The black metal that attracts me most is ambiguous black metal - black metal where you are never sure where you stand with regard to the transgressive fantasies of its creators. So I have always been drawn to the Meads of Asphodel who play around with the twisted interconnections between jihad, early Christianity and the occult. I just found out that there next release will be called 'The Murder of Jesus the Jew' which will take the band ever closer to some truly dangerous and antisemitic fantasies. They aren't NSBM - like most other smart black metal bands, they prefer to revel in voluptuous fantasies of hatred rather than permanently fixing their sites on any one category of persons - but you can easily see how they might be construed as one. Their record label has the following statement from Metatron from the Meads:
‘NSBM, has obvious grievances towards the Jews, hence its fascist Nazi imagery and stark one dimensional theology. Most NSBM owes much to cultural independence rather than blatant anti Semitism, but this very real and for most, disturbing genre is not necessarily [although by nature] aligned directly to the all consuming aura of Hitler.
Anti-Semitism at its root form is rooted to the early Roman Church, itself an extension of the Roman Empire, both subversive institutions of conversion by persuasion. The Romans levelled Jerusalem in 70BC, killing around a million Jews from a population of three million. With the Roman Empire in decline, its transformation into the Holy Roman Empire through the adopted Judaic cult of Jesus [eventually stripped of all its Judaism] was the next crucial factor in our perceptions of anti-Semitism today. The growth of early Christianity depended on its sellable nature to a Pagan Roman Audience; hence the blame for their Gods death [Jesus] could not be pointed towards a Roman [Pontius Pilate]. The blame was therefore placed firmly on the Jews, and Anti-Semitism was truly born. The Christian religion, already based on debatable foundations grew at an astonishing rate, consuming half the globe, and dragging its dark anti-Semitic guilt with it. The Jews were bundled in groups and ghettos throughout Europe, their main source of survival money lending and their drive to succeed gained wealth and business attributes worldwide. This was the bane of German Fascism, a twisted excuse to drag a nation into the bowels of war.
The whole Jewish question during Hitler's reign is one of the Holocaust, indiscriminate extermination, and calculated cruelty. The systematic destruction of a race had no name at the time, so one was invented for it, Genocide. Whether you accept History's stark truth of gas chambers and deliberate mass murder, or take the revisionist view, [that it never occurred] is neither there nor there. What is important is the freedom to discus without prejudice individual views, and NSBM is a medium for a minority to express those views. It is your choice whether to listen ,but to silence this view is to become the very beast you attempt to muzzle.
This is a classic example of ambiguous black metal discourse: on the one hand it scorns antisemitism as a lunatic Christian invention, on the other hand it rejects suppression of NSBM in the name of free speach. This is where black metal's frisson lies, in never turnin away from evil but never wholeheartedly embracing it either. I can live with this - sometimes only just - but you can see how in the wrong hands this is mighty dangerous stuff.
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