Boyd Rice Meets Nazi Tom Metzger

Maybe you've already seen this but, if not, here's Boyd Rice being interviewed by Tom Metzger on the latter's cable TV show. Metzger is a White separatist, former Ku Klux Klan member and Democratic Party Senatorial Primary candidate, and founder of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) party. He's notorious among other things for his comments on the death of Mulugeta Seraw, an Ethiopian studying at college in the US, murdered in 1988 by WAR supporters. Metzger announced that his men had simply done their "civic duty" by killing Seraw. A court found that Metzger and WAR had encouraged racial violence and imposed the largest civil verdict in Oregon history at the time—$12.5 million—against Metzger and WAR.

The interview is interesting because it shows that Rice is explicit about the fact that music can be used as a "propaganda art form" for encouraging the growth of an "Aryan Youth Movement" - presumably the kind of movement that will go out and murder more Ethiopian students and other "racial enemies". He calls Current 93 and Death in June "racialist bands", and can hardly be said to be slurring them since he was close friends with the key members of both, having toured and recorded with them over a long period of time, and even appearing alongside Death in June's Doug Pearce in the film Pearls Before Swine: there's a cosy picture of them (Rice, Tibet, Wakeford and Pearce) on tour together elsewhere on this blog.

I'll be writing more about Rice soon as I'm currently plowing through his collected essays. In the meantime it's good to be reminded that, whatever half-witted fanboys and apologists say about how the use of fascist iconography by Neo-Folk and Industrial bands is merely aesthetic, some of the musicians concerned know perfectly well that it's also political.

Hat tip to Commando Bruno