disclaimer at the start of their videos which is basically a politer version of “Nazi punks fuck off”.
The whole scene has been doing that since what 70 years or so now. After the war some groups of people started seriously wondering about what civilisation is, how it’s very much not rooted in whether or not you wear a suit or not, and started looking for roots. The old Germanic roots were at that time actually out of the question: The Nazis had appropriated and bent them to their brand of insanity, but Karl May existed and with the US there were actual Indians in Germany in the form of GIs. Cultural exchange happened, pretty much unnoticed by the general population, and with that came knowledge: Tradition is not the praying to the ashes, but the passing of the fire, that exchange helped people find genuine embers, small as they were. Once people started to flame the symbols of those embers Nazis came along and wanted to be part of it and promptly were told to fuck off – not just out of a general antifascist stance but also because Nazis, in particular, were the ones who poisoned the little that was left after Christianisation. Then time moved on and a lot happened. Baudrillard, for one. Bear with me:
You might’ve noticed that Heilung doesn’t have Germanic symbology front and left and centre – it’s not about the, or any, symbology. They’re not Asatru or something, their costumes and historical references go back further than the Norse (pretty much as far as they can). About the closest you get is song titles written in runic alphabet and some consistent choices in graphic design looking quite like Nordic carvings – but none of that is religious stuff as-such.
From what I can tell Nazis don’t actually try to get a piece of that particular pie: It’s not to their liking. They like their symbols, their flags to rally around, their fetishes, to distract themselves from realising what they’re actually doing. The “Nazi punks fuck off” part is there for people stumbling across it, vibing with it, and wondering whether it’s kosher. Yes, yes it very much is. They’re plain and simply modern shamans who happen to be history nerds, and western esotericism has been post-structural for long enough now that the lack of symbolic system shouldn’t really surprise, c.f. e.g. Chaos Magick. They write and perform rituals to speak to parts of the psyche that what we call civilisation may have forgotten, but certainly not the genome. That, you know, one great being that was always there.
The whole scene has been doing that since what 70 years or so now. After the war some groups of people started seriously wondering about what civilisation is, how it’s very much not rooted in whether or not you wear a suit or not, and started looking for roots. The old Germanic roots were at that time actually out of the question: The Nazis had appropriated and bent them to their brand of insanity, but Karl May existed and with the US there were actual Indians in Germany in the form of GIs. Cultural exchange happened, pretty much unnoticed by the general population, and with that came knowledge: Tradition is not the praying to the ashes, but the passing of the fire, that exchange helped people find genuine embers, small as they were. Once people started to flame the symbols of those embers Nazis came along and wanted to be part of it and promptly were told to fuck off – not just out of a general antifascist stance but also because Nazis, in particular, were the ones who poisoned the little that was left after Christianisation. Then time moved on and a lot happened. Baudrillard, for one. Bear with me:
You might’ve noticed that Heilung doesn’t have Germanic symbology front and left and centre – it’s not about the, or any, symbology. They’re not Asatru or something, their costumes and historical references go back further than the Norse (pretty much as far as they can). About the closest you get is song titles written in runic alphabet and some consistent choices in graphic design looking quite like Nordic carvings – but none of that is religious stuff as-such.
From what I can tell Nazis don’t actually try to get a piece of that particular pie: It’s not to their liking. They like their symbols, their flags to rally around, their fetishes, to distract themselves from realising what they’re actually doing. The “Nazi punks fuck off” part is there for people stumbling across it, vibing with it, and wondering whether it’s kosher. Yes, yes it very much is. They’re plain and simply modern shamans who happen to be history nerds, and western esotericism has been post-structural for long enough now that the lack of symbolic system shouldn’t really surprise, c.f. e.g. Chaos Magick. They write and perform rituals to speak to parts of the psyche that what we call civilisation may have forgotten, but certainly not the genome. That, you know, one great being that was always there.