When Sanders launched his campaign in February 2019, he was asked what would be different this time. “We’re gonna win,” Sanders replied, with the blunt assurance that thrills so many of his supporters.
By his own admission, he is falling short of that goal. As Sanders fights for the future of his candidacy, there is also the sense that he has already accomplished more than he could have imagined in his nearly 50-year political career.
Michael Kazin, a historian and co-editor of Dissent magazine, said Sanders has already achieved what many nominees and presidents never do: he has fundamentally shifted the ideology of the Democratic party on everything from healthcare and climate change to raising the minimum wage and taxing the rich. Sanders, Kazin said, was likely the “most leftwing candidate” to make it this far in American political history.
That a 78-year-old democratic socialist has come within striking distance of the nomination is an “astounding success” in its own right, marveled Bill Press, a progressive talkshow host who helped launch Sanders 2016 campaign from the living room of his Washington home.
The Hunt depicts elites hunting the poor for sport. The 'satire' feels a little too real
That the film coincides with a pandemic which will kill the uninsured, sick and elderly is just another layer of discomfort
Jessa Crispin THE GUARDIAN Sun 15 Mar 2020
‘If you don’t find it funny to watch a woman impaled on spikes or a man blown up on a landmine, you must be one of those humorless cancel culture freaks who need to learn to take a joke.’ Photograph: Universal
My entertainment options this week were a movie in which “liberal elites” hunt down and murder “deplorables” for sport – deaths that are ultra gory and played for laughs – and a Hulu documentary in which Hillary Clinton explains with a chuckle and a smile why the policies supported by her 2016 opponent, Bernie Sanders – policies like universal healthcare and prison reform, which would help countless Americans – are just not “doable”. In other words, essentially the same thing.
The Hunt was supposed to be released last fall, but it was put on hold after some people wondered if a movie about political polarity and divisiveness in contemporary society, in which a bunch of poor people die violently was really going to be a good idea. Released now, the controversy is its main selling point. And – since we are in the beginning stages of a pandemic for which the United States is not remotely prepared and in which the uninsured, elderly, and poor are much more likely to die – well, let’s just say the timing creates a certain tone.
The co-writer and producer Damon Lindelof – who recently read the legendary anti-fascist comic Watchmen and thought, huh, okay, but what if instead we made the cops the heroes? – has created a world where a group of rich, NPR-listening liberals, who bicker about gendered language and whether “black” or “African-American” is the more acceptable term, drug, abduct, and murder Trump voters for sport. One of the Trump voters actually isn’t a Trump voter but is brought there by mistake, and not being a redneck hillbilly idiot, she manages to fight back. I think that’s a metaphor. For something.
Ultimately the film wants to pretend to be a commentary on cancel culture and our new culture wars. It turns out the whole plan for liberal elites to hunt deplorables becomes a reality because deplorables can’t take a joke about liberal elites hunting deplorables. The slapstick deaths are supposed to indicate that hey, we’re just playing around here, rather than show a callous disregard for human life on the part of the film-makers. And if you don’t find it funny to watch a woman impaled on spikes or a man blown up on a landmine or a woman choking to death after she’s poisoned, you must be one of those humorless cancel culture freaks who need to learn to take a joke.
But of course if you’re from and of the coasts it’s easy to believe these new culture wars are just about a difference of opinion about gun control or abortion and not about the hopelessness and loss of meaning and instability causing the deaths of despair killing white middle Americans without college degrees through suicide and addiction. It’s similar to how one segment of the population will remember the culture wars of the 1990s as a discussion about whether a crucifix of Jesus Christ submerged in urine should be considered art, and not about whether the thousands of gay people, IV drug users, hemophiliacs, and others deemed ultimately disposable by the government and society should have been allowed to die from Aids. Or as a debate about whether children should be exposed to vulgarity in music, and not about whether black people or people in poor neighborhoods should be murdered, brutalized, and harassed by the police forces that claim to protect them.
It’s not clear that anyone involved with this film has ever even been to the south. The star, Betty Gilpin, plays a working-class woman named Crystal who spends the entirety of the film holding her jaw as if she is trying not to let any spit from the chewing tobacco dribble out, and yet at no time does she partake in chewing tobacco. It’s like she saw a picture of someone once and thought, Oh, that must be how they do it down there, but no one explained to her it’s not just that all southerners have a severe underbite. But then no one involved in the production thought it might be weird for the action of the film to play out in Croatia, a country still dealing with the aftermath of its own … uh, let’s call it political polarity and divisiveness, I guess.
I’m sure the millionaires who endorsed billionaire Mike Bloomberg in the Democratic primaries will watch this movie on their private jets and have a good chuckle at the depiction of clueless and out-of-touch elites heading to Croatia on their private plane with a cargo full of white trash. “Oh my God, that’s so us! I also enjoy a little caviar snack while on my way to my private manor in the Balkans.” And then they’ll go back to deciding which underprivileged group should receive their charity this month – instead of just paying their taxes, which could fund an adequate public healthcare system that would keep people from having to beg online to afford chemotherapy.
Cinemas across the US are currently closing because of coronavirus; perhaps only the elites who can afford private screenings of The Hunt in their palatial estates will be able to see it. In the meantime, the rest of us are about to go on quarantine lockdown, forced to sustain ourselves on whatever mediocre bilge Netflix has put out this week. I think that’s a metaphor. For something.
Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast. She is a Guardian US columnist
'It's a fun movie, I promise': behind the elites v 'deplorables' thriller The Hunt
The director of the controversial film about liberals hunting Trump voters talks intention, assumptions and how it feels when the president tweets about you
Benjamin Lee Thu 12 Mar 2020
Hilary Swank in The Hunt. Photograph: Patti Perret/AP
“It felt bizarre because the film was supposed to be an absurd satire and was not supposed to be serious and boring and I felt that the conversation immediately got serious and boring,” Zobel said. “I was just the person, over in the corner, maintaining ‘It’s a fun movie, I promise! I just want people to see it!’ because it’s a film that’s essentially about the assumptions you make about something without really knowing anything about it.”
Making an assumption about something without really knowing anything about it has become a signature move for the US president although nothing could have prepared Zobel for the surreal moment of seeing your film tweet-dragged by one of the most powerful men in the world.
“I was in the very last days of sound mixing the movie,” Zobel recalled. “I got a text from Ike Barinholtz, one of the actors [in The Hunt], who said I think that the president of the United States just tweeted about our movie. I had to go looking for what he was talking about and pretty quickly just ended up standing outside the soundstage for the rest of the day trying to process and kind of parse what was going on and it was unique. The day that the president tweets something about you or a movie that you made is just a very weird day, it really is.”
The ire aimed at Zobel, death threats included, was predicated on the idea that the film was somehow celebrating the leftists who take bloody revenge on rednecks but, if anything, it works hard at doing the opposite. Zobel sees it as a “fun refuge” rather than an angry dissection of where we are right now. The difficult journey it’s had to reach an audience has found its happy ending with a wide release but it also serves as a warning of how easily film-makers can get silenced in a culture keen to cancel.
Betty Gilpin in The Hunt. Photograph: Patti Perret/AP
“It isn’t a healthy world, one where everyone is trying to decide whether or not they should make something based on how it’ll be received politically,” Zobel said. “I certainly wouldn’t advocate for that and I don’t think like that, even after this. “I believe that people who have things to say will continue to really have things to say.”
We spoke a week before the reviews came out, which were mixed at best (the Guardian’s Adrian Horton called it “a boilerplate B-movie that doesn’t say nearly as much as it thinks it does”), telling a cautionary tale of the dangers of hype. The film that Zobel saw as “playful and fun” had mutated into something with far more to carry on its shoulders. Ultimately, what The Hunt works best as is an action thriller which I told him would please at least one potential audience member, notorious for skipping past dialogue to watch the explosions.
“I think the president might like the movie,” Zobel agreed. “I’m proud of the action scenes in the movie. If he wants to just watch the action scenes, I’m fine with that!”
The Hunt is out now
That the film coincides with a pandemic which will kill the uninsured, sick and elderly is just another layer of discomfort
Jessa Crispin THE GUARDIAN Sun 15 Mar 2020
‘If you don’t find it funny to watch a woman impaled on spikes or a man blown up on a landmine, you must be one of those humorless cancel culture freaks who need to learn to take a joke.’ Photograph: Universal
My entertainment options this week were a movie in which “liberal elites” hunt down and murder “deplorables” for sport – deaths that are ultra gory and played for laughs – and a Hulu documentary in which Hillary Clinton explains with a chuckle and a smile why the policies supported by her 2016 opponent, Bernie Sanders – policies like universal healthcare and prison reform, which would help countless Americans – are just not “doable”. In other words, essentially the same thing.
The Hunt was supposed to be released last fall, but it was put on hold after some people wondered if a movie about political polarity and divisiveness in contemporary society, in which a bunch of poor people die violently was really going to be a good idea. Released now, the controversy is its main selling point. And – since we are in the beginning stages of a pandemic for which the United States is not remotely prepared and in which the uninsured, elderly, and poor are much more likely to die – well, let’s just say the timing creates a certain tone.
The co-writer and producer Damon Lindelof – who recently read the legendary anti-fascist comic Watchmen and thought, huh, okay, but what if instead we made the cops the heroes? – has created a world where a group of rich, NPR-listening liberals, who bicker about gendered language and whether “black” or “African-American” is the more acceptable term, drug, abduct, and murder Trump voters for sport. One of the Trump voters actually isn’t a Trump voter but is brought there by mistake, and not being a redneck hillbilly idiot, she manages to fight back. I think that’s a metaphor. For something.
Ultimately the film wants to pretend to be a commentary on cancel culture and our new culture wars. It turns out the whole plan for liberal elites to hunt deplorables becomes a reality because deplorables can’t take a joke about liberal elites hunting deplorables. The slapstick deaths are supposed to indicate that hey, we’re just playing around here, rather than show a callous disregard for human life on the part of the film-makers. And if you don’t find it funny to watch a woman impaled on spikes or a man blown up on a landmine or a woman choking to death after she’s poisoned, you must be one of those humorless cancel culture freaks who need to learn to take a joke.
But of course if you’re from and of the coasts it’s easy to believe these new culture wars are just about a difference of opinion about gun control or abortion and not about the hopelessness and loss of meaning and instability causing the deaths of despair killing white middle Americans without college degrees through suicide and addiction. It’s similar to how one segment of the population will remember the culture wars of the 1990s as a discussion about whether a crucifix of Jesus Christ submerged in urine should be considered art, and not about whether the thousands of gay people, IV drug users, hemophiliacs, and others deemed ultimately disposable by the government and society should have been allowed to die from Aids. Or as a debate about whether children should be exposed to vulgarity in music, and not about whether black people or people in poor neighborhoods should be murdered, brutalized, and harassed by the police forces that claim to protect them.
It’s not clear that anyone involved with this film has ever even been to the south. The star, Betty Gilpin, plays a working-class woman named Crystal who spends the entirety of the film holding her jaw as if she is trying not to let any spit from the chewing tobacco dribble out, and yet at no time does she partake in chewing tobacco. It’s like she saw a picture of someone once and thought, Oh, that must be how they do it down there, but no one explained to her it’s not just that all southerners have a severe underbite. But then no one involved in the production thought it might be weird for the action of the film to play out in Croatia, a country still dealing with the aftermath of its own … uh, let’s call it political polarity and divisiveness, I guess.
I’m sure the millionaires who endorsed billionaire Mike Bloomberg in the Democratic primaries will watch this movie on their private jets and have a good chuckle at the depiction of clueless and out-of-touch elites heading to Croatia on their private plane with a cargo full of white trash. “Oh my God, that’s so us! I also enjoy a little caviar snack while on my way to my private manor in the Balkans.” And then they’ll go back to deciding which underprivileged group should receive their charity this month – instead of just paying their taxes, which could fund an adequate public healthcare system that would keep people from having to beg online to afford chemotherapy.
Cinemas across the US are currently closing because of coronavirus; perhaps only the elites who can afford private screenings of The Hunt in their palatial estates will be able to see it. In the meantime, the rest of us are about to go on quarantine lockdown, forced to sustain ourselves on whatever mediocre bilge Netflix has put out this week. I think that’s a metaphor. For something.
Jessa Crispin is the host of the Public Intellectual podcast. She is a Guardian US columnist
'It's a fun movie, I promise': behind the elites v 'deplorables' thriller The Hunt
The director of the controversial film about liberals hunting Trump voters talks intention, assumptions and how it feels when the president tweets about you
Benjamin Lee Thu 12 Mar 2020
Betty Gilpin in The Hunt. Photograph: Patti Perret/AP
“Icertainly didn’t make the movie to try and gin up controversy,” said Craig Zobel, director of the most controversial movie of not only this year but last year as well, a potato so hot that it was briefly deemed untouchable. The Hunt, a schlocky thriller that also happens to be a broad satire on political extremism in the US, was originally scheduled for release last September, but after the Dayton and El Paso shootings the month before, it faced an uncertain future.
The plot imagines a Hunger Games-style playground where liberal elites hunt “deplorables”, AKA Trump voters, in a variety of gruesome ways. Initially, the film’s marketing campaign were paused out of respect (even a satirical use of such heavy artillery was not deemed appropriate at the time) but matters worsened when details about the film’s red state v blue state setup started to disseminate and rightwing anger travelled all the way from Fox News to the White House. Trump didn’t name the movie specifically but in a tweet on 9 August, he called Hollywood “racist”, “really terrible” and said some of the films being released are “very dangerous for this country”. On 10 August, The Hunt was taken off the schedule.
For a time, there were questions over whether we would ever get to see The Hunt, at least on a big screen, with rumours that Universal might consider selling it to an online streamer. But with a tweaked marketing campaign, one that now revels in its toxic infamy, it re-emerged earlier this year and now, finally, it’s being unleashed on the public.
“It’s been a long road,” Zobel said to me on the phone from Los Angeles, sounding understandably wearied. “You make a movie hoping that people get to see it and now people finally do and I think I’m just excited to hear people’s responses.”
The Hunt began with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof and his Leftovers co-writer Nick Cuse crafting a devilish way to update Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, centred on a brutal human hunt, for an increasingly fractured America. Zobel, whose big-screen credits had included grim fact-based fast-food drama Compliance and post-apocalyptic saga Z for Zachariah, had also directed a number of episodes of The Leftovers and was immediately drawn to the idea.
He had just moved from the liberal safe haven of New York City to Athens, a smaller city in Georgia, a state that voted for Trump in 2016. “I realised I was making assumptions about these people that lived around me,” he said. It led him to crave something that would both explore and poke fun at the ideas that we have of those on the opposing side so it was kismet when the script came his way. “We found out that we had all been individually thinking about this stuff and that it was the perfect time for us to tell this story,” he said.
For a while, the stars seemed to align. Blumhouse, the hit-making company behind Get Out and Paranormal Activity, jumped onboard, as did Universal and a cast including two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, Glow breakout Betty Gilpin and Ryan Murphy. Emma Roberts quickly signed on. But then things went sour and a Friday night B-movie suddenly became the subject of noxious debate, referred to as “demented”, “evil” and “dangerous”. Before anyone had even seen it.
“Icertainly didn’t make the movie to try and gin up controversy,” said Craig Zobel, director of the most controversial movie of not only this year but last year as well, a potato so hot that it was briefly deemed untouchable. The Hunt, a schlocky thriller that also happens to be a broad satire on political extremism in the US, was originally scheduled for release last September, but after the Dayton and El Paso shootings the month before, it faced an uncertain future.
The plot imagines a Hunger Games-style playground where liberal elites hunt “deplorables”, AKA Trump voters, in a variety of gruesome ways. Initially, the film’s marketing campaign were paused out of respect (even a satirical use of such heavy artillery was not deemed appropriate at the time) but matters worsened when details about the film’s red state v blue state setup started to disseminate and rightwing anger travelled all the way from Fox News to the White House. Trump didn’t name the movie specifically but in a tweet on 9 August, he called Hollywood “racist”, “really terrible” and said some of the films being released are “very dangerous for this country”. On 10 August, The Hunt was taken off the schedule.
For a time, there were questions over whether we would ever get to see The Hunt, at least on a big screen, with rumours that Universal might consider selling it to an online streamer. But with a tweaked marketing campaign, one that now revels in its toxic infamy, it re-emerged earlier this year and now, finally, it’s being unleashed on the public.
“It’s been a long road,” Zobel said to me on the phone from Los Angeles, sounding understandably wearied. “You make a movie hoping that people get to see it and now people finally do and I think I’m just excited to hear people’s responses.”
The Hunt began with Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof and his Leftovers co-writer Nick Cuse crafting a devilish way to update Richard Connell’s 1924 short story The Most Dangerous Game, centred on a brutal human hunt, for an increasingly fractured America. Zobel, whose big-screen credits had included grim fact-based fast-food drama Compliance and post-apocalyptic saga Z for Zachariah, had also directed a number of episodes of The Leftovers and was immediately drawn to the idea.
He had just moved from the liberal safe haven of New York City to Athens, a smaller city in Georgia, a state that voted for Trump in 2016. “I realised I was making assumptions about these people that lived around me,” he said. It led him to crave something that would both explore and poke fun at the ideas that we have of those on the opposing side so it was kismet when the script came his way. “We found out that we had all been individually thinking about this stuff and that it was the perfect time for us to tell this story,” he said.
For a while, the stars seemed to align. Blumhouse, the hit-making company behind Get Out and Paranormal Activity, jumped onboard, as did Universal and a cast including two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank, Glow breakout Betty Gilpin and Ryan Murphy. Emma Roberts quickly signed on. But then things went sour and a Friday night B-movie suddenly became the subject of noxious debate, referred to as “demented”, “evil” and “dangerous”. Before anyone had even seen it.
Hilary Swank in The Hunt. Photograph: Patti Perret/AP
“It felt bizarre because the film was supposed to be an absurd satire and was not supposed to be serious and boring and I felt that the conversation immediately got serious and boring,” Zobel said. “I was just the person, over in the corner, maintaining ‘It’s a fun movie, I promise! I just want people to see it!’ because it’s a film that’s essentially about the assumptions you make about something without really knowing anything about it.”
Making an assumption about something without really knowing anything about it has become a signature move for the US president although nothing could have prepared Zobel for the surreal moment of seeing your film tweet-dragged by one of the most powerful men in the world.
“I was in the very last days of sound mixing the movie,” Zobel recalled. “I got a text from Ike Barinholtz, one of the actors [in The Hunt], who said I think that the president of the United States just tweeted about our movie. I had to go looking for what he was talking about and pretty quickly just ended up standing outside the soundstage for the rest of the day trying to process and kind of parse what was going on and it was unique. The day that the president tweets something about you or a movie that you made is just a very weird day, it really is.”
The ire aimed at Zobel, death threats included, was predicated on the idea that the film was somehow celebrating the leftists who take bloody revenge on rednecks but, if anything, it works hard at doing the opposite. Zobel sees it as a “fun refuge” rather than an angry dissection of where we are right now. The difficult journey it’s had to reach an audience has found its happy ending with a wide release but it also serves as a warning of how easily film-makers can get silenced in a culture keen to cancel.
Betty Gilpin in The Hunt. Photograph: Patti Perret/AP
“It isn’t a healthy world, one where everyone is trying to decide whether or not they should make something based on how it’ll be received politically,” Zobel said. “I certainly wouldn’t advocate for that and I don’t think like that, even after this. “I believe that people who have things to say will continue to really have things to say.”
We spoke a week before the reviews came out, which were mixed at best (the Guardian’s Adrian Horton called it “a boilerplate B-movie that doesn’t say nearly as much as it thinks it does”), telling a cautionary tale of the dangers of hype. The film that Zobel saw as “playful and fun” had mutated into something with far more to carry on its shoulders. Ultimately, what The Hunt works best as is an action thriller which I told him would please at least one potential audience member, notorious for skipping past dialogue to watch the explosions.
“I think the president might like the movie,” Zobel agreed. “I’m proud of the action scenes in the movie. If he wants to just watch the action scenes, I’m fine with that!”
The Hunt is out now
Black Sky Thinking
Does My Black Sun Look Big In This? Skullflower’s Patterns Of Predjudice
Does My Black Sun Look Big In This? Skullflower’s Patterns Of Predjudice
Dylan Miller , February 11th, 2019 08:59
Late last week, veteran noise act Skullflower were dropped from the line up of Raw Power festival - yet for most of their lengthy career they have been considered apolitical. Here Dylan Miller considers the jigsaw of evidence against Matthew Bower and asks, 'What changed?'
“We offer an invocation to, and an evocation of the hidden, averse, heathen powers that seethe within our native soil. Come leave your timid gelded civilised masks, bow down and rise up, reborn, within our whirlwind.”
Skullflower mission statement, July 2013
Skullflower mission statement, July 2013
Last week – on a day that saw news reports of innocent British people being torn from their families and deported to Jamaica as part of Theresa May’s “hostile environment” and a three-fold rise in antisemitic crimes in the UK – London’s Raw Power, the noise-orientated music festival programmed by Baba Yaga’s Hut, made the unusual decision to drop veteran act Skullflower from its bill. In a brief statement they wrote that Matthew Bower, Skullflower’s core member, “appears to have taken part in some questionable actions & has some public-facing associations that do not line up with how we feel at Raw Power.”
Matthew Bower has been a constant presence on the noise scene for decades, appearing, for example, in 1983 as one half of Pure, sharing a bill with Derek Jarman, Coil and Ceryth Wyn Evans at Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema. Until the accusations against Bower surfaced, the racist wink implicit in Pure’s name could be dismissed as the sort of provocative trolling endemic to the young noise scene of the time, when schoolboy Philip Best (Consumer Electronics/Whitehouse) released his infamous White Power cassette, and two volumes of Oswald Moseley speeches, on his Iphar cassette label (we’ll have more on this period in a future piece).
Skullflower emerged as a full band with their Birthdeath EP in 1988, since when, according to Discogs, they have racked up 39 albums of searing, hellish, ecstatic racket, that have, rightly, earned Bower no little respect as an uncompromising, dedicated noise artist.
Interviews with Bower have appeared in pretty much every magazine covering experimental music, including this one, and as far as we are aware, he hasn’t used any of them to espouse controversial political viewpoints. Bower has always presented himself, and his bands, as cultural irritants, and has had a reputation as an unapologetically spiky character, yet politics have never been central to Skullflower’s musical vision, any hints at meaning coming from track and album titles, which are often elaborate and evocative but seemingly devoid of political content.
So what’s happened?
Bower’s acerbic personality has, unsurprisingly, led to many fallings out over the years, and rumours of a deeper darkness beyond the wall of noise. The idea that any musicians, of any genre, are obliged to be nice people is obviously absurd – some people are arseholes, and some of them happen to be musicians, we can live with that. But bringing arseholes and the Internet together can have explosive results, and online Bower has scattered fragments of a persona that, when pieced together, create a depressingly familiar picture.
The Skullflower blog, begun in 2011, is a repository for Bower’s musings and photographs. Collectively they reflect a mind deeply immersed in art, witchcraft, music and animal husbandry. In one domestic image, posted in 2016, nestled amongst a display of animals, talismans, artworks and artefacts, is a print of the most iconic image of esoteric neo-Nazism – the black sun. The symbol, twelve sig (SS) runes in a spoked wheel, first appeared as a floor decoration at Heinrich Himmler’s SS fortress at Wewelsburg in the late 1930s. According to historian of esoteric Nazism Nicholas Goodrick Clarke, Himmler regarded the castle as “the magical omphalos, marking the centre of the Germanic world, and planned ultimately to develop the whole site as an SS Vatican of Aryan spirituality.” The Black Sun then, sat at the initiatic centrepoint of the of the Nazis’ mythic empire.
Since the early 1990s neo-Nazis have viewed Himmler’s sunwheel as a representation of the Black Sun, a symbol of Thule, the dream of Europa, “an alternative world in total opposition to a multiracial Europe” (Goodrick-Clarke). The symbol serves as not-so-secret handshake amongst occult-leaning neo-Nazis, many of whom view Hitler as an avatar of more-than-human energies. Unlike the swastika, a symbol that predates the Nazi party by millennia, and continues to have an existence beyond that corrupting appropriation, Himmler's Black Sun has no meaning outside of its role as a neo-Nazi dream catcher – you’ll see it on flags at neo-Nazi rallies, in Sonnenkrieg Division‘s race-hate memes, and tucked away on cryptonazi-edgleord album covers. This author once saw one on a sticker in a hip East London pub.
The Black Sun as featured in poster for neo-nazi group Sonnenkrieg
So Bower has a Black Sun on his wall at home. OK. It’s a charged symbol of the mythic darkness that Skullflower have made a career of exploring – he also named a spin off project Black Sun Roof. Nice one.
Alone this fact doesn’t make him a Nazi, crypto or otherwise. Nor do pictures of a model kit of a WWII panzer tank crew soldiers out haring with their dogs. Nor, necessarily, do recent track titles, 'Ayran Wolf' (2017), or 'Stormfront' (2016), with its accompanying text: “Winter is a brutal gardener, despoiling summers finery to rot where it falls. We too, need a weeding out, a culling, a gardener.” Stormfront also happens to be the largest online message board for “White Power, World Wide… the voice of the new, embattled White minority.” (italics sic) Haha, provocative japes surely?!
Elsewhere on the blog, it becomes clearer that Bower’s politics are right of centre. He is anti-EU, he claims, in a post celebrating the 2016 Brexit referendum vote, “exiting a hated union”. That’s also OK, lots of men in their mid-50s voted to leave Europe in Summer 2016, many of them also musicians. In a November 2016 comment on this web site, beneath a review of an Andrew Marr TV interview with French National Rally (formerly National Front) leader Marine Le Pen, Bower, or someone purporting to be Bower, wrote: “Vive marine and vive la france!... keep whinin’ liberals”. “Matthew Bower” also put in a dig at comedian Stewart Lee, known for his love of noise music – “oh and that douchebag Stewart Lee; burn yr skullflower records, thems naszty. mb.” Is the extra ‘z’ in nasty also a troll’s wink? (All comments have since been erased from tQ.)
So Bower (or someone using his name) aligns himself with the French National Front, OK that’s pretty extreme, but they’re almost a mainstream party in France; and anyway, why do we noiseniks expect the music we like to be made by progressive liberals, whinin’ or otherwise?
But there’s another clue, for those who might recognise it, buried in his Brexit blogpost: “We are for Europa, anti E.U.” Like the Black Sun, Europa is another piece of twilight language, code amongst ‘Traditionalists’– essentially elitist cryptofacists – for Europe as it used to be, a white, pagan Europe of distinct nation-states, feudally-governed and divided upon “ancient” ethnic and cultural lines. A lost Europe that lies in our future, one in which the great mistakes of the past – the capitulation of the Third Reich, the loss of our colonies and the ensuing disasters of multiculturalism – can be unmade. It reflects, to quote Josef Klumb of martial-industrial cryptofascists Von Thronstahl, "the idea of the REICH for Europe, or Europa, as I’d prefer to call it."
This ideal of Europe – or Europa – is the dream at the heart of the neo-folk musical movement, which emerged in parallel to the noise scene that Bower has inhabited for so long, and often involved the same people. It’s no surprise then, to find him linking arms with Austrian cryptofascist band Der Blutharsch – whose logo has incorporated the Iron Cross and Sig-runes and whose WKN label released music by Skullflower (2016) and Italian fascist group Casa Pound’s house-band Zetazeroalfa (2003) – and English folk musician and jodhpur-sporting Traditionalist Andrew King, who Bower gigged with at London's Café OTO in 2015. [Fielding Hope of Café OTO has since informed us that King’s appearance was kept secret from the venue, Ed]
In 2016, at the time of Bower’s Europa comments, Skullflower outraged many in the Leeds musical community by performing with veteran Finnish nihilist agit-noise group Bizarre Uproar, aka Parsi Markkula, who told the Plaguehaus zine in 2010: “I like discord, chaos, tension between races… XE [xenophobic ejaculation, another Markkula solo noise project] is about racial issues, KKK hanging black trash, whites humiliating black whores, steel cap execution, White Power, 3rd Reich – glorious REICH, concentration camps, racial hygiene, white supremacy, xenophobic hate, black whores eating excrement.” [Temple Of Boom, the Leeds venue, has since informed us that they were unaware of the nature of the groups playing at the time and banned the promoter and all of the artists involved once they were made aware, Ed]
OK have you had enough now? Hopefully you are beginning to see the picture. Accepting that a band you’ve enjoyed for many years is the work of a right-leaning cultural irritant prone to acts of long outmoded, privileged provocation is one thing – accepting that they have collaborated with, and espoused the views of, elitist cryptofascists and death camp celebrants is another.
Yes, Bower has spent a career exploring the abyss, but at some point he also became the abyss. And in our fucked up, fracturing and fractious world that abyss is no longer an obsidian edge ready to expose the hypocrisies of the mainstream – it is the mainstream, and it has engulfed us. This is why we, Raw Power and others have finally drawn a line in the sand – you are either with the people who seek to inflame hatred and division, or you are against them. We are against them.
So that’s why Bower isn’t playing Raw Power.
A small handful of people might be angry and dismiss the promoters as snowflakes bowing to political correctness – let them, and let Baba Yaga’s Hut, and their partners at Corsica Studios, continue to advocate for optimism, diversity and a progressive future.
Bower has yet to respond to his removal from Raw Power. His last blog post simply reproduced the festival’s email to him without comment.
The post before that, dated 12 January, is a tarot reading, entitled “now the die is shaken, now the die must fall”, and shows the Death card, 13, from the Smith-Rider-Waite deck superimposed with ehwaz, the “horse” rune. The Death card, seen here riding upon a white horse and sporting a white rose flag (perhaps a Yorkshire rose?), is usually interpreted to mean that a transformation is coming, perhaps a difficult one. Ehwaz is, also appropriately, associated with communication and collaboration.
Whether something has happened to ‘radicalise’ Bower, or whether he has always been this way, only those who know him can say. But whatever he does next, Skullflower will no doubt survive. They may lose some of their audience, they may well gain a new one. Certainly they have a welcoming home on the Cold Spring label, where martial edgelords, cryptofascists and their apologists rub shoulders with noise and industrial artists too physically or psychically dead to care anymore.
Is Matthew Bower a neo-Nazi, a fascist, or a white nationalist? We doubt that he would ever identify explicitly with any of these positions. Should you stop listening to Bower’s music, or buying his albums? That’s not up to us – who you support with your money is your decision alone.
We shall have to wait and see what happens next. Bower’s psyche seems to be in a constant state of flux, and we strongly believe that people can change, for the better, as well as for the worse.
All we know is that Skullflower’s veil of mystique has dropped, revealing another lost and angry white man, looking for Europa.
We invite Matthew Bower to respond to this article
Black Sky Thinking
Beyond The Iron Gates: How Nazi-Satanists Infiltrated the UK Underground
Beyond The Iron Gates: How Nazi-Satanists Infiltrated the UK Underground
Dylan Miller , November 27th, 2018 08:53
In the second in our series exploring the connections between far right politics and music, Dylan Miller investigates the satanic-fascist Order Of Nine Angles and how, via musician and artist Richard Moult and the experimental folk scene, they have connected with the UK underground. Please note - this article contains imagery that some readers might find disturbing.
A member of Nazi organisation the O9A posing with a WWII-era German machinegun and an artwork by Richard Moult
Read the introductory feature on why we're investigating extreme politics and underground music here
"Let us not be mis-understood: genuine Satanists are evil… They cause, and strive to cause, Chaos, disruption, revolution... they bring joy, ecstasy and laughter, but perhaps most of all they bring death… death to those who have shown by their actions that they have a weak character or are a nuisance, or a hindrance to the spread of darkness." (O9A - 'Satanism - Epitome of Evil' ca. 2008)
What connects a convicted rapist in Yorkshire, a racist murderer in California, a critically-acclaimed underground experimental band from Ireland and a hip US "black metal chamber music" group? The answer is the once-obscure – and now influential – forty-year-old Satanic Neo-Nazi organization, The Order of Nine Angles (O9A), whose membership over the past decade has grown from a handful to an estimated 2000 adherents worldwide.
A number of O9A members are actively involved with the new generation of white-supremacist, neo-fascist and neo-Nazi organisations. This includes the UK's National Action, which was founded in 2013 and is now banned under the Terrorism Act, and international neo-Nazi group The Black Order. In the US, it includes the Atomwaffen Division, one of whose members has been convicted of murder, while the group is implicated in four more deaths.
"Musick creates itself… the composer, if naturally gifted, is a living NEXION. Thus, like any numinous form, Musick has the capability to presence forces and so alter the causal." (Christos Beest, aka Richard Moult, pictured below)
In early autumn of 2018 an anonymous document began to circulate within occult and musical underground circles accusing Newcastle-born artist and musician Richard Moult of using his connections with respected leftfield musicians to gain a wider audience for the Order of Nine Angles. Usually photographed in unassuming knitwear and spectacles, Moult is an accomplished, well-regarded musician; he was a regular member of Irish avant-folk band United Bible Studies and his own music has appeared on labels including A Year in The Country and Fort Evil Fruit. For at least two decades, however, Moult, under pseudonyms including Christos Beest, Beesty Boy and Audun, was a core member of The Order of Nine Angles, and for some years effectively ran it as its 'Outer Representative', training and initiating new members, editing its journal, Fenrir, and "giving a direction to [its] strategies".
Moult publicly left the O9A in 2001, but according to the circulated PDF, he returned in 2008, at a time when he was actively involved with United Bible Studies and other musicians – some of whom he collaborates with to this day. In The Dreccian Way, a handbook for the new generation of O9A members dated "yf 120" (2009), one of Moult's O9A aliases, 'Audun', sets out the goals for the revitalised organisation:
"At this time of writing the ONA is concerned with several major undertakings in preparedness for the return of the Dark Gods, three of which are… to create new forms, in image, word and musick, which depict and presence the manifesting acausal dark – the essence of the Dark Gods."
The Sinister Game
"Culling is natural and necessary. To cull humans is to be ONA. To cull – according to our guidelines and tests – is what makes us ONA." (The Dreccian Way, ONA, 2009)
The Order of Nine Angles originated as an obscure British 'Traditional' Satanism group in the 1970s, but over the next decades, under the leadership of David Myatt, would become an avowedly neo-Nazi organization, sharing roots and members with two of the most extreme British fascist groups of recent history, Combat 18 and the National Socialist Movement. Myatt, a former mercenary and bodyguard to fascist British Movement leader Colin Jordan, wrote reams of O9A literature under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms, such as Anton Long and – on far-right message boards – Darklogos. Myatt saw the Order as a tool to further his dream of overthrowing "Magian" (liberal, Judeo-Christian) civilization.
Although the O9A set itself apart – and still does – from 'mundane', exoteric fascism, in the late 1990s Myatt, along with fellow members of Combat 18, founded the National Socialist Movement. This organisation had as a member David Copeland, who killed three people and seriously injured over a hundred more during his 1999 London bombing spree. As if running two fascist organisations wasn't enough for one man, around the same time, Myatt also founded Reichsfolk, a cultural and religious National Socialist faction, many of whose codes and ideas have been folded into the current phase of O9A ideology. Now in his late 60s, Myatt converted to Islam in 1998 before renouncing it in 2010, and now claims to have rejected violent extremism altogether, though he does appear to maintain links to the O9A, whose most prominent voices continue to promote his philosophical developments in Satanic terms.
Our view – as supporters of our Western culture – is that a resurgent National Socialism, or a resurgent fascism, or something politically similar, embodies what is necessary to bring down the Old Order from whose ruins a New Order will emerge. (O9A, TWS Nexion)
That the O9A is at heart a neo-Nazi organisation is unequivocal. Even its calendrical system of Fayens, or yF – from the Anglo Saxon word for rejoicing – is dated from 1889, Adolf Hitler's birthday, perhaps a hangover from Myatt's National Socialist Movement, in which yF stood for Year of the Fuhrer. While O9A members like to differentiate themselves from 'mundane' fascists and neo-nazis, their ultimate aim, to overthrow democratic Magian civilization by spreading chaos and crime, succeeded by the establishment of an Aryan culture on Earth, is shared by many such groups. Ever ambitious, the O9A seek to take things much further. They envisage being led, by a messiah-like figure known as Vindex, deep into the cosmos, where they will establish a Galactic Reich "to champion and make known our unique human Destiny of Galactic exploration and the colonization of Outer Space" (The Dreccian Way).
Creating a perfectly sinister world, however, requires creating perfectly sinister humans, and this aim, they believe, can be achieved through the practice of "genuine modern heresies", rigorous mental and physical trials and the enactment of ritual magick. Progression within the Order requires the successful completion of a number of tasks, undertaken over years, even decades, several of them concerned with occult self-mastery and the honing of one's physical and magickal abilities. But many O9A initiation rites are far more sinister in practice. The Dreccian Way, a training manual for the O9A's 'dreccian' tribe, introduced by "Audun" (one of Moult's O9A identities), and shaped by Myatt's ideas, exhorts readers not just to commit crime, but to "spread it, encourage it, incite it, support it". Within their literature they advocate ritualised rape, lynching, random attacks on innocent victims and what they describe as "human culling". "Culling" is one of a number of "Sinister Standards" which must be met in order to become a true initiate.
The Dreccian Way advises initiates on the culling of carefully selected 'opfers' (human sacrifices, named after the rune for self-sacrifice, used by the Nazis), discussing in detail the code to which O9A members and affiliated "dreccs" must adhere. In another text, initiates are commanded to "Find, and test… a suitable mundane, and then cull that mundane. If you cannot do this – you failed."
Also central to a serious O9A initiate's experience is the 'Insight Role', whereby they are encouraged to infiltrate and rise through the ranks of organisations as far from their prior life-experience as possible, typically for somewhere between six months to a year. One document suggests such roles may include joining the police force or the military – which, it is suggested, might also facilitate human culling – becoming a professional burglar or travelling the world by foot. Such roles should hone an initiate's physical and mental skills, as part of their transformation into an Aryan-Satanic ubermensch. More often than not, O9A members are encouraged to take insight roles in groups defined by Magian standards as 'heretical', such as neo-nazi or jihadist organisations.
Jackboots On The Ground
"Two acts of assault are most commonly recommended: lynching, and sexual assault." (The Dreccian Way)
One only has to briefly consider the real-world consequences of the propaganda spread by the ONA and its affiliates to understand the genuine threat that they pose. How many unsolved hate crimes in Europe and the US are O9A style 'opfers' or initiations we will never know, but at least two in the past year can be directly traced to O9A membership.
The US-based neo-Nazi group Attomwaffen Division contains a large number of O9A adherents; earlier this year AWD member Samuel Woodward was convicted of the murder of Blaze Bernstein, a gay Jewish student, in Orange County, California. AWD are currently linked to at least four other murders.
In the UK Ryan Fleming (aka A.A. Morain) of the Yorkshire-based O9A nexion Drakon Covenant, as well as the banned fascist group National Action, is currently serving a three-year jail sentence for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl who he had groomed online. He has also previously served time for the physical abuse of a mentally-disabled teenage boy. Described by a judge as "boastful and arrogant", Fleming believes himself to be part of a Satanic elite that is above and beyond 'mundane' laws. Under his A.A. Morain pseudonym, Fleming has written several books of vampiric/satanic fiction and non-fiction published by Martinet Press, run by Jillian Hoy in South Carolina, USA.
As well as reflecting O9A initiation rites, the crimes of Fleming and Woodward mirror the content of an emerging culture of Nazi-Satanist fan fictions, whose writing is encouraged as part of an O9A initiate's practice. A key text is Iron Gates, also published by Hoy's Martinet and credited to the 'Tempel ov Blood', an O9A-affiliated group headed by Hoy and Joshua Caleb Sutter. (Something of a neo-fascist power-couple, Hoy and Sutter previously operated as North Korean propagandists and Hindu Ultra-Nationlists/Esoteric Hitlerists, before turning to the O9A.) The book, which is freely available on Amazon, depicts a grim post-Magian future, set largely in concentration camps, in which opfers and child rape are carried out with post-messianic zeal. Iron Gates and other Martinet Press output provide us with disturbing insights into the mindset and desires of the new Satanic far right – "Iron Gates, NOW!", meanwhile, has become a rallying cry for Atomwaffen Division.
The Crooked Path of Christos Beest
Richard Moult's involvement in the O9A dates back to the late 1980s. In a privately-circulated memoir, Myndsquilver (written in 2011), Moult describes a youth spent as something of a 'seeker' – an outsider figure searching for spiritual fulfilment through a number of occult, esoteric and political subcultures. He describes "a disposition towards finding beauty in melancholia" and reveals that his involvement in occult groups was often marred by difficulties assimilating with fellow members as he himself sought a more extreme, sinister path. He writes: "the Temple of Set and the Church of Satan… were contrived gothic circuses… they held for me nothing of the arcane darkness I was searching for." But the Order of Nine Angles was able to offer just that.
After a lengthy involvement in the movement, during which he developed several key O9A texts, Moult appeared to abandon the order in 2001 and publicly considered converting to Catholicism (the branch of Christianity most often favoured by recovering occultists). During this time his musical career flourished and he released material both as a solo artist and through collaborations with, amongst others, United Bible Studies and Michael Lawrence. He also worked with David Tibet of Current 93 – though these recordings were were never formally released – and Tony Wakeford of Sol Invictus, Death in June and Above The Ruins.
Moult didn't hide his "colourful" past from his new collaborators but emphasised that his life as a Satanic neo-Nazi was well and truly behind him. He was now more likely to be found tending his garden or meditating in church than encouraging violent 'opferings', and he gained the trust of members of this new community. In recent years Moult has married and settled down with children in the Hebrides. But, despite his assurances, the O9A was never far away.
In 2011, to the consternation of some of his musical collaborators, Moult published The Emanations Tarot, a deck reflecting the myths, symbols and imagery of the O9A, in collaboration with Ryan Anschauung (allegedly Kris McDermott), founder of the Australian O9A-offshoot Temple of Them. The deck, also known as The Sinister Tarot seemed designed to trade upon his lingering status within the growing Order and sold well. Moult's artwork depicted typical O9A imagery, including a portrait of founder David Myatt and an image of the decapitated head of German officer Claus von Stauffenberg, who led the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The opening image of this article, taken from the cover of the ONA journal Fenrir, shows a masked O9A member holding up card 16, 'War', from Moult's tarot deck; next to him is a WWII-era MG-42 machine gun favoured by the SS – the image is captioned "Seth, ONA, Afghanistan, 2011" – was "Seth" serving in the UK or US military? At least one Atomwaffen Division member, Vasillios Pistolis, has served in the US Marines.
Stauffenberg tarot card
Myatt portrait by Moult
Whatever reasoning lay behind the publication of The Sinister Tarot, and despite his alleged renunciation of the Order, Moult's own memoir, Myndsquilver, published the same year as the deck, makes clear that he had never fully abandoned the O9A, and continued to author texts and advise initiates long after his alleged exile. "It struck me then that this immersion in 'the Light' [i.e. His experimentation with Christianity] was exactly the process described by the stage of post Internal Adept/pre-Abyss," wrote Moult, "That beyond the Abyss there would be a synthesis of opposites."
So, Moult explicitly states that his leaving the O9A and becoming Catholic were merely further stages in his development along the path of the Nine Angles – and he began working with its members again, in secret: "I began to slowly play a hidden role within the ONA, guiding/advising one or two individuals, writing the odd article... At this time my musical life flourished and I was working with several reasonably well-known groups and individuals. In order to protect their reputation… two articles were written by the Order… underplaying my involvement."
Tellingly, this last paragraph is omitted from the version of Myndsquilver circulated amongst his musical collaborators, but is present in the version given to O9A members (both were eventually leaked online). Amongst the individuals that Moult advised were Chloe Ortega and Kayla DiGiovanni, who operated as White Star Acception and sought to develop a version of the O9A modelled on skinhead gangs – the aforementioned 'Dreccian Way'. During this period, the 'Old Guard' (Moult and Myatt) also encouraged O9A members to engage exhaustively with social media, growing the O9A's online presence until it became a self-sufficient online subculture with a considerably expanded membership.
In my limited correspondence with Richard Moult for this article, he presents himself as a left-leaning libertarian who champions "individual freedoms" above all – "as long as those freedoms do not cause harm or suffering to others". When questioned over the overt Nazi imagery in his Tarot paintings, Moult claims; "There is no political content in my painting, music or poetry," instead arguing that the subjects of his paintings are "broad, mystical ones based upon Jungian archetypes."
While he admits to maintaining an "ongoing close friendship with David Myatt", Moult closed our exchange with an insistent renunciation of the O9A: "I utterly condemn, reject and denounce any individual or organisation - INCLUDING THE ONA/O9A - which glorifies and/or encourages acts of suffering and destruction."
This is the first time Moult has explicitly and publicly rejected the order. Perhaps he does genuinely regret his past and believes, sincerely, that the activities he promoted and advocated were wrong. Although his history of deception doesn't do him any favours, we can only take him at his word.
Moult's musical collaborators certainly believed him the first time he renounced the O9A. David Colohan of United Bible Studies claims that when Moult began working with the band in 2008, "in conversations with several members of UBS Richard intimated that he had severed links with and ceased participating in both the ONA specifically and far right politics generally, and that he essentially regretted his involvement in those organisations as the mistakes of a younger and much more foolish man."
Moult (right) with United Bible Studies
Rebuffing accusations that he might have enjoyed the edginess that Moult's presence brought to his band, which presents itself as within the sinister folk tradition, Colohan continues: "The far right is morally, spiritually and intellectually repugnant, and anyone who actively participates in or supports far right groups or movements is not someone the members of United Bible Studies wish to be associated with." When Colohan learned last year that Moult had deceived UBS and was, at some level still involved with the ONA, "it was mutually decided that Richard would no longer work with United Bible Studies".
Similarly, Fort Evil Fruit, one of the labels under which Moult released material, removed his releases once they were made aware of his beliefs and the true nature of the ONA. Upon seeing the circulated PDF, Paul Condon who runs the label claims he "didn't want to deal with anything with far right connections". As well as dropping Moult and removing his work from the label's Bandcamp page, Condon removed the work of his collaborator, the West Country musician known as 'Michael Morthwork'.
Michael Morthwork, MMP Temple image, removed from (not by) Facebook
For a man who has supposedly left the world of Nazi-Satanism behind, Moult keeps some surprising company. As recently as September 2017 he collaborated with 'Morthwork' on a cassette album of eerie pastoral guitar music, The Man Whom The Trees Loved (named after the 1912 novella by Algernon Blackwood). 'Morthwork' runs the label MMP Temple and, perhaps emboldened by his anonymity, is explicit about his ties to O9A and affiliate National Socialist organisations like The Black Order.
MMP Temple's Bandcamp page also contained releases credited to the Order of Nine Angles, many of which featured artwork and compositions by Moult, as well as Morthwork's own music: scratchy Black Metal and sinister O9A chants released under his 'Hammemit' and 'Deverills Nexion' monikers (a Nexion is a regional O9A cell).
Following my approach for an interview, MMP Temple took down both their Bandcamp and Facebook pages – the latter containing images (see below) of desecrated human remains, including a rotting human head (grave robbing is an offence under the 1984 Anatomy Act), swastikas, and images celebrating other neo-Nazi groups including The Black Order (referred to as "comrades"):
MMP Temple image, removed from (not by) Facebook
MMP Temple image, removed from (not by) Facebook
MMP Temple image, removed from (not by) Facebook
Explaining his decision when asked for this article, Morthwork told me: "It is inevitable that in the wake of such an article as yours, some self-declared guardian of morality will make it their business to have our Facebook page reported and shut down, we therefore deny them the satisfaction of having done so. A social media presence or indeed any related internet page is of no great importance to us in any case."
In keeping with O9A doctrine, Morthwork also sought to distance himself from the "so-called alt-right," whose politics he described as "meaningless abstraction"; "call us neo-Nazis if you will, but do not make assumptions otherwise about our motives or alignments… All hail darkness and evil!"
Morthwork himself was, and still is, an active member of the Order, maintaining his Deverills Nexion (the Deverills are a collection of villages in West Wiltshire) and contributing to the O9A journal Fenrir, which for a while appeared in a glossy print edition, as well as online PDFs. Fenrir features Dreccian fiction and artwork and interviews with the likes of Moult and hero of National Socialist Black Metal, Varg Vikernes. Collaborating with Morthwork would not appear to be the actions of a man trying to distance himself from the O9A…
Towards The Galactic Reich
As we move toward the beginning of our new sinister Aeon with the emergence of sinister tribes in place of nation-States – that we are beginning to shed the term satanism and instead describe ourselves as sinister, as Dreccian, as Dark Warriors of The Sinister Way, as assassins of Baphomet, as the sorcerers, and the warriors, of Vindex; among other terms." (O9A Questions, 2016)
In occult circles, the O9A was once jokingly referred to as 'The Order of No Members,' since for many years its membership appeared to be limited to Myatt and Moult. This is no longer the case. The twenty-first-century O9A is made up of a global network of loosely-affiliated 'nexions', united by their ultimate goal to overthrow Magian democratic society. O9A Nexions now operate locally and independently, recruiting via online occult and fascist messageboards, while new sacred texts are regularly added to the corpus. The Order is also making inroads into the global black metal scene, with a number of musicians and labels drawing on its own substantial legacy, imagery, terminology and mythology – most of it originating in texts written by David Myatt in the 1980s – to bolster their own sinister 'authenticity'.
In May 2018 LA Weekly reviewed a gig by 'Hvile I Kaos,' a Californian "black metal chamber music" group. The band's leader, 26-year-old Kakaphonix, discussed how he drew spiritual insight and inspiration from O9A, while the band's music is released via the Deathwave Nexion label, a US vehicle for O9A-related music, some of which proudly features cover art by Richard Moult. Hvile I Kaos themselves made this Facebook statement about their beliefs on 7th November, which are in line with aspects of O9A's vision of ubermensch, if not that of the White Nationalists amongst the Order: "The Western Aeon is at an end, and attempting to preserve its trappings and hierarchies is ultimately futile. The race of the future is not white, black, brown, yellow, or red. ALL must be replaced with an archetype more majestic and terrifying than anything the failed human race has birthed thus far."
While praising their chamber-music take on black metal, the LA Weekly piece makes no mention of the O9A's wider fascist agenda – presumably the work of hurried newspaper music journalists and editors having neither the time, nor the disposition, to dig deeper into their hip new discovery. Whether by accident or design, the result is the same – the O9A is now getting mentioned, without comment, in the arts pages of one of America's best-known publications.
In July 2018, on the hugely popular Folk Horror Revival Facebook Group, Marc O'Connor posted 'River Redlake', a track by 'The Order of The Nine Angles' (written and performed by Christos Beest, aka Richard Moult) and hosted on Morthwork's MMP Temple Bandcamp page (now closed).
He also recommended giving Morthwork's musical project Deverill's Nexion a listen. O'Connor's own Facebook page displays the Algiz rune within a laurel wreath, the symbol of National Alliance, an American Neo-Nazi group. This social media sharing builds pathways between the blossoming Folk Horror movement which, like the wider folkloric and pagan scenes, implicitly contains the potential for retrogressive, traditionalist and nationalistic readings, and the O9A's own fascistic, sinister mythos.
These instances represent entryism in action – the process of infiltrating existing communities or cultures, especially fringe groups and subcultures, to propagate your ideas. Every aesthetic expression of the Order of the Nine Angles – every text, every image, and every piece of music – is propaganda for the Order and its associates, and with it comes the potential for recruiting new members.
Far right groups have long attempted to make headway into other outsider or underground scenes – particularly punk, noise, black metal and neo-folk music or heathen strands of paganism – it's now almost impossible to differentiate a white nationalist's use of runic symbols from those of a peace-loving heathen. The next stage of development following such an infiltration is the normalisation of extreme ideas and memes within the targeted subculture followed by, as we are now seeing all around the world, the normalisation and acceptance of once unacceptable ideas within mainstream political discourse. The slow-burning far right infiltration of the online geek cultures surrounding the 4chan message boards over the past decade proved instrumental in the evolution of the American alt-right and, ultimately, the election of Donald Trump.
While the superior, space-faring O9A like to distance themselves from ordinary fascist groups, their call to "cull the mundanes" is essentially the same as the 4channer drive to "kill all normies"; but we shouldn't let their inherent absurdities undermine the seriousness with which we treat them. As Robert Evans noted in a recent Bellingcat article: "one of the more frustrating elements about covering the fascist right is that much of what they say sounds ridiculous and makes them appear less than serious. This is why it is important to remember that these groups have a body count and represent a real threat. Their absurdity does not negate their danger."
We are as we are, representing as we do a specific new type, a new breed, of human being, a specific new and expanding tribal family of human beings. (O9A 'Fenrir' magazine, 2010)
The O9A is now an institution with a literature and mythology to rival Scientology, and has far outgrown Moult and Myatt's original vision, and their ability, or desire, to manage it. It's unsettling to say it, but it is also an institution whose time is now – as autocrats, oligarchs and dictators seize power around the world, Myatt must be hoping that he may yet live to see the collapse of Western democracy.
Myatt, and Richard Moult after him, opened themselves up to the darkest forces that they could envisage. If we are generous we could view Moult as simply a vessel – an occult seeker deceived and exploited by the O9A's chief architect, David Myatt, to further his lifelong aim of destroying Judeo-Christian culture. Indeed Myatt has stated in the past that his occult groups were simply a means to propagate his political ideas: "my occult involvement, such as it was in the 1970's (sic) and later, was for the singular purpose of subversion and infiltration in the cause of National-Socialism".
But it's hard to take anything Myatt says at face value, so successfully has he enshrouded himself in self-contradictory disinformation – something he has mythologised as the Order's 'Labyrinthos Mythologicus'. Moult, meanwhile, may genuinely regret the actions of his past, but between them, he and Myatt have opened Pandora's Box, and created a global, leaderless collective whose presence is now far more threatening than one could have foreseen in the ONA's formative years.
The question remains: what can we, as music fans and music makers, do about organisations like the Order of Nine Angles? As I hope this article makes clear, the first thing to do it to inform ourselves of their goals and their history. The next, unless you want to become one of them, is to reject them outright. By welcoming the music of Moult, Morthwork, Hvile I Kaos or any other O9A bands into your culture or scene, you welcome their poison, and their four-decade-long legacy of hate, with it.
You may argue that the music in itself is harmless, that there is no explicit O9A, crypto-facist message within it, but that is exactly the point – their music creates an intriguing and seemingly authentic 'sinister' atmosphere: a lure that will encourage some listeners to explore further. Most will probably be repelled – or simply puzzled – by what they find when exposed to the O9A's 'Labyrinthos Mythologicus'; but a handful won't be.
And even a single new member for a group that incites its followers to kill, rape and hate the rest of us, is one member too many.
Follow ups on this piece.
Richard Moult declared that:
There is no political content in my work, nor in that resulting from collaborations. I hold no political views save that of championing individual freedoms, as long as those freedoms do not seek to cause suffering to others – with these “others” also including all the non-human life forms we share this planet with…
While we accept his statement, we also still believe that Moult is either naive or disingenuous if he thinks that collaborating with the likes of Michael Morthwork is compatible with his sentiment. Little has been heard of Morthwork since he removed his internet presence, though we are aware that the local police have taken an interest in his activities.
After initially attempting to defend his involvement with the Order of Nine Angles, Christopher Edward Brown, aka Kakophonix of Hvile I Kaos formally disengaged from the group:
In light of recent circumstances, public and private, I am taking this opportunity to announce my departure from the Order of Nine Angles. This decision comes not only due to the recent media scrutiny, but also from a place of honest self-evaluation, as well as some needed consultation from those closest to me. In short, my continued involvement with the O9A praxis is no longer compatible with the artistic and spiritual goals that propel me, and Hvile I Kaos, forward.
The band have gigs planned for this year and we wish them well with their lives and their music.
In the article's wake Deathwave Nexion the O9A label behind Hvile I Kaos, Nameless Theirein, Serpent ov Old and publisher and promoter of other O9A-related materials, closed down without explanation, removing all its websites and social media presence.
The Order of Nine Angles and its supporters rolled out its usual line, that the O9A’s philosophy is anarchist rather than fascist, that Myatt’s path of pathei mathos allows O9A’s followers to judge their actions based upon their own ethical and moral codes. We encourage readers to decide for themselves what the O9A and its many affiliates represent. A reminder of the Order's true face came in an online post incorporating a not so subtle threat of violence against us (later edited out):
Would some zealous person associating themselves with the O9A – having reached the stage of External Adept on the O9A Seven Fold Way – therefore consider someone such as “D” as a suitable opfer? Is that one of the reasons why “D” chose to write their tendentious anti-O9A article using a pseudonym? Or perhaps “D” feared some zealous, O9A-alinged, neo-nazis might do violence to D and/or to D’s family?
As if to reinforce this point, just days after our piece was published, the BBC reported that Andrew Dymock, 21, and Oskar Dunn-Koczorowki, 17, leading members of Sonnenkrieg Division, a British offshoot of National Action with strong ties to Atomwaffen Division and the O9A, were arrested and charged with terrorist offences after distributing memes suggesting that Prince Harry should be shot as a race traitor.
Black Sky Thinking
Why We're Investigating Extreme Politics in Underground Music
Why We're Investigating Extreme Politics in Underground Music
Dylan Miller , November 26th, 2018
With the far right in ascendence across the globe, there's never been a more necessary time to investigate fascist and racist infiltration, current and historical, into the underground culture we love. In an introductory essay to a new Quietus series, Dylan Miller explains why we're doing it
For over 10 years now this website has championed underground music, art and culture which seeks to challenge its audience, provoke thought and subvert mainstream ideas. Part of our purpose is to celebrate artists who have left a unique stamp on the world through uncompromising vision and determination, artists like The Fall, Sunn O))), Coil, Throbbing Gristle, Current 93, Nurse With Wound, Gnaw Their Tongues, Dragged Into Sunlight, Death Grips, Fat White Family and The Body. Whilst sonically dissimilar, all these bands share a disregard for convention and a sincere desire to push artistic and intellectual boundaries.
Artistic transgression and subversion are vital elements of any socially progressive culture, but mindlessly pushing against the boundaries of what is considered acceptable, artistically, politically, or socially, is not necessarily progress.
In his excellent book England’s Hidden Reverse (2015), David Keenan argues: “to take morality so seriously you have to pick it apart yourself in order to rebuild it in the face of the truth of existence, in all its horror and beauty, is intensely moral”. To push limits of expression in such a way that boundaries are questioned and moral lines are overstepped (either intentionally or by sheer accident and experimentation) is a moral endeavour. But, through this process of picking apart the fabric of morality, the more positive and vital elements of our communities may, if we are not vigilant, be exposed to the threat of entryism – infiltration and appropriation – by those whose motives and beliefs are regressive and altogether more sinister.
Underground culture has frequently utilised the aesthetics and imagery of fascist or extremist ideologies as a means to subvert, satirise or mirror social, cultural and political trends. In the immediate post-war period we witnessed this in the biker gangs of the 50s, who openly flaunted swastikas and iron crosses brought home from WWII by their fathers, wearing them as an act of generational rebellion and, perhaps, twisted patriotism. They simultaneously celebrated the Allied victory over the Nazis whilst shocking the ‘straight,’ law-abiding citizens they sought to differentiate themselves from, and challenging the dour post-war values they sought to liberate themselves from.
Gradually – culture moved slowly in those days – these underground, potentially dangerous acts of social defiance manifested themselves in the new pop culture. Many have interpreted the wave David Bowie made outside Victoria Station on returning from Sweden in 1976 as a Nazi salute, while his coke-fuelled fascination with fascism rose to the surface on that year’s Station To Station, a record peppered with references to Nietzsche and the occultist Aleister Crowley. “I believe Britain could benefit from a Fascist leader. After all, Fascism is really nationalism” Bowie told a journalist that year, while musing to another that Hitler was “one of the first rock stars”. Bowie, to his credit, was publicly contrite the following year: “I have made my two or three glib, theatrical observations on English society and the only thing I can now counter with is to state that I am NOT a fascist.”
At that point, racism was part of mainstream culture. Later in 1976, Eric Clapton drunkenly declared his support for anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell to an audience in Birmingham, who probably wanted to hear him yell “Laaaaylaaaaa”, rather than “get the foreigners out, get the wogs out, get the coons out" and "keep Britain white". That year, a shit one for Britain, which was plunging fast into and social and economic doldrums, saw a surge of support for the Far Right, in the shape of the National Front, and the formation of Rock Against Racism as a response from the musical underground.
But not everyone got the message. High street punks, following the lead of Siouxsie Sioux and Sid Vicious, adopted the Nazi swastika as a symbolic rejection of the suburban society they wanted no part of. In Manchester, Joy Division’s Hitler Youth stylings and references to Rudolph Hess – not to mention the fact they were named after a concentration camp brothel from the novel House Of Dolls – can, perhaps generously, be read as clumsy, yet powerful attempts to find beauty in the macabre and to hold a mirror up to Britain’s own psychic ills. In London, Throbbing Gristle brought extreme performance art to the music scene and invented “industrial” music, creating the blueprint for four decades, and counting, of electronic noise outfits. TG’s logo cleverly merged Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists lightning bolt with Bowie’s glam fash-flash from the cover of 1973’s Aladdin Sane. TG called their Martello Street studio the Death Factory, an overt reference to the Nazis’ wartime death camps and titled tracks ‘Zyklon B Zombie’ (a reference to the gas used to exterminate their victims) and ‘Subhuman’. Initially oblique, the reasoning behind their extreme references were gradually made explicit: an attempt to expose the hypocrisies of politicians and the conservative media, and to draw parallels between the mundane brutalities of day-to-day life and the horrors that mankind so often inflicts upon itself.
Following in TG’s wake came a grimly-determined race to the bottom, as the early 1980s experimental noise scene entirely blurred, or perhaps simply erased, the lines between provocative art and outright political incitement. Whitehouse, Sutcliffe Jugend, Death in June and others sought to out-outrage audiences, and each other, with visual and lyrical preoccupations with far right politics, serial killers, rape and sadism. The deliberate obfuscation of motive was a standard technique for generating mystique amongst many of these groups – did they really want to move in with the Moors Murderers and bring about a new Holocaust, or did they just like shouting about it? Many of these early noiseboys, now older and perhaps wiser, put it down to youthful indiscretion; some have chosen to maintain their tired mystique, while others remain defiantly unapologetic.
In America Boyd Rice, aka American noise artist Non, still supported by Mute Records, has spoken publicly about amongst other things, his Social Darwinism, his misogyny and his unusual beliefs about rape and, over four decades, surrounded himself with a wretched pantheon that includes Tom Metzger (leader of US neo-Nazi organisation White Aryan Resistance), Bob Heick (founder of American Front, another White Nationalist order), Charles Manson (whom he visited in prison on a number of occasions) and Michael Moynihan, of neo-folk/martial band Blood Axis, himself for many years an intellectual influencer for America’s new right.
In Europe, cryptic references to the ‘metapolitical’ fascism of European New Right ideologues like Julius Evola, Alan de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin are de rigeur for the neo-folk/martial post industrial music popularised by Death in June, whose only core member Douglas Pearce is, shall we say, unguarded in his vituperation of racial diversity and multiculturalism – greatest hits include “The West’s liberalism will be its death” and “Britain imported millions of unskilled labourers from the colonies for that kind of work and look what a huge success that was”. Former DIJ member Tony Wakeford was at one time a British National Front activist (though he recanted his racist past in 2007), while his follow up groups Above the Ruins and Sol Invictus have included members – like Gary Smith and Ian Read – with direct links to right-wing extremism. It’s hardly surprising then that convicted National Action activist Claudia Patatas should be seen photographed, a beaming fan, alongside Pearce, or that a member of the murderous American neo-nazi organisation Atomwaffen Division, is seen sporting a striking Death In June totenkopf T Shirt.
In Scandinavia during the early 1990s, young Black Metallers prioritised the visceral impact of their look and their music over intellectual considerations. And, within the largely equal-opportunities misanthropy central to the ethos of the scene, a vein of explicitly National Socialist Black Metal emerged. Its poster boy was, and still is, Varg Vikernes of Burzum, whose beliefs that “true Norwegian culture” was being eroded by Judeo-Christian values were backed up with a series of notorious church burnings. Having served 14 years for the murder of Mayhem guitarist Euronymous, Vikernes now lives in France, spreading far right propaganda via his ‘Thulean Perspective’ YouTube channel. Countless National Socialist black metal bands have since sprung up across the globe, and as with the noise and neofolk scenes before it, it’s perhaps no surprise that fans of a musical aesthetic which thrives on darkness, misanthropy and sonic brutality, should be drawn to the outer edges of politics and occultism. Membership of organisations like the crypto-nazi-satanic Order Of Nine Angles have grown dramatically as a result.
The latter’s infiltration of the UK underground music will be the the subject of the first in an irregular series of features examining the ways in which extremist political ideas have entered (predominantly) underground music cultures. Looking at bands, albums, labels and movements the articles will attempt to understand, and present clearly, the motives of the players involved, the ideologies they address, the historical contexts within which they were formed and the problems that they may raise today.
We hope to discover why some people think it acceptable to wear a Burzum or Death in June t-shirt in public, when they would never dream of wearing of wearing the slogans of a White Nationalist organisation, or a far right political party; and we hope to understand why it might have been OK for Siouxsie Sioux to wear a swastika armband in 1976, but Christine and the Queens probably wouldn’t get away with it now (nor, presumably, would she want to).
Fear not, this isn’t the birth of a new, conservative era for the Quietus. We aren’t going to fall into the kneejerk-triggered traps that state that artists should be held responsible for the actions of their fans, or that participation in ‘negative’, misanthropic music scenes leads one to acts of violence. Real world atrocities are the result of a multitude of inter-related social, economic and psychological factors – culture can, of course, play a part in shaping and influencing events, normalising certain destructive attitudes and beliefs for example, but we know from years of experience that listening to heavy metal won’t make you a satanic murderer, that listening to Marilyn Manson didn’t cause the Columbine school shootings, and that rap, grime and drill aren’t the cause of gang violence.
But, what (if any) responsibility do we have to police our musical and cultural scenes? What responsibility do artists have to police their fanbase? Are an artist's personality defects, behavioural flaws or political beliefs reason enough not to at least explore their work?
There is an argument to be made that music scenes and artistic communities are self-policing, that the majority of small underground and experimental scenes are populated by reasonable people, that arseholes are usually pushed out simply because nobody wants to be around them. Following this logic, any attempts at political entryism by, say, a far right element would simply be excluded or ignored. Sadly, however, history has shown that this is an idealised, romantic vision of the cultural underground and arseholes, especially arseholes with bands or a following, are always amongst us, along with the same bigotry and ignorance that exist in the wider world.
Our task is not an easy one. At a time when the notion of objective truth is regularly called into question and the Orwellian practice of ‘doublethink’ is becoming an everyday reality, separating ‘difficult’ or ‘provocative’ art from genuinely anti-democratic far right sentiments becomes an increasingly difficult task. The xenophobic rhetoric of the far right filters down into the underground just as ideas emerging from the underground influence mainstream politics and culture.
Boyd Rice and Douglas Pearce might be brushed off as hipster pranksters using confrontational, dadaist or situationist methods to achieve their artistic ends, in part because underground culture audiences – who are, predominantly, good people – find it hard to accept that people like them mingle with people like us. The same blend of ignorance and denial means wearing a Burzum or Death In June T-shirt can be considered a harmless, edgier-than-thou exercise in naughty provocation, rather than the end result of an exchange that involves paying economic and cultural capital to people who would likely do many of us harm if so empowered.
The times have changed. Playing into the myth of harmless artistic provocation in the name of cultural libertarianism is simply feeding a beast that would remove many of our own personal, social and cultural freedoms. As music fans and supporters of underground cultures in all their raging complexity and beautiful diversity, we have a duty, and an imperative, to question, reappraise and, where necessary, hold to account, the artists who we listen to and support.