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

Guest Post by John Eden

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

What's Behind the Mask?

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

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

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

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

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

I Ain't Nuthin' But A Gorehound

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

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

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

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

Don’t Eat That Stuff Off The Sidewalk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Far Can Too Far Go?

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

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

Zombie Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tear It Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kizmiaz

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

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

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

Peter Webb Investigates

In an earlier post I said of sociologist and Goldsmiths lecturer Peter Webb that "he is either unwilling or unable to do the work required to comprehend his chosen field". I think I owe it to Webb to bear that opinion out by looking more closely at his work. In a section of the book that concerns us, Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures, he discusses the 'apocalyptic folk, postindustrial, folk-noir, neo-folk' scene through the work of the three core members of the group Death in June - Tony Wakeford, Doug Pearce and Patrick Leagas - who, he tells us, have been "central to the developing British underground and postindustrial/post-Punk milieu"¹. Webb is well aware of the controversy surrounding these musicians due to their use of fascist imagery and symbols², and their promotion of arguments associated with various strands of contemporary esoteric fascist and 'conservative revolutionary' thought derived from Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola, Savitri Devi, Otto and Gregor Strasser and others. He knows that Wakeford was a member of the fascist National Front, and he certainly should know of the fascist connections of some of the group's collaborators, such as Boyd Rice, Albin Julius and Michael Moynihan, since they have been widely publicised. Given this, what is staggering is the extent to which he accepts their excuses and evasions at face value and refuses in any way to critically examine the ideas they promote, or place them in a context that would make sense of them. Instead of challenging any of this he chooses to descend into the gutter with his heroes to join them in condemning the 'fascistic censoriousness' and 'McCarthyism' of the left³. The result is a complete whitewashing of the people concerned, and the corresponding destruction of any credibility Webb might have had as a researcher or commentator.

In his chapter on method ('The Theoretical Development of the Milieu'⁴) Webb says that his concept of 'the milieu' addresses "the networks of interaction, production and influence that music makers and actors in the particular music 'scenes' (are) involved in [and] articulates a set of overlapping levels of meaning, relevance, disposition and understanding"⁵. He argues that "there are three main levels of theoretical abstraction" that must be addressed in order to understand a milieu⁶, encompassing three sets of relations; those internal to the milieu itself, those between different milieus and different orders of milieu (specifically in this case, between the musical milieu and the record industry), and a third level of interaction between the milieu and the surrounding "culture, economy and politics"⁷. Anyone reading the latter might imagine that Webb would therefore want to examine - to pick some minor examples at random - what Patrick Leagas means when he says he has a "sense of being English" despite the fact that "I do not recognise this as England"⁸, or perhaps Doug Pearce's claim to have been part of a "reawakening of... Eurocentrism" in the milieu⁹, or any of the many similar statements that litter the interviews here.

Webb repeatedly mentions the group's interest in 'traditionalism'¹⁰ without bothering to find out if this might refer not to a vague hankering after Morris Dancers and cricket on the village lawn but rather the traditionalism of René Guénon and the 'super-fascist' Julius Evola¹¹ - who's work, after all, has been edited and published by a key collaborator of the group, Michael Moynihan (of Blood Axis), who is mentioned repeatedly in the book¹² and whose connection to Evola is even noted¹³. Similarly you'd expect that he might be interested to know whether the group's interest in "occult influences in the social and cultural order"¹⁴ might possibly be connected with Evola's idea that an occult war is being waged for control of society, in which Jews and Masons work for the "forces of subversion" seeking to overthrow the "forces of order"¹⁵. According to Evola this plan was revealed in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the infamous anti-Semitic tract for which he wrote an introduction when it was published in Italian in 1937, and the veracity of which he continued to defend long after it had been exposed as a forgery¹⁶ cooked up by the Czarist secret police. Since Evola's arguments on the matter are taken from a book edited and published by Moynihan there is every chance that this is precisely what was intended, but Webb is in no hurry to find out. Indeed, Webb seems not even to be curious about the politics involved: his bibliography lists none of the relevant texts by or about the fascist ideologues who have inspired so many members of this 'scene'.

Despite the constant use by the group of dog-whistle references to ideas from the radical right¹⁷, Webb consistently steers clear of any attempt to find out what the members of Death in June and their friends actually think. In fact, if we are to believe Webb his subjects have few real opinions¹⁸. Instead they seem to suffer from an incurable case of chronic ideological indeterminacy which prevents them from concluding anything at all; they are forever 'exploring' and 'investigating', apparently without arriving at any definite convictions. So, his musicians have "a thirst for esoteric knowledge, and an art of self-questioning and soul searching"¹⁹; they 'deal with' "the traditions of Europe"²⁰ and 'allude to' "paganism, heathenism, Europe, the West"²¹; they have "explored and looked at a variety of philosophies and pagan knowledges"²² and "sought out ideas and ways of understanding"²³; they are "searching for something else"²⁴; they 'take inspiration' "from a wide variety of sources and (show) "their thirst for knowledge and new ways of interpreting things"²⁵; and the neo-folk milieu as a whole has created a space in which "a variety of ideas can be explored and developed"²⁶. But it is impossible to imagine how any idea could be 'developed' if everyone involved in its development refused to say what they thought of it, how they interpreted it, or whether they believed it to be true. But, again, Webb puts his blind eye up to the glass and refuses to see.

To some small extent this dereliction of duty simply reflects Webb's declared methodology. In an early chapter ('A Journey Through Theories of the Intersection of Music and Culture'²⁷) he offers a potted overview of the history of popular culture studies in which, broadly, the (pseudo-) Marxism of Dick Hebdige and the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) is given a rap on the knuckles for placing undue emphasis on structure above agency, and a string of post-modernists are wheeled out to make a case for privileging instead "the subjective meanings of subculturalists rather than deriving these from a pre-given totalising theory"²⁸. While I have no interest in the minutia of such debates within the sociology department, it's clear from Webb's arguments that he simply wants to justify his preferred approach, in which he can tell his story from an insider's point of view, as a fan of the genre, its cod philosophy, kitsch aesthetics and atavistic politics. To some extent, then, the problem is that Webb, in his enthusiasm to paint himself as the hippest and most edgy sociologist in town²⁹, has simply 'gone native'. His 'phenomenological' approach is solipsistic, allowing him to seal off his favourite musicians from even the possibility of criticism. This is hinted at in the tendentious example he provides of a 'momentary milieu', in which someone from "a Socialist background", on meeting a Nationalist, may "respond with disdain and contempt", in which case their "momentary exposure to this other political milieu is... fenced off by the rigidity of his or her particular political vision"³⁰.

This relativism is mirrored by a corresponding blurring of moral lines. At one point he considers the lyrics to the Death in June track 'C'est un Reve' (It's a Dream):

Ou est Klaus Barbie?
Il est dans le coeur
Il est dans le coeur noir

Liberté
c'est un reve

Webb concludes that Barbie (an SS captain in occupied France known as 'The Butcher of Lyon', who personally tortured his victims and had as many as 4,000 murdered) is to be found "in the heart" of everyone³¹; a repulsive argument which attempts to capsize the moral distinction to be made between Barbie and his victims³². Webb offers this as an example of "the direction of Death in June's art" which works to "enliven, question, re-examine and provoke a response"³³. Certainly  arguments like this are going to 'provoke a response', if only because they are so repellant, but that hardly justifies the art. If it did then we would have to be similarly grateful to Barbie himself for also 'making us think'.

Another gear in Webb's machinery of obfuscation is his idealist concept of art. For Webb the aesthetic is a privileged domain in which no one needs to say what they think or be held responsible for the results. He claims that the racists and fascists who attend neo-folk concerts have "taken the symbols and references... directly and uncomplicatedly", not understanding that the bands are using them "for artistic purposes"³⁴, as if the re-presentation of an idea in the context of a song somehow means we can ignore its meaning or the intentions of the singer. Of course a song can express opinions on behalf of a character other than the singer, but in the case of Death in June the two may often coincide. If we were to rely on Webb we would never know: he might have tried to find out one way or the other, but instead he uses the idea of 'artistic ambiguity' to avoid the question. Similar feelings about the sublimity of art are common among those postindustrial fans who claim they are interested in 'the aesthetics of fascism' but not the politics, ignoring the fact that, as the anti-fascist critic Walter Benjamin argued, fascism crucially involves precisely the admixing of aesthetics and politics, such that the two cannot be so neatly separated³⁵.

Webb relies extensively on his half-baked notion of 'ambiguity' to provide cover for his pop idols. Of course such ambiguity can be central to the artwork, but it can also provide the perfect cover for supporters of the radical right pursuing a strategy of 'right-wing Gramscianism'. This strategy has been developed by Alain de Benoist and other supporters of the Nouvelle Droite / European New Right (ENR), whose ideas chime neatly not only with the 'third way' faction of the NF that Wakeford mixed with but also with the positions defended by him to this day. As Anton Shekhovtsov has explained, the aim of the strategy is;

"to modify the dominant culture and make it more susceptible to a non-democratic mode of politics... the adherents of the ENR believe that one day the allegedly decadent era of egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism will give way to ‘an entirely new culture based on organic, hierarchical, supra-individual, heroic values’. It is important to emphasize, however, that ‘metapolitical fascism’ focuses... on the battle for hearts and minds rather than for immediate political power. Following Evola’s precepts, the ENR tries to distance itself from both historical and contemporary fascist parties and regimes."³⁶

Webb notes that Death in June "deliberately were ambiguous about any political meaning that they might be conveying"³⁷, but fails to register that if someone dresses up on stage as a fascist and sings songs promoting fascist ideas while waving a fascist flag around, but then denies being a fascist, what they are engaged in is not ambiguity but subterfuge. He notes that "this milieu acts as a source of pathways into a set of... ideas"³⁸ but refuses to consider what those ideas might actually be behind the blabber and smoke.

If that were all there were to it this book would be just another example of the vacuity of academic sociology, the impotence of postmodernism and the dangers of letting a fanboy loose in the academy. But Webb's self-imposed myopia becomes a shade more sinister when you consider the gaping aporias he leaves scattered around his text so that his boys can emerge from it unsullied. For instance, in telling the story of the group's origins he omits to mention that their name commemorates the 'Night of the Long Knives', in June 1934, when the Nazi regime executed the leadership of the Sturmabteilung (SA - The Stormtroopers, or Brownshirts), including Gregor Strasser, a major influence on sections of the National Front with which Tony Wakeford has been associated. This event, in which the Nazi leadership dispatched the left-facing wing of their movement, was also known as Operation Hummingbird, which also happens to be the title of an album the group recorded with Albin Julius, whose band, Der Blutharsch have been banned from playing in Israel and elsewhere because of their stance. Such coincidences are certainly going make the audience think; unless, of course, they are sociologists or phenomenologists from Goldsmiths University.

Webb discusses Crisis at some length, since they were the band Wakeford and Pearce belonged to back in the days when they were, respectively, members of the Socialist Wokers Party (SWP) and International Marxist Group (IMG). Strangely, though, he has nothing to say about the group Wakeford formed on leaving Death in June - Above the Ruins - whose members reputedly (Wakeford will neither confirm nor deny) included Gary Smith, previously of the openly Nazi band No Remorse (who were part of Ian Stuart's Blood and Honor organisation and also, co-incidentally, recorded an album that referred to the Brownshirts; The New Stormtroopers) and Nazi activist Ian Read. The band contributed a track to an a album, No Surrender, which was produced as a fundraiser for the British National Front, and which included a track by Skrewdriver, the first and most notorious White Power band, and their name is presumably derived from the title of Evola's book, 'Men Among the Ruins'. None of this gets a mention from Webb. Perhaps Wakeford himself never mentioned the band or its members to him. This is possible, since Wakeford has admitted lying to and misleading interviewers in the past (on preparing for a particular interview he says "I better dig out my bumper book of fibs"³⁹), but then such evasions could be got around by a little independent research. But it seems that Webb has no interest in doing such research, preferring to base his work entirely on the say-so of his subjects - in the name of 'phenomenology'.

Similarly, when Webb discusses Wakeford's involvement in the online fanzine Flux Europa he tells us that the magazine "discussed postmodernism, art, literature, philosophy, film and music", reassuring us that "the content was diverse". He proves this by mentioning the articles it contained "on Camille Paglia, Jack London and Ezra Pound"⁴⁰. What Webb conspicuously fails to mention is that, as reported by Stewart Home, Flux Europa was an extension of the cultural activities of Transeuropa, which itself emerged from the wreckage of National Front cultural-intellectual group IONA (Islands of the North Atlantic) - both organisations that Wakeford has had some involvement with. And - a tiny detail but one that is highly revealing - while Webb mentions Camille Paglia, Ezra Pound and Jack London as artists about whom Flux Eropa had published articles, what he omits to mention is that they are among a small group of people who are included under the site's 'Personae' section, which is presumably how Webb came to choose them in the first place, and at the time Webb was doing his research that section contained biographies of just two other people; the Vorticist and fascist supporter Wyndham Lewis, and Ernst Jünger, the German Nationalist fanatic who celebrated war, death and pain, and whose Stirnerian concept of the sovereign individual as 'Anarch' has inspired subsequent generations of radical rightists and neo-fascists - including Troy Southgate of the neo-folk band H.E.R.R. In an act of blatant self-censorship, Webb chooses not to mention these names. Of course, if he wanted to exclude all of the fascist supporters on the list then he'd have omitted to mention Ezra Pound too - but that wouldn't have left him with much of a list.

Another curious omission concerns Death in June's album Rose Clouds of Holocaust, which was banned from sale in Germany by the Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien (Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young People), who found that the title song cast doubt on the occurrence of the Holocaust on account of lyrics that run "Rose clouds of Holocaust/ Rose clouds of lies/ Rose clouds of bitter/ Bitter, bitter lies"⁴¹. As we have now come to expect, none of this is mentioned by Webb.

Boyd Rice

Webb applies his now familiar uncritical and tendentious attitude to Wakeford's supposed renunciation of his fascist past, hastily posted to the Sol Invictus website when the heat was beginning to be turned up on him, and which is worded so ambiguously as to convince me that he still holds to at least some of the core ideas he learned as a member of the National Front (NF). He says; "I have no connection with, or sympathy for, or interest in [the ideas of the NF], nor have I had for around 20 years"⁴², but then that would be true of other ex-members who also moved on to more diverse forms of radical rightist politics since that party's collapse. When Wakeford adds that "none of the artists I work with hold such views either" you know that he is throwing sand in your face given that he has worked with the likes of Boyd Rice, who is quite happy to promote the white power skinhead party, the American Front, appearing in full Nazi uniform alongside its leader, Bob Heick. Webb, on the other hand, accepts the statement as definitive proof that Wakeford has nothing to answer for. Stranger still, he continues to believe Wakeford's reassurances despite having been shown to have been misled by him. As Stewart Home has argued, Wakeford's attempt at rehabilitating himself falls a long way short of what you would expect from someone who had truly broken with their fascist past.

Apart from covering up for this gaggle of neo-fascists Webb has little or nothing of interest to say about the milieu or its art. His analysis of the music on offer would make even the the most lazy and inept music hack blush. Generally all he can muster is the observation that the music is 'melancholic': so Nico made "intense melancholic music"⁴³; Scott Walker's work combines "simple melody... with the melancholy of the words"⁴⁴; Death in June are attracted to "melancholic poetry"⁴⁵ and their work is pervaded by "a type of melancholia"; neo-folk has added "melancholia" to industrial music⁴⁶, and so on. It never occurs to him to ask what the artists are melancholic about. He doesn't bother to speculate about why folk music, which idealises the pre-capitalist past, should be so appealing to his subjects. His attempts at analysing the use of collage in art are laughable: he  manages to compare Death in June's deliberately evasive and dishonest jumble of fascist iconography with John Heartfield's superbly pointed and polemical anti-Nazi collages⁴⁷, and he thinks that what Death in June do "is like a more structured version of William Burroughs and Brian (sic) Gysin's cut up method" adding "(reference needed here)"⁴⁸. Indeed, a reference is the very least that would be required to make this argument get off the mortuary table - it's like saying that a car maintenance manual 'is like a more structured version' of an exploding library.

Peter Webb has written a book which deals with a milieu that is riddled with neo-fascists and supporters of the radical right. He claims that he wants to explain the milieu by considering the relationship between it and the wider 'culture, economy and politics', and admits that "there are many questions [concerning] the political and cultural implications of a scene such as this", but he finally concludes that "These questions are outside of the remit of this book"⁴⁹. To the rest of us this looks like exactly what it is; an attempt to justify an utterly craven and dishonest book that fails to meet even the most minimal academic or intellectual standards.


NB. Peter Webb subsequently replied to these criticisms in a statement that we have also published - Strelnikov, 11/10/10

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Evola, Julius. 1953. Men Among the Ruins: Post-War Reflections of a Radical Traditionalist, (2002: tr. Guido Stucco, ed. Michael Moynihan, Inner Traditions, Rochester NY)
Shekhovtsov, Anton. 2009, Apoliteic Music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and “Metapolitical Fascism"’, in Patterns of Prejudice, Volume 43, Issue 5 (December 2009), pp. 431-457. This excellent essay is also available online.
Sykes, Alan. 2005. The Radical Right in Britain, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.
Webb, Peter. 2007. Exploring the Networked Worlds of Popular Music: Milieu Cultures, Routledge, Abbingdon.


1. Webb, 2007, p65
2. ibid, pp93f
3. ibid, pp94f. In an extraordinary page-long digression from his thesis, he also claims that these 'fascistic tendencies' are also behind the hounding of former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), who we must assume are his former comrades since I see no other justification for his dragging in them into the argument at this point.
4. ibid, pp29-38
5. ibid, p30
6. ibid, p37
7. ibid, p38
8. ibid, p96
9. ibid, p97
10. ibid, pp 98, 99, 105
11. Evola, Julius. 'Things Put in Their Proper Place and Some Plain Words', in La Torre, issue #5, April 1930, quoted in H.T.Hansen, 'Introduction', Evola, 2002, p42. Here Evola explains that he is an 'anti-fascist', critical of Mussolini and Hitler, only to the extent that he is a 'super-fascist' and wants to go much further.
12. Webb, 2007, pp 66, 67
13. ibid, p92
14. ibid, p97
15. Evola, 2002, p236
16. ibid, p239f
17. My use of the terms 'fascist', 'revolutionary conservative' and 'the radical right' is sometimes fairly loose since with many of the people concerned it is hard to say exactly where they stand in the spectrum of ultra-right thought. But I follow Alan Sykes in seeing the 'radical right' as a term that encompasses fascism. I also include within this the 'traditionalism' of Evola and others, as well as movements that could be described as 'reactionary modernist', 'radical imperialist' or similar. Sykes, 2005, p2.
18. Although in the case of Patrick Leagas this may well be true, since he admits that "coming to a conclusion about anything at all is beyond me!". Webb, 2007, p81
19. Webb, 2007, p66
20. ibid, p68
21. ibid, p68
22. ibid, p81
23. ibid, p85
24. ibid, p85
25. ibid, p89
26. ibid, p105
27. ibid, pp11-28
28. ibid, p21
29. "This book has been inspired by a love of popular music for over three decades", ibid, p7
30. ibid, p30-31 
31. ibid, p79
32. In April 1944 Barbie ordered the deportation to Auschwitz of a group of 44 Jewish children from an orphanage at Izieu. He was also responsible for a massacre in Rehaupal in September 1944. See Wikipedia.
33. Webb, 2007, p79
34. ibid, p92
35. Walter Benjamin, 'Epilogue', 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'
36. Shekhovtsov, 2009. Apoliteic Music
37. Webb, 2007, p76
38. ibid, p105
39. Wakeford, Sol Invictus profile, Facebook, 26 July 2008
40. Webb, 2007, p89
41. Shekhovtsov, 2009. Apoliteic Music, note #6.
42. Wakeford, 'A Message From Tony', tursa.com 14 Feb 2007
43. Webb, 2007, p61
44. ibid, p62
45. ibid, p98
46. ibid, p105
47. ibid, p93
48. ibid, p78
49. ibid, p105