Richard Seymour: Breivik’s 21st Century Fascist Manifesto

This article was a contribution by Richard Seymour, of Lenin's Tomb, to the book On Utøya.

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Introduction: new model fascism 

2083: A European Declaration of Independence is the product of intense disillusionment.  Its author, the son of professional parents, a loser on the stock market and a failed businessman, resembles nothing so much as the “exasperated petty bourgeois” identified by Leon Trotsky¹ as the seed of Hitlerism.  Whence the exasperation of Anders Behring Breivik?  By his ‘own’ account², it arises from the moral and social decline of European nation-states in the post-war era.  A family from the 1950s that was able to visit a European city in the 2000s, he maintains, would encounter a landscape of crime, homosexuality and pornography.  “Were they able, our 1950s family would head back to the 1950s as fast as they could, with a gripping horror story to tell”.  (p 21)  The continent has somehow lost its “cultural self-confidence” (Breivik’s definition of nationalism, p 13), leading to an accommodation with Muslim immigrants who will have “demographically overwhelmed” Europe within “a few decades” if “a sufficient level of resistance is not developed”.  (p 17) 

Breivik’s brief, as he sees it, is to anatomise the causes of Europe’s decline and vulnerability to Muslim takeover, and provide 'patriots' with the information necessary to organise both political and military resistance. 2083 is a patchwork of polemic, autobiography, plagiarised materials, weapons instructions, military strategy, and historical excursions, most of it only loosely fitting together.  The resulting text is a manifesto for a peculiarly 21^st Century form of fascism.  In saying this, I mean not merely that Breivik is advocating a violent rightist putsch, though he is.  Long sections deal with the use of weapons of mass destruction such as anthrax and nuclear bombs against “cultural Marxists” and other “Category A and B traitors” (pp 960-73), and the “systematical and organized executions of multiculturalist traitors” (p 1436).  Breivik specifies the strategic value of military targets in Europe by reference to their Muslim population, and urges priority assaults on left-wing political meetings, media outlets, Muslim gatherings, and so on.  But the attempt to take power through armed attacks on opponents is a classic feature of fascism.  What is distinctive here is the particular set of ideological articulations that make this a fascism far more adequate to 21^st Century circumstances than the tenets of extant neo-Nazi groups.  It reminds us that fascism in the 2000s will not simply be a Third Reich re-enactment.

In making this claim, I have to tread carefully.  The great historian of fascism and Vichy France, Robert Paxton, has argued that it is no accident that there is no Fascist Manifesto, as fascism possesses no coherent ideology or philosophical system.  Fascists have shared neither assumptions, nor enemies.  European fascists were often hostile to Christianity, for example, but this was not true of Franco or Petain.  Similarly, while fascists from the northwest and east of Europe directed their most deadly ire against Jews, Mediterranean fascists were far more conspicuous in their hostility to the Left and colonized peoples.  At the same time, fascists have rarely elaborated a programme and stuck to it.  Mussolini’s 1919 programme promised sweeping social change, from the eight hour day to workers' involvement in industrial management. The 'Twenty-Five Points' of the Nazis in 1920 boasted hostility to all forms of non-artisanal capitalism. In neither case did the programmes prefigure the regimes, both of which involved coalition with conservative elites.³

In general, the core ideas of fascism seem to differ little from those of reactionaries of other stripes, leaving it in doubt whether there can be a specifically fascist credo.  Arguably, what is distinctive about fascist ideas is less their substance than the contexts in which they are deployed.  Moreover, the historian Dave Renton has pointed out the difficulties arising from attempts to identify a fascist ideational core.  These tend to take the statements of fascists about themselves at face value, and as a consequence fail to anticipate the actual conduct of fascists when in power, and ultimately suffer from the same incoherence that fascist ideology itself suffers from.⁴

Even so, much recent scholarship on fascism has been concerned, as the sociologist Michael Mann put it, to take fascist ideology seriously.  Mann describes fascism as a “movement of high ideals”, able to offer seemingly plausible solutions to social problems.  To ignore fascist beliefs, says Mann, is to view fascism “from outside”, and thus gain only a partial understanding of it.⁵ Indeed, taking fascist ideology seriously need not mean treating fascist self-descriptions uncritically.  For example, Breivik is by his own account a democrat, and an anti-fascist.  Taking this claim seriously entails understanding what it means in his world-view, not accepting it at face value.  Therefore, despite some reservations about Mann’s approach⁶, we shall take his advice and consider in detail the specific articulation of ideas and actions commended by Breivik’s sprawling pronunciamento.

As we will see, the burden of Breivik’s argument involves a recitation of standard reactionary complaints – multiculturalism, Islam, political correctness, leftists and the European Union all conspire to degrade the nation and abridge its sovereignty.  What makes these complaints into a fascist diatribe is their specific articulation.  The political theorist Ernesto Laclau argued that the character of an ideology is determined less by its specific contents than by its “articulating principle”.
 

None of the ideas of fascism are distinctive to it – this is why it has been called a “scavenger ideology”, appropriating dis-embedded elements from other ideological traditions.  These elements are capable of being appropriated because they possess “certain common nuclei of meaning,” which can be “connotatively linked to diverse ideological-articulatory domains”.  Yet, fascism is a distinctive ideology and behaviour.  And the “articulating principle” that quilts these heterogeneous elements is precisely that point at which ideology becomes practise: the call for a mass, extra-parliamentary movement of the right to take power through violence against opponents.⁷ At any rate, this is the approach I will now take in examining each element in Breivik’s doctrine.

Islamophobia: Muslims as the ‘Other’ of the nation

The pressing threat to European nationhood in Breivik’s testimony, as we have seen, is the Muslim problem.  “Islam is NOT a race,” Breivik insists, so “patriots” should not “make this war about race or ethnicity.”  But his argument about racist language is strategic, rather than moral.  “You have to keep in mind,” he says, “that most people in Western Europe have been systematically indoctrinated for the last 4-5 decades. ... internal filters against these words [“race war”, “ZOG” and “kill all the Jews”] are all hardcoded into the base thought patterns of a majority of Europeans through decades of multiculturalist indoctrination”.  (pp 679-80)  Thus, the focus on Islam as the major enemy of the nation brings with it the convenience of allowing one to avoid politically toxic ‘race’ language.

Yet, he does allow that a religious faith can be the basis for a cultural bloc, or civilization.  For example: “Myself and many more like me do not necessarily have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ and God. We do however believe in Christianity as a cultural, social, identity and moral platform. This makes us Christian.” It is for this reason that he seeks the preservation and strengthening of “the Church and European Christendom in general” by “awarding it more political influence”.  (p 1309)  Christianity is in this reading a potentially resistant cultural bloc underpinning European civilization; Islam is its Other.  Such civilizational, culturalist discourses have been validated by the ‘war on terror’, during which the ideas of Samuel Huntington and Robert Kaplan (both cited in Breivik’s text) enjoyed a spike in popularity.

And if Islam is “not a race”, Breivik attributes to it essential characteristics which make it, in his words, “more than a religion”.  Citing the Serbian-American rightist, Serge Trifkovic, he argues that “Since its early beginning in Muhammad’s lifetime it has also been a geo political project and a system of government and a political ideology.”  Citing Robert Spencer, the founder of Jihad Watch, he finds that Islam is a “political and social system”.  And citing Walid Shoebat, a fraudulent ‘expert’ on Islam whose dubious finances and false claims to be a former PLO militant have been exposed on CNN, he discovers Islam to be a “form of government first, THEN a personal application”, an “imperialist system” that completely controls the lives of believers.  In the context of the ‘war on terror’, such thinking has gained a mass audience, and its logic ultimately leads to Geert Wilder’s assertion that Islam is a “cult” rather than a religion: a worldly, materialist social doctrine in devotional get-up. Thus, Breivik asserts that it is “a historical fact” that Islam has always been “an overtly militant and aggressive cult”.  (pp 109-10 & 151)

Not only does Islam seek to achieve complete control over its believers in this view, but it also seeks to kill and enslave the non-believers.  Thus, again quoting Robert Spencer, 2083 warns: “we have very clear instructions from Muhammad that it is the responsibility of every Muslim to meet the unbelievers on the battlefield to invite them either to accept Islam or to accept second class Dhimmi status in the Islamic state.” (p 113)  Indeed, this is not just the view of right-wing hate-mongers, but also of liberal atheist writers such as Sam Harris, who maintains: “the basic thrust of the doctrine is undeniable: convert, subjugate, or kill unbelievers; kill apostates; and conquer the world”.⁸ 


It follows from this that it would be impossible to live alongside very many Muslims, without oneself suffering subjugation or death.  “As soon as Islam reaches a few percent [of the population],” Breivik asserts, “it begins to show signs of chauvinism which is the essence of any fascist, racist and imperialistic ideology.” (p 1404)  Thus, Islam is not merely a religion, but a cult, a complete totalitarian social and political doctrine, an imperialist ideology and ultimately “fascist”.  In this reading, Breivik would be the “anti-fascist”. 

Unsurprisingly, the mere physical presence of Muslims is considered a state of war.  Breivik alerts readers to the “demographic” situation, which has been “falsified by multiculturalists”.  “Europe is under siege by Islam. It is under demographical siege,” he explains.  By 2070, the age at which he expects his right-wing revolution to mature and begin to bear fruit, the Muslim population of the UK will have reached 38%.  In Norway, the figure will be identical.  In Germany, it will be 50%, and in France it will be 70%.  Russia, with a 72% Muslim population, will be the most ‘Islamified’.  (pp 575-6)  The resulting situation for those living in these countries will be one of ‘dhimmitude’, which Breivik translates as ‘slavery’.  In a passage excerpted from the Blogger ‘Fjordman’, 2083 explains: “all non-Muslims will live with a constant, internalised fear of saying or doing anything that could insult Muslims, which would immediately set off physical attacks against them and their children. This state of constant fear is called dhimmitude.”

Breivik is not innovating here.  His culturalist racism has been the dominant form of racist reaction since Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech.  And his representation of Islam draws on a network of counter-jihadist websites and writers, from the Israeli website MEMRI to Jihadwatch, Little Green Footballs, Frontpagemag, and various right-wing pundits such as Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer (both co-founders of Stop the Islamization of America), Daniel Pipes, Bat Ye’or, Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, and Martin Kramer.  Indeed, as with previous segments of the manifesto, some of these passages consist of material simply copied wholesale from The Weekly Standard, Frontpagemag and Islamophobic blogs.  But also striking is just how much he depends upon perfectly mainstream news outlets – not just Fox News, but the BBC, for example.  His ruminations about the demographics of Islam in Europe are redolent not of Nazi pamphlets but of mainstream conservative writers such as Mark Steyn and Christopher Caldwell.  This adverts to a problem with the mainstream media’s coverage of Islam, which has been more than adequately documented elsewhere.⁹

Racism toward Muslims, resting as it does on essentialist stereotyping about a diverse population practising diverse interpretations (or none at all) of Islam, has been normalised by the ‘war on terror’.  But if the global situation thus ordained since 2001 has identified Islam as the Other of the West, with the far right capitalising heavily on this shift, this has had ramifications regarding fascist enunciations of another, kindred form of racism.

Antisemitism: the National Jew vs the International Jew

A common trope in anti-Semitic ideology plays the ‘good Jew’ off against the ‘bad Jew’.  So it is with Breivik who re-states in his own language a distinction notoriously made by Winston Churchill, between the ‘National Jew’ and the ‘International Jew’.  In a 1920 article, ‘Zionism vs Bolshevism: A struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People’, Churchill had explained the difference between “Good and Bad Jews”. The good Jews were those ‘National Jews’ who, while practising their faith, exhibited undivided loyalty to their nation of habitat.  In contrast, the ‘International Jew’ who showed no such fidelity, or was disloyal, or revolutionary, was a bad Jew.  For Churchill, Zionism was to be endorsed, as the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in British Mandate Palestine would serve the interests of both Jews and the British Empire, and siphon Jewish energies away from revolutionary projects.

So it is for Breivik, who distinguishes between “loyal” and “disloyal” Jews.  The former are Zionists, and thus nationalists, the latter anti-Zionists and cultural Marxists.  In this respect, he poses the question of whether Hitler’s anti-Semitism was rational:

 

“Were the majority of the German and European Jews disloyal? Yes, at least the so called liberal Jews, similar to the liberal Jews today that opposes nationalism/Zionism and supports multiculturalism. Jews that support multiculturalism today are as much of a threat to Israel and Zionism (Israeli nationalism) as they are to us. So let us fight together with Israel, with our Zionist brothers against all anti-Zionists, against all cultural Marxists/multiculturalists. Conservative Jews were loyal to Europe and should have been rewarded. Instead, [Hitler] just targeted them all.” (p 1167)

Breivik’s objection to Hitler, then, is that he was indiscriminate in his punishment of Jewish disloyalty, when only “the majority” were disloyal.  The implication is that only the latter should have been “targeted”.  This is not so much Holocaust denial, as Holocaust affirmation.  And in Breivik’s treatment, even loyal Jews are better disposed of in some far away land:

“[Hitler] could have easily worked out an agreement with the UK and France to liberate the ancient Jewish Christian lands with the purpose of giving the Jews back their ancestral lands ... The UK and France would perhaps even contribute to such a campaign in an effort to support European reconciliation. The deportation of the Jews from Germany wouldn't be popular but eventually, the Jewish people would regard Hitler as a hero because he returned the Holy land to them.”  (p 1167)

The second principle objection to Hitler, then, is that he did not simply ethnically cleanse the Jews from Germany in the cause of Zionism.  For Breivik is fanatically pro-Zionist, seeing in them the ‘good Jews’ that nationalists can work with.  While most, approximately 75% of European and American Jews are “disloyal” today - being “multiculturalist (nation-wrecking) Jews” – only 50% of Israeli Jews are “disloyal”.  This “shows very clearly that we must embrace the remaining loyal Jews as brothers rather than repeating the mistake of the NSDAP.”  This is a vital strategic point for Breivik, who maintains that in Western Europe, only the UK and France have a “Jewish problem” – in contrast to the US which, due to its relatively high Jewish population, “actually has a very considerable Jewish problem”.  (p 1167)

Breivik’s embrace of Zionism puts him at odds with many fascists and neo-Nazis, but he is not out on a limb among his fraternity.  For several years now, far right groups in Europe have been gravitating toward a pro-Israel position.  Geert Wilders, though not a fascist, represents a strain of radical right opinion that is pro-Israel.  Marine Le Pen, daughter of Jean Marie Le Pen and leader of the fascist Front National (FN) in France, argues that the FN has always been “Zionistic”.  The BNP’s legal officer, Lee Barnes, gave full-throated supported to Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon: “I support Israel 100% in their dispute with Hezbollah ... I hope they wipe Hezbollah off the Lebanese map and bomb them until they leave large greasy craters in the cities where their Islamic extremist cantons of terror once stood.”  The BNP declared itself “prudently” on Israel’s side, for reasons of “national interest”: Israel was part of a “Western, if not European” civilization whose opponents were “trying to conquer the world and subject it to their religion”.  An article on the BNP’s website explained that the party had cast off “the leg-irons of conspiracy theories and the thinly veiled anti-Semitism which has held this party back for two decades”.¹⁰

This realignment reflects a geopolitical reality in which the ‘war on terror’ has revived colonial discourses and designated Islam as the eternal Other of the ‘West’.  In this situation, Israel is seen as an ally against the Muslim peril.  Thus, it is quite logical that anti-Semitism should take the form of embracing the ‘good Jew’, and Zionism.¹¹  Yet history, and the thrust of Breivik’s argument, suggests that even the ‘good Jew’ would not be safe from a reconstituted European fascism.

Capitalist globalism and Eurabia

 
The predominant theme of Breivik’s manifesto, as with most fascist texts, is the over-riding importance of the nation-state.  This does not mean support for the existing state authorities.  As he puts it: “we CANNOT and should not trust that our police forces and military act in our interest now or in the future. Both our police forces and military are lead by the multiculturalist traitors we wish to defeat.” (p 1240)  Thus, an extra-parliamentary movement is needed to recapture the state apparatus, and restore the nation-state’s standing.  But what has so enfeebled the European national state?

If the immediate danger for Breivik is the presence of Muslims, this is merely a symptom of a much larger problem internal to European societies.  Two major enemies combine in Breivik’s purview.  The first is the capitalist globaliser, driven by greed, and the second is the “cultural Marxist”, driven by hate.  We shall deal with an example of the first here.  Like most on the European hard right, Breivik is an opponent of the EU.  He draws on the analysis of the British ‘Eurosceptics’, Christopher Booker and Richard North, to argue that it is at root a project aimed at creating a tyrannical multinational state, inspired by the USSR (hence, “the EUSSR totalitarian system”, p 1384) and driven by France.  The idea is that France is, in pursuit of continental dominance and in great power rivalry with the Anglo-American axis has sought to suppress national sovereignty in the interests of a Greater France.  (pp 294-5)

Worse, however, is that this is bound up with the aim of pursuing a pro-Arab foreign policy. And this is where ‘Eurabia’ comes in. Bat Ye’or, one of Breivik’s muses, and the author of the ‘Eurabia’ thesis, is credited with explaining how “French President Charles de Gaulle, disappointed by the loss of the French colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as with France's waning influence in the international arena, decided in the 1960's to create a strategic alliance with the Arab and Muslim world to compete with the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union.” The result was Eurabia, a political-cultural entity bound by markets and migration, turning the Mediterranean into “a Euro-Arab inland sea by favouring Muslim immigration and promoting multiculturalism with a strong Islamic presence in Europe.” (p 289)

In fact, Breivik goes further. Citing newspapers such as the British Daily Express (the most right-wing of UK tabloids), he asserts that the EU has decided that “the Union should be enlarged to include the Muslim Middle East and North Africa ... has accepted that tens of millions of immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries in northern Africa should be allowed to settle in Europe in the years ahead ... is planning to implement sharia laws for the millions of Muslims it is inviting to settle in Europe ... [T]he EU is formally surrendering an entire continent to Islam while destroying established national cultures... This constitutes the greatest organised betrayal in Western history, perhaps in human history”. (p 318)

Like fascists past and present, Breivik has no objection to the profit system. He is himself someone who has invested in the stock market, and set up two private businesses. What he objects to is an effect of capitalism, which is its tendency to break out of the bounds of the national state and to transport cultural, religious and political trends with it. What he wants is the impossible: a ‘national’ capitalism, subordinate to the imputed cultural, spiritual and material needs of ‘the nation’. 

Anticommunism: Against the Marxist Tyranny

The 2083 manifesto pivots on anticommunism, in an era where actual communism is thin on the ground. Most of Breivik’s reflections on what communism is are unremarkable, if fanciful. For example, he calls upon the liberal political economist Friedrich Hayek and the conservative tobacco salesman Roger Scruton to explain the appeal and thematics of socialist ideology (a totalitarian doctrine, based on wrong theories, attractive to wrong-headed intellectuals). (pp. 63-4) It is rather when he explains the role of communists in the betrayal of the nation that things become interesting. For, as Markha Valenta has put, Breivik “hates the left even more than he fears Islam”.¹² The text of 2083 begins not with Muslims, the EU, or weapons advice, but rather with an extended soliloquy (not, as noted above, written by Breivik) on the influence of “cultural Marxists” in upholding “multiculturalism” and “Political Correctness”. The burden of the argument is as follows: 

Multiculturalism is what results when the doctrine of Marxism is transposed from economic class struggle to culture. As a result of the failure of socialist revolutions to spread through Europe in the post-WWI situation, Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Georgy Lukacs attempted to locate the source of the obstacle in the failure of Marxists to win cultural battles. For Gramsci, the winning of such battles meant creating a new ‘communist man’ who would be the ideal subject for a socialist state. But to win the culture wars meant “a long march through the society’s institutions, including the government, the judiciary, the military, the schools and the media”. In short, it meant taking hold of the levers of power.

Later, this mode of analysis was combined with Freud, in the Frankfurt school, and then linguistic theory, to become ‘deconstruction’. ‘Deconstruction’ exists to prove that any and all texts discriminate against minorities, and has had a powerful effect on educational theory, helping produce the doctrine of ‘Political Correctness’. This in turn works to control language, thus thought. Cultural Marxists, wherever they obtain power, expropriate white European males just as much as communist regimes expropriated the bourgeoisie, both on behalf of defined victims – whether peasants and workers, or Muslims and minorities. (pp 21-3) In this way, cultural Marxists have quietly formed a treasonous power bloc within the state that is: “anti-God, anti-Christian, anti-family, anti-nationalist, anti-patriot, anti conservative, anti-hereditarian, anti-ethnocentric, anti-masculine, anti-tradition, and anti-morality”. (p 38)

It is not just on questions of race and culture that the white European male is persecuted. Modern feminism is also, owing to its Marxist roots, “totalitarian”. As a result, it is producing a “feminisation” of society and of men. Breivik regards Adorno’s theory of the “authoritarian personality” as the key weapon in the feminist arsenal, devised for “psychological warfare against the European male”, making him unwilling to defend his traditional gender role. (p 37) 

An important upshot of this is that ‘Political Correctness’ stifles the unpalatable truth about important subjects. Breivik cannot say “an evil, retarded and supremacist death-cult that refuses to afford women and unbelievers respect and the most basic of human rights” without being “smeared as an ‘Islamophobe’”. Nor can he say “Whites are generally more intelligent and creative than blacks and have, throughout human history, solved the problems presented to the human race by Mother nature far more effectively than blacks have” without being “vilified as a racist”. No dissent from “the childish Liberal fantasy of equality” is possible. In so altering people’s conscious, the cultural Marxists have inflicted a “mental illness”, and one that only affects “the people of the white race as other races and cultures know full well the entirely natural order of inequality.” (pp 400-1)

The white European male, then, is a pitiable figure, not only expropriated, oppressed and feminised, but also prevented from speaking of it by the Marxist dictatorship: “we, the cultural conservatives of Europe, have become slaves under an oppressive, tyrannical, extreme left-wing system with absolutely no hope of reversing the damage they have caused. At least not democratically”. (p 799)

It is not necessary to ponder the absurdities, fictions and paranoia of this analysis, taken from a Free Congress Foundation pamphlet. It is sufficient to note what it means to believe such things. The idea of the communist as conspirer and traitor to the nation has been a mainstay of fascist polemic since its inception. For Mussolini, international socialism of the kind advocated by the anti-war Zimmerwald Left during WWI was a “German weapon” of war, a “German invention”. For Hitler, communist treason was Jewish treason, placing the German masses “exclusively at the service of international Marxism in the Jewish and Stock Exchange parties”. And while Austrian fascists vituperated against “Judeo-Bolshevism” and the “aliens” and “traitors” who defiled the nation, the leader of the Romanian Iron Guard Alexandru Contacuzino excoriated communism for being “harmful to the essence of Romania and to the national life”.¹³ Their answer was to use terror against the Left. Breivik’s answer was to bomb government buildings in Oslo, then descend on a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya and gun down 69 unarmed children.

Fascism: organising the counter-revolution

“We, the free indigenous peoples of Europe, hereby declare a pre-emptive war on all cultural Marxist/multiculturalist elites of Western Europe.” (p 812)

Anders Breivik is not a Nazi. His manifesto makes it clear that he would be “offended” to be called a Nazi, and that he “hates” Adolf Hitler. This is because he considers Hitler a “a traitor to the Germanic and all European tribes”, whose “crazed effort for world domination” was “reckless”. The Nazis “knew perfectly well what the consequences would be for their tribes if they lost, yet they went ahead and completed the job ... And people like myself, and other cultural conservative leaders of today, are still suffering under this propaganda campaign because of that one man.” (pp 1166-7) Breivik hates the Nazis, then, primarily because the Nazis made things difficult for people like him. His objection would be moot were it possible for the Nazis to have won. 

Perhaps it would not be pressing the point too far to say that, on balance, Breivik has more in common with the Nazis than separates him from them. Indeed, he is sympathetic to present-day Nazis, believing that they are “fellow patriots” and that “90% of the individuals who uses [sic] Neonazi/fascist symbols are not real national socialists. They are only extremely frustrated individuals who have been demonised and ridiculed for too long by the establishment.” (p 1239) That said, the fascist agenda that he has outlined does differ in several respects from that of historical fascism. This is because the context, especially the geopolitical context, is radically different. Fascism initially arose amid a crisis of liberal capitalism, a wave of revolutionary socialist insurrection, economic turmoil, and the first signs of the decline of European empires and the ascent of the United States. In a colonial world, characterised by inter-imperialist rivalries, it was still possible to envision solving the nation’s productive problems through territorial expansion – be it the “proletarian nation” grabbing its fair share of the colonies, or the Third Reich reaching for Lebensraum. In a post-colonial era, far right activism has centred on a defensive white nationalism. So it is with Breivik. 

Not that Breivik is opposed to imperialism. His appraisal of colonialism is largely positive, and his objection to the ‘war on terror’ is strategic. It is impossible to bring democracy to Muslim countries such as Iraq, so “we should shift from a pro-democracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive.” We should “talk straight about who the enemy is”. The real war coming is not this politically correct “war on terror”, but “World War IV”. (pp 524 & 572) Still, having purified the nation, he wants to batten down its hatches rather than risk any potentially compromising encounters with nefarious aliens: “The best way to deal with the Islamic world is to have as little to do with it as possible.” (p 338)

Similarly, interwar fascists had a steady stream of recruits among young, idealistic men socialised in institutions which moralised violence (such as the army). They filled up paramilitary units such as the squadristi and freikorps, where non-fascist recruits could be hardened into fascist cadres, through comradeship and ‘knocking heads together’. Since WWII, mass recruitment for such activities has been an endemic problem for the far right. This has left fascists with two options. The first is to seek respectability through parliamentary campaigns, shedding explicit references to fascist or white supremacist language and demonstrating their fitness to govern. This is problematic for fascists, for whom control of the streets is more important than control of the council chamber. The alternative is to find substitutes in existing gangs with a culture of violence and nationalism. The infiltration of football gangs by the National Front in 1970s and 1980s is an example of this. Today’s English Defence League (EDL), in which organised fascists lead mobs of racist football hooligans in targeted street campaigns is another. In practise, many fascist organisations have tried to maintain both strategies concurrently.

Breivik attempts a hybrid of these strategies. While declaring that democratic struggle is otiose, he is embryonically aware of the need to engage in hegemonic battles, shedding the stigma of the Third Reich. As he puts it: “Copy your enemies, learn from the professionals”. The “cultural Marxists” whose dominance “cultural conservatives” bridle under have effectively concealed “their true political intentions by claiming to be driven by humanist principles”. Thus, while “cultural Marxists” exert dominance through front organisations supporting human rights, feminism or environmentalism, so “cultural conservatives” should embrace front tactics based on alliances “against Muslim extremism”, “against Jihad”, “for free speech”, and for human and civil rights. (pp 1241-2) 

Intriguingly, Breivik credits the “British EDL” for being “the first youth organisation that has finally understood this. Sure, in the beginning it was the occasional egg heads who shouted racist slogans and did Nazi salutes but these individuals were kicked out. An organisation such as the EDL has the moral high ground and can easily justify their political standpoints as they publicly oppose racism and authoritarianism.” He goes on to urge “conservative intellectuals” to support the EDL and “help them on the right ideological path. And to ensure that they continue to reject criminal, racist and totalitarian doctrines.” (pp 1242-3) We do not need to take Breivik’s descriptions of the EDL at face value, any more than we accept his idiosyncratic understanding of what constitutes racism. It is sensible to assume that he is aware of the EDL’s record as a violent street gang, and that no “individuals were kicked out” of the EDL for Nazi salutes or racist slogans. But it is two features of the EDL that he particularly values: what he perceives as their ability to gain favourable media coverage, and polarise opinion; and their loose model of street organization which “is the only way to avoid paralyzing scrutiny and persecution”. (pp 1243 & 1255) 

The key to his argument, however, is that “patriots” must begin preparing for an armed insurgency. The moral and political argument for armed struggle is that multiculturalism, “like drugs”, has already destroyed “the heart and fabric” of the nation, such that its subjects “possess no potential for resistance”. As such, it is not “remotely possible” that a “conservative, monocultural party will ever gain substantial political influence”. “The cultural Marxists have institutionalised multiculturalism and have no intention of ever allowing us to exercise any political influence of significance.... It is ... lethal to waste another five decades on meaningless dialogue while we are continuously losing our demographical advantage” (pp 802-3) As such, “armed struggle is the only rational approach”. (p 812)

This insurgency must attack the “category A and B traitors” (Marxists, “suicidal humanists”, “capitalist globalists”, etc), first and foremost, rather than Muslims whose presence Breivik deems to be a symptom rather than the source of the problem. “We will focus on the Muslims AFTER we have seized political and military control. At that point, we will start deportation campaigns.” (pp 1255-6) This is not to say that Muslims cannot be singled out. Numerous targets are suggested because of a high Muslim population, or because they constitute a major Muslim gathering. But the priority is to assault “cultural Marxists” and what he regards as the centre-left establishment. A key section on weapons of mass destruction is headed: “Obtaining and using WMD’s against the cultural Marxist / multiculturalist elites”. It proceeds to outline ways of obtaining or cultivating anthrax, procuring deadly pathogens, and gaining access to chemical agents. 2083 does not envision “cultural conservatives” getting hold of small nuclear devices until the later days of the insurrection, between 2030 and 2070 – but this is no reason not to think ahead, and the manifesto describes scenarios for their acquisition and use. (pp 960-73)

Breivik envisions a three-staged civil war in Europe, characterised at first by clandestine cells using “military shock attacks”, followed by a phase of more advanced resistance movements and preparations for “pan-European coup d’états, and finally a period of coups, repression, the defeat of “Cultural Communism”, and the deportation of Muslims. By 2083, 400 years after the ‘Battle of Vienna’ between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the revolution is to be victorious. (p 813)  

Once the revolution is successful, there is to be a transitional phase of dictatorship in which a “patriotic tribunal” will ensure that nationalist-minded individuals are placed in prominent positions in the security forces, and the media, all public offices, publishing outfits, and schools. It will choose a new “birth policy”, and social structures will go from being “matriarchies to once again becoming patriarchies”. It will organise the execution of “all category A and B traitors who continue to oppose us”. This will be followed by a shift away from “mass democracy” to “administered democracy”. “Mass democracy does not work,” Breivik asserts, “as has been proven.” It must be replaced by constitutional monarchies and republics. The tribunal will continue to act as a guardian council to ensure that the nation is inoculated against renewed Marxist infiltration, that the fertility rate is kept to an acceptable level, and that “the suicidal humanists and capitalist globalists do not misuse their influence”. (pp 795-801 & 1325)

This sinister augury, supplying – Nostradamus-like – a detailed prospectus of events, many of which the author of these prognoses would not live to see, is of a piece with classical fascist millenarianism. The European “tribes” are endowed with a destiny, an apocalyptic final reckoning, out of which is to come national redemption. It is this which, in part, was responsible for the perpetual radicalisation of the Nazi regime. It was ultimately this which informed Hitler’s decision to provoke a Europe-wide war in a situation in which he was very unlikely to win. It was this which led to his turning on Stalin and attempting to enslave Russia, despite this adding an impossible dimension to his war. And it was this which culminated in auto-obliteration as Nazi planes were sent back to bomb German cities to prevent their capture by Allied forces.¹⁴ The culmination of fascism is not dictatorship; it is catastrophe.

Conclusion

Breivik’s 2083 is a fascist manifesto not because it apes the language of fuhrers and duces past, but because it has absorbed the elements of contemporary reactionary discourse and articulated them in an agenda of mass rightist insurrection. He has eschewed many of the obsessions and talking points of much white supremacist discourse, which has been concerned with reviving the prospects of fascism by restoring the reputation of the Nazi regime. He does not need Holocaust denial to articulate his agenda, any more than he needs the hard biological racism of the colonial period to express his supremacism. His vituperations about ‘cultural Marxism’ have, by placing crypto-communists in senior positions of authority, provided the conspiracy that he needs to explain the nation’s parlous circumstances. The nefarious ‘Jew’ of anti-Semitic discourse is not rejected, but is qualified, allied to a Zionist posture, and is at any rate secondary to his wider schema.

There are other respects in which Breivik’s manifesto is very different from classical fascist discourse. For example, there is nothing about trade unions, very little about traditional revolutionary socialism, and also nothing on the global economic crisis, in 2083. It is hard to imagine a Mein Kampf without some reference to the trade unions, to winning the German workers from the reds, and so on. To put it another way, there is very little that is specifically addressed to the problems of the working class, or even the insecure petty bourgeoisie. Unlike most fascist parties and intellectuals in Europe, Breivik has no orientation toward winning over masses. In politics, he worked as part of a milieu, but ultimately set out to make his most significant contribution to the fascist struggle on his own. Yet, Breivik aspires to trigger a mass movement, even if he does not attempt to offer plausible solutions to popular problems. And in defining a ‘revolutionary’ rightist creed that is more informed by this conjuncture than the interwar period, 2083 outlines some of the contours of what we can expect from fascist movements of the future.

Richard Seymour

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Notes

1. Leon Trotsky, The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany, Pathfinder Press, 1971, p. 399

2. In fact, this section of Breivik’s text is lifted, word for word, from William S. Lind, ed., “Political Correctness:” A Short History of an Ideology, Free Congress Foundation, November 2004 . Indeed, much of the remainder of the text is lifted, without credit, from numerous sources such as the Unabomber’s manifesto, and a Norwegian blogger known as ‘Fjordman’. See "Dette er terroristens store politiske forbilde – nyheter", Dagbladet.no, 25 July 2011 ; ‘Massedrapsmannen kopierte "Unabomberen" ord for ord’, Nrk.no, 24 July 2011 This fact explains some of the oddities of Breivik’s manifesto, which we will return to.

3. See Robert O Paxton, 'The Five Stages of Fascism', The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, March 1998; Robert O Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Penguin Books, 2004; and Michael R Marrus & Robert O Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews, Stanford University Press, 1981

4. Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, Pluto Press, 1999, pp. 18-29

5. See Michael Mann, Fascists, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 2-3 & 21

6. For a fine critical review of Mann, see Dylan Riley, ‘Enigmas of Fascism’, New Left Review 30, November-December 2004

7. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism - Fascism - Populism, NLB, 1977, pp. 160-2. Strictly speaking, Laclau’s point concerned the ‘class connotation’ of an ideology, but the argument works as well in this context.

8. Sam Harris, ‘Bombing Our Illusions’, Samharris.org, 10 October 2005

9. See, for example, Elizabeth Poole, ed., Reporting Islam: media representations of British Muslims, IB Tauris, 2002; and Julian Petley & Robin Richardson, Pointing the Finger: Islam and Muslims in the British Media, Oneworld Publications, 2011

10. Michelle Goldberg, ‘The Norway Shooter’s Zionist Streak’, Daily Beast, 25 July 2011; Geoff Brown, ‘Why Muslims are the BNP’s Current Target’, Morning Star, 20 September 2006

11. There are also historical precedents. Mussolini, though personally anti-Semitic, was not averse to the claims of Zionism, particularly its Revisionist right-wing. After 1925, he offered to put the Fascist state at the service of Zionist colonization, calculating that it would weaken the British. Hitler was much more hostile to the Zionist project. While he gleefully pointed out that Zionism was an admission that the Jews were “a foreign people”, he maintained that Jews were incapable of state-building, and at any rate were only interested in Palestine so that they could create a centre for criminal conspiracy, outwith “the seizure of others”. Nonetheless, the Third Reich was quite willing to make population transfer and trading agreements with the Zionist leadership. See Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators, 1983, reproduced at the Marxists Internet Archive: ; Francis R Nicosia, The Third Reich and the Palestine Question, Transaction Books, 2000

12. Markha Valenta, ‘Breivik: killing the left’, Open Democracy, 31 August 2011

13. Paul O’ Brien, Mussolini in the First World War: The Journalist, The Soldier, The Fascist, Berg, 2005, p. 173; Michael Mann, Fascists, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 235; Roger Griffin, Fascism, Totalitarianism and Political Religion, Routledge, 2005, p. 154

14. On Hitler’s calamitous decision, see Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, Penguin, 2007

Hanns Eisler: Contemporary Music and Fascism (1944)

Taken from Hanns Eisler – Musik und Politik – Schriften 1924-1948, ed. Günter Mayer(1973: VEB Deutscher Verlag für Musik, Leipzig), pp. 489-493. © Stephanie Eisler.

Hanns Eisler was a German Communist, a friend and collaborator of Bertolt Brecht, writing the music for several of his plays. His sister, Ruth Fisher, was one of the leaders of the KPD in the 1920s. Eisler was one of Schoenberg's first pupils, but later dismayed his teacher by writing popular music that drew on jazz and cabaret. After the Nazi rise to power his music was banned and he fled for America, where he continued to be persecuted, being one of the first artists placed on the Hollywood blacklist by the studio heads, and appeared before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The following are his notes for a lecture he gave in 1944.

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Before the war it was not unusual to hear people of many sorts, (particularly of the so-called professional or intellectual type) express their admiration for the successes of fascism or for the personalities of their leaders. Perhaps, they said, fascism has really brought a new idea to the world. They have found a new solution for the social crisis that dominates our time.

Success always has a certain fascination.

Today, the total bankruptcy of fascism is recognized by everyone as the biggest flop in history. German anti-fascists have always declared that fascism had nothing new to offer, neither new ideas nor even the intention to find such ideas — that it was nothing more than good, old-fashioned barbaric reaction — a more forceful and efficient suppression of the people than ever before invented — made more efficient by borrowing and stealing from all sides, digesting and adapting everything to their totalitarian purpose.

We musicians are apt to consider our art as something a little apart from life and its crises. But on the other hand music is extremely sensitive to all social trends. When fascism first touched German music, German musicians found it difficult to understand this contradiction. If Flaubert for instance could write and publish L’éducation sentimentale under Napoleon III¹ why couldn’t a modern German composer continue to write chamber-music under Hitler?

There is a reason: fascism, more organized and brutal than everything Napoleon III could imagine, cannot afford even the slightest dissonance in their artificial harmony — or a breath of opposition even in the most abstract and remote arts and sciences. Everything is controlled. Physics, mathematics, even the art of landscape or still-life painting are observed as being potentially dangerous.

What does fascism require of a musician? Nothing and everything! First of all, preserve the musicial traditions of the past. Good performances of classical music, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart continued. There was even an attempt to continue the Weimar Republic’s programme of `bringing good music to the masses’. On the other hand there was an energetic encouragement of the folk music movements. It was in folk music that they hoped to find an attractive substitute for the dominance of American jazz in the entertainment, field songs, dances, operettas, etc. Perhaps the clearest way to understand all these problems is to imagine yourself as a modern composer trying to survive fascism. What must you do? If you are young you have to find your own way after you have digested the innovations of Arnold Schönberg, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók. But before you begin, fascism stops you. The music of these three modern masters has been labelled as Kultur-Bolschewistisch, degenerate. Their works are forbidden and if you follow them you will find yourself in a dangerous position. What does fascism have against these three masters? And why especially against Schönberg, the most hated of these? Schönberg’s music reflects the complexity and crisis of our times. If I may say so, he expressed long before the invention of the airplane the fear that one experiences in an air-raid shelter under bombardment. Everything fought for by the Nazis — enthusiasm for their imperialistic goals, devotion to their leader, conformity to their way of life — all this is challenged by the work of Schönberg. The loneliness, despair, torment expressed by Schönberg, as modern society confronts him, are unacceptable to the nazis. In 1942 Herr Goebbels reafirmed the rules which the state authorities laid down for the artists:

"No art for art’s sake, no individual choice of subject. The artist should express the newly risen spirit of the Reich, he must avoid psychological problems and depict the Nazi soldier-type, the worker, the city, the industry."

According to such standards modern music became the enemy of fascism.

If you write modern music, you will have to follow certain rules. Go ahead, write it, but if you want it performed and to be supported by the Nazis, you must write an eclectic style, steering cautiously between Richard Strauss and certain moderate moderns. Has a school of modern German music come from this base? I am happy to report — no. And not for lack of talent! The majority of responsible modern German composers living in greater Germany prefer silence, writing and hiding their new works supporting themselves as conducters in provincial operahouses? Teachers, arrangers, etc.

When I was in Prague in 1937 I was visited by a young German composer who had sneaked over the border as a tourist to show me the score of his new opera, based on the events of the Thirty Years War. This extremely gifted work was written in a most advanced style so that aside from the revolutionary tendencies of the subject, the music itself, as Kultur-Bolschevismus, was unacceptable to the Nazis. When I proposed a Brussels performance of the overture alone, he was terrified.

"The Gestapo would ask me how I had not presented my score to the proper art authorities... And they have a most unpleasant manner of asking questions — even of musicians".

So he prefered silence — waiting for better weather.²

Let me tell you another story: A young German refugee composer called Leibowitz was hidden and protected by the French underground during the German occupation of Paris.³ As a gesture of gratitude he rehearsed secretly (with five French musicians) one of the most modern works of Schönberg — the Quintet for Woodwinds.

French musicians were most delighted to do this. All France was tired and disgusted with the endless mass-singing of the German soldiers, bellowing their folk and military songs. This music of Schönberg expressed at least the feeling and suffering of a human being in difficult times. These are not unique cases.

Another aspect of modern music is the so called Gebrauchsmusik — a sort of departure from modernism by those composers who were left unsatisfied writing only for the concert hall, and wanted to bring music closer to real life, even declaring that music is obliged to serve a concrete purpose. In the famous festivals of Donau-Eschingen and Baden Baden, we experimented with the media of theatre, film, radio, music for bands, community singing, schoolchildren, short operas, etc. There were two tendencies in this field. The right wing interpreted their task as purely functional —any function was good enough — dentists’ congresses or folk festivals. The left wing had a more realistic interpretation of this new function in music — the closer relation of music to practical life. The value of this music was to be measured by its usefulness to the people in their struggle. And this struggle was the struggle against reaction and fascism.

This left wing of Gebrauchsmusik was naturally a very specific enemy that had to be annihilated by Hitler. The right-wing, however, with its programme of simplicity in music, flexibility for all purposes, was welcomed and assimilated. But in ten years, all this ideas of functional music boiled down to simple marching songs, so called workers songs and patriotic jingles. The popular composer had his difficulties too. Obviously all German popular music within the past twenty years borrowed or stole from American jazz. Even the grandpa of the Viennese operetta, Léhar, began to swing a little. The statements and decrees of the Nazi authorities, forbidding all jazz music as the product of lower and degenerate races broke like a thunderbolt over the amusement market.⁴ But there were two alternatives. You could color jazz with a fake folklore dress, or, as Hitler was a close friend of Franco and has some friends in the Argentine too, Latin rhythms were permitted. Heaven alone knows how many foxtrots were dressed as tangos and rumbas — no one had told Goebbels about the African origin of the rumba. So American jazz in sheep’s clothing, has survived in the Hitler-Regime.

About folk music itself let me say only that the industrial revolution in Germany ended folk music a hundred and fifty years ago — and its so-called revival under Hitler is a purely artificial and manufactured task and has nothing to do with the real tradition of folk music. This is a museum matter in modern Germany and not the basis for creation of new musical life.

In the field of music Hitler has met defeat as total as at Stalingrad. Not even successful Quislings have appeared in the ranks of modern German composers. It is refreshing, to report that in the years of crime and corruption in Germany, German music remained silent. No Hitler symphonies, no Goering operas, no Goebbels quartets, no Horst Wessel tone poems. Although money and power were offered as never before good music and honest musicians were and always will be arch-enemies of fascism.

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1. Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) completed his L’éducation sentimentale in 1869. Napoleon III (1808-1873), nephew of Napoleon Bonaprte I reigned from 1852.
2. Eisler is most probably referring to Karl Amadeus Hartmann (1905-63) and his chamber opera Des Simplicius Simplicissimus Jugend which was composed in 1934-5 and first performed in Köln in 1949.
3. René Leibowitz (b. Warsaw, 1913) went with his parents to Paris in 1926. He studied composition, first in Berlin with Schönberg from 1930 to 1933, then with Anton Webern in Vienna.
4. At a meeting of radio directors [Radioindentanten] in 1935 it was decided that "Nigger jazz shall as of today be prohibited across the entire German radio network" (evening edition of the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 12 October 1935),

Robert Paxton: What is Fascism?

From Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism

If we are going to talk about Fascism it would be worth having some idea of what characterises it. Paxton offers a good starting point - Strelnikov

"The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person.

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

To be sure, political behavior requires choices, and choices – as my critics hasten to point out – bring us back to underlying ideas. Hitler and Mussolini, scornful of the 'materialism' of socialism and liberalism, insisted on the centrality of ideas to their movements. Not so, retorted many antifascists who refuse to grant them such dignity. “National Socialism’s ideology is constantly shifting”, Franz Neumann observed. “It has certain magical beliefs – leadership adoration, supremacy of the master race – but it is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.” On this point, this book is drawn toward Neumann’s position, and I examined at some length in chapter1 the peculiar relationship of fascism to its ideology – simultaneously proclaimed as central, yet amended or violated as expedient. Nevertheless, fascists knew what they wanted. One cannot banish ideas from the study of fascism, but one can situate them accurately among all the factors that influence this complex phenomenon. One can steer between two extremes: fascism consisted neither of the uncomplicated application of its program, nor of freewheeling opportunism.

I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feeling than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them “mobilizing passions”:

• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions
• the primacy of the group toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it
• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external
• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences
• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary
• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny
• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason
• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success
• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.

Fascism according to this definition, as well as behavior in keeping with these feelings, is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One ('the creation of movements') within all democratic countries – not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions”, especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is currently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular 'march' on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national 'enemies' is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two ('the rooting of fascist movements in the political system') in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past."

~ Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, Allen Lane (2004), pp.218–220

Just Say Non: Nazism, Narcissism and Boyd Rice

"Boyd's rather unimaginative sadism used to embarrass me, but then he explained it using words like 'Weltanshauung'"
Lisa Crystal-Carver, Drugs are Nice ^{[LC, p215]}

I last saw Boyd Rice play (as 'Non') back in August 1981, alongside Throbbing Gristle (TG), Z'ev, Cabaret Voltaire and Clock DVA as part of the 'Industrial Night Out' at the Lyceum, London, which brought together the big cheeses of Industrial Music in what was to be something of a coming out party for the scene but turned out also to be its swansong (it was TG's last UK concert; they broke up a few months later). At the time Rice presented himself as a Dadaist and prankster though his aesthetic was actually closer to the sub-Futurist 'instant karma for kids' noise-racket that Merzbow has since successfully appropriated and turned into a brand / 'racket' of his own. While TG boasted of making music from ugly noise, Rice tried to outflank them by serving up the ugliness directly, unfiltered by any obvious concern for form. In fairness Boyd Rice could be said to be among the key players of early Industrial Music, and as a result he perhaps has a shade more kudos than some of the complete musical non-entities we're generally concerned with around here (Wakeford, Pearce, Moynihan, et al). Rice has declared his Fascism in a number of statements, in his art, and through public actions such as appearing in full Fascist regalia and holding a dagger in a photograph alongside Bob Heick, taken in 1989 to promote the latter's organisation, the neo-Nazi skinhead party, American Front. He has also appeared on White Aryan Resistance founder Tom Metzger's cable TV show Race and Reason, where he declared that his friends in Current 93 and Death in June were promoting a 'racialist' agenda and emphasised the importance of Industrial and Neo-Folk music for building the 'Aryan youth movement'.

Since the 80s Rice has continued to release records as well as dabbling ineptly in other media (photography, painting) and playing a leading role in the Church of Satan (he has recently been installed as its leader and 'High Priest') as well as getting involved with Grail mythology, Tiki culture, alcoholism and various other similarly moronic pastimes. Along the way he's written essays and articles outlining his evolving concerns and hobbies for a string of publications, which are collected here along with some previously unpublished writings in the book Standing in Two Circles: The Collected Works of Boyd Rice, edited by Michael Clark and published in 2008 by Creation Books. This collection offers an opportunity to pin down the peculiarly slippery Rice; 'slippery' because his defenders claim that he sets out essentially to 'provoke', which lends him a degree of insulation from the charges of Fascism that would be trivially obvious in any other context. The way this works is that Rice can openly declaim and publish Fascist and racist ideas, and yet confused fans and commentators - who have bought into the mistaken idea that provocation in and of itself is the ne plus ultra of artistic radicalism - still refuse to accept that by buying his records and attending his gigs they are financing a Fascist propagandist since, after all, he is 'merely' trying to provoke. Perhaps these people are by now so utterly stupefied that they're just grateful to anyone who can still manage to wring a response out of them - even if it's by promoting ideas that threaten themselves and everyone they know. This was brought home to me earlier this year when a photographer friend attended Rice's gig in New York to record it for a local paper. Despite the fact that this person has a background as an anti-Fascist, having watched an entire evening of Rice dressed in Fascist military gear, surrounded on stage by Sieg Heil'ing Nazi goons while projecting images of the Swastika and Wolfsangel (the SS symbol Rice used for years as his logo) and reading selections from racist, Social Darwinist tracts, and with the support groups being open White Suprematists, the best he could come up with at the end was that Boyd might perhaps be "a little dodgy". I mean, what does a Fascist have to do these days to get the recognition they deserve?

One reason that Rice's ideology is difficult to get to grips with is that he is patently stupid, meaning that people are loath to take him seriously in case it reflects poorly on their sense of humour or proportion. But that is to miss the fact that condescending to Rice's idiocy by not taking him seriously also makes it easier for him to sell his ideas. While Fascist ideology is by its very nature irrational and essentially incoherent - it doesn't seek to understand the social world in order to place it under collective human control but rather to justify post hoc the Fascist's pre-existing drive to annihilate large parts of society in the name of racial and spiritual 'purity' - this is made worse in Rice's case due to his inability to grapple in even the slightest way with history, politics or anything else requiring a modicum of intellectual focus. His arguments are confused and contradictory, and on top of this he shares the Fascist-occult regard for portents and symbols, for 'mysterious forces', innate biological imperatives, occult machinations and Chthonic powers as the determinants of history, which means that his thought necessarily has the chaotic, cobbled-together quality of childhood obsessions and superstitions.

Despite the fact that there is very little logic or sense in his thought there is nevertheless another kind of coherence at work to the extent that his obsessions cohere with those of his comrades, overlapping neatly with those of the other players in the Fascist-occult 'Apoliteic' counter-culture. Their ideas may well be an incoherent mess when considered purely as ideas, but they share them in common in practical terms as they thrust their hands into the lucky-dip bowl of Fascist esoteric idiocy to pluck out those notions they like they sound of and dole them out among their peers. So it's no surprise that in these essays Rice touches on many of the core themes that tie him to the likes of Michael Moynihan, Doug Pearce and other musicians he has collaborated with over the years (both Moynihan and Pearce provide blurb texts promoting the book; Pearce even providing a rare dash of humour when he salutes Rice as an "inspirational genius"). These people may be in different stages of denial or employing different degrees of deception when it comes to admitting their Fascist allegiances, but they all draw from the same pool of half-baked atavistic notions and gladly share what they find, disagreeing only in points of detail (and then largely only on the basis of minor variations in taste or as a matter of mutual brand positioning). Among Fascist ideologues ideas are essentially fuel for the creation of a mobilising myth, so coherence doesn't matter that much. But while it is impossible to take Boyd Rice seriously as a man or a thinker it would be irresponsible not to register the threat his ideas represent.

Balding alcoholic Boyd Rice
(Photo by Brian Clark)

A good place to start into this mess of a book is Michael Clark's 'Introduction', which runs through a few of the set-piece arguments the Fascists and their supporters use in their defence. First up is Clark's defence of Rice's use of Fascist motifs;

"To conform to the edicts of contemporary Western social mores one must totally accept or reject controversial taboo subjects... In considering the issue of Nazism, for example, there can be no grey area, no possibility whatsoever that certain facets of such a subject might hold a kernel of merit or glimmer or redemptive worth... The use of Fascistic or Nazi aesthetics and symbolism is resolutely - aggressively - forbidden in all but the most comedic of contexts, while... the Hammer and the Sickle and The Red Star are so ubiquitous as to verge on countercultural corporate branding... Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are unilaterally and universally anathematised, while their despotic Communist counterparts Joseph Stalin and Mao Tse Tung and regularly given a pass - despite the fact that the latter wrested exponentially more human life from the planet than did the former." ^[38]

The first thing to note about this is that it skirts the fact that Rice not only uses Fascist 'aesthetics and symbolism' but promotes Fascism itself (in the very book Clark is introducing, for example): Clark presumably hopes that the reader is as stupid as his author and won't notice his equivocation. More importantly, this line of argument exemplifies one of the defining characteristics of the book as a whole since it remains trapped entirely within the framework of a bourgeois thought. To put it bluntly, Rice and his friends repeatedly accept a liberal perception of the world and then simply reverse its particular judgements (Fascism is taboo <-> Fascism is grand). This does not allow the individual to escape bourgeois thought in the way that is promised to the consumer, but rather keeps them entirely within its clutches, albeit perhaps looking a little racier now they sport Totenkopf patches and worship Satan.

Stalinism did indeed pile up the bodies of its victims, slaughtering millions on the road to conquering and then consolidating its social power. But Stalinism and Fascism do not represent political antitheses in the way that both Clark and Fascist thought like to pretend. They are simply different forms of rule peculiar to different stages and conditions of capitalism. Both Stalinism and Fascism murdered Jews, homosexuals, national minorities,'revisionists' and backsliders, trade unionists and socialists. The difference is that Stalinism in both Russia and China did so as part of a process of primitive (state-) capitalist accumulation similar to that by which Britain, for example, achieved much the same ends at a corresponding stage of development through, eg., the slave trade and Highland Clearances (though Stalinism appears bloodier because it compressed the same phase of development into a far shorter period of time). This does not justify Stalinist violence in any way, but it begins to explain it. Fascism serves a different end and achieves it differently. It is essentially a form of emergency rule at a time of extraordinary capitalist crisis in which the working class is terrorised into submission by unleashing waves of destructive violence against any and all perceived enemies of the state, internal and external. Fascism has its ideological dimensions, of course, but in practice they are ultimately subordinate to its self-appointed task of integrating and stabilising capitalist society at times of danger to the state by liquidating it's enemies, both real (the class conscious working class) and imagined (any and all impure and degenerate elements as defined by whatever myth or prejudice inspires the particular strand of Fascism under consideration and mobilises the masses behind it). This is done in order to create an 'organic' / integral society where all the parts are subordinated to the social totality, existing only to serve it.

All of this is opaque to Clark, who talks instead like a consumer in the shopping mall of history, choosing between competing brands of totalitarianism on the basis of which is less fattening for his notional conscience. He wants to pile up the bodies and count them rather than understand the ideas that coordinated their destruction. Instead of considering the politics of Rice's Fascism he likes to present Rice simply as someone 'brave' enough to challenge the 'taboo' against Fascism, as if he might shake bourgeois society to its core merely by invoking the negative theology it shrouds itself in. But this taboo is, after all, only the socially constructed fetish of a particular epoch and doesn't mean that crisis-ridden capitalism won't reach toward Fascism again in future (there are faint indications of this already in Europe). And this turn will be made easier to the extent that ideologues and propagandists, even feeble ones like Boyd Rice, have helped clear the route back to Fascism by normalising it's anti-democratic, mythic values.

A similar logic is apparent in Clark's defence of Satanism;

"The Church of Satan is often dismissed outright as illegitimate by practitioners of more established belief systems... it's difficult to deny that conventional organised religion has been responsible for scores of large scale wars, genocides, inquisitions, witch hunts, crusades and other varieties of human strife over the centuries, but one would be hard pressed to find so much as a single example of a major conflict undertaken in the name of Satan." ^[39]

Once again, the ignorance of basic historical processes (if it isn't entirely feigned) is astonishing. Does he really imagine that the Crusades were simply an expression of Christian values, as opposed to social and political struggles for which the language of religion served merely as a smokescreen and ideology? Clark takes religious ideology at its own word and assigns to it a primordial power over events, as if religion created man rather than the other way about. Worse than this, in treating Satanism as merely an abstract negation of Christianity he ignores the positive content that modern Satanism has developed, which is rooted in racist and proto-Fascist ideas. Modern Satanism begins with the work of Howard Stanton Levey (aka Anton LaVey) and his Church of Satan. As is well known, the key text of his church, The Satanic Bible, which has influenced all of the main Satanist cults since, plagiarises the 19th Century Social Darwinist tract Might is Right, by Arthur Desmond (aka Ragnar Redbeard), a work brimming with violent anti-Semitism and racism. Partly as a result of LaVey's promotion of it, Desmond's book has become a favourite of modern racists, right-wing Libertarians and Fascists, and was even republished by 14 Words Press, the company founded by David Lane, the notorious Klan member who also helped lead the armed Fascist group, The Order, and who died in prison after being convicted of conspiring in the murder of Denver Radio talk show host (and Jewish anti-Fascist) Alan Berg. Entire sections of Might is Right are simply transferred wholesale into Levey's Bible. If Satanism has not yet proved as practically malevolent as Christianity in Clark's estimation it is certainly not for the want of effort on the part of those who have taken the core of Levey's teaching to its logical conclusion, such as Lane and, eg., the members of The Order of Nine Angles and other Nazi-Satanic cults.

As a collection of occasional pieces it's hard to get to grips with Rice's book as a whole. Large parts of it document his obsession with all kinds of ephemera: over the course of the book he discusses things such as novelty soaps, The Lawrence Whelk Retirement Home and Museum, bumper stickers and campaign ribbons, Disneyland, Tiny Tim, 'Leave it to Beaver', Martin Denny and Tiki bars, Mondo films, bubblegum pop and similar avowedly lightweight culture. I've heard it argued that Rice's love of trivia shows that he can't really be a Fascist since he clearly doesn't take anything that seriously (whereas Fascists are presumably permanently dour, focussed solely on their destiny and the tasks of history). But that is to seriously overestimate the Fascist mind which, in reality, feels quite at home with the banal, the kitsch and the maudlin. Rice's debunking attitude is represented as a levelling, critical iconoclasm, but in fact it expresses a much more systematic and thoroughgoing narcissism and cynicism which ultimately sees everything (other than his own übermensch ego) as essentially worthless. This conception perhaps represents the point at which Fascist narcissism blends into post-modern affectlessness. For the Fascist the social world (as opposed to nature) really is a meaningless pit. In Boyd Rice's mind a bar of novelty soap might well be the perfect symbol of the supposed vacuity of existence. The twist in his case is only that he revels in this vacuousness; "it is my view that the best way to inoculate oneself against the prevailing dystopia is to simply decide to love it" ^[144]. Boyd celebrates the trivial because, as Terry Eagleton put it, "Nihilists and buffoons are allergic to the slightest hint of significance" ^{[TE, 87]}.

In 'Burning the Ice' (1989) Rice recalls "one of the pivotal episodes of my youth", in which he watches through a picture window as an anonymous man within irons his shirt then makes himself a sandwich and packs his lunch before setting off in his car for work. "I was horrified", says Rice ^[56]. This experience leads him into a life of desperate opposition to conventional morality, which expresses itself through his stealing money from purses he finds in the cloakroom at parties and breaking into his neighbour's flats through open windows in order to have a sniff around. Terrifying stuff. In 'Sin in the Suburbs' (1994) Rice details his early sexual experiences, including an unintentionally hilarious story about how he was told as a youngster that every time he masturbated he was destroying the millions of potential souls contained in his sperm. This naturally led him to embark on a prolonged course of intense wanking. The image of the red-faced Rice furiously pulling on his cock while fantasising impotently about annihilating non-existent Christian souls seems somehow a fitting tribute to the man and his career.

Things start to take a more genuinely sinister turn when, as the next stage in the planned development of his psychopathy, he decides to stalk a waitress from a local restaurant. He follows her around to learn about her daily movements and then engineers a 'chance' meeting with her on her way home from work. This leads to a date after which, back at the woman's flat, he talks her into letting him tie her up for some S&M fun. Once she is bound he goes into the kitchen to fetch a carving knife then convinces the woman that he is going to cut her open. He then suddenly departs, leaving his victim terrified. Such violent misogyny would become a staple of Rice's life. In 1994's 'Revolt Against Penis Envy' (notice the acronym) he works himself up into a fever of hatred and contempt for women;

"At one time all was right with the world. It was lorded over by men who imposed their will by force. Women kept their mouths shut, underlings knew their place... In a once glorious past, woman was a creature without rights; a second class citizen... She was part cook, part whore, part servant and all child... Woman must be put in her place... These days the only way to restore balance between the sexes is by fear and pain... Rape is the act by which fear and pain are united in love... Now is the time to subjugate. Now is the time to dominate. Now is the time to rape. Let the RAPE commence. Go forth! Rise up! Rape, rape, rape!" ^[81-83]

Clearly this was written as a provocation and, according to the reasoning usually applied to Rice, can't be taken entirely seriously. But why not? If the ideas conform to his practice we can assume that for all that these opinions are expressed so as to 'provoke', they nevertheless also represent his thinking. In her book, Drugs are Nice, Lisa Crystal Carver (aka Lisa Suckdog) details the long-term mental and physical abuse she suffered as Rice's partner and the mother of their child, leading to a brutal attack which saw her badly injured and Rice imprisoned ("Boyd strangled me and threw me against walls and bashed my head against the futon frame, [finally he] released his hands from my neck and stood up, dazed, like a big, stupid oaf and smacked his lips with the satisfaction of having given in to impulse" ^{[LC, 309]}).

Other parts of Rice's book concern individuals who have become icons for the Fascist counter-culture; Anton LaVey, Savitri Devi and Charles Manson. In 'I'll Call You Abraxas' (1994) Rice details his various meetings and interviews with Manson. Indeed, Manson gave this book it's title, having said to Rice, "I'll call you Abraxas, because you stand in two circles at once" ^[100] (Abraxas being a Gnostic deity which Rice believes, after Jung, is "the ultimate archetype", being beyond all dualities - and therefore 'beyond good and evil'). Rice claims to have been a fan of Manson since his teenage years. He also claims that it was him who took Throbbing Gristle out to Manson's old base at Spahn Ranch to have the photographs taken which appeared in Re:Search's early feature on TG, and which cemented the association between them and Manson. Naturally, Manson is a hero to Rice, and a font of tremendous wisdom;

"... he seemed to be an expert in many things... He knew about ancient history and current history, and the forces that shaped both. He seemed to posses a comprehensive overview of the history of the whole world; not just the events as they are presented, but all the unseen factors that preceded and resulted from those events." ^[97]

Even Rice cannot fail to notice that Manson is a fantasist (at one point he tells Rice that his supporters have hijacked a fleet of nuclear submarines and are holding the leaders of the world to ransom while negotiating his release). He also notices the disparity between Manson's supposed omniscience and the fact that, apart from anything else, he is by normal standards a hopeless loser. But that only leads Rice to conclude that Manson is "a far more complex and multi-faceted character than even I'd imagined" ^[100]. What binds Rice and Manson together is a titanic narcissism which leads them to take for granted their own effortless superiority to the general run of worthless mankind (an impression which strikes me as incredible, given the poverty of the human material in question). Rice certainly approves of Manson's violent misanthropy, which mirrors the attitude expressed in LaVey's Satanic Bible and Redbeard's Might is Right. At one point Rice encourages Manson to attempt to get people to understand his point of view, to which Manson responds;

"People? Understand? People don't understand a fucking thing. They have lower awareness than turds. If this table were the world, and it was covered with turds representing humans, and you exercised complete control over them... You could move the turds from here to there... and it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Not one bit. They have no souls. No intelligence. You could flush three fourths of them down the toilet and the planet would never miss them." ^[99]

"When the person finally comes along to restore the balance in this world... There will be more blood, more death, more destruction and more suffering than there has been in the history of life on Earth. And I don't say that just because it's what all the worthless fuckers out there deserve... but because that is what will be necessary." ^[99]

A love of Manson's systematic misanthropy ties Rice squarely to James Mason and The Universal Order, a Nazi group dedicated to promoting Manson as a Fascist icon. Mason's book, Siege, celebrates Manson's vicious alienation and was published by Rice's friend and collaborator Michael Moynihan (and discussed in a earlier post). In the early nineties Rice appeared alongside Mason and Moynihan on radio evangelist Bob Larson's show, during which Moynihan and Rice not only defended Manson but even taunted the mother of Sharon Tate (one of the victims of the Manson Family's killing spree), who had called in to protest. Mason famously has even defended the murder of Tate's unborn baby, saying that "it was, after all, a Jew" ^{[JM, 328]}.

Rice also has essays here on Anton LaVey and Savitri Devi. Both are important figures in the Fascist-occult underground; LaVey as the fantasist who founded The Church of Satan, and Devi as an obscurantist who tried to combine Fascism with ideas drawn from Vedic culture, arguing that Hinduism is the nearest thing we have today to the Pagan religion of the original Aryans. In her book The Lightning and the Sun she argues that Hitler is 'Kalik', an incarnation of Vishnu destined, according to the Vedas, to end the current cycle of world history and initiate a new age (she was clearly wrong about that, but that doesn't bother her followers). Devi was also an active Fascist, imprisoned by Allied Forces in 1949 for spreading Nazi propaganda in post-War Germany. Her work has been praised by such conspicuously un-diverse figures as repeat-offending aspirant British Führer Colin Jordan, James Mason, and 'Squeaky' Fromme from the Manson Family. As it happens Rice has little of interest to say about either LaVey or Devi, except inasmuch as he gives away aspects of his own mindset. Apart from celebrating LaVey's misanthropy ("He would often speak at great length (and in great detail) of unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence" ^[133]) he is also impressed because LaVey normally "only deals with millionaires and movie stars" ^{[ 131]}. In Devi's case he notes that "she tested as having genius level IQ" ^[152]. Reified wealth, celebrity and intelligence are all equally attractive to Rice's banal mind.

A number of essays in the book deal with the weighty matter of Rice's 'philosophy' and world-view. In them he touches on ideas that are common currency among his Fascist peers. Rice's 'big' idea, which he returns to over and again, consists of a reactionary-romantic elevation of nature over culture. It is not so much that his view is reductive (in which case culture would be a mere epiphenomenon of nature); he sees everything that is specifically human as an unnatural and arbitrary excrescence on top of nature. His train of thought starts with an idea he quotes from the German naturalist and artist (and Social Darwinist racist) Ernst Haeckel; "Man is not above nature, but in nature" ^[89]. As far as it goes, this is true. The problem is that Rice's rigidly mechanical mind cannot grasp the thought dialectically, so he draws the mistaken conclusion that "man is synonymous with nature" ^[65]. But this is a very different argument, and it leads to the conclusion that that part of man which is not strictly natural is abstract to the point of unreality. This is clearly a self-cancelling and redundant philosophy: to see this you need only ask yourself why somebody who believes that nature is everything, and ideas are airless distractions, would bother publishing a book at all. The point is that man, while wholly part of nature, is at the same time distinguished from it by culture, and that this culture is every bit as real and effective as nature.

To see what this implies, consider the next stage of Rice's argument, which involves pointing out that nature has no sense of right and wrong, good or bad; "Nature, unlike man, is utterly indifferent to subjective judgements such as 'good' and 'bad'" ^[142]. The obvious response is to point out that the converse is equally true - that man, unlike nature, simply is not indifferent to subjective judgements. If that were not true then Rice would have nothing to rant about, and his attempts to persuade you of anything at all would be pointless. In fact, the distinction between nature and culture which Rice's entire 'philosophy' turns on is itself cultural and unnatural (but nonetheless real). It is culture that generates the dialectical distinction between ourselves and the nature that is the 'other' we transform in production: Rice's mistake is to reify this distinction and make it absolute, rather than relative.

Rice claims that "Nature adheres to an immutable order" ^[63], but in fact nature is very much mutable and has a substantial history of its own. One thing we know with absolute certainty is that nature at some point gave rise to culture. This mechanical idea of an unchanging nature is also at the root of traditional religious metaphysics. If nature was immutable then you might ask; where did humans and their culture - where did 'spirit' - suddenly arise from? The traditional answer is that God breathed spirit into matter as part of his creation, and yet this spirit is still separate from matter and exists in its own right, being 'unnatural'. In this way the crude materialism Rice advocates inevitably gives rise to religiosity and occultism ('spiritualism'), as it does with Rice himself: his book is littered with tales of ghosts (autonomous 'spirits'), uncanny happenings, mysterious portents and other such occult banalities: stupid materialism (mechanical and biological determinism) and stupid spirituality (occultism) are conjoined twins.

While Rice's explanation of his ontology and 'spirituality' are a nothing more than jumble of 19th Century solecisms, they nevertheless form the basis for the further development of his boneheaded narcissistic resentment. Having separated nature and culture his next trick is to argue that nature itself knows nothing of equality or human rights;

"In truth, the concept of natural equality is not natural at all - and in fact contradicts every dictate of nature." ^[63]

"Nature adheres to an immutable order; humanity to an ever increasing chaos. Nature recognises no equality at any level of its order; humanity preaches an all-pervasive equality and freely hands out unearned 'rights'... In short: humanity is Democratic, nature is Fascist." ^[63]

This naturally allows him to launch into a series of bitter tirades against 'inferiors' of every kind, who he believes have no rights and should expect no mercy, since talk of 'rights', 'equality' and so on is rooted in the unreality of culture and out of step with natural law. In an act of extraordinary special pleading he argues that the intellect is nothing to be proud of anyway, and not to be taken seriously because it is out of kilter with 'reality'. Instead he argues that man should rely on instinct alone;

"Man follows his intellect, employing logic and reason, and yet in so doing he betrays his most primal, basic desires." ^[88]

"Man's instincts will always and forever reflect the will of the natural order. Conversely, man's intellect has become divorced from the hard realities of life on earth, having instead become lost in a nebulous realm of ideas, theories, beliefs and opinions, which largely have no basis in tangible fact. Unless man's intellect comes to reflect his instinctual, soul-oriented values it will always place him at odds with himself." ^[61]

His trick here is to try to divide the human being schematically in two, one part (ideas and values) corresponding to culture, the other (instincts) corresponding to nature. Once again he makes absolute what is in reality only a relative distinction. Of course some human responses are more deeply wired into the physical, biological and genetic 'nature' of man than others, but certainly the 'instincts' that Boyd is covertly trying to justify (racism, misogyny, etc.) are in fact very much cultural products, as can be seen by anyone who spends any time at all considering their long development and the way that different societies have taken different attitudes towards them.

Morality too has nothing to do with nature in Rice's estimation, and so he's against it and wants you to slough it off. He believes that "a true understanding of natural law would render conventional morality obsolete." ^[87]. What Rice advocates is an eternal feeding frenzy in which the strong annihilate the weak in a totally amoral struggle for domination, for "higher men disdain the lives of the weak and cowardly - slave types" ^[61]. You might call this 'unprogrammatic Fascism', as he doesn't believe that things could ever be otherwise and criticises his Nazi heroes because they "still harboured the naively romantic dream that they could somehow turn the tide around" ^[141]. So that is Rice's philosophy in a nutshell: Fascism without its noble ideals (like the old joke about Hitler returning to Earth and declaring "this time - no more Mr. Nice Guy").

The only remaining thing to say about Rice's cod-philosophy is how neatly it mirrors that of his hard-core Nazi friend James Mason. Both fetishise extreme alienation and violent misanthropy: Mason's Universal Order has adopted Manson as the ideal Nazi icon because of a combination of this and the fact that he has counter-cultural clout. Both believe that that the process of social 'degeneration'  (from a fascist point of view: multiculturalism, democracy, etc.) is so advanced that they will support any and all violence against it. Both prioritise 'instinct' (their prejudice) over reason. And both, in different ways, are finding an audience.

This utterly stupid and offensive book should be warning enough that Boyd Rice is not a prankster and certainly not someone who should be lauded for 'pushing the envelope', but rather a Nazi who uses the cover provided by slack-jawed concepts of what constitutes radical art in order to promote - and create a focus for - the violence and hatred of a small but growing section of the Fascist movement internationally. As such he should be opposed in every possible way in order to stop his operation in its tracks, precisely as we would with any other Fascist shithead.

---

Unless noted otherwise, references are to Boyd Rice, Brian M Clark (ed), 2008, Standing in Two Circles: The Collected Works of Boyd Rice, Creation Books, London.

LC: Lisa Crystal Carver, 2005, Drugs are Nice, Snowbooks, London.
TE: Terry Eagleton, On Evil, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
JM: James Mason, 2010, Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason, edited by Michael M. Jenkins (Michael Moynihan), introduction by Ryan Schuster, Black Sun Publications, Bozeman, MT.