How the Counterculture
Ushered in Fascism

In the consideration of the faculties and impulses—of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it.... The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its seeming supererogation. We saw no need of the impulse—for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself;—we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal.... The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs—to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness, and this organ is the scourge with which the Deity compels man, will-I nill-I, into eating. Secondly, having settled it to be God's will that man should continue his species, we discovered an organ of amativeness, forthwith. And so with combativeness, with ideality, with causality, with constructiveness,—so, in short, with every organ, whether representing a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect....

Induction, a posteriori, would have brought phrenology to admit, as an innate and primitive principle of human action, a paradoxical something, which we may call perverseness, for want of a more characteristic term. In the sense I intend, it is, in fact, a mobile without motive, a motive not motiviert. Through its promptings we act without comprehensible object; or, if this shall be understood as a contradiction in terms, we may so far modify the proposition as to say, that through its promptings we act, for the reason that we should not. In theory, no reason can be more unreasonable; but, in fact, there is none more strong. With certain minds, under certain conditions, it becomes absolutely irresistible. I am not more certain that I breathe, than that the assurance of the wrong or error of any action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us, and alone impels us to its prosecution.

Indeed, in the United States today, we are living in a society of the perverse. We are a population that is doomed to plunge into a new dark age, were we not to change our ways soon! Lyndon LaRouche writes that we are dying because of a self-inflicted doom. It is the essence of Classical tragedy to show that the only thing that threatens the survival of any great society, is revealed in the change that occurs once the population is no longer able to see its own faults. The absence of leadership, when leadership is needed continually to improve the society, creates the vacuum, which ultimately results in self-implosion.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss—we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness, and dizziness, and horror, become merged in a cloud of unnameable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genie in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genie, or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall—this rushing annihilation—for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination—for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it. And because our reason violently deters us from the brink, therefore, do we the more impetuously approach it. There is no passion in nature so demoniacally impatient, as that of him who, shuddering upon the edge of a precipice, thus meditates a plunge. To indulge for a moment, in any attempt at thought, is to be inevitably lost; for reflection but urges us to forbear, and therefore it is, I say, that we cannot. If there be no friendly arm to check us, or if we fail in a sudden effort to prostrate ourselves backward from the abyss, we plunge, and are destroyed.

The story-teller here, in Edgar Allan Poe's tale, “The Imp of the Perverse,” is not Poe, but a prisoner in a jail cell, recounting how he got there in the first place.

Likewise, this article intends to recount certain aspects of how the United States became the perverse society it is.

The fight to found the nation was a fundamentally philosophical battle. What is the nature of man? Can mankind be herded like cattle to be the underlings of an empire? The Founding Fathers had another idea for the destiny of man. Gottfried Leibniz knew that “wisdom is the science of happiness.” He was the principal influence on leaders of the American Revolution, such as Benjamin Franklin; and that idea of happiness was the basis for the Declaration of Independence.

We were meant to be a “beacon of hope and temple of liberty” for mankind, a society where education is universal, and where the individual can be proud to use his mind to make an eternal contribution to humanity.

Historically, those who have defended the system of empire as the best system of government have been convinced, and have tried to convince others, that man is a beast. Their major concern was that the majority of mankind must be managed and herded like cattle; and therefore, they crafted many philosophies of how this is to be done. That is precisely what the American colonists where revolting against.

With the assassination of John Kennedy and other moral leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr., the United States underwent a shift in military, as well as economic, policy. We became a predatory consumer society, from the powerful productive nation we had become under Abraham Lincoln and again under Franklin Roosevelt. With this shift came a completely new set of values, which were the reflection of a change in the minds of the American population concerning their conception of the fundamental nature of man.

The absolutely unique nature of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence was the key, in giving those great leaders of the United States the power that was needed to get through the chaotic moments in our history, which threatened the existence of the republic. This key factor was understood by those great Americans. Those documents place as their centerpiece, the notion that the fundamental nature of man is to be in the living image of the Creator: Man is fundamentally creative; man can change, and therefore he can change the universe. Change is primordial, and the Constitution lays out a system of government which is consistent with that notion of change.

The intention of the cultural shift that this nation underwent beginning in the period immediately following the death of FDR—exemplified by the witchhunt known as McCarthyism and the dropping of two nuclear bombs on Japan; becoming more exaggerated after the assassination of Kennedy, with the introduction of the sex-drug-rock counterculture—was to attack this notion of change. The attack was meant to eliminate the ability of individuals to change society, and ultimately to change themselves. The “ideal” society, according to the “utopian” imperialists, is depicted in the pages of books that youth are forced to read in high school, written by such authors as H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell.

The question of change is more or less an ontological question, dealing with the way in which the universe is composed. But, it points to another question, one of epistemology: How do you know what you think you know?

Are we limited by what our senses tell us about the world, or can we go beyond that? As Plato conveys, in the Allegory of the Cave in The Republic, the impressions that our senses make on us are as shadows on a cave wall. Man alone has the power of mind to create a hypothesis and test it. This is true human creativity, as is expressed in Classical art. Man can know the unseen principles that govern the shadows that we are experiencing.

In this way, all men are created equal, in that we can know truth, and use it to change the world.

Truth is the most powerful force in the universe and it is always followed by a moral question: Are you willing to act upon that truth? Are you willing to change the way you previously thought, or lived your life, in accordance with that truthful principle that you just discovered? Once you know that you are not an animal that goes by what its senses tell it is pleasurable, are you willing to give up those things which you once thought were comfortable, but which you now know, are not truthful?

Human progress, especially now that we are at a level of 6 billion, depends on assimilating new scientific principles, those secrets of the universe that can only be unlocked by the individual sovereign human mind.

The notion of the General Welfare, or Common Good, is not a matter of personal taste. If an individual knows that truth is universal, and that the good is measured in terms of human progress, he or she is now faced with the question of what to do for the improvement of humanity.

Are you willing to dedicate your life for the sake of others? The idea that Friedrich Schiller calls the Sublime—devoting your life to improve humanity—is the natural human characteristic that Bertrand Russell, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, among others, hated and had to uproot.

In fact, a war has been waged around this idea for centuries. The evil of the Romantic movement was that it denied that moral quality of man—that quality which recognized a responsibility to the species—and instead insisted that man indulge in his arbitrary sensuality and please himself. Edgar Allan Poe fought this Romantic ideology, represented by the Transcendentalists during his time.

The self-evident truth of the equality of man formed the basis for the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence. The spread of this idea has always been the threat to world government. For a plan of global hegemony to be carried out, there is a prerequisite of effectively destroying that notion of man made in the image of the Creator, and eradicating it, especially, from the minds of Americans. A cultural war has been waged with many different fronts; but all of them have had, at the core, this one essential issue. The target was man.

Aldous Huxley claimed that the best way to wage this war was on the psychological and physiological level. Do not force slavery onto people; use propaganda and brainwashing to lure them into embracing their own slavery. This was mainly done through the entertainment industry.

A second tactic—although not entirely separate from the first, as I shall show—is going directly after the mind through the language itself. This was elaborated upon by Bertrand Russell, the man who, along with H.G. Wells¹, authored the policy of World Empire; but also by George Orwell, in the book 1984, wherein he invented a new language called Newspeak, in order to accomplish this task. This attack is much more prevalent than the reader may be aware, in advertisement and marketing, including the marketing of entertainment.

Orwell makes his strategies clear in his book; Newspeak is but one of them. What the reader finds out, approaching its end, is that the character Winston, who was looking for a way to rebel, has walked into the hands of what was supposed to be the enemy, in his attempts to defy it. Orwell's entire society was controlled. What is unfortunate, is that this happens every day. More and more youth, who are disenfranchised with what they see in the society around them, are turning to a trap that was set up to foster their own destruction. From the standpoint of imperial policy, this is known as gang and counter-gang; or, better, “divide and conquer.” You play both sides, so that there is no escape.

Orwell's character brags about this in 1984): “We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable. Or perhaps you will return to your old ideas that the proletarians or the slaves will arise and overthrow us. Put it out of your mind. They are hopeless, like the animals. Humanity is the Party. The others are outside—they are irrelevant.”

During the course of the '60s, the cultural shift was under way. Facing the trauma of the Cuban Missiles Crisis; the assassination of great leaders, John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., et al.; and the Indo-China war; many from the generation known as the Baby Boomers were looking for an escape from the horror of it all. Conveniently, the escape was there for them at the college campuses, in the form of the sex-drug-rock counterculture.² The population was being demoralized and dehumanized by precisely the propaganda methods that Huxley had so prophetically “warned” about.

This so-called “revolution” was actually a more vicious attack on the mind than the trauma previously described. The real insidious quality of this, was that it was affecting the population in the places where they could not literally see it, in the fundamental ideas that are responsible for determining the behavior of an individual. The connotation of the language was changing. Arbitrariness was becoming accepted in the place of Truth.

The split between science and art was widening. And this was the advantageous moment when the population was so distracted, that the shift in economic practice, of producer to consumer society, was enacted through the decisions of August 1971. That was the moment that the population of the republic was changed in such a way, that it allowed the country to start through the process of becoming the collapsing empire that it has become today.

To make the point more clear, let's look at an example of this. Prior to the 1970s, the term industrial referred to something having to do with productive labor. Industry referred to a trade, or the way in which mankind was able to harness its power over nature. It was connected to a productive process. That changed, in a specific way, through the 1970s. “Industrial” became a genre of “music,” or perhaps anti-music. It became something to consume. Moreover, it was something arbitrary to consume.

John Keats concluded his famous poem, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” with the words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” He was actually pointing to the same questions of ontology and epistemology. Earlier in the piece,

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

What is it about the universe and man that Keats is trying to tell us?

The new paradigm denied truth, and as a consequence, denied that beauty can be universal. What one is left with is an arbitrary array of sensual impressions that you develop an opinion about; in other words, no science, and no distinction between man and the beast! Using this method, Beethoven would never have been able to set Schiller's “Ode to Joy” to the music of the Ninth Symphony, because he was deaf at the time he wrote it! But, despite his physical impairment, he was such a master of the principles of composition, that he knew that what he composed was beautiful!

Where did “industrial music” come from? It was by no means something new. The general theory of the epistemology involved is as old as history itself. The aspects of industrial music that are more specific to it, came about as reaction to the spread of Classical culture, particularly in Italy and Germany at the end of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. The response was to create a counter-gang that is now known as modern art: Dadaism, Surrealism, but more specifically Futurism.

In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) published a “Manifesto of Futurism” in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. It received the front page, probably because Marinetti was engaged to the daughter of the owner of the newspaper at that time. This was meant to be the new wave of art. The following is taken from it:

We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.... Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! ... Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

This philosophy was the basis of a movement that was formed by the friends of Benito Mussolini. Many Futurists were present at the March on Rome that was a part of the process of putting Mussolini into power. Marinetti was hoping that Futurism could be the official art of Fascism. Marinetti worked closely with Mussolini; they were even arrested together.

They were devoted to destroying development of Classical composition in music, as well as the other arts. The principles of bel canto voice training, discovered by Leonardo da Vinci during the Renaissance, were being attacked. When Bach developed the well-tempered system, he took the human singing voice as primary. Futurists such as Luigi Russolo, who wrote “The Art of Noises,” and Balilla Pratella, who wrote the “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians,” made it a point to erase the importance of the human singing voice, and take all of the life, and humanity, out of musical composition. The notion of truth in composition was discarded. The idea of the Beautiful became an arbitrary opinion. An appeal was made to the youth to join the “new” trend in the “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians.”

I appeal to the young. Only they should listen, and only they can understand what I have to say. Some people are born old, slobbering spectres of the past, cryptograms swollen with poison. To them no words or ideas, but a single injunction: the end.

I appeal to the young, to those who are thirsty for the new, the actual, the lively. They follow me, faithful and fearless, along the roads of the future, gloriously preceded by my, by our, intrepid brothers, the Futurist poets and painters, beautiful with violence, daring with rebellion, and luminous with the animation of genius.

Industrial music culture was an attempt to reintroduce the same philosophy in England and the United States in the 1970s, after the economic shift was made. Timothy Leary, the Harvard professor who worked with Aldous Huxley to distribute psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, on college campuses, also worked with, and lived with, Neil Megson,³ otherwise known as Genesis P-Orridge, the founder of Industrial Records and industrial music.

Megson formed a “performance art” group called Coum Transmissions in the late 1960s. This group was comprised of Megson, a stripper named Christine Newby, who took the name Cosey Fanni Tutti (a take on a Mozart opera), and Peter Christopherson, nicknamed “Sleazy.” With the addition of Chris Carter, they became Throbbing Gristle—a slang term in Yorkshire for an erection—on Sept. 3, 1975, the anniversary of Britain's entry into World War II. Throughout the '70s, this group of people consistently pushed the limits of what was acceptable, and by doing this, transformed the standard of what is considered art to an ever more degraded notion. According to Megson, “We were interested in taboos, what the boundaries were, where the sound became noise and where noise became music and where entertainment became pain, and where pain became entertainment. All the contradictions of culture.”

The group was catalyzing an acceleration of the process of the degeneration of society. At the start of their careers they were receiving many grants from arts councils, including the British Arts Council, to enable them to work and participate in exhibitions. And the term exhibition is all too ironically appropriate. Megson called the group an embodiment of the “secret fears and neuroses” of society. He continued:

So many people repress or dismiss large areas of themselves that they find it easier to dismiss Coum, but, like dismissed and suppressed emotions and desires, Coum is never totally forgotten.... Sex is sensual, delirium, escape, key to magick, joy, excitement.... We expand ourselves to boundaries, even destroying, condemning ourselves to forms of madness and isolation, to damnation in evil forms.... We need each other, hate each other, hate is nothing.... We want people to be themselves, and the price of that is to abandon thee [sic] false ideas one has of oneself.... Coum explore their ideas and obsessions and live them out where possible.

Take a moment to compare this with the Futurist Manifesto of Lust, written by Valentine de Saint-Point:

Lust is the expression of a being projected beyond itself. It is the painful joy of wounded flesh, the joyous pain of a flowering. And whatever secrets unite these beings, it is a union of flesh. It is the sensory and sensual synthesis that leads to the greatest liberation of spirit. It is the communion of a particle of humanity with all the sensuality of the earth.

Lust is the quest of the flesh for the unknown, just as Celebration is the spirit's quest for the unknown. Lust is the act of creating, it is Creation.

Flesh creates in the way that the spirit creates. In the eyes of the Universe their creation is equal. One is not superior to the other and creation of the spirit depends on that of the flesh.

We possess body and spirit. To curb one and develop the other shows weakness and is wrong. A strong man must realize his full carnal and spiritual potentiality. The satisfaction of their lust is the conquerors' due. After a battle in which men have died, it is normal for the victors, proven in war, to turn to rape in the conquered land, so that life may be re-created.

When they have fought their battles, soldiers seek sensual pleasures, in which their constantly battling energies can be unwound and renewed. The modern hero, the hero in any field, experiences the same desire and the same pleasure. The artist, that great universal medium, has the same need. And the exaltation of the initiates of those religions still sufficiently new to contain a tempting element of the unknown, is no more than sensuality diverted spiritually towards a sacred female image.

Art and war are the great manifestations of sensuality; lust is their flower. A people exclusively spiritual or a people exclusively carnal would be condemned to the same decadence-sterility.

In their performances, Coum Transmissions often engaged in explicit sexual acts, self-mutilation,⁴ and self-degradation, which is better left undescribed. They thought of the shift to Throbbing Gristle, TG, as representing their decision to take this into popular culture.

Theodor Adorno, in his Philosophy of Modern Music, elaborated on how modern music—which, to him, meant Stravinsky and Schönberg—had a role in destroying society. The destruction of modern society, according to Adorno, was necessary because it was a hotbed of evil. So, the solution was to drive the population insane: “It is not that schizophrenia is directly expressed therein; but the music imprints upon itself an attitude similar to that of the mentally ill. The individual brings about his own disintegration.... He imagines the fulfillment of the promise through magic, but nonetheless within the realm of immediate actuality.... Its concern is to dominate schizophrenic traits through the aesthetic consciousness. In so doing, it would hope to vindicate insanity as true health.” The idea is that you can “cure” a sick society, such as Megson thought ours was, with all that repressed emotion, by pushing it to the limits of perversity, with necrophilia being the ultimate expression of this.

This is precisely the mission that Megson and others were carrying out, with the music and the performances. They saw much of the work they carried out as being experiments in mass psychology, as well as experiments to determine the physiological effects that can occur in individuals.

In fact Megson, calls himself a cultural engineer. In July 1976, Megson produced a poster to publicize the debut appearance of TG:

EVENT:

'MUSIC FROM THE DEATH FACTORY' live disconcert by THROBBING GRISTLE PERSONELL:

The members of THROBBING GRISTLE wish to remain anonymous.

SOUND:

Produced on Analogue Synthesiser; Minikrog synthesisers; Electronic Violin; Bass Guitar; Prepared Tapes. Projected through 800 Watt Quadrophonic P.A. System.

Imagine walking down blurred streets of havoc, post-civilisation, stray dogs eating refuse, wind creeping across tendrils. It's 1984. The only reality is waiting. Mortal. It's the death factory society, hypnotic mechanical grinding, music of hopelessness. Film music to cover the holocaust. Tantra of the subliminal, word falling, photo falling. In a nostalgia for feeling totally sterile endless tribal music. Thee [sic] tribe of mutations, street gangs lobotomized in the Death Factory. It never ends. TV Children trying to prepare themselves, meditating on, cease to exist.

First LIVE London concert of music by THROBBING GRISTLE to be released later this year on record. Disturbing, cruel, inexorable, yet calming if you hold on brief for life. The music of 1984 has arrived. Made up of various people from all creative areas, post-psychedelic trash, vanguard for thee [sic] Wild Boys, death seekers.

What appears to be a sick sense of humor is very serious.⁵ A few months later, in an article in Melody Maker, Megson openly discussed the intention of his “artwork”:

We're writing about the future by looking at today. We look at this scabby, filthy, dirty, horrible society and transform it into an inhuman, emotionless parallel. That's the way it's going to be in 1984 for sure.... We'll have a tape which has nothing but an incredibly deep, repetitive droning note on it. That will affect people directly. There are some people susceptible to strobe lights and we know that there are others susceptible to certain noises. This is the effect that we'll be trying to achieve.

In several other locations, Megson confessed that his intention was never to entertain. He admitted that he had no interest in music, as such. He was carrying out an “information war”; he was promoting propaganda! The official newsletter, Industrial News, published many articles on topics like mind control, subliminal messages, and ways to produce physiological effects through high frequencies of sound and strobe lights. They would use these tactics in their own shows as a way of doing social research in mass psychology.

In October 1976, Coum seemingly overstepped a limit by putting on a show at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts. The exhibit, which ran for eight days, was called “Prostitution” and included used tampons and pornographic photos of Newby. A scandal exploded in the media and resulted in the group losing some of the government funding it had been receiving. This was the end of Coum Transmissions. But, this is not a paradox. The exhibitions of the group were always aimed at shocking the population by doing the unthinkable, and therefore become an invitation to the perverse. Despite the controversy stirred up, the group stayed alive and continued to push the limits. The group came to the United States, as TG, on a tour. The British Council was paying the travel expenses, which was a relationship in jeopardy because of media attacks. Because of this, Megson reluctantly had to cancel Canadian performances.

At the time that they arrived in the United States, the media was consumed with the murders committed by Utah serial killer Gary Gilmore. This intrigued the group. Together with Monte Cazazza,⁶ another “performance artist,” they formed the Gary Gilmore Memorial Society. They were developing a stronger fascination with death, mass murder, Satanism, and fascism.⁷ At this time, in the United States, Megson and Newby put on a series of exhibitions in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Santa Monica, called “Cease To Exist,” the name of a song written by Charles Manson and published by the Beach Boys under the name “Cease To Resist.” The fourth of the series, performed at Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Arts (LAICA), included acts of bloodletting, mutilation, wallowing like swine in various fluids, and explicit sexuality. The term “pornographic” is too light to describe this behavior; it can only be called perverse.

TG were being offered contracts with many record companies, including Virgin. Instead, they decided to create their own record company with Monte Cazazza, Industrial Records. The logo was taken from a photograph of the first gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz. But, this is not the first reference to fascism. The logo of TG was taken from the insignia used in the 1930s by the British Union of Fascists. As a point of fact, it was about the same time that many punk bands started to display the swastika.

In 1978, Megson began to work with Boyd Rice, also known as NON. Rice described Megson in an interview:

I had no idea what T.G. was when I went around to look up Gen [Megson], all I knew is that he was an artist who was very into Manson and Hitler. Back then, NO ONE was into that sort of thing. Now it's just a trendy youth culture fad, but back then if anyone bothered to pursue such things you could pretty much guess it came from a sincere interest, and further that the interest could only have been born of a seriously divergent world view. In those days Gen still wore swastikas and would tell anyone who would listen (and many that wouldn't) what a great guy Hitler was. Uncle Adolf he called him. But that was a long time ago.⁸

In another interview, Rice admitted that he loves making noise because he wanted to make music “that would bypass the mind” and create “an experience more primal in nature.” He explained, “at certain levels of volume you cease to think.... You're forced to experience it.... You've got to override the mind.” Later in the same interview he went on to say, “As far as I am concerned, the intellect is a disease. It imposes values where none exist. Values don't exist in the world, they exist in the mind and are purely imaginary. They're completely fictional and to project them onto actual things or situations can only result in fictionalizing the world and your experience of it.”

So, in other words, all you know of reality is what your senses tell you, the mind has no value. This is a philosophy that rejects science, morality, and any notion that man can have an ever-lasting impact on the world, despite his short physical existence.

The rejection of Truth as the source of morality, the separation of art from science—that is, Beauty from Truth—is the start of a downward spiral in society that ultimately leads to fascism. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that Boyd Rice developed close ties to fascist philosophers; in fact he claimed to be a fascist in art. In 1984, Rice, along with a Holocaust denier, Keith Stimely, started the Abraxas Foundation—taking the name from Jungian philosophy—which he described as a “social Darwinist think-tank.” Abraxas hailed Malthusianism as “Nature's Eternal Fascism.” During performances, Rice has read from the racist and anti-Semitic Might Is Right, by Ragner Redbeard. The book's forward is by Anton LaVey, its afterward by George Burdi, founder of Resistance Records and former singer of the neo-Nazi band RAHOWA (Racial Holy War).

Rice was close to Church of Satan founder LaVey, and rumored to be a member of its “Council of Nine” and to have initiated others into it. He also stayed close to the Temple of Psychick Youth (TOPY), which was the cult started by Megson and others in 19981 as a resurrection of the Process Church of the Final Judgment. The Process Church has been shown to be involved in many murders, including the Manson Family murders of Tate-LaBianca, and the David Berkowitz/Son of Sam killings.

Rice regularly visited Charles Manson and organized a campaign to free him. Through Manson, the group came into contact with James Mason, former member of the American Nazi Party and the National Socialist Liberation Front, currently a member of the Universal Order, which views Charles Manson as the next Hitler. Rice was also a member of the neo-Nazi American Front and was very close to its president, Bob Heick. Heick was present at an event, “8/8/88,” that Rice explained “was a recapitulation of a destruction ritual that Anton LaVey performed on August 8, 1969.” It was shown on Geraldo Rivera's “Satanism” special. Perhaps not coincidentally, the eighth letter of the alphabet is H, and 88 is considered by some to signify the words “Heil Hitler.”

Rice was interviewed in 1986 by the white supremacist leader, Tom Metzger of White Aryan Resistance. In it he was asked whether industrial music is the “beginning of an Aryan underclass movement.” He is quoted as saying, “I think so. It's engendering a new will among people. That's what I'm interested in.” In 1989, Michael Moynihan, a self-proclaimed political fascist, joined the Abraxas group., and lived with Rice in Denver until their falling out. While there, Moynihan was visited by the Secret Service in 1991, for suspected involvement in a plot to kill then-President George H.W. Bush. The suspicion arose from Moynihan's association with Charles Manson and Manson Family member Sandra Good. Moynihan recently published Lords of Chaos, describing church burnings in Scandinavia linked to the black metal scene; and he has published Siege by James Mason.

In 1989, Moynihan, Rice, and members of the band Douglass Pearce of Death in June participated in concerts in Japan. Pearce has called Hitler “the most influential man of the century” who “shaped the world with his death and destruction.” Death in June refers to the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, when Hitler killed Ernst Röhm and other leaders of the Sturmabteilung (SA), his opposition among the Nazis. More recently, Rice toured with Death in June, having some of their tour dates cancelled because of the controversy surrounding them.

All of these bands flirted with fascist ideology, and used fascist and Nazi imagery, as did Throbbing Gristle. This shouldn't be surprising; they came from an environment shaped by Megson's groups, and many of them worked closely with Megson and Peter Christopherson.

Megson and his friends set the precedent and successfully enacted a shift, which resulted in the acceptance of axioms that are responsible for such deviant behavior today. Once this shift occurred, virtually anything was accepted in the name of art. There were many others who worked with Megson and his associates, such as Cabaret Voltaire⁹, Skinny Puppy, Coil¹⁰, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and others. There are those who have not worked with him but are influenced by the philosophy, like Marilyn Manson.

But, there are also many, many youth, who have never heard of Megson, do not know that they are influenced by him, but are being driven to commit suicide¹¹ because they don't know that things can change!

Modern art created the preconditions where the population accepted that beauty is a matter of mere opinion, which is completely arbitrary. But this specific form of modern art forced a situation where the population accepted the glorification of the ugly in art; because after all, “it's what you feel that's right for you!”

The “Poet of Freedom,” Friedrich Schiller, addressed this in his essay, On the Pathetic. He began it by stating:

Representation of suffering—as mere suffering—is never the end of art, but, as a means to its end, it is extremely important to the same. The ultimate end of art is the representation of the supersensuous, and the tragic art in particular effects this thereby, that it makes sensuous our moral independence of the laws of nature in a state of emotion. Only the resistance, which it expresses to the power of the emotions, makes the free principle in us recognizable; the resistance, however, can be estimated only according to the strength of the attack. Therefore, shall the intelligence in man reveal itself as a force independent of nature, so must nature have first demonstrated its entire might before our eyes. The sensuous being must profoundly and violently suffer. There must be pathos, therewith the being of reason may be able to give notice of his independence and be actively represented.

One can never know whether self-composure is an effect of one's moral force if one has not become convinced, that it is not the effect of insensitivity. It is not art, to become master of feelings which only lightly and fleetingly sweep the surface of the soul; but to retain one's mental freedom in a storm, which arouses all of sensuous nature; thereto belongs a capacity of resisting that is, above all natural power, infinitely sublime. Therefore, one attains to moral freedom only through the most lively representation of suffering nature, and the tragic hero must first have legitimized himself to us as a feeling being, before we pay homage to him as a being of reason, and believe in the strength of his soul.

Schiller describes in this essay, how suffering can be deployed in art to portray the higher notion of humanity, the sublime nature of man to transcend the physical nature located in the sensuous being; the ability of man to act on a truthful, moral principle, which can only come from a general sense of agape, the love of humanity. This is acting for the General Welfare, which is why leadership must understand the distinction between man and beast, and that Beauty and Truth are one and the same.

This notion of man can never be located in man's sensual nature—just as an empiricist, someone who believes all truth is limited to what you can see, hear, smell, touch, and taste, can never discover the principle of change that lies outside the domain of the senses. The portrayal of suffering is never an end in itself; it is never for the sake of pleasure in pain. Seeing man as a sensuous being will never generate the higher love of agape, transcendent of erotic love, which is necessary for development of effective leadership that is willing to die for a mission that will advance the cause of humanity.

Romantic art indulges, while Classical art overcomes!

It is in this ability to embrace immortality—in the sense that an individual can devote their life to this cause, and that that choice produces an immortal effect on the world—that Schiller locates true freedom. And it is in this conception of man that we find the source of the true happiness, as reflected in the Declaration of Independence.

Go back to Poe's short story, “The Imp of the Perverse.” The narrator is sitting in a cell. He had committed a crime that was perfectly executed, without threat of detection. No one knew and no one would find out. So, why is he in a cell? He confessed! Poe chooses to end the story with the words: “To-day I wear these chains, and am here! Tomorrow I shall be fetterless!—but where?”

What is the narrator's notion of freedom? What is his idea of immortality? He's a slave to his senses! He's a slave to his desires! His idea of freedom is being able to do whatever he wants to. He ends up being a slave to himself. What is clear from the start is that he doesn't understand morality and free will. His idea of immortality is that it is a physical location It was never the chains that he was slave to. He was never morally free.

That moral freedom is, in the truest sense, an individual's humanity. We live in a society where the people have lost their sense of humanity, and in a way, one can say it was stolen from them. Therefore, we must change! The ability to escape from the brink of self-destruction, just as in the case of Classical tragedy, depends on our ability to change.

Take the LaRouche Youth Movement as a sign of the future coming to remind the people of that sense of humanity, which is lying dormant in the population. The crime we have been committing, the economic collapse that we have brought upon ourselves, and the economic devastation that we have brought to the rest or world, will not go away on its own. We, the people in the United States, have a responsibility to free ourselves and the rest of the world from the oppressive yoke of this doomed, collapsing financial system.

Why was the prisoner in “The Imp of Perverse” compelled to confess his crime? What is it about human nature that would not let him rest until the burden of carrying around this horrible secret was lifted? Justice is not simply revenge; it is a universal physical principle.

Let's turn this evil into a greater good while we still can. The crime that was committed in the story was irreversible. We have not reached that point yet, but it is right around the corner. Were we not to change, mankind would be condemned, in accordance with universal law, to live in the prison of a new dark age. But, were we to change, we would be able to do what has never been done before; we could unleash the greatest cultural renaissance ever to be enacted in history! The final outcome lies with you. What are you willing to do?

[1] H.G. Wells authored The Open Conspiracy, in 1928, wherein he outlined the way in which the transition to World Empire can be made, using weapons of mass destruction to force nations to submit out of fear.

[2] MK-Ultra was the project carried with CIA sponsorship by Gregory Bateson, Aldous Huxley, and Timothy Leary, as well as others, in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, to enforce the mind-control methods necessary to subjugate the population by having them accept the status of human cattle. As prescribed by Huxley, this was done with propaganda, drugs, and brainwashing on the college campuses and at events that were organized for the purpose of spreading the counterculture, such as Woodstock and Altamont.

[3] Megson is still alive today and continues to give lectures at various art schools in England and the United States. He is currently involved in projects involving cybernetics and information theory. He also has a band, PTV3, Psychic TV 3. Douglass Rushkoff, writer of the book Cyberia, which describes the counterculture associated with information and chaos theory, is part of this group. Timothy Leary spent much of his time developing mystical theories on Cybernetics. Megson gave a series of lectures at universities in the early 1990s with Timothy Leary, just before the latter died, entitled “How To Operate Your Brain.”

[4] Self-mutilation quickly became a trend. With the rampant spread of counterculture, also came the rampant spread of what is considered “body art.” This includes tattoos and piercings, in all areas of the body.

[5] The connotation of the language is changed because of the way in which it is marketed. Many bands take names that would otherwise signify the degeneration of the music, such as Slayer, Disturbed, and Suicidal Tendencies. Most people mistakenly take it as harmless because to them “it's just music.”

[6] Monte Cazazza grew up in the United States and most of his work was done in San Francisco. He was first to make “art” films using child pornography.

[7] Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Monte Cazazza were all fascinated by Gilmore because he accepted his execution sentence. They saw this as somehow connected to their own work. They also had a fascination with Charles Manson and saw him as an important icon for the Process Church, which they were probably a part of. Temple Records, a later manifestation of the work of Megson, glorified Jim Jones as well, by incorporating his speeches in their work.

[8] At http://www.boydrice.com/INTERVIEWS/FifthPath/INDEX.htm.

[9] Cabaret Voltaire was the name of the club opened up in Zurich in 1916. This was the start of the Dada movement, which also claimed to be “anti-art.” Voltaire was an Enlightenment philosopher, who was picked up by the British elite and wrote the plays Candide and La Pucelle d'Orléans, attacking the ideas of Leibniz and the historical importance of Joan of Arc.

[10] Coil, which was founded by Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, worked with a number of others who were perhaps a little bit more well known. Marc Almond, a member of Temple of Psychick Youth and the lead singer of Soft Cell, the band responsible for the famous song “Tainted Love,” was involved in performances of this perverse type.

In fact, The Museum of Modern Art, in New York, bought a copy of Coil's cover of the famous song. Coil was also extremely important to Trent Reznor, the founder of Nine Inch Nails and Nothing Records. Reznor was also the man who made Marilyn Manson so famous.