Pre-Emptive Notes on the Title

In the normal course of events, if someone asked, I would rather make up some excuse as for my choice of the blog's name. Eventually the matter would come up anyway.


There would many options to choose from. I could make up a sort of comparison between the blog medium and the tabloid.
I could make some half-hearted reference to Julia Kristeva's quite excellent essay on depression and melancholy, and indubitably include token pretentious wallowing about the object gaze of the Other or some such highbrow quackery. The Black Sun is after all a potent symbol of the place in your mind which is determined to cast you and everything around you in a negative light, the impossible angle that initiates the seizures of panic disorder.

I could even go for vulgar shock value and make it into a reference to the occult SS symbol found in the Obenführergruppensaal of Schloss Wewelsburg, banned for public use in Germany under the same paragraph as the swastika, before chickening out and assuring repeatedly (again) that I do not hold neo-Fascist sympathies.

All of these would be valid yet limited ways out of the quandary and resulting public vilification. Curiously, each in their way they all have a grain of truth to them. In a previous post I have admitted to having played with certain far-right ideas in the past - this is by no means something I'm proud of, and if I knew that part of Internet history would never come back to me I'd avoid the topic completely. Omitting the pathetic details, it suffices to say that it was a desperate time, one of depression, anxiety and isolation looking for its own excuse.
The maxim "Once a Nazi, always a Nazi" is not only grossly misleading, it also hampers all efforts in breaking up far-right groups - at worst it works as an excuse for certain Antifa communities (not pointing fingers) to legitimize the violence, censorship and smug intolerance that at the same time serves to limit their effort in the longer perspective. There are humane ways to handle these destructive political movements, but they require that we overlook our own fear and see (and worse: embrace) the sad, frightened human behind the swastika banner - respectfully, not sentimentally.

Furthermore, we need to tell the difference between totalitarianism and those cultural expressions that play on its aesthetic, thus taking a political weapon out of the hands of reactionary forces. Among what I sometimes pejoratively refer to as the "cultural Left" there is a superstition that sees far-right politics wherever there are iron crosses, runes, references to Rome or the sound of marching boots. This has lead to a lot of misunderstandings between them and the Neofolk community, most of which seem to have been largely cleared up (with certain exceptions).

Black Sun Express is supposed to be about ideas, about art, sometimes about news, sometimes about political topics, etc. Ultimately it is supposed to be about the dark joy of not living in Utopia, a world without Time or the Other.