Black Metal and the Extreme Right, Part 7

A couple of years ago I wrote about Mark LeVine's book Heavy Metal Islam, which was a complete mess for many reasons, but the main one underlying all the others was that LeVine fundamentally didn't understand heavy metal.

This is the problem when non-metalheads write about metal: it's not just that they don't really "get it"--which is fine in itself, I think it's ridiculous to suggest that authors writing about metal need to be enthusiastic about it--it's that they seem to not think it necessary to do what should be basic research. And so I looked forward to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity to shed some much-needed peer-reviewed light on the topic.

This book is a glimpse into the bizarre world of contemporary neo-fascist subcultures and how in the face of political isolation and hostility from the liberal democratic hegemony that fascists have increasingly turned to occult and esoteric ideas. The book features a chapter on black metal, which is of obvious interest to this blog, and since the fascistic elements of black metal are not always obvious, I thought that this book might provide some much desired insights. Unfortunately, the book is sorely lacking. Here are some factual errors and misinterpretations I spotted--this is the stuff that was immediately obvious, it's possible that there's more if I dug deeper. Note: I have Black Sun in e-book format so references are to locations and not page number. I have no idea how they translate or even how you're supposed to properly cite them or whatever.

A circle of black metal fans and performers gravitated to this dismal cellar [Euronymous's Helvete record shop in Oslo, Norway] with its satanic decor, and new Norwegian bands called Emperor, Immortal, Enslaved, and Arcturus were formed. The groups Satanel and Darkthrone followed in 1990. (4452-71)

The chronology is all wrong here. Helvete opened in May or June of 1991, and most of these bands had already formed or were forming. Darkthrone formed in 1987, Immortal and Arcturus in 1990, and Emperor and Enslaved in 1991. The Satanel reference is puzzling: according to the information at last.fm (the only I could find), they "both formed and disbanded in 1991. It only achieved status for consisting of several well-known black metal musicians at the time; Varg Vikernes, Harald Nævdal, and Olve Eikemo. It is also said that the band never released any official recordings." There's a reference in the next paragraph about how Satanel split into Immortal and Burzum--again a strange reference given that Satanel has been virtually forgotten and left almost no evidence that it ever existed though the same members played together and recorded together in Old Funeral. Why they aren't mentioned but Satanel is is beyond me.

Having introduced a devil-worshipping cult into Norwegian black metal, Euronymous and Vikernes began to proclaim their readiness to commit outrages. (4462-80)

"A devil-worshipping cult"? Come on, this is pure sensationalism. Certainly, the "Black Circle" wanted to portray themselves as such, but the truth of the matter is much more prosaic.

[Essays on "nationalist heathen ideology" Varg Vikernes wrote while in prison] were published in various underground publications and in Filosofem, a neo-Nazi magazine published by Vidar von Herske, another member of Burzum. (4471-80)

Burzum is Varg Vikernes's one-man band, though Samoth of Emperor is credited with playing bass on the early Burzum EP Aske. To talk of "members" of Burzum is silly, and in any case, I can't find any references to von Herske ever playing with Burzum.

The black metal scene has since exploded into an international phenomenon [this is a reference to black metal's popularity after the media coverage of the murders and church burnings lined to the early Norwegian black metal scene], with hundreds of bands in Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, Austria and the United States. With names such as Bathory, Possessed, Slayer, Sodom, Enslaved, Moonfog, Soulgrind, Ragnarok and Helheim, the groups cultivate a dread image with black clothes, long hair, and white facial "corpse-paint". (4480-90)

Okay, here's proof that Goodrick-Clarke doesn't have a clue about black metal. Bathory, Possessed, Slayer, and Sodom were all influential on black metal bands, but with the exception of Bathory can't be considered black metal themselves. The notion that they were a result of black metal becoming an "international phenomenon" due to the criminal actions of a handful of Norwegian metalheads is nonsense. Enslaved have already been mentioned here. I had to look up the other bands because I hadn't heard of them before. They appear to be more or less insignificant. I have no idea why they're mentioned and other groups who have achieved some degree of popularity, or at least have recorded at least a demo, aren't.

An explicit link to Nazi ideas is often present. One Australian group, Spear of Longinus (inspired by Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny), describes its music as "Nazi occult metal" and features pictures of Himmler's Wewelsburg castle on its fliers. The New Zealand zine Key of Alocer includes articles on Nazism and satanism, while Trumpeter of Evil in Holland has glorified the Dutch SS. (4490-4501)

What I don't understand here is why Goodrick-Clarke says that "Nazi ideas" are "often present", yet only gives the example of one band and two zines. A similar issue comes up again later in the chapter. It's not that I fundamentally disagree with him here--after all, a significant number of posts on this blog have been about explorating the links between black metal and the far right--but I'd like to see 1) more evidence of this; 2) a discussion of the significance and influence of the bands and zines mentioned; 3) greater conceptual clarity. I think to properly be able to discuss the role of the far right in black metal you first off have to distinguish between your regular, garden-variety black metal and National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) because it's in the latter that you're going to find the overt Nazism. Which isn't to say that "regular" black metal is free from a fascist influence--this is what I find most interesting, and I think that Shekhovtsov's essay on "apoliteic music" that I posted about here goes a long way in bringing theoretical clarity to the topic.

The black metal scene in Germany also acquired a Nazi wing. The band Absurd was formed by sixteen-year old Hendrik Moebus...and two others in Sondershausen in the former East Germany. (4501-10)

Again, like the last comment. If Goodrick-Clarke is going to talk about how German black metal acquired a "Nazi wing" he needs to talk about more than one band. Otherwise it looks like he's exaggerating.

Moebus aligned himself further with the Norwegian black metal Nazi movement by becoming head of the German branch of Varg Vikernes's Heathen Front. (4510-20)

This is disputed. Norwegian anti-fascists have named Vikernes the head of the Heathen Front; Vikernes denies this. I don't think that Vikernes is reliable here, but again, I'd like to see supporting evidence one way or another or, barring that, mention that this isn't a settled issue.

The widening influence of this nihilist, satanic subculture is evidenced by the Black Circle, a loose network of national socialist black metal bands. (4510-20)

No, the Black Circle refers to the group of Norwegian black metal musicians who hung out at Helvete. Perhaps Goodrick-Clarke is referring to The Pagan Front? Impossible to say. Sloppy work, regardless.

There's then discussion of other neo-Nazi black metal musicians and bands including Michael Moynihan of Blood Axis and also author of Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Kadmon, Ethnic Cleansing, Acheron, Robert X. Patriot and the White Devil Conspiracy, and Boyd Rice/NON. The chief problem being here...that none of these are black metal. Moynihan has somewhat of a connection through Lords of Chaos--which was a piss-poor book in its own right--and the black metal label The Ajna Offensive put out a split 7" between Robert X. Patriot and Voluspå, but really, if Goodrick-Clarke wants to write about "the several hundred black metal bands across the States" of which "a significant minority flirt with Nazi and fascist ideas" (4568-78) he had better be prepared to name at least one, instead of giving us this hodgepodge of industrial music, neo-Nazi punk, and death metal.

And then Goodrick-Clarke gives us the punchline: "The potent attraction of the black metal underground to alienated youth was demonstrated dramatically by the school massacre at Littleton near Denver, Colorado, on 20 April 1999." (4578-87). Maybe Goodrick-Clarke has some heretofore unseen evidence that Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were inspired to kill their fellow students and teachers after listening to some Burzum records. You would expect that, wouldn't you? Here's there interest in black metal: "The killers' favorite metal musician was Marilyn Manson, a transvestite shock-rocker who took his name from Charles Manson with all its associations of rebellion, murder and mayhem. Marilyn's records included such songs as "Antichrist Superstar," while other lyrics celebrated grenade explosion, suicide and evil." (4587-97). And this is in a peer-reviewed academic book published by a university press. Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

We then get a little bit of analysis about how Resistance Records wants to use music as a recruitment and politicisation tool--nothing new there--but also no specific relevance to black metal either, or where there is, it's not appearing in Black Sun. All told, the book's treatment of black metal is massively disappointing and a real lost opportunity.

Class War, 2

"My view is that [neoliberalism] refers to a class project that coalesced in the crisis of the 1970s. Masked by a lot of rhetoric about individual freedom, liberty, personal responsibility and the virtues of privatisation, the free market and free trade, it legitimised draconian policies designed to restore and consolidate capitalist class power. This project has been successful, judging by the incredible centralisation of wealth and power observable in all those countries that took the neoliberal road. And there is no evidence that it is dead."

-David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism

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)

Class War

The rich get richer:

The multimillionaires are worth £335.5 billion, up £77.265 billion (29.9 per cent) on last year, according to the latest edition of The Sunday Times’ Rich List 2010.

The rise is easily the largest annual increase in the 22 years that the survey has been carried out.

And everyone else gets squeezed tighter and tighter:

Britain's poet laureate has accused the government of behaving like "scrooge at his worst" after ministers decided to axe all funding for a free book scheme that benefits 3.3 million youngsters a year.

Carol Ann Duffy, who was appointed poet laureate in 2009, leads a series of writers who have attacked the decision to cut all government funding for the Booktrust charity which provides free books for children from the age of nine months until their first term of secondary school when they are 11.

Class war: your bosses believe in it even if you don't.

'Tis the season

May your friends and loved ones see the workers' utopia realised in their lifetimes; may your enemies be put against the wall and shot in theirs.

Anti-communism and the rehabilitation of the Nazis

The Guardian reports here on how the EU has, thankfully, rejected a call from the foreign ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and the Czech Republic to treat communist crimes the same as Nazi crimes.

There's some excellent analysis of this from Dovid Katz here that examines why the United States is remaining silent on the topic, and also gives a good background into anti-communism and the rehabilitation of fascism in the Baltic countries.

Jonathan Freedland's report is also worth your time. He went to Lithuania with his father to search for the origins of his family, and observed the way in which the discourse of "double genocide" seeks to obscure Nazi collaboration and crimes.

Don Van Vliet, 1941-2010

One of rock's greatest eccentrics is dead.

We would have reviled them had they lived

Absolutely superb stuff from Critical Legal Thinking about the drowning of 28 Iranian and Iraqi refugees off the coast of Australia:

There is a definite inconsistency between the expressions of mourning, grief and a-political human tragedy that are being bandied around now, and the welcome this boat would have received had it made it safely to the shores of christmas island. Had the tragedy of the shipwreck been averted, Australian headlines would today be filled with alarmist, racist jargon about the need for tougher policies of deterrence against asylum-seekers, and those who were on the boat would be beginning their indefinite prison-sentences, waiting in a detention centre where suicide might start to seem like their best option. Asylum-seekers come from spaces of death and misery over there, and we create further spaces of death and misery for them to occupy here.

The whole thing is here.

h/t Will.

Us and Them

Peter has a post at his place about two articles Gershon Baskin wrote in the Jerusalem Post about the necessity of reaching a peace agreement soon in the Israel-Palestine conflict. I was especially intrigued by this argument in the first article:

A very large minority, which in a short period will become a majority, will not accept to live in a Jewish state. The two-state solution will lose its viability when it is no longer supported by the majority of Palestinians – both citizens of Israel and residents of the occupied territories. At that time a global campaign will be launched that will force Israel to become a democratic state, and then we will no longer be able to speak about a Jewish democratic state.

The call for equal citizenship and one-person- one vote will be compelling compared with lack of logic behind the idea of a Jewish nation-state where a majority are not Jews.

No one outside Israel’s right-wing and religious citizens will accept the idea of two types of citizens – Jews and non-Jews. No one, not even the US, will be able to support a state which is so blatantly antidemocratic.

I hope that I'm being overly pessimistic here and that I'll be proven wrong, but I'm not confident that there being "two kinds of citizens" would be enough force the countries that currently support Israel to withdraw their support and apply pressure on them to make a peace deal. It seems to me that the division into "us" and "them" is becoming ever more entrenched in Western democracies, and while I can't think of anywhere were actual policies have been enacted to codify this distinction into law, there are troubling indications that this is happening de facto. There's also an ever-increasing amount of public discourse that is pushing for exactly this. Some examples:

- On Sunday, CBC Montreal reported on a march in support for Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Sudanese-Canadian who was arrested in 2003 on a trip to Sudan to visit his mother under suspicion of having links to al-Qaeda. He was allegedly tortured in Sudanese prisons, lived in the lobby of the Canadian embassy in Khartoum for fourteen months while fighting for the right to return to Canada, which was denied to him despite his Canadian citizenship, and placed on a UN terror watch list even though CSIS, the RCMP, and the Sudanese Justice Department exonerated him. Abdelrazik was eventually allowed to return to Canada, though because he is still included on the UN watch list--even though there is no evidence to justify this--he is not allowed to work or withdraw money from his bank account, as Ottawa has the power to punish anyone providing Abdelrazik with "material support". The Canadian Supreme Court has ruled in Abdelrazik's favour, judging that the government has violated his constitutionally-guaranteed rights, though his situation still remains precarious. There are parallels to the Mahar Arar case here. Not that arbitrarily abrogating the supposed rights of Canadians is anything especially new: During World War II, the Canadian government interned tens of thousands of Japanese-Canadians--most of whom had Canadian citizenship--and sold off their property and possessions while they were in camps in British Columbia's interior. CBC's the Fifth Estate recently aired an excellent programme on secret Cold War-era RCMP plans to arrest and intern Canadians suspected of being Communists or subversives in the case of an emergency.

- There's plenty to say about the antidemocratic and even fascistic tendencies within American political life, but I think comments made in September by Marty Peretz, The New Republic's editor-in-chief, questioning if Muslims are "worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment"--hint: the answer is implied in the question--is significant because it shows how this sort of discourse has wormed its way into mainstream American debates. In a way, I'd say that this is even more portentous than, for example, Arizona's anti-immigration laws in that it effectively creates a category of American citizens who don't deserve constitutional protection--as if such protection was something that can be earned or taken away instead of automatically guaranteed. But wouldn't the American Constitution protect against that, you object? Not necessarily, in the legal debacle around California's Proposition 8 is any indication. Maybe I'm overreacting here because I am, after all, talking about editorials instead of laws, but with the way that the Republicans are rapidly becoming a right-wing extremist party and how Obama and Democrats seem more intent on attacking a mythical left than actually stopping the very real threat of the right doesn't exactly fill me with confidence.

- Also in the United States, the right wing furore over so-called "anchor babies". Again, it doesn't take much imagination to see how if a Republican president was elected that the children of undocumented migrants could potentially--though not necessarily--be stateless.

- In Switzerland a law introduced by their far-right party to automatically deport foreigners convicted of "serious crimes" was passed by a referendum. From the New York Times:

Legal experts have warned that automatic deportation could violate a 1999 agreement between Switzerland and the European Union that provides for freedom of movement in the Continent. The government also expressed concern that the measure would breach Switzerland’s obligation not to return people to countries that practice torture.

But those arguments evidently made little impression on voters uneasy over a large immigrant population.

A counter-proposal by the government and center-right parties opposed to the People’s Party initiative that was also put to the vote in the referendum failed to garner a majority in any of the cantons and won support from only 46 percent of voters. The counter-proposal also would have toughened provisions for deporting foreigners, but it would have allowed a judge to review each case.

Initial analysis of the results, however, suggested that many supporters of center-right parties voted for the People’s Party initiative, said Lukas Golder of the political and social research institute Gfs.Bern.

So, a far-right iniative, but one that is supported by a majority of voters. And that's part of the problem here: at the moment this sort of thing is massively popular with the voters, and even political parties that should know better (I'm looking at you, UK Labour) are pandering to nativism.

- Geert Wilders. Don't need to explain that one. The electoral successes of far-right parties in Europe generally. Angela Merkel publically stating that multiculturalism is a failure--as if Germany ever even tried. The way in which traditional far-right positions on immigration and immigrants have entered on the political mainstream and shifted discourse to the right.

And so on.

So what we have here is a situation in which the rights of the "them"--be they non-citizens or citizens (not that I accept this distinction)--can have their rights stripped from them. This isn't a new feature of Western democracies, as some of the examples I gave above of Canada's internment of Japanese-Canadians during World War II shows, though it appears to be happening at an increasing rate. Could this change? Of course. It does suggest, however, that the commitment of Western (formal) democracies to guaranteeing equal rights for all citizens isn't as solid as the governments of these countries would like it to appear--especially when the "them" can be portrayed as a threat to the "us". And if they can't be bothered with this at home, why would they be bothered with it with a strategic ally?

Like I said above, I hope I'm wrong about this and that I'm being overly pessimistic.

Apathy is dead.

Photo by Nina Powers from yesterday's demonstrations in London. Stolen without permission.

Everything you need to know about bourgeois freedoms like "freedom of speech"

Remember how Ezra Levant is the great champion of free speech in Canada? How against the totalitarian forces of political correctness and human rights tribunals that Levant is a shining beacon to those of us for whom bigotry--and more importantly, the right to use that bigotry to advance our careers and bolster our bank accounts--is as important as breathing?

Here is Levant's spirited defence of freedom in the wikileaks case:

Why is Assange still alive? Why is he being treated as a journalist or political activist? If someone had published the intimate details of the D-Day plans during the Second World War, he would never have been seen again.

Assange and his colleagues act like spies, not journalists. WikiLeaks could have its assets seized, just like the Taliban has. And U.S. President Barack Obama could do what he’s doing to the Taliban throughout the world.

He doesn’t sue them or catch them. He kills them. Because it’s war.

Obama has even ordered the assassination of an American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki.

How does Obama see Assange any differently?