Black Metal and the Extreme Right, Part 6

Back in November, Invisible Oranges reviewed the new album by the American black metal band Kommandant, and commented on the band's ambiguous use of fascist imagery:

Its visual presentation is also problematic. It has an album called Stormlegion (which I liked musically), it has a shirt with an Iron Eagle-like emblem, and it has a shirt that says “Einsatz” on the back. By itself, the word “einsatz” has innocuous meanings. But when paired with an image of soldiers, it brings to mind the Einsatzgruppen, the Nazi death squads that killed over a million civilians. Slayer, Onslaught, and Marduk have flirted with fascist imagery, but none pushed the association like this. If a band wants people to wear the word “Einsatz” this way, it might not want to leave things open for interpretation.

A Kommandant t-shirt design

The review also mentions an interview with the band that explicitly asks them about their use of fascist imagery and their connection to National Socialist ideology. The band's response:

We are musicians and are not politicians. Do I agree that the band has a bit a militaristic aesthetic? Yes, absolutely. However, we have absolutely no control over what a fan takes from our music and imagery into their overactive, negative, interpretive psyche. If you were to ask five different fans for their interpretation of what the meaning is behind Pink Floyd's The Wall, I guarantee that you will find five completely different perspectives. For us, what makes art interesting is what you DO NOT see, and not the obvious. I believe this also answers the second part of your question. If a band ever desires to provoke attention to one's lyrics, or to even draw attention to their music and visual aesthetic in a general way, I can tell you what the secret formula is...Don't print your lyrics!

Here we see the classic evasion we typically get from what Keith Kahn-Harris terms "ambiguous black metal": the band will drop all sorts of suggestions pointing towards one conclusion, then pulls back at the last moment and denies all responsibility if the listener concludes based on the available evidence that indeed the band is fascist or has fascistic sympathies. This is very different than National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) bands, which are explicitly and openly fascistic, though there is a grey area between NSBM bands and labels and the so-called ambiguous or non-political ones--this will be the subject of a future post.

How, then, to understand a band like Kommandant, or for that matter, the "non-political" "English Heritage" bands like Winterfylleth and Wodensthrone that I discussed here. One possible answer is that this is for shock value, that it is mistaking extreme reaction for transgression. This makes a certain amount of sense. To begin with, black metal is intended to inspire fear, alienation, and hatred--this is in strict opposition to death metal's humanism--and what is more loathsome to the liberal democratic order than fascism? It certainly has a lot more power to shock than another predictable and cartoonish iteration of Satanism. Also, controversy sells, at least to an extent. The marketplace is overcrowded with a lot of virtually indistinguishable black metal bands, and since a flirtation with fascism won't necessarily economically harm a black metal band (full-blown fascism, however, would effectively limit a band to the neo-Nazi scene), it is a cheap and easy way to create a buzz.

Is there something more to it, though? Anton Shekhovtsov's essay Apoliteic music: Neo-Folk, Martial Industrial and 'metapolitical fascism' is very interesting here. Shekhovtsov distinguishes between two types of neo-fascist musics: The first is "White Noise", which "originally referred to Punk Rock acts that propagated extreme right-wing ideas" but "one can apply this term to any aggressive rock music that is imbued with an openly fascist or racist message...It is crucially important to highlight two features of White Noise. First, this type of music is characterized by overt racism or revolutionary ultra-nationalism. White Noise bands do not veil their messages and some of the bands’ names—not to mention the albums and song titles—speak for themselves...Second, White Noise is associated with either direct violence against an Other or the political cause, however marginal, that inspires it." Shekhovtsov mentions NSBM here as being ideologically and tactically similar to White Noise, though it is generally understood as a seperate phenomena. The second is "apoliteic music", which is drawn from the fascist philosophers Julius Evola and Armin Mohler's conception of post-war fascism. This is worth quoting at length:

In Die konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918-1932, published in 1950, Mohler argued that, since fascist revolution was indefinitely postponed due to the political domination of liberal democracy, true 'conservative revolutionaries' found themselves in an 'interregnum' that would, however, spontaneously give way to the spiritual grandeur of national reawakening. This theme of right-wing 'inner emigration' was echoed by Evola in his Cavalcare la tigre (Ride the Tiger), published in 1961. Evola acknowledged that, while 'the true State, the hierarchical and organic State', lay in ruins, there was 'no one party or movement with which one can unreservedly agree and for which one can fight with absolute devotion, in defence of some higher idea'. Thus, l’uomo differenziato should practise 'disinterest, detachment from everything that today constitutes "politics"', and this was exactly the principle that Evola called 'apoliteia'. While apoliteia does not necessarily imply abstention from socio-political activities, an apoliteic individual, an 'aristocrat of the soul' (to cite the subtitle of the English translation of Cavalcare la tigre), should always embody his 'irrevocable internal distance from this [modern] society and its "values"'.

The concepts of interregnum and apoliteia had a major impact on the development of the 'metapolitical fascism' of the European New Right (ENR), a movement that consists of clusters of think tanks, conferences, journals, institutes and publishing houses that try—following the strategy of so-called 'right-wing Gramscism'—to modify the dominant political culture and make it more susceptible to a non-democratic mode of politics. Like Mohler and Evola, the adherents of the ENR believe that one day the allegedly decadent era of egalitarianism and cosmopolitanism will give way to 'an entirely new culture based on organic, hierarchical, supra-individual, heroic values'. It is important to emphasize, however, that 'metapolitical fascism' focuses—almost exclusively—on the battle for hearts and minds rather than for immediate political power. Following Evola's precepts, the ENR tries to distance itself from both historical and contemporary fascist parties and regimes. As biological racism became totally discredited in the post-war period, and it was 'no longer possible to speak publicly of perceived difference through the language of "old racism"', ENR thinkers pointed to the insurmountable differences between peoples, not in biological or ethnic terms but rather in terms of culture. They abandoned overt fascist ultra-nationalism 'in the name of a Europe restored to the (essentially mythic) homogeneity of its component primordial cultures'.

How do fascism's strategies in the 'hostile' post-war environment relate to music? While there can be no purely musical reflection of right-wing party politics, White Noise has nonetheless become part and parcel of the revolutionary ultra-nationalist subculture. And I suggest that 'metapolitical fascism' has its own cultural manifestation in the domain of sound, namely, apoliteic music. This is a type of music in which the ideological message contains obvious or veiled references to the core elements of fascism but is simultaneously detached from any practical attempt to implement that message through political activity. Apoliteic music is characterized by highly elitist stances and disdain for 'banal petty materialism'. Both apoliteic artists and their conscientious fans appear to be self-styled 'aristocrats of the soul', united in their implicit knowledge that the imperium internum is the reflection of a forthcoming new era of national and spiritual palingenesis. Lost in contemplation of this utopian future, they perceive the current situation as the interregnum. Regardless of the extent to which the contemporary Europeanized world is actually decadent or spiritually impoverished, it will always pale beside the imaginary fascist 'brave new world'.

Shekhovtsov then applies this to neofolk and martial industrial music, which works well considering how many references these groups make to the writings of Evola, Juenger, Spengler and other similar-minded writers. Can this also apply to black metal? I think in some cases it may, though there are other elements in play as well and this will involve a reasonably detailed examination of black metal aesthetics. I will revisit this in a later post.

(removing the cap in a large way to Who Makes The Nazis? for really helping me to develop my thinking on this subject)