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The
Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity is the product of
a merger between the Northwest Coalition Against Malicious
Harassment and the Coalition for Human Dignity. The latter
group was founded in Portland in the late '80s.
Apocalypse
Culture II has received advance praise from Portland
rock journalist and poet Richard Meltzer, National Public
Radio's Andrei Codrescu and Marilyn Manson, among others.
Moynihan
says he is not a member of any national Asatru group, though
he works with a small "Asatru-oriented" arts collective.
Blood
Axis' Blot: Sacrifice in Sweden, is available at
Ozone and other local record stores, and from the label
Cold Meat Industry: www.coldmeat.se
Lords
of Chaos won a 1998 Firecracker Alternative Press Award
for music writing. Other Firecracker honorees include leftist
historian Howard Zinn and Zapatista leader Subcommandante
Marcos. Moynihan and Søderlind are preparing a German
edition.
"I feel
perfectly comfortable selling Blood Axis," says Janelle
Janosz, owner of Ozone Records. Janosz doesn't carry bands
such as infamous English Nazi boneheads Skrewdriver. "I've
never seen any reason not to carry his band."
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Last fall, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the national anti-racist
organization, published a list of six men it claimed to be
the leaders of a new generation of American hatemongers.
There's Jimmy Miller, a skinhead imprisoned for bombings
in Arizona; Alex Curtis, a San Diegan convicted of harassing
inter-racial couples, now publisher of a white-supremacist
newspaper; Matt Hale, once arrested for threatening three
black men with a gun and now pimp for the virulent World
Church of the Creator; Bruce Breeding, crony of David Duke
and member of the far-right National Alliance; and Erich
Gliebe, a National Alliance organizer.
And then there's Portland's Michael Moynihan, a 31-year-old
author and musician, whom the SPLC describes as "a major
purveyor of neo-Nazism, occult fascism and international
industrial and black metal music."
Two Sundays ago, as a gorgeous summer evening faded to
black, Moynihan reclined on the back patio of the Moon &
Sixpence, an English-style pub just off Sandy Boulevard.
He sipped a Guinness and considered the notion that he is
one of the most dangerous men in America.
"These guys have no idea where to even begin," he says.
"They're out of their league. If they would check with me
in the course of their research, it would be much more difficult
to spread these lies."
Especially since last May, when neo-Nazism was initially
(and incorrectly) supposed to have sparked the massacre
at Columbine High School, Moynihan has become a favorite
bête noire of anti-racist activists. On May
13, 1999, an Oregonian guest editorial by Robert
Crawford, a member of the Northwest Coalition for Human
Dignity, declared, "we believe that the Portland leader
of a metal band, Blood Axis, and head of Storm Publications,
is a big player in the effort to bring racism into the metal
scene locally." Joe Conason, writing in Salon,
alleged that music and writing like Moynihan's drives "dangers
lurking in dark, Nazi-worshiping corners of alienated youth
culture."
A booklet called Soundtracks to the White Revolution,
published in November by the Seattle-based Northwest Coalition,
accused Moynihan of spreading racism through his music and
writing, particularly his 1998 book Lords of Chaos,
an examination of Norway's violent "black metal" underground
that was praised by numerous reviewers. (The book won a
prestigious alternative-press award and sold more than 20,000
copies.)
Why do activists lump an author and musician together with
convicted felons and active right-wing organizers?
"Moynihan's inclusion on that list is more emblematic of
a different section of the far right than an attempt to
suggest that he's the leader of any group," says Mark Potok,
the editor of the SPLC's Intelligence Report. "He's
an intellectual leader."
The drumbeat may get louder. This month, Feral House, publisher
of Lords of Chaos, released Apocalypse Culture
II, an anthology of extreme writing and art certain
to be one of the most jarring books published in America
this year. In its percolating stew of strangeness, ACII
contains oddball actor Crispin Glover's denunciation of
Steven Spielberg ("Would the culture benefit from Steven
Spielberg's murder?"), a short story by Ted Kaczynski and
an essay by one S. Epps, explaining why white people are
genetically inferior to black people.
Moynihan helps translate some Italian terrorist manifestos
and an essay by Finnish ecologist Pentii Linkola, who believes
that only the dismantling of modern society can save the
Earth. Moynihan also profiles the efforts of onetime Charles
Manson associate and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil
to adapt his formidable sexual appetite to prison life.
If Apocalypse Culture II crosses activists' desks,
such strangeness may join other evidence they cite in their
case against Moynihan:
Exhibit A: Quotes in obscure fanzines, like one from No
Longer a Fanzine, circa '94: "The number of six million
[Jews killed in the Holocaust] is just arbitrary and inaccurate....
If I were given the opportunity to start up the next Holocaust,
I would definitely have more lenient entry requirements
than the Nazis."
Exhibit B: Interest in Asatru, a revival of Norse pagan
spirituality. Some forms of Asatru are championed by white
supremacists, although many elements within the movement
vigorously oppose such efforts. Moynihan also writes for
The Black Flame, the Church of Satan's magazine,
and interviewed late COS founder Anton LaVey twice.
Exhibit C: Blood Axis, his band, well-regarded within a
small experimental scene in which a fascination with the
forbidden is practically de rigueur. Blood Axis rarely
books clubs in the US, but has toured extensively in Europe.
Despite what some think, Blood Axis is definitely not
a heavy metal band. Dark portents of classical, folk, electronic
and experimental music swirl through band's sound. Blot:
Sacrifice in Sweden, the most recent of the group's
two albums, runs hot with images of sacrifice, pagan gods,
revolution and arcane ritual, but contains no racist lyrics.
Still, the band's use of such controversial material, not
to mention the Kruekenkreuz, an ancient cross adopted
by some Christian Crusaders and Austrian nationalists (but
banned by the Nazis), sparks leftist ire. Protests spurred
by socialist groups forced the cancellation of Blood Axis
shows in Seattle and San Francisco in 1998.
Exhibit D: Moynihan's small hobby-level publishing company
and record label, Storm, carries such "rare and heretical"
items as folk recordings by Charles Manson (Manson and Moynihan
had frequent phone conversations for a time, which later
served as the basis for an article by Moynihan) and Siege,
an anthology of rants by James Mason, an ex-Nazi and Mansonite.
Siege has been out of print for five years, and Moynihan
says he hasn't printed a Storm catalogue in about as long.
Exhibit E: Lords of Chaos, which Moynihan co-authored
with Norwegian journalist Didrik Søderlind.
Though many praised the book's exploration of a grim variant
of heavy metal that won popularity among some Norwegian
kids, Moynihan's activist critics slam the book's account
of murders and arsons and the racism espoused by some of
the scene's principals. Some call the book a work of veiled
propaganda.
Members
of Blood Axis, with Moynihan at center, in Budapest, Hungary.
Surveying this jihad against him, Moynihan is frankly dismissive.
"They don't understand the first thing about what I'm saying
or doing," he says. "They're convinced that if society was
run according to their views, everybody would be happy.
I don't think it's that simple."
That Moynihan has some unusual ideas and interests is clear.
However, a deeper look into his strange case creates serious
doubts about allegations that he's a fascist bent on twisting
underground culture to his will. If you actually talk to
him, you, too, might start thinking that it's not that simple.
No one from the Coalition or SPLC has spoken with Moynihan.
If they did, they would find him an engaging and tireless
talker who waxes decidedly pessimistic on the direction
of modern society, but also exhibits a certain sardonic
humor, especially as far as his notoriety is concerned.
He christened his other band, a dark-edged folk group, Witch
Hunt; he adorns an envelope full of recordings with sprightly
"TEACH TOLERANCE" stickers. He recently told the venerable
punk magazine Flipside that his membership in the
"National Polite People's Party" precludes any sympathy
with Nazis.
He moved to Portland in 1995 and now shares a house in
Northeast with his girlfriend, Blood Axis violinist Annabel
Lee, and their two dogs. He has a distinct fondness for
good beer and also sings the praises of absinthe, which
some friends of his distill. He describes his circle as
a diverse crew of artists, writers and musicians, mostly
united by their determination to stand against conventional
thought.
"I know all kinds of strange people," he says. "I've always
hung out with people who are real outsiders or heretics."
A pair of local events illustrate the wide swathe Moynihan
and friends cut through Portland's (for lack of a better
term) "alternative" subcultures. At the end of July, Witch
Hunt played a kind of New Age teach-in at Pioneer Courthouse
Square organized by Jose Arguelles, a local writer who believes
he's decoded the ancient 13-month lunar calendar of the
Mayans. Last week, Moynihan and Lee both played in an eclectic
performance-art cabaret at Berbati's Pan, joining in on
a Gypsy burlesque song popularized by Marlene Dietrich.
The Boston native has been involved in underground music
and culture since he was a teen-ager. Trading hardcore punk
for the more transgressive aesthetics of early industrial
music, he played for a time with genre pioneers Sleep Chamber.
He moved to Belgium in the late '80s, hanging out with avant-garde
artists and squatting in a factory. After returning to the
US, he roomed and collaborated with notorious musician/
provocateur Boyd Rice--who actually has called himself
a fascist--in Denver before moving to Portland in 1995,
in part to work with Feral House. (The publisher has moved
to LA; Moynihan has long since stopped working with Rice.)
There is no doubt that, as an artist and thinker, Moynihan
is radical. For starters, he rejects the idea that society
is evolving into progressively more enlightened forms.
"That's where I part ways with all these political
people," he says, "whether they're the Marxist/ Communist/Socialist
people who think that humans want to get along on a grand
scale, or whether it's the Nazis, who think that if everyone
was just of the same race, they'd all get along perfectly,
or the anarchists, who think everyone would love to live
this way if you just took away the police.
"They're all deluded. People should worry about what happens
on their block. They should get along with their neighbors
before they worry about the great ills of society and about
telling someone who lives 200 miles away what to do."
He describes conventional politics as a parlor game played
out to 19th-century rules while consumerism paves the planet
and wipes out unique cultures. He says he never votes. He
says vast nation-states are a ridiculous way to organize
society, and that a tribal mosaic of small, tightly bonded
groups would better suit a human nature he views as largely
unchanged from ancient times.
"The only realistic way I would want to deal with society
is on some sort of small level of people who have something
in common, who look out for each other," he says.
Asked point-blank, Moynihan says he's not a neo-Nazi. He
also bashes white supremacy and fascism.
"I don't see white people doing anything particularly noble
these days, so why on earth would I be a white supremacist?"
he says. "What does fascism have to do with anything that's
going on? The far right is a bunch of isolated losers. I
probably have far more in common with anarchists than I
would with any right-wing person, and they would probably
agree."
People who have encountered Moynihan in Portland's independent
music and publishing scenes have reached a rather different
conclusion about him than the watchdog groups like the SPLC.
"My most basic impression is that he thinks some people
are better than others and the people who are better should
not have to live according to the lowest common denominator,"
says Chloe Eudaly, owner of Reading Frenzy, the downtown
'zine emporium that hosted a standing-room-only reading
by Moynihan shortly after Lords of Chaos came out.
Eudaly says she's known Moynihan for about four years. "I
wouldn't call that fascist, I would call it elitist. I think
that many people share the same belief and act it out on
a daily basis but would never recognize it in themselves."
"Mike has been a very good friend," says Sean Tejaratchi,
the Portland graphic artist who designed Lords of Chaos
in close collaboration with Moynihan. Tejaratchi is
also the half-Iranian adopted son of a Jewish family. "He's
gone out of his way to help me. If he turns out to be a
high commander of the evil racist forces, then hoo boy!
There's going to be egg on my face! I choose to give more
weight to my own experiences and observations than to people
who tell me that a good friend of mine is a force of ultimate
darkness."
Some academics and journalists who've done extensive work
on radical politics and religion also feel that damnations
of Moynihan may be off-base.
"Based on my work with the subject of the far right, and
my dealings with Michael Moynihan, none of these labels
would constitute a fair characterization," says Dr. Jeffrey
Kaplan, an American cultural historian currently associated
with the University of Helsinki in Finland. Kaplan wrote
Radical Religion in America, a well-regarded 1997
investigation of fringe religions, including Asatru and
the extreme racism of Christian Identity. Kaplan says he
made Moynihan's acquaintance while working on the book's
section on Asatru. He also says he called some of the several
errors of fact in the SPLC's bio of Moynihan to the attention
of Intelligence Report editor Potok.
James Ridgeway, a Village Voice reporter who has
covered extremist politics for years and wrote Blood
in the Face, a 1991 study of the far right, praises
Lords of Chaos as a useful reference work. As for
the SPLC's list, he says, "I don't know what the shit that
was about."
Moynihan has said some things that, at first glance at
least, are pretty outrageous. There's his suggestion that
a new Holocaust under his direction might be more freeform
than the Third Reich's, for example.
"That's the big one," he says. "A lot of these attacks
stem from that one quote, basically."
A close reading of the quote reveals it to be general misanthropy
rather than specific bigotry. Last fall, Moynihan told Eye
that he is not a Holocaust revisionist. More crucially,
he notes that the quote has been lifted from its original
place in an underground subculture, where all brands of
radicalism are bandied about, and held up as a serious political
statement.
"This is in response to a question from a snotty 15-year-old
punk rocker, and that's the spirit in which it was answered
with this sort of incendiary statement," he says. "I'm not
calling for singling out any one group for this sort of
treatment, because I've never made such a comment about
anyone, ever."
As the old pulp-fiction cliché goes, no one knows
what evil lurks in the hearts of men. But insofar as it
can be said of anyone, it can be said that Moynihan's not
a neo-Nazi. And the idea that he's an agent (or organizer)
of a nebulous far-right conspiracy looks
a little shaky.
The research presented by his critics is mostly based on
quotes in old fanzines and outfield websites, and is thus
built on quicksand. Even as such, it neglects most of the
voluminous material by and about Moynihan that's been printed
in 'zines, newspapers and journals. While the activists
argue that they're just presenting their side of the story,
there's no question that their slickly printed reports,
widely distributed to journalists and law enforcement, have
a rather unbalanced impact. In the wake of Soundtracks,
for example, Moynihan's name figured in a number of newspaper
articles that did not include any comment from him.
"Once you get stuck with that Nazi tag, it never comes
off," Moynihan says. "Putting an editorial like that in
The Oregonian, filled with misrepresentations, has
serious implications for someone who has to live and work
in Portland. People lose their jobs over that sort of thing."
Moynihan does take America's traditional fascination with
the strange to a deeper level of inquiry. You could trace
this national tendency back at least as far as Edgar Allen
Poe, and detect it, in debased form, in the serial-killer
T-shirts sported by suburban metalheads. His writing examines
people far beyond the borders of the mainstream. Blood Axis'
allusions to a pagan past and its use of Nordic, Germanic
and Celtic elements definitely contrast with both bubble-gum
pop and sword-and-sorcery metal.
"I make no apology about my interest in European culture,"
Moynihan says. "Europe is my spiritual homeland. I'll leave
to other people to research Native American culture, or
Far Eastern culture, or whatever. I encourage everyone to
find out as much as they can about their heritage."
Those who criticize him on political grounds, he says,
really lose him.
"These people are worried about some skinhead takeover?"
he says. "It's not like the average black person in America,
or someone in Thailand or Tibet, is really threatened by
skinheads. What they're threatened by is a global corporate
monoculture that's really going to divest them of power
and destroy their culture. Not to sound like some progressive
type or anything, but I actually do support the idea of
a diversity of human groups surviving on earth. Different
cultural traditions make the world interesting. In the United
States, you have homogenous consumerism. Everyone buys the
same clothes at the mall no matter what their heritage is.
That's a far more immediate threat to racial justice or
identity than anything emanating from neo-Nazis."
Certainly, a serious consideration of Moynihan takes you
into rocky terrain, where many of the assumptions of mainstream
politics and culture are either irrelevant or under assault.
At the same time, who hasn't looked at the plastic sprawl
of current pop culture and wished for something a little
more intense, intimate and immediate? Who hasn't spent at
least a few moments considering some of the darker corners
of human experience? Who hasn't said things or entertained
notions that could offend? Aren't artists, under a cultural
mandate as old as the West, supposed to rub salt into society's
wounds?
There's no doubt that some aspects of Moynihan's work are
hard to swallow. However, those who've attacked him in the
name of democracy and tolerance have failed to present a
clear picture of that work or its creator.
For his part, Moynihan says he has little choice but to
add new complications.
"I think people have to do what their impulses and character
propel them to," he says. "I couldn't imagine sitting behind
a computer in a corporate office. If my work doesn't meet
with approval, there's nothing I can do about it. I try
to interact with people who I like, and who I respect, and
who are stimulating, where there's a mutual respect. That's
what makes life meaningful."
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