Lab To Become The New Lib?

Nobody held a gun to Nick Clegg’s head and forced him to enter into a coalition that was, to many, a walking oxymoron. At least no one did so in the pseudo-physical, extortionate or even figurative sense. However, that doesn’t completely dispel the notion that a merge onto the side of the Conservative party was chiefly an escape route, or move for survival, just as parasites would sooner choose a new host to feed on than waste away alone. Abysmal election results and a growing roar of hilarity from the media dogs surrounding Clegg’s press office would no doubt have fuelled the hatred from within the party itself, and who knows if Clegg would have been forced to stand down after such a chaotic, unstable and ultimately futile act of rebellion against traditional party politics? The heretic, it seemed, could either be burnt at the stake or make a prompt conversion and enter the fold. And the latter, according to politicians and journalists across the spectrum, is exactly what he did.

 

So Clegg married Cameron to keep a legacy for himself. Any mindless walking penis would probably do the same out of sheer desperation. Yet the strange pseudo-conservative policies and ideals being peddles by the Liberals in their slice of the pie, and a strangely docile opposition to Tory policy itself as only served to stoke up once again the fuels of heresy and discontent in the Lib Dem party. This, presumably, is why a large number of high profile Liberal bénévoles famously defected over to working class ‘saviours’ Labour in a desperate bid to recoup some of their fundamental values. By the same token, rumours are spreading across London this very second which suggest that Charles Kennedy, once leader of the Lib Dem party, is now also planning to defect. He may have half-heartedly denied the claims in a hastily scrawled press release, but if this isn’t a love letter to the Labour party then...well....what is?

 

So why are these head honchos and grass roots rioters alike all deciding to flock elsewhere to get off on centre-left policies (sort of the soft porn of British politics, if you will). The political field seems to undergoing a great deal of reshuffling, with the Liberal Party drawing closer and closer to the dreaded political purgatory of The Centre and, who knows, might precariously wobble there for months before finally taking a chaotic plunge into the murky world of old world elitism and class-consciousness. An unpleasant place to be indeed. Meanwhile, the Labour party, grotesquely loaded with faux-liberal, young new faces and the golden Milliband Brothers, is making appeals to the jaded Liberals of the left, namely those who were once part of the renegade SDP. Ed Milliband’s speech earlier this week was a thinly concealed appeal to those frustrated and disillusioned with their bizarrely draconian post-9/11 policies:

 

"I believe the argument is being won that on issues like ID cards and stop-and-search we became too casual about the liberties of individuals. And I believe the argument is being conclusively won that we must recognize the profound mistake of the Iraq war. I want to take my party on a journey to a different identity for the future: social democratic on economic policy, standing for redistribution and tackling inequality, liberal in our respect for individual rights." (Guardian)

 

Yes, that was me dicking around with the italics, not the Guardian, which is a respectable and established paper, as opposed to a moron with a digital screen. Anyway, the repetition of words such as ‘casual’ and ‘individuals’ and of course ‘liberal’ would make any young cynic of the decontracté variety sit up and listen. Whoever wrote this speech – probably not Milliband himself but I suppose there’s always hope – clearly wants to open the floodgates for the so-called ‘true Lib Dems,’ or rather those repulsed by the coalition. As long as the Liberal party stays joined at the hip to the Tories, no one’s going to look to them for entertaining the more radical liberal policies – so why shouldn’t they try their luck with what could quickly the become the new Liberal Left?

Abfahrt Von Gedanken...Going Up...Bad Fries And Fremdenfeindlichkeit

THE WOODS ARE BURNING! Yes. And if I don’t at least try and regurgitate this filth onto something civilised, like a keyboard, it’s just going to ferment in my brain until I start foaming at the mouth and somebody gets shivved. Probably me. I’ve got a maggot in my brain for each hour of sleep that I lost last night, a monstrous debacle of jet clouds, turbulence and cold, empty hotel rooms. Frankfurt airport is Hell. No questions asked.


I should probably get some sleep, but this needs must raus. I’ve still got that weird, out of town feeling, driving like an asshole, pushing the car up to over one hundred on the drive into town, and watching other people being watched in traffic. Someone grinded past playing Lady Ga Ga – no one plays that out of their own free will, I thought, and gave the poor girl a poor sympathetic grimace. But what the hell was I doing? Where the hell was I? Goddamn these useless tangents.

Let’s start from the beginning, that would be the most rational place to commence. My diary notes are hazy at best, barely spilling over a single page of A5 but the few scraps I can salvage from it will have to do:

It’s not a binge if it doesn’t give you cardiac arrest, and then, scrawled into the corner, The Mountains....Jonny’s in America.

I’d left town on a high and was dreading the possibility that sometime, sometime soon, I would crash down suddenly and unexpectedly, in a most inconvenient place, such as up the mountain, or something, Yes, I’m afraid of Americans, I’m afraid of the worst...

But time out of town seemed almost synonymous with recuperation and the opportunity, greatly overdue, after all this forgetfulness and arrogance and gnashing of teeth, to finally just chill the fuck out. Enough shaking. There is good beer in Austria, and good people, and they know it. There were no malicious sideways glances or glares as we exited the Terminal at Graz, no pallid veils of tolerance. Those would come later, when we met the other countries. It was hot in the city and I was sweating like a pig, but that was OK.

(The author, bemused, sleep deprived, pissing away the time before climate change fear-mongering)

The others were friendly – and then some. We rolled up to a hotel in Judenberg, considerably more salubrious than the hellholes pasted over tourism leaflets in the airport, and the staff had faces made from real skin. No fakes grins and thick clumps of foundation to hide the xenophobic turmoil of their brains. Excellent good. Hours later, perhaps many hours, I strike up a conversation with one of the employees at the bar and the ice breaks easily thanks for a few somewhat endearing grammatical errors on my part. Austrian German was tougher than it looked, and the host on the plane had taken to my attempts at all kindly. But this was different – I was instantly adopted as her little pet, something to stroke and coo at when the job got dull as hell. It suited me fine, as did the extra beer and cigarettes.

Heavens forfend – twenty minutes of frantic typing and all I produce is mush. The relevant content, you couldn’t stretch it over the eye of a needle. Very poor indeed. The cider can is getting low and my keyboard’s groaning with the strain.

NB: My companion for the week has been HS Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 and there is a lurking fears in the sleep deprived fibres of my brain that, sub-consciously, this will into some pathetic, sick, contrived work of pseudo-plagiarism. Hideous. But words are words and I’m out of brain cells.

Extortion!

Out of the pungent vapours of beer, sweat, and god knows what else, down the stairs, down the ragged red strip of fabric, through the entrance (Why are we going through the fire escape? This must be some kind of administrative error.) and into, really, nothing in particular. The venue looked not dissimilar to some hideous old aircraft hangar that had sagged in on itself, crippled by its own self loathing, and there wasn’t a vibrant statuette or proud portrait frame in sight. (Call that a red carpet? Someone asks, a rhetorical question, we presumed. It looks like it’s had something amputated. The poor fool. He was probably right)

‘It looks like a fucking bingo hall,’ someone moaned and, according to a partially torn poster hanging uncomfortably above the urinal, it certainly was. It would seem that the architectural dress code, if such a thing truly exists, had strictly prohibited style, and it was perhaps for this reason that an attempt to merrily carry open bottles of wine inside the hangar/hall/hole was met with an orgy of frowning and tutting at the door, and someone faintly implying that I was being an inconsiderate asshole.

‘What do you mean, he can’t come?’ Some poor drunkard moaned, clutching her wine bottle tightly against two sagging burst balloons, ‘you mean this isn’t a suitable companion?’ Not unless style or class was on the agenda, but it seemed that the venue and the latter were no longer on speaking terms.

Matters improved considerably at the bar – reasonably over the top, treat-yourself-luv-it’s-the-fucking-ball price labels, but self conscious and guilty about it – however there was once again a sudden and unpleasant surge downwards as we approached the table. Everyone is talking about cummerbunds. I am not wearing a cummerbund – in fact, I don’t even seem to be wearing socks.

Eventually, sustenance arrives, born lethargically on the huddled backs of fierce, angry women who bark strangely exotic words at each other, referencing, presumably, the food, but in between their brain and their mouths some terrible transformation takes place, and what spews out orally is nothing more than garbled ejaculations. ‘Broo-lay! Krem-fresh! Do-fin-wars!’

‘Right.’ A particularly terrifying individual is stood directly behind my chair, glowering down at the puny post-it card bearing my name and some odd initials. ‘I wan’ a Gammon and I wan’ a Chikkin,’ she snarls at the hapless young boy, tentatively bearing a bent tray loaded hideously with the rickety plates of the meal, costing in excess of twenty pounds.

‘This isn’t Gammon, damnit,’ my drunken companion seethes, eyes fixed down on the sinewy strips of meat, mercifully all but submerged in gravy. ‘This is ham – this is just ham!’ Someone informs him that, really, the two meats are essentially exactly the same, but the attempt at consolation was promptly torn down and devoured hungrily, the hapless agent branded as ignorant and uncultured. Unlearnèd in the manners of food. Quite.

My attention drifts away from the small lump of chocolate on my plate which followed the Gammon – which didn’t taste too bad, even if it wasn’t true gammon – and over to the flashing lights and bold white panels of the photography stand across the hall. There seemed to be some minor dispute taking place.

‘What do you mean you can’t take a picture of all five of us?’ A bold young man was retorting incredulously, as his friends looked on in horror and restrained admiration for this defiance of the infallible photographer, ‘there’s more than enough room – we need to do a group photo.’

‘Group photos come later,’ he said. They didn’t.

‘Do not question my authority as a supreme fountain of aesthetic knowledge.’ They didn’t.

The masses then seeped into the centre of the hall, a dance floor of sorts, and so began the final desperate spasms of egotism. There might have been a band playing.

This strange throng of animals had moved as one for six years. But as the last synthetic fibres began to peel away, no one took much notice.

Rags Of Filth

‘’Ngh...yeah...oh yeah, that’s what I like...that’s how I like it, so cold and hard, so rough and rugged, that’s what I’m into lads, that’s what – oh hello, I didn’t see you there. Oh, you know exactly who I am. Remember me, the acid-tongued columnist from the Daily Mail? You're not a reader? Oh dear, you must be some snivelling fool from the under classes, or even worse, a Guardian reader. Oh, heavens forfend! I’m sorry you caught me like this; I was just shooting my load off over this circa 1940s helmet, British forces, of course. Best in the world rah, didn’t you know. What’s this? Oh, just a few odds and ends from the war – ah, the second world war, what a heavenly thing to have been whirled up in, don’t you just love to reminisce about it? I’ve got a few old guns and whatnot lying about here too, I just adore shooting my load off to it all. It’s the roughness, the derring-do and the sheer nostalgic quality to it all – yes, we Mail journalists do have a true fetish for anything hearkening back from that lovely period. Golden age, didn’t you know. Now do turn around a second, while I finish off.''

‘‘Pass me those tissues – lovely. Thanks. You know, it’s funny that you should have mentioned the second world war because I have a profound adoration for everything anti-Nazi, especially planes, lovely things, planes, and it just really makes me stir...down there. People claim I’ve got a nasty habit for trying to link everything back to the war, but they’re a bunch of ignorant young people. Good God, I can’t stand young people at all – so bloody arrogant, so bloody alternative. Plagues of the nation, truly plagues of the nation, we ought to exterminate the brutes! Where were we? Ah, yes, the extermination of those Jew-killing German bastards. Yes. Well, you see, I wasn’t the only one seeing clear links between the England match against Germany and the war – in fact, everyone at the Mail does, did I mention we all just absolutely love the war and everything vaguely resonant of it?’’

‘’What?! Of course it was appropriate to compare the efforts of the brave, patriotic and heroic British, oh the British, oh the Britishers, Oh God save our gracious....Ahem! Yes, it was certainly right to compare...their...efforts, I like to call them ‘the few’, don’t you know – CAPITALIZE THAT WHEN YOU PUT IT IN WRITING YOU SWINE, AND SHOW SOME BLOODY RESPECT, YOU YOUNG NAIVE PIECE OF TRASH – and the English team, referencing that rather ghastly match. And I’ll tell you why – it’s my duty, as a noble and patriotic citizen, a columnist to boot, to make sure that no one who ever reads our paper – those who don’t read us aren’t worth the efforts, they’ve all been brainwashed by the liberal media – can ever forget how profound the difference is between German people and BRTISH PEOPLE and, perhaps more importantly, are never able to cast the cast-iron stereotype of Germans out of their minds. Post-war relations? A fig’s end!’’

‘’Was that a knock from outside? Open the cell door, will you? No doubt my editor, he’s in rather a foul mood today, after England lost the football to Germany and all – what’s that, master? Yes master. Young people urinating on memorials in Manchester, master? Awful, master, awful, awful, awful. Repugnant. Of course I’ll sort them out, master. I’ll find the little runt. I’ll bite his cock off. Yes, master. We do, master. No, nothing worse than a following generation of new world values or, perish the thought....liberal ideas, master. That truly would be a hideous world to live in – see you tomorrow, master. Are you still here? Good heavens, if only they hadn’t scrapped national service, little bastards such as your ilk wouldn’t be poisoning the streets – off with you! And make sure you take your bloody hat off when you walk past the English flag, you self-interested, misinformed, blinkered, ignorant bastard!’’

HP Lovecraft A Racist Fiend?

The Rats in the Walls alluded to it, The Horror at Red Hook beat us over the head with it – but the question still stands: was the talented and controversial writer of cosmic horror, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, revered across the world for his flamboyant, corpulent horror fiction, a massively racist bigot?
 I have a lurking feeling that re-printing the phrases Lovecraft uses in his work would get this sorry salvatory of bloggy flesh sent down immediately, so I can only allude to his verbal assaults against black people, Asians, Indians and Arabs in passing – but anyone who flips through a copy of Lovecraft’s fiction will most certainly know what I’m talking about it.

 Lovecraft sure as hell wasn’t violently racist – his wife, Sonia Haft Greene, often commented that he would, to cut a long story short, go ape-shit around foreigners but this is the only solid evidence other than Lovecraft’s fiction that implies he was stoically, enthusiastically or passionately racist. The old wives’ tale that he was contacted by an emerging National Sozialismus Partei during the early thirties has been disproved by numerous scholars – S.T Joshi couldn’t find a trace of evidence that even alluded to this kind of lunatic theory, yet the racist label remains steadfast and difficult to remove.

 Of course, perhaps one loses sight of the fact that Lovecraft, for all his wonderful horror fiction, was something of a reclusive snob, who certainly held prejudices against the crude, uncultured American masses – so why shouldn’t he hold the same disdain against foreigners? By the same token perhaps he, not unlike Conrad, Waugh and, I suppose Fitzgerald, was simply a product of a generation which held racism as a common value – a fundamental pillar of a society which had an irrational fear for immigrants.


Personally, I think the fiction actually speaks for itself – I’m not even referring to the cat called n***** man, or the ‘grotesque negroid features’ of a black boxer. Anybody who scares the shit out of people by writing about creatures which, fundamentally are aliens, is bound to be housing some kind of racial views – the creatures and hideous creations of his fiction are, perhaps, simply crude allegories to illustrate his own racial venom in an acceptable medium. Hell, I don’t know.

I Want To Dig Up A Certain Metaphysical Poet And Chop Him To Messes

I’ve got the shovel, the lantern, the battered copy of the Necronomicon and, to put it bluntly, I’m about the walk out the door and act out of my vindictive rage-fuelled fantasy on a certain metaphysical poet, who has been the epicentre of much stress and pain in my insignificant and ancillary existence, being a box of worm seed, salvatory of green mummy and slab of fantastical puff paste, over the last year.
 Yep, it looks like I’m through the hysterical stage and now I’m just gonna march over to the poet’s corner, pretend I’ve come to renovate, or paint, or something, and then I’m going to dig in, dig out, and tear up a few bright bracelets of hair around bones and if I get the time, an outward soul.

Goddamnit, I am sick of the motherfucking conceits in those motherfucking poems – I can hardly take it anymore. I don’t care if that subtle wreath of hair which crowns his arm will keep his limbs her provinces from dissolution and all that other happy go lucky orthodox crap. If it wasn’t for John Webster’s casual and refreshing nihilism, elegantly reminding of us of what a shadow, or deep pit of darkness doth, fearful and womanish mankind live, then I probably would have ran screaming from my educational institution by now.
 I guess it’s time of evening, although I should not harm nor question much that – goddamnit. I’ll have to leave it, just in case it breeds idolatry. Goddamnit. Donne must be turning in his grave.

John Donne: The Lusty Misogynist?

I’ve got an exam on this nightmare angel of linguistic deviance, so I might as well try to kill one bird with two stones (or rather, merge two hemispheres with one compass) and spew out some kind of commentary on his identity as a woman-hating sleazy bastard. I guess I'm also, rather conveniently, spreading venom about Conservative politicians. Anywayy, the twentieth century vision of Donne, outside of Eliot’s opinion, certainly seems to be one of unaffected scorn towards metaphysical poet and ‘massive priest’ John Donne. This is, of course, understandable because feminism has become saturated into not only popular culture but also a healthy dose of post-modernist (whatever the hell that is) works, and so any derogatory comment levelled against females is, according to the masses, an implicitly misogynistic comment.

There is more than a germ of truth in that last sentence, regardless of whether one attacks Donne as a feminist, a historicist, or a fellow misogynist. Lines in his poetry such as ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair,’ or ‘Hope not for mind in woman, at their best, sweetness and wit they are, mummy possessed,’ stand as potent ammunition for anyone who wants to brand the ‘M’ word onto Donne’s pious forehead. However, I would imagine that the same people who count Donne in this dubious circle of writers also include Bret Easton Ellis, Martin Amis and of course Ernest Hemingway. I haven’t got a god-damned clue if Amis is a woman-hater, I still haven’t got around to reading Money, but it wouldn’t surprise me if he’s regarded in this way due to the presentation of females in his novels.

However, most readers who bring up these rather dubious comments that Donne has made –and apparently if you think those are offensive, wait until you get an eyeful of his letters – will of course neglect statements which imply the complete opposite if misogynistic impulses. There is a pervasive theme of spiritual equality in Donne’s work – the sexual union is a spiritual union – and both the female and male entities are equal participants. Take The Good Morrow – ‘my face in thine eye, mine in thine appears’ weaves the image of two lovers equally fixated upon each other. Likewise, ,Donne’s statement in The Fever, that her sickness will burn out fast because ‘much corruption needful is to fuel a fever long’ contradicts somewhat the bitter epithet of Twicknam Garden that ‘alas, hearts do not appear in eyes, Nor can you judge what woman thinks by her tears, than by her shadow what she wears .’ It’s also an exaltation of purity in woman that contrasts violently with his smug assertion in an early Song that ‘nowhere lives a woman true and fair.’ People seem to neglect the fact that Donne, to a certain extent, has steeped most of these poems in imagination – although scholars are hell-bent on proving otherwise – and therefore the opinions expressed within them are not necessarily supposed to correspond with each other. Nobody thinks that the internal monologues of Browning belong to the same character- so why think the same about Donne’s poetry?

The second reason to suspect Donne’s identity as a misogynist is the fact that everybody was a misogynist during the 17th Century, just like everybody was terrified of going to the Hell in the 16th and everybody wanted to burn witches in the 15th. We don’t brand Conrad as a racist –ok some people do – so we shouldn’t blame Donne for being a product of his environment. By the same token, the entire artistic community was possessed by the theme of female infidelity and mindless fucking. We see it everywhere else, but we only reprimand Donne for it.


There are all kinds of reasons to hate Donne – he was deeply religious, his poetry was shamelessly egotistic, he, to paraphrase Ben Johnson, ‘deserved hanging for not keeping accent’ and perhaps most frustratingly of all he weaved insane threads of deviant logic to come to fucking weird-ass conclusions – twisted ‘iron pokers to true love-knots’ indeed. Oh man, I’m exhausted. I think I left some cider in my wardrobe – Big Time...

Reznor's Side Project A Train-Wreck?

What the hell happened to Trent Reznor? One minute he was the brooding Byronic hero for the MTV generation, spreading gorgeously casual nihilism across the otherwise sterile channels of the music industry across the globe, and now he’s spewing out contrived and unimaginative crap alongside his spouse, whose name has almost completely escaped me, and some other guy that I’ve never even heard of. So much for being objective and doing my goddamn research.


The ‘train wreck’ in question is an EP which was recently released for free download on the band’s website, howtodestroyangels.com, or some crap like that, and has raised all kinds of strange questions about Reznor’s artistic credibility. The problem is that most of his fans revere him as the epitome of an anti-commercial musician, and his ingenious viral marketing and refusal to charge for his music downloads stood as a testament to that. So does the extremely generous gesture of releasing copyright free tracks onto nin.com, which fans are able to take for themselves and create their own remixes. Happy discovery. But the latest Reznor offering has only managed to engender concern amongst his closest fans and followers. Or maybe they just hate his wife, I don’t know.

How To Destroy Angels takes its name from that rather wonderful signal by that old creepy industrial band Coil, who hung around the same kind of dark dingy Gothic ruins as Boyd Rice did, and seems to attempt to pay homage to the track itself through the jarring, discordant riffs and the baying of some crazy-ass machine of groaning cogs and wires in the background- hell, I don’t know what they’d call that in the music industry. Taking a shit on a snare, or something? I don’t know.

 As someone who tries to defend the merits of industrial music in the face of a society almost crippled by its obsession with the same old god-dammed Lady GaGa hooks, I want to exalt Reznor’s EP as a grand offering of mechanical dissonant joy, but the problem is that by rights, it just doesn’t sound like industrial music. Admittedly, nor did Trent’s material as Nine Inch Nails, but his own leathery voice and laborious panting merged with the clanks and whirrs and screams of his music rather brilliantly. The same just doesn’t happen in How to Destroy Angels. Except the opening track. Wait a second, where the hell am I going with this...

The bottom line is that Trent’s churned out something of a howler this time round, and although it’s by no mean the finished product, the quality of the EP itself has cast some doubt over the minds of most industrial fans, mainly because the female vocals make the whole fucking EP sound like some kind of Blondie/NON cross-over. That should be pretty cool, but it How to Destroy Angels is anything to by, it’s not. Nevertheless, if you really want to, you can download the EP here.

David Cameron Can't Believe You've Done This (Ah, Fuck)

  


   So...uh basically, what he was thinking of was uh, introducing a spate of outrageous new policies which not only tempt disbelief from the most ardent of Tories but also seems to fall woefully to bits after scrutiny- that of course is before he makes the equally bizarre promise of providing ‘Change’ in the ‘New (What the dickens??!) Conservative Party,’ which needless to say strikes most people as something of a colossal oxymoron , unless of course you do happen to be one of the poor, blind weasels out there who truly believe that Gordon Bear managed to single-handedly tear down the foundations of the Global economy, in addition to ruining Britain’s identity in the European market through ‘too much’ investment in public services and the of course the small matter of opening wide those hairy Scottish thighs and giving birth to Broken Britain. Did I mention that we can’t go on like this?



     But just don’t mention the 80s –or Thatcher, or the war, for that matter, and you ought to do just fine. After all, despite having absolutely no experience in managing national finances whatsoever he is, like, sooo much better equipped to drag us out of the economy than Gordon Brown and despite being spawned by a party known for its class consciousness and violating the working class from behind with their giant throbbing private sector members, he is like, sooo much better equipped to address the widening gap between the rich and the poor than Nick Clegg. Duh. So, basically what he was thinking was, uh....wait a second? You didn't vote Tory - you Swine!


(Cameron punched square in the face from off-screen)


‘‘Ah, fuck...I can’t believe you’ve done this!’’


Oh, if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about, check this out:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X6VoFBCE9k

Is Modern Britain a Satanic Nation?

David Cameron’s affirmation that we’re the miserable and oppressed denizens of a ‘broken Britain’ has managed to ruffle all the right feathers. Cameron, of course, wants us to think that Britain is crawling with moral fissures so that he can leap in and save us all, probably by taxing the crap out of us and closing down all our asylums, but it was a fascinating campaign move nonetheless. It’s a completely ridiculous assertion to make, rather like most things that politicians have been saying lately, but it does raise a bizarre question in the back of the mind: What if we really are a bunch of Satanists?



Satanism, despite its numerous shortcomings, has to be one of the most fascinating and startlingly coherent religions of the last millennium. It’s also frightfully misunderstood- there’s no doubt of that in anyone’s mind- but one can assert with a reasonable level of assurance that the majority of prejudice towards this ‘religion’ is fuelled by ignorance, and most probably the deep seated dogmatic values that Britons are forced to imbibe every single day. Indeed, journalists, grasping desperately for a succinct phrase to discuss bizarre crimes such as the mutilation of goats on Dartmoor (http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23367793-sheep-slaughtered-in-satanic-ritual.do), fall prey to labelling them as the aftermath of satanic rituals. The same goes for most cultural forms that exist on the very fringes of society. Baudelaire’s poetry, Marilyn Mansons’ music or even cult films such as The Wicker Man have all been accused at some point of having a ‘satanic agenda.’ The reality is quite the opposite. In fact, one could argue that almost a third of the British population actually conform to Satanic values – without even knowing it. Western Society, on the whole, is a Satanic culture, but this is not necessarily a bad thing.


But what the hell is Satanism? The vast majority of the middle class- especially those frightful weasels with Daily Mail subscriptions- would probably brand it with wonderfully vibrant adjectives such as ‘monstrous,’ ‘evil,’ ‘depraved’ and, if they’ve done a splinter of research, ‘elitist.’ (Intriguingly, many of those attributes can also be traced to the Conservative party but that, alas, is for another article.) Such people quite rightly label the movement this manner- but they do so for all the wrong reasons. Satanism is Evil and monstrous, in the Judeo-Christian sense of those words, but that certainly does not equate it with child molestation, sexual violence or bank robbery; No, Satanism is quite something else altogether.


The Church of Satan, founded by an ex-carnival performer named Anton LaVey, is considered by the majority of those interested in the movement as orthodox – orthodox in the sense that it contains doctrines, such as rituals, bibles, ceremonies etc. - but, crucially, it is orthodox in the sense that any ‘satanic’ act that does not comply with the values of The Church of Satan is by default non-satanic. Therefore, all the goat murders, child rapes and other crazy deviant crimes of the last fifty years are not under any circumstances rooted in Satanism – quite the opposite, in fact. They’re just the offhand product of a bunch of crazy acid-heads whose attention span happened to short out in a field full of farm animals.


The focal point of The Church of Satanism – the form which this article obviously refers to, rather than the loose adjective used to define mutilating sheep’s genitals – is, as many are aware, LaVey’s Satanic Bible. With its sexy black sheen and intricate pentagram sketched onto the cover, one can hardly be surprised to learn that the book is something of a household item. Not dissimilar to Thus Spoke Zarathustra or La Nausée then, in the sense that the majority of those who adorn their bookshelves with it are ignorant to its ideas or content. Despite its enormous pall of controversy, the Satanic Bible can be obtained effortlessly from most bookstores at a generous discount and, in the egotistic spirit of its founder, customers from Amazon are treated to an edition that displays LaVey’s closely shaven head on the blurb.


Essentially, when one peels away the layers of majestic prose in LaVey’s Bible, saturated with adjectives and some rather interesting send-ups of Christianity, the visible centre of gravity in Satanism is individualism – do not accept blindly the established values of your society, the Satanic Bible implores you, but instead create them for yourself. Satanists do not believe in any form of paternal God or intelligent being and therefore the concept of an intrinsic morality is completely dismissed. If there is no God, then there can be no intrinsic, concrete force which creates right and wrong and it’s for this reason that Satanism advocates its own values.


Another fundamental component is the subversion of a good number of Christian doctrines – quite unsurprisingly, the ones that we as humans breach on a daily basis anyway. Self-indulgence, for example, is by no means sinful or something to be condemned. You like cake, go ahead and eat all the cake you want, unless of course this will infringe on your enjoyment of other indulgences, such as pride in your body image. Satanists have no moral gripes about preening ourselves in front of the mirror, and in a culture as image conscious as ours, this surely would be met by many with a sigh of relief. It’s the exaltation of the ‘me’ culture. It plucks God out of the centre of all existence, and encourages you to put yourself there instead. For these reasons, some have drawn comparisons between Satanism and Epicureanism, and on the whole this a fair match.


It’s also a movement that isn’t afraid to promote selfishness. After all, our civilization was not developed to this stage through mutual respect and kindness, but rather through the harsh natural selection of evolution. Our culture as it stands now seems to hold selfishness very close it its chest, whether we like to admit it or not, and numerous examples such as the reckless investments in the financial sector and the fear mongering of airbrushed adverts can testify to this. Other religions are quite right to condemn vanity as satanic, but they are in many ways wrong to brand it as a fault of human beings when it comes so naturally to each and every one of us. Vanity, self-centeredness and an obsession with our outward appearance are the foundations of western capitalist culture- so why condemn them when they appear under the name of ‘Satanism?’


But Satanism is not without its flaws, and even though LaVey’s bible conveys a number of very interesting philosophical ideas, most of them are simply watered-down fragments of Nietzsche. Individualism and pride are simply counterparts of the Uebermensch theory, and most of LaVey’s points regarding the flaws of Christian morality were deconstructed far more effectively in Beyond Good and Evil, and even some of Dawkins’ works. It’s also disappointing to learn that most of the impressive feats and anecdotes surrounding its charismatic founder are actually hugely exaggerated or in many cases, simply completely untrue. It’s somewhat fitting that the poster-boy of Satanism is something of a poster boy himself.


In spite of the flaws, the argument that modern Britain is indeed a part of satanic culture has an alarmingly broad range of evidence, mainly due to the fundamental fact that capitalism and Satanism are almost exactly the same thing: Money is God, the body has replaced the soul, and the earthly pleasures are all we’re ever going to get, so we must devour them hungrily. No doubt, such an affirmation could rile even the most liberal thinking of Britons... but one has to consider the possibility that a superficial and hedonistic society isn’t quite the Tartaraus that hardnosed Conservatives would have us believe.