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.

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.

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.