Why We Fight by Shane Burley: A Response, Part 3
“The president may have changed, but the apocalypse continues. When you’re living through an apocalypse, the most fatal mistake you can make is to convince yourself it’s something else, that everything can somehow go back to normal. Normal is what got us here, and there’s no way out now except to go right on through it.”
The Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin, Public Domain image.
Why We Fight Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse
Shane Burley (Author); Natasha Lennard (Foreword)
Publisher: AK Press
ISBN-13: 9781849354066
Apocalypse Continued
Finishing Shane Burley’s Why We Fight: Essays on Fascism, Resistance, and Surviving the Apocalypse, the main point that sticks with me is Burley’s theme of two opposed apocalyptic prophecies. The fascists prophecy a world defined by violence, in which the strong will always and forever oppress the weak. We prophecy a world reborn in equality, a world rebuilt through mutual aid and solidarity. The centrists – the vast majority for now – deny that an apocalypse is happening at all, but their denial is becoming increasingly unbelievable even to themselves.
As I write this essay, the Gulf of Mexico is literally on fire. The Western United States is searing in one protracted heatwave after another, with several hundred already dead. Here in Minneapolis, a Federal task force assassinated Winston Smith, a man who had been telling black activists to “get ready for war.” In the protests that followed, a woman named Deona Marie was run over and killed by a driver who intentionally sped up above 80mph to ram his car through a barricade protecting protesters.
The president may have changed, but the apocalypse continues. When you’re living through an apocalypse, the most fatal mistake you can make is to convince yourself it’s something else, that everything can somehow go back to normal. Normal is what got us here, and there’s no way out now except to go right on through it.
The Isle of the Dead
The theme of apocalypse is awe-inspiring and numinous, the feeling defined by Rudolf Otto as “the terrible and fascinating mystery.” When I think of the numinous, I think of the mysterious feeling invoked by Symbolist paintings such as Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead, in which a white-clad figure guides a small boat into an island so dark it seems to swallow the light. I feel uncomfortable in my appreciation for Böcklin’s work because his dark romanticism is often interpreted as right-wing even though it contains no explicit political themes. Is Symbolism inherently suspect because it is darkly romantic, because of its mythic themes… or solely because the enemy has claimed that ground, and we will not be able to feel comfortable with such themes until we win it back?
Contested Spaces
Shane Burley’s “Contested Space” is an essay about the cultural and subcultural territories that are currently contested between fascists and antifascists. Pagan religion is one of those spaces, especially the heathen variety, but Burley also discusses black metal music as well as neofolk, a genre steeped in romanticism and occult themes – often as a cover for fascist metapolitics.
My own preferred aesthetic is a dark romanticism, so the neofolk genre is deeply appealing to me although the fascist politics of many neofolk bands causes me to stay well away from most of it. If this type of aesthetic belongs to the enemy, then I don’t have any choice except to cut off that entire side of myself. That’s a type of dishonesty, and one that will cause many people to drift over to the other side rather than choose to deny who they really are.
For those who occupy these contested spaces, ceding any ground at all is unacceptable. Black metal and neofolk cannot be “fascist music,” or else an entire range of human experience becomes fascist territory. Paganism and heathenry cannot be fascist religion, or we lose everyone drawn to the gods, the worship of nature, or the ancient myths. As antifascists, we don’t aim to let them have any territory. The only solution is to create explicitly antifascist neofolk and black metal, such as the work of Margaret Killjoy, and explicitly antifascist spaces for pagan religion, such as Gods and Radicals.
As Burley says of neofolk: “it has its own appeal and value to people on the opposite extreme: celebrating ancestral traditions, agrarian living, pagan religions, Indigenous folkways, opposition to empire, anti-patriarchy, utopian thinking, fantasy, spirit, and dreams.”
As a pagan anarchist, I define my own life as much by pagan religions, fantasy, spirit, and dreams, as I do by opposition to empire or utopian thinking. I see no contradiction there, only a fruitful tension. The tension is real, though. It’s a contested space, a battleground of ideas and images. It’s a space we cannot afford to lose.
Christopher Scott Thompson
Photo by Tam Hutchison.
is an anarchist, martial arts instructor, and devotee of Brighid and Macha.
