It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 1917 Denmark also the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) to the United States. Nor is America the only nation following Trump’s Arctic strategy; for in 2011, China had also attempted to a large chunk of territory in Northeast Iceland. 

But this is where the similarities end. In the case of what is now the US Virgin Islands, Denmark was compensated financially for this loss. By contrast, China’s attempted foothold in the Arctic Circle was more subtle than Mr. Trump’s current attempt. Firstly, China did not try to buy the entire country. Secondly, after the offer of purchase was rejected, it attempted to enter into a lease instead. Thirdly, China ran the offer through an interlocutor, namely a shadowy state-owned enterprise (SOE), to make the overture less brazen or politicized. Fourthly, China couched the offer in the form of an economic investment, which was good for an otherwise economically neglected region of the country. And lastly, when all of these attempts failed, the Chinese quietly walked away.

Domestic and international risks of Trump’s assertive approach

For an individual with a background in real estate and a reputed expertise in deal-making, Mr. Trump’s overly assertive actions have currently made him appear like the robber baron Henry Potter in Frank Capra’s (1946). Crucially, his actions threaten not only his popularity at home but also US geopolitical security. in the US indicates that a huge majority of Americans do not approve of his threats against a long-standing and loyal NATO ally.

At the same time, even though the United States maintains the globe’s foremost armed forces, China is not far behind. According to the , the People’s Liberation Army “is the world’s largest military” with some two million active-duty personnel. Consequently, despite Mr. Trump’s boasts of US military dominance, it surely makes strategic sense, given China’s rising power, for him to maintain his European military alliances. They are not insignificant, with the UK, France and Italy all ranked as global military powers. If one imagines US-China relations as a poker game with both Trump and Chinese Supreme Leader Xi Jinping likely holding similar flushes, the NATO alliance gives the Americans a Royal Flush.

The question remains, therefore, how Mr. Trump can achieve his ambition now without damaging himself further and the US’ global dominance. Whilst some commentators at Davos 2026 were reassured when he that “I won’t use force” to take Greenland, he simultaneously reminded the audience that he had the capacity to take the island easily: “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable.” Such a statement appears not a world away from the not-so-veiled threats that Italian Dictator used when he spoke to the Italian parliament on January 3, 1925: “Italy, Gentlemen, wants peace … we will give it with love, if possible, or with force, if necessary.”

A more strategic and diplomatic alternative: referendum and financial incentives

Given his determination post-Davos to seek “” to obtain Greenland, as well as his real estate background, Mr. Trump might want to try a different approach to the situation instead, beginning with asking Denmark to fast-track a referendum on Greenland independence and then to offer each and every Greenlander an extremely generous financial inducement to vote for annexation to the USA. He could, in other words, make the Greenlanders a proposal that they won’t want to refuse, as opposed to threats of invasion and a Mafia-like intimidation which they “.”

Critics would certainly and rightly accuse Mr. Trump of bribery, but, given his transactional nature, there is a financial soundness in this approach. However, to soften accusations of crassness, Mr. Trump might also want to offer all Greenlanders US citizenship and representation in both Congress and the Senate. In fact, he could use this opportunity to entirely rethink the representation of all unrepresented peoples in US overseas territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa, and offer them all voting rights in Congress and the Senate as well as for the Presidency.

To help win the Danes over, not only could he try to convince them of the economic sense of this proposal, saving them an estimated in subsidies, but he should additionally offer Denmark compensation for the loss of Greenland, either by direct cash injections or as a percentage of mining rights for a certain period of time. Regardless of the way in which the vote goes, overnight, Mr. Trump’s reputation would go from accusations of fascism to shrewd negotiator. He could then make history before the midterms, rather than be history after them.

Plan B: pursuing partial acquisition instead of full takeover

Should the vote in Greenland, despite all of the above, still go badly for Mr. Trump, instead of issuing more threats, he could try Plan B and follow the Chinese playbook in Iceland: attempt to buy not the whole country but only a piece of it. Indeed, after his Davos speech, he was reputedly having this very conversation with NATO, looking for territory akin to the British bases in today.

Europeans might cry foul at recent events, but the UK followed a similar sale strategy when it excised the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius in the latter half of the 20th century. What is more, it treated the Indigenous population terribly by exiling everyone living there without their consent and with very little compensation. Ironically, these atolls were purchased for use as a military base, namely Diego Garcia, the very same base that Starmer wants to return to Mauritius and that Trump is now calling a strategic error. It seems that the past has a way of haunting the present.

If Mr. Trump insists on his ambition, it is Greenlanders, however, who need to decide what is in their best interests, not NATO and not Denmark, and not under duress. Mr. Trump, in the meantime, also has to decide now what the history books will remember him as: Democratic Don, or an /Godfather-like Don Don.

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Via the Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Whilst the Assyrian empire may now be long forgotten, and the modern world decolonized after World War II, as historian Krishan Kumar , “The ‘end of empire’” is not necessarily “the end of empire.” For, as the 21st century comes into its adolescence, President Vladimir Putin’s Russia invades Ukraine, China threatens Pacific hegemony, Turkey stretches its muscle, and now US President-Elect Donald Trump looks yonder to potentially annexing Canada, Panama and Greenland. In a January 7, 2025, news conference, Trump to the world that he intended to expand US territory by either economic and/or military might and to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.”

Trump — emperor?

The question remains, therefore, is Trump a genuine emperor in waiting? Certainly, he has proven to be an able political strategist, and these public proclamations might be part of a broader Machiavellian “madman” ruse to unbalance Russia and China. There are also sound realpolitik incentives for Trump to entertain such thoughts, especially as China recently to acquire a portion of Iceland with a possible view to developing a refueling station there as climate change has opened up Arctic transportation.  What is more, although the Kingdom of Denmark (of which Greenland is an autonomous territory) and Canada are NATO partners, their military expenditure is below the required threshold of 2% of GDP. Trump can possibly afford, therefore, to forswear his allies if it improves his own public standing and America’s security. 

Yet the omens suggest that Trump is a serious contender for the purple, a factor that Mélanie Jolie, Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, has also . During his first term as president, and like other emperors of the ancient past, Trump wanted to build a great wall. Likewise, Trump Tower has all the bombastic hallmarks of a Roman triumphal arch. Recent media reports of Meta CEO , Amazon CEO and owner of The Washington Post and Canadian Prime Minister-Deselect all supplicating themselves at Trump’s presidential palace at Mar-a-Lago suggest that, while the media might have changed from ancient Assyrian obelisks, the imperial meme remains the same. Even the kings in Nimrud do not appear that dissimilar from Trump’s Florida mansion when it comes to an architecture of imperial power.

Via the Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

Kevin McCarthy visits Mar-a-Lago. Public domain.

In addition to Trump being desirous of expanding American power, the US has a long history of imperial expansion, both in terms of Cold War engagements as well as more direct 19th-century incursions into the Caribbean and Pacific. Nevertheless, that nation’s own continental empire is often as an imperial conquest: “No one speaks about the colonization of the Midwest and west of the United States, ” according to historian Moses Finley.

This period of expansionism might be forgotten now, but some contemporary supporters of Manifest Destiny had envisioned all North and Central America falling under US control. What is more, much of this continental territory, despite the Hollywood Western image, was won not by military victory but rather through legal purchase. Alaska, Louisiana, Florida and the Gadsden Purchase are among a few of the more prominent examples. Additionally, in 1917, America, motivated by fears that foreign powers might use the islands as a base to threaten the Panama Canal, successfully negotiated with Denmark to the Danish West Indies — now the US Virgin Islands. Given that the Danes have already acquiesced in such an agreement with the US, Trump’s proposal to purchase Greenland aligns with precedent.

Moreover, purchase has not been the only relatively subtle approach used to expand America’s global reach; the country has also rented territory. Examples include Guantanamo, Diego Garcia and the Panama Canal zone. As a result, a future takeover of these territories in one form or another is not out of the realm of possibility. Such an approach to expansion is also more fitting with Trump’s transactional outlook and his property mogul background. This “monopoly imperialism,” a typology of expansion by purchase and lease that resembles the board game Monopoly, has often slipped under the radar given that it was all done legally and without recourse to violence. What is even more intriguing about this approach is that all of these purchases and leases, unlike so many other 19th-century European thalassocracies, remain .

Canadians in the wake of Trump’s announcement might joke that his remarks resemble a South Park scenario, and they may flippantly jest that Trump has to find Canada on the map before he can invade, but these eventualities are really possible.

For Americans, there is danger too. Trump’s tenure might herald both a clever strategy to secure the future of the country and another chapter, a 21st-century variant, in the history of that nation’s imperial drive, but it also portends a new period in that nation’s politics with a potential Palpatine pivot from republic to empire.

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In October, the prime ministers of the UK and Mauritius announced the decision to transfer sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius. Diego Garcia now stands at the center of a Byzantine nexus of colonialism, indigenous dislocation and contemporary geopolitics.

Settlement and colony

The native population of Diego Garcia, known as Chagossians, descended from enslaved Africans brought by French colonists in the late 18th century. The French were the first European power to lay claim to Diego Garcia, using the island primarily for coconut plantations. They brought enslaved people to the island who worked in agriculture and established a small, thriving community. 

After the abolition of slavery, these populations mixed with other ethnic groups and formed a Creole-speaking community with a unique . However, in 1814, Britain took control of Mauritius and its dependencies under the Treaty of Paris — including Diego Garcia. For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the island and its Creole culture remained relatively isolated as it served as an obscure outpost of the British Empire’s Indian Ocean territories. 

The strategic importance of Diego Garcia only came to international attention during the Cold War. At the time, the US was searching for military base locations to counter communist influence from the Soviet Union and China. Diego Garcia’s location made it an for a major military installation.

This was a watershed episode in the island’s history. In 1965, in anticipation of the establishment of a US military base, the British government separated Diego Garcia and the other islands of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius. This was part of the creation of the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), under which Chagos became the in Africa. Under this agreement, the British leased Diego Garcia to the United States for use as a military facility. 

Mauritius, then still a British colony, was subsequently compensated ($3.8 million) for the transfer of the Chagos Archipelago. Based on an average inflation rate of 4.9%, that amounts to £50 million ($63 million) in today’s currency. This arrangement was made as part of the broader context of Mauritius gaining its independence, which finally occurred in 1968. However, critics claim the payment was inadequate. They state it took too long to reach Chagossian pockets, and that only awarded to Mauritius actually went to the exiled Chagossian islanders.

More disturbingly, the entire arrangement was completed without the sanction or knowledge of the Chagossian peoples themselves. This planted the seeds for future disputes over the legal status of Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Islands. It also laid the groundwork for the indigenous population’s deportation.

The expulsion of the Chagossians

One of the darkest days in the history of Diego Garcia was the forcible removal of the Chagossian population to make way for the US military base. Beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the early 1970s, the British government undertook a systematic campaign to remove all the inhabitants of the island. The exact number of people displaced is disputed, but range from 1,000 to 2,000 individuals. 

The British justified this removal on the basis that Chagossians were only “,” not indigenous inhabitants. Declassified UK Foreign Office documents outline the extent of the falsehood which was utilized to deliberately justify British actions:

A small number of people were born there and, in some cases, their parents were born there too. The intention is, however, that none of them shall be regarded as being permanent inhabitants of the islands ().

On this spurious basis for eviction, namely length of historical settlement, one could similarly have argued that the entire Pakeha population of Aotearoa New Zealand should be removed given that they have lived for less time on their islands than the Chagossians have on theirs. Regardless of the illogicality, as a result of this fiction, the Chagossians were forcibly transferred from their homes to Mauritius and the Seychelles, often under the pretense of “resettlement.”

Instead of resettlement, these communities were effectively abandoned in foreign lands where they faced extreme economic hardship. In his book Island of Shame, David Vine describes that the exiles often lived in “slums or temporary housing, struggling to adapt to life in an unfamiliar environment without the means to sustain themselves.” The difficulties plagued Chagossians in Mauritius and the Seychelles alike.

The battle against displacement

The exiled Chagossian population, including the descendants of the original displaced community, was estimated in 2016 to be around . While scattered across several countries, many still reside in Mauritius. Despite the passage of time and their continued displacement, the Chagossians have maintained their identity and culture, and many still hope to return to their ancestral lands. 

For decades, the various displaced Chagossians dispersed across the world have fought legal battle after legal battle for the right to return to their homeland and for compensation for the injustices they had suffered. As a result of this pressure, the British government finally offered an additional sum of ($5.1 million) to Chagossians in 1982, but this too was insufficient. 

Most significantly, this compensation did not address the right to return. A British Court of Appeal in 2000 did, however, make a start on that by deeming the expulsion of the islanders illegal and granting them the right to visit their homeland for the first time in thirty years. However, Diego Garcia itself, the largest and most habitable island, was to remain to them still for security concerns.

Considering that the other atolls in the archipelago were concurrently , and with Diego Garcia itself still off limits, this ruling was merely a Pyrrhic victory. To borrow Tim Marshall’s term, Diego Garcia and the Chagossians remained “.” 

Calls for for the return of Diego Garcia 

Unsurprisingly, the status of Diego Garcia has remained an ongoing subject of international legal disputes. In February 2019, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued a that Britain’s occupation of the Chagos Islands, including Diego Garcia, was illegal and that the islands should be returned to Mauritius. 

The court concluded that the detachment of the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in 1965 as part of the BIOT was unlawful and that the process of decolonization was incomplete. Whilst the court’s ruling was non-binding, it carried significant moral and political weight. 

Following the ICJ’s decision, the UN General Assembly then passed a resolution calling for the UK to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. However, the government refused to comply until this past October, citing the continued strategic importance of Diego Garcia for defense purposes. The US had also expressed opposition to any changes in the status of Diego Garcia until recently, when President Joe Biden reportedly for a transfer of sovereignty.

History repeating itself

There is a sad irony at play with the recent willingness of the UK Government to comply with the ICJ’s decision. While the UK has agreed to hand over power, the judgment now gives control of the islands to Mauritius, not to the Chagossian peoples themselves. One very distant colonial power merely seems to have been replaced by another, less distant one. 

This recent development mirrors the events of when negotiations were brokered solely with the incoming Mauritian government of the day rather than the Chagossians themselves. To add further injustice to this recent political development, today’s agreement will continue to see Diego Garcia remain under US and UK jurisdiction for the next . This again is reflective of the when it was made clear that Mauritius’s independence would not be granted without the annexation of Diego Garcia. 

History is repeating itself. Today, the only difference is that instead of being hidden in secret Foreign Office memos, this handover is being celebrated openly as the culmination of justice. 

The path forward

Some Chagossians see it as an event worth , at least according to the Mauritius Government Information Service. In the British press, the transfer of control is likewise being described as “.” Meanwhile, international pundits are claiming that the agreement is a “‘ moment in international relations.”

Nevertheless, there is a flip side to this halcyon perception, namely the danger that the British, with UN connivance, are enabling Mauritius to rule an island group and its peoples some 2000 kilometers plus away without the consent of the entire indigenous population. 

Peter Lamb, the Labour MP for Crawley where a Chagossian community 3,000 strong resides, has been publicly critical of his own leader’s recommendation to hand the islands to Mauritius without their consent. He that “the decision… belongs [to] the Chagossian people, it’s not for the UK to bargain away.” Other Chagossians are similarly , referencing indigenous rights. 

Wherever they reside, all Chagos Islanders deserve to have a say in their political future. Even with the return of the islands to Mauritius, little financial compensation is likely to reach the displaced Chagossians directly. Not to mention that base lease rights and payments notwithstanding, the entire archipelago has a potential exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of an astounding 640,000 km². It remains unclear if, and how, the Chagossians will regain independent rights to these zones and their resources. But the UK and US governments are not alone in bearing responsibility. The UN is also at fault in this dire situation, as the organization played a significant role in influencing the decision to return the atoll without the consent of the indigenous population. 

As the treatment of the Chagossian population in Diego Garcia demonstrates, history continuously repeats itself when it comes to the story of empire. As long as indigenous voices continue to be overlooked, the ghosts of the colonial past will haunt the present.

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The Far Right’s Alternative History

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What is particularly disturbing is the recognition that many recent violent crimes perpetrated by the extreme right seem to be connected or influenced by such worldviews. Anders Breivik, responsible for bombings and the shooting of 77 people in Norway in 2011, as an Odinist. James Alex Field, arrested for the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, marched alongside a flag depicting the black sun, a Nazi symbol drawing directly on Germanic heathen Ariosophic imagery, which in turn had inspired the formation of the Thule Society.

This same black sun emblem appeared on the front and last pages of the manifesto of the Christchurch mass murderer in March 2019. The manifesto ended with the clarion call: “see you in Valhalla.” In the UK, Thomas Mair, who West Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, was reported as being influenced by racist Ariosophic literature too.

Gospel of Hate

The internet, the dark web, online gaming forums and encrypted messaging services are frequently accused of helping to spread this gospel of hate. Thus, some academics, such as Steven Woodbridge, have of the need to watch the uses of “historical themes, imagery and language” that are used in these forums to promote their particular brand of violent political discourse. One of these potential memes is black metal music and its offshoot, national socialist black metal (NSBM). Indeed, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, in “Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity,” that black metal and its “fascination with the occult, evil, Nazism and Hitler” were a possible motivation behind the 1999 massacre, on Hitler’s birthday, of 12 students and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Black metal is also associated with a series of church burnings across Norway in the 1990s by Varg Vikernes, a racist heathen and black metal musician. More recently, it was that Holden Matthew, the 21-year-old charged with burning down three black churches in Louisiana, was also influenced by black metal and held racist heathen beliefs. Some of black metal’s aesthetics even appear to have the violent imaginary of the neo-Nazi Atomwaffen Division. Plato may have been correct when he “about the interconnectivity of politics and music.”

Black metal is an extreme genre of heavy metal that first emerged in the UK with the band Venom. The subgenre took its name from the title of Venom’s second album, “Black Metal,” released in 1982. It was intended as a rejection of the commercialization of heavy metal as well as a critique of modern secular society. A second wave of the movement, which was more ideological in orientation and often emphasized Satanism or paganism, became infamous for promoting a series of church burnings. It emerged primarily in Norway in the 1990s and is exemplified by such bands as Burzum.

This Norwegian second wave helped to popularize the genre even further and led to the creation of other black metal bands across Europe and the globe. So influential has this genre now become that one commentator that “black metal has arguably become Norway’s greatest cultural export.”

Karl Spracklin black metal as “a form of extreme metal typified by evil sounds and elitist ideologies,” with a number of bands drawing on “nationalist and fascist images and themes.” Its sound is generally characterized by shrieking and growling vocals, disjointed guitar riffs, a frenetic pace and an emphasis on atmosphere, often deliberately created through the implementation of a raw, lo-fi quality of the recording. Many black metal performers tend to adopt pseudonyms and dress in a kind of Kiss-inspired corpse paint. Upside-down crucifixes and medieval weaponry, alongside Satanic and pagan imagery, additionally appear with relative frequency on black metal websites, CD covers and tattoos.

Other common musical and visual leitmotifs include war, death, fantasy, the apocalyptic and the mythological. Norwegian Satanic black metal band Gorgoroth, for example, took the inspiration for its name from a fictional setting in Tolkien’s land of Mordor. Although such motifs might be viewed as deliberately transgressive in order to attract devotees, some have that black metal practitioners also intend the genre to function “as a springboard from which violent actions could logically emerge” with the specific intent of “reclaiming … a pagan heritage.”

National Socialist Black Metal

Defenders of the genre, however, that it “is not a unified, monolithic culture” and that are too frequently “fabricated by conservative groups seeking to impose their own moral agendas.” Indeed, bands such as the Rolling Stones and Eagles have been linked erroneously with a Satanic agenda as early as the late 1960s. Cronos of Venom also denies outright any religious affiliations, : “We are entertainers first and foremost — if I wanted to be a murderer or a Satanist, I’d do that full time instead of playing songs for a living.”

The genre is notoriously difficult to define, with a litany of subgenre offshoots, including unblack/Christian, depressive suicidal and ambient black metal, to name but a few extreme variants. Black metal followers also argue, in their defense, that the music is primarily , celebrating a romantic and idealized view of the past which is heavy on ritual and critical of secularism. Aron Weaver, of the US black metal and heathen-inspired band Wolves in the Throne Room, it “as an artistic movement that is critiquing modernity on a fundamental level, saying that the modern world view is missing something.”

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Some contemporary UK black metal bands, such as Winterfylleth, while admitting that their “musical influence … unashamedly borrows from Burzum” and other black metal bands of an extremist predisposition, that they do “not necessarily” believe the message behind those bands. A number of black metal followers would agree, as Spracklin points out, with many fans making “a distinction between the sound and the ideologies.” There are also heathen black metal bands, such as Norway’s Enslaved, that are avowedly anti-Satanic and anti-fascist.

Some black metal musicians are openly Satanist but reject Nazism. King ov Hell, who played in Gorgoroth, that “I am totally against every form of flock ideology. Nazism is an ideology of the flock.” There is even a countermovement against Nazism within the black metal music scene, evidenced by the US-based band Neckbeard Deathcamp and its 2018 album, “White Nationalism is for Basement Dwelling Losers.” The latter is a satirical critique the NSBM subgenre, which is avowedly pro-Nazi.

Black Metal Against Racism

While it is important to point out that national socialist black metal remains a minority element within black metal, signs of far-right extremism similarly contaminate related musical genres such as goth, industrial and neofolk. The latter incorporates elements of traditional European folk and reconstructed medieval instruments, exemplified by such bands as Fire, Sol Invictus and Death in June. The latter take their name from the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler arranged the murder of his rivals in the Sturmabteilung critical of his policies. Nazi imagery, including the death head worn by the SS, is a consistent theme on their album covers, as are such Germanic runes like Algiz and Odal that were appropriated by neo-Nazis into their blood-and-soil ideology.

According to one Death in June fan on Nordic Elite in a post now removed, “European Civilisation … is going down the drain with the jewish/American mulicultural invasion.” But in the neofolk scene, too, there are recently established bands that are explicitly anti-racist and who reach a much larger, liberal audience. The band Heilung, for instance, recently issued a on the alleged harassment of a black woman at a performance in New York: “Apparently some people attended our ritual with the idea that Heilung is only for white people … This is not the case. Heilung is for ALL people, regardless of the color of the skin. And we are sorry that this happened at our show. We do not tolerate hate speech and racism.”

The neofolk band Wardruna, the authors of the soundtrack to the History Channel series “Vikings,” has made prominent anti-racist statements. In a blog promoting “antifascist neofolk bands from around the world,” the band’s lead singer, Einar Selvik, : “It is a very positive effect, that increased interest does not allow the subculture on the extreme right wing to use our history in peace. We have somehow taken our own story back.”

Whilst outright extremism in the neofolk, black metal and related music scenes is not the norm, it is important to address this problem as well as to draw attention to instances in which such prejudice is less explicit. The Manchester-based Winterfylleth may denounce Nazism by labeling it “the first attempt at some kind of tyrannical EU,” but their critique of extremist politics is reserved. Note that they were “not necessarily” believers in national socialism — this is far from outright rejection.

Winterfylleth are overtly and “unashamedly Anglo-Saxon in their approach” to their music, expressing a particular concern about a loss of national English identity. Hence their recent turn from black metal to a more lyrical folk black metal style, evidenced by their 2018 song “The Hallowing of Heirdom” with its melancholic refrain, “So who are we now?” Fandom comments on the latter signify an ambiguous range of to their politics and new musical direction, from the negative (“its like countryfile meets the druids”), to the more enthusiastic (“Celebrate that you are English… hail Woden”).

Another English pagan metal or folk metal band, Forefather, like Winterfylleth also celebrates its Anglo-Saxon roots. Intriguingly, with these UK bands, a broadly Germanic influence has become explicitly rooted more in specific English heathen blood-and-soil themes, exemplified in songs such as “When Our England Died.” Fan comments tend to the greatness of Anglo-Saxon culture and critique other foreign elements.

Beyond the Footnote

Given that not all black metal fans are fascists or Satanists, that many are simply intrigued by the genre’s ability to shock and entertain, and that some are genuinely attracted to the genre for its interest in ancient heathen religion, an even more specific blood-and-soil subgenre emerged from within black metal, the NSBM. National socialist black metal aimed to specifically its politics and religiosity much more clearly than black metal. It mixes extreme-right racism with paganism, is explicit in its rejection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and was very much influenced in its development by the actions of Varg Vikernes. It is also violent, exemplified by the German NSBM band Absurd and their of a 15-year-old boy, which they also then referenced on the cover of their 1995 album, “Thuringian Pagan Madness.”

According to , NSBM “reskins the classical fascist ideological elements and combines them with racist and ethnic Paganism.” Critics state that NSMB is deliberately being “as a vehicle to spread hate and radicalize nominally apolitical metal fans.” While many of these NSBM bands appear to be primarily Ukrainian and Scandinavian, the subgenre has become global. According to Celan Brill-Voelkle, “When the keywords ‘national socialism’ are searched in ‘the metal archives’, there are an astounding 774 results of active bands worldwide.”

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Ian Stuart Donaldson, former lead singer of the English Nazi rock band Skrewdriver, once that “A pamphlet is read only once, but a song is learnt by heart and repeated a thousand times.” Given their global reach and violent messaging, NSBM and other extremist elements within black metal can be seen to “paganism and Nordic folk myths … far more effectively than any number of meetings and marches could.” While others have on the way in which Christian nationalists are trying to infiltrate and influence mainstream Christian groups “in order to pull Christians to the far right,” there is an urgent need to monitor more closely a similar development within heathenry.

The black metal genre, alongside the existence of extremist racist heathen groups such as the O9A, is interesting for another theoretical reason too. It reinforces the made by Graham Macklin more than 15 years ago that if scholars of the far right in the UK look beyond a traditional narrow political lens, they will see that a study of fascism in Britain, given its wide cultural influence, deserves more than a mere epilogue or footnote in the history books.

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