Although I'm not a fan of most of the artists discussed on this purportedly 'anti-fascist' website, I got pretty annoyed about the campaign they initiated during the summer. Here's an email I recently sent to the site owner Strelnikov, with his permission I'll update this thread with any replies I get:
Hi Strel,
Sorry for the rather confrontational nature of my emails but obviously it's a topic on which feelings are going to run high, I quite surprised myself with how worked up about it I got last summer.
The 'about' section on the site which forces you to think about the idea of 'the sanctity of art' is something I did find usefully thought-provoking. To address the only writer believed to have far-right sympathies whom I admire: a hardline anti-fascist wouldn't have allowed Celine to go on and write North, Rigadoon and Castle to Castle and I think that would have been a loss to humanity. I've read Bagatelles (published online in bootleg translation by far-right creeps) and it contains some stunning writing, although the content is relentlessly disgusting and I think his estate are right to suppress it - whether it was intended as a parody of anti-semitism or not, the timing was horribly stupid.
My respect foranyone who was ever involved in organised far-right politics is automatically severely diminished, be it Tony Wakeford or the bloke from Blaggers ITA. I think that if I was a fundamentally apolitical fan of these crap bands such as Sol Invictus though, my respect for anti-fascism would have diminished severely as a direct result of the anti-Slimelight campaign initiated by your site. People don't generally enjoy being lectured by soft cops about why the things they enjoy are wrong, it feels comparable to public health campaigns.
As well as damaging anti-fascism's credibility to a bunch of clueless music fans, the other great achievement of the campaign was stopping the pervy American writer Sotos from coming and showing his badly-collaged gay porn videos (you can see an example at the French videodrom site) which brings me to the moral crusade, tabloid-friendly angle of things. I can understand hating fascism to the point where smear campaigns and the use of folk devils feels justifiable, but it's the same impulse that leads to real escalation of mutual antagonism, to the violence which only the state wins.
Anti-fascists in somewhere like St Petersburg, Russia where they have a real job to do (and more real nazis to go after) are fucking heroic in my eyes. Those in the UK who cloak the moralising impulses usually associated with the religious right in the guise of 'anti-fascism' deserve satirising without mercy.
Best -
Simon
