The Notorious Michael Moynihan

Interviewed by Zach Dundas (editor@mumblage.com)

Ask some people, and they'll tell you Michael Moynihan is a gentleman and a scholar. Ask others, and they'll tell you he's a clear and present danger to modern America, a crypto-Nazi spreading an insidious agenda through the music of Blood Axis and several other music project, and his underground-hit book Lords of Chaos. Moynihan, who wrote Lords of Chaos to document the violent black metal scene in Scandinavia in the early '90s, just seems to attract the most virulent kind of criticism. Anti-racist watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center have claimed that Lords of Chaos furthered a white supremacist agenda, and the dark, archaic imagery of Blood Axis has likewise been a magnet for controversy.

However, last year I spent quite a bit of time with Moynihan, interviewing him a number of times. As the following transcript may suggest, I became convinced that things in the case of this writer and musician are not as black and white as some think. The reader is invited to draw his or her own conclusions.

ZD: Someone who thinks that what's in Blood Axis' music--or in Apocalypse Culture, or in Lords of Chaos--is dangerous could ask, what's the point of making all this extreme, terrible stuff available?

MM: It already is available. I don't think you could say the books are promoting anything specifically. They're acknowledging that it exists, and if you ignore it, that doesn't mean it goes away. It's a matter of choice whether or not you want to read Apocalypse Culture II, whether you want to allow that stuff into your consciousness. Most people would probably find it enlightening at least in some way, because they'd realize that there's a lot more going on in the world than they were previously aware of, and it's not necessarily all good. I don't see how anyone could read ACII and not find it to cause a serious rupturing of their notions of human progress. It's pretty clear that the decline of the West is already a done deal.

ZD: Would Apocalypse Culture II have had an equally hard time ten years ago, or fewer difficulties?

MM: Fewer.

ZD: Why?

MM: That's a good question. In my opinion, modern society--and especially America--is developing this culture that, in the name of freedom and making sure that everyone's rights are safeguarded, is being reduced to protecting whether or not anybody, anywhere, might be offended by something or have their feelings hurt. Now they're outlawing material that isn't even real, but is an artist's depiction of something. They're outlawing your imagination.

ZD: Is this shift driven by events like the Columbine massacre, and the media coverage that says that these kids did this because of all this weird culture they were exposed to?

MM: Yeah, exactly. Or that they did it because it was Hitler's birthday, or something like that, which has been totally debunked. But I just looked at a Time magazine while I was waiting at the barbershop, and there was some essay about why Hitler wasn't the man of the millennium or century. The reporter writes about how his name came up again recently when these kids committed a massacre to honor his birthday--now this is something that's been totally refuted, in the New York Times no less, and it still gets recycled in a major news magazine.

ZD: What was your experience with the media in the wake of Columbine?

MM: Lords of Chaos actually got a high degree of mainstream press. It was reviewed all over the place, and I appeared on a lot of radio shows. When Columbine happened, as is typical when there's an event like that, which happens in a split-second and is really catastrophic, they desperately go looking for someone to comment on it. I got called by some stations the day the thing was happening, while the whole place was under siege. I was on a big Texas radio station, and a few others. I tried to be really rational about it, and I said, "I don't know what is going on with these kids, but I have a real problem with ascribing it to the music they listen to. There's obviously more to the story." I would hear some of the radio shows and afterwards they'd have people on there saying these incredibly inane things. They had a guy on who was, I think, mayor of the suburb it happened in. His analysis was ultimately, there are good people in the world, and there are bad people, and this is one of those cases where the bad people hurt the good people. Well, a five year old could come up with something more intelligent. A five year old would have said "these kids hate their school", and that would have been much more insightful. I knew when it happened it was going to become a scapegoat situation, that anyone who wanted to could use Columbine for their own purposes. What were the solutions that were proposed afterwards? The politicians were saying, we need more laws! We need gun laws so kids can't have guns. But there ARE already gun laws saying kids can't have guns. Well, we need more of them. Then the psychologists come and say, no, we need more psychologists in the schools to detect these troublesome students before they erupt with acts of violence. The Christians say, we need more religion in the schools, we need Christian values. And it's so obvious that these people all have a vested interested in these issues. Nobody could step back and say, obviously, there's something else going on.

ZD: When Columbine went down, I knew the second I heard the news how it was going to play. I knew they would find a Marilyn Manson CD in one of the kid's bedrooms, and that would be it.

MM: When these people who are totally out of their league try to go in and analyze these subcultures, they get indignant about things they don't even understand, except they sense there's something wrong about it. They can't even articulate what it is in a rational sense. It's not any different than those civil rights watchdog groups. When they try to go in and talk about industrial music or whatever, they're totally out of their league. They have no idea what that subculture is about or what kind of strange things swirl around in that subculture, and then they try to interpret it in some kind of political/economic world view. It's a lost cause.

ZD: And then there was the effort to link your music and writing to some possible "future Columbine."

MM: Yes, there was an editorial in the Oregonian that was full of factual errors that actually, if you read it carefully, implied that I had something to do with Columbine. There were a number of other things; someone from Salon, Joe Conason, wrote a demented article about it. He was obviously fed the same info by the human-rights watchdog people, trying to create a grand Columbine conspiracy in which these violent Nazi music sympathizers were going to make kids all over the country go berzerk. Interestingly, any time a reporter called me beforehand, well, they didn't write one of those articles.

ZD: So It's fairly easy for groups, say groups that are self-proclaimed liberal watchdog groups, that have established a certain credibility to plant stories in the media, in your experience?

MM: That's what they spend all their time doing, writing press releases. A large percentage of the stories in media originate from this stuff. From the way media and information is disseminated now, it's so fast and everything's on these tight deadlines and is instantly spread over the Internet. You don't have time to research things. It's easier to take a press release from some watchdog group and assume, "Well, this is an exciting story, it's good these people are on top of this situation and they've done all the research." they skip the whole stage of finding out whether it's true.

ZD: From my contact with the Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity and the Southern Poverty Law Center, it's clear that they have extensive dossiers on you.

MM: They probably have them on tons of people. They'll keep a dossier on anyone who says anything they don't approve of; they'll note the name. It gets sort of creepy, in that you have organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center working with the Justice Department. The line between public and private government starts to blur. If you wanted to keep dossiers on everyone you didn't like, well, it's a free country and no one could stop you from doing that. But when you're feeding all this stuff to law enforcement agencies, and the law enforcement agencies don't have time to do research either, and you have this imprimatur that you're doing the right thing. No one from the law enforcement agencies, or the media, bothers to check out whether the information is factual.

ZD: What's the point?

MM: I think it depends. I think some of these people have a political agenda and can feel good because they think they're working for a good cause. At the same time, conveniently, the good cause is paying their rent and giving them an office to work in. They can feel like they're doing something. I think the world at this point is filled with people who don't have anything to do. If you can feel like you're this knight on a horse, slaying this dragon that's a menace to society, you can feel like you're a hero. I don't seen any threat to society in any of this stuff.

ZD: Did you first start receiving all this attention after Lords of Chaos came out?

MM: The Columbine thing was really a pivot point for these people. Everybody leapt on it, using it for their own purposes. It was like these people were waiting for it. The SPLC immediately sent out a mailing talking about the Columbine massacre, saying, "Look what's happened on Hitler's birthday, we need your money more than ever!" I find that totally cynical. These people feed on the blood of all the kids who died at Columbine. Maybe they've convinced themselves they're doing it for the good of mankind, but to me they seem like bloodsuckers engaged in a feeding frenzy, feasting on a pile of kids' corpses at some school in Colorado.

ZD: There's this idea that Lords of Chaos is actually a veiled work of propaganda. I asked one of the Coalition members, if Lords of Chaos is a work of propaganda, what is the end it seeks? And he said, well, what Moynihan is trying to do is create an intellectual climate in which violence can occur. Then he said, he advocates the work of Julius Evola--why else would you champion a guy like that?

MM: My answer to that is: go and look up what Julius Evola's writings are for yourself. There's a book he wrote about the spirituality of mountain climbing, a book on alchemy, a book called Revolt Against the Modern World that basically argues that the Western world has been in decline--not for the last 100 or 200 years, but since about 800 BC. So there's that book, where he argues that society has lost its moorings and people are these atomized creatures swirling around with no understanding of why they exist. There's a book on Zen buddhism, a book on yoga. How those things contribute to a climate of violence, I don't know. The publisher of the Evola book I'm working on publishes only metaphysical books--some could call it a New Age publisher. This publisher must be very confused if they're putting out books that create a climate of violence without realizing it. Something tells me these guys have never actually read any of this stuff. If you look at the actual writings in question, anyone with a brain will see that their interpretation is crap. Go flip through the books and decide for yourself. This is what I'd say to everyone, about everything--let the chips fall where they may. Decide for yourself.

ZD: It's also claimed that Lords of Chaos is a rallying point for a racist black metal scene in the US.

MM: There IS NO black metal scene in the United States. Those kids at Columbine were not black metal fans. The general reaction to LOC was positive, but often the people who didn't like the book were black metal kids, who were upset that the book is hard to read in places and wasn't just a compendium of record reviews about their favorite bands. These kids hated the book. And ninety percent of the 20,000 people who bought that book were not into black metal. That's why it was successful, because it was a glimpse into a subculture which most people would never have had any idea about.

ZD: To what degree did the fact that you're in a band and have some CDs out in Europe influence your ability to get access to people for interviews?

MM: It made a big difference insofar as I was not someone who was a typical journalist or outsider. There was a kind of rapport or mutual respect. Some of the sociologists who were favorably impressed by the book knew that they could never have written it. If they went there, as academics in shirt and tie, they'd be treated totally differently than me or Didrik, who knew all those people from when he was 15 years old, and who'd spent time himself as a teenager at the store where all those people met. We were able to really get in there and root around a little.

ZD: Tell me about your thoughts on "resurgent atavism" and "the dawn of the heathen Millennium," two phrases you've dropped into your writing.

MM: I think that a lot of modern philosophy and trends of thought and the way humans see themselves in the world have really erred in the track they've gotten on. If you trace things back to a few thousand years ago, it was a totally different view. People were much more realistic about life and death, and the fact that death is part of life. It seems people existed in a more sensible relationship with nature and you don't have that any more. Now you have people trying to preserve human life at any cost, people terrified of death and trying to avoid it and denying it. You can see the ramifications of this played out in the excesses of the American funeral industry. In America, it's all exaggerated to the Nth degree. These older ways of looking at the world were more sensible.

ZD: And you feel that there's a definite, identifiable resurgence of that sort of thinking?

MM: We did notice that when we went on tour in Europe. No matter where we went, we met people who, in a certain sense, saw things in a similiar way. In Portugal, we played with we played with Sangre Cavallum, an amazing band that played traditional Portugese music, not in an anachronistic way, but in a very aggressive way. There were people like this in Brittany, and similar people in Hungary, everywhere. In Germany we played with this great band called Voxus IMP that played electronic, almost techno music, but it was all inspired by ancient Germanic history. They were guys who worked as pyrotechnics engineers in an opera house in Dresden, so they had this pyrotechnics display that would have made KISS jealous. It was really over the top, totally modern, and yet infused with this imagery of older things. There is a revival of that stuff, but at the same time it's a tiny, tiny blip on the radar as far as popular music goes. I don't think it was there ten years ago, though.

ZD: The selective evidence that's used to damn you is interesting. No one from watchdog groups sends out the recent Flipside interview, where you're asked point-blank if you're a Nazi or white-supremacist and say no.

MM: Those are difficult topics. When you get into these buzzwords like fascism and Nazism, those are difficult areas. The media forums where these terms are bandied about don't allow for any discussion of the intricacies of such subjects, or what the words even mean. These people who are anti-this and anti-that activist types, they don't want such intricacies discussed. People will say, are you a fascist? And I'll say, if fascism is opposed to the current state of affairs, and if people are going to label me a fascist because I'm opposed to the current state of affairs, whatever. I can't really argue with that. They'll ask me if I'm a white supremacist. I say, I don't see white people doing anything particularly worthy these days, or noble or worthy of support, so why on Earth would I be a white supremacist? I find most of the behavior of white people to be totally reprehensible.

ZD: What has the impact of all this infamy been, beyond the cancellation of certain Blood Axis shows?

MM: The only thing these people really did is make us way more famous than we ever would have been, and elicit all this support from people who otherwise would have never been supporters. There's been this idea established that if you're an artist, you're enlightened. If you're enlightened, you're a progressive who looks at human history in terms of people evolving towards this better ideal, working out all their problems over time. And that's the "correct" way to view everything. I think that reality is much more complex, and I thought that art was one of these few areas in life where you could express whatever you wanted to express. And now you have these people who aren't artists themselves, who don't produce anything other than little pamphlets, you have them coming in and saying, this is not acceptable art, this is not acceptable writing. I don't think these people are qualified to comment.

ZD: Wouldn't it be easier to become a moderate Democrat and repent of your ways?

MM: No, because I think people have to do what their impulses and character propel them to do. I do what comes naturally to me to do. I don't have choice. I couldn't imagine sitting behind a computer in a corporate office. I'd rather be six feet under. And if the stuff doesn't meet with approval, there's nothing I can do about it. I'm sort of a lostcause. In the end, it doesn't matter that much, because I spend my time ensuring that these people have nothing to do with my existence on an everyday level. 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 rewarding.

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