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?

In 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

In 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.)

How Far Can Too Far Go?

In the mid-nineties there was a gradual intensification of what was being said in fanzine interviews. I’m still not clear if the artists were trying to outdo each other, or if there was a testing of boundaries involved – seeing how much of an already existing agenda could be revealed without any comeback.
The arrival of Michael Moynihan’s Blood Axis project in 1995 marked a significant gear change. I picked up the notorious issue of No Longer, a FANzine from Tower Records in Piccadilly, and read Moynihan’s comments about wanting to reopen the gas chambers, but how he’d be a lot more lenient in terms of the admission criteria. The 'zine also had an interview with James Mason, an actual Nazi who clearly wasn’t exploring any ambiguities. Blood Axis’ first album got rave reviews in all the right places, but was laughably awful.

Around this time I also found out about Tony Wakeford having been a member of the National Front. He brushed this aside in interviews saying that he hadn’t really been a member – he’d just been knocking about with some people who were into historical re-enactments, some of whom knew some people who were a bit dodgy. Which more recently has been revealed as being an outright lie. The fanzines I was reading also started to pick up on Black Metal. I sent away for some  Burzum 'zines and was revolted by Varg Vikernes’ blatant anti-Semitism.

Zombie Dance

Gradually all this stuff started to become de rigueur, like a new fashion. It was actually comical how rapidly the subculture became an identikit set of ideas and themes. I satirised this with a pretend fanzine called Blood & Fire  (named after the reggae tune by Niney The Observer, but also very similar to the title of an early NON album). It seemed to amuse the right people, but there wasn’t nearly enough criticism going on.

A lot of the howls of protest were from the mainstream anti-Fascist sources who'd also had problems with Joy Division, New Order, Throbbing Gristle, and even Front 242 in the past. People who were actually fans of the music displayed a staggering lack of political nous. Despite priding themselves on being independently minded (not being part of the 'herd mentality' was the new thing, right?) they swallowed any old bollocks which was on offer as long as it was wrapped up in a limited edition embossed runic cover.

The final straw for me came with the arrival of issue 6 of Esoterra magazine. This had started out as a really good occulture fanzine that had amazing graphics and in depth features and interviews with all sorts of interesting people. I’d been distributing a few copies in the UK (alongside a bunch of other stuff) and had baulked a little at the obligatory Blood Axis feature in issue 5. Issue 6 of Esoterra included a full page advert for Canadian Nazi skinhead band Rahowa. Their name was an acronym for RAcial HOly WAr. Here was a group with blatant connections to political Fascism (in the form of the wacko World Church of the Creator). Rahowa’s singer, George Burdi, founded Resistance Records, the biggest neo-Nazi skinhead label and distributor outside of Europe. He was imprisoned for violently assaulting a female anti-Fascist protestor.

It was clear to me that the more articulate parts of the Nazi music scene were trying converge with the more retarded parts of the industrial/occulture scene. These were people I didn’t want anything to do with. The same shitheads I’d shared a school canteen table with, the same knuckle dragging boneheads who had assaulted Asian students near my college. All of them worshipping the regime that killed my grandfather. I ended up having an argument with the editor of Esoterra and not distributing that issue. He informed me that the group had offered him money for a whole lot more advertising if he published an interview with them, but he had declined.

The next issue featured my interview with Amodali of Mother Destruction – a brilliant group who managed to avoid all the stiff-right-arm posturing which seemed to be becoming the norm. In retrospect this was probably my last ditch attempt to draw a line in the sand and show that it was possible to be concerned with dark, occult material, but not be a Fascist. I was particularly encouraged that the group included Patrick Leagas, formerly of Death In June, who also expressed his frustration to me with the nudge nudge, wink wink nature of what was unfolding. But we were both pushing against the tide. I climbed the cliffs to dry land whilst Patrick seems to have re-immersed himself in the icy waters of neovolkisch runic twiddling.

It gradually dawned on me that the music was becoming less and less interesting. It was pointless hanging about and watching an entire scene go down the toilet musically and ideologically at such an exciting time for dance music. My philosophical needs continued to be satisfied by the whole 'post-situ' scene, including the refreshingly un-sinister Association of Autonomous Astronauts, London Psychogeographical Association and many others.

Tear It Up

I never formally 'left' the industrial / neofolk scene, I just found more interesting things to do. Things which involved people who were less grim and music that was much better. Towards the end of the nineties I’d have a pop at things which came my way, but I no longer went looking for trouble. A good example would be my (quite ranty, in retrospect) review of the third issue of the UK fanzine Compulsion:

"The subtitle is 'Surveying the Heretical', which I think highlights my problems with this (and the 'scene' as a whole). Doing a survey suggests that it's just a report of what's going on – someone else has to analyse it all. But obviously this isn't the whole story. Anyone who puts out a 'zine goes through a process of selection, deciding what goes in and what stays out. It isn't like someone went through the racks at Tower Records and pulled out every 10th CD or something, is it? So the editor must either like the material, or at the very least find it intriguing. But, oh no, there's a 'Views and beliefs expressed' statement on page 2, so we have to guess, eh?

This wouldn't be a problem were it not for the fact that Compulsion contains some pretty dubious people, some of whom have worldviews that I consider thoroughly objectionable. For example there's a puff piece on ex-American Nazi Party organiser James Mason and his Manson-inspired Universal Order. I'm sure James is fantastically exciting, but it fucks me off that he can blandly suggest that the Tate killings were great because they were all "drug users, drug dealers, Jews, anti-racists and homosexuals" without even the teeniest bit of editorial comment.

Mason's publisher is also interviewed. Unsurprisingly he's also happy to be called a Fascist and we even get to read his (ooh how heretical!) views, though thankfully we're spared his usual spiel about re-opening the concentration camps this time. Admittedly Compulsion isn't all blokes with an unhealthy fixation with uniforms and the music of Wagner. The Boredoms, Foetus, Jim Rose and the excellent Somewhere in Europe are also covered. It's just that anyone who expresses an ideology in any depth is completely reactionary. That is clearly one of the editor's major interests, but any conclusions he's made or insights he's gained are missing completely.

It's not even as if the editor is a Fascist, it's just the usual laziness that seems to permeate industrial culture these days. Nobody is ever challenged about their views, not because people agree with them, but because people just aren't bothered. The 'scene' seems to have ditched Throbbing Gristle's ideas of actively researching extremes and is now just a darker version of MTV, spoon-feeding extremity for the sake of it. The excuse is always that people can make up their own minds, which no doubt is true – there just doesn't seem to be any evidence of it happening.

Most of the people I've discussed this with have a pretty unsophisticated analysis of it all, despite all the elitist "oh we are so much more intelligent than the masses" bollocks that goes with the territory. The fans either just get off on the 'mystery' of whether such and such a group is 'dodgy', nudge nudge, wink wink, or try to get themselves off the hook by arguing that so and so can't be a Fascist because he isn't racist (as if the two were the same thing). There are too many people who still think that Nazis are all evil, stupid and ugly. That sort of liberalism just leaves them ill-equipped to critically examine anything resembling a considered argument for (for example) racial segregation, or stopping all welfare and letting people starve to death. I'm not suggesting that every paragraph should come with a dogmatic PC analysis, or that such views shouldn't be allowed to appear in print. That isn't a situation I will ever be able to (or want to) enforce.

However, I am not happy to just uncritically consume people's ideas. It is not in my interest to give Fascists or their fans an easy ride. Perhaps that makes me the biggest heretic of all."

Sometime shortly afterwards, the editor of Compulsion started distributing a US industrial fanzine called Ohm Clock which featured Rahowa on the front cover, and had an extensive interview with them inside. Oh, and quite a lot of adverts for them.

In the summer of 1998 someone else who I had considered a good friend called me up to discuss some industrial CDs he was releasing to see if I would be interested in reviewing them. I wasn't. He went on to have a rant about the power of the media and how 'they' never told the whole truth. Sentiments I wholly agreed with, until he started referring to the brutal racist murder of James Byrd Jnr. My friend was outraged that none of the media reports had mentioned that Byrd had been in prison previously with his murderers. I felt that the salient point was that three white men (two of whom were known white supremacists) had chained a black man to the back of their truck and dragged him two miles along a road, killing him. We were clearly getting our analysis and worldview from completely different sources.

Kizmiaz

Since then neofolk seems to have continued in this vein with people getting less and less shy about describing themselves as Fascists, working with former members of the National Front, namedropping Evola, bandying about terms like eurocentrism (aka “white pride”) and dressing up in uniforms like an amateur tribute to “’Allo ‘Allo”. I sold my Death in June / Current 93, etc., collection on Ebay (or tried to; “The Brown Book” is banned for being “hateful or discriminatory”). I did this partly to finance new projects and partly just to get rid of it all. Quite a few of the people who emailed me to discuss my auctions reminded me of my younger enthusiastic self. I wasn’t about to give them a lecture or stop them having fun. If someone had done that to me 25 years ago it would just have confirmed how 'out there' and dangerous I was. Let’s be clear – enjoying Death In June records as a teenager didn’t make me a Fascist. What I hope this piece has shown is that there is a bigger picture, a wider context than that. There is merit in extreme music and culture, but there are also pitfalls.

A lot of people in 'alternative' scenes like to pretend that politics don’t matter to them. To me that means that they just haven’t thought through their politics. It is precisely this kind of ignorance that can provide a cover for people who are explicitly political to operate and influence the cultural landscape.
History shows us that people are attracted to far right politics for all sorts of reasons, some of them ideological, some of them social. Any mass movement will happily incorporate “apolitical” people who like the violence, or the uniforms, or the music, or the kudos of being weird, the feeling of belonging to an exclusive club.

I think the critique being developed on this blog and elsewhere is long overdue. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading the contributions here and the discussions they have provoked. Ultimately it's up to people to decide for themselves where they draw the line, which artists they support and what they believe in. I don't really regret my dalliance with neofolk (bar having given my money to some people I now despise) because I think ultimately I made the right decisions.

Peter Webb: Statement on Neo-Folk and Post-Industrial Music

Peter Webb has made this statement in response to criticisms made on this blog and elsewhere (presumably Stewart Home's site). It is good to see him start to clarify his position at last since, even if unintentional, the absence of criticism in his book surely lent some credibility to the guilty parties. I'm happy to be able to post his statement here on his behalf as the basis for further discussion and clarification. This statement has also been published on the ICRN blog by Alexei Monroe - Strelnikov, 11/10/10

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Boyd Rice, Dave Tibet, Tony Wakeford,
Doug Pearce and Michael Moynihan

I have been alerted to the contents of this blog Who Makes the Nazis? and one other website and feel that I have to respond to the criticism and confusion that seems to link my work to some kind of support or covert agreement with some of the ideas that are discussed here in the Fascist, Conservative Revolutionary or Traditionalist sphere. I firstly want to make clear that my work in Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music (2007) is partial and a discussion and description of some elements of the Neo Folk/post-industrial music scene in amongst chapters on hip-hop, Bristol’s music culture, the Independent music production of Crass and a variety of house music labels and musicians dealing with each other, writing credits and the wider music industry. Therefore it is not exhaustive or comprehensive and does not fulfill the remit of discussing the ideological/political implications of this scene (Webb, p105) in much detail, this is something I had always intended to fulfill in other pieces of work. Sites like Who Makes the Nazis? are one set of views on the political implications of this scene and whilst I feel my work and reputation are being crudely represented within them they do have a place in presenting information on this scene. My position politically is one of opposition to many of the political/ideological elements of this scene and below I present some comments on that.

Christopher Browning in his book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1992) describes the events that led to the deaths and deportations of tens of thousands of Jews from Poland in 1942. The focus of the book is on the German order police (Ordnungspolizei), battalions of drafted middle-aged reservists who couldn’t fight on the frontline and who were used to police Polish cities and also to round up and kill Jews en masse. This group who had no particular affiliation with Nazism (but had nationalist ideas) were attached to units led by SS men. The executions were carried out by large groups of officers, mainly by shooting their Jewish victims one by one in the neck after they had been forced to lie down in forest areas used for the killings. Browning tries to examine how this group of men who came from ordinary backgrounds and jobs had been turned into mass executioners able to kill tens of thousand of Jews in cold blood day after day whilst in Poland. His explanation suggests that a combination of Nazi Ideology, peer pressure, the situation of the war (even though these individuals had not experienced any fighting before their part in the killings), conformity and indoctrination were responsible. Only a minority refused to take part in the acts and as they developed they became routine and were even joked about. The point of Browning’s book, if we accept its thesis, is that ordinary men and women can become detached killers and brutal racists through a mixture of ideological leadership (in this case from those who had gone through SS training) and the power of group conformity. The reason I discuss this is that, like Stanley Milgram’s obedience and authority experiments or Phillip Zimbardo’s Prison experiment, Browning alerts us to the importance of group dynamics and conformity or obedience to a dominant set of ideas or norms that are pushed to the foreground in a group (either politically, socially or culturally) and often followed uncritically and obediently by the majority of the social group involved.

Browning’s work is useful here as it gives an insight into how strong ideological elements within a social grouping can heavily influence the way that grouping continues to act and think. Even though there is clearly no direct comparison to the events that Browning describes and a small music scene (Neo Folk/ post industrial), the idea of dominant figures in a social situation gaining peoples obedience and shaping their actions through ideological hegemony is important for this discussion. Both situations, do however, contain ideological positions that foreground elitism and disgust, demonization and contempt for an 'other' group (e.g. Jews, gypsies, the ignorant mass population). The chapter I wrote describes elements of this milieu as accounted for by some of its members and through some of my engagement with it over a number of years; it focused particularly on the three musicians of the band Death In June and their various musical projects since two of them (Tony Wakeford and Patrick Leagas) left and Douglas Pearce continued the project to the present day. The chapter does not delve consistently into the various ideological elements of the scene and I suggested that it was beyond the remit of this particular piece of work as I think it would require a book or series of articles in their own right to really discuss the full extent of the ideologies that are referenced by this milieu. That said however it is an omission that needs rectifying. I wish to state clearly that within the milieu there is a clear timeline that runs from the incarnation of Death In June through to the current output of bands like Von Thronstahl, Allerseelen, Orplid, Blood Axis etc that leads its audience to look at thinkers from the three ideological and philosophical areas previously mentioned i.e. Fascism, Revolutionary Conservatism and Traditionalism. The artists themselves have clearly explored and would subscribe in some cases to elements of the worldview of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Ernst Junger, Moeller Van Den Bruck, Armin Mohler, Oswald Spengler, Rene Guenon, Francis Parker Yockey, The Strasser brothers and particularly in the present configuration of the milieu, the European New Right and the work of Alain De Benoist and associated thinkers around him.

Douglas Pearce stated in an interview with Zillo magazine (1992) that:

“At the start of the eighties Tony and I were involved in radical left politics and beneath it history students. In search of a political view for the future we came across National Bolshevism, which is closely connected to the SA hierarchy. People like Gregor Strasser and Ernst Rohm who were later known as `second revolutionaries, attracted our attention” (Forbes, p.15)

He has not discussed this topic in great detail again, never wishing to publically account for his political or ideological position, but it is prophetic and telling in its indication of ideas that are still referenced and linked to by leading artists and fans of these bands and some of the various webzines and magazines that have given space to them (e.g Heathen Harvest, Occidental Congress etc). It also seems clear that these were the ideas that DIJ were engaging with around the period of 1981 – 1984 when Tony Wakeford was a member of the National Front and part of the group who were being referred to as Strasserites and Third positionists. The milieu of neo-folk is littered with references to these thinkers, to the political project of the New Right and the third positionists that came out of the fracture of the (UK) National Front in the early 1980s. DIJ, in name, referenced the `night of the long knives’ and the culling of the leadership of the SA and also in the dates put on the first two releases: SA 29 6 34 and SA 30 6 34, Tony Wakefords post DIJ band Above the Ruins were a direct reference to Evola and contained lyrics that echoed the third positionist direction of the NF, the title of the first Sol Invictus album was `Against the Modern World’ a reference to Evola’s work `Revolt against the Modern World’ (1996), Current 93 referenced Francis Parker Yockey’s `Imperium’ (1969) work on the album of the same name in 1987 and Savitri Devi on the album `Thunder Perfect Mind’ (1992). As the scene develops many bands reference and provide links to this range of thinkers maybe most clearly in the compilations Cavalcare El Tigre (Eis Und Licht, 1998 a reference to Evolas work of the same name) featuring Von Thronsthal, Alerseelen, Orplid, Blood Axis, Waldteufel, Camerata Mediolanense and Ain Soph amongst others and more recently the Von Thronstahl album `Sacrificare’ which alerts readers of the CD liner notes to look at the work of Moeller Van Den Bruck and Joseph-Marie Comte De Maestre one of the founders of a European Conservatism that put its trust in emotional allegiance to an unquestioned authority; usually a form of hereditary monarchy.

From Boyd Rice’s continuous references to Ragnar Redbeard's Social Darwinist `Might is Right’ text and his appearance on Tom Metzger’s Race and Reason Cable TV show (where he discusses White Nationalist/power music mentioning DIJ, C93 and Above the Ruins) to Tesco distribution (Neo-Folk and Marital Industrial distributor) selling books such as De Benoist’s `On being a Pagan’, John Michell’s `Confessions of a Radical Traditionalist’ and the Evola inspired `Handbook for Traditional Living’ published by Artkos (who also publish work by Troy Southgate the National Anarchist/3^rd Positionist and racial separatist), through to Michael Moynihan’s publishing of Seige (1992)  the work of James Mason the American National Socialist Mansonite, there are continuous and clear signposts to writing and work in the fascist, traditionalist and conservative revolutionary tradition. There are many other examples of this tendency within this scene and to clearly outline and discuss these specific elements of this milieu would need a fairly exhaustive work, which, I am sure, will be produced by many different writers and commentators. I am currently finishing a piece that deals with some of these elements but my intention here is to state clearly that I have no political, ideological or philosophical sympathy with any of the ideas of Fascism, traditionalism or conservative revolutionary thought. My interest in this milieu stems from my own immersion and interest in anarchist punk, post-punk, gothic music and various dance music scenes that provided clear links to sets of ideas, artistic practice, political activism and lifestyles – my own politics has come partly out of these types of engagement and could be described as a type of humanism derived from a combination of post Marxism, anarchism and libertarian thought but clearly driven by non-elitist, democratic and egalitarian principles all of which are clearly totally oppositional to the ideas presented by some of the key members of this musical milieu and in fact openly despised by some of them.

The reason for starting this piece with reference to Browning’s work is that although the neo-folk and post-industrial milieu is inhabited by a variety of different political, philosophical, spiritual and lifestyle ideas, practices and supporters there is a clearly significant and dominant use of the ideas of some of the most elitist, racist, conservative and traditionalist thinkers from the 19^th, 20^th and now 21^st centuries, those ideas can lead to and provide a strong conformist group dynamic. Some people will be drawn to these ideas through their engagement with this milieu and some will take these ideas forward to develop a type of political engagement. I would hope that further discussion of these ideas and illumination of their potential social and cultural impact will break many individuals from that engagement and get them to look to develop their own work with a different set of reference points. So even though I think that this blog has taken my work completely out of context in terms of what it suggests should have been the focus of my chapter and of some fairly crude slurs on my reputation I would suggest that `some’ of the material here is useful. Whether individuals in this milieu are active politically or not the main point here is that the use of these thinkers in the forefront of the reference points used by the main bands as they have developed over the years leads to the creation of a group dynamic and conformity to this type of thinking amongst a significant section of the audience and new bands that emerge. This element of the milieu is one that I feel is highly problematic and one that needs opposing critically within the scene as well as from outside.

Peter Webb, October 2010

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Bibliographic References
Browning, Christopher (1992) Ordinary Men : Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, New York : HarperCollins
Devi, Savitri (2000) The Lightning and the Sun. Lulu.com
De Benoist, Alain. (2004) On Being a Pagan. Ultra Press.
Evola, Julius (1996) Revolt Against the Modern World: Politics, Religion and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. Inner Traditions Bear and Company
Evola, Julius (2002) Men among the ruins: Post-war reflections of a radical traditionalist. Inner Traditions, Bear and Company 
Forbes, Robert (1995) Death In June: Misery and Purity. Jara Press 
Goddrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2000) Hitler's Priestess: Savitri Devi, the Hindu-Aryan Myth and Neo-Nazism. New York University Press
Silfen, Paul Harrison (1973) The Volkisch ideology and the roots of Nazism; The early writings of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. Exposition.
Southgate, Tory. (2010) Tradition & Revolution: Collected Writings of Troy Southgate. Arktos Press.
Spengler, Oswald. (2007) Decline of the West. Open University Press
Yockey, Francis Parker (1969) Imperium: The Philosophy of History and Politics. Noontide Press

Flirting With Hitler

Hat-tip to Idiots Crusade for digging up this old Guardian article from 2002.

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

Manuella and Daniel Ruda

"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.

Daniel Ruda

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"."

John Hooper
The Guardian, Saturday 16 November 2002
 Additional research by Beate Steinhorst

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1. "a Gothic club in Islington", I assume is the Slimelight Club, which has hosted concerts by, among others, Boyd Rice