I recently read Bill Peel’s wonderful Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics. It’s a short book about how left-wing political thought and action can be mapped on to the themes of black metal. Those themes specifically being: 1) Distortion; 2) Decay; 3) Coldness; 4) Secrecy; 5) Heresy. Black metal is a genre that I just kind of fell into over the years. I think even as recently as 2015, if you’d tried to have me listen to something by Trespasser, I would have balked and run screaming for the doors. Yet since then, I’ve grown to really love it. The genre’s distortion, dissonance, and thees have been a big standby in my playlists since I was first introduced to Rotting Christ, and I don’t think I’d have it any other way.

Still, it’s painfully obvious to anyone who listens to the genre that it’s got a big ol Nazi problem. As Peel points out, that’s due – at the very, very, very least – to the fact that many of the popularizers (ironic, that) of black metal were, themselves, Nazis. Since the 90s in Norway, though, there has been a rise in what’s known in Red-Anarchist Black Metal (RABM). RABM uses the themes of black metal – outlined above – to the ends of building a better world, smashing oppressive systems, and even a bit of religious commentary here and there. But RABM is not a popular subgenre even within a very unpopular genre of music. In vast swaths of the metal community, it is rather gauche to be seen as political. Apoliticalness is a badge of honor, partly because it allows the listener to pretend that they are above the masses of humanity who waste their time caring about things. More distressingly, though, apolitical music often gives cover to right wing movements who infiltrate subcultures. (See Anton Shekhovtsov’s “Apoliteic Music: Neo-folk, Martial Industrial And “metapolitical Fascism” for an excellent breakdown of how this works.) 

But we’re not here to break down right-wing metal and RABM in detail. I already did that in my podcast. No, we’re here because something popped into my mind as I read Talia Lavin’s latest blog post about the fall of Rome and how that relates to where we’re at in America. Now, I’ve calmed down over the years. I used to get very, very annoyed when people equated America to Rome and how we’ve been in the decline of America just as Rome declined etc etc. It’s something that liberals and conservatives love to trot out. Liberals love it because it gives American political institutions a sort of Victorian romanticism. They think of grand paintings depicting the fall of the Roman Republic and they think, “We, too, had decorum once.” Conservatives love it because they get to point at the borders, migrants, and “woke culture” and shout, “Do you see?! They’re coming for us! The barbarians are at the gates!”

Now, both of them are wrong. It’s a lazy equivocation to compare Rome and America. The Roman Republic was even less of a Republic than the American Republic. Women were essentially property, slavery was warmly embraced at all corners of the state, and politicians openly hired crowds of street toughs to beat up their opponents. Now, we have the good sense to do all of that under the table, thank you very much. 

It is, of course, undeniable to state that the Republic transitioned to an Empire, and one can point out parallels to America, but I reaffirm my stance that doing so comes not from a place of historical accuracy, but a desire to be a Victorian romantic. It is more droll – yet I think more accurate – to point to any number of more modern states that had a liberal democracy and went whole-hog into autocracy. My favorite is the Weimar Republic, because I’m a paranoiac and like to joke that, any day now, the chuds will load me onto the trains for the concentration camps in Idaho. 

I’m a blast at parties.

But the main thing that I think people get wrong about this is drawing a line that, as Rome the city fell out of the hands of what we commonly refer to as the Roman state, the Empire fell. It ignores the fact that, long before then, the Roman Empire was governed by two emperors: One in the West in Rome (and later Ravenna, Milan, and even out of Italy for a time) and the other in Byzantium, later Constantinople. The latter was more secure, fortified, and stable than the Western counterpart for a number of reasons which I won’t go into, but the point is that, while the Western Rome “fell,” the Eastern Rome remained until the 15th century, though the full expanse of the Roman Empire was never re-achieved.

And indeed, there’s something even more specific that I want to briefly chat about. The reason I put “fell” in quotation marks in the paragraph above is that I don’t think it’s at all accurate to say that Western Rome “fell.” See, one of the ideas that Peel outlines in his book is the idea of decay. While decay is commonly thought of as a negative, Peel points out that decay is part of the growth cycle of every form of life on this planet. In a very illustrative case, Peel writes about mushrooms, specifically mushrooms that grow out of specific dead forests. While a common perspective is that the forests have died and, thus, provide nothing of value, the truth of the matter is that the value just changes forms. From fallen trees come mushrooms, often monetarily valuable (or tasty) ones. Life, in other words, does not have a hard stop; it just changes from one thing to another.)

So too with Rome. Even if one wanted to take the position that the Empire ceased when the gates of Rome were breached, it ignores a slew of questions of defining the continuity and transition of power (and indeed the veracity of that power) between emperors and who granted those emperors that power. It is less difficult to say that power centralized in Rome, which had by that time strong ties to the Papal seat in the Vatican, transitioned to the power recognized by the Pope and given the Christian authority to establish the peace of Rome. In less obtuse terms: While what is popularly construed as the Roman Empire disappeared from the world stage, it is not at all hard to draw a transitional line from the various Germanic tribes that sacked Rome to Charlemagne and, thus, the Holy Roman Empire. 

(The Holy Roman Empire, is not a strange thing to be wondered at, like it’s an alien. It’s a simple premise summed up in a simple label: The Holy Roman Emperor is the man with the authority given to him by God, via the Pope, to bring Europe under Christian dominion and leadership, and sits above kings in order to ensure that kings play as nice as they can. It is Holy because it is a religious authority. It is Roman because the Pope, in Rome, grants it that religious authority, and it is, obviously, an empire.)

What I’m getting at, here, is that we need to approach these things with a decay-centric worldview. When we do, life and the world get much, much more interesting. We see the way institutions transition authority between themselves. We see the way peoples change over long periods of time. We get a better understanding of how things work. It’s not romantic. Shelley would not write about these things. You won’t get think-pieces about great transitional periods and the potentialities therein. But it is the way of things. 

(And this, of course, does not begin to touch the interplay between the Eastern Roman Empire [ERE] and the Western, and later how Constantinople interacted with the West at large, and what that says about the ERE as an artifact of antiquity vying against newer forms of government and power in the West. Really, the ERE gets short shrift!)

I suppose what I’m saying here is that it’s not wrong to say that the Roman Empire in the West collapsed, but it is wrong to leave it at that. It is wrong to give in to melancholy, to fetishize the past of a past, and thus to fetishize death. It allows oneself to become a wasting waif, which is very romantic and seems to automatically impart one with the scent of burning candles, leather-bound books, and the sound of wind and rain on the moors outside one’s manor house in the Midlands, but it’s limiting. 

We can look around us and see, obviously, that things are changing. But when we think of that as approaching an end, we place ourselves in a spot where we’re more inclined to be inactive, to let events happen to us. When we see our world as in flux and moving from one thing to another, it’s easier to not only act to change things, but to imagine a better world and to plan for that world to come into being. That’s the promise of decay, as I see it, and, sadly, you don’t get that from gigantic paintings that hang in the Louvre or the National Portrait Gallery.