The Underground
No Longer Exists

As metal music has further slid into an abyss of genericism and meaningless sound and fury, the bleating of "Support the Underground!" has intensified to the point where its cliche is expected as if a test of allegiance. What none will say is that the underground does not exist, and even were someone to construct it, it would no longer be relevant, as the circumstances which made "underground" metal important are long departed.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was more difficult to get one's music published than today. There were few labels, and putting out releases was expensive. A few gigantic companies controlled what most people see and hear (and still do, because only they can afford the advertising). Consequently, small underground labels popped up and tended to put out a couple CDs a year and sell them for reasonably high prices.

When one said "support the underground" back then, it meant going the extra mile to get the quality releases from these off-broadway sources. Because pressure on the underground was high, most of its releases were meaningful art even if not as slick as the major label stuff, and it was not a terrible idea to support the underground as an agenda.

The current decade is a different story entirely. First it is important to note that despite thousands of people chanting in unison how we should support the underground, it has been nearly ten years since the underground produced excellent art in any numbers. Sure, there are some good bands around, like Averse Sefira or Demoncy, but they're the exception and they are not getting the reception one could expect when the underground was vibrant and any band of high quality was immediately recognized widely.

In fact, when an outsider says that all of the current metal bands sound the same, he or she is not entirely inaccurate. The radical differences in music between bands like Emperor and Morbid Angel, or Deicide and Burzum, no longer exist; metal, like a product, has come to sound very similar because the same assumptions propel its creation. Much like in the 1970s, when stadium metal turned the entire genre into cliche, almost all of the bands today operate within the same narrow band of technique, artistic idea, song structure and aesthetic. If you miss one this week, there will be a nearly-identical one next week which will be just as good - or bad, if you're feeling realistic.

While the degree of instrumental ability and production quality has risen, the variation of metal bands from a tedious norm has declined alarmingly. There is an endless procession of bands that people talk about as "the next big thing," but it has been many years since there have been true greats: bands that express something profoundly and well so exactly that a selection of intelligent fans will find it universal.

Our problem now is abundance. Where in the 1980s, getting a CD out was so difficult that there were few bands and few labels, we now have thousands upon thousands of bands, labels, zines, websites and concert festivals. Everyone can record, and everyone does, which generates a flood of mediocre metal.

The problem with this flood isn't its quality in itself. The problem is that when there is a flood of undistinctive material, (a) anything that does not conform to the pattern is not recognized and (b) the information overload is so great than any excellent band that does rise will be ignored. In essence, the underground has replicated the errors made by gigantic record labels in the 1980s!

For this reason, those who might make excellent art are staying away from metal. They know that their chances of success are slim, and that then they will be one voice among millions, with whatever unique or personal qualities they put into the art ignored. For this reason, the fans start to look toward external traits: slick playing over profound songwriting, quality of production, technical concerns like instrumental precision, the novelty of aesthetic and/or band origin, and most of all, whether or not the band has networked socially among what we call "the underground" but is in fact a very accessible fanbase that is no different than the mainstream in how it rewards trends, group favorites, sycophants and the well-financed.

Why play in a metal band if everything excellent that you do goes unrecognized? The crowd of imitators and fools will look over your best work and nod, but they will not give it wings to rise above the others. After all, they each have their own bands and labels and zines to promote, so why defer their own success and participate in yours, even if your work is better? Social favorites dominate over quality. Consequently, the best people go elsewhere, where they can be recognized for what they do well, and where they are not doomed to being one of a crowd which, by its size, will never get anywhere.

If you start a black metal band today, and are as good as Emperor were on their demos, you will first face censure from others who fear that you will "get ahead" of their own mediocre bands without having "paid your dues," which translated into realistic terms means participation in the society of fans. Both of these factors have nothing to do with your demo, or your music.

Such a hypothetical band can expect that, once it has decided to socialize and become popular enough to be recognized, it will become flavor of the week, because there are so many bands that there is no time or energy to single out some excellent ones. Even more, the fanbase is numb to quality, and therefore will rank an excellent band on par with mediocre ones. The end result is that our hypothetical excellent band will get an equal share of the metal pie, but will never rise above that, even if its quality is far above that of all others.

This means the band members will have to content themselves with an endless series of day jobs, the praise of idiots, and a lack of recognition that means when it is all over, their excellent work will be forgotten, buried beneath a landfill of the mediocre. Any artist who is not strictly a hobbyist is going to avoid this genre, because the crowd has taken over and will not recognize quality, thus there is no way to make a name for oneself.

Interestingly, the same thing happened in hardcore music in the 1980s when it became cheap and easy to release seven-inch records. Suddenly, there were no "fans": everyone had a band, zine, label or distro. Consequently, quality went down, because no leaders were picked, and a great averaging occurred. Everyone could participate, but because there was no specialized fanbase, the farthest they got was participation, getting their share. No one great rose above and therefore, the great people stopped trying. There was no direction.

Analogous to the effects of democracy and consumerism on the quality of people in society as a whole? You bet it was. Analogy to egocentricism of the west, and its own cultural failings? You bet: the same mechanism was in effect: a lack of appreciation for quality because popularity/social pressures dictated participation, an external factor, not hierarchy, which requires a measurement of amorphous qualities such as "artistic worth" which are unrecognizable to most people in the crowd. Consequently, hardcore declined to the point where, in 1985, all the bands sounded exactly the same and there were no leaders.

The underground is dead, and if it shows signs of reviving, shoot it. It no longer has meaning and thus has become a way to sell music, a brand name even, not a distinction in quality or attitude. "Underground" metal is marketed exactly the same way mainstream music is, on a smaller scale, and while it does hard to hide this fact behind angry album covers, bad sound quality, and sociopathic topics, the lack of quality reveals what a lie its "underground" status is.

To use the occult terms, our current view of metal is exoteric: show up, participate, and you'll get your equal share. The best years of metal came about when it was esoteric, or rewarded the best among its members, and had a community in place that could tell the difference. Consider it a form of evolution. When such conditions are again in place, quality metal on a broad scale will return.

If there is something to replace the underground, it is the dissidents who choose music based on artistic quality alone. They don't care about the album covers, who the band knows, or how well its production makes it sound. They look for quality art of the poetic but aggressive nature found in early 1990s blackmetal, and when the horde of imitators stops flooding the market with crap, they stand a chance in hell of finding it - if any remains.

http://www.anus.com/metal/about/metal/underground/

Nature is a Bug-Wrecking Factory

In New York, they cannot imagine why someone would choose to live in heathen, dirty, uneducated, Republican Texas. It is simply so un-hip, unglamorous, and the shopping has nothing on fifth avenue. When, as good nihilists, we strip aside all the social pretense and morality and politics, we can see Texas as it actually is, which is a good-sized chunk of land that contains at least five distinct ecosystems, and infinite numbers of wonderfully bizarre bugs.

Specially adapted, these species occupy niches in the environment which are still unknown to science, and their shapes and colors reveal this position. Strange mandibles rise above serrated limbs, and wings come in innumerate shades of translucent color. You can wander through these woods in summer and see a new kind each day without even trying, although you will be trying to swat away the impressively bellicose mosquitoes. Each variety has its own form as inspired by what it eats and what it avoids.

There are moths that you cannot tell from tree bark until they move. Cicadas dwell underground for seventeen years, then emerge as gnarled warmachines with razorlike claws, worthy of an underground Japanese monster movie. Worms drop silently from silk enshrouded branches, and multitudinous ants move under a layer of leaves, invisible. Praying mantises like wrought iron stand immoble until their prey is exactly within striking range, and then they obliterate the present tense because suddenly their stillness is past, as is their strike; they dwell patiently in the future, eating or waiting, because their movements are too quick to be captured in current time.

There are giant beetles with pincers bigger than any limb, spiders brightly colored as if to warn enemies like children shouting into dark rooms, wasps that hover and paralyze their victims, carrying them off to become zombified food for imminent young. Not only is Texas home to millions of bugs that, once you see how their form mates to a function, are beautiful, it is also a gigantic mixed martial arts competition between bugs. Nature makes them, and out of the eggs they stream, violent and vigilant, ready for war. When they collide, one sees the strength of each design matched against an equally strong will, and that which has the advantage wins. Nature at these moments is an enormous bug-wrecking factory, as if searching through uncountable possible blueprints for the future of each type.

It is not only militant, but playful, because these bugs are without emotion when they grapple. They perform it as a function like eating, seeming to relish every moment of stalking their prey and then sucking out its innards or embalming it in strands, stabbing through its exoskeleton to inject parasitic larvae. It is a dance, when these bugs confront one another, through the detritus of the forest floor or high above on the lichen-speckled branches of ancient trees. They show no fear, or anger, but move toward it like any other fate that waits them, as if more curious to see what happens than concerned about their own mortality. They live, and die, without blinking in the stare of eternity.

This reminds me that whatever force created this universe is present in all things, as if each of us were a device driver or daemon running on a giant UNIX system, and that in its purest gaze, nature is not afraid of death because it does not die, even if its objects are destroyed and consumed. It is eternal, and whatever force engendered and sustains it grants consciousness to its bugs much as to its humans, aware that when they die, consciousness flows back into the whole and then out again to a new set of creatures. Life cannot die (barring ecocide by selfishly individualistic humans) but death is one of the colors of its palette, an unavoidable ochre to stain the canvas so that a watcher might feel an emotion in the contrast as the eye passes over form and vision, a story unfolding.

Like us, the bugs fight it out, neither creating or destroying, but preserving an eternal balance which affords consciousness avatara in which it can exist perpetually. Selfless and fearless, bugs engage in combat knowing that their deaths are meaningless, in that through the massive digital computer of nature their designs are slowly tested in architectonic millions of ways, bettering them at every increment. Through these better designs, the machine of life becomes more efficient, leaking less energy through inexact tradeoffs, and pumping life back into its origin so that life can return eternal. There is a massive spiritual peace in war and death as in a sunny day or the birth of a doe, and it is all as natural as our angers and fears and loves.

In the ancient religion of my forefathers, which some call Paganism and others Hinduism, there were many gods but all things came from the same godhead, which was like a great brooding consciousness not outside of the world but present in all of it; it does not exist outside of reality as we know it, but through its will, manifests that reality and thus comes into observable being. It does not judge, and while it makes flamboyantly specialized creatures and thrusts them into neverending war, it is creating while it destroys, and destroying in order to create. It alone is a perfect balance. When I walk in the woods and see nature's bug-wrecking factory, I am looking into the parentage of the gods and man and nature alike, and it touches my heart with appreciation for the genius of life.

SAY NO TO ECOCIDE

http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/nature/

This document is written to promote the use of infoterrorism as a means of spreading the only truly heretical philosophies in a democratic society, namely anti-democratic ones. Official forms of discourse permit only limited exposure to these ideas, but in the world of information a sheeplike audience can be divided between those who can awaken and those who need to be shocked and spurred into blind insane rage and fear. This is the goal of an infoterrorist, and he or she knows success has been achieved when discourse about forbidden topics breaks out yet again with those on the side of society as it is strident denouncement.

http://www.infoterror.com/

Finnish melodic progressive death metal with quirky but soulful solos. Mathematically impossible to decipher, it makes Dillinger Escape Plan look like the ham-fingered droids they are, and is a treat for anyone who thought Voivod should "go extreme."

MyThpace:
http://groups.myspace.com/demilich

Website:
http://www.anentity.com/demilich

Label:
http://www.morbidthoughts.net/

Cops
Or How Abusive Authority is Not Authority Itself

Most people like to see the world in two sides, x versus y, a linear equation. They would like you to believe that there's a right way, and a wrong way, universally, of doing things. They would like you to believe that some people are evil and some are good. They want you to see anyone with money as bad, and anyone without, as innocent and pure. They also want you to see any authority as oppressive, and any anti-authority as being on the side of fun, freedom, and acceptance. This is the oldest trick in the book: they're trying to lure you into Us Versus Them, and oversimplify the world, so that you can feel good about yourself for joining the "right" side.

Pay attention to both extremist and moderate propaganda. The Republicans want you to think that their position is moral, and anyone else is amoral, and thus lacks the strength to take necessary action (invading Iraq) and will cause society to degenerate. The Democrats want you to believe that those who have money will oppress all others, and that only those who embark on a pity crusade to raise up the lower are correct and moral. Both sides have some truth to them, and if you take their ideas out of linear context, there's a germ of something compatible between them: moral action must be taken, and some are against it. Because they use oversimplification, however, their platforms become blind dogma and have little relevance to the real world.

Extremists do the same thing. In the environmental movement, there are people who would like you to believe that only those who check carefully for dripping faucets, buy organic food and heat their bathrooms with solar energy are right, and everyone else is "blind" and destructive. Neo-Nazi groups preach exactly the same dogma, except their rhetoric is conservation of race. Only those who adopt a strictly racialist view of the world are right, and everyone else is part of the conspiracy. Both groups suffer for their linear outlook, in that both degenerate rapidly into bigotry. Organic buying hippies versus the mass corporate horde; if we just oppress that mass corporate horde, everyone will live comfortably with water conserving toilets and recycled maxipads. Neo-Nazis tend to preach, in a manner guaranteed to alienate all successful people from them, that if we just eliminate Jews/Negroes (Jews being Asiatic- and Negroid-hybridized Caucasians, historically speaking) everything will be okay. Us Versus Them. Good Versus Evil. Right Versus Wrong.

Life isn't designed on a single axis.

There are two problems with the Us Versus Them theory, and they are as follows: first, that a universal, single law can apply to all places - universality, because it must apply a single measurement to diverse areas, is by nature absolutist, and increasingly so as those trying to implement it become defensive. Second, that it polarizes between an Elect and a Preterite, e.g. the Us who are ordained to do what is right, and those who are destined to have it done Unto Them. In Platonic terms - and we all know that Plato's metaphor of the cave was misinterpreted as metaphysical description, in the modern belief "neo-Platonism," when it was a metaphor for the interpretation of knowledge - in the world of appearance, we see only ourselves and a world opposing us so, because of our entrenchment in the self, we tend to contrast between two extremes. What Plato was hinting out however was that we are enslaved by that perspective, and need to rise up out of the cave of our artificial knowledge and look directly at the world as it is, so that we can understand its structure, which is by definition not linear but parallel in form. Some might say this is itself a polarization, but it's not Us Versus Them but a contrast between a simplistic way of viewing the world and a more accurate one. Anyone can pick up either method, thus "Us" and "Them" are not descriptive terms.

One place this can be seen clearly is in our responses to authority. By nature, most of us are anarchistic in emotional outlook, but when it comes time to getting things done, we recognize the need for leadership. This leads to the problem of authority, because someone must not know what the plan is and tell people what to do, but must also give a firm yes or no to their actions. Therein lies one of the paradoxes to society: in order to have the freedom to enjoy what civilization grants, through specialization of labor and the corresponding efficiency of scaling, one must have some kind of authority. Leaders. Sergeants. Cops.

Authority versus Authority Abusive by Design

This concept of authority, in itself, is not abusive. In theory, authority is granted by tacit contract between citizens and the enforcers so that the enforcers can do what is right for the citizens (a group which must include the enforcers as well). When authority does what is beneficial for the citizens, only those who oppose authority are in disagreement; when authority is either abusive, or is applied universally to citizens with different needs, an abuse of authority occurs. At some point what unifies a society is agreement on what authority must do, but when that breaks down, the tendency of most leaders is to become defensive and to try to replace that consensus of authority's purpose with greater authority. The thought is that greater strength can replace citizens who have grown apart in values and, like the same principle applied to a dying romantic relationship, it makes active abusers of authority and passive abusers of those who must submit to it. It is a no-win situation.

Bill White's recent article about speeding tickets brings to mind a powerful example. Speeding tickets are a case of abusive authority because they are motivated by the wrong ideals. Local law enforcement is encouraged to use them as a means of collecting revenue, like a tax, although the original idea was that society could be divided into safe drivers versus reckless drivers. In the first days of traffic legislation, the focus of giving citations was to rack up enough negative points for bad drivers so that they could be forced off the road. Things changed. At the current time, a car is required to get to work, so instead of trying to eliminate bad drivers, the law has mutated to become a bizarre form of taxation on behavior - not the behavior of bad driving, which is open to debate, but a good old linear measurement: speed.

When we say that authority applied universally is defective, we mean in part that not all people are equal. Some can drive safely at seventy miles an hour, where others should drive at fifty or not at all; a driver can be as dangerous driving slowly, and causing traffic pile ups and thus forcing others into bad behavior, as driving quickly. But assessment of speed gives us that good Us Versus Them feeling, where those who drive within the laws are OK and those who go faster are outcasts, amoral and lawless, etc. That the cops who give the tickets are not only taking in money for their departments, but also getting personally closer to promotions and praise, turns this situation of dubious authority into one of predation: cops become predators who find those who, responding to speeding limits designed for the least competent but applied equally to those of all competences, drive faster than the official limit. There is no greater confirmation of this than the tendency of American freeways to have an average road speed of ten to fifteen miles per hour faster than the posted limit.

"In a closed society where everyone is guilty, the only crime is getting caught." - Hunter S. Thompson

When we see someone pulled over for speeding, we have initial compassion replaced almost immediately by a sense of Better Them Than Us, because we know that it's a luck of the draw that the person pulled over got caught and we didn't, since in order to function normally in this society we all speed on a regular basis. At this point, what we have is authority that is of a poor design, and thus is abusive. There are many other examples, but speeding tickets are a daily fact of life for all of us who drive anywhere, and it is small feedback loops like citizens annoyed at being taxed for what others equally escape that will contribute to change in our view of authority.

Authority versus Abuse of Authority

Being careful to separate authority itself from abuse of authority does not blind us to recognizing where authority is abused. Authority is both a power, and a responsibility, in that in the role of authority one is a servant of those over which one presides, and must do what is best for them regardless of its popularity. If it is necessary to do more work in less luxurious circumstances, it is a hard sell to the population, but that does not obviate the necessity of that transaction. We all want to hear that we can have more of what we want without much sacrifice, but life often is not compliant, which is fortunate, as to use a simple example, if we ate only desserts and not main courses, we'd be an unhealthy bunch.

Authority is abused when the person in authority acts outside of the social agreement by which the authority was bestowed, using authority instead for reasons of personal enrichment or emotional response. Probably the best example of this in recent memory is the assault on Branch Dravidians in Waco, where a popular president encouraged his forces to attack religious dissidents who also sold rifles. The excuse was that they were violent; the reality seems to be that those in authority resented people disagreeing with them, and decided to crush them, sending all of them and their children to their deaths. While the Branch Dravidians may have been a bit odd, there was no definitive proof that they were dangerous or even committing criminal acts, and in the intervening years, evidence has emerged that suggests they were set up and wholesale murdered by President Clinton and his cohorts for the crime of not going along with his vision of the world. Even if screwing around with his intern was what in theory brought him down, Clinton lost much of his popular support after he decided to incinerate his own citizens with military force. Like most career politicians, his method was to adopt popular viewpoints but his goal was raw power and personal ego-gratification.

Currently, we can witness abuse of authority in the American crusade in Iraq. At first, it was a war against terrorism; that didn't pan out, so it became a war against WMD, presumably to take out Israel's primary enemy (Israel had bombed Iraqi WMD programs before). Finally, with all else failing, it became a war for Democracy and Freedom, both of which mean nothing when they come at the expense of your native culture being replaced by cultureless Product-ism and American-style infestation of malls, fast food, etc. Iraq is at this point as neurotic as America is, since the Americans have effectively divided it against itself. Where one ethnic group ruled, now each group pulls in its own direction, dooming the country to endless civil war. Women are now polarized against men, the poor against the rich, the rural against the urban. Iraq is destroyed much as the Branch Dravidians were, and for what? Well, it's convenient that, as in Vietnam, American industry can take over and cultivate both new sources of cheap labor and new markets for mediocre products (Coca-Cola, General Motors, Microsoft). The reason for this war is less obvious, but lies within the revenge impulse of George Bush himself: he wanted to best his father, and finally beat back those who defied not only American-Israeli hegemony in the middle east, but also the American way of life and "official" religion, evangelical Christianity. Oil, democracy, WMDs, terrorism, religion are the justifications - the real reason is pure abuse of power, based in the personality of our leader much in the same way it was with Clinton. Maybe being popular forces politicians to internalize so much of their own personalities that when those elements come out, they are by nature violent and revengeful?

Authority becomes abusive when it falls into the power vacuum created by a lack of official consensus, but a powerful majority who will identify with its Us Versus Them rhetoric. Iraqis and Branch Dravidians = bad; Freedom and Democracy and Civil Rights legislation = good. The abuse of authority is enabled by a population that cannot agree on basic values and is willing to be manipulated by such demagoguery, in part from the belief that greater force will compel others to join the "right" and not "wrong" side. It is not a property of authority itself, but of authority placed into an impossible decision and the error compounded by leaders choosing to avoid the actual problem - disunity - and to emphasize force instead. The Iraq problem lies in an ancient division between Jews and Muslims, exacerbated by Christian Crusades, and cannot be solved by force alone. The Branch Dravidian problem arose because America, as a culture and shared set of values, has always been a melting pot and thus has no common ground except basic law and order and money, of course. In each of these situations, misuse of authority has simply hastened the inevitable collapse. The Iraq war came on top of announcements by al-Qaeda that America and Israel would attack Muslim lands, and immediately made prophets of al-Qaeda. The attack on the Branch Dravidians spawned greater divisions in American society and more radicalized dissidents. The only solution that misusers of authority see is greater authority, which they'll tighten until they force revolution or other extreme social breakdown. Entropy is our future.

Conclusion

Didn't this column promise to be about cops? Now that we have some understanding of the underlying problems of authority, it is easier to understand why cops are so divisive. There are two major attitudes in America, at least, toward law enforcement. The first are those who out of pure meekness and submission or practical not rocking the boat choose to support law enforcement radically; they tend to fear the lawless, the coming anarchy, and the hordes of impoverished, drug addicted, violent felons that America produces. The other group believes that cops are inherently authority abusers, and paints them all with the same wide brush as consummate bullies and oppressors. The reality of course is that cops must represent a system of law that is, as in the case of profit derived from speeding tickets, abusive by design, and, because of the paradox under which they labor or other personal factors, that some cops are authority abusers. The counterculture would like us to believe that only authority abusers join the police force, but this does not address the fact that some form of authority is needed. The other side is blind to the failings of the design of our authority and the situations in which it places cops that make authority abuse easy. Authority is only as good as its design and underlying that, the will of the citizens to come together and agree on values systems.

There are plenty of good cops out there. Hardworking, they see their job in a transcendent light, which is that it's their chance for heroism on a daily basis. They look forward to placing themselves in harm's way so that they can do an act of good, usually saving the rest of us from some deviant. It was cops such as these who spoke up against the Branch Dravidian invasion and the war on drugs and other misguided, abusive ideas, and it's their counterparts in the military - who view their own roles with the same kind of respect and hope - who are currently voicing the rumblings of dissent with the Iraq war. Much as many of our citizens are either passive bullies or active forces of subjugation of others, some cops are simply screwed up people. Many are not. What makes people fear cops is the system of values behind their authority, which in its absolute and universal application of laws that do not take into account the differences between people, creates an oppressive atmosphere in which both sanctioned and unsanctioned abuse have free reign.

December 9, 2005

http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/cops/

How to be a Black Metal Fan in 2005
Don't Listen to Black Metal

Black metal as a community has grown exponentially since it emerged as a musical style in its own right in the early 1990s. Like a new civilization, it grew from a small group of innovators who were disgusted by the "jogging suit" mentality: people who were essentially products of a modern time, who blindly bleated its ideas, figuring out how to play death metal and becoming popular in the genre by making their music more like what audiences accustomed to rock music expected. In essence, the crowd had infested death metal as it had speed metal before that, and black metal was a response to this.

Recognizing that no matter how they dressed up the music as something "new," appearances could be cloned, black metal musicians decided to go where the crowd could not follow: they would write music that expressed a grandeur of nature and feral amorality, hearkening more to the values of Samurai or European knights than to the disposable ideals of modern time. Since such a topic requires music that infuses the listener with a sense of awe and beauty in the cycle of destruction and creation that renders our world, they could no longer rely on "three chords and the truth," but had to actually put the truth in the music, and write more poetic and complex songs.

"Complexity" is a difficult term here, because it can be made into aesthetic as well; almost every failed progressive rock band in the universe has done this, by adding fills and "technical" parts that contribute little to the music as a whole. "Truth" is a difficult term because Ani DiFranco thinks she has truth and that it's in her lyrics, which she puts over entirely forgettable lyrics - don't mention to her that, to a philosopher, the ideals she espouses are no different than what George Bush rants about in his spacy speeches.

Black metal took a new direction and put the truth into the music, independent of lyrics, making sweeping mini-symphonies which covered a range of emotions and brought the listener from alienation to a unity with nature. An alert reader might note that almost all poetry does the same, by finding mundane details and abstracting them to higher principles, then translating them into an experience which narrates the reader from an initial position to a sense of having learned something and, more importantly, having learned to appreciate it. "Political" music like Ani DiFranco and Napalm Death can't do that for you.

The small civilization within civilization that was black metal was united more by ideals than by aesthetic or musical tenets, although all of its music by aiming to express the same kind of idea had similarities, mainly in its use of poetic complexity and truth within the music (and not necessarily the lyrics; you listen to black metal, and because of its intense artistry, find truth there). Because even educated and thoughtful people are brick-stupid these days, since they're surrounded by infinite voices repeating the same few ideas in many different forms, here are the basic ideas of black metal:

1. Nature as supreme order, where nature like thought is a process of evolution whereby a proliferation of ideas are filtered down by their adaptation to reality as a whole. Many potential designs start out, and those that match their surroundings the best persist.

2. Thought and ideal as more important than physicality. Like the values of knights, of Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ as well as Adolf Hitler, black metal musicians saw it as more important that a functional order geared toward higher evolution persist on earth. They cared at a distant second place how many lives were lost, or what pains were endured, and were primarily concerned that better ideas - forms of organization, designs, personal ideals - endured over the lesser ideas, generally construed as materialism and Judeo-Christian morality, in which loss of life is terrible no matter what is achieved.

3. Introspection. In black metal lore, the only meaning comes from what the individual can interpret; there are no boundaries between individuals and the world (nature) as whole, but the individual can only perceive what he or she can through natural abilities and learning from experience. Not everyone can see all of the truth; we all get it in degrees, but what is most important in black metal is the individual inspecting him or herself for internal values and finding a way to connect these to the world. It's the exact opposite of "if it feels good, do it" rhetoric from the rock-n-roll crowd and American politicians.

4. Morbidity as not only important, but essential, and a giver of meaning. Where most view death paranoiacally, and see it as a great entropy removing all value, black metal musicians viewed it as something giving meaning to life. That we die means we must find value in life (see point 3) and must do that which is rewarding not just to our physical selves, but to our unique and ephemeral souls (see point 2).

5. Nationalism. Racism is a preference for one race above all others, worldwide. Nationalism is pride in one's country, and its native ethnicity, language and culture. Nationalism is a subset of naturalism because, much as one appreciates the diversity of species on earth, one appreciates the diversity of humans and wishes to preserve that by isolating nations from one another. Some black metal musicians are racist, and others not, but all agreed that ethnic separation was necessary for the preservation of their native lands.

6. Holistic morality and spirituality. In Judeo-Christian spirituality, the center of belief is the relationship between the individual and God, and anyone can have it. In ancient faiths, the gods were impersonal and nonjudgmental, and the individual forged a path through life based on the upholding of higher ideals and understanding nature. Judeo-Christian spirituality is a product; ancient faiths are esoteric and little more than elaborate forms of philosophical learning and martial discipline. Occultist, Satanist, Hindu, Nordic and Greco-Roman mythological references abound in black metal.

To any student of European history or art, these values are not new; they are traditional to all Romantic forms of art, whether literature or visual art or symphonies, and were upheld by artists as disparate as William Wordsworth, Anton Bruckner, John Keats, Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Lord Byron and William Shakespeare. For all of these artists, nature was a higher form of order than the rules of civilization, and civilization had become decadent by praising its own "equal" order more than the "unequal" order of nature. Many philosophers, including the celebrated F.W. Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, explicated these sentiments in their own work. Black metal's ideology is nothing new.

What was new was an expression of these ideas in popular music, because rock music and blues and all of the associated disposable art has always been a manifestation of the crowd revolt mentality: simple music so that everyone in a room could get it, diametrically opposed to the grand works of classical music which were too complex and emotionally involved for a crowd to appreciate (or even to have the attention span to endure). Rock music focuses on one emotion per song, bangs it out in riff and chorus, and makes it very simple by using a relatively fixed number of scales and chord progressions. Rock music is the perfect product because it's easy to make, is appreciated by customers of all ages and not limited by intelligence, and is inoffensive on a certain level in that it has nothing to say that will disturb. The basic message of rock music is to include everyone equally, to appreciate them for being alive and not for their inherent traits, and to come together on simple human values and not higher ideals; rock is inclusivity. Black metal is not.

The "jogging suit" people who infested death metal, a genre devoted to the nihilism of recognizing that death alone is predominant so we, and not our products or warm fuzzy feelings, must define the meaning of life for our mortal selves, were an offshoot of this inclusive impulse of modern music. When death metal was new (1983-1987) it was exclusively an embrace of the light to be found at the other side of this dark tunnel, which is that when one gets over the fear of death that unites modern society, one can return to that which is more important than material comfort or popularity: ideals, nature and real experience. Where black metal was pure Romanticism, death metal was a form of scientific existentialism bonded to a brawler's resentment of those given positions because of their obsequious acceptance of the moronic logic that is popular.

When black metal emerged, it was ridiculed, mocked, hated, and excluded from popularity in metal circles. From 1990-1993, it was hard to find anyone who even thought it had artistic merit: it was simply unpopular, in part because it did not embrace the root of all popularity from movie stars to politicians to drug dealers, which is an inclusiveness that says anyone who comes in the door and appreciates a simple experience is one of the crowd, one of the in-group that then defines itself as important to civilization. After the events in Norway, involving burning churches and murders, black metal was suddenly popular because it suggested there was an "other side" and, the crowd reasoned, by buying CDs they could be part of it.

Much as civilizations are started by a brave few and later, when following generations lose their sense of ruthless struggle against disorder so that civilization can be created, degenerate into societies where popularity and luxury are more important than truth, black metal fell apart shortly after that because of the invasion of the crowd. Suddenly a band like Cradle of Filth, who are basically a bad Iron Maiden cover band playing fast heavy metal with black metal vocals, could be vastly popular and introduce hundreds of thousands of people to the new genre. And they came, expecting more bands like Cradle of Filth, and buying them, and thus drowning out the few bands of merit. If you became a black metal musician, there was no longer safe haven from the crowd, and thus you had a choice between making traditional black metal and being ignored, or making Cradle of Filth style heavy rock and getting rich. The original bands cracked under the pressure, and broke up or sold out, and the newcomers came in.

The average black metal fan today has not heard the formative works of the genre: Immortal, Emperor, Burzum, Gorgoroth, Enslaved, Darkthrone, Beherit and Varathron when they were making essential, complex, beautiful music. All they've heard are the newcomers, both of the blatantly commercial Cradle of Filth variety, and the scene whore "loud, fast and antisocial" type of band that Black Witchery represents. The newcomers are uniformly worthless, as they express nothing that rock music does not, and by giving it an extreme aesthetic, allow their fans to convince themselves that they are "part of" some movement against the dominant trend of society, even though much like Democrats and Republicans in America agree on the same core values, newcomer "black metal" repeats the same empty rhetoric that rock music has been feeding us for fifty years. Newcomer black metal is black metal only in the world of appearance; in terms of musical and artistic structure, it's closer to punk rock or even Dave Matthews Band. It's rock music.

The aesthetic of black metal is easy to clone. Put screeching vocals, midtone guitars, fast drums and heavy distortion on top of fast rock music, and it "sounds like" black metal, even if the dumbest fan can see that somehow it misses the vastness and emotional depth of Det Som Engang Var or In the Nightside Eclipse. The structure of art - its Romanticism, its poetry, its depth - eludes those who clone black metal. And, as we see in hindsight, the original black metal bands like the original death metal bands were not a natural thing, but an aberration in a steady stream of bands that have been cloning the same ideas since early rock'n'roll. Black metal and early death metal were the exception, not the rule.

What we have now is not black metal, although it calls itself "black metal," in the same way that rock music will never be a symphony even if it calls itself so. I tend to refer to the mainstream stuff like Six Feet Under or Cradle of Filth as "heavy metal," since musically it's closer to Motorhead and Led Zeppelin than death or black metal; I tend to refer to the "underground" black metal like Black Witchery or Velvet Caccoon as "black hardcore," since musically it resembles late model hardcore music with black metal aesthetics. None of this is black metal.

Ideals of black metal clones:

1. Everyone must get it. It must be simple, not challenging, and most of all not have any poetic essence to its soul, as most fans can't get that and thus will not buy it.

2. Appearance over structure. It must have a unique appearance, but say the same old things philosophically and use familiar musical ideas so that even the dumbest fans can understand it and buy it. Even more, it must be upheld as dogma truth that adding a flute or screeching spotted owl to the same old music somehow makes it "unique" and worth owning.

3. Simplistic emotions are important. Forget the depth of "Inno A Satana"; blindly praise Satan with roaring, consistent anger, because that way every fan, even the ones with Down's Syndrome, can get what it's about and get into it. Start a big singular emotion party, and make it simple so everyone can buy the CD and come along.

4. Everyone can get it. Black metal clones are not specific to a certain land or belief system, as they are essentially musically the same and are designed so that even a retarded outer space alien could "get it" and start tapping its feet and wearing Darkthrone-brand jogging suits immediately. Nationalism, even elitism, eugenics or belief in anything at all is out; what's in is having some music that sounds angry, is written like punk rock, and can be appreciated by everyone so they can buy the CDs or praise the "underground" scene queens who created it.

The problem with black metal now is that fans, out of a desire to have something contemporary, are buying and praising the mediocre music of right now and thus are diluting any distinctiveness black metal ever had, slowly turning the genre as a community and art form into the same ol' rock music. They are misinformed, or uniformed, and therefore buy the best of what they can find and try to pretend they like it, but even a crowd of uneducated fans can sense that it is empty, so they try buying more and more of it, and going for novelty factors like location or obscurity, but still cannot find the essence of black metal and what made it great. That is because quite simply it is not made anymore; a musician looking at today's black metal scene will recognize quickly that the competition is for novelty and not for quality art, and thus will take his or her skills elsewhere. Black metal is now a trend.

My suggestion to all those who love black metal is simple: stop supporting band that are OK instead of great. If that means there's no black metal that's new to listen to, then accept that like a warrior, and listen to the older stuff or branch out into different genres. Uphold black metal in spirit and not by buying mediocre products that are a cancer eating away at whatever legitimacy the genre once had. If you really care about black metal, you care more about its ideas than your own comfortable existence of buying lots of little CDs so you have something to gossip about with your little friends. To want to understand and care about black metal is to care about its spirit, not the disposable art that now dresses itself up in black metal's appearance. You might even explore other Romantic art instead. The path is clear: you either support black metal's "life" as a mediocre rock genre, or you encourage the mediocre music to die so black metal can be reborn from within, when the intangible elements such as poetry and musical quality once again predominate. Until that happens, black metal will continue to be absorbed the same generic stuff that its creators hated.

http://www.anus.com/metal/about/metal/blackmetal/

List of Nationalist Groups (December 5, 2005)
[ INFOTERROR ]

Nationalism is organic rule, meaning that it occurs by the divisions which in parallel have been created by evolution. Each population is bound to a landmass, and that population is defined by the combined factors of race/ethnicity/heritage, language, and culture.

-+-

African
http://www.blackpanther.org/
http://www.theblacknationalist.com/

American
http://www.nationalistpartyusa.com/

American Nativist
http://www.anu.org/

American Southern
http://www.southernnationalist.org/

Australian
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~natinfo/

Bangladeshi
http://www.bnpbd.com/

Brazilian
http://www.integralismo.com.br/

British
http://www.bnp.org.uk/

Chinese
http://www.kmt.org.tw/

French
http://www.frontnational.com/

German
http://www.npd.de/

Greek
http://www.hellas.org/

Indian
http://www.nazi.org/community/nations/india/
http://www.hindutva.org/
http://geocities.com/akhandbharat1947/

Indo-European
http://www.nazi.org/

Irish
http://irelandsown.net/

Japanese
http://www.nsjap.net/

Maltese
http://www.pn.org.mt/

Manx
http://www.manxman.co.im/mecvan/

Mexican
http://www.aztlan.net/

Quebecois
http://english.republiquelibre.org/

Russian
http://nationalism.org/

Scottish
http://www.snp.org/

Syrian
http://www.ssnp.com/

Tamil
http://www.tamilnation.org/

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The term "nationalism"...raises questions about the concept of nation (or national identity), which is often defined in terms of common origin, ethnicity, or cultural ties...

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nationalism/

-+-

Produced by INFOTERROR group:
http://www.infoterror.com/
infoterror@fastmail.fm

UNFAGGOT R.E.M.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QJFY1K5D

Of all the bands from the early 1980s, R.E.M. accomplished perhaps the most: defining the indie rock aesthetic, explaining the existential fears of generation X, giving a voice to folk and country music through pop. Unfortunately, they got absorbed by one of the great rock 'n' roll timewasters, which is liberal politics, at which point they began to whine like an emo band and all their songs sounded roughly the same. This compilation assembles the R.E.M. songs from before they sold out to an audience of grateful but clueless liberals, and thus had artistic integrity. It is hoped that this will prompt those who have overlooked this band because of Michael Stipe's brand-name-Democrat carryings on to instead give their early, less dogmatized work, a chance. The saga of R.E.M. illustrates the essence of art: when captive, it declines. As soon as you stop trying to communicate to your audience, and give them an experience, and start selling them a product based on the experience they say they'd like to have, you're muzak and not music. Sadly, that happened to R.E.M. in the late 1980s and it has been downhill ever since. These tracks however are timeless and should remind us all of how once great this band was.

01-Wolves Lower
02-Gardening at Night
03-Carnival of Sorts (Box Cars)
04-1,000,000
05-Stumble
06-Pilgrimage
07-Laughing
08-letter Never seNt
09-White Tornado
10-9-9
11-Shaking Through
12-Perfect Circle
13-Windout
14-(don't Go back To) ROCKVILLE
15-Rotary Ten
16-Swan Swan H
17-We Walk

Compilation created by VIJAY PROZAK (prozak@anus.com; http://www.anus.com/). Direct all whining to that address so it can be viciously ignored.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=QJFY1K5D

Why White Nationalism Fails

This article will need a disclaimer to offend all of those readers who are still unclear on the issue of race: race is heritage, and heritage is how nature passes along the important traits, and thus race is one of the more important considerations in one's life. Race is not just "white" or "black," but what tribe - what mixture of racial subgroups later shaped into something unique by geography and culture - comprises one's origin. Race is the measure of empires, and the only continuation of a people (German-speaking people of mixed-race aren't Germans, but German-speakers). Race is the only way that memory and values are preserved through the ravages of time. Race is also taboo in the modern society.

Why is it taboo? Briefly: we are in the final days of a mass revolt, by which the crowd of laborers rose up against the aristocracy and replaced their quality-based system of rule with a quantity-based system that focused not on the holiness of the task as a whole, but the holiness of the individual as an atom. It was a switch from top-down to bottom-up rule, and while it resulted in some positive things, it has also created the greatest disaster in human history, which is our overpopulation and a massive decrease in the quality of our population. Race is one aspect of this crowd revolt, as the crowd likes to use race and any other tool possible to break up bloodliness and force us all to be "equal," which is the natural state of people in a crowd since few of them are good at anything but being a member of a group.

Before one approaches this issue, it's important to see with clarity its framing. There is not a conspiracy on the basis of race against races; rather, there is an underlying tendency toward the type of society in which we live to crush those who are different and possibly better at something or another, and to value linear quantities - money, popularity, power - more than internal qualities, such as those which permit selective breeding to produce better humans in every race. Because we are ruled by the crowd through implements such as democracy and economic competition and product popularity, every idea that is publically advanced to us will be a solicitation for the popularity of the crowd. For this reason our politicians and social leaders are exclusively in denial about race, because to deny someone anything on the basis of inherent traits is to deny the primacy of quantity over quality.

It is the belief of this writer than Traditional nationalism is the best system of government for any race, and for all races together. It allows the individual to live among similar people who share values systems and therefore intuitively get along and can work toward shared, higher goals. It gives an identity to land, and gives people a reason to believe in things larger than their own lives, including the surrounding ecosystem and the culture as a whole. It is the most positive system of government that exists, in contrast to the selfish modern governments that indulge the whims of the individual while attempting to shape him according to a centralized program of "good" intentions. Nationalism is also localism, as it means that smaller communities police themselves and handle their own trade, shying away from large corporations and central governments. Nationalism is diversity; Nationalism is flexibility; Nationalism is natural.

However, "white nationalism" is a populist (crowd revolt) interpretation of nationalism, and it needs to be destroyed for two reasons. First, it takes the place of a meaningful nationalist movement, and sucks people up into its vortex, burns them out, and then spits them out, at which point they will normally have nothing further to do with nationalist ideas. Second, it is ineffective and because of the cycle of cognitive dissonance entered by those in the grips of its ineffectiveness, tends toward violent and destabilizing acts that achieve nothing. White Nationalism is pro-white crowd revolt, and it will increase and not decrease the underlying problem that has caused our racial problem in the West to date. In place of white nationalist movements, it makes sense to have groups based around national ethnicities in monocultural (Germany, France, Zimbabwe) areas and to have nativist movements - based on the identity, culture and heritage of the original settlers of these lands - in mixed countries (USA, Canada, UK, Latin America).

The essence of nationalism is that each race be distinct from all others, and each tribe as well, and that together they form an order which is opposed to internationalism, or the cosmpolitan mixing of races and cultures for the purposes of commerce. Nationalism is a higher value than mindless self-indulgence, or profit, or any of the other ways in which we gratify the individual at the expense of nature, humankind and the soul of the individual. Nationalism is not a modern function, although it can adapt to modernity and indeed be a vector of changing modernity from soul-killing function toward a qualitative, spiritual existence. Unlike modern political systems, it is not an excuse to unify disparate people under some banner of "self interest" based on sketchy, spacy, academic concepts in politics. It is a blood and soil, practical as a good shovel, both-feet-on-the-ground view of politics as an agent to serve civilization, as seen in the unbroken heritage of the local population.

"White Nationalism" is a modernist solution to the situation nationalism addresses. Its goal is to round up all whites, form a single population unified by being white, and then to wage race war and violent, bigoted exclusion against other groups. This author has no problems with violent exclusion, as any population that does not practice violent exclusion will be bred out within a few generations, unless it is so impoverished that no immigrants are attracted. However, White Nationalism does not solve the problems it identifies, and will bring about many more problems owing to its delusional and modernist nature.

1. White Nationalism does not fix the problem.

Banding together all whites, including those with Eurasian or Semitic admixture, will simply produce a generic, cultureless race of whites who will then be much easier to assimilate than today's national groups.

2. White Nationalism makes whites neurotic.

First, it makes people feel bad about themselves for adopting such doctrinaire and violent outlooks. Second, it is an apocalyptic belief system that makes whites feel that if they do not act now, violently and dogmatically, the entire cause is lost and all will be fecal. Further, it shows them a world in terms of whole loss or whole salvation; either all whites are "saved" and the Great Race War occurs, or nothing happens and we're all horribly doomed immediately. (This author does not attempt to discredit the idea of inducing Race War, as among other things, it would reduce the population of useless and stupid people of all races.)

3. White Nationalism creates pointless enmity toward other races.

The problem is not Them. The problem is that they're here, where we need to be. Clearly they need to be removed, but that does not mean we have to kill them, hate them, slander them, or otherwise speak the negative, both true and untrue, of them. What we want is for us and not Them. We want our land for us, and therefore we kick out anyone who isn't us. We can be polite about it. White Nationalism should just rename it after their favorite slander for African-Americans, as it seems to be all they talk about!

4. White Nationalism lowers our level of heroism.

White Nationalism is a defensive philosophy. It is reactionary. It is panicked, and it portrays whites as victims. What is needed is a calm voice of reason and masculine assertion of what is right, not a reaction to what is wrong. There are infinitive wrongs in life, and the only way to triumph over them is the success of what is right.

5. White Nationalism does not address internal quality.

In addition to failing to draw distinctions between radically different populations such as Germans and Slavs and Venezuelans and Italians and Irish, all of whom may claim to be "white" but each of whom has a distinct heritage and culture that will not mix with others unless averaged into a lowest common denominator as seen in many parts of the USA and Canada, White Nationalism attempts to gloss over internal caste divisions and quality control in the white races. Simply put, in a fair world, most white people would be killed for their gross stupidity (as would most people regardless of race; stupidity has triumphed in modernity). Further, not all white people are equal, and within each tribe, we want to breed the best to lead. White Nationalism is a form of racial Marxism that hopes to mix all whites into a generic melting pot and then eliminate caste and class divisions so that the lower can triumph over the higher; in this way, it's no different than crowd revolt, populist Christianity or Communism. White Nationalism is another modernistic "quantity over quality" idea.

6. White Nationalism is a revolutionary ideology.

The concept of revolution is that a grassroots group overthrows ruling elites, and puts into place a better system of leadership. In practice, however, what happens is that a few vicious souls appeal to the sympathies of a grassroots cause and maneuver themselves into power, at which point they murder anyone smart enough to oppose them and then begin ruling in exactly the same way their predecessors did. Communism starved more than the Tzars; the French Revolution murdered an aristocracy and then returned the people to exploitation after years of political unrest; the American revolution separated a colony from its parent country so that it could assume its "world policeman" role. Did anything positive come of these? Perhaps the American Revolution did for the simple reason that it detached a colonial territory from unwieldy central rule. Otherwise, no, and all of these revolutions brought with them the exile and murder of high-quality people for having the wrong opinions.

There is no need to abandon our society. There is good among the garbage. Build up the good, and throw out any garbage in your way, and you will have a healthier future than that of some apocalyptic, violent, paranoiac, inflexible "revolutionary."

7. White Nationalism addresses only race and ignores other issues.

Unlike National Socialism, which did include economic and green issues, White Nationalism focuses only on race. After the Great Race War and revolution, White Nationalists reason, they will build a perfect society by virtue of its being white. Yet they mention no changes except racial ones. What about pollution? What about overpopulation? What about the fact that we all work long hours in boring jobs for minimal pay? White Nationalism falls into the traditional trap of "left versus right," something which occupies the population with a political dog-and-pony show while the real power exchange goes on behind the scenes.

8. White Nationalism forgets that nationalism is good for every race.

For years, insightful minds have suggested that White Nationalists pair up with nationalists from other races. They have not. Why is this? For the most part, it is because they are violent bigots seeking to make themselves feel better for being "white." Many of them are from the lower strata of the white race, or from mixed tribes like Irish or Italian or Russian, and their goal is to try to become part of the favored Northwest European races (German, English, Dutch, Scandinavian). They want to have equal status. This requires not that they take a sane look at Nationalism, but that they find some way to argue their own superiority over other groups simply by virtue of their being white. This in turn requires blind, idiotic bigotry. It's true that the races aren't equal, and that we're different levels of an evolutionary ladder, and that some are above others - this is simply history and science. But one does not have to make a big deal of this; what is important is that our own tribes separate, and be able to breed within themselves to produce the best humans possible. White Nationalism obscures all of this with repetitive, violent ranting.

9. White Nationalism denies the good among Black, Brown and Asian races.

They aren't us. They will never be welcome among us. But many of them are good people, and people who have found friends among whites. Do we have to be haters in order to stand up for our own race? White Nationalists would like to think so, thus including anyone sane or compassionate from pro-white political activity, and alienating the rest of us from it. Normal, sane, decent white people will respond to a political initiative that says (sans violent ranting) that we must build a positive culture for white people to exist by themselves and for themselves. This is what most people want. They won't vote for it if it is presented in the White Nationalist way, however, because no one wants to deny the importance of people of other races to us. Many of us, in the way one loves friends (non-sexual), love these people and care about them. We want no part of some ranting organization that sees all Black, Brown or Asian faces as The Enemy. Pro-white is good politics, but pro-bigotry is a failure. That White Nationalism exists permits our overlords to group all pro-white activity with ranting bigots, and thus White Nationalism ensures that no nationalist movement with a chance of success will ever exist.

10. White Nationalism doesn't address the ego problem.

The major problem in the West is that people are fixated on themselves and their self-image. A crowd is, paradoxically, made of individuals, and what they want is protection of the individual above all else. Therefore, crowd revolts breed egomania. Most white people now are disconnected from anything beyond their own jobs, wealth, homes and affairs. This leads to a general breakdown in community, a loss of culture and heroic values, and a replacement of all our motivations with selfishness, i.e. commerce, as is favored in Middle Eastern nations. White Nationalism has no plan for this.

11. White Nationalism creates a false positivity.

"Feel good about yourself because you're white!" - this is a false and addicting premise. One feels good about oneself for achievements, including but not limited to those of one's ancestors. And one must find an active reason for feeling good about themselves, such as achievements or personality traits. Quality not quantity - but White Nationalism hates this idea, and wants only quantity of whites.

12. White Nationalism is confused regarding Jews.

No other culture belongs in one's own. For this reason alone, Jews should be exiled. In 1930s Germany, Jews were the foremost and most successful immigrant group, owing largely to their own racism against Germans and diligent nepotism which allowed them to always hire and promote their own people over Germans. Jews are not unique, not as a people (Semites, of mixed Asian, Black and majority Caucasian descent) and not as a culture, in that their morality is typical crowd revolt mentality. Most likely, they're the remnants of an ancient culture that underwent what the West is undergoing now: crowd revolt, a loss of culture, and the eventual ascendancy of commerce as a replacement for culture and national identity. Jews are not the identity and, while they have clearly disproportionate influence in politics and industry and media, the underlying problem is that white people are susceptible to these ideas because they have no better ideas presented to them. You cannot blame brainwashed masses watching television on Jews; you have to at some point realize that it's more profitable for someone this way, and thus perhaps that the profit motive - a replacement for culture caused by crowd revolt, as the crowd loves quantity instead of quality, and profit is a measurement of quantity - is our downfall and Jews, among other internationalist groups, are merely its enablers.

13. White Nationalism does not reform Christianity and liberailsm.

For centuries now Christianity has dominated the West, and while there are highly enlightened (Schopenhauer, Blake, Emerson, Eckhart) Christians, populist Christianity has combined crowd revolt ideology with the dualistic obsession of Christianity. This results in people who think in terms of abstract, absolute symbols like "equality" and "good" and "evil," but view this fantasy world as more important than reality. It is this perverse belief, manifested in both populist Christianity and populist liberalism, that has destroyed our world and contributed greatly to the racial problem. There are sane interpretations of Christianity and Liberalism that do not involve taking on the populist or crowd revolt dimension, and any sensible plan for white people should involve converting these beliefs to healthier form.

14. White Nationalism does not increase culture or values.

In fact, it is opposed to culture and values, as it wishes to mix all whites (including those with admixture) into one giant melting pot, and pull from it generic White Culture, which we assume is something derived from the Cleaver family on television. You can have German culture; you can have French culture; you can even have nativist American (English-German) culture. You cannot have generic white culture without destroying what makes each nation great. If you want better whites, separate out other races and tribes, and then breed each nation for its best people. It has been too many years, and too many different experiences and varied fortunes, for whites to be re-integrated into one large group. Trying to commit that integration is a political delusion, and not a practical or beneficient plan.

And this brings us back to:
1. White Nationalism does not fix the problem.

Despite claims to the contrary, White Nationalism will not make life better for whites. It will force them through another insane revolution and class conflict. It will destroy their culture and replace it with commerce. It will cause untold carnage, destruction of learning, and will probably result in the killing off of our upper castes, slaughtering good along with bad and thus weakening us overall. White people do not support White Nationalism in droves not because they disagree with the idea of "white nations for white people," but because they disagree with the idea of bigotry, the idea of generic white people, the Marxist racial agenda and the utter lack of plan beyond race war inherent to White Nationalism. White Nationalism is a device of our enemies; it replaces political success with clubhouse-mentalitied, backroom resentment and plotting paranoid revolutionaries. This will never succeed among the healthy and normal whites. For whites to succeed in politics, and for them to get national independence and freedom from the intrusion of other races and cultures, White Nationalism must be obsoleted.

September 28, 2005

http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/ambuscade/

We cannot view race in modern terms, as function. In functional terms, we need people to do the menial jobs, and we like economic competition as it gets us cheaper products and thus empowers us to comfort at a greater level. When one thinks functionally, race is not part of the equation (functionalist thinkers are limited to the present tense, and cannot project themselves ahead several generations, to the point where one must begin looking to see why race is important). In functional terms, any person is as good as any other, because they will be indoctrinated with laminated cards covered in pictures of idealized workers doing idealized tasks, and the tasks will be broken down into such simple fragments that even an idiot could do them. Culture, heritage, community, etc. are impediments to profit, not its enablers, and profit is what allows even the lowest among us to enjoy comfort and, if they are wise enough to generate greater profit, to rise to the heights of our society and become "elite" for their wealth.

http://www.pragmatism.us/solutions/opinions/stillwell/race/

The world will be here a year from now. I have been fighting for fifty-one years, and every one of those years were wasted by the "It's now or never" crowd who should have been helping me lay the groundwork for the future.

I remember one woman who genuinely believed that if the Catholic Kennedy beat Nixon there would never be another election.

She said, "Forget everything but winning THIS election." She never planned for anything but the political equivalent of Judgement Day.

Bless her heart, she did much more harm than good for our cause.

http://www.nationalistpartyusa.com/Whitaker.htm

1. Jewish culture and values are different enough from my own that I don't want to force them to coexist.

2. All other races would make poor breeding partners for my people, as it would cause us as a unique population to cease to exist.

3. The pursuit of money and power replaces culture and values systems, thus we should cultivate culture before we worry about developing our economy.

4. People are of different levels of quality, and we should breed them toward the highest level possible.

5. Some have better judgment skills than others, thus they should rule.

None of these are accepted among the mainstream, yet each makes plenty of sense. Why is our society illogical?

http://www.nazi.org/community/forum/YaBB.cgi?board=Chat;action=display;num=1127532790

The Eternal Circle

People in modern times are conditioned by buying products. First, you invest nothing in the product but your money; you are not required to thrust forth energy into understanding it or comprehending its context. You need a vacuum cleaner - locate; buy; read instructions. Second, they are accustomed to selecting from interchangeable philosophies. A vacuum cleaner does not demand that you re-interpret your other philosophies of cleansing, or that you find a broader framework of understanding why to clear. You match problem (dirty carpet) to solution (cleaning machine) and plunk down the credit card, ready to go.

For this reason, when people schooled in a modern way of life attempt to approach philosophy, they almost always make a mess of it by falling into a kneejerk pattern of trying to match "issues" to solutions that are disconnected from a systemic approach and therefore, as philosophy, fail. In fact, most of what people would call "philosophy" is a grab-bag of caveats, self-conceptions and homilies; there is nothing that unites metaphysics and epistemology and ethics within it, for example. It is this type of person who approaches the writings here and, not wanting to admit the logical connections are lost to them, declares them to be "ranting" or "incoherent" or that old standby of the embittered, "it's just a bunch of big words to make you seem smart." Crowdism there, indeed.

However, if one is willing to not read between the lines, but look at these philosophies as logical tools much in the same way different pieces of software make up an operating system, it reveals the function behind what otherwise seem as rootless pronouncements coming out of the void. In this article, we look at four major components of the beliefs expressed here, and illustrate how they are connected and thus what implications for the whole can be drawn from their presence.

Idealism

The initial confusion here is that idealism in the populist vernacular means any kind of belief in a progressive or utopian sense, and when we speak of "idealism" we generally refer to someone who screws up reality for some starry-eyed optimal ideal. In the philosophical sense, "idealism" means a belief system in which the cosmic order is composed of, or acts as if it is composed of, thoughts. The Cambridge Dictionary of philosophy expresses it well:

"The philosophical doctrine that reality is somehow mind-correlative or mind-coordinated -- that the real objects constituting the 'external world' are not independent of cognizing minds, but exist only as in some way correlative to mental operations." - CDP, 2nd Ed.

There are two components to this belief. First, we understand the world only through the process of thought. Second, the world acts much as our thoughts do, and because all of our actions thus affect the design of the external world, our actions are like thoughts: a series of reasonings which are by process of elimination filtered into an answer. This answer is the working hypothesis upon which the next level of thought is built.

Idealism is important because it navigates a path between materialism (belief only in material value) and symbolic-literal thinking, in which individual thoughts are more important than reality. Idealism joins human thought and the working of the world by pointing out they have a common mechanism, and thus a common end. It is not dualistic, nor is it solipsistic; idealism is like a highest-level abstraction that explains the motivations of both humankind in world in evolving the design of their thoughts to greater levels of discipline, clarity, and interconnectedness.

Realism

In other words, for the world to think, it is required that we act; our actions, by changing reality, change whatever thoughts correlate to or cause changes in our physical environment. In this sense, much like an inventor with a blowtorch, our actions are the process of designing or redesigning our world, and the reason we act is to achieve change in the design of external reality, or an abstraction of its function. The design may actually exist, like DNA does, or it may merely be our method of understanding how the world can be predicted through consistent tendencies inherent to its operation (some call these "natural laws"). By altering reality through our actions, we alter the design of our world and if we do so in accordance with natural laws, enhance its function or our position within it.

What is essential for perceiving this design and its changes is a sense of "realism," or a taking of changes in our physical world to be the totally of existence. This separates our thoughts and feelings from our recognition of changes in our external world, and allows us to point clearly at something known as "reality," even if we later interpret it as a process of thought which we change with our deliberate actions. Since this later interpretation will be exacting, and will require us to perceive patterns in our world and then anticipate them with our actions, we call this belief in the primacy and consistency of the external world "realism."

Nihilism

If we are to act on our world and change its design, we must do so with a clear understanding of how it works, and not act on thoughts which are solely confined to our internal design, and are not shared by the external. This requires that we clear our minds of illusion and tighten the correspondence between our perception of events and the actuality of what occurs, so that we might predict as exactly as possible our actions to manipulate our world. Nihilism is the process of clearing away all belief and preconception from the process of perception, so that we see simply what is and do not encumber ourselves with illusion, or emotionalism, or other pitfalls of consciousness.

Nihilism is controversial for many as they confuse it with an utter lack of belief in anything, or in the effectiveness of anything. This highlights the difference between a belief that colors interpretation, and a belief in value, in that values beliefs do not affect how we see the world but they influence the choices we make as to how we change it. A nihilist may hold deeply-felt beliefs, but will cease to be a nihilist the minute he or she allows these beliefs to intrude upon a realistic perception of the cosmic order. Values are not to be used to interpret the world, but are something that we act upon it so that in the changing of its design we bring them closer to manifestation.

Integralism

These philosophies imply a framework that embraces all of them. Nihilism allows for perception of reality, and realism means that we accurate see its design, while translating that into a thought process of the cosmos through idealism. All of this so far has been operational, in that it describes the workings of the world and our means of interpretative it; none of it has been prescriptive, or instructive of a values system which suggests what we should do with this system. To address this need we have integralism.

Integralism posits a unity of human and external events and thoughts. From comparison of our own intentions to the operations of this cosmic order, we determine how well-adapted our ideals are. This allows us to understand what a higher value might be: a more elegant, greater adaptation which increases the quality of our lives in harmony with the order of the cosmos. It is the achievement of these higher values that is the core belief of integralism, and its prescriptive goal as passed on to any adherents: discover your world, get a clear picture of its design, and work to complement that design, as the same language which describes external design also describes internal adaptation, e.g. the beauty found in thoughts and imagination.

Continuity

William Blake once said that "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." When we unite our imaginations to the process of the universe, as is found in the belief system of idealism, we have opened up that continuity and are now closer to accepting our mortality as part of that larger plan. In this we have found perhaps the one bliss that exists for thinking creatures, and we have done it by entangling ourselves with that which we fear most (nothingness) and finding a sense of order not within it but that includes it. It is this inclusion that forms the basis for our believe in turn in continuity, as we see that all dark things lead to light, and vice versa.

Philosophy does not succumb well to a product-oriented outlook. It is something that does not mix and match well. Regardless of the point of entry chosen, the beliefs of the individual must eventually resolve into a comprehensive worldview, or be seen for what they are: scattered borrowings with no unity. While this makes it difficult to initially comprehend the worldview espoused on this site, it makes it far easier, once one has accepted its genesis in ideas, to explore its breath and find from it an explanation of and response to our world.

September 19, 2005

http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/realism/