COMMENT: Drudkh right, do we just take their word for it?

‘I just like the music, I don’t have to agree with them,’ is only a convincing argument up to a certain point. All art is political, in that it’s the product of a certain backdrop, set of circumstances or cultural context – you can appreciate the end result, it doesn’t make you a goosestepping Third Reich sympathiser or personally responsible for dragging Anne Frank from her attic window, but you have to acknowledge just what it is that gives this piece of music its glistening, copper-toned resonance. Any fear about what the music you identify with says about you is tantamount to admitting that the music DOES say something about you, because it doesn’t have to, you CAN just enjoy it as music but an unwillingness to explore the beliefs behind a band is wilful ignorance, like reading ‘the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and pretending it’s got nothing to do with Jesus.

Part of the problems with confronting the Far Right in extreme metal is that all sides are reliant upon a lexicon which lacks a consensus of meaning. To a pitchfork-waving liberal left witchhunter ‘Nazi’ is a blanket term for anyone slightly to the right of odious Daily Mail pundit Richard Littlejohn – the core tenants being vague ethnonationalism hidden behind a malevolent cloak of ‘common sense’, ‘fairness’, ‘our country’ and ‘our values’ – and defenders of their odious beliefs fall back on the semantic argument that not being followers of German National Socialism as espoused by Adolf Hitler, they can’t possibly be Nazis. It’s an unconvincing slight of hand that a worrying percentage happily accept as the case being closed, wheeling out a extra defence so dense that it insults the intelligence of anyone who comes into contact with it: ‘Given how x nation/people suffered in the Second World War, they can’t possibly be Nazis!’. Almost every nation on earth has a political Far Right, and almost every nation in Europe – from Britain’s British Union of Fascists to Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party – has a history of unpleasant ethnic nationalism contemporaneous to that of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. To compound the insult and further establish this dishwater premise that should be quickly discarded, Nick Griffin frequently drags up his family’s war record as evidence as to why his vile racist organisation clearly aren’t vile racists.

Where these tired and overtrodden arguments involve Drudkh, and indeed all of Roman Saenko’s folksy black metal projects, is that they’ve helpfully released a statement making it clear they’re not supporting “racism and political extremism” and claiming "there's nothing in Drudkh's music or lyrics that would suggest any political outlook", and yet refuse to talk about their beliefs (or anything, in fact). Yes, Slayer have songs about murderous Auschwitz camp doctors, but Slayer do interviews and we can all sleep better at night for having answers to our questions.

That they know a statement about their politics is necessary means they know full well it requires more discourse. And the reasons rests upon their appropriation of 19^th Century Ukrainian nationalist poets (most prominently Taras Shevchenko), on 2005’s ‘The Swan Road’, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans in the Second World War, on 2006’s ‘Blood In Our Wells’, which is dedicated to the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, their use of the slogan, on 2007’s ‘Anti-Urban’ EP, ‘Conservative Revolutionary’ (which they share with their openly racist parent entity Hate Forest), which is drawn from the pre-war German political party of the same name. The intentions and the Far Right credentials behind all of these sources is open to interpretation to differing extents, but seeing as the band aren’t prepared to entertain a dialogue around them how can we be possibly held to account for drawing out own conclusions?

Taras Shevchenko was effectively the father modern Ukrainian literature, just as Ukraine was beginning to establish its contemporary national identity, pressing against the Russian Empire, of which it was a component, and Poland, of which it had previously formed the edge (Ukraine coming from the Polish for ‘edge’ or ‘corner’) before being swallowed up by the Empire. He insulted the tsar and church, and was an active pan-Slav (campaigning for a federation of Slavic peoples, many who were under the feudal bootheels of the Ottoman Turks or Austrian Hapsbergs), so definitely an internationalist as opposed to nationalist, but his peons to the beauty of his homeland definitely fed an emerging nationalism of which Drudkh could be argued to be the latest manifestation.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for a free Ukraine in the Second World War and unenviably found themselves caught between the rock and hard place of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, to a degree they played both factions fairly skillfully, often co-operating with the Waffen SS against the Red Army, and the ethics of their methods are perhaps not for us to pass judgement on. The Eastern Front was a whole other sticky, bloody mess of divided loyalties and lesser evils compared to the relatively tranquil ‘gentlemanly war’ being waged in Western Europe. But what we can pass damning judgment on is that the Ukraine they fought for was defined purely on ethnic lines where clear ethnic lines didn’t necessarily exists – especially as the would-be nation had formed part of a union with Poland and Lithuania for centuries, and then the Russian Empire. And so the Ukrainian Insurgent Army made good their effort to create an ‘ethnic Ukraine’ in the time honoured tradition, one that Bosnian Serb premier turned oddball mystic Radovan Karadžić currently sits in the dock for in the Hague, by the wholesale massacre and expulsion of Poles from their territory. Between 1943 and 1944 between 80-100,000 Poles were murdered, at least 50,000 in one region alone where the Insurgent Army commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky ordered “We should undertake the great action of the liquidation of the Polish element. As the German armies withdraw, we should take advantage of this convenient moment for liquidating the entire male population in the age from 16 up to 60 years. We cannot lose this fight, and it is necessary at all costs to weaken Polish forces. Villages and settlements laying next to the massive forests, should disappear from the face of the earth.”

Stepan Bandera himself exemplified that pragmatic attitude to the Germans perfectly, his declaration of Ukrainian independence could be argued to kowtow to Nazi interests as a matter of survival - the proclamation announcing that the new state "will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world", briefly gaining Gestapo protection before German enthusiasm waned and he was set to a concentration camp. When it came to the Poles, like his organisations military wing he was far less ambigious, saying, "[Russians], Poles, Jews are hostile to us must be exterminated in this struggle, especially those who would resist our regime: deport them to their own lands, importantly: destroy their intelligentsia"

Finally, as fans of the Griffin defence will be proud to note, the Conservative Revolutionary party of Weimar Germany did indeed hate the Nazis, and their leader was offed in the Nazi regime’s first act of state terror in 1933 – the Night of the Long Knives. But this wasn’t for particularly saintly reasons, but because the militaristic, liberal-hating, antisemitic Conservative Revolutionaries were a threat to the Nazi monopoly over the Far Right, being an outspoken part of Hitler's right wing coalition. The difference between the two being the classic political conflict between crass, unsubtle populists (the National Socialists) and largely middle class, educated elite (the Conservative Revolutionaries).

At this point it feels like saying Drudkh’s politics are open to interpretation is a bit more generosity than they really deserve.