Blood & Sadistic Intent Playing Netherlands Deathfest 2018

Blood, Sadistic Intent, Suffocation, Angel Witch, Root, and Mortuary Drape are playing the 2018 Netherlands iteration of the social justice warrior organized Deathfest series of festivals. This one will run from March 2nd to March 4th and will be a good chance for Dutch headbangers to check out Sadistic Intent and Blood live. Hopefully the sound will not be as terrible as everyone is saying it was when Maryland Deathfest moved to a parking lot surrounded by junkie encampment in Baltimore.

No Comments

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Deathfests went wrong way on Disma

disma_-_towards_the_megalith

Nothing makes a big deal out of something faster than making a big deal out of it. – Martin M. Jacobsen, Ph.D.

It’s old news that the Maryland Deathfest, California Deathfest, and the Netherlands Deathfest removed New Jersey death metal band Disma from their shows, citing vocalist Craig Pillard’s association with the Nazi band Sturmführer and his public embrace of right-wing positions.

The fests had the right to remove Disma. I’m not really writing about that. Pillard has the right to embrace any position he wishes. I’m not really writing about that either. I have no sympathy for Nazi thinking, and I’ve noted a wave of Nazi apologia flying around the net lately, which may have contributed to Disma’s difficulties. I’m generally put off by overtly political bands that place ideology of any kind before musical expression. But I’m not really writing about my positions or political bands either. I’m disinclined to discuss SJWs or criticize the fests or Pillard or Sturmführer.

This editorial addresses the imbecility of the outcome of banning Disma from these fests or other shows. Since removing Disma from the playbill has become a bandwagon phenomenon, Sturmfuhrer and Nazism have benefited. If these fests would have let Disma play, it stands to reason that fewer people would have been “affected” than have been reached by the news of banning them. As Pillard and countless other have correctly pointed out, Disma is not invested in political stances. They’re a fairly standard death metal band offering fairly standard death metal lyrics and themes. In fact, they’re so standard that the Netherlands Deathfest said this:

We feel that Funebrarum is an adequate replacement to make up for this, but if for some reason you purchased a Sunday ticket to see Disma, you may request a refund.

Funebararum may or may not be equivalent (ironically it shares a drummer with Disma). But the passive-aggression in the second part of this statement typifies the mindset here under discussion. What they really mean to say is “If you wanted Disma, you’re a Nazi because now that the story is out you couldn’t possibly like Disma because they are a relatively middle-of-the-road doom/death band-you must follow in lock-step the condemnation of what we condemn.”

Sound familiar?

Disma fans who know of Pillard’s association with the aforementioned band and ideas are surely not legion. Other fans who like Disma as Disma may not have known much about it at all. While there’s no way to know how many of the latter would be ‘reached’ by the former, the number of people ‘affected’ by ‘exposure’ to Disma and their fans surely would not have been overwhelmingly unsettling.

But banning Disma has had a reverse effect. Rather than disassociating themselves from the problems listed above, the actions of these promoters have generated a wave of ‘reporting’ in the metal press that has carried the ethos they sought to exclude to an audience far larger than any fest would draw. As the ‘news’ spread, so did the imagery and ideas that the fests claimed to oppose. As often happens in a media frenzy, the reporting of the ‘problem’ results in the promotion of it.

MetalSucks, Metal Injection and other cut-and-paste journals wasted no time spreading the story, modeling their best bandwagon morality, adding their outrage to the outrage. But for reasons that do not make any sense to me at all, they chose to splatter a swastika-clad CD and screen shots of Pillard’s statements all over the internet. Undoubtedly the purveyors of this story would argue they are being accurate and thorough, but the proliferation of these ideas in any form actually incites the very mania these people claim to fear. They hate these ideas, they say, and yet knowingly make them available to a larger audience than letting Disma play at all the fests would ever have done.

And I’m guessing that people who advocate for Nazi or right-wing positions are not terribly afraid of MetalSucks or Metal Injection being outraged about anything, but they are undoubtedly delighted by the idea of these images breaking into a medium that they would never be included in otherwise. It makes these fest promoters and ‘journalists’ accessories after the fact.

After all, somebody once associated with propaganda said that people will believe a square is a circle if you repeat it enough. Circling Disma like vultures circling a carcass has drawn far more attention to these ideas, repeating the unintended message as much as the intended one. Being so against something that you expose its artifacts to the entire world in an attempt to lessen their impact is about as logical as believing in God.

Correction: the wrong image was used with this original post against the author’s wishes. We regret this oversight.

1 Comment

Tags: , , , , , , ,

SJWs force Disma from Netherlands Deathfest

netherlands_deathfest

SJWs have doubled-down on their campaign to force Disma out of the death metal scene. The band, who play non-political death metal, are under fire because one member of the band used politically-sensitive imagery in a side project ten years ago, and has refused to humble himself before the allegedly superior knowledge of SJWs by apologizing and rejecting his former work. Instead, Disma have stuck to the statement that they are not a political band and want nothing to do with either side of the issue.

Since they operate as a type of internet lynch mob, and their power is in generating controversy that causes bands to be ostracized for not joining the SJW hive mind, SJWs in the Maryland Deathfest staff twisted arms to get Disma removed from the Netherlands Deathfest, as shown by the following announcement:

Disma are no longer playing NDF 2016 and have been replaced by Funebrarum.

This is the first time in 14 years of putting on festivals that we’ve been put in such an awkward situation, and in the end, just like a member of Disma who recently quit the band, we’ve decided to distance ourselves from the drama surrounding the band lately.

For the record, nobody “pressured” us into making this decision and the decision is solely ours, but it should be stated that the billing would look drastically different if Disma remained on the bill, as at least 10 bands have said they do not want to play the event if Disma remains on the bill.

We acknowledge that Disma are nothing more than a death metal band (who once played Maryland Deathfest) and it’s unfortunate that their fans cannot see them for what they know them as, but all things considered, there would’ve been far too many negatives than positives for us to deal with by leaving them on the bill. We thought the situation settled down slightly when the admin of the Disma FB page made a statement about a month ago claiming that the band member in question “made mistakes in the past”, but that post was quickly erased and the drama fired up again as a result.

We feel that Funebrarum is an adequate replacement to make up for this, but if for some reason you purchased a Sunday ticket to see Disma, you may request a refund.

This news will surely create a debate that we don’t wish to get roped into the middle of. We’ve always been about putting on a celebration of music and nothing more. Let’s all just try to get along and enjoy dozens of great bands at this festival.

As some savvy observers noted, this statement makes no sense. They claim that nobody “pressured” us into making this decision but also say that we’ve been put in such an awkward situation. This means the situation is of their own making, and their Let’s all just try to get along means not that we all get along, but that we exclude bands so that the Maryland Deathfest organizers feel their own political demands have been met.

If they wanted to be honest, they would not take this action since by their own admission, no one has asked them to do it. The “drama surrounding the band” is entirely made by SJWs, and is a non-issue given that it remains unclear whether this side project was anything more than political provocation, like Craig Pillard dressing up as a Nazi comandant in a Bill Zebub movie and demanding that a character “kick me in the balls” in a Hollywood German accent.

SJWs specialize in concern trolling, or disguising their own political sentiments as public services, and then using that power of guilt to remove all voices but those compliant with their own. This form of totalitarian mindset is far more threatening that even an outright Nazi band, since it expresses a sentiment that a minority of people would agree with, and echoes the sentiments of witch-hunters from centuries past who feared that witches might “infect” others with their “seductive” ideas.

For people who claim to be open-minded and progressive however this viewpoint is not new. Over two millennia ago, the citizens of Athens convicted Socrates of “corrupting the youth” with his ideas and sentenced him to death. They were defending the progressive regime in Athens which had become unstable due to its unrealistic ideas, and instead of fixing its problems, wanted to censor its critics so the citizens remained oblivious to the disaster approaching them.

So it is with SJWs, the Maryland Deathfest, and in fact most of our society. In the 1960s when people were so unnerved by the signs of collapse of our civilization that they turned to the type of “peace and love” ideas on finds on greeting cards and under dreamweavers in gift shops, Black Sabbath showed up to confront them with the “heavy” realities of the world as it exists outside the collective human feelings of the hive mind. Now Disma does the same, and to their shame, some of metal’s institutions are attempting to destroy them.

Edit: for kicks, you can watch SJWs looking for a target to boycott in order to make themselves important. No, really.

mdf_-_vitamin_x

17 Comments

Tags: , , , , , ,

Classic reviews:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z