Hitler youth?

"Black metal" is a smaller subset of industrial music, sometimes pervaded by strands of occultism, Satanism, Nordic paganism and far-right, white-power politics. Many if not most black metal bands are simply poseurs concealing their lack of talent behind ghoulish makeup and synthesized noise. But at another level, this quasi-underground has provided an environment where real live fascists can disseminate hate literature and encourage serious violence among vulnerable, disturbed young people.

The most notorious example of the latter was a wave of church burnings in Norway and Sweden between 1993 and 1995 by black metal gangs. That outbreak culminated in the stabbing murder of the leader of one band by another; the killer, a Nazi pagan named Varg Vikernes, is now lionized in some black metal circles as "the Manson of Norway." In 1996, a couple of years after that Scandinavian crime spree, six Florida teenagers torched a church, blew up a bottling plant and fired a lethal shotgun blast in the face of a high school band director. According to police, their intended finale was to turn Disneyworld into a killing field of black tourists. They called themselves the "Lords of Chaos" -- a name memorialized in the title of a recent popular book about the violent fringe of the black metal scene by Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind.

Moynihan is much more than a mere chronicler of black metal excesses. He is the leader of Blood Axis, an American Nazi-Satanist band that toured Europe last winter, and more importantly, a prominent figure linking the music scene to fascist and occult circles. Moynihan once said he rejected Holocaust revisionism about the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews because "I'd prefer it to be true."

Before "Lords of Chaos," he published "Siege," a collection of writings by former American Nazi Party member James Mason, who admires David Duke and regards hate crimes as "white self-defense." In interviews with right-wing music zines, both Moynihan and Mason have openly advocated lethal violence against "the system" -- and they particularly admire "lone wolves" like the Columbine killers. Commenting on Varg Vikernes in 1995, Mason said that "killing any number of people and blowing up any number of buildings" is "ultimate heroism." But, he added, "We need a lot more of this simultaneously, not one here, not one there, but in concert." (Incidentally, he happens to reside in Denver, not all that distant from Littleton.)

Of course, none of this proves that black metal mania motivated Klebold and Harris, nor is it meant to suggest that the suppression of Satanic or even Nazi-oriented countercultures is warranted. Forbidding such obnoxious expressions only makes them more transgressive, and hence more attractive to adolescents seeking to assert their rebellion. And the death lyrics of metal music may even provide a harmless outlet for kids who might otherwise find more destructive diversions. Michael Moynihan himself once complained about "cartoonish and stupid" music about murder that was "just fantasy" by people who "would never actually go out and do what they were talking about." Yet it's also clear that the metal underground may serve as a recruiting and propaganda instrument for sinister political forces, much as white-power music has both here and in Europe. For adults who hope to prevent the next high school atrocity, it is a phenomenon that deserves attention.

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