* In the early 1980s, the Neue Slovenische Kunst outraged Slovenia’s government and culture at large. However, Laibach have since attained significant stature and commercial heft in their tiny home country; prior to the fall of communism, they were, in western countries, the top-selling Eastern Bloc band of any genre, and today their largest markets are in Germany and the United States. In 2003 they began receiving financial support from the Slovenian government. The practice of anti-authority acts receiving government funding is arguably paradoxical, but within the industrial scene it dates back to COUM Transmissions, to whom the Arts Council of Great Britain repeatedly awarded grants.

* More recently, the post-9/11 industrial scene’s reception of songs like Dutch act Grendel’s “Soilbleed” even hints at a new air of genuine reverence for the specific reality of the United States military. The song was ubiquitous in clubs from 2005 to 2007, and its samples of Full Metal Jacket (which Ministry also pillages on 1989’s “Thieves”) were contextually heard by more than a few agreeable dancers as a pep rally cheer for the United States Marine Corps.

** In one interview, the band says the number was more like three thousand skinheads—and not one woman among them.¹¹

* Lest this essay blindly vindicate what might be the baiting of “puritan leftist” politics (for which most crypto-rightist industrial music has little patience), another perspective on this type of provocation is offered in a few pages through the lens of Žižek.

** Incidentally, a long fucking wait is not quite the same thing as never.

* He has since declared this “a big mistake”—the worst of his life.²⁶ Some journalists and music fans have continued their criticism of him despite this.

* Julius Evola was an Italian philosopher influential in postwar fascism.

* The attributed author of the source from which this quote comes, “Klaos Oldanburg,” is a pseudonym for Stewart Home. A mid-1970s pamphlet by English mail art duo BLITZINFORMATION (Stefan Kukowski and Adam Czamowski) declares, “it has become one of BLITZINFORMATION’s foremost projects to change everyone’s name to Klaos Oldanburg.”³⁹