Gucci, Aladdin Sane, Serge Gainsbourg, Chuck Berry, Brian Jones, New York Dolls ... and MANY more! What value do you give to Jewish punk?

Gucci?  What value do you give to ironies like those of the Jewish punk group Jewdriver - parascending songs of the neo-Nazi ideology group Skrewdriver or Serge Gainsbourg - also Jewish - with their conceptual

album Rock Around The Bunker ?

The Jewdriver has a lot of symbolic value, but there is no more wax than the one that burns: it is parody and self-irony. However, Jewish culture is so complex and we are so ignorant of it that it is hard to have

a realistic perspective on the matter. The matter has many ramifications. Jewish culture is crucial in the pop culture that we have all consumed. The same counterculture is a bourgeois revolution, for example, and a large part of that bourgeoisie
is Jewish and what it wants to do is normalize itself within American society, which is what everyone wants to go to, because Israel, the bare desert is in danger nobody wanted to go. The Serge Gainsbourg seems to me a great exercise in irony
and sarcasm. And the definitive proof that they were other times, it is difficult to imagine something like that now.

Store Locator Saved Hitler's Brain (David Bradley, 1969), adaptation for television of the film Madmen Of Mandoras . How do you
explain such a paradoxical phenomenon as that of "stalag" literature, pulp novels with terrifying stories of sex and torture in concentration camps that triumphed in ... Israel? The antecedent is House Of Dolls , novel of a prisoner of war, Yehiel
De-Nur , who narrates the misfortunes of his sister who theoretically or really happened to be part of a "Joy Division", the brothels inside the concentration camps. The book caused a commotion in the Israel of the 50s, it was translated into
many languages. Zionism was presented with a series of dilemmas and contradictions: until then it had been said that Jewish women had never prostituted themselves, but took them by force, without receiving anything in return. The book denounced
other aspects of life in the concentration camp -where survival is the only thing that everyone has in mind- such as the betrayal among Jews, strangle a breast-fed child because he is crying so that the troops will not discover them. German Examples
in which human nature is faced with very terrible and terrible dilemmas. That did not please that new state of Israel that was consolidating and that on the Holocaust had spread a blanket of silence that the new generations did not understand.
The stalag , written in Hebrew, appear as a result of the success of that novel, and unleash a commodification of the Holocaust, reducing it to a pulp novel. Of course, the victims were never Jews, but allied prisoners. The stalag found a lot
of public because of its uncharacteristically erotic component. The covers were lascivious drawings pirated of American publications and attracted adolescents in full sexual awakening who began to receive information from the Holocaust. They were
novels of short life and great sales, that they did not take in eradicating. It is still a phenomenon of study, the paradox is enormous. Search Stalag novel covers. This pornographic literary genre located in concentration camps was treated by Ari Libsker in the documentary Stalags - Holocaust and Pornography in Israel And to what do you attribute the "Nazi chic" current especially spread
in countries like South Korea and Thailand or Honk Kong? The face of Hitler and the swastikas reduced to fashion caricature. In his imagination he is stored in the same mental space as the Telemetries or Ronald McDonald. The key to this is their
absolute historical ignorance, partly because they have been denied access to that part of history. That allows fascism to arrive there as a pure and hard product, devoid of ideology. They only perceive it aesthetically. They are attracted to
the savages like the glitter of beads. And that this is not interpreted as racist, please, we ALL remain savage and we are all dazzled by the great refulgores of the dark age in which they have put us. More worthy of attention is the fact that
Gandhi and Hitler corresponded and made plans together. Why do not you say that?

Bag

Ronald McHitler, mascot of a fried chicken chain in Thailand. To finish, and tell me if I'm wrong, one of the conclusions
I drew from the book is that we should all learn to identify the fascist inside us.

Of course, accept and acknowledge that, like everyone else, I am no longer a fascist but a tyrant, a sociopath and a genocide if they left me or in a moment of alienation

in which I lost sight of that layer we call civilization (another artifice). We all have a certain superiority complex. In the big cities you go to the defensive, the atmosphere is not only competitive but captain. There is a lot of frustration
and resentment, two clear components of fascism. I speak for myself, eh, maybe there are people with a bomb-proof goodness that manages to reject that phantom that for me is consubstantiation to human nature. Since I do not believe in democracy as
I have known it, and considering how things are going, it could be that at any given time that fascist attitude was even a survival tool.

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  Image of the fictional music number Springtime for Hitler , from the film The Producers (Mel Brooks, 1968).
  Neither blacklists nor yellowness to kill the time, that we already have enough of that. Jaime Gonzalo's new book, Merchandise of Horror , is at the antipodes of the sensationalist report to the use of the well-known flirtations with the morbid swastika by renowned artists. Nor does it pretend to be a bestiary of cannon fodder that grasps an instrument (barely skips over the neo-Nazi rock, "for reasons of intellectual prophylaxis"). What he is trying to do is to unravel the why and the how of the fetish appropriation by different manifestations of popular culture, literature, cinema and pop and rock music of the Nazi-Fascist imagery. That, and address without fuss the totalitarian drive of the industrial ideological apparatus of the cultures of rock and leisure. Thorny subject of study, without a doubt, fascinating and greedy, that Gonzalo undertakes with rigor, harsh word and without communicating with maniqueísmos or simplifications comodonas. Surely for that reason it has raised not a few suspicions.
  
  

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    New In "Merchandise of Horror" refers to the album "Aladdin Sane" (1973) in which David Bowie had painted on the face a symbol
    similar to the "flash and circle" that used the British Union of Fascists (BUF) Oswald Mosley . In-Edit Beat: I suspect that with no other book you had to give so many explanations about your intentions and your thesis. Jaime
    Gonzalo: I'm already used to the trilogy about the counterculture Poder Freak (Raw Books). The reader can be very sensitive if your thesis is demystifying and you throw down certain preconceptions or myths. With Merchandise of
    Horror , some have called me an asshole and accused of looking for controversy without even reading the book; others who have read it criticize its excessive pessimism and negativism, which for me is just realism or try to be
    honest with the reality that surrounds us and its history. You said that the book was born of the need to self-explain. Like almost everything one does. I am from a generation that grew up accepting as the most normal of the
    world the historical revisionism of the 2nd World War. And we saw photos of London punks with Nazi bracelets and he did not care. And all this coming out of a dictatorship, and with a father who has told you a lot about the Civil
    War, in a way he has implicated you in it. And with cultural referents - from toys and soldiery to comics, books and movies - that petrify the image of a great and sinister historical ghost, Nazism, in principle with dissuasive
    purposes: "Be careful, do not complain that everything could be worse, there There is Nazism to remind us. " I needed to analyze this and unravel all the Manichaeism, the ambiguity, the hypocrisy and the puritanism that, as I
    have seen, continues to prevail on the subject. That version of Manichaean history, perverse and tragic that does not tolerate dissensions and hides what Lampedusa already pointed out in El gatopardo , that of "changing everything
    so that nothing changes" . The link with rock has been the alibi for professional deformation but my interests went further.

    • Discover:Siouxsie Sioux in front of 100 Club de Londres, venue of the first Punk Rock Festival, 1976. Photo by Caroline Coon / Hyman Collection
      You turn the famous phrase of David Bowie in his interview for Playboy of 1976. You write: " Hitler was not one of the first rock stars, but the rock stars were in any case the second Nazis".
      Bowie perhaps thought when he said that in those documentary images in which German teenagers surrounded the Führer prey to a hysteria similar to that of "beatlemania", but more serious is what he said in other interviews of the first 70: that he strongly believed in fascism, that England needed a great leader, an extreme right front to put order ...
      Then Bowie would apologize by noting those comments [similar to others on the Nazi iconography of Brian Ferry in 2007] to an outrage of occultism and cocaine, although in a way predicted a great right-wing leader like Thatcher.
      Yes, and it could have been someone worse. Let's see, at that time Bowie had a hot mouth, do not take this kind of thing very seriously. Rock is an anecdote, as is life. I am more interested in pointing out that the stars of rock and the subjection that rock preaches have managed to universalize a message of prostration and adoration, without reflecting or considering one where the fantasy that is proposed to it ends. Many have adopted rock as a cosmetic: looking at themselves in the mirror and believing they are still young because they are rockers, the opposite of old age. And profess that idolatry in some cases grotesque or worthy of psychiatric attention. Rock & roll is a prison like any other. The abstract rebellion that sells does not go beyond disobeying your old ones in a given moment, never to try something of greater depth. To think that rock is, by force, synonymous with a progressive and tolerant society, transmitter of values ​​of freedom and well-understood individualism, seems obsolete and outdated, nothing to do with the current situation. Rock is a consumer good and has also been an instrument of zombification. New In

• • • This Week: Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music wearing military uniform in 1975.
      If I have understood correctly, in the book you come to say that while we entertain ourselves with media circuses and "offended" us in social networks before the outbursts of fascist tute of, say, the John Galliano or the Phil Anselmo of turn, we do not face another fascism, real and everyday, in which we are immersed.
      I claim freedom of expression, which is not the exclusive property of the left but, as Noam Chomsky said, is precisely to apply it with what you do not agree with. On the other hand I think that we live in a society guided absolutely by fascist principles. Economically speaking, there is no doubt. And never like today the individual has been so subordinated to the State; the difference is that now it is not necessary to create a blind faith to the State as a religion that determines life, but has been blurred in a warp of great and dark powers almost "lovecraftianos". We do not understand them and it makes us uncomfortable to become aware of them. We all profess certain revolutionaryism as long as that does not affect our pace of life or translate into discomfort. That diffuse fascism advances and evolves at will as we continue to manage as a paradigm of totalitarian mentality something as obsolete as Nazism or National Catholicism.
      To this day, any conflict continues to be resolved by taking the name of Hitler or crossing out the Nazi opponent. The reductio ad hitlerum [nde: expression coined by the philosopher Leo Strauss in the 50s] of all life.
      That "fachizicación" so promiscuous and frivolous that we live, with the spring always ready to jump as a mechanism to condemn what we do not agree with. It is an everyday fact, you are facha because I say it and because it causes me a tremendous anguish to confront a contrary opinion. The postures are very exacerbated, overreacted, imposed. And here I am interested in emphasizing the hypocritical and poisonous that is certain good or left-wing thinking or social-democratic in all this maremágnum, that when it suits you crushes any discordant thought. An example: José Antonio Fortes , professor of Spanish Literature at the University of Granada, his thesis is to dismantle the Lorca myth and try to tell the truth: Lorca is an Andalusian gentleman who writes of things he does not know and who lives as what he is, a landowner, and his mythification as a leftist intellectual is nonsense ... Well, saying that "sacrilege" cost him a tremendous campaign of defamation (he was accused of drunkenness) and ostracism in the academic world, he has been expelled from society to unmask a distorted view of history according to the conveniences of the leading hegemonic class, in this case the same Spanish socialists who in agreement with the PC affiliated with the Francoist forces to orchestrate all that great business that was the Transition. Another terrible case: in the Rototom reggae festival, a Jewish artist, Matisyahu , is required after the pressure of I do not know which Valencian group explicitly pronounces itself against what happens in Palestine or does not play. If that is not censorship and fascism, you'll explain to me ... People should be able to choose freely, be able to decide for themselves if they can face a show for what their author represents or because he does not agree ideologically with him.
    • This Week:  Chuck Berry and his pendant with the iron cross at Madison Square Garden, 1969. Photo
      by Jim Marshall.

• • • You also analyze how some symbols linked to Nazism go unnoticed at certain times and others cause a scandal. Yes, perhaps now someone of the relevance of Chuck Berry with an iron cross would raise a big stir
      and would be reason for much disquisition. And in that change of criteria I am afraid that we have lost out, in an inexorable and irreversible process. A new Puritanism has arisen, different from the United States Parental
      Center for Music Resources of the 1980s, which was looking for tacos, boobs and asses on the records, but equally poisonous. Everything offends us very easily, the positions are very exacerbated, overreacted. Now the smallest
      motive can cause the great commotion of the day. Every day there are more horrifying examples of what we are talking about; the case of the puppeteers is worthy of the Celtiberia Show , Luis Carandell would rub the hands
      of discovering news like this, and in full 2016. Another equally serious example: Western Spiritual Reserve , a group that has no fascist message, presents new album and it is boycotted by its aesthetic inspired by fascism.
    • On the Runway Brian Jones, of The Rolling Stones , poses with a nice uniform designed by Hugo
      Boss with the actress and rock muse Anita Pallenberg . Some have blamed you for a certain moral relativism by putting yourself at the same height or defending the same right to fetishize Nazi imagery as the communist, for
      example. The book includes examples such as the cover to the Hitler Youth of Joy Division (whose name was already Nazi-inspired), the posed in Nazi uniforms of Keith Moon (The Who) and Brian Jones (Rolling Stones), the scene
      with the sickle and the hammer of New York Dolls (an idea of ​​the same Malcom Maclaren that would fill with swastikas the London boom of the punk) or the cover of the "Little Red Book" of the Matching Mole of Robert Wyatt.
      And each one will know with what intention he does it. Maybe my perspective is relativistic, in the book I try not to judge anyone but to stimulate the reader to draw their own conclusions. They are provocative, powerful
      and sometimes fascinating images that, in any case, come to enrich and are perfectly acceptable within the imaginary rock. The position of Malcom McLaren is clear: after all it is about selling a merchandise. And what else
      are the idols pop and rock but actors of a fantasy that they interpret for us. They can pass from one character to another, today I am a fascist, now a communist and tomorrow a free thinker. What's the difference? If something
      good has rock is that it allows us that kind of fantasies.

    Joy Division, Matching Mole and New York Dolls. More complex is the aesthetic appropriation of totalitarian regimes of diverse fur by artists of industrial music. Sometimes the approach is parodic, other metaphorical, some would
    say that only seek to epatar while others play to the clueless if they are Nazis or not ... Genesis P-Orridge , of Throbbing Gristle, says that what really worries him is mass fascism, not that personalized fascism in malign entities
    like Hitler, but how the mass is homogenized, devoid of thought. In other cases, like that of Boyd Rice , who denies being a fascist because he "hates everyone equally," or the neo-folk group Death In June is an elaborate fetishization,
    they are well-read people, which can make more perverse his game. To me sincerely all the anesthetizations seem to me unhealthy dependencies that monopolize the vital space and limit the individual, they belittle him. Like patriotism,
    fetishism is another flag with which to rub, give a little sense to the dead hours. I prefer not to give myself to her, although I suppose it should be delightful ... And, yes, I think that for some the ambiguity is a claim that
    continues to work, if one is a little astute can get some important revenues. The mass is very susceptible, and it is not something young, there is a lot of impressionable adult.
The industrial / experimental musician Boyd Rice before a portrait of Gabriele d'Annunzio . I just wanted to ask you about a historical character of which Boyd Rice is an avowed fan, Gabriele D'Annunzio. The perfect photo-fascist. Poet, soldier, sexual predator, cocaine addict. In 1920 not only takes a city [nde: Fiume, the current Croatian Rijeka] and founded his own republic, but dictates a series of rules that include music as a basic element of communication between mass and state, greater freedom for women, the indiscriminate use of drugs and the celebration of great shows. Dance, orgies, violence, give free rein to primitive instincts ... It sounds like hell of the Hells Angels. It is the same mentality: to feel part of the 1% of the elect, free men and outlaws, the return to the call of the wild, to transgress civilization. And, as I say in the book, it is hard to imagine D'Annunzio blessing, for example, Harley Flanagan , founder of the hardcore group Cro-Mags , which made right-wing tendencies, hare krishna and martial arts compatible. Another poet involved in politics is the English conservative Enoch Powell. Why do you think his anti-immigration discourse was echoed by relevant figures in the countercultural London of the late 1960s? The racial conflict was then present in a London that was reabsorbing the ex-colonized. England has an undeniable conservative and right wing position, and at that time the mentality was more openly racist than now, now racism is more buried. In the same way that Hitler used anti-Semitism, many used the rejection of immigrants to focus on uprootedness and social frustration of which perhaps they did not know the causes very well. During the 70s this served to pave the winter of discontent and the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher , which radically changes the European discourse to lead us to what we have now. You can almost see it with eyes of pure historical logic. Powell's theses were supported by people like Rod Stewart or Eric Clapton , people without any economic pressure who did not see their work in danger, that's what is striking. In that same context, The Beatles recorded a version of the "Get Back" entitled "No Pakistanis" whose lyrics capture that anti-immigration sentiment. We should know if they had at some time the intention of making it public with those lyrics. Without knowing that, you can not make any other consideration. They could do it privately, where we all still have the freedom to do what we want. For me it does not alter at all my perception of the Beatles the fact of knowing if they obeyed an ideological or satirical impulse and was a private joke. In any case, it seems as pathetic to condemn it as to strive to justify it, the hypertrophy of a nonsense. I only record a very well-known fact already, any fan of the Beatles knows it in advance. It is anecdotal.