitude is intellectual and elitist with adoration for Ernst Jünger and Julius Evola not Hitler and Mussolini. Even with key figures who have undeniably been members of far right political groups (in Britain this is crystallized around the mid-80’s National Front and its “Political Soldier” faction), there is a surprising eagerness to distance themselves from allegations of “fascism”. This has a historical precedent in the French “Nouvelle Droite” (see appendix) who, motivated to get out of the neo-Nazi cul-de-sac, and on their march through the institutions, tried hard to avoid being tagged fascists while serving old wine in new bottles, or old ideology in new phraseology for to the present day.

Troy Southgate, head of the group HERR, seems particularly eager not to be branded a fascist despite his history as a wanderer from one group of the extreme right to the other (such as the National Front, the International Third Position, the English Nationalist Movement, the National Revolutionary Faction etc). Presumably this is a tactical move not to scare away potential recruits to his more recent “National Anarchist Movement”. With a list of his favorite authors including pre-cursors like Bakunin, Proudhon and Nietzsche, “classic” fascist and National-Bolshevik authors such as Julius Evola, the Strasser Brothers, Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ernst Niekisch, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Karl Haushofer, and finally more contemporary fascists and esoteric Hitlerists like Francis Parker Yockey, Miguel Serrano and Savitri Devi, one wonders why he pretends to be so allergic to the f-word. While this is not necessarily a homogenous bunch of authors, and most of them are not “Nazis” in the sense of toeing the line of the NSDAP, all of them (minus the 19th century pre-cursers) can reasonably be called fascist in the sense of using “fascism” as an umbrella term for tendencies including the conservative revolution, national bolshevism, the Hitler-Nazis to the various strains of the contemporary New Right.

Armin Mohler, a historian and speaker of the “conservative revolution” said: “Fascism for me, is when disappointed liberals and disappointed socialists come together for something new. Out of this emerges what is called conservative revolution.” He somewhat modifies this point in 1973/74: “Apart from a few extras from the ‘lunatic fringe’, no one was defining themselves as ‘fascist’ anymore.” He then tries to define what “fascist” means. He chooses a procedural method he terms the “physiognomic approach”: “In any case all attempts to understand fascism from its theoretical declarations, or (which is not the same) to reduce it to a theory, are doomed to fail (…) In this area of politics the relationship to the concept (Begriff) is just instrumental, indirect, retrospective. Preceding there is a decision for a gesture, a rhythm, in short: a style. This style can of course express itself in words – fascism is not mute, on the contrary. It loves words – but they are not there to communicate a logical context”, rather, according to Mohler, they lead “most of the time” to “random and arbitrary results”. “To summarize we can say that fascists can obviously easily accept discrepancies in theory, because their communication is happening in a shorter curve, exactly through ‘style’”. (Von Rechts gesehen, 181f.)

Mussolini declared in an almost more radical fashion: “Fascism is to the highest degree a relativist movement, because it never made the attempt to clothe its multi-layered and powerful mentality in a defined program. Its success lies rather in the fact that it has followed constantly changing individual inspirations (…) Us fascists have always expressed out complete indifference towards any theory…” Mohler (1920-2003) himself was increasingly openly calling himself a fascist towards the end of his life, while the younger “new right” adepts on the contrary try to utilize an ideological fog machine to obscure their positions.

While Southgate only more recently added a musical “career” to his CV, his former comrade in the NF, Tony Wakeford, has been involved with music longer than his involvement with far right politics. In fact, Wakeford did have roots in the far left scene as a member of the Socialist Workers Party when he was in the band Crisis (see Datacide 7). Douglas Pearce who was also simultaneously in the International Marxist Group. Crisis was dissolved apparently out of disillusionment with the left, and Death In June was founded in 1981.

Shortly afterwards Tony Wakeford joined the National Front. The NF had been the most important party of British neo-fascism in the 1970’s. However, in the early 80’s it already was in a state of decline and internal factional disputes. There was soon a de facto split between the “Official NF” and the “Flag Group”. In control of the “Official NF” was the “Political Soldier” faction around Nick Griffin and Patrick Harrington, and it was with this latter faction that Wakeford was sympathizing. Supposedly Wakeford had to leave the band DIJ for this reason, although this seems strange, given that this was right at the point when the NF took a turn to Strasserism, the so-called “left wing” of National Socialism. Douglas Pearce himself said in 1992 that when “searching for a new political perspective we stumbled across nationalist Bolshevism (…) people like Gregor Strasser and Ernst Röhm, who were later known as the ‘second revolutionaries’”.
This is a position that would have been compatible with the “Political Soldiers” from the NF.

The question has to be inserted here: why wasn’t DIJ immediately recognized as a far right band by most people? There are different reasons for this. Their background was explicitly left, texts and imagery seemed to be ambivalent, one wanted to recognize not a glorification but also a critique, and when the band was singing the Horst Wessel Lied, it was seen as a provocation embedded in a historical collage. One could and should have been more critical, but songs like “Death of the West” were serving both “left” and “right”-wing anti-Western resentment. People like John Balance and David Tibet, who seemed unsuspicious, were playing on DIJ records and Douglas Pearce was working for a time in Rough Trade record shop, which was supposed to be politically correct – hadn’t they banned Whitehouse records for the fact the band shared the same address as the fascist League of St. George? And last but not least hadn’t Wakeford been sacked from the band for his involvement with the NF?

After leaving DIJ, Wakeford founded the band Above The Ruins with the bassist Gary Smith of No Remorse, which was an openly neo-nazi band similar to Skrewdriver both in terms of musical style and ideological direction. Above The Ruins released one album and became effectively the first line-up of the new band Sol Invictus, in which Wakeford is still active. Sol Invictus first album was called “Against The Modern World” in homage to Julius Evola, on which Smith still played bass, and was joined by Ian Read and Liz Gray. Wakeford has denied this connection for many years, although there was a re-release of the album in 1996 which was also sold through the Sol Invictus mail order. Above the Ruins featured on a National Front benefit sampler called “No Surrender” alongside the likes of Skrewdriver on the Rock-o-Rama label, who have as recently as 2008 released a track by No Remorse on a 30 years anniversary compilation. Interesting detail: The track “Waiting” had not previously been released on Rock-o-Rama, but was on the “Songs of the Wolf” album. This album, released originally on cassette tape in 1984, then on vinyl in 1986, had already reaped praise in Scorpion magazine from Michael Walker, who is another figure of the British New Right as former NF member.

What is certain is that Wakeford makes some sort of effort at damage control concerning his involvements with the far right. His strategy seems to be to make flimsy disclaimers and otherwise deny everything (see his “Message from Tony” on his website). The legend that he was only briefly involved with far right politics in ca. 1984 doesn’t hold up. His involvement with the NF went back at least two years during which he was a member of DIJ. Wakeford has had many personal involvements with important figures of the far right till at least 1999 when Richard Lawson was best man at his wedding, which also include figures like Patrick Harrington and National Socialist Movement leader Tony Williams. We already encountered Patrick Harrington as one of the organizers of the White Noise Club in the mid 80’s, and he was also a part of the Political Soldier faction of the NF. When this faction split at the end of the decade (leaving the small rump of the NF to the “Flag” group), it produced the International Third Position (Griffin, Holland) and the “Third Way” (Harrington), which is posing as a “think tank” rather than a political group. Harrington remains a confidant of Griffin as the chairman of the fake trade union Solidarity, which is essentially a BNP front. Wakeford was good friends with Harrington and Tony Williams, the future leader of the National Socialist Movement and the person who would issue his NSM membership card to London nail-bomber David Copeland. Wakeford’s other close friend Richard Lawson had a career in the extreme right going back into the 70’s. He was editor of “Britain First” together with Dave McCalden, who became known as a holocaust revisionist, followed the Strasserite split of the short lived National Party. In the 80’s he returned to the “Strasserized” National Front, founded the IONA-Group (Islands of the North Atlantic) and wrote for Scorpion, the magazine of Michael Walker (who was one of the people who safe-housed Italian neo-fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore). In the mid-90’s, Lawson founded the fluxeuropa website and was involved along with Southgate in Alternative Green, the nationalistic spin-off from Green Anarchist. As we can see, Wakeford was surrounded by key figures of the extreme right until the end of the 90’s at least. So it’s not surprising that he spouts on about Europe in true new right fashion in an interview with Jean Louis Vaxelaire, which was published on Lawson’s fluxeuropa site. Wakeford said that Europe was “one of my obsessions”, and slightly distanced himself from 19th century concepts of nationalism by preferring to see “Europe as a collection of regions”, but he then in accordance with the new right decried the “unstoppable” “americanization of European culture.”

Wakeford and Southgate are by no means the only ones involved in the far right. Ian Read, a founding member of Sol Invictus and occasional member of Current 93, who featured on Death In June’s “Brown Book”, founded his own project Fire & Ice in 1990. Known in occult circles for his editorship of Chaos International, his interests are focussed on runes, odinism, nordic mythology, and he thinks of himself as one of the most important occultists of the British Isles. But he too has a history as a far right militant as he acted as security for Michael Walker and Michèle Renouf at events around 1990.

Renouf is one of the leading figures of British holocaust denial and anti-Semites. Amongst other things, she participated in the Teheran holocaust conference, and is one of the most active supporters of David Irving. She also pops up in our context again in 2007 when she spoke at an event of Southgate’s New Right groupuscule, as reported by the anti-Fascist magazine Searchlight. This (and a looming leadership contest) led to disputes within the British National Party, since its culture commissioner, self-declared “philosopher” and “artist” (who made garish oil paintings with titles such as “Adolf and Leni” or “Freud was wrong”) was simultaneously Southgate’s partner in the New Right grouplet. This was at a time when Nick Griffin (former Political Soldier, now BNP chairman and recently elected to the European Parliament) tried to create a more “respectable” image for the party. Of course if leading functionaries rub shoulders with radical anti-Zionists and anti-Semites, who, as Renouf does, believe that “Hamas fights for us all”, then Griffin’s attempt to clear the BNP from charges of anti-Semitism have little credibility.

Back to Neo-Folk: In contrast to “Battlenoise!”, the book titled “Looking For Europe” was received with praise in the scene. The 500 page convolute is stuffed with information on bands and records. It functions a bit like a film documentary cut with snippets of interviews in between the text, and amended with “essays” on the “philosophical” background of the artists. The book title of course is taken from a song by Sol Invictus. All sides of the scene are presented and indeed all kinds of references are mentioned and quoted, but the overall agenda seems to be to discredit the anti-Fascists who are active in monitoring and counter-acting the fascist tendencies in neo-folk. Thus, “Rik” from the fluxeuropa web site comments on whether the Neofolk-scene in England has the reputation of being politically incorrect: “The witch hunters of Political Correctness have their very own and narrow minded political agenda – a kind of ‘social marxism’ – and are not satisfied with anything less than complete compliance with their own values and aims. To justify oneself towards these people would be to play their game, and is ultimately futile. This is why I think we shouldn’t even pose this question.” (p 24) This “Rik” can be none other than Richard Lawson, who we already encountered as NF cadre and IONA founder, but the reader is kept in the dark about these facts. It would be interesting to know if the authors of the book knew this information. If the answer is yes, it would show that they are manipulating the reader on this question; if no, it means they didn’t do their research properly. Either way it illustrates well how the book operates – consciously or not – in its quest to create a whitewashed encyclopedia of Neofolk. Why left wing authors like Martin Büsser or Lars Brinkmann let themselves be instrumentalized remains unclear, but it makes it possible that pretend-equilibrium is created. Most importantly, the involvement of the far right in Neofolk is trivialized and reduced to footnote status.

One other method in this strategy is to present authors such as Ernst Jünger and Julius Evola as heroic mavericks and mystical sages. It is worth briefly looking into their relationships with fascism. Ernst Jünger was active as a publicist and author from the 1920’s onwards on the fringes of the furthest right of the Weimar Republic. He was never a Hitlerite National Socialist, but still he was one of those intellectuals who expected to be the helm of intellectual life after the “German Revolution”. Benn and Heidegger are other examples of this. In 1964, Jünger wrote in his book “Maxima-Minima”: “Revolutions also have a mechanical side”, complaining that the result is that “subaltern” types are coming to the fore. I’m sure he is thinking of the mediocre writers that became national authors of Nazi Germany. Of course Jünger is a stylistic “genius” compared to a Herbert Böhme. It was beneath him to formulate cheap adulations of the “Führer”. Much has been made of Jünger’s supposed refusal to join the Deutsche Akademie der Dichtung when it was purged and then filled with Nazis in the spring of 1933. Fact is that he wasn’t actually invited to join it in May ‘33. One month later, when the NSDAP was already consolidating its power, five more writers were nominated to the Academy. Besides Jakob Schaffner, this also included Jünger. However Jünger got the least number of votes. The poet was insulted and penned a letter of refusal even before the actual invitation arrived. He wrote: “The character of my work lies in its essentially soldierly character, which I do not wish to compromise with academic ties… I ask you therefor to see my refusal as a sacrifice which my participation in the german mobilisation is imposing on myself, in which service I have been active since 1914.” He was obviously offended by the preferential treatment lesser authors were receiving. In any case there is no anti-fascist attitude that can be projected into this statement, and is rather a position that is still consistent with his critique of the Hitlerites from the right.

In his post war writings there is clearly a different tone, and Jünger may well have learned something from the horrors, but it is also possible that a very similar message was encrypted in a different way for a different cultural climate (see the box on “Der Waldgang”). Whatever may be the case, there is definitely no self-critical analysis of his own role in the “german mobilization”. Instead, he often revised his older writings including those versions in his collected works making the texts more compatible for the cultural climate of the post war era. In passing it should be mentioned that Armin Mohler, who was Jünger’s secretary for a while in the early 50’s, turned away from the author exactly for this reason.

Julius Evola was one of the main inspirations for the extreme end of Italian post war fascism. Marginally involved with avant-garde art after WWI, he soon became an ideologist of a radical and anti-Semitic “traditionalism”. That he was not just some random occultist will be clear from the following quote from the preface of the English edition of “Men Among the Ruins”:
“… for us as integral advocates of the “Imperium”, for us as aristocratically inclined, for us as unbending enemies of plebeian politics, of any ‘nationalistic’ ideology, of any and all party ranks and all forms of party ‘spirit’, as well as of any more or less disguised form of democracy, “Fascism is not enough”. We should have wanted a more radical, more fearless, a more absolute fascism that would exist in pure strength and unbending spirit against any compromise, inflamed by a real fire for imperial power. We can never be viewed as ‘anti-Fascists’ except to the extent that ‘super-Fascism’ can be equated with ‘antifascism’.”
Despite this, various protagonists of the neo-folk scene are allowing themselves to present Evola only as an eccentric mystic in order to trivialize what he is really about: “super-fascism”.

Not everybody sees it like that. For example, the Ukrainian academic and fascism scholar Anton Shekhovtsov wrote the article “Apoliteic music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and ‘Metapolitical’ Fascism”, which appeared in “Patterns of Prejudice” magazine in December 2009. His starting point is that in the post war years the radical right had to switch from openly political forms to what he calls “apoliteic” form. Here, he is particularly referring to Evola, Mohler and Jünger. These conservative revolutionaries find themselves in an interregnum until the time would be ripe again for the “glorious” national re-awakening. The metapolitcal fascism of the New Right manifests itself less in the form of parties than in networks of think tanks, conferences, journals, institutes and publishing houses. Shekhovtsov demonstrates how this strategy is at work in Neo-folk and Martial Industrial with bands such as Folkstorm, Death In June, HERR and others. Of course, record labels and distributors, venues and festivals, fashion and fetishism also add to the cohesion of the scene and operate as transmitters of ideas.

We have seen how certain activists of the scene have roots in the political milieu of British neo-fascism, and that their later activities appear not to be “sins of the youth” but rather a conscious change in strategy. This makes it easier to sell records and exert influence, and also makes is possible that the Antifa can be portrayed as “intolerant” and “totalitarian”. The examples shown in this article are by far not the only ones. From the US, examples such as Michael Moynihan, Boyd Rice or Robert Taylor could be examined and would show deep involvement with far right politics, just as the band Von Thronstahl from Germany would. There are numerous other examples. On the other hand, it doesn’t mean that everybody involved in this scene is automatically to be seen as a far right activist. There are even members with years of involvement who seemed to be unaware of the political components. The right wing Gramscian strategy works best when the recipients of the ideas don’t identify them with the hard right, but with “common sense”. This is a very small scene which tries to ennoble its consumers into being supposedly part of some “elite”.

One of the more prevalent opinions on this topic is: as long as these are just the quirks of some pseudo-eccentrics, we shouldn’t care. However, the danger of lies in a camouflaged and sneaking popularisation of ideas as concepts of the New Right can not be underestimated. Caught in the cul-de-sac of “straight” neo-nazi politics, the individuals involved in the far right and neo-folk switched to “metapolitical”, sub-cultural strategies. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to expose these actual connections, to prompt those in the “grey zone” to distance themselves, and especially to expose the actual arbitrariness and banality of fascist thinking.

Datacide Author: Christoph Fringeli


http://datacide.c8.com/from-subculture- ... ndustrial/



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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby semper occultus » Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:45 am

....points about the "lack of success" of these music acts are arguable .....I get the impression that selling music CD's was by far the most lucrative - if not the only lucrative - activity undertaken by neo-nazi groups - and conflict over ownership of these fraanchises caused far more blood letting than anything "ideological"......
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Tue Feb 11, 2014 9:46 am

American Dream » Tue Feb 11, 2014 1:09 pm wrote:Great analysis which explains some of the phenomena exposed previously here from an anti-Fascist perspective, as in the closing paragraph:

One of the more prevalent opinions on this topic is: as long as these are just the quirks of some pseudo-eccentrics, we shouldn’t care. However, the danger of lies in a camouflaged and sneaking popularisation of ideas as concepts of the New Right can not be underestimated. Caught in the cul-de-sac of “straight” neo-nazi politics, the individuals involved in the far right and neo-folk switched to “metapolitical”, sub-cultural strategies. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to expose these actual connections, to prompt those in the “grey zone” to distance themselves, and especially to expose the actual arbitrariness and banality of fascist thinking.



As far as I can see AD, you haven't 'exposed' any phenomena. In fact, the vast proliferation of varied data over information has more likely served to obscure things to the average person who's attention may usually be directed elsewhere.

This overconfidence is a fairly widespread delusion in these days of the internet, that mere access to lots of second-hand articles is they same as understanding, but it's not, it's just a conflation of reach with grasp, even when the former exceeds the latter by quite a degree.

At least you did a bit of highlighting here, so some of my comments seem to be rubbing off on you. What I think is overstated here is that the complexification and watering down of egregious ideas, still transmits the germ of them (the disease/infection metaphor here is entirely intentional).
This idea, swallowed whole, completely misses the trick that this watering down works in both directions, and can be used in that sense. This is not lost on the more practical anti-fascists (of my ilk), and your approach, while being shrill and wordy, is old hat and doomed to failure.
Use your imagination.
" Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism"
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 11, 2014 10:13 am

Sunday, 7 November 2010

What Ends When the Symbols Shatter? My Time as a Death In June Fan

Guest Post by John Eden

One of the devices used by people who defend neo-Folk is the claim that its critics are outsiders who don’t understand the nuances of the genre. I’ve written this piece for a number of reasons, but mainly to show my perspective as someone who was there as a fan at the outset. Another argument is that none of the rhetoric and imagery matters, that it’s all a bit of a laugh which doesn’t make any difference in the real world. I would counter this by saying that it certainly made a difference to the beliefs of some of the people I knew.

What's Behind the Mask?


ImageIn 1987, at the ripe old age of 17, I asked the bloke behind the counter of Our Price if I could hear The Brown Book, an LP by a band called Death In June. I knew nothing about the group except that people from slightly less obscure bands in the industrial music scene made guest appearances. The sleeve gave very little away – a skull and the title of the album, embossed in gold leaf. The inserts were seriously weird – leaflets about occult supplies and some very sinister T-shirts. It sounded fantastic – nice and loud over the shop’s great system and headphones: dark ballads, weird imagery and simple folky songs.

The final track on side one was a dreamlike spoken word piece over a haunting soundscape. When it finished I handed over my cash. Death In June were one of the ultimate bands for fans who liked a bit of a treasure hunt. Very few clues were ever given away. Before Google or Discogs had even been thought of, this was quite exciting.

Putting the pieces of the jigsaw together became my new obsession, but when I saw the finished picture I was older and wiser and didn’t like what I saw. The skull on the cover was a Totenkopf and one of the songs on the album was an acapella version of 'Horst Wessel'. These were the first steps in the “are they dodgy or aren’t they?” game that Death In June plays with their fans. The consensus seems to be that those in the know can get off on this elitist / faux-Nazi imagery without actually being a Fascist.

And of course, I wasn’t a Fascist. I’d spent a typical British seventies childhood playing with model soldiers, Action Men and Airfix models. I read 'Commando Comics' which were available in all the local newsagents. Me and my mates played 'war' and we knew that the Nazis were the bad guys. Not least because my grandfather had died fighting them in World War 2. I’d had my first encounter with actual Fascists at the tender age of 11. I was in the school canteen for lunch and the only available seat was next to three older boys who I didn’t know. When I sat down one of them asked me, with a disgusted sneer on his face, if I liked “little black boys?”. To my eternal shame I replied that I didn’t. I guess it was partly his tone of voice and the fact that they were bigger than me. I certainly had no problem with the black kids in my class. My reply animated my fellow diners. They told me it was cool to sit with them and asked if I interested in joining the Young National Front. One of them started listing, from memory, the NF’s manifesto. I realised this was pretty fucked up and started making my excuses. They didn’t seem to mind that much.

Lots of the desks at school had 'NF' written on them and you’d see their stickers on bus stops, as graffiti etc. It was part of the landscape, along with anarchy or CND symbols and the iconography of various bands. As I got older and bolder I used tear down racist stickers and cover up the graffiti.

I Ain't Nuthin' But A Gorehound

I had an enquiring mind. Actually that’s a rationalisation. I had (and still have) a tendency to be slightly obsessive. This is a trait I have in common with a lot of people who collect records or are involved with other subcultures. I used to devour the music press, trying to find out everything I could about music I liked the sound of. If it was attached to an extreme ideology then all the better, more stuff to delve into.There were swathes of other music I liked – synthpop, punk, postpunk, hip hop, goth, indie, reggae, whatever. But industrial music was unique in giving me access to an entire subterranean world of strangeness – art, magick, revolution, sexual deviance. There was a lot to get your teeth into.
I felt that Throbbing Gristle’s concept of an Information War was useful – that some things were kept hidden because they were so powerful. This was a good rationale, before the internet, for checking out all manner of extreme phenomena.

I liked the starkness of Death In June’s imagery, words and music – probably in that order. I guess there might have been something in there which reminded me of those childhood war games. Something heroic and male – romantic and bleak. I bought their records and defended them in discussions with friends. I rationalised, with lines fed from interviews in fanzines, that they were simply exploring the darker side of human nature – they didn't believe any of this stuff themselves. And anyway, Douglas P was gay, so there was no way he or anyone he worked with could be a Nazi, right?

When I moved to London in the late eighties I regularly visited the Vinyl Experience record store in Hanway Street. The shop was a focal point for the emerging 'apocalyptic folk' genre (it later evolved into World Serpent Distribution). I picked up a bunch of records and ended up going to what I guess are now legendary gigs like Current 93 and Sol Invictus at Chislehurst caves. I was also involved with the fringes of anti-Fascist campaigning at that time. The Nazi skinhead group Blood & Honour had opened a shop near my college and its bonehead customers were causing some grief in the area. I remember getting some funny looks off people I was protesting with when they saw my Death In June totenkopf badge. I removed it, telling myself that they wouldn’t understand the ambiguity of it all.

I suppose it’s fair to say that I had a fascination with the aesthetics of Fascism but was, like most people, repelled by the ideas and practise. Unfortunately it soon emerged that not everyone was quite so discerning.

Don’t Eat That Stuff Off The Sidewalk

ImageIn the early nineties some cassettes of US Christian radio talkshows circulated around the underground scene I had immersed myself in. Evangelical preacher and self-publicist Bob Larson had taken it upon himself to interview Nikolas Schreck (of the group Radio Werewolf) and industrial noise stalwart Boyd Rice (who had launched a 'think tank' called the Abraxas Foundation). Both were involved with the Church of Satan, which I knew little of. The cassettes were very entertaining, with Nikolas and Boyd being relentless in their criticism of Christianity and a whole heap more.

So far so good, but Schreck and Rice also expressed social Darwinist ideas and a 'might is right' philosophy. Boyd described himself as 'an occult Fascist' but went on to say that he didn’t mean that in a political way. These concepts also formed the basis of his album Music, Martinis and Misanthropy. At the time they seemed quite exciting: daring, but also troubling. I don’t remember fully embracing it all, but it certainly piqued my obsessive curiosity.

I inevitably stocked up on Church of Satan reading material to have a look. Other books like Apocalypse Culture and Schreck’s Manson File added a new slant to what I’d previously seen as being an anarchist or left wing perspective. Slowly, friends who were more into this scene than me started spouting a load of old bollocks:

“All this stuff about how ‘the weak should be crushed by the strong’ – you’d understand that if you sat on the top deck of bus with me in South London.”

“I truly believe in having society run by a nobility – especially when I see all the human waste queuing up to buy their lottery tickets on a Saturday afternoon.”

“Why should I have to come in at night and turn on the TV to see a bunch of stuff about bhangra – this is London!”


People who might previously have talked about anarchism, or William Burroughs, or Situationist theory were now coming out with the sort of right wing shit you’d read in the Daily Express. This led to a number of heated debates in pubs and at parties, with predictably mixed results. (Each of those quotes is real, I remember them clearly because they wound me up so much. But I'm not going to name and shame people – at least two of them have since expressed regret about talking such rubbish.)


Continues at: http://www.whomakesthenazis.com/2010/11 ... -time.html
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Tue Feb 11, 2014 11:44 am

semper occultus » Tue Feb 11, 2014 1:45 pm wrote:....points about the "lack of success" of these music acts are arguable .....I get the impression that selling music CD's was by far the most lucrative - if not the only lucrative - activity undertaken by neo-nazi groups - and conflict over ownership of these fraanchises caused far more blood letting than anything "ideological"......


It could be called a success in that, as you say, it was their only lucrative venture, and even that small amount of financial success has been quickly scattered to the winds.

I was aware of the 'nazi' groups during the eighties as I was going through a 'political music' phase at the time, and the main flashpoint seemed to be centred around Conflict and Skrewdriver.

The neo-nazi music scene stayed small and irrelevent though because it just revolved around really basic thrash metal (it never evolved from it's early attempts at infiltrating the Punk scene), and therefore had limited appeal. The anarcho bands on the other hand ranged from Crass type stuff to dub reggae to dance, even verging on psychedelia (as my own group did), and had the whole free festival scene to keep feeding it.

It therefore died of incest, and there wasn't even a trace of it in the grunge and hardcore scene of the early nineties, which could be said to be their only natural progression.
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Tue Feb 11, 2014 11:59 am

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Manuella and Daniel Ruda

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/200 ... arright.uk

Flirting with Hitler

Gothic is a way of dressing, a taste in music, a style. But in Germany - at the extreme fringes - it has also become the point at which neo-Nazism and Satanism meet

John Hooper
The Guardian, Friday 15 November 2002


The prosecutor called it "a picture of cruelty and depravity such as I have never, ever seen". He was describing the scene left behind when Daniel and Manuela Ruda fled from their home in the west German town of Witten in July last year after murdering their friend, Frank Hackert. When police broke in three days later, on July 9, they found a poster of hanged women in the bathroom and a collection of human skulls in the living room. There was a coffin in which 23-year-old Manuela sometimes slept. Blood-stained scalpels were scattered around the house. And then there was Hackert's corpse. He had been stabbed 66 times. A scalpel was lodged in his stomach and a pentagram cut into his skin. Nearby was a list of names. Police believe that they were those of the people the couple intended to kill next.

The Rudas' trial in January provided a stream of outlandish and gruesome details. Much of the focus was on Manuela, who shrank from sunlight and had had two of her teeth replaced with animal fangs to look more like a vampire. She said her initiation into the world of Satanism had taken place at a Gothic club in Islington, London, where she claimed to have met real vampires. "We drank the blood of living people," she told police. On January 31, she was sentenced to 13 years in a secure mental facility, while Daniel was sentenced to 15 years.

While public attention tended to dwell on the way in which Manuela had given life to her sinister fantasies, a more chilling aspect of the case went largely unnoticed: the links between the Rudas and the neo-Nazi movement, links that hint at a much broader - and growing - overlap in Germany between the far right and the broad range of occult and esoteric movements that nowadays go by the generic name of "Gothic" or "Dark Wave".

Among the witnesses at the trial was 28-year-old Frank Lewa. He testified that he had first met Daniel Ruda on the local far right/skinhead scene. Daniel's involvement was more than casual. The regional newspaper, the Rheinische Post, discovered that at the 1998 general election campaign in Germany, Daniel had canvassed for the National-Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a far right party that the government has since tried to outlaw (the matter is currently before the Constitutional Court).

On the witness stand, Lewa said that after the election Daniel drifted out of the skinhead world and into the Gothic scene. He began listening to "black metal" music, a variant of heavy metal, and at one time played in a band called the Bloodsucking Freaks. It was through a black metal fanzine, in fact, that he met Manuela, after placing an ad that read: "Black-haired vampire seeks princess of darkness who despises everything and everybody and has bidden farewell to life."

Daniel, 26, broke contact with Lewa after a row at a party. Lewa told the court that he had received a letter from his erstwhile friend in July, a few days before the Rudas killed Hackert. In it, Daniel called Lewa a Judas and enclosed a photograph of himself, covered in blood and apparently hanging from hooks in the ceiling. He was pointing two gas pistols at the camera.

When the police finally caught up with Daniel and his wife, on July 12 2001, they were in the east German city of Jena, having previously visited two nearby towns, Sonderhausen and Apold.

The significance of these details would be lost on most Germans, and it appears not to have been remarked upon at the trial. Nevertheless, it would have meant a very great deal to anyone who had studied what has become known as "the case of Satan's Children", in which three schoolboys who lived near Jena were convicted in 1994 of the ritual black magic killing of a classmate.

One of the boys, 16-year-old Hendrik Möbus from Sonderhausen, formed a band while in a juvenile detention centre. Among the tracks on a CD they produced was one called Zyklon B, after the gas used in the Auschwitz gas chambers. Not long after Möbus's release on probation in 1998, he began violating the terms of his parole, roaring out "Sieg Heil" from among the audience at a concert, and attempting to justify the murder for which he had been sentenced on political grounds. "I don't know whether, in the Nazi era, one would have been convicted if one had rendered race vermin harmless," he was quoted as saying.

Germany has legislation making both Holocaust denial and the use of symbols from the Third Reich criminal offences. In 1999, faced with the prospect of another spell in jail for contravening these laws (and thereby breaking the terms of his parole), Möbus fled to the US, where he applied unsuccessfully for political asylum. He is now back behind bars in Germany. His brother, who lives in Apold, runs a black metal label, Darker Than Black.

In the days that followed the murder of Frank Hackert, the Rudas embarked on a kind of pilgrimage to places that in their minds linked the far right and the occult - to Jena, Sonderhausen and Apold. It is possible they planned to do more than visit: on the death list police discovered in the Rudas' flat was the name of the mother of the boy whom Hendrik Möbus and his friends had murdered seven years earlier.

Links between Nazism and esoteric and occult movements are nothing new. Hitler, rejecting Christianity, embraced instead the paganism of the early Germanic tribes. Their beliefs, both real and imagined, offered a basis on which any number of sinister concepts could be superimposed. The process reached its apogee at Schloss Wewelsburg, near the town of Paderborn. Though the present-day castle dates from the late 16th century, records suggest that there has been a fortress on the site since the days of the Huns, more than a thousand years earlier. The surrounding landscape is wooded, often misty, and interspersed with giant, weirdly-shaped rocks. The castle and its environs were ideally suited to the purpose for which Heinrich Himmler rented them in 1934 - that of providing the officers of his elite corps, the SS, with an education in the supposed pagan mysteries underpinning National Socialism.

Though it does not make much of an impact at election time, the far right remains a disturbing undercurrent in German life: sufficiently disturbing for the federal government to have launched an all-out drive against the neo-Nazi fringe two years ago (including the attempt to ban the NPD). "The problem with the far right in Germany is not that its members are particularly numerous, but that they are readier than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe to resort to violence," said a senior intelligence officer who asked not to be named. That point was driven home by a string of savage attacks in early 2000, culminating in the beating to death of a Mozambique-born German citizen in Dessau.

The far right is especially pervasive in the formerly communist east where unemployment is high and where, after the war, there was not the same painful reckoning with the past as in the west. Despite - or perhaps because of - the fact that there are fewer immigrants in the former GDR, surveys also show that racist attitudes are more prevalent there than in the cosmopolitan west.

One possible reason why the degree of support for the far right does not show up in election results is that the most extreme rightwingers will have nothing to do with the democratic process and abstain. This is particularly true of those connected with the so-called Kameradschaften which form a network of mutually independent, neo-Nazi secret societies. Each may have no more than 10 or 15 members, but around them is a wider circle of associates and sympathisers. Indeed, the secretive and hierarchical world of the German far right mirrors that of many occult communities.

On several occasions since the fall of the Third Reich, evidence has surfaced of connections between the far right and Satanism. As in the cases of Hendrik Möbus and Daniel Ruda, however, they have been limited to individuals or, at most, small groups. But in the past five years, an entirely new phenomenon has developed: a mass youth culture in which neo-Nazi ideas and symbols have merged with the Gothic scene.

This movement can be traced back to 1993, when Roland Bubik, widely regarded as the leading thinker of the German extreme right, wrote a seminal article for the magazine Junge Freiheit. Entitled "Culture as a question of power", it argued that "new possibilities for influencing people are arising in the area of communications networks. In particular, the entertainment industry... has an immense influence that until now has gone unremarked." Within a couple of years, Bubik's partner, Simone Satzger, was stating as fact, in a collection of essays edited by Bubik, that the far right's strategy was "to open up contemporary cultural and political phenomena to use them for our own purposes".

Since the mid-1990s, Germany's neo-Nazis have attempted to penetrate several youth scenes, including techno, but it is with Goths that they have had their greatest success. The Gothic movement may be on the wane in Britain and many other countries around Europe, but in Germany, where its adherents are known as Gruftis (from the German word for "crypt"), they constitute a vast group. It is particularly strong in the former GDR. East Germans are still reeling from the fall of communism, and the young in particular seem to be searching for new values to fill the gap left by a creed that was as much a religion as an ideology.

"The concentration of Goths in Germany is much higher than in other European countries," says Stephan Tschendal, who edits an online Gothic magazine. He estimates that between 5% and 7% of all young Germans between the ages of 12 and 25 are Goths, an overall population of at least 650,000. Many of them are doing no more than making a fashion statement, or registering a protest against the drabness and conformity of modern adult life. Devil-worshippers exist only on the extremist fringe. But in two specific areas of the Gothic scene - the areas in which the neo-Nazis have had the greatest success in infiltrating their ideas - Germany's intelligence officers believe there is genuine cause for concern. One of these is "neo-folk"; the other is black metal, the dark variant of heavy metal that so appealed to Daniel Ruda.

In a darkened hall in the centre of Leipzig, blue lights play on the smoke billowing out from under a stage where Darkwood, a three-piece neo-folk band, play placid, lilting, slightly weird music. The band's gig forms part of an annual, three-day Gothic festival, which this year attracted some 17,000 people from all over Europe to Leipzig. Churches in the city that had been asked to host concerts refused to do so, citing the risk that Satanists could assemble on consecrated ground.

About half the crowd at the gig are typical Goths, but the rest look as if they have wandered in from a Nuremberg rally. There are men wearing high, heavy boots and black military-style shirts and trousers. There are women, also wearing boots, with calf-length skirts and white shirts with a symbol on the right arm that resembles a badge of rank. Everywhere, there are leather cross-straps, forage caps and 1930s-style shorts.

As its name implies, neo-folk draws on the musical heritage of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other protest singers of the 1960s and 1970s. Some German groups dig further back into the past, updating and reworking traditional folk tunes. The acoustic guitar is central to its music, which also features flutes, cellos and violins. Yet neo-folk is anything but folksy. Punk has had an influence on its evolution and much of the music could be described as industrial. Unusually extensive percussion sets are typical of the genre. Another characteristic is that gentle melody-making can all of a sudden give way to something much more visceral: the lead singer of Darkwood seized hold of a pair of heavy drumsticks and beat out an intimidating tattoo on a bass drum. It was like Japanese Kodo drumming, but with the rhythms of a Prussian parade ground. The drumming rose in a crescendo, then ended as abruptly as it had begun, prompting the loudest cheers of the night.

The Leipzig festival was launched in 1991, soon after German reunification, and has helped turn the city into the Gothic capital of Europe. Like neo-Nazis, Goths are drawn to its Volkerschlachtdenkmal, one of the strangest and most intimidating monuments to be found anywhere in Europe. A vast, stepped pyramid towering over a lake on the wooded fringes of the city, it resembles a Mayan temple. The Volkerschlachtdenkmal was inaugurated in 1913 to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Leipzig 100 years earlier. But since German reunification, it has become a favoured rallying point for the far right.

The pivotal figure on Leipzig's neo-folk scene is a 29-year-old DJ who goes by the name of Mortanius. He denies that neo-folk has anything to do with extreme-right politics. "These groups use language and symbols both from the Nazi era and the days of the GDR to provoke people, to get people to think - think about their past," he told me. "People from the far right scene don't feel comfortable in this environment. We never see skinheads at our gigs or in our clubs. On the contrary, we have problems with them. I won't say you don't see people from the extreme right or that they aren't trying to infiltrate. The attempt is certainly there. But it is doomed to fail because people can think for themselves. We have a generally left-leaning audience."

Less than an hour after meeting Mortanius, I found myself in a shabby room with four Goths, three young men and a woman, who had agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity. One of the men had a partly shaven head and a pigtail, and was wearing a black shirt, camouflage trousers, military boots and a symbol dangling on his chest that managed to combine a Celtic cross, a human skull, an eagle's wings, two entwined snakes and a pentagram. His girlfriend had a spiked collar around her neck and a dog's lead dangling between her breasts. At one point, we fell to discussing what he called "youth Satanism". "It starts with the moving glass and then they go on to animal sacrifice," he said nonchalantly, and apparently knowledgeably.

When I read out Mortanius's description of the local neo-folk scene and its lack of connection to the far right, all four burst into incredulous laughter.

Solveig Prass, the Leipzig social worker who had set up our meeting, asked me if Mortanius had been wearing any badges when I met him; had I noticed that one of them was the so-called "Black Sun"? A pagan fertility symbol, the Black Sun is known to have been used by the Alemans, a third-century Germanic tribe. Each of its 12 "rays" is the rune meaning "sun". According to Dr Rudiger Sunner, author of a recent book on Nazism and its use of myth, the Black Sun is "definitely a sign of the SS". Himmler fashioned the SS emblem from one of the Black Sun's 12 jagged "rays", and a large Black Sun was set into the floor of the Obergruppenführer's Hall in Schloss Wewelsburg, immediately above the crypt.

Mortanius was in fact wearing three badges, including the pagan Black Sun: he argues that "our symbols... don't really have anything to do with the Third Reich".

How close, really, are the links between Gothic - or, specifically, neo-folk - culture and the German far right? Unquestionably, there is an element of sheer, apolitical mischief: it is not easy for the sons and daughters of the generation of 1968 to find a way of shocking their parents, but dressing up in vaguely neo-Nazi garb should do the trick. "I want to stand out from the crowd of normal Dark Wave folk," Mortanius told me. "I don't want to be an ordinary Goth in the street. I want to provoke people."

The organisation charged with protecting Germany from a Nazi revival is the Verfassungsschutz, a body roughly equivalent to Britain's MI5. Reinhard Boos is its director in Saxony, the state in which Leipzig lies, and so has a special interest in gauging the threat posed by far right penetration of the Gothic scene. When I visit him in his office in a leafy Dresden suburb, he produces a couple of CD covers and lays them on his desk. One is an album by the British band Death In June, which shows four dogs' heads arranged at right angles. Half-close your eyes and they become a swastika. The other CD is by the Austrian band Der Blutharsch. Tip it, and a shiny patch on the inside cover becomes a triangle containing the jagged ray of... what? The SS symbol? Or the sun rune? Is this merely provocation, or evidence of a link between extremist politics and neo-folk music?

"I think the truth is in between," says Boos. "The Gothic scene is not to be confused with rightwing extremism. But there are some groups that use symbols which refer to rightwing extremism and they do it mainly for provocation. Very, very few of them do it to support rightwing groups. On the other hand, the rightwing extremists know that there are people who can be useful to them, so some of them try to win them over for their own aims. It is not a plan by a few [people] that is carried out in a clear, structured way. Those who think it is a good idea do so of their own accord."

"Things are not going well for the far right," argues Wolfgang Hund, an educational scientist and the author of several books on the occult. "They are under pressure from all sides and they are looking for allies... They are looking for foot soldiers in the ranks of disoriented youth - human raw material for any Pied Piper who comes along."

One of the young men I met in Leipzig was about as different from the far right stereotype as could be imagined. His jet-black hair was shaved away on one side of his head and hung lank down the other. He was wearing a black velvet tailcoat, a silver pentagram on a chain around his neck, five rings in one ear, and sunglasses. This apparently typical Goth was in the process of trying to free himself from the neo-Nazi scene.

"My first contact was through a member of the NPD," he said. "It was all very low key at first. We went to some concerts [of neo-Nazi bands] and I liked the music they played. Then I started getting flyers and leaflets. Eventually, I began to help distribute them." He decided to leave after a row over money ended in his being badly beaten.

Such cases notwithstanding, Boos believes that recruitment is not, in fact, the far right's primary aim. The threat posed by the infiltration of the Gothic scene is, he believes, subtler. "We take it seriously because it opens people's heads to extreme rightwing thought."

Solveig Prass and her colleagues in Leipzig, who talk regularly to DJs and others, have been keeping a running estimate of how much of the Goth scene is under the influence of the far right."The link was first noticed in the mid-1990s. At that time, it was estimated that the overlap was about 5%. Two years ago, we put it at 7-8%. Now, our estimate is 9%." Alfred Schobert, a lecturer at the Duisberg Institute of Language and Social Research, took a similar view in his 1998 academic investigation into the infiltration of the Gothic scene by the far right. "It is not about recruiting in the short term. It is about [producing] an overall reversal that picks up on and distorts the prevailing mood."

Through the Gothic scene, the far right can obtain access to the minds of hundreds of thousands of young people throughout Europe. If they can be taught to accept certain beliefs and symbols as normal, then the extreme right will have made significant progress towards achieving what Schobert argues is a key, medium-term goal: "The removal of the taboos that attach to Nazi symbols and racist-nationalist ideology".



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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby jakell » Wed Feb 12, 2014 8:25 am

Going back to the few posts on Neo nazi music, I've just arrived at this again via a discussion on Bob Dylan on another forum.

Bob got me thinking the English singer Billy Bragg, who sort of got handed Woody Guthrie's baton by Nora Guthrie, passing Bob Dylan over and very likely putting Bob's nose right out of joint.

Even though I've never been a fan of Billy (he's too traditional Left, or rather he attracts that crowd). I do have some very fond memories of British Nationalists really hating him, not so much because of his left leanings, but because he has been quite vocal about his Englishness in a way that is also far more inclusive than traditional BN, ie an image of Englishness that is an alternative to the one they project.
Competition in other words.

Just wanted to get this down before the thoughts dissipate. There has been a lot of (often wordy and dated/inaccurate) pasted stuff about BN on here, so it sort of fits
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Re: A New Europe: Anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, Nation-State

Postby American Dream » Wed Feb 12, 2014 9:00 am

Continuing with the subcultural agenda of these lovely folks who have no racist/fascist leanings whatsoever:


http://www.xs4all.nl/%7Eafa/alert/engels/sl8_2004.html

Ultra right band barred from Israel

Searchlight, December 2004

The Austrian ultra-right industrial band Der Blutharsch has been forced to cancel a planned concert in Tel Aviv, Israel, following widespread protests and demands from members of the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that it be banned.

Israeli MP, Yossi Sarid, who had asked the major of Tel Aviv and the country's justice minister, told the Jerusalem Post: It is clear why Der Blutharsch wants to perform in Israel. They want to be legitimate, have an 'Israeli passport' and then become persona grata everywhere else. Against their critics, they can then say 'Who are you to call us fascists? The survivors of the Holocaust invited us.'

The cancellation of the Tel Aviv concert was only the latest: in March 2003, a concert was cancelled in Clausnitz in Germany and, in December 2003 a concert was cancelled in Chicago after protests mobilised by Searchlight supporters and Antifa-Net members in the USA.

On 28 September the band performed a concert, attended by known right-wing extremists, at the LVC music centre in the Netherlands city of Leiden. Before the concert, Anti-Fascist Action and the Leiden-based anti-racist organization, Fabel van de illegaal (Myth of the illegal), informed the LVC centre of their objections to the concert but the LVC insisted that the band's performance was a matter of "artistic freedom".

Der Blutharsch, whose members invariably perform in black clothing and military belts, was formed around an Austrian, Albin Julius, and openly flirts with nazi occultism. Julius is keen fan of the Austrian right-wing extremist, Jörg Haider. Haider makes stands the government should have taken earlier, he told the Greek Neo-folk/Dark Wave magazine L'ame Electrique.

Julius also said in the interview that he did not regard Haider as extreme right-wing. In another interview, with the German Gothic magazine Black, he stated that he hoped that Europe would consist again of 'national states' and that there would be 'finally a halt to migration'.

At concerts and at production sessions, Douglas Pearce of the British far-right Neo-folk band Death in June often provides Julius with musical assistance. The name of Pearce's band is a reference to the day Ernst Röhm, the leader of the Hitler's brown-shirted Sturmabteilung (SA), was murdered, together with the rest of the SA leadership, by the SS in June 1934. Despite this, Death in June's logo is an SS Death's Head symbol and the band's members frequently dress up in SS uniforms.

Death in June was the first right-wing band to perform in Croatia at a time when the civil war at the Balkan was raging and Pearce and the band spent time hanging around the headquarters of the fascist HOS-militia. They have also, in interviews with various Dark Wave magazines, voiced approval for the pogroms against Roma and refugees in early 1990s Germany.

Another musician who performs from time to time for Der Blutharsch is Boyd Rice who also parades regularly in SS uniform and is a good friend of Bob Heick, führer of the US nazi organization, the American Front. On the Internet, one can find the two posing together in fascist uniform. Rice is also fan of so-called Social Darwinism, the ideology of the survival of the fittest and is member Church of Satan's 'council of nine'.

During Der Blutharsch concerts, Julius is also sometimes assisted by ex-Death in June member, Ian Read. On Death in June's CD 'Brown Book', Read sang the infamous 'Horst Wessel'-song which is outlawed Germany. During the 1980s, Read was involved in rightist circles in the UK, notably the Rune-Gilde. He is founder of the bands Sol Invictus (Black Sun) and Fire + Ice, and was member of the British nazi crank David Myatt's Order of the Nine Angles.

In Dutch extreme right-wing magazines like the Nationale Beweging's (National Movement) paper Nieuwe Bezem (New Brooms), Der Blutharsch is described as one of the more radical bands from the scene, which openly flirt with Nazi occultism. In this, the fascists are quite correct.

Der Blutharsch is in love with nazi aesthetics. For a long time, its logo was a Sig rune, the stylised S in the SS insignia, but now they have replaced it with the Iron Cross, a German military symbol originating from the Prussian liberation struggle against Napoleon at the beginning of the nineteenth century. After 1939, Hitler retained the Iron Cross as one of his most important Nazi military decorations and all kinds of Iron Cross-emblazoned nazi kitsch is touted for sale on Der Blutharsch's website.

It also figures in the video Gold gab ich für Eisen on which Der Blutharsch the German guest player Wilhelm Herich is seen screaming 'Free Pinochet! Freiheit für Pinochet!' in a gesture of support for the decrepit Chilean ex-dictator.

In another video fragment, a bottle with a swastika label is held up for the camera. And, on the same video, the band plays 'Lisa Pien', the Finnish version of the popular Second World War song 'Lili Marleen' and dedicate it to the European volunteers of the SS.

Der Blutharsch's CD covers are awash with references to Nazi Germany. A CD, titled 'The pleasures received in pain', features the work of the German Nazi painter, Ferdinand Staeger, while another CD - Der Sieg des Lichtes ist des Lebens Heil - displays a painting by the German Nazi artist, Werner Peiner. Der Blutharsch also uses the first four lines of the Hitler Youth's 'Marching Song'.

Der Blutharsch recently released a joint album with the Italian fascist band Zetazeroalfa which belongs to 'Rock Identity Italy', a New Right music formation whose main aim is to present fascism in a 'nice' way. This is not Der Blutharsch's first joint venture: it has, in fact, previously released a collaborative album with the Italian New Right band Ain Soph which is fond of quoting the fascist mystic, Julius Evola.

Albin Julius does not just sing. He also runs the Hau Ruck! music label which has released an album 'Odessa vine ill Bello', on which you containing Italian fascist marching songs from the time of Benito Mussolini.

In their letter to the LVC, AFA and Fabel van de illegaal wrote: 'By giving Der Blutharsch a stage, you appear to have a policy of closing your eyes to the use of Nazi symbolism, with the danger of allowing it to become normality'.

The LVC did not agree. Though accepting that the website of Der Blutharsch is 'provocative', it still saw reason to hire the band, on the grounds of 'artistic freedom'. The LVC also used the supposed approval of the not-yet-cancelled Tel Aviv gig and laughably claimed there would be no right- wing audience, because 'Der Blutharsch is not appreciated by extreme right groups.'

AFA and De Fabel van de illegaal then informed the press and local councillors in Leiden. Some of the councillors reacted furiously and demanded that the city council should put pressure on the LVC to cancel the concert. Henri Lenferink, the city mayor asked the police to investigate Der Blutharsch but nothing came of it. An ultra right band, it appears, has to do a lot to be banned on legal grounds or for threatening public order. AFA and De Fabel then leafleted at another gig at LVC a few days before the Der Blutharsch concert, calling on those attending to protest to LVC's management.

Despite this, the concert went ahead and Der Blutharsch duly performed in black uniform and sporting the Iron Cross. Among the hundred or so in attendance were known right-wing extremists like Jasper Velzel (see Searchlight August 2002), convicted in 2002 for the possession and distribution of racist, nazi and Holocaust Denial music through his mail order outlet, Berzerker Records. Velzel was acquitted for possession of swastika badges and SS Death's Head's, because the prosecutor could not prove the stuff was meant for distribution. Velzel is an activist in the nazi National Movement and is drummer for the hate rock band Brigade M.

Another extremist present was Alwin Kerkhof who was convicted in 2003 for racist remarks. Kerkhof used to be active in the fascist Nieuwe Nationale Partij (NNP) and was also an activist in NieuwRechts. On 4 March this year, he was arrested together with two prominent members of the Jonge Fortuynisten, the youth branch of late Pim Fortuyn's party, the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF). Masked with balaclavas, the trio had threatened a photographer at his home.

Jeroen van Valkenburg, yet another notorious right wing extremist was present at the Der Blutharsch concert. Van Valkenburg belongs to the New Era Productions music label (see Searchlight July 2004), which organised a black metal concert, at which the French fascist and anti-Semitic bands Ad Hominem and Seigneur Voland performed, in a youth centre in Bladel near Eindhoven on 17 April.

By Jeroen Bosch of Alert! and Antifa-Net [with thanks to De Fabel van de Illegaal]
alertafa@xs4all.nl
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