Abir Taha: Speaking at the London New Right in 2011
Anarchism of the Right
This is a translation of Karlheinz Weißman’s entry on 'Anarchismus von rechts' in the Lexikon des Konservatismus (Graz and Stuttgart: Leopold Stocker Verlag, 1996) edited by Caspar von Schrenck-Notzing.
The concept of right-wing anarchism seems paradoxical, indeed oxymoronic, starting from the assumption that all “right-wing” political viewpoints include a particularly high evaluation of the principle of order. . . . In fact right-wing anarchism occurs only in exceptional circumstances, when the hitherto veiled affinity between anarchism and conservatism may become apparent. Ernst Jünger has characterised this peculiar connection in his book Der Weltstaat (1960): “The anarchist in his purest form is he, whose memory goes back the farthest: to pre-historical, even pre-mythical times; and who believes, that man at that time fulfilled his true purpose . . . In this sense the anarchist is the Ur-conservative, who traces the health and the disease of society back to the root.” Jünger later called this kind of “Prussian” . . . or “conservative anarchist” the “Anarch,” and referred his own “désinvolture” as agreeing therewith: an extreme aloofness, which nourishes itself and risks itself in the borderline situations, but only stands in an observational relationship to the world, as all instances of true order are dissolving and an “organic construction” is not yet, or no longer, possible.
Even though Jünger himself was immediately influenced by the reading of Max Stirner, the affinity of such a thought-complex to dandyism is particularly clear. In the dandy, the culture of decadence at the end of the 19th century brought forth a character, which on the one hand was nihilistic and ennuyé, on the other hand offered the cult of the heroic and vitalism as an alternative to progressive ideals.
The refusal of current ethical hierarchies, the readiness to be “unfit, in the deepest sense of the word, to live” (Flaubert), reveal the dandy’s common points of reference with anarchism; his studied emotional cold, his pride, and his appreciation of fine tailoring and manners, as well as the claim to constitute “a new kind of aristocracy” (Charles Baudelaire), represent the proximity of the dandy to the political right. To this add the tendency of politically inclined dandies to declare a partiality to the Conservative Revolution or to its forerunners, as for instance Maurice Barrès in France, Gabriele d’Annunzio in Italy, Stefan George or Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in Germany. The Japanese author Yukio Mishima belongs to the later followers of this tendency.
Besides this tradition of right-wing anarchism, there has existed another, older and largely independent tendency, connected with specifically French circumstances. Here, at the end of the 18th century, in the later stages of the ancien régime, formed an anarchisme de droite, whose protagonists claimed for themselves a position “beyond good and evil,” a will to live “like the gods,” and who recognised no moral values beyond personal honour and courage. The world-view of these libertins was intimately connected with an aggressive atheism and a pessimistic philosophy of history. Men like Brantôme, Montluc, Béroalde de Verville and Vauquelin de La Fresnaye held absolutism to be a commodity that regrettably opposed the principles of the old feudal system, and that only served the people’s desire for welfare. Attitudes, which in the 19th century were again to be found with Arthur de Gobineau and Léon Bloy, and also in the 20th century with Georges Bernanos, Henry de Montherlant and Louis-Ferdinand Céline. This position also appeared in a specifically “traditionalist” version with Julius Evola, whose thinking revolved around the “absolute individual.”
In whichever form right-wing anarchism appears, it is always driven by a feeling of decadence, by a distaste for the age of masses and for intellectual conformism. The relation to the political is not uniform; however, not rarely does the aloofness revolve into activism. Any further unity is negated already by the highly desired individualism of right-wing anarchists. Nota bene, the term is sometimes adopted by men–for instance George Orwell (Tory anarchist) or Philippe Ariès–who do not exhibit relevant signs of a right-wing anarchist ideology; while others, who objectively exhibit these criteria–for instance Nicolás Gómez Dávila or Günter Maschke–do not make use of the concept.
Bibliography
Gruenter, Rainer. “Formen des Dandysmus: Eine problemgeschichtliche Studie über Ernst Jünger.” Euphorion 46 (1952) 3, pp. 170-201.
Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus, ed. Antichristliche Konservative: Religionskritik von rechts. Freiburg: Herder, 1982.
Kunnas, Tarmo. “Literatur und Faschismus.” Criticón 3 (1972) 14, pp. 269-74.
Mann, Otto. “Dandysmus als konservative Lebensform.” In Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ed., Konservatismus international, Stuttgart, 1973, pp. 156-70.
Mohler, Armin. “Autorenporträt in memoriam: Henry de Montherlant und Lucien Rebatet.” Criticón 3 (1972) 14, pp. 240-42.
Richard, François. L’anarchisme de droite dans la littérature contemporaine. Paris: PUF, 1988.
______. Les anarchistes de droite. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
Schwarz, Hans Peter. Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers. Freiburg im Breisgan, 1962.
Sydow, Eckart von. Die Kultur der Dekadenz. Dresden, 1921.
Kaltenbrunner, Gerd-Klaus, ed. Antichristliche Konservative: Religionskritik von rechts. Freiburg: Herder, 1982.
Kunnas, Tarmo. “Literatur und Faschismus.” Criticón 3 (1972) 14, pp. 269-74.
Mann, Otto. “Dandysmus als konservative Lebensform.” In Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, ed., Konservatismus international, Stuttgart, 1973, pp. 156-70.
Mohler, Armin. “Autorenporträt in memoriam: Henry de Montherlant und Lucien Rebatet.” Criticón 3 (1972) 14, pp. 240-42.
Richard, François. L’anarchisme de droite dans la littérature contemporaine. Paris: PUF, 1988.
______. Les anarchistes de droite. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.
Schwarz, Hans Peter. Der konservative Anarchist: Politik und Zeitkritik Ernst Jüngers. Freiburg im Breisgan, 1962.
Sydow, Eckart von. Die Kultur der Dekadenz. Dresden, 1921.
How the Devil Got His Horns: A Diabolical Tale
When not being an over-staffed nannying monolith with its tentacles thrust into every orifice of British cultural life, Aunty Beeb can produce some things worth watching.
"Art historian and critic Alastair Sooke reveals how the Devil's image was created by artists of the Middle Ages. He explores how, in the centuries between the birth of Christ and the Renaissance, visual interpretations of the Devil evolved, with the embodiment of evil appearing in different guises - tempter, tyrant, and rebellious angel. Alastair shows how artists used their imaginations to give form to Satan, whose description is absent from the Bible. Exploring some of the most remarkable art in Europe, he tells the stories behind that art and examines the religious texts and thinking which inspired and influenced the artists. The result is a rich and unique picture of how art and religion have combined to define images of good and evil."
Heinlein’s “Gulf”, The Dark Triad and Sanity
Homo Novis
I’ve made a few posts here about the writer Robert A. Heinlein and his immense influence on my weltanschauung;
while in my maturity I don’t agree with everything he wrote and stood
for, to my child self devouring his works circa 1971 he bestrode the
world as a Colossus. His “juveniles” written from the late 1940s through
the late 50s inspired a generation of bright young boys to put
Americans on the Moon. He emphasized duty, honor, work, intelligence and
grit, and his ability to draw the reader into strange new worlds and
make them seem possible and, indeed, plausible, was unique.
The novella Gulf was quite unusual, for Heinlein or any writer, in its conception and execution. In the November 1948 issue of Astounding Science Fiction a letter had been published critiquing the…November 1949 issue. As editor John Campbell wrote:
“Generally, a desirable, practically attainable idea, suggested
in prophecy, has a chance of forcing itself into reality by its very
existence. Like, for example, this particular issue of Astounding Science Fiction.”
A good explanation of the “Prophecy” issue of the magazine is here. In the event, Heinlein was asked to write Gulf,
having been given nothing but a title. The result was something that
has fascinated me as much or more than anything else he ever produced,
despite his multiple Hugo awards and best-sellers later in his career.
Gulf is available free (and legally) online now, so if you’re not familiar with it, here you go.
You don’t have to read it to get the rest of this post, but I suggest
you do. There are enough new, intriguing ideas in this brief novella to
keep you thinking about it for a long time: an artificial, highly
compressed, efficient and logical language (“Speed-talk”); a secret
society of “Supermen” working behind the scenes to discover and
regulate major scientific and technological discoveries; bar codes (in
1949!); but what I note here is focus, mental attitude, and what are now
called “Dark Triad” traits and their usefulness in getting things done, rather than emoting and “virtue signaling.”
Intelligence Agent(s)
The details of the plot need not concern us, but if you haven’t read
the story yet, our protagonist is one “Joseph Gilead” (pseud.),
intelligence agent for a kind of future super-CIA. We begin cold, in the
middle of a courier mission going bad:
When he had stepped out of the tube car he had been reasonably sure, first, that the persona of Joel Abner, commercial traveler, had not been penetrated, and, second, that the transition from Abner to Gilead had been accomplished without arousing suspicion. The pocket-picking episode had not alarmed him, but had caused him to reclassify those two propositions from calculated certainties to unproved variables. He had proceeded to test them at once; they were now calculated certainties again—of the opposite sort. Ever since he had spotted his erstwhile porter, the New Age runner, as standing outside this same drugstore his subconscious had been clanging like a burglar alarm.
It was clear not only that he had been spotted but that they were organized with a completeness and shrewdness he had not believed possible.
We’re bombarded these days with “scientific research” that purports
to prove that we don’t actually make rational decisions about most
things, most of the time; we make emotional, instinctual, subconscious
decisions and then consciously rationalize and invent reasons for why they’re good. Perhaps this is true for most people, most of the time. However, instead of saying “that’s just the way people are,” should not we instead be taking action to improve on this ridiculously low standard of thought?
On to our next quote/lesson:
Joe, what is a man? What is man that makes him more than an animal? Settle that and we’ll take a crack at defining a superman—or New Man, homo novis, who must displace homo sapiens—is displacing him—because he is better able to survive than is homo sap. I’m not trying to define myself, I’ll leave it up to my associates and the inexorable processes of time as to whether or not I am a superman, a member of the new species of man—same test to apply to you.”
“Me?”
“You. You show disturbing symptoms of being homo novis, Joe, in a sloppy, ignorant, untrained fashion. Not likely, but you just might be one of the breed. Now—what is man? What is the one thing he can do better than animals which is so strong a survival factor that it outweighs all the things that animals of one sort or another can do much better than he can?”
“He can think.”
“I fed you that answer; no prize for it. Okay, you pass yourself off a man; let’s see you do something. What is the one possible conceivable factor—or factors, if you prefer—which the hypothetical superman could have, by mutation or magic or any means, and which could be added to this advantage which man already has and which has enabled him to dominate this planet against the unceasing opposition of a million other species of fauna? Some factor that would make the domination of man by his successor, as inevitable as your domination over a hound dog? Think, Joe. What is the necessary direction of evolution to the next dominant species?”
Gilead engaged in contemplation for what was for him a long time. There were so many lovely attributes that a man might have: to be able to see both like a telescope and microscope, to see the insides of things, to see throughout the spectrum, to have hearing of the same order, to be immune to disease, to grow a new arm or leg, to fly through the air without bothering with silly gadgets like helicopters or jets, to walk unharmed the ocean bottom, to work without tiring—
Yet the eagle could fly and he was nearly extinct, even though his eyesight was better than man’s. A dog has better smell and hearing; seals swim better, balance better, and furthermore can store oxygen. Rats can survive where men would starve or die of hardship; they are smart and pesky hard to kill. Rats could—
Wait! Could tougher, smarter rats displace man? No, it just wasn’t in them; too small a brain.
“To be able to think better,” Gilead answered almost instantly.
I fed you that answer; no prize for it.
Illusions and Their Discontents
Those of you follow me on Twitter know I’m an admirer of Scott Adams and have often linked articles like this one, “The Illusion of Knowledge“:
And so we have an odd situation in which both sides of the debate are in deep illusion, even if one side is right and the other is wrong. The illusion is that one side is obviously correct – and the belief that you could see that too, if only you would spend a little energy looking into it on your own. If you hold that belief, no matter which side you are on, you can be sure you are experiencing an illusion.
Adams also talks a lot about hallucinating certainty, about how when it comes to persuasion, emotion/ beats tribe/ beats mere facts.
But none of this ought to apply to Heinlein’s homo novis,
who by definition must think better, a whole lot better, than the
average emotionally driven tribalistic LDD (Little Deluded Dupe), and
not just about one thing but about many things, about reality.
As convincing a persuader as Scott Adams is, I’m not convinced by
radical subjectivism. We don’t live in an “illusion” after all, though
most live, much of the time, “inside their own head.” I’m still of the
solid conviction that the world is hard, and you are soft; that if you
jump off the Empire State Building, you are going to die. If you’re
really lucky, you won’t look so bad afterward…
A Perfect Landing
Mostly you won’t be so lucky.
There is indeed a Gulf, between a Peter Thiel and the “average” #AltRight shitposter doing it for lulz (i.e., emotional reasons), between a John von Neumann
and a professor of “Womyn’s Studies.” Many of our “cognitive elite” are
elite in only their specialized disciplines, though. Picture Einstein
and his childish socialism.
Of a Vital and Necessary Hardness
Thinking better has never been and never will be replaceable. Neither
will the “Dark Triad” traits of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism and
Narcissism–properly understood. I touched on this in an earlier piece, The Good Psychopath, the Dark Triad Man and Me, and won’t go into detail here, but it struck me when reading Gulf how Gilead exhibits these traits, always at the appropriate time:
Mrs. Keithley pursed her lips. “Frankly, I do not expect to learn anything from her. I may learn something from you.”
“I see.”
The leader of the two men looked questioning at his mistress; she motioned him to go ahead. The girl stared blankly at him, plainly unaware of the uses of the equipment he had gotten out. He and his partner got busy.
Shortly the girl screamed, continued to scream for a few moments in a high adulation. Then it stopped as she fainted.
They roused her and stood her up again. She stood, swaying and staring stupidly at her poor hands, forever damaged even for the futile purposes to which she had been capable of putting them. Blood spread down her wrists and dripped on a plastic tarpaulin, placed there earlier by the second of the two men.
Gilead did nothing and said nothing. Knowing as he did that the tube he was protecting contained matters measured in millions of lives, the problem of the girl, as a problem, did not even arise. It disturbed a deep and very ancient part of his brain, but almost automatically he cut that part off and lived for the time in his forebrain.
Consciously he memorized the faces, skulls, and figures of the two men and filed the data under “personal.” Thereafter he unobtrusively gave his attention to the scene out the window He had been noting it all through the interview but he wanted to give it explicit thought. He recast what he saw in terms of what it would look like had he been able to look squarely out the window and decided that he was on the ninety-first floor of the New Age Hotel and approximately one hundred and thirty meters from the north end. He filed this under “professional”.
This is hard-edged stuff. The very fate of the world is at stake, but
I’m sure your average 2017 Ivy League undergrad would diagnose Gilead
as a monster. He ought to at least break down into sobs, vomit, and need drugs and therapy for the PTSD, afterward.
There is indeed a Gulf, between a U.S. Army Ranger and a Social Justice Warrior, even, perhaps, between a Rex Tillerson and a John Kerry. My examples are not perfect, but I’m sure you get the point.
Us “HBDers” understand well that the thinking part of homo novis
is mostly genetic and not very amenable to training. The attitude part,
the detachment from crippling and useless sympathy, the maximization of
one’s physical assets, are.
As you can tell, I have a special fascination with this story and again, urge you to read it. If not, well, take the previous paragraph under serious advisement.
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Neovictorian is a writer from the U.S. He can be reached on Twitter and his blog, where this piece was originally posted.
____________________________________________________
Neovictorian is a writer from the U.S. He can be reached on Twitter and his blog, where this piece was originally posted.
Bare Bones
by Christopher Pankhurst
You tread through the collected litter, anonymous and branded, paving the path for you. The garages set back behind the allotments, at the end of an unused road, now fallen into a disrepair beyond hope of redemption. Bindweed trumpets white flowers and plays the final notes for the last of the brickwork. This frozen architecture already hinting at the rubble to come in years yet to be.
Two garage doors are broken and lost, the other two sit firm, faded to a muted shade beyond colour, the bright dreams of a forgotten past long lost in an already forgotten future. Even the graffiti has died, its decades old anger passing away into peace perfect peace.
My God, why hast thou forsaken this place? Only the litter comes here, the excrement of a diabetic civilisation, ebbing and flowing with random breezes, finally settling in this place that no longer exists, the road erased from maps, going nowhere. Literally nowhere. At the end of the broken road a rusted metal fence supports the highest of the weeds, pink buddleia, growing to 10 feet or more, pushing through the metal bars like starving prisoners. It is a trellised garden of the uncultivated fauna of the city. The buddleia grows to the edge of the railway line beyond the fence where it reaches the border of its possibility. Here, between the speeding commuters anxious to be somewhere else and the city facing in the other direction, there is a possibility of solitude.
The garages which have lost their doors do not sit next to each other, so as you walk past you alternate between a closed, flat face and an open, damp cave, a closed, flat face and an open, damp cave. The open caves invite the music of the wind which whistles like an idea of a ghost. Rainwater drips in all weathers, no matter how dry. These caves are never dry, they always drip to a time signature that defies human understanding. And the patchwork of potholes that was once a road collects the rain in small pools that mirror the clouds. Desolate tarns awaiting a drought.
Behind the garages the weed life is somewhat calmer, the lack of sun stunting growth. Here, the litter is settled, the detritus comes to the end of the road and embeds itself into the earth beginning its aeon long journey to degradation. The reds of flattened drinks cartons fade to mauve and the blues and oranges of carrier bags combine and wash out to shades of autumn skies. The suggestive stink of death is never entirely absent.
This place is a church of rejection, a cathedral of exclusion and disenfranchisement. This is your patch and you regard it as your temple and canvas. You drag a stick along the metal fence posts drumming an invocation to a God who doesn’t exist in a temple of the unsublime. Everything here is manageable; you have no fear.
At the heart of the patch of yellowing grass you see bones. Walking closer you discern the shape of a bird, a pigeon. Three days ago you last came here and now there is the skeleton of a pigeon in this place. It is positioned as though artistically depicted in flight: wings both stretched back behind the body. But the neck cranes back to a ghastly extent so that the head is upside down, looking back behind itself.
There seem to be no feathers around the bones; just the perfect skeleton framed forever in an impossible flight.
How could it have got here?
You look more closely at the bones lying flat on the ground flying nowhere forever. They are the colour of dirty cream but they have been totally picked clean. Surely they have not been here long enough for the weather to have washed away the flesh and feathers? Could a fox or a cat have caught the bird and stripped it clean to the bone? You look around the wasted space and confirm that there are no feathers lying around. Maybe it was carried here by some filthy stray cat, drunk with the stink of death, its taste buds dribbling saliva down its jaws and onto the dead bones. In any case, here it lies, here it flies. The beak is pulled open by the weird positioning of the head, though it’s destined to never sing again. There must be some meaning to this ghostly intrusion into your patch. You stare at the bones with greater attention. The bird is looking back to where it has come from. Why? Is it seeking the life that it has departed from, flying inexorably towards death but looking back on life, clinging to it in eternal memory?
You extract a sun-bleached carrier bag from beneath other litter and put the skeleton into it. You roll it tight and carefully place it at the base of the metal fence. These bones seem to signify something but a clear interpretation eludes you. You leave the skeleton at rest and return home.
The next day you are distracted and surly all through school. Each lesson is a tiresome chore relieved only by the sketches of the strange bird that you deface your school books with. Not until the sound of the final bell do you feel alive and then you rush out and run to the supermarket. The comics are all the same as yesterday and at your age you are too old for their magic to be effective. Still, you look again through the Dr Who comic and attempt to induce a sense of awe at the science fiction world it presents to you. But the pictures are staged and caricatured, and the words are shouted slogans. You leave the comics and walk up and down each aisle, slowly losing touch with reality as the hypnotic displays of pop art multiply and echo along corridors of efficiency. You have arrived here before the mothers and it is as quiet as it ever will be. The music of a lady singer is all around. “Here you come again,” she sings, and though you don’t recognise the song you wonder if it might be meant for you to hear. In the frozen aisle the air is chilled and the freezers hum like an unwatched ocean. There are no shadows here yet the light is cold and its ubiquity carries an air of totalitarian indifference. This is a place of restless anaesthesia.
You come to the end of an aisle and face the checkouts. The momentary spell is broken so you leave and head to your patch. As you enter the dead road the rest of the world recedes and the sacred opens itself up to you. You pass a closed, flat face and an open, damp cave, a closed, flat face and an open, damp cave. And you stop. There are low voices. Quickly but quietly you enter the last garage and the darkness falls upon you. A wet, dirty, threadbare carpet lies on the floor and muffles your footsteps. You walk to the rear of the garage where a thin spillage of sunlight leaks through displaced masonry. You put your blinking eye to the gap and look through.
On the yellowing grass where yesterday you found the bird’s skeleton you see Angela Watkins lying on the ground. Her trousers and knickers are around her ankles and a boy is lying behind her. You don’t remember seeing her at school today but she is in the year above you so you cannot be sure. Her eyes are turned down to the earth and her lips, painted with red lipstick, are parted. Her hips are dancing in time with the boy’s. You do not recognise him but he has certainly already left school. You guess he must be at least eighteen.
His hand reaches around inside Angela’s unbuttoned shirt and holds her breast, still cupped inside her bra. His fingers pull the bra cup down and her full breast falls out, milk-white. He rubs her nipple and then cusps the whole breast in his hand. Angela moans and raises her eyes. She looks into the gap through which you are looking. She looks right at you even though you are hidden in a dark cave looking through a tiny slit, no more than a centimetre wide. It can only be a coincidence, she cannot really see you through a tiny slit, hidden in darkness. But still she looks right at you and you feel a need to run. Your muscles are poised but you reason that it must be impossible for her to see you and that if you move you will make your presence known. You remain deathly still.
She is still looking right at you, even though she can’t possibly be seeing you, and she is still moaning through parted, painted lips. You look at her naked breast and legs and realise that you’re getting a hard-on. As she continues to stare at you, as though besotted with your voyeurism, her parted lips stretch to a grimace; her eyes widen, the whites growing larger. The lips continue to pull back and the eyes continue to widen. Her moan becomes a groan and skin pulls back from her face. You still have a hard-on as the skin continues to pull back revealing the white of the bone beneath. Her eyes are still staring at you, grotesquely exposed in bone eye sockets. The skin has all gone, pulled back behind the head, and the eyes stare stupidly at you from the skull; the mouth grins in savage, toothy mockery.
Still the boy is fucking her from behind but her head is now pure skull, the eyes disappeared into their black sockets. The black holes still seem to look within you and you are transfixed in fear clutching your hard-on. And then you hear the groan turn into hollow laughter and you turn and run.
You snag your school blazer on rusted metal as you bump around the corner of the garage but you don’t stop; the fabric pulls and tears. The clattering laughter chases you down the road and you run and run, skipping over the pot holes and dirtying your trousers with unclean water. The laughter gets no quieter with distance and you turn the corner back towards the main road still fleeing from that tawdry epiphany. Still you run, forever fleeing her laughter.
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Christopher Pankhurst is a writer from England.
Namaste Narasimhaya: Black Metal versus Postmodernity
by Colin Liddell and Francisco Albanese
The uniformity of the post-modern world pushed Black Metal towards the abyss of recursiveness, to reinvent itself, to be both product and producer – a complex construction that, despite its message, tends to its own destruction and devastation.
The primeval spawn of the NSBM movement started with its adoption of Hollywood nazi-fascist elements that were designed simply to shock and scare, but this later evolved in a more ‘positive’ direction that became tied to the goal of explicitly affirming racial survival. This created the ultimate irony of a musical genre that had been focused on the metaphysical aspects transversal to life and death becoming instead focused on life.
In place of totemic National-Socialist aspects, there was an incorporation of ideological National-Socialism and identitarian elements, usually of a nostalgic and anachronistic nature. This also tended towards a domestication and softening of the movement, as well as some loss of spirituality in the counterculture (or “occulture”).
What was once frightening and radical thus became focused on the technical and accessible to the masses, effectively becoming a demystified and ‘secular’ Black Metal. This move, which separated the music from its roots, was welcomed and supported by the audience. But as the ‘positive’ aspects were highlighted, Black Metal also lost much of its primal nature – its fundamental negativity, the abyss from which it drew its energy, as, in essence, Black Metal was the glorification of death as a core of transcendence, not an ultima ratio.
Through this reinvention, this so-called counterculture and attack on society, underwent a process of beautification, selling out its mythic power in exchange for banalities like brotherhood and philanthropy. From existing as a heresy in the contemporary music scene, it mutated into something more like folk music. The true Black Metal spirit was lost under layers of flutes, ocarinas, and good wishes for all.
Some argue that the decline of the West lies in individualism, and that we should therefore strive to escape from it and turn towards such collective bonhomie, but at the same time there can be no place for socialism in the Black Metal domain.
How, then, can we create an potent individualist antithesis in Black Metal to oppose to the atomization of modernity that is turning the world into an effeminate cage focused on human rights beloved by leftists? To answer this I will use a metaphor from the Narasimha Purana, one of the Upapuranas, a genre of Hindu religious texts, and invoke the Dionysian thought of Nietzsche. Let us make the following equations:
- Hiranyakashipu ＝ the post-modern world (a consequence of the modern world)
- Vishnu ＝ the true Western ethos
- Narasimha ＝ the form and function of Black Metal
In the Narasimha Purana, Hiranyakashipu (the post-modern world) cannot be killed by a human, deva, or animal. Vishnu (the Western Ethos), takes form through Narasimha, a beast/man deity. In a cruel world, Vishnu makes his avatar crueler, so Narasimha (Black Metal), if it is to have a meaningful existence, must go beyond all parameters and acceptable boundaries, and not be limited to established standards, which merely lead it into anachronism.
This reliance on a degree of individualism may seem paradoxical, but rather than the self-seeking narcissism of the post-modern world, it is actually a pure negation of the Self and a pulverization of all human aspects. It is pure desire separate from reason because in an Apollonian world, the Apollonian man has become mass-man.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law: this Will-to-Power must deny the main rule of the Modern World, i.e., reason.
Because progressive values and science go hand in hand, there is no real separation between State and Religion. This is despite the view of atheists that only a religion with explicit gods is an actual religion. In fact, the secular rational atheist liberal has many other “gods.” To move away from such spiritual banality it is important to conceive of the world as it truly is, as something more irrational, superstitious, sinister, amoral, and transcendent.
The religiosity and fanaticism expressed by sectors inside Black Metal go beyond mere aesthetic elements or devotion as an end in itself. They open up an attack on post-modernity from two time flanks: past and future.
Black Metal has served not only as a tool of apostasy – a means to opt out – but also as an archeofuturistic precursor of old and new spirituality. But even the elements of resentment have acted as a catalyst of knowledge/wisdom. Without Black Metal to blast the scales away, many would not have been able to investigate more enlightening avenues.
On the basis that all the great civilizations and their manifestations, except those of the East, have been product of Indo-European peoples, it is not hard to understand the reason why the occult – that is religions and spirituality of past ages – tends to evoke degrees and forms of racial awareness and white nationalism that focus on cultural and identitarian claims (Kultürkampf) rather than the defence of the modern nation-state (an ideological polity). This points to the awakening of archetypes as small islands in Modernity, tribal islands in a uniform world.
Rock, the ‘grandfather’ of Black Metal, also, just like Black Metal, appeals to the basic, carnal, awakening aspects suppressed by centuries of Apollonian white music. The emergence of Rock marks a return of the Dionysian that rejects, mocks, disrupts, and destroys the neat, rational pop sound (a celebration, embodiment, and stasis of the banality of modern life). It is an impulse to overthrow the universal order rooted in the catacombs of Rome that has castrated the beast in man.
I will finish this brief commentary with a quote from Friedrich Nietzsche, who we could perhaps claim as a proto Black Metaller, drawn from The Birth of Tragedy:
“[L]est the Apollonian tendency freeze all form into Egyptian rigidity, and in attempting to prescribe its orbit to each particular wave inhibit the movement of the lake, the Dionysian flood tide periodically destroys all the little circles in which the Apollonian will would confine Hellenism.”
[Birth of Tragedy 9.]
Id est, “Against the odds, black metal gods.”
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