Few fascist administrations have proceeded without direct
participation of the reigning religious authority. In Mein Kampf, one can find
the sentiment, quite early into it, that “In standing guard against the Jew I
am defending the handiwork of the Lord”, and a phrase of related significance
was emblazoned on the belt buckles of Hitler’s Wehrmacht: Gott mit uns, or,
“God with us.” In return for the Fuhrer’s loyalty, the “Venerable” Pius XII
managed to do as little as he could to help the wretched conditions and the
systematic regime of murder taking place under his very holy jurisdiction. Even
after the war, he still could not mention the killers by name, reciting a
now-famous speech over the course of forty-five sanctimonious minutes exhorting
“mankind” to protect the “hundreds of thousands” (oh, Pius!) from race-murder
and oppression. His conduct during the Final Solution and his useless
condemnation after the fact earn the pope rightful scorn at the Holocaust
museum in Israel’s Yad Vashem, a slight that the current pope, himself a former
member of the Hitler Youth, succeeded in protesting early last year, certainly
earning his rodentine birth name Ratzinger.
In Young
Stalin, Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s redoubtable chronicle of poet
and firebrand Joseph Djugashvili’s growth into the first Premier of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics, the fledgling revolutionary renounces religion as early as he is
able to tell the difference. He later succeeds in leading at first groups of
other young men on minor waves of terror, ripping off banks in Tbilisi and
committing acts of arson, but is finally able to consolidate his influence
through a surgical itinerary of internecine purges. These were usually overseen
or carried out by a psychotic henchman nicknamed Kamo, with the clear intention
of galvanizing the lazy proletariat into participating in a revolution
allegedly unfolding on their behalf. This incidentally sounds like the
retrospective mandate for the classic black metal scene, with an emphasis on
tearing down much the same forces (greedy corporations, corrupt religious
institutions) and through much the same means. This is how the tired hashing
out of the Euronymous/Grishnackh feud assumes a new element of absurdity, as
what has been traditionally understood as an ideological clash – with Aarseth
supposedly on the far left and Vikernes very clearly and unapologetically on
the right – has more in common with the early Marxists than with their religious
contemporaries in Italy, Japan, and the Third Reich.
Vikernes has often admitted to being a religious man. It is
only that his faith is largely unrecognizable to a majority of people and comes with the
caveat that his gods have been recently played for camp on screen by the
Hollywood actors Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston. In the documentary “Until the Light
Takes Us”, he cutely posits that “everybody can relate” to the pagan gods; his
writings on burzum.com intuit that the church fires he all but admitted to
lighting were done to draw the line at the encroaching influence of Christianity.
This is key to Stalinism, not Hitlerism, but Vikernes has embraced the latter
(see his execrable anti-Jewish rant shortly after the terrorist attack of
Anders Breivik in Oslo) even as he offensively pretends against his own
neo-Naziism. Had Euronymous prevailed in 1993, the cult of personality would
have centered around him, the busiest member of the “circle”, and it is not
impossible to imagine black metal shifting leftward for the remainder of its
golden years.
The few stated leftists in black metal have taken for their
genre the mouthy “red and anarchist black metal”, a reworking of the official
name of an anti-racist, anti-fascist skinhead group from New York. (The
illustrious Aaron Weaver of Wolves in the Throne Room definitely voted for
Obama [no word on Nathan], and I don’t also doubt that the guys from Deafheaven or Liturgy did as
well, but the kind of left-wing black metal I have in mind is more actionable.)
RABM does not like to think of itself as a reaction to NSBM any more than
Vikernes likes to think of himself as BM at all, but it cannot be easy to dent
the triumphant paradigm of nationalism in black metal when every genre release
sounds like the first take on a rejected demo. The most well-known RABM band is
Jarost Marksa (“Fury of Marx”), and their EP is unlistenable and largely
derivative of the usual long-form tropes. The void left by Euronymous and
awkwardly filled by the square peg of Vikernes-esque conservatism has, if I may be allowed to breathe new life in that old cliche, produced
music first as tragedy, then as farce. For those on the left inclined to the
chilly strains of a tremolo pick, the stunted growth of socialist black metal
is an unforgiveable loss.
It is a long-documented phenomenon that the most
conservative states – those most opposed to institutional assistance – are
ironically those most reliant on government intervention for their health and
livelihood. And to ignite a church in service to another is not to tear down an
institution, but to re-entrench oneself in it anew. RABM, if it ever gets
off the ground, may be the last best opportunity of counterposing itself
against the victorious trend. There was
a familiar if faintly heard promise in the anti-church dictums of the original
black metal scene, last perceived spoken into the yearning ears of Stalin’s and
Mao’s proletariat – right before they were sent to the gulag. It is the same
promise squandered in the vicious murders of Magne Andreassen and Sandro Beyer
(the latter by a confessed neo-Nazi band). It would be nice to see that promise
fulfilled in the reddened blush of a new age of black metal.
