It’s two in the morning local time, I just came home from a work meeting at including a racist and sexist MP who joked about why the fuck everyone worries about invasive alien plant but no-one about asylum seekers from a different culture, and that in this municipality the rule would be that a man would stand by his word, while a woman would stand by the dictionary. And I had to be nice and friendly and helpful and useful.
So I came here to unwind. And react to your post about Laibach.
Their whole concept, without being really qualified to judge on that, incidentally, seems to be to confuse people by appropriating style and aesthetics of the ridiculously far right and irritate people by that. Starting with the name, which still is considered to be offensive, as a friend from Lubiljana told me.
The beef my friends have with that is - again, if I recall correctly - that it just irritates people who are acutely aware of the connotations, and doesn’t really challenge the neo-fascists. Adopting the pose and style rather reinforces the stereotypes used and depicted instead of questioning them. Their ambiguity would be considered bad art, recreating rather than destroying the attitudes of cold superiority which fascists claim for themselves. Punks using Nazi symbols for their shock effect to express your disdain with the then-perceived fascism in our then-perceived hyper-capitalistic society of the early 80s is a completely different story from my perspective. Laibach is ambiguous rather than shocking most of the time, or am I wrong?
Anyway, given the current developement in many parts of Europe, I personally don’t feel inclined that we need this kind of concept band to help us spot neo-fascists in our societies. They are more often than not already out on the open, and very vocal. Also, in quite a few countries, they are already in charge, forming the government. From my POV Laibach seems to be just a joke to them, and it’s quite surely not one on them, but probably on us.
Did I mention that I came here to wind down?
Oh, well. Good night, and whereever you are, who or whatever you are: smack fascism. You may mock it, but don’t forget so smack. I couldn’t, today. I needed to be conciliatory.
