We find ourselves at one of those terrifying and exciting points in history, like standing on the narrow point of a mountain ledge and feeling the cold northern breeze. The old system has failed; we are going to change to something new, although most are still kicking their feet in a tantrum of protest at the threat of change. This opens up new spaces and possibilities.

The old system brought us prosperity but then began to follow the sad arc of all democracies, and since the French Revolution in 1789, the major change to the West has been democracy. No, it was not capitalism, which is merely an economic servant, nor technology, although both aided democracy in surviving this long.

Signs of decline stare at us everywhere as they have for at least fifty years, longer if you are a more sensitive or more analytical thinker. People are existentially miserable, meaning that they doubt that they are spending their time in such a way that they will have good lives. Democracy makes them atomized, or independent little nations of themselves alone, working for self-interest and yet beholden to the rest of the group because egalitarianism — the philosophical theory behind democracy — demands that we make all people equal, which requires vast entitlements programs. These programs have made all first world nations broke and in debt, at the same time that they have failed to fix any major problems and have brought about new problems, including the social disunity and lack of standards wrought by diversity, the ecological destruction of overbuilding and big cities, the lack of belief in life brought on by the loss of customs including faith, and the endless dumbing-down caused by caste warfare in which the proles and their lowest common denominator standard are always victorious.

In short, we are living in Hell. Everything that we are told is evil, and much of what we are reminded daily is evil is in fact not just good, but realistic. Morality and natural selection converge on the idea that results matter more than intentions, biology trumps ideology, and we need to think in terms of a larger order than the self or we end up marooned in neurosis, unable to form bonds, isolated, alienated, and most of all, bored.

As the only actual rebellion coming from within modern society, namely because it was an awakening by people who had prospects that even a good middle class life was not enough, heavy metal also brought in a plan, albeit in artistic form: embrace the darkness because if we look at the structure of our world, as opposed to its texture in terms of what scares us or does not, we can see that darkness serves a role, much as it does in natural selection and morality. Some bunnies are not going home tonight, and will be eaten, but the removal of the slower, dumber, and more oblivious (really, narcissistic) bunnies means that bunnies as a whole are stronger and better. Some people are born to sweet delight, but others are just born incompetent, criminal, defective, stupid, evil, vile, parasitic, retarded, or lazy, and when their corpses tumble into a mass grave, all of us are healthier, and the next generation will be healthier too. Egalitarianism hates this because it wants to rope us together into one big pacifistic happy, something that individuals like because it means that they are “safe,” and that gives power to whoever becomes the airbender that manipulates that herd.

Heavy metal looked at death, war, horror, violence, emptiness, distortion, and ugliness and in them saw a sense of hope, in that through “destruction of the empty spaces” (which are filled with modern garbage) we can find new spaces. It is better to have a few things that are real, than many which are irrelevant or hypothetical, and so metal embraced ultimate truths, like the combat in nature or the need for power and dominance in human affairs. In doing so, it presaged everything from the European New Right to the Men’s Rights Movement, embraced Darwinism unlike any other popular genre, and saw past the façade of modernity into the snarling, uncivilized core of humanity that is logically correct because it adheres to natural law instead of human intentions.

Black metal took this a step further and assembled all of what humanity feared and made sense of it. The wolves of winter, an ancestral memory which still makes us shudder, became the gentle force that kept us strong by carrying off the weak, diseased, and stupid. Satan — who laughs as you eternally rot — became an icon of power, blamed by the mentally feeble for their own greedy failings, and hailed by those who recognize the iron law that the more intelligent must bash down the lesser and subjugate them. National Socialism, a feared symbol in Europe because it was the last thing to challenge our liberal democratic hegemony, became a source of pride in European-ness and a desire to assert that Europe must go its own way and separate from the genetic Other in non-European races and even mixed European ethnic groups like Southern, Eastern, and Irish Europeans as well as the victimized Jews. Masculinity, feared because it meant conflict, was embraced along with aggression, militancy, and of course, an elitist hierarchical intolerance for the lesser, no matter how “well-intentioned” it was. Christianity, seen as the tamer of Europeans from wild barbarians into docile glasses-wearing people with cubicle jobs who worked to pay taxes to support the third world populations with aid, welfare, and Ebola care centers, was instead seen through a Nietzschean light as the weakness which had toppled Western Europe from its position of leadership and made it into a vassal state of international finance.

This shocked the world at the time, but survived because black metal was entirely off the radar until it has already expended its creative juice, probably sometime around 1994 or so. At least, very little black metal that is truly great has come out since then, and most of what has emerged is like the hardcore punk of the late 1980s, imitations of past greats recombined into a unique style without any inner content. In other words, black metal emerged because it was the right voice for an idea, but when the idea was gone, people were just churning through technique and imagery in increasingly bizarre and energyless combinations. However, it still manages to shock the herd.

As the world realigns into those who like the past liberal democratic order, and those who recognize that it has failed and we are heading toward what has worked in every era of history instead, those who are going to lose are fighting back by trying to demonize black metal with the usual squealing outrage (non-paywall) at its rejection of political correctness and the egalitarian agenda and narrative:

The Times was tipped off by a Los Angeles musician who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from hate groups.

Earlier this year, he tried to promote a concert featuring his hardcore punk group and a black metal band on Facebook. When he typed “black metal” into Facebook’s ad portal, he said he was disturbed to discover that the company suggested he also pay to target users interested in “National Socialist black metal” — a potential audience numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

The punk and metal music scenes, and black metal in particular, have a long grappled with white supremacist undercurrents. Black metal grew out of the early Norwegian metal scene, which saw prominent members convicted of burning down churches, murdering fellow musicians and plotting bombings. Some bands and their fans have since combined anti-Semitism, neo-paganism, and the promotion of violence into the distinct subgenre of National Socialist black metal, which the Southern Poverty Law Center described as a dangerous white supremacist recruiting tool nearly 20 years ago.

This shows us the success of black metal: not only has it become associated with the philosophies which it re-framed into its formula of natural selection plus traditional European morality and a transcendental idealism that saw the world as a living organism and not merely material for us to equally manipulate, but it is now a category for marketers. Enough people understand what it is on about for the sightless fumbling mechanisms of consumerism to want to pander to us, since we are no longer afraid and hiding in the underground, but showing up in the real world to demand that the failing system of liberal democracy be cast aside and replaced with feral realism of the black metal nature, although we tend to voice it as Old Right, New Right, Alt Right, or even Ult Right beliefs.

To combat, this, the propaganda machine has cranked up, and when we distill all of its components to their essential nature, we arrive at the notion that black metal is bad because it does not include everyone as equals in a vast herd. That is all. When you look at that, the only reasonable reaction is a shrug, since of course black metal does not endorse the herd; it is like nature, prone to create hierarchies and reward the strong, instead of consuming the strong in order to feed the weak as human society does.

In order to saturate the herd in propaganda, the egalitarians have done what they traditionally do, which is create a fake version of black metal that bleats repeating their message of equality, then force us to include it in what we consider “black metal,” and finally, make its message become the core of black metal. If you leave it up to them, in twenty years black metal will be seen as a movement to create equality through Satanism. That is simply the nature of the egalitarian response in which we are all trained from birth, and it would destroy the fundamental atavistic nature of black metal.

Naturally, they write nagging articles about the “Nazi problem” (like the “Jewish problem” for Nazis… oh wait, that is not very sensitive) in order to cajole, berate, admonish, whine, and otherwise use passive aggression to induce us to accept their view of the world:

National Socialist black metal emerged from a darker environment, in the nineteen-nineties, that featured figures like Varg Vikernes, of the one-man band Burzum. Vikernes, who was part of a Norwegian black-metal scene whose practitioners often wore ghoulish black-and-white “corpse paint” and upside-down crucifixes, was known for burning churches. In 1993, while playing bass in the band Mayhem, he murdered the guitarist, a man known as Euronymous. That same year, Hendrik Möbus, of the German band Absurd—whose album “Asgardsrei,” from 1999, is seen as influential in the world of National Socialist black metal—took part, with two accomplices, in the murder of a high-school classmate. After violating the terms of his release from juvenile detention, Möbus fled to the United States. Before being arrested and returned to Germany to face charges, he lived for a time in a West Virginia compound belonging to the neo-Nazi leader William Pierce.

In the past few years, leftists have attempted to halt shows by metal bands whom they accuse of promoting Fascism or racism. In many cases, bands have countered that they have been mischaracterized, or that accusations are based upon past associations that have since been abandoned. In 2016, organizers of the Messe des Morts festival, in Montreal, cancelled an appearance by the Polish band Graveland after an Antifa group announced plans for a confrontational protest. The band responded on its Web site by writing, “Graveland is not NSBM!”

The announcements for the Black Flags shows, which also included performances by Racetraitor, Cloud Rat, Dawn Ray’d, and others, portrayed the rejection of far-right metal as an urgent issue, saying, in part, “The worldwide rise of violent white supremacy and fascism has put every one of us—but especially those in marginalized communities—at risk, and metal should not be allowed to become a breeding ground for right-wing extremism. . . . This festival is for those of us who reject and push back against that poison—who adhere to the mantra that ‘Metal is for everyone (except Nazis),’ and who are committed to cleaning up our own backyard.”

As could be expected, this uses the begging-the-question fallacy inherent to egalitarianism, which is framed as “if we assume the equality will bring Utopia and Utopia is the only good, this violates equality, and therefore is the opposite of good, bad.” To any red-blooded male, this kind of mealy-mouthed palaver inclines us to seize up a sword and take another trophy to add to our skull throne, but of course, in democratic egalitarian humanistic society, such things are frowned upon. However, this too shows how black metal has become important: it put its finger on the abyss yawning under our current system and the direction that we will likely go, and that scares the heck out of people.

If you have any further doubts about how quickly and forcefully we should use our one power on Earth, choice, to scream “No!” loudly at these mental rejects, consider that they are doing the same to all of civilization and have been since before 1789. They have nothing natural or organic in them, being a byproduct of civilization and its tendency to raise living standards for everyone, not just the good, and so they know only the desire to make a herd and keep adding people to it by destroying anyone who refuses to conform. They want obedient people who can be controlled so that none of them are at risk because they know they could not survive a night in the forest with nothing but a hatchet, and they know that if humanity ever implements a quality filter and starts discarding useful people, they will find themselves standing naked before a mass grave.

The enduring message of black metal — that society fears darkness, and so has banished it, but in doing so has exiled the structure of constant conflict that we need to produce real answers instead of popular ones — scares the heck out of them. Black metal showed that what They consider good is in fact evil, a slow type of evil that like entropy slowly makes everything broken down and isolated, until it all just comes to a creaking stop. They fear our endorsement of what the herd calls “evil” but in fact is necessary, namely quality control for humans and human ideas, because inside humanity there is a self-destructive instinct that in seeking “safety” produces horror, and this destroys civilizations, time and again. The various forms that egalitarianism takes — pluralism, democracy, equality, diversity, tolerance, pacifism — are simply variations of the fundamental idea that grouping people into a mob and neutering them makes the individual safe, so weak and unstable individualists (the opposite of transcendental thinkers, for whom the greatness of an idea of achievement is more important than the risk and struggle required to make it real) must coerce the rest of us into obedient conformity in order to achieve that “safety.” Black metal is the only real opposition.

You can see the dull and dreary nagging poison of the passive-aggressive utilitarians who endorse safety spreading even to innocuous areas, like the anti-racist assault on knitting:

For weeks, POC knitters have used Instagram, and specifically Instagram stories, to share their observations, tag other knitters, and conduct polls about others’ experiences with racism in the community. Hundreds of people of color have shared stories of being ignored in knitting stores, having white knitters assume they were poor or complete amateurs, or flat-out saying they didn’t think black or Asian people knit.

The backlash is “usually from white people who don’t understand why we’re ‘making it about race,’” says Mahon. “It’s generally people who either don’t think this is a problem or feel uncomfortable engaging with us. There are also POC who find this discussion uncomfortable, which I find harder to deal with. They just don’t want to rock the boat too much — but we already know where that gets us (nowhere).”

Hand-dyer and knitter Maria Tusken, who is white, posted a video on YouTube saying she spoke for the “silent majority” of knitters who didn’t think racism was a problem, that people were being “hostile … all in the name of this social justice issue.” She added that those who did were following a “one-sided belief” that was leading them to bully people who didn’t think racism was a problem.

This shows us how close we are to change. The liars are desperate because all of their plans have ended in disaster, like Merkel’s immigration or Obama’s healthcare plan. Eight billion people are too many, and pollution is piling up to kill us all from diseases of slow decay. The new world order of peace and harmony is about to erupt in many raging wars over resources and territory. People are miserable, with the good ones dying first, and the rest are now seeing that their future is one of incompetence, corruption, and other third-world style social norms. This means that the egalitarian order is over, and black metal as one of the first voices to accurately critique it has risen above the herd, glorious in its vision and dangerous in its power.

Tags: Black Metal, far-Right, national socialism, nationalism, Nazism, racism