“A Scandinavian, for instance, has no good reasons to emotionally react negatively to "Nazism"… German 'Nazis' behaved exemplary in Denmark and Norway during WWII… In Norway only about 0.03% of the population was killed (and the vast majority was actually killed by the Allies).”
Varg Vikernes, The Nazi Ghost, July 2005.
Despite the severity of his crimes and 21 year sentence, he was transferred to the low security Berg prison in Tonsberg after serving less than half his time to prepare for release. However, in October 2003 he failed to return from a 17 hour home leave. He was recaptured just a less than a day later in a stolen car with a Heckler & Koch AG3 assault rifle, a handgun, a selection of knives, a gas mask, camouflage clothing, a laptop, a compass, a global positioning system, maps and a fake passport. When questioned he said he had been planning to go to Sweden but then changed his mind. After talking to his mother, he felt that trying to cross the border wouldn't work.
For this escape attempt, which included hijacking the car from a family at gunpoint, only 13 months were added to his sentence. Vikernes was released in March 2009, his musical career uninterrupted by his sentence as he was given access to instruments and studio equipment whilst in jail. During this time his one man band Burzum arguably did more to spread the NSBM word than any other artist. Although lyrically not outwardly fascist, the Burzum website leaves no doubt about his ideology. Vikernes calls his philosophy Odalism (a Germanic word used pretty much exclusively by Germanic nationalists) which he describes as a combination of the proto-Germanic ôþalan, 'heritage', and Old Norse óðal, meaning 'homeland' and 'distinguished family'. It is however primarily Teutonic Völkisch Nationalism based on ancestor worship, Paganism and rejection of outside cultures. Its symbol is the Odal rune.
There's no denying that Burzum and NSBM in general are a Rock ‘n’ Roll success story. A Burzum CD can be expected to sell well in excess of 15,000 copies with estimates of up 100,000 for the popular Belus album. In 2009 Emperor stated they had sold 500,000 units in total worldwide. This in a genre where online trading between fans is the norm.
Emperor’s Tomas “Samoth” Haugen was sentenced in 1994 to 16 months for burning Skjold Church in Vindafjord, together with Vikernes, whilst drummer Bård 'Faust Eithun was convicted of the homophobic murder of Magne Andreassen the same year as well as the burning of Holmenkollen Church in Oslo with Vikernes and Euronymous in 1992.
1992 was a busy year for Vikernes, during which he also founded the Cymophane label, based in his hometown of Bergen, Norway, to release his Burzum output. However, in July 2000, the Chicago-based Center For New Community discovered that William Luther Pierce, founder and leader of the white nationalist National Alliance (NA) and owner of Resistance Records, had gained control of Cymophane.
Pierce, who died in 2002, is probably best known as the author of The Turner Diaries, the futuristic race-war fantasy novel that inspired Timothy McVeigh to detonate a truck full of explosives in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 167 people. The main purpose of the NA’s takeover of Cymophane was to gain the rights to distribute Burzum albums in the USA, but this was just an in-road. The NA also set up Unholy Records as a subsidiary of Resistance to distribute the 2002 compilation album, Visions – A Tribute to Burzum and other international NSBM acts.
Unholy is managed by Ymir G Winter, guitarist in Grom, a New York-based NSBM band. Winter told the US Heavy Metal magazine Decibel in 2007 that his father openly advocated fascism and that his maternal grandfather fought for Germany in the Second World War. Of Greek/Slavonic & Polish descent, Grom named themselves after the two Grom class destroyers, built in the UK for the Polish Navy, some of the most heavily-armed destroyers on the seas before World War II. A slightly odd choice of name for an NSBM band, maybe, but they are very vocal with their opinions. “During many of our shows, we will spit fire and then set an Israeli flag ablaze,” Winter says, “When regulations don’t allow this, we have the crowd stomp the Israeli flag and spit on it.” Winter, a proud NA member (you hear this a great deal), is head of A&R for Resistance Records and writes for the label’s magazine. “Resistance wants to promote Aryan awareness and does so by using music as a recruitment tool and as a vessel for the National Socialist/White Power movement,” he has said.
Grom, the Polish NSBM band Graveland and the rather odd Australian Nazi Black Metal group Spear of Longinus (“The Yoga Of National Socialism”) also released music on the now defunct New York based Vinland Winds Records, an NSBM label set up by the late Rich Mills. Like many NSBM acolytes, Mills could not praise Varg Vikernes enough, “Burzum is the only Norwegian band that remains unapologetic and literally convicted of his beliefs.” Mills always openly admitted he had been affiliated with the National Alliance. Under the name Grimnir Heretik, he was the vocalist for Grand Belial’s Key, another NSBM band. GBK’s album, Kosherat, closes with two covers of songs by white power punks Chaos 88 (one of which, 'Holy Shit', contains the line, “I wanna beat you like the Jew that you are”).
Vikernes was not the only nor the first NSBM murderer that William Luther Pierce actively sought out. Another leading figure in the NSBM scene was arrested whilst on an extended NA sponsored tour of the US through 1999-2000. Hendrik Möbus (aka Jarl Flagg Nidhoegg), a neo-Nazi killer wanted in Germany was tracked across the country by US Marshals for eight weeks prior to his arrest on 29 August 2000. The Marshals followed Möbus as he left the National Alliance compound, eventually detaining him outside a family restaurant in Lewisburg, West Virginia. Möbus had fled Germany to avoid serving a five-year prison term and had begun his American racist underground tour nine months earlier, travelling 4,000 km across the country before he was finally arrested.
Möbus’s Nazi career began at school in Erfurt, east Germany, when aged 16 he formed a death metal band called Absurd with a couple of classmates. On 29 April 1993, he and his bandmates murdered Sandro Beyer, a classmate, who they considered a 'Volksschadling', or race defiler. In January 1994 the three were found guilty of murder and as a minor, Möbus received an eight year sentence. During the summer of 1995, whilst the band members were serving their time, Rob Darken of Graveland released Absurd’s demo tape Thuringian Pagan Madness, which helped propel the group to fame within the NSBM scene. Möbus was released on parole in August 1998 and issued a statement justifying Beyer’s murder, saying he died because he did not “fit the picture” of the German race. By that October Möbus had been arrested once again and charged with displaying Nazi symbols.
His strenghtened bonds with the international NSBM network helped Möbus become head of the German branch of the Pagan Front, an international coalition of organisations, record labels, bands, fanzines and individuals dedicated to promoting the NSBM underground. Allegedly founded by Varg Vikernes, though he denies this, the Pagan Front describes itself as “a neo-Pagan and racially aware movement, which struggles to secure the Aryan peoples existence”. The Pagan Front claims chapters in Romania, Poland, France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, the USA, Canada, Flanders, Finland, Australia and Russia. Whether or not he admits membership, the Front publishes books by Vikernes and actively promotes Burzum releases.
Möbus went on to found Darker than Black (DTB) Records, which quickly became one of the leading National Socialist Black Metal labels. He also befriended neo-Saxon boneheads the Hammerskins, which enabled DTB to agree a distribution deal with Germany’s Hate Records, one of the biggest distributors of white power music in Europe. In July 1999 Möbus was sentenced to eight months in prison for displaying Nazi symbols and Hate Records purchased DTB which he continued to run behind the scenes. On 6 October 1999, the German authorities raided DTB Records’ offices and Möbus was charged with the distribution of Nazi propaganda. Faced with a possible five years in prison, he chose to go on the lam.
Despite an international arrest warrant, Möbus was able to fly into the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport using his real name in December 1999. He then travelled around the country through a kind of National Alliance ratline, before ending up at the NA headquarters, an impressive cross-country trek that highlights the increasingly international nature of the NSBM underground, the growth of the network in the US, and the inroads William Luther Pierce and the National Alliance made as he used his time with Möbus to secure entry into the Black Metal scene in the US and Europe.
As Pierce explained, “I invited him to stay as my guest and help me establish new outlets in Europe for my records. And that’s what he did for ten weeks. He stayed as my guest, and we talked about the role of music in our overall effort.” This led to the National Alliance acquiring Cymophane, in return for which Pierce helped Möbus with his legal problems filing paperwork with the US Immigration and Naturalization Services requesting political asylum.
Resistance Records found it easier to distribute their Burzum tribute 2CD and other NSBM releases in the UK than in the US. At the time HMV, Amazon UK and Play.com were among those documented as selling their product. However, it should be noted now that HMV have ceased any connections (though they do stock the entire Burzum back catalogue) and NSBM only appears to be available on Play.com through independent marketplace sellers. HMV, Amazon and Play.com have also carried a large amount of stock from Supernal Music, a label that is the largest online distributor of what it terms “extreme black metal”.
Supernal bands such as Drudkh, Astrofaes, Hate Forest and Dark Ages, all Ukrainian, are these days considered fairly mainstream within NSBM. Their CDs are widely available mainly because they are not blatant about their far right racism and anti-semitism but like Burzum, mask them in a pseudo-intellectual, semi-romantic ancestor worshipping nationalism. Fellow countrymen Nokturnal Mortum’s 'The Call of Aryan Spirit', a bizarre, almost Spinal Tap-esque mix of Black Metal and Pagan Folk suffers no such shyness.
Based in Cranleigh, Surrey UK, Supernal has been run by Alex Kurtagic since 1996 and it was through him that NSBM came to Rough Trade (RTM) that year. The RTM deal gave access to The Cartel, a group of independent record shops throughout the UK and the RTM/Disc distribution network, though by no means did all those stores stock the fledgling Supernal’s product. The deal lasted until Vital (now PIAS UK) bought out RTM in 1997, but sometime before then the sales team had realised what they were being asked to sell and refused to have anything more to do with many of the darker releases. This unfortunately did not stop the occasional appearance of NSBM demo tapes at the Rough Trade’s Camden offices, one of which came clamped in the teeth of a decomposing sheep’s head.
Kurtagic also records as Benighted Leams, whose fourth album Obombrid Welkins (2007) was heavily influenced by the writing of William Luther Pierce and Kevin MacDonald. His monthly email bulletin regularly featured pictures of Nazi mystics and advocates of esoteric Hitlerism including Savitri Devi, Miguel Serrano, the anti-semitic writer Ernst Junger and Julius Langbehn, a 19th century anti-semite. In June 2010 Kurtagic penned the revisionist article Black Metal Ethno-nationalism for the American Renaissance periodical that stated Möbus was persecuted and imprisoned by the German authorities for loyalty to his beliefs and Vikernes received his 21 year sentence for one case of church arson.
Supernal’s catalogue similarly makes no bones of its allegiances. US group Sturmführer’s Ich kämpfe (I fight) CD boasts Hitler as the cover star and contains the track 'Treu Martyr' featuring a speech by Robert Mathews, leader of the NA affiliated US Nazi terror cell The Order, who is portrayed as a martyred hero. A typical Sturmfuhrer quote reads “Germany was defending itself from the plague of world usury/Jewry and was unfortunately beaten with the help of world Jewry, between Amerika, CCCP and Britain, 'OUR' kind was seduced into believing Hitler was a madman. The sad thing is that most of 'US' didn't even realize that 'WE' were fighting 'OUR' own people.”
Another Supernal distributed CD is the Capricornus/Der Sturmer split album (for some reason split albums are big in NSBM) entitled Polish Hellenic Alliance Against ZOG with a Nuremburg rally style cover. Der Sturmer (The Attacker) hail from Athens and take their name from a weekly Nazi tabloid newspaper published by Julius Streicher from 1923 to the end of the war in 1945. They are closely linked to the Greek arm of the Nazi skinhead organisation Blood and Honour and Nazi occultist street gang the Golden Dawn who have been making their prescence felt once again in the poorer areas of Athens these past few months.
Included on the album is “The Nailbomber”, a tribute to David Copeland, London Nazi bomber and former member of both the BNP & David Myatt’s NSM. The Nailbomber features excerpts from police interviews with Copeland. The Polish Capricornus tread a little more carefully but 'Sun Wheel on the Helmet of Steel' gives you a fair idea of their leanings. Der Sturmer also contributed to a compilation CD on the Club 88 imprint that raised funds for German Nazi war criminal Erich Priebke, a former Hauptsturmführer in the Waffen SS, convicted in 1996 for his part in the massacre of 335 Italian civilians at the Ardeatine caves in Rome in 1944. Further contributions came from German NSBM groups Lunikoff, Halgadom and Words Of Anger.
Other bands promoted by Supernal include Kiborg and Temnozor from Russia, both of which have intimate ties with Russian Blood and Honour and the US based Xenophobia, writers of 'Anti Semite Eternal', whose singer, the self-styled Reverend Brian Moudry, aka Warhead Jewgrinder is a member of both the white supremacist Creativity Movement, formerly the World Church of the Creator and the Pagan Front as well as being publisher of Hatemonger Warzine, a radical NSBM fanzine. Moudry is a man who once threatened to bomb his black postman because he wasn’t receiving enough mail and was recently arrested for chasing a child cyclist away from his house with a gun. Another contributor to Hatemonger is Wisconsin based Jamie Welch “a proud supporter of the Pagan Front” who runs the NSBM label Terrorwolfe to which Xenophobia are signed and who himself records 'Aryan Melancholic Black Metal' as Veil for the Russian Stellar Winter imprint.
Most of the bands are still active and Mayhem, Vikernes’ original group still perform, recently revealing that they smuggled in real human remains to use as part of their stage show at Hellfest 2011 in Clisson, France.
Absurd, minus Hendrik Möbus but with his brother Ronald having taken over vocal duties are now considered one of the top NSBM groups worldwide. A recent Absurd gig in the Czech Republic featured appearances from Temnozor, the Ukrainian band Kroda and Czech NSBMers Sekhmet.
UK Black Metal band Meads Of Asphodel (latest release 'The Murder of Jesus the Jew'), whilst publicly denying neo-Nazi affiliations then go on to print an announcement in defence of NSBM on their label Godreah Records website. Hertfordshire UK based Godreah also distribute the work of Norwegian Nazi Satanists Absurd, Burzum, Der Sturmer, Spear Of Longinus, Kiborg, the Belarus-based PD SS Totenkopf and Brazilian NSBM group Evil amongst many others.
why posit or suggest that Emperor and Mayhem are in any way NSBM bands when neither are or ever were? the author of this post is far too versed in the subculture to make this mistake unintentionally...how disappointing that when the topic of NSBM is finally and necessarily covered on here, it is done to such a low standard of journalism...even the most casual student of the genre's history knows that Mayhem is not "Vikernes' original band" - already having started his Burzum project, he briefly played session bass in Mayhem before falling out with Euronymous, the actual bandleader. By Vikernes' own accusations, Euronymous was a homosexual and a Communist, hardly qualifying Mayhem for any NSBM legacy. And who fucking cares if they bring human remains onstage - they're a black metal band! Is Tipper Gore around?
ReplyDeleteThe thing that makes grey area difficult here is that NSBM is an insular microgenre of self-professed racists - and yes, surprise, they are actually racist. I don't understand the offhand implication that Emperor and Mayhem - two completely apolitical bands that are metal superstars now on the order of Iron Maiden - are fellow travelers. Is it because they came from the same scene as, and even fraternized with, the teenage Vikernes? The author of this post states that Vikernes' racist nationalism was a later development and involved a revision of his younger Satanism...detailing the church burnings that Vikernes and other Norwegian scenesters carried out is a sensationalistic distraction from the point of this post, as these crimes were acts of religious rebellion completely devoid of any racist content. Bard Eithun didn't claim a political motivation for the killing he carried out or tie it to Emperor in any way - he went to prison and the band has functioned without his involvement for most of their career now.
this post gives some interesting detail about some more obscure figures, but aside from roll-calling NSBM bands and labels and reminding everyone what the unsavory nature of National Socialism is, I fail to see what dialogue it invites...and why waste everyone's time throwing in tabloid scraps about how nasty black metal is more generally?
Sources might be nice, too.
K, many thanks for your corrections, you make some valid points. I would be the first to concede that I am not a journalist.
ReplyDeleteI was however, working in the business at the time.
Firstly, It is actually Mayhem after the death of Euronymous that I would consider to be NS.
Drummer Jan Axel “Hellhammer” Blomberg spoke out against race mixing and foreigners in Norway in Ablaze Magazine #6 from September/Oktober 1995. He has also advocated violence against homosexuals. Michael Moynihan’s Lords of Chaos, quotes him as saying, "I'll put it this way, we don't like black people here. Black metal is for white people. I'm pretty convinced that there are differences between races as well as everything else. I think that like animals, some races are more… you know, like a cat is much more intelligent than a bird or a cow, or even a dog, and I think that's also the case with different races." He has, like most other LOC interviewees since denied this, but considering he has made similar remarks elsewhere it would fair to assume the quote is genuine.
In the February 1996 issue of Spin magazine Darcey Steinke’s piece "Satan's Cheerleaders" reads “The band Mayhem used to practice here in a room framed by puke stained carpet below and swastika flags tacked overhead”.
The Mayhem Legion Norg long sleeve shirt from 1997 features a Totenkopf on each sleeve and the Nasjonal Samling symbol on the back. The short sleeve version just has the rear NS print.
Mind you, if we are going to rely on the varying accounts given by Virkernes then according to at least one of them Euronymous had begun to embrace NS in the months before his murder (although admittedly I am struggling to find that reference now).
Whilst I agree that Emperor are not outwardly political, dual actions between band members and Vikernes, Samoth’s side-project Zyklon-B, the fact that although the account Faust gave at his trial was that he murdered Andreassen because he propositioned him, evidence showed that he purposely lured his victim far into the woods, making it without doubt a hate crime and possibly more coldly premeditated than Virkernes’ shows a certain unity in ideology between Emperor members and NSBM bands in general. Please note that I called the murder homophobic not Nazi. So, yes, I may have made a leap there (in actuality it was in an attempt to illustrate how much this type of music sells) but maybe not a very big one I think. If it looks like a Nazi and acts like a Nazi around other Nazis, it’s pretty much definitely a Nazi, but then that’s just my opinion.
As for “throwing in tabloid scraps”, well, this is as you say an insular microgenre of music and those that know about its background are in the minority, so I think for the rest a some amount of scene-setting is not out of place, after all, the tabloid grabbing actions by band members are what helped propel Black Metal and with it NSBM into international awareness and keep it there to this day.
And yes you’re correct of course, Mayhem were not Vikernes original band, he formed Kalasnikov/Uruk Hai in the late Eighties and Mayhem came together in 1984. What I should have said is that Mayhem were the band in which he originally became well known.
>Meads Of Asphodel
ReplyDeleteDon't they have an Asian drummer?
Meads Of Asphodel do indeed have an Asian drummer, Sunil Jolly. They have also worked with ex-members of Hawkwind, which makes their statement all the more surprising.
ReplyDeletewww.whomakesthecatholics.com - The Pope's Catholic's Connections Exposed!
ReplyDeletewww.whomakesthebearsshi.... ah I got nothing.
What was their statement?
ReplyDeleteNSBM ; Statement from Godreah Records
ReplyDeleteGodreah has always supported freedom of speech in its purest form and as such the likes of Anti Christian, NSBM, and on occasions music made by total lunatics will be found in the catalogue. Godreah does not support political views of the aforementioned nature.
To those idiots who moan about NSBM, i say this : Without such movements the past would be Inevitably forgotten and lessons from specific ages of human history lost from memory. NSBM can serve as a reminder to both sides of a very controversial coin. If you are still croaking in your self righteous...., go and save a third world nation, or resurrect the equally sensitive issues but no less critical, of the Armenian Genocide, or the destruction of the north American Indians by the white man, or even the Irish Potato famines of 1845-49, a British genocide?
Metatron from the Meads of Asphodel has this to say on the subject,
‘NSBM, has obvious grievances towards the Jews, hence its fascist Nazi imagery and stark one dimensional theology. Most NSBM owes much to cultural independence rather than blatant anti Semitism, but this very real and for most, disturbing genre is not necessarily [although by nature] aligned directly to the all consuming aura of Hitler.
Anti-Semitism at its root form is rooted to the early Roman Church, itself an extension of the Roman Empire, both subversive institutions of conversion by persuasion. The Romans levelled Jerusalem in 70BC, killing around a million Jews from a population of three million. With the Roman Empire in decline, its transformation into the Holy Roman Empire through the adopted Judaic cult of Jesus [eventually stripped of all its Judaism] was the next crucial factor in our perceptions of anti-Semitism today. The growth of early Christianity depended on its sellable nature to a Pagan Roman Audience; hence the blame for their Gods death [Jesus] could not be pointed towards a Roman [Pontius Pilate]. The blame was therefore placed firmly on the Jews, and Anti-Semitism was truly born. The Christian religion, already based on debatable foundations grew at an astonishing rate, consuming half the globe, and dragging its dark anti-Semitic guilt with it. The Jews were bundled in groups and ghettos throughout Europe, their main source of survival money lending and their drive to succeed gained wealth and business attributes worldwide. This was the bane of German Fascism, a twisted excuse to drag a nation into the bowels of war.
The whole Jewish question during Hitler's reign is one of the Holocaust, indiscriminate extermination, and calculated cruelty. The systematic destruction of a race had no name at the time, so one was invented for it, Genocide. Whether you accept History's stark truth of gas chambers and deliberate mass murder, or take the revisionist view, [that it never occurred] is neither there nor there. What is important is the freedom to discus without prejudice individual views, and NSBM is a medium for a minority to express those views. It is your choice whether to listen ,but to silence this view is to become the very beast you attempt to muzzle.
I'm aware this post is ancient but it came up while looking for left-wing black metal of all things! This seems a lot more in keeping with Godreah's views. I've actually released music on this label with the group Old Corpse Road, including a split release with Meads of Asphodel. While I can't really speak for Meads I'd say we've often been lumped with the "Heritage" BM label, which on the face of it is quite accurate since OCR's songs focus primarily on the folklore of the British Isles, however musically we were intentionally apolitical. Many other bands currently on the scene seem to take this stance musically, although the strange thing I've found little evidence of online, but a huge abundance in the scene itself, is in fact that a large proportion of the people in the current scene are actually very left wing. That includes most of my (now-ex) band. There's definitely a few racists about but they are actually kind of both "oldschool" black metal and often older, but simultaneously almost outsiders to the scene at large when their politics come into play. Weirdly there's not a lot of conflict at gigs mind, because there seems to be a level of tolerance for a wide range of views, and that includes listening to bands with very differing politics. In public the newer members of the scene almost unanimously shy away from politics altogether but when you know most of their key members on social media you are left with very little doubt as to their political stances.
DeleteIn the past few years I also think mainstream UK politics has become more and more right wing, so perhaps this "loony left" stance as the Mail likes to put it is considered more counter-culture here these days. Socialism is certainly rife, but nationalism is not.
I think the real point is that NSBM is poorly recorded and unlistenable. And I stated before it started long before Black Metal was even talked about -- the whole metal scene in Buffalo New York was particularly disgusting, where the reprehensible hate-core band No Alibi thrived. (BTW I'm pleased to say N.A.'s Chris Gawlick apparently disappeared from Facebook, and I'll bet no-one misses him...)
ReplyDeleteAnd on a different note it may surprise you all that I've given up on DIJ and Boyd Rice, not even because of the 'Nazi' issue but I'm getting sick of both's hardline Islamophobia. The last straw was some freak praising the action of Anders Behring Brievik on DIJ's Yahoo page. You may not like my own politics, but at least I don't agree with shooting up left-wing teenagers...
I wouldn't consider the Meads... statement to be supportive of NSBM, rather supportive of the right to free speech - an argument that has its pros and cons as we all know. It would seem (taking into account Metatron's historical essay here) that the title of their album "The Murder of Jesus the Jew" is designed to offend anti-semitic Christians. Bear in mind also that they released a split in 2009 featuring covers of tracks by Doom, Hellbastard and Conflict - all staunchly anti-Nazi acts.
ReplyDeleteYeah, Meads are the least of peoples worries, a band that are very aware of history, yet avoid the trappings and silly statements inherent in NSBM.
ReplyDeleteVarg Vikernes is to release a book in the coming months on Scandinavian history though, which will obviously be from a Nationalist perspective.
This article feels very late in the day. Black Metal is fading fast...
Shit, this article scared me. I'm gonna be way more discerning in which bands I listen to now. I had actually completely forgotten about the accusations of Burzum's Nazism. Now I am quite convinced. I think more people need to learn about this- Burzum is very accessible musically (may be hard to many to believe, but definitely true in the context of "extreme metal") and, I think, lulls people into a false sense of security . After hearing Burzum, people poke around the scene, inevitably stumbling across even more controversial bands. While I luckily realize that it is time to stop listening to such an evil genre, many do not. Extremist beliefs sneak into the minds of the suceptible
ReplyDeleteplan scam, you haven't seen or experienced nothing compared to the '90s metal scene in Upstate NY, as I mentioned earlier here. Now racism in the scene isn't existent anymore although I hear now there's a problem with the rockabilly scene ironically (another thing to blame Ian Stewart Donaldson for.) I'm not saying there isn't still problems elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteI think the only place that NSBM thrives is in Eastern Europe as far as I know and it's marginalized everywhere else (or I would hope anyways.) There's plenty of non-racist metal that's more about people than petty hatred. Look around...
BTW that raises up another point no-one here talks about -- that there's nazi skinhead involvement in the rockabilly scene. It's easy to put crosshairs on a band like Sol Invictus, but nobody seems to make a fuss about the Krewmen or Demented Are Go, both bands having members that played in Ian Stewart Donaldson's despicable side project the Klansmen. I don't want to tar the whole genre with the same brush, after all it has roots in Black American music, but I've been hearing here in upstate New York there's been nazis showing up at rockabilly-oriented shows at various clubs, which raised a few alarms with club security lately.
ReplyDeletetypical Middle class Left wing trendies yes the Othala Rune was Used by the 7th panzer division but a lot of the symbols Hitler used were old Slavic/Pagan symbols and weren't his to use in the first place do your research before tarring these symbols with the "nazi" tag
ReplyDeletemiddle class? mind your manners.
ReplyDeletefunny, isn't it, how all the pagan, slavic, aryan symbols that musicians like to use turn out to be exactly the same ones that the Nazis preferred. I mean, the coincidence gets a bit boring after a while. Also, they use the symbols for the same reasons the Nazis did, referring to the same underlying ideas, so this does not really separate them from the Nazis but points to what they have in common.
It's like claiming that the musicians like to dress up in Nazi fatigues, not because the Nazis wore them but because they really, really like Hugo Boss suits, and it's just a coincidence that the Nazis liked Hugo Boss suits as well.
Ie. I am not really sure how gullible you would have to be to be fooled by this argument.
Bård didnt kill the man cause he was gay. He stated he had long time urge to kill someone and would have been anyone he met that night. No one else can speak about his motivations nut he himself. Case closed.
ReplyDeleteStrelnikov, this has to go on both ways than. There are also leftist pagan orientated people and we have to see them as nazis now cause of the symbols
ReplyDeletewhy on earth would leftists use Nazi symbols?
ReplyDeleteStrelnikov, Pagans, surprisingly, use Pagan symbols. Some of these symbols were appropriated by the Nazis, but are still used by Pagans today, regardless of their political affiliation. Just like how Buddhists still use swastikas. And, in terms of politics and Paganism, there are Pagans all across the spectrum, and the far-right has a very small niche of the community. There is actually a growing LGBT Pagan scene that has been embraced by the wider Pagan community. All this is coming from a left-anarchist atheist bisexual by the way.
ReplyDeleteMayhem just like dabbling in dark esoteric themes, nazi imagery being part of that theme
ReplyDeleteI have no problem with it. In fact I like it a lot. The human race are a pest on this planet and any figure from history that set out to remove humans is someone to be celebrated.
next stop ebola!
Being a hardcore Hawkwind fan, I heard that their seventh or eighth bassist Alan Davey was in a black metal band. That interested me because I enjoy when two words cross and those are two starkly different musical worlds (one being psychedelic and colorful and the other being cold and full of black and white imagery). I obviously wish Meads of Asphodal wasn't involved with a label that put out NSBM. I asked Alan Davey and he said that he personally has no Nazi connections, which makes sense since his world isn't black metal let alone NSBM. So I figure he was just like a studio bassist for them even though he's listed an official member of the group. Either way, I wish they just kinda didn't get involved on labels at that put that stuff out. What's the point? It's upsetting and it destroys careers (Nachmystium anyone?).
ReplyDeleteAlthoug I think most NSBM bands are garbage I find it funny how people normally shouting "kill all christian" are offenden about a little nationalism.
ReplyDeleteKind of hypocritical don't you thnk ?
Wow, so wrong about Burzum, Emperor and Drudkh being NSBM.
ReplyDelete