antisemitism - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

It’s not real if you don’t feel it – but what is ‘it’ and what is ‘real’ and who’s to say anyway?

A wise woman once sang “It’s not real if you don’t feel it”* and as far as the arts are concerned it’s as good a measure of quality as anything. But what is “it” that you are feeling? Is everyone feeling the same thing? Clearly not. Even the opinions of people who do like the same song, the same book, the same film, the same painting, are likely to diverge when it comes to the detail of what they like and how it feels.

*The Goonies “R” Good Enough, (Cyndi Lauper, Stephen Broughton Lunt, Arthur Stead, 1985

Part of the mission of modernism in the early 20^th century was to free art from associations; from sentimentality, from tradition, culture, religion, politics and define it for itself. That was necessary, in order to break the endless repetitive staleness of academicism and/or lowest-common-denominator entertainment, and because photography and recorded sound and near-universal literacy had all become significant factors in western society. Looking at the visual arts; if all that art does is to repeat what is already popular, to record and represent and recreate the visual and the actual, then how can it compare or compete with something like the camera which captures that external reality? And if that external reality, in the form of contemporary society, is something the artist rejects or objects to, then why use its tools and its language at all?

It’s hard to imagine, a century after the modernist explosion (say 1900-1939), the extent to which the arts were in thrall to academicism, presumably because, having fought first for freedom from the world of manual labour and craftsmanship, artists were keen to stress their respectability, their links to nobility, aristocracy and wealth. But access to that world came, not surprisingly, with rules, manners and forms of behaviour which settled, over the course of a couple of centuries, into its own rigid traditions. Therefore, the artists of the modernist era were, like any revolutionaries, especially concerned with making their own manifestos and statements. ‘Art for art’s sake’ is a nineteenth century, essentially romantic/bohemian idea which feels remote from the milieu of modernism, but at the same time a theory of pure art is found even more clearly in something like Kazimir Malevich’s The Non-Objective World (1926) than in anything written by Théophile Gautier or Edgar Allen Poe;

“Art no longer cares to serve the state and religion, it no longer wishes to illustrate the history of manners, it wants to have nothing further to do with the object, as such, and believes that it can exist, in and for itself, without “things”.’

Though formulated later, this is the kind of theorising that helps partially to explain works like Malevich’s Black Square (1^st version 1915). Un-controversially considered a masterpiece – and one that I myself like a lot – it nevertheless seems to me a work that gains enormously from some kind of context, even if all that context is, is the knowledge that it is in fact a painting by an artist. ‘Left to itself’, without any associations, if encountered ‘cold’, especially outside of a gallery, it might just as easily not be ‘art’ at all. And while that isn’t a bad thing, a random black square encountered in one’s daily life doesn’t – depending of course on the individual who encounters it – have the intensity or pregnant quality that one can (repeat of previous caveat) feel standing in front of Malevich’s ‘Black Square’. But what Malevich does in his statement is to take the artist out of the art and anthropomorphise the art itself (“…it wants to have…”). This seems to me to negate – not unintentionally – what is meant by art at all. For myself, I prefer the German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s statement which, while it doesn’t even slightly contradict the idea of purely abstract art, puts the artist at its centre, rather than treating art as a kind of self-creating phenomenon:

“I know of no new ‘programme’…. Only that art is forever manifesting itself in new forms, since there are forever new personalities – its essence can never alter, I believe. Perhaps I am wrong. But, speaking for myself, I know that I have no programme, only the unaccountable longing to grasp what I see and feel, and to find the purest means of expression for it.”

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Kunst und Kunstler (1914) quoted Wolf-Dieter Dube, The Expressionists, p.21 (T&H 1972, transl. Mary Whittall)

If a painting hangs in a forest…

The three key factors here (for me) then are creator-work-recipient. If the artists (Schmidt-Rottluff’s ‘personalities’) are trying to communicate something specific to the recipient with their work, then they either succeed or they don’t. If the artist doesn’t succeed in communicating what they intended to communicate – or if they aren’t thinking of the ‘end user’ at all, and are expressing their own feelings/ideas purely for their own reasons – they may (and probably will) still transmit something of themselves; a personality, an emotion or group of emotions, a mood or idea. But although in either case the work may be imbued with that power, it only becomes power when someone is there to experience and/or interact with it. In material terms, the great masterpieces of painting, be it the Mona Lisa (oil paint on wood), or the Black Square (oil paint on linen) have little more intrinsic ‘value’ than a few tubes of oil paint or a piece of wood or linen; after the lights go out and the visitors go home, they basically cease to exist as art. The alchemy that takes place when art finds an audience is what makes it art; at least, so it seems to me.

Malevich’s paintings at the 0,10 exhibition, Petrograd 1915. Black Square hangs where traditionally a religious icon would be displayed

So can there be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ art? Short answer; intuition says yes, but experience says no. Alongside the disintegration of traditional academic rules, there has been the growth and persistence of the myth that, in order to break the rules of art, you must first understand and adhere to the rules. This idea has been strengthened by the fact that some of the iconic figures of modern art, like Picasso and Dali, have been immensely talented by the traditional, renaissance standards of art and could easily have made a career in academic painting; but so what? Would Guernica, looking exactly as it does, be a lesser work if it was the only painting Picasso had ever done, or if his immature works had been unimpressive?

Top: Pablo Picasso – Science & Charity (1897)
Bottom – Pablo Picasso – Guernica (1937)

Separating personal, aesthetic judgements of good and bad from objective judgements is almost impossible; a strong argument could be made for either of the above images being ‘better’ especially since the emotional impact is as subjective as anything else. And separating these kind of aesthetic judgements from moral ones can become even more complicated – can a work of art that is an expression of something ‘bad’ be good? If for example we discovered that Picasso was celebrating rather than mourning the slaughter and destruction at Guernica, would the painting be as good? And what does good even mean in that sentence anyway? The idea that (for instance) a painting, or a song is “bad” is essentially meaningless, despite the fact that millions of paintings and songs are clearly very bad. They can never be demonstrably bad because, as Hamlet says, and even the relatively short history of pop music proves, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Even the most derivative, tuneless, unimaginative, moronic or amateurish song can and will be loved by someone, or many someones. And beyond people liking it, how can the quality of something like art truly be gauged? Yes, ‘Liking’ can be a complex thing and is not the same as ‘admiring’ and yes, there are people with knowledge and expertise and highly developed critical faculties and so forth; but their opinion can no more prove a work of art is good than a restaurant critic can prove that a Michelin-starred chef’s finest creation tastes better than a Big Mac.

Despite the ‘golden ratio’ of the ancients, Hogarth’s ‘line of beauty’ and the Turner Prize, despite Grammys and Brits and Eurovision Song Contests, there is no logical ‘2 + 2 = 4’ type equation which can prove that “4” = a good work of art. In architecture at least, a building either works as a building (ie stands up and people can go inside) or it doesn’t, but even then, it would probably be easier to ‘prove’ that your local supermarket is logically ‘better’ as a building than Chartres Cathedral, rather than vice versa. But it obviously isn’t (unless you are very lucky) better than Chartres Cathedral. It feels too trite and easy to say ‘art is only as good or bad as an individual’s opinion of it’, but I can’t really do any better than that. You can’t make someone like something by telling them it’s good, however convincing your argument may be to you.

I also don’t think (though I am less convinced about this) there are good or bad reasons for liking a work of art, a song or a book, although there are certainly different levels of engagement, which are still however subjective; I like Citizen Kane but I love Robocop. Do I think Robocop is therefore the better film? Absolutely not. In the western world there is a kind of agreed pantheon of ‘great art’, encapsulated in the ‘high art’ end of the scale by the way in which art history, English literature, cinema et al are taught in institutions and, at the lower end of the scale in books and websites of the ‘1000 albums/films you must hear/see before you die’ type, but in practice everyone constructs their own pantheon, with the importance of the ‘official’ ones being little more than a guide. I know Robocop wouldn’t exist in the same form as it does without the innovations of Citizen Kane, but that doesn’t change the way I feel about either film. In reality, the only way to gauge (for example) the “greatest album ever recorded” is to have a public vote without offering a list of previously selected albums to choose from and then see who ‘wins’ – and I am sure I still wouldn’t agree with it.

Hans Holbein the Younger; Henry VIII (c.1537)

Over the years, it has often been considered that the correct critical attitude is to remove sentimentality from judgements on the arts, and although it is one way – judging pictures on their composition, harmony etc, ignoring subject altogether, evaluating music on its structure, technical skill etc – it is sometimes almost impossible to do, and really, thinking again of both the emotional satisfaction people get from songs, films, pictures they love, and the example of Malevich’s Black Square, is it even desirable? Thinking of Black Square, to judge a work which has so much context; theoretical, spiritual, cultural and emotional – by the sum of its basic physical attributes is reductive, as well as boring. Likewise, a great portrait in no way relies on the viewer knowing anything about the sitter, but – is Holbein’s great Henry VIII (1537) more interesting/engaging as flat masses of colour laid out in a particular, intricate design on a two-dimensional surface, or as the impression and interpretation of one human being through the eyes, mind and skill of another? The answer for me is the latter, which is really both, since the technical aspects of the first option are anyway incorporated in the second.

Pogo and the Black Square

A debate that rears its head fairly often – and I guess will increasingly do so as information about everything becomes more readily available – is whether ‘bad’ people (or just bad people) can make good art. Unlike art, and despite the murkiness of morality (influenced as it is by essentially amoral and anyway changeable concepts like tradition, religion and culture) there are some people that we can agree are bad, or at the very least, ‘not good’. Here’s an uncontroversial opinion; John Wayne Gacy, the ‘killer clown’, rapist and murderer of around 33 young people, was – even if he was at the mercy of his own personality disorder – a bad person. He also made something that is as close to being ‘bad art’ as anything I can think of. The fact that his paintings are collected by people and have sold for serious sums of money has nothing to do with their quality and everything to do with their associations. You could of course say much the same about the Black Square. And if the imaginary passerby who unpreparedly encountered the Black Square also encountered one of Gacy’s paintings, how would the experience differ?

Firstly, they would know immediately that it was a painting made by a human being, and, if from a western background, they would probably recognise the subject matter. Because of this, Gacy is both at an advantage and disadvantage; advantage because, no matter how the viewer feels about clowns, they have immediate ‘access’ to the painting – ‘I know what that is’. Disadvantage, because while the black square is a black square and therefore looks like a black square, Gacy’s clowns, portraits, skulls etc are – by the standards that most people judge art by – pretty amateurish. He wasn’t an accomplished enough artist (I don’t mean just in a technical way) to communicate anything very deliberately (he wanted his paintings to bring joy into peoples’ lives; which seems unlikely, unless said people are serial killer fetishists), so what the viewer is left with are his obsessions – or at least the ones he could express to his own satisfaction through his paintings.

Going back to my highly dubious creator-work-recipient idea of art, the creator, Gacy was (or said he was) trying to do something specific – to create bright and happy pictures to bring joy to the recipient. Whether he succeeded in this aim, regardless of who he was, depends on how one responds to childlike but sometimes enigmatic pictures of clowns. What he definitely did do was to transmit something of himself; a clear-cut but deeply alienated/alienating vision of the world; actually, without a world. Not, as one might expect, a simplified Norman Rockwell America, with the sun in the sky and a clown in the garden, but essentially just the clown; mostly in fact Pogo the clown, Gacy’s own alter ego, sometimes with an extremely cursory, but telling hint of a setting. Not a circus, or the suburbia of the childrens’ parties he haunted, but a hint of a dark, fairytale (the seven dwarfs appear in a particularly odd picture) forest. These are clowns in the wild. The term ‘outsider art’ could have been coined for Gacy’s paintings. The other often-used term, ‘naïve art’ seems fleetingly appropriate, until one considers pictures like his paintings of Charles Manson, or even more so, of Tim Curry’s Pennywise from the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s IT. Gacy may not have been a good painter, he may have been to all intents and purposes insane, but he was not naïve; he knew that he belonged to a pantheon of famous murderers, that he was the original killer clown and he was flattered by the association.

John Wayne Gacy – Pennywise the Clown (1993)

But Gacy was chosen as an intentionally extreme example; even more extreme would be Hitler, whose serviceable but bland and slightly lifeless paintings are also highly collectable, despite lacking even the visceral ‘disturbed’ quality of Gacy’s. Whereas the innocent buyer might just be attracted to Gacy’s clowns for their kitsch, weird, outsider quality, Hitler’s works are best suited for what they were meant to be – postcards, unambitious souvenirs, illustrations. The lack of frisson they have as images is an indicator that the reasons people have for buying them have little to do with the pictures themselves. For, hopefully, a variety of reasons, these people are not buying ‘art’ at all, they are buying history.

The art didn’t abuse…

The world of actual art also has its fair share of murderers, rapists and so forth, and the question of whether their lives and actions invalidates their work is never really answerable. Apart from anything else, what about the legions of artists, musicians, writers whose private lives and opinions we know little or nothing about? Or artists like Andrea del Castagno, known for centuries as a murderer because of a mistake (whether malicious or not we cannot know) in Giorgio Vasari’s biography of him? At this distance of time it isn’t really an issue, even when talking about a definite murderer like Caravaggio. We don’t expect historical figures to have views, opinions and beliefs that we would find acceptable in the 21^st century, although people of the 16^th century certainly felt at least as strongly about murder as we do now. When we get closer to our own time, things become more complicated. For me, it’s easy to disregard the achievements of, say Eric Gill*, because even without the knowledge of his child (and animal) abuse, his work is not really my cup of tea; graceful and stylish yes, but, given that he was a contemporary of people like Jacob Epstein and Constantin Brâncuși, also a bit un-dynamic, insipidly faux-modern and backwards-looking. And then, adding the context, knowing about Gill’s religious beliefs, a bit churchy, and then, knowing about his abuse of his daughters, hypocritically pious too; it leaves a bad taste. Which doesn’t stop people from loving it, and nor should it; the art didn’t abuse anyone. (This short article by Waldemar Januszczak is very good on Gill I think).

Left:Jacob Epstein – Rock Drill (1913)
Right: Eric Gill – Stations of the Cross (1913-18)

But one of the points about Gill is that even his apologists probably wouldn’t, these days, hold an exhibition of Gill the artist without at least acknowledging the problems with Gill the man. More my cup of tea, and more relevant to now, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art will be hosting an exhibition of Emil Nolde’s work this summer. German Expressionism (or in Nolde’s case, German-Danish Expressionism) is one of the areas of art I love the most and, although Nolde is not one of my favourite artists I will be excited to see his work. But. Emil Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party. That of course doesn’t change his paintings, but it makes them – and the exhibition – problematic for several reasons. The main reason for me, is that, in its pre-exhibition publicity at least, the NGS makes no mention of his Nazism whatsoever. That might still be okay, I suppose, if they didn’t include this little snippet in their bio:

“This exhibition…covers Nolde’s complete career, from his early atmospheric paintings of his homeland right through to the intensely coloured, so-called ‘unpainted paintings’, works done on small pieces of paper during the Third Reich, when Nolde was branded a ‘degenerate’ artist and forbidden to work as an artist.”

Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler – self portrait (c.1930)

There is a certain amount of schadenfreude in this detail. But there is also the ghost of fellow Expressionist Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, murdered at Sonnenstein castle in 1940 as part of a government programme to eliminate the mentally ill, and of German-Jewish painters like Charlotte Salomon and the surrealist Felix Nussbaum, murdered in Auschwitz in 1943 and 44 respectively. As a member of the Nazi Party, Nolde was to an extent complicit in their deaths; for him, ‘entartete kunst’, a policy he didn’t necessarily oppose in general, meant he had to paint unobtrusively, in private and couldn’t exhibit his work until after the war. For those artists it meant a death sentence, for many others it meant harassment or exile. A more wide-ranging exhibition in which Nolde’s paintings bridge the gap between the work of his fellow ‘degenerates’ including perhaps some of Nussman’s Auschwitz paintings, and the art of Nazi-approved painters like Adolf Ziegler or Conrad Hommel would be a strange and indigestible (and chronologically back to front) thing perhaps, but I think that failing that kind of an overview we, at the very least, shouldn’t be encouraged to feel sorry for Nolde that he had to work in secret because of the actions of the government he supported.

Felix Nussbaum – Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (1943)

Is Nolde’s art then ‘Nazi art’? No, or at least not in the same way that state-sponsored art under Hitler was. It isn’t didactic, realist or heroic. Nolde saw expressionism and therefore his own painting as definitively German, and was deeply moved by colour, which he equated with emotion. The works of his which I like best (which, by coincidence perhaps, long pre-date even the idea of the Third Reich and belong to the period when he had recently been in contact with the younger artists of Die Brücke) translate that emotion into intense and visionary land and seascapes. These pictures feel utterly free of the ideology of Nazism – but that said, even under Nazi rule, the German ideal of the nude Freikörperkultur (Free Body Culture) and ‘oneness with nature’ was respectable in a way that was unthinkable in the UK, so the apparent freedom of the painting need not be reflected in the kind

of egalitarian ideals that artists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner expressed in their art. If expressionism can be seen as the ultimate kind of subjective painting; where the aim is ultimately to make the viewer feel what the artist feels by filtering a subject through the distorting lens of their individual perception, then Nolde’s paintings show the world as it was felt by someone who could write, in 1938;

“For as long as I’ve worked as an artist I have publicly battled against the foreign infiltration of German art, against the dirty dealings on the art market and the disproportionately predominant Jewish influence everywhere in the arts. Now if that is the case, and I have been attacked and persecuted now for years by the side I championed and fought for, then there must be misunderstandings in need of clarification.”

As to the question of how easy it is to like Nolde’s ‘unpainted pictures’, I’ll have to wait for the exhibition.

How do you solve a problem like Morrissey (it solves itself)

The Nolde exhibition is only one reason that these issues have been on my mind recently; the other, more personal one is Morrissey. Morrissey is clearly not John Wayne Gacy, or Adolf Hitler, or even Emil Nolde. Nor is he, unlike Varg Vikernes, whose music I also like, a murderer. But I never felt let down by any of those people; with Varg I knew about him before I ever heard his music, I have no emotional investment in it, whereas Morrissey’s recent utterances seem completely at odds with the worldview of his earlier music; which is not his problem, or his fault, I simply interpreted what I wanted to from the art he created, just as it’s possible to look at Emil Nolde’s work and see beauty and freedom there, even if that freedom and beauty is diametrically opposed to the views he professed in his non-artistic life.

I first listened to The Smiths and Morrissey when I was 17, although I was aware of them/him years before. Of all the music I loved as a teenager I think Morrissey’s was the music I identified with the most. I liked The Cure and Joy Division and The Fall probably as much, but their music was – I suppose because it’s less lyrically straightforward – less personal to me. To this day, Morrissey’s lyrics (up to the mid 90s at least) are engraved on my memory and I certainly know more of his lyrics by heart than any other band or artist’s. It’s been very clear for a while now (and murkily apparent for much, much longer) what kind of person, politically, Morrissey is. And that’s fair enough; he is entitled to his views, even if I think he’s wrong and don’t feel inclined to fund him any further (I still think he is more complex than his worst detractors would say, but so what?)

It’s no use really to say as some people do, that there are artists out there making great work who don’t have extreme right wing views. Obviously that’s true; but unless their art speaks to you why would you care? And most of the time, one has no idea what opinions or beliefs of an artist are anyway, unless they specifically say so. And (to me) art that is explicitly political/religious or politically/religiously-motivated rarely connects on a very deep level; and to paraphrase Cyndi again, it’s not real unless I feel it.

And I always felt The Smiths’ music, deeply, and much of Morrissey’s solo stuff too, though it is less critically acclaimed. His recent/latest statements in the press don’t seem like the words of someone who could write “It’s so easy to laugh/It’s so easy to hate/It takes strength to be gentle and kind”, but that’s people for you.

Initially, several controversies ago, I decided that although I wouldn’t actively avoid Morrissey and his works, I would just no longer buy them in a way which would benefit him directly; mean and possibly unfair I know, but that’s people for you too. I am not someone who is going to burn records, CDs and books, or even throw/give them away in disgust, if they have ever meant anything to me. But then came the latest and most crass Morrissey interview (so far) and I got to the point where I’d be kind of embarrassed to buy anything Morrissey-related at all. It’s not so much (as one example out of many) the factual inaccuracy of statements like “Hitler was left wing” – people have been saying moronic things like that (Hitler was a Zionist etc etc etc) for many years. It’s the fact that, as with those who claim the death toll in the holocaust has been exaggerated, people like Morrissey seem to think that his amazing revelation about Hitler is in any way relevant to the things his regime did and how one should feel about it. As with (ironically) people who taunt vegetarians with ‘Hitler was a vegetarian’, it spectacularly misses the point; Hitler is not famous because he’s a vegetarian, any more than he’s famous for his ‘left wing’ views. And you know that, so don’t be so stupid.

But anyway, in the end my fears that the soundtrack to my youth/life would be tainted only came half true. When Morrissey songs popped up in a shuffle I found that, without any feeling of revulsion, drama or anguish, I just didn’t want to hear them anymore. The connection seems to be gone, without regret and possibly with the relief that I was never – despite the fact that I even, unrepentantly, like his autobiography – one of those Morrissey obsessives. Maybe one day my love of his music will come back, maybe not. It’s not real if you don’t feel it and, right now I just don’t, so it isn’t. Ho hum.

A Reading of Orwell (and others) in 2017

I started writing this thing about George Orwell ages ago, but never got it finished, but suddenly it seems possibly relevant, so here it is, still not in the final form intended, extremely long-winded, but hopefully fairly coherent. I should also point out that lots of views of my own are mentioned here, because I can.

Sales of 1984 have risen sharply lately; but although there is definitely no wrong place to start reading Orwell, to me the most relevant of his works for the present day are to be found in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, published by Penguin in the 60s and I assume still in print. I got the four volumes in a charity shop about fifteen years ago for 80 pence; one of the best bargains I have ever had. I’ve read and re-read them more than almost any other books I own and there is never a time when I could pick them up without finding something there to grip me.

They are also intensely relevant to 2017, because the preoccupations that led to his writing of 1984 and Animal Farm are there in their rawest form;

“The era of free speech is closing down. The freedom of the press in Britain was always something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion; still, so long as the legal right to say what you like exists, there are always loopholes for an unorthodox writer.” (Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party, 1938, vol 1, p. 373)

As it happened, the era of free speech never did quite close down (so far anyway), but it should be remembered that Hitler and even more so, Mussolini, were far from universally reviled in Britain, right up to the start of the war. As late as 1940, Orwell could write;

“It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle… He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.” (Vol 2, p 27)

“The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or Democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up.” The Lion and the Unicorn, 1940 (Vol 2, p. 92).

The idea of Fascism is very much still with us, but it’s interesting to find that, despite Mussolini’s explicit adoption of the word, it was no more clearly defined in 1944 than it is now;

“Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much abused word has come.”
“…it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”
As I Please, 1944, vol. 3 p. 138-9

In fact, it’s surprising (and a bit alarming) to find just how relevant much of Orwell’s wartime writings are – in fact, the continuity of life in the UK is still, a world war and a sexual revolution later, still surprisingly noticeable: for instance a quote from the Daily Mail in 1932 shows that, despite being written and edited by entirely different people, the newspaper’s character has hardly changed:

“With that rather morbid commiseration for fanatical minorities which is the rule with certain imperfectly informed sections of British public opinion, this country long shut its eyes to the magnificent work that the Fascist regime was doing. I have several times heard Mussolini himself express his gratitude to the Daily Mail as having been the first British newspaper to put his aims fairly before the world.” Daily Mail, quoted in Who Are The War Criminals?, 1943, vol 2, p. 365)

Most of the current referencing of Orwell has to do with language, ‘newspeak’ and government propaganda (a few years ago it was more to do with surveillance & ‘big brother) and it’s noticeable that, paradoxically, people nowadays seem to be more sceptical than ever about the information given out by the media and government (in itself a fairly healthy thing) but also quite ready to believe any old nonsense that comes from unverified (mostly online) sources. This would not have surprised Orwell, who, reflecting on the ‘truth’ of the Spanish Civil war, wrote;

“Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of ‘facts’ which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these ‘facts’ for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future schoolchildren will believe in it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become the truth.” As I Please, 1944, (vol.3 p. 110)

Also, the age of ‘nasty’ and ‘difficult’ women and ‘deplorable’ people would not have shocked him;

“Someone could write a valuable monograph on the use of question-begging names and epithets, and their effect in obscuring political controversies. It would bring out the curious fact that if you simply accept and apply to yourself a name intended as an insult, it may end by losing its insulting character.” As I Please, 1945, Vol 3 p.372

The moral of this seems to be that, if you want your insults to hurt, choose an epithet that no remotely normal person would embrace; easier said than done perhaps.

Orwell was writing in a time when political ideas, on both the extremes of left and right, were being expressed with absolute conviction, but not much sense of reality, let alone any humanistic thought, Orwell’s writings are notable because above all else, he accepts the basic fact about human beings; we are all the same because we are all different. He was therefore an enemy of totalitarianism, because no abstract system of thought can allow for humanity in all its illogical, unpredictable variety. He was a socialist, but of an extremely undogmatic type, probably because his own upper class background (he was educated at Eton and was afterwards a member of the Imperial Indian Police in Burma) meant that his egalitarian beliefs were not obviously in his own interests. The fact that he had direct experience of the colonial system of rule meant that he couldn’t overlook – as most left-leaning political theorists did – the fact that the oppressed majority that made up the working class at home was mirrored by a far vaster, even more oppressed majority elsewhere. An early essay, A Hanging (1931) – based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma – is important for the development of his socialist beliefs because, as is the case in all of his writing, he confronts his own attitudes, rather than simply judging others’ based on the political system he has adopted. It’s also a brilliant piece of writing;

“He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.” (Vol 1, p.68-9)

The truth that he acknowledges here, that (to unfortunately/accidentally quote USA For Africa) ‘we are the world’, or more accurately but far more awkwardly – the world as we understand it is the result of our own perceptions of it – is to me a vitally important part of any political discussion. I have sometimes been a bit dubious of my belief in individualism, a philosophy (not that it is a philosophy to me) which has often had right-wing (and always has selfish) connotations; but the Prime Minister attacked it recently, which is encouraging. To me – I have no idea if Orwell would have agreed – individualism automatically entails a wider humanistic view, the idea that if I am this collection of thoughts, feelings, perceptions, then other people in their different ways, are this too. We are all important or none of us are.
1984, Animal Farm and many of Orwell’s essays stress the loss of individualism in any Totalitarian philosophy. But while we still live in a relatively free society, his writing on the undercurrents that end in totalitarianism are (to me) even more important. In 1945 he wrote;

“Nationalism, in the extended sense which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemetism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them the objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.” Notes on Nationalism, 1945, vol 3, p. 412

This seems to me to hold true now as it did then. Phrases of the moment, like ‘take our country back’ or ‘Make America Great Again’ are so open to interpretation as to be almost meaningless; but that doesn’t prevent people from taking them extremely seriously. This quote, from the same essay (and with the same disclaimer as to what he means by ‘nationalism’) seems even more appropriate;

“Nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feelings of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.” (p.418-9)

Orwell is – and he almost always is – careful to delineate exactly what he means when discussing issues such as nationalism, because then, as now, the world was full of people who wilfully misunderstand anything vaguely ambiguous that they don’t like the sound of. Then, as now too, there was a tendency, especially among extreme leftist groups, to acknowledge one obvious wrong by pointing out other, similar and/or worse abuses, without addressing the original issue at all; evasive nonsense in fact. A recent example; as it was World Holocaust Day, people were naturally sharing a lot of stories about the experience of Jewish people in WW2 on TV and online. As one would expect, the moron minority of Nazi people made their usual remarks* but the internet was also full of things like ‘think of that story and substitute ‘Jews’ for ‘Palestinians’”. How about substituting it for HUMAN BEINGS? It’s perfectly possible to – in fact I would think impossible not to – be appalled by the inhumane treatment of people by other people whatever the origins of both parties. And for the record, it is entirely possible to be critical of the policies of the government of Israel (for example) without extending that criticism to “Israel” or to Judaism; lots of Jewish people do it. It’s possible to criticise I.S. and Islamic extremism without condemning Islam – lots of Muslims do it. It’s entirely possible to flag up the plight of Yemen (and its causes) without also ignoring and/or dismissing the plight of Syria. Unless one has a quota of compassion that gets used up, it’s not only possible to do these things, it’s obvious and necessary. Be specific; the enemies of freedom always are.

*Holocaust denial by people who like the Nazis and don’t like Jews has to be among the most confusing/confused phenomena of our age. These people show their true colours by their assumption that the Holocaust would somehow be less bad if instead of 6 million, there was ‘only’ one million, or a few hundred thousand dead people at the end of it.

But it’s easy to point out the faults of one’s arch-enemies – it’s worth remembering that when Orwell wrote a review of F. Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy in 1940, he was pointing out not only the truth about Nazi Germany, but also of Stalin’s Russia, which was still at that point the main inspiration for British socialists, with whom Orwell himself was uncomfortably allied;

“As for the hate campaigns in which Totalitarian regimes ceaselessly indulge, they are real enough while they last, but are simply dictated by the needs of the moment. Jews, Poles, Trotskyists, English, French, Czechs, Democrats, Fascists, Marxists – almost anyone can figure as Public Enemy No. 1.”

“Simply in the interests of efficiency the Nazis found themselves expropriating, nationalizing, destroying the very people they had set out to save. It did not bother them, because their aim was simply power and not any particular form of society.” (Vol 2, p. 41)

It’s not surprising to find that in the years surrounding the Second World War, Antisemitism was a particularly touchy issue, but again Orwell did not shy away from the fact that Britain itself had a long history of Antisemitic thought (which had in fact been considered entirely respectable in earlier generations) and that, if anything, knowledge of the Holocaust had only made people ashamed of their own prejudices, rather than removing the prejudice;

“Whenever I have touched on the subject in a newspaper article, I have always had considerable ‘come-back’, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people – doctors for example – with no apparent economic grievance. These people always say (as Hitler says in Mein Kampf) that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories which could not possibly be true.” Antisemitism in Britain, (vol 3 p. 385)

At the same time, Orwell’s belief in free speech was not diminished by the fact that people inevitably use it for a variety of ends. When, in 1949 Ezra Pound was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry, despite his earlier ostracisation from the literary world because of his Antisemitism and backing of the Fascist regime in Italy during the war, Orwell expressed his feelings in a response that feels appropriate to me;

“Antisemitism… is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences.”
“I think the Bollingen Foundation were quite right to award Pound the prize, if they believed his poems to be the best of the year, but I also think that one ought to keep Pound’s career in memory and not feel that his ideas are made respectable by the mere fact of winning a literary prize…
“…since the judges have taken what amounts to an ‘art for art’s sake’ position, that is, the position that artistic integrity and common decency are two separate things, then at least let us keep them separate and not excuse Pound’s career on the ground that he is a good writer. He may be a good writer (I must admit that I personally have always regarded him as an entirely spurious writer), but the opinions that he has tried to disseminate by means of his works are evil ones, and I think that the judges should have said so more firmly when awarding him the prize.” (vol 4, p.552)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I have been reading these books for years now; but the fact is that reading them in 2017 is a far less comfortable experience than it was a decade ago. But at the same time, the key subtexts running through Orwell’s work – especially the idea that political ideology is the enemy of individual freedom – remain important lessons to learn. And here I go off on my own tangent, but I’ll come back to Orwell eventually.
I have always been a left-wing liberal with libertarian leanings and recent events have only confirmed me in my beliefs. More and more, it feels like no one, let alone any political party, can speak on my behalf. Which is a good thing – because the current surge in right-wing extremism has, weirdly, coincided with – on one hand, a willing shirking of responsibility from people who don’t like the things they have voted for, and a willingness to project that responsibility onto others from the media and parts of the public. That was a long, badly-constructed sentence, so here’s a concrete example:
In the UK Brexit referendum (which actually, I have zero desire to write about but it’s an obvious reference point, as is the US presidential election), people voted for it, some got what they wanted and in a minority of cases, didn’t like it afterwards. They then complained that they were lied to by politicians. This may be true, but –
1) people in the UK as long as I can remember, have ALWAYS assumed that politicians lie to them, so that’s rather a disingenuous complaint and more importantly
2) there was no attempt whatsoever from the government to prevent people from finding out the likely consequences of the vote, or in fact doing any kind of investigation for themselves. These people are one small step away from saying that they shouldn’t be trusted to make important decisions. There are enough powerful people who agree with them to make that worrying.

At the same time, a certain part of the media colludes with these idiots; the blame for their regretted decisions actually lies neither with them, nor with the people who are supposed to have deceived them, but with the last 60 years of liberal thought – people like Orwell in fact – which has sidelined the views of bigots and Nazis and tried to foist equality on the world. There are so many reasons this is bullshit, but the most obvious one is just logic; if you leave your front door open while you are out and someone steals your furniture and then police catch the burglar, which one of you should go to prison? And if this is a false analogy (and it is, a bit), it’s because the comparison between (unless you are a moron) a positive thing; sixty years of striving towards equality among human beings, each of whom is as unique and important as the other, and a neutral thing – leaving one’s door unlocked, is ludicrous. In fact its ridiculousness highlights the malignancy of thought behind the pretence that progressive people have brought right wing extremism on themselves. Rather than making excuses for wilfully ignorant people, Orwell suggests what seems to me a far more sensible response (here in reference to the treatment of Polish and Jewish refugees in postwar Britain);

“I think it is a mistake to give such people the excuse of ignorance. You can’t actually change their feelings, but you can make them understand what they are saying when they demand that homeless refugees should be driven from our shores, and the knowledge may make them a little less actively malignant.” Tribune, 24 January 1947 (vol 4, p.316)

The nonsense spouted now in the press and elsewhere is not just stupidity, it’s stupidity with its own creepy conservative agenda and every day it feels like damage is being done to society by people pretending to speak on the behalf of others. Sometimes, surprisingly, others like me; as a white, male, working class British person who wasn’t raised in a metropolitan area and still doesn’t live in one, the kind of paternalistic statements continually being made by people who are for the most part metropolitan (no bad thing in itself) and aren’t working class (ditto) are far more oppressive to me than the idea that I should respect the people I have to share the earth with.
It may surprise the people who claim to be championing me, but even people of my class and background have TV, the internet and relatively high standards of literacy. I am not confused or outraged to see people of different races, genders/no gender/different faiths being represented in the media, even if I did not grow up in a particularly ethnically diverse area. One of the many mistakes these kinds of commentators make is assuming firstly that the working class (and although I belong to it I doubt if there really is such a thing still) is patriotic – which may or may not be true – and that patriotism is by its nature insular and/or xenophobic, which is far less obviously true. To me personally, it is 100% patriotic to want your country to be defined by inclusiveness, an interestingly varied culture & vibrant non-stagnant interactions with other cultures. Or to feel patriotic to the land as actual land and therefore to want to do as little damage to the fabric of the country itself as possible. Patriotism was an important topic for Orwell; as he pointed out often, the British intelligentsia of the inter-war years were not only not patriotic, but tended to be embarrassed by appeals to patriotism, a dangerous thing in an era when the worst elements in the world are very aware of the power of appealing to nationalistic sentiment. Orwell’s work is often imbued with a love of Britain and British culture although he was not at all blind to or uncritical of its inequalities. He was always careful, too, to separate patriotism from nationalism, which he abhorred.

“Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism… By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world, but which has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose for every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself, but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” Notes on Nationalism, 1945 (vol 3, p. 412)

“Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt mystically to be the same.” My Country Right or Left, 1940 ( Vol 2, p.591)

He says a lot more on the subject, and really it’s worth reading his essays, because he is aware of the appeal of the things he doesn’t like in a way that is exceptionally rare in political journalism. My own disliking of nationalism has something to do with the (it seems to me) artificial divisions it seems to involve. I have been to several countries; all of them were beautiful, all of them had wonderful people and less wonderful people, all of them had interesting cultures, and were distinctively but at the same time not deeply different to my own culture. Also, nationalism seems to entail making generalisations which I’d rather not make. I am not someone who really likes belonging to things. I don’t like watching or participating in sports, I don’t really enjoy being in any crowd that has a purpose (though oddly I quite like being in aimless crowds on streets etc) and while I am happy to support specific things and causes, when faced by a group with more than one aim – like a political party – I tend to be dubious. I have a lot of sympathy for William Blake’s statement “To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” Admittedly, he also write “a Horse is not more a Lion for being a Bad Horse”; but that’s genius for you. But I think he was right about generalising, though perhaps Mark Twain was even more right when he said in his smartass way “all generalizations are false, including this one.” I believe personally that valuing what is most individual about us is important in part because it is impossible to have any kind of equality while seeing people as less than the equivalent of yourself. And it’s important, especially when so much of the media is willing to overlook the fact, to point out that civil defence movements like Black Lives Matter and groups like the Women’s Equality Party are doing no more (and no less) than insisting on something that almost everyone apart from the stupidest elements in society automatically agree with; humans are created equal. The only generalisation about humanity worth making is the platitude so perfectly coined by Depeche Mode; people are people. To categorise beyond that only diminishes the personhood (what a horrible word) of those you are talking about. Kristin Hersh puts it thusly;

“Is there a difference between male and female people? Is there? Seriously. I have yet to identify a single character trait I would attribute solely to one gender or the other.” (Rat Girl, 2010, p. 198)

Me either. Since I have descended into this kind of thing, here are some brief bullet pointed things that I believe, that I am sure not everyone agrees with. I list them for clarity, since at least 80% of this article is wafflage:

Inclusivity isn’t a favour to be bestowed from on high to various groups out of all proportion with their numbers, it is exactly what every adult human being expects, and should be able to expect, from a healthy society.
People can and should think whatever they like; but states and governments should be concerned only about the welfare of all of the people that make up that society– otherwise why should those people contribute to it?
Cultures like that of Britain are not undermined by diversity. It is in their nature to be diverse, they always have been and always will be.
The simple idea that everyone is equal does not exclude anyone except for those who wish to exclude themselves, for whatever deluded reason.
Anyone who thinks that the advances in equality since the 60s have in some way altered society to the detriment of ‘ordinary’ people have a) been walking around with their eyes closed their whole life and b) a narrow & distorted view of what ‘ordinary’ people are.
Other peoples’ rights are your rights. If people express themselves harmlessly in ways you don’t like, it’s none of your business.
there are ideas/philosophies that can’t be reconciled or compromised with. The worst people in history have always believed that, so everyone has to, too.

ANYWAY: all this was mainly to say, if you are interested in George Orwell but haven’t read him, by all means read 1984, but if, as well as seeing a nightmare vision of where we could end up you also want insights into how the world got where it is now, as well as lots of interesting, funny and above all, well written articles on a variety of topics (not just politics, but popular culture, food and drink, murder, literature, to name a few), try his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as ours without wanting to change it.” Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party, 1938, (vol 1, p. 374)”

One of the right responses to being alarmed by events is to do whatever it is you are good at doing in order to try to improve the situation; what Orwell did was to understand, and to write.

next… more inane stuff about music, thankfully

NSBM (and possibly NSFW)

It’s not National, to my knowledge it’s rarely socialist, but it mostly is black metal; National Socialist Black Metal (hereafter, NSBM) annoys people by being ‘too evil’, or at least evil in the wrong way. As the snuff movie is to the horror movie, it seems, NSBM is to BM. There are a couple of flaws in this analogy; firstly, it suggests that black metal in general is, like horror movies, some kind of fantasy (which it certainly often is, but isn’t necessarily) and secondly, that NSBM isn’t some kind of fantasy (see previous parentheses). The Nazis of World War 2 probably represent the ‘ultimate evil’ to people of the post-war generations, because whereas even the worst serial killers of the 20th century ‘worked’ on an individual, localised scale, the Nazis made murder into an ideology and ultimately an industry; that is, they functioned in ways that are relevant and relate-able to the daily lives and experiences of most people; the mundane quality of extermination, of ‘death factories’ is ultimately more frightening than a lone maniac. So is Nazi black metal the embodiment of that evil and therefore the ultimate in musical terrorism? Let’s see…

Defining NSBM

Let me be clear; I am not discussing heathen/pagan/folk BM that may or may not be perceived to have a Nazi angle to it; interesting though that scene is (and Graveland is the classic example of a sometimes great band whose career has been blighted by the media’s – and indeed the band’s own – inability to differentiate between history and ideology) the term ‘Nazi’ is too specific and anachronistic to be very useful when discussing paganism, heritage etc. Here, I am more concerned with bands whose work fully intends to glorify that specific NS ideology, and whose output can be represented by artwork like this:

The first question is, is NSBM any good? Just like any black metal, the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no. On occasion, the mixture of the classic sound of orthodox BM with the particular (and let’s not beat around the bush, racist and especially, anti-Semitic) kind of extreme bile that a Nazi band projects can be extremely effective. Even a modestly-talented middle-of-the-road orthodox BM band like Poland’s Ohtar were able to make something nightmarishly gripping out of tunes that, had they been devoted to Satan, would have just been too familiar. In that (but not only that) respect, NSBM is comparable to Christian Black Metal – it may sometimes be okay as sound, but that doesn’t make it right.

Given the existence of such subgenres as ambient BM and folk BM, perhaps the only essential ingredient of black metal is Satanism, in one form or another; and the good thing about Satanism is that it can mean many things to many people. Therefore you have the kind of religious goats ‘n’ horns Satanism that is the polar opposite of Christian metal, exemplified I guess by Watain. Related, but not necessarily requiring any religious belief, there is Lucifer, the fallen angel, analogous to humankind; the cosmic light-bringer with the key to forbidden knowledge. As the philosophical figure of the adversary, Satan can simply be seen as the ultimate rebel; the perfect icon for black metal.

Misanthropy: a group activity?

In fact, some of the best black metal, even by those with Nazi links (Burzum being the best and most obvious example) is metaphysical and above all personal. Like any music that people put their souls into, BM isn’t ‘just music’ – and no-one could deny that in the early 90s, people like Dead and Varg Vikernes lived the music they made. Whatever his political views were or are, Varg Vikernes has the sense to realise that, while his views may be shared by many, his thoughts and feelings are his alone and at its best, Burzum’s music is an expression of those feelings. Filosofem, probably his finest work, expresses a kind of solitary desolation through lyrics that are almost abstract in their elemental bareness, making it endlessly appealing to those metal fans (and not just metal fans) who feel alienated from modern urban society and the mainstream music scene.

As an alternative (or even an accompaniment) to this kind of individualistic Satanic philosophy, National Socialism is highly inadequate; it’s too specific, too political, too ephemeral, too small. Anyone reading Mein Kampf can have no doubt that, to Adolf Hitler, National Socialism was a deeply felt personal philosophy. But anyone following it now should be aware that that’s exactly what they are doing – following someone else’s ideology, living someone else’s dream. Not to be too dictatorial about it, but surely although BM isn’t all that some of its proponents make it out to be, following a failed idea from the recent past is fundamentally not what the genre is supposed to be about.

Another key band who helped to ignite the idea of NSBM while definitely not belonging to it were Darkthrone, but as is obvious from looking at their work, their brief flirtation with the language of NS, even evaluated from a politically neutral point of view, actually undermined the impact of their music. The album which caused the controversy is also the one which cemented the band’s reputation as scene leaders, despite the fact that it is significantly weaker than the two which preceded it; 1993’s Transilvanian Hunger. The title track is one of the band’s best ever songs, but it also helps to illustrate where they went wrong. The (not surprisingly) vampiric lyrics are classic black metal, an almost romantic view of misanthropy, forever making cold one of the keywords of the genre. The narrator is utterly divorced not only from society but from humanity. And yet, at the same time as putting forward this image of inhumanity/antihumanity, the band chose, famously, to include the statement Norsk Arisk Black Metal (‘Norwegian Aryan Black Metal’) on the album’s sleeve. What the Aryan or Iranian (or Indo-European or however you choose to interpret ‘Aryan’) people have to do with Norway is anyone’s guess, and if we are to presume that the vampire of Transilvanian Hunger believes in some kind of racialist ideology it can only undermine the song with baggage it most definitely doesn’t need. Which raises another problem with National Socialist ideology in relation to BM; it’s too nice.

Nazism is too nice

This statement clearly needs elaboration. Misanthropy, whether or not it is a viable design for life, is all-encompassing. Nazism is definitively unpleasant, but – examining even the term ‘National Socialism’ – it most definitely cannot be said to be anti-social, let alone misanthropic. Therefore NSBM, although at first it may seem like the ne plus ultra of darkness, actually has a reductive effect compared to the stance of the classic ‘second wave’ of BM. As a misanthrope, you can’t ‘belong’, to be a member of some kind of elite society, you must ‘belong’. Sweet.

The Inclusiveness of true evil?

Standing for ‘all the darkness of humanity’ (variations of this dedication have appeared on album sleeves since the dawn of the 90s and are still going strong; a recent one in my own experience being Malaysians Nefkarata’s (very good) Morts, dedicated to “All Evil In Man”) would by necessity include Hitler & Co alongside Jewish serial killer David Berkowitz and Caligula, Idi Amin, Margaret Thatcher etc, etc, but the most strident NS bands are so dedicated to that vague and misunderstood thing, ‘Aryanism’ that basically it’s all about one short, albeit turbulent, period of the 20th century. And for all the true NSBM band’s xenophobic, elitist rhetoric, it should be remembered that historically, Nazis were not only mainly Germanic (whereas NSBM bands are as or more likely to spring from North or South America as anywhere else) but also – and for a totalitarian ‘might-is-right’ philosophy this is extremely important – the losers.

The glamour of atrocity

Like it or not, it’s undeniable that Nazism and especially the holocaust, have a certain frisson; hence the existence of Nazi exploitation movies like Salon Kitty, Ilsa, She-wolf of the SS and (slightly more ambitiously) The Night Porter.

Awareness of this frisson is at the heart of one of Stephen King’s better pieces of writing; the opening chapters of Apt Pupil, and a disapproving awareness of it was behind the predictable moral panic which greeted Martin Amis’ deeply non-exploitative Time’s Arrow. This special atmosphere is definitely part of the allure of certain kinds of NSBM; mostly the sillier kind made by bands with ‘Aryan’ in their name – and an album cover that features a photograph of Nazi atrocities with a black metal logo has a kind of spurious impressiveness that makes it stand out amidst the hordes of unreadable scrawls, inverted crosses, enthroned goats etc.

“Nazi Moods”

Perhaps the most artistically successful Nazi-themed or related BM is the ambient kind, partly because, however unappetising it may sound from a pop-music perspective, the mix of sombre, wintry and minimalist electronica with martial themes and archive recordings of WWII-era radio broadcasts, speeches and music is incredibly evocative and paradoxically, strangely emotionally involving.

Similarly, the kind of artwork that accompanies these releases tends to be evocative rather than visceral; black and white photographs of landmarks like Zakupy Chateau, Schlöss Wewelsburg, the Wolf’s Lair; crumbling monuments, statues or ruins. This kind of aesthetic has a deep appeal which matches the music, boring if you don’t like it, but strangely moving if you do, even for those who completely reject the ideology behind it. Compared to standard NSBM, this is a very grey area; whereas a record with a cover image of a mountain of emaciated corpses and a name like ‘Aryan Sturm’ can be reasonably presumed to be an NSBM album, a masterpiece like Tronus Abyss’ Kampf – which has many of the hallmarks of an NS ambient project as listed above cannot (and shouldn’t) be easily labelled NSBM. The band do explore avenues of mysticism associated with the Third Reich, they do use martial themes and evoke the ruins of postwar Europe, but it would be difficult (and futile) to try to demonstrate that Kampf is a ‘Nazi album’, any more than Oliver Hirschbiegel’s superb and similarly evocative Der Untergang is a ‘Nazi film’.

Banning Nazism; the ultimate irony

In recent times, the escalating paranoia about right-wing extremity (alongside, ironically or maybe obviously, a tolerance among people for actual right-wing extremity) has led to some high-profile cases of BM bands being prevented from playing live, especially in Germany. Most of these bands have of course not been Nazis at all – and it is intolerable that these bands have had their livelihood threatened over what is basically the same kind of metal-phobic ignorance that led to US burnings of Number of the Beast in the early 80s.

Banning any kind of art is a ridiculous, futile gesture which has (to my knowledge) never had any positive results except to energise those opposing the regime in charge. On the other hand, actual NS bands should be quite pleased; banning is a classic Nazi trait, which should give them hope for the future of the reich.