CHAPTER 5

Archives of Pain

Of Walking Abortion – Archives of Pain – Mausoleum – The Intense Humming of Evil

“I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings […] the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the ‘Christian’ tradition, itself.”

Margaret Atwood

“The interconnexion between sadism, masochism, success-worship, power-worship, nationalism and totalitarianism is a huge subject whose edges have barely been scratched, and even to mention it is considered somewhat indelicate.”

George Orwell, Decline of the English Murder

THE RESPECT THEY DESERVE

After the personal self-laceration of “Yes” and the political wrecking-ball swing of “Ifwhiteamerica,” “Of Walking Abortion” blends and distils both. It begins to expand the album’s themes beyond explicit political critique and personal crisis towards the deeper philosophical questions asked of human nature in “Archives of Pain,” “Mausoleum” and “The Intense Humming of Evil.” After the rapid-fire pace of the first two tracks, the creeping first few lines of “Of Walking Abortion” also provide a momentary breathing-space, despite offering little else in the way of relief.

The song’s opening samples the US writer Hubert Selby Jr, whose 1964 puritanical panoply Last Exit to Brooklyn is similar in atmosphere and concerns to some parts of The Holy Bible. Book and album walk a similar conflicted line between morally absolutist horror and morbid fascination with the squalor and venality among their cast of “junkies, winos, whores.” Selby’s imagery finds its closest echo in “Yes” and “Ifwhiteamerica,” both songs seemingly set in the same overcrowded cityscape, their busy, bristling lines both pitying and contemptuous. After these, “Of Walking Abortion” is starker and sparser, its world far less densely populated. What was claustrophobically intense in “Yes” is here spaced-out and strung-out, viciously precise rather than breathless and chaotic. The song’s towering contempt, its arm’s-length alienation from humanity, is such that the mass of corruption which “Yes” and “Ifwhiteamerica” anatomized in lurid close-up has now, observed from a suitably disdainful distance, dwindled to the size and moral value of maggots. The terrain feels almost alien — we might be standing outside the universe, in horrified but implacable judgement.

“Of Walking Abortion” is merciless. Its musical bludgeoning and lyrical bleakness (Richey’s notes for the song open with “There is little hope…”) make it feel apocalyptic in parts. Against the spitting of Moore’s off-kilter percussion and staticky scrawls of guitar, Bradfield’s delivery is white-hot and scourging, the abrupt self-criticism of “loser, liar, faker, phoney” striking like a slap to the face after the drawling and stilted first verse. The cumulative condemnatory fury of the song’s final lines is immense: Bradfield’s growled “little people in little houses” and suddenly slicing guitar as sinister as a shark’s fin cutting through water. “The massacred innocent blood stains us all” is a line which, like many on the album, could sound wildly overblown or parodic in the wrong hands, but Bradfield’s delicate and raw delivery manages to set it down unscathed before the final, clanging back-and-forth of “WHO’S RESPONSIBLE? – YOU FUCKING ARE,” Bradfield berating himself like a late-night drunk in the street.

And what are we responsible for? The song’s targets range from mass murder, torture and incarceration by Hitler, Horthy, Tiso and Mussolini, to Western consumers buying branded baseball shoes made by underpaid workers in developing countries (and, through the recuperation of radical icons or imagery — Malcolm X in this case — adopting moral or political causes as fashion accessories). The song neither admits nor allows neutral ground. The taut, ruthless economy of “pure or lost / spectator or crucified” underlines its view of life as a zero-sum game. In 1994, the era of Clinton and Blair’s cozily compromising Third Way, the album’s rigid logic is defiant, both continuing the divisions of the Cold War and anticipating the with-us-or-against-us mentality which spread, in the US at least, following 9/11 — perhaps still this century’s defining New Moral Certainty. The song recognizes 90s liberal triumphalism as disingenuous, a historical glitch.

Those on the losing side of the twentieth century’s political battles, facing the sudden absence of previous certainties with nothing to replace them, could just as easily convert this sense of loss into nihilism and self-destruction — and, in places, an attraction or resignation to resurgent totalitarianism. “Of Walking Abortion”’s second verse observes this danger in the political backlash which formed part of de-communization in Eastern Europe and led to the rehabilitation of former fascist leaders, including Hungary’s Miklós Horthy and Slovakia’s Jozef Tiso. But the song, like the album as a whole, goes beyond this to suggest that fascist figureheads merely write large the things of which every individual may be capable and in whose crimes every individual may be implicated.

The song’s title comes from Valerie Solanas’ 1967 polemic The SCUM Manifesto, seen by some as a wholly sincere call for the eradication of men and by others as a more subtle critique of patriarchal control, comically and grotesquely exaggerated for effect. After shooting and wounding iconic pop artist Andy Warhol at his New York studio — thereby attaining minor iconic status herself — Solanas spent years in and out of institutions before her death in 1988. Like Selby’s moral tracts, her story can be used to illustrate the dark side of the 60s, junctures at which the era’s lifting of restrictions spiralled into social and psychological anarchy. Arguably, the song either weakens or subverts Solanas’ critique by expanding its target from men to humanity as a whole. Unlike some of the band’s hit-and-miss earlier efforts, this is not primarily a song of male self-loathing or feminist solidarity, but a comprehensive condemnation of human nature. The song’s canvas is vast and its vision too single-minded to be concerned with nuance: everyone is guilty and blood stains us all. The rest of the album explores the uses to which this absolutist perspective, for good or ill, may be put.

THE GRIEF OF THE MOTHER IS THE PROSECUTOR

Between the murky “She is Suffering” and the relatively perky “Revol,” “Archives of Pain” swirls, boils and seethes like a red-hot whirlpool. Anchored by a muscular bassline, it bobs between extremes, between the revving, slamming urgency of the chorus and the languorous, incongruously dreamy-sounding bridges (the line “a drained white body that hangs from a gallows” itself seems to lazily twist like the hanged corpse it describes). The song grounds the album’s abstract concerns in a concrete context, its chorus naming a litany of state and civilian offenders both historical and contemporary, both iconic and relatively obscure. By marshalling these names together, as “Revol” does more playfully, “Archives of Pain” challenges the distinction between personal and political wrongdoing. As the album as a whole is conscious, the state can kill on a far greater scale than the individual, and often with impunity — with the claim to right, morality and justice on its side.

“Archives of Pain,” seemingly advocating retributive justice in its most terminal form, raised eyebrows at the time and continues to do so. The band themselves were anxious about its reception. Britain in the 90s, particularly after the murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two other children in February 1993, saw an increasingly stormy debate on crime, with the right focusing on punishment as deterrent and justice being seen to be done, the left on understanding, rehabilitation and viewing crime in its socio-economic context. The Manics’ intervention came down jarringly on what seemed an unexpected side. Although on this album the song’s moral grandstanding and merciless absolutism is hardly out of place, its embrace of the state’s potential power and duty to punish its citizens seemed unprecedented, and lyrics condemning Hindley’s crochet lectures felt uncomfortably close to the manufactured outrage of the Daily Mail. Regardless of where one stood on the song’s argument, the argument itself seemed uncharacteristic of the band.

“Is revenge justified?” asks Richey in his notes for “Archives of Pain.” “Nothing in common with Manson or Dahmer cult and its current fashionability. There is no glory in innocent death.” Bradfield’s explanation of the song, drawing on Camus rather than Foucault, was that in the absence of visible manmade justice, a dissatisfied citizenry will turn from the state and back to god to see retribution exacted (see No Manifesto). “Archives of Pain” complicates the idea which is developed throughout the rest of the album, of collective responsibility for humanity’s atrocities and corruption. If we have already established that everyone is guilty — and we will, ultimately, all be buried in the same box — then why the emphasis, so luridly expressed here, on punishing individuals? Why insist on enacting “justice” against one, if we all — through passivity, through spectating, through turning away — are equally deserving? Foucault’s deep ambivalence to the state and state power makes the title’s hat-tip to him seem like another of the song’s logical fault-lines.

As both Edwards and Bradfield suggest, the desire for vengeance is not quite the desire for justice, and the heart of “Archives of Pain” is not merely the unexamined bloodlust that the Daily Mail et al thrive on. On the chorus’ hit-list is the High Court judge James Pickles, notorious for dispensing the kind of hardline, zero-tolerance punishment that “Archives of Pain” is held to support — yet here he is, indicted alongside Dahmer, Le Pen and Milosevic. In the 80s and 90s, Pickles was notable for his contemptuous remarks towards survivors of rape. He accused one woman of “asking for it,” another of “clever manipulation,” and another of dressing in a manner “calculated to invite attention.” A female hitchhiker, who had been raped by the man who gave her a lift, was deemed guilty of “contributory negligence” and her rapist merely fined accordingly. (“A lot of people,” Nicky Wire mused in a 1994 interview, “don’t like to see rapists getting off with a £25 fine.”) The song’s singling-out of Pickles, whose idiocy might also have inspired the climactic shout of “STERILISE RAPISTS,” is a more helpful statement of feminist solidarity than anything in “She is Suffering.” This aspect also complicates the song’s critique, recognizing the flaws and biases of judicial institutions even while it advocates their strengthening.

Also notable is the song’s opening sample, taken from a report on the trial of Peter Sutcliffe, who between 1975 and 1981 murdered thirteen women and left seven others for dead. In the recording, the mother of one of the women killed by Sutcliffe speaks to a camera outside the courtroom in Leeds. Most of Sutcliffe’s victims were sex workers, as are a large proportion of the victims of serial killers, along with homeless and transient populations — those who are already economic and social casualties. Police investigations into the Sutcliffe case were hindered by the notion that such women were less of a priority and that injury and death were practically a hazard of their job. The socioeconomically weak and marginalized die young and, overwhelmingly, unheard. “Archives of Pain,” by prioritizing the voices of sex workers and condemning both their predators and subsequent victim-blaming, illustrates The Holy Bible’s commitment to amplifying the voices of victims rather than “martyrs.” This principle aligns the song against the artistic tradition which romanticizes murderers as martyrs, outlaws and libertines, while ignoring their (often more deprived, invariably less powerful and romanticized) victims.

Nicky Wire has stressed that “Archives of Pain” “isn’t a rightwing statement, it’s just against this fascination with people who kill.” In the tradition to which the song objects, murderers have been viewed as iconic outsiders who have shaken off the constraints of “civilization,” as the extreme, obscene expression of a general social malaise, and as lesser criminals in a society which applauds and rewards the larger criminality of capitalism and imperialism. This was in fact the attitude taken by the Manics in their 1993 b-side “Patrick Bateman,” a song which lauds the uber-80s anti-hero of Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho as a manifestation of the horror endemic to Reaganite capitalism, and which sees individual psychopathy as the logical conclusion of such a dysfunctional system. Bateman’s victims, like Sutcliffe’s, are already the casualties of brutal economics and urban alienation, but “Archives of Pain” sheds any exculpatory romanticism when dealing with real life rather than literature.

From the Marquis de Sade to Patrick Bateman, the male serial killer in particular has been a figure of fascination and almost preternatural power in popular culture, with the taking of life frequently mythologized as a path to some kind of immortality. Ian Brady, an admirer of both de Sade and Nazi Germany, claimed his killings granted him an “expanding sense of omnipotence.” Brady’s associate David Smith, the “tearaway” brother-in-law of Myra Hindley, wrote in his adolescent diary some lines which found their way not into “Archives of Pain” but “Of Walking Abortion”:

Rape is not a crime, it is a state of mind.
Murder is a hobby and a supreme pleasure
God is a superstition, a cancer that eats into the brain
People are like maggots, small, blind and worthless.

(see Wilson and Seaman)

The solipsistic sentiment expressed in the verse’s last two lines pervades much of the album, and its loftily contemptuous perspective lends “Of Walking Abortion” much of its impact. But, in “Archives of Pain,” the sub-Sadean attitude behind the first two lines is violently rejected with the same distaste for “edginess” which antagonized Wire on hearing the Therapy? lyric “I know how Jeffrey Dahmer feels.”1 A similar uneasiness at outrage-courting art was evident in 1997, when the Young British Artists Sensation exhibition included Marcus Harvey’s reproduction of Hindley’s iconic police photograph, composed from the multiple layering of an infant’s handprints. The exhibition was greeted by pickets and protests, and Harvey’s work was vandalized twice by other artists. The Sun newspaper, oddly echoing the gallows-vs-crochet imagery of “Archives of Pain,” wrote that “Myra Hindley is to be hung in the Royal Academy. Sadly it is only a painting of her.”

“Archives of Pain” disdains the idea of murderers as Genet-like antiheroes, and of murder as glamourous rebellion in a meaningless universe. This insistence on a moral framework may be striking — square, perhaps, and at odds with the often nihilistic tendencies of adolescent romanticism — but it is consistent with the album’s recognition of humanity’s unsettling tendency towards Nietzschean self-aggrandisement by some and power-worship by others, the sadomasochistic “worm in human nature” described by Wire. If the album condemns institutional political sadism and its apotheosis in the Holocaust, then it must also condemn the same principle where it identifies it on an individual level — even if, in songs like “Of Walking Abortion” or the Übermensch impulses of “Faster”, there is the suggestion that what is being condemned has been explored from inside as well as out.

REGAIN YOUR SELF-CONTROL

The Holocaust is a shadowy presence throughout The Holy Bible, briefly glimpsed on “Of Walking Abortion” and thrown into starkest relief by “Mausoleum” and “The Intense Humming of Evil.” The subject had been one of Richey’s areas of interest as a student, and the Manics had joined in the anti-fascist activism that formed part of 90s alternative culture. Alongside the band’s commitment to firefighting its ongoing manifestations, The Holy Bible was a deeper-rooted attempt at processing the phenomenon of fascism. The album’s “brother-sister songs” are contrasting treatments of the same subject: “Mausoleum” is all speed and fury, a blazing rage against the same dying of the light that “The Intense Humming of Evil,” with its atmosphere of banked fire, slowly and clinically anatomizes. The Holy Bible deals with the Holocaust as apocalypse, its particular horror blended into both the horror of the world in general and the horror experienced in coming to terms with this.

On The Holy Bible, the band take a far more serious approach to Holocaust representation than they did with the sub-Pistols provocation of “celebrate Buchenwald as Her Majesty’s heir” on early b-side “We Her Majesty’s Prisoners” — or indeed their debut album’s “you love us like a holocaust.” The Second World War, and specifically the Holocaust, as cautionary tale, as a gothic horror story that defines the limits of what can be called civilization, is how the narrative has passed into twentieth-century history. The Holy Bible both draws on this lesson and complicates it. Matthew Boswell has identified the album as an example of “Holocaust impiety” — a counterpoint to works of “holocaust piety,” exemplified by Schindler’s List, whose redemptive and optimistic retellings can only be achieved by “resisting the basic facts of […] good failing to triumph over evil.” In retrospective representations of the Second World War, public preference for positive messages has led creators to focus on stories of “escape, survival and heroism [rather than] slavery, disease, suffering, moral compromise and mass death.” By contrast, works of Holocaust impiety “deliberately engineer a sense of crisis […] by attacking the cognitive and cultural mechanisms that keep our understanding of the Holocaust at a safe distance from our understanding of ourselves” (1–6).

Octave Mirbeau’s novel The Torture Garden was written partly to allegorize the hypocrisy of European civilization. It was published at the height of the Dreyfus Affair, a judicial scandal rooted in anti-Semitism and still often referenced as a universal example of injustice. The book is ironically prefaced: “To the priests, the soldiers, the judges, to those people who educate, instruct and govern men, I dedicate these pages of Murder and Blood.” (Mirbeau’s character Clara, who reaches orgasm over the torturing of prisoners, might have felt at home with “Revol”’s political perverts, not to mention certain fans of “Archives of Pain.”) This quote from the book, appearing on the album cover and gabbled by Bradfield on an unreleased version of “Revol,” sums up much of the album’s atmosphere:

You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.

The Holy Bible’s indictment of history, however, admits no distinction between the civilized and uncivilized world. Civilization can contain the worst of human impulses and achievement: murder, war, enslavement, exploitation, mass imprisonment, torture and execution have all, at one point or another, been carried out under the banner of advancing civilization, and are still. The Holy Bible argues that even the worst excesses of humanity must still be recognized and acknowledged as human. In her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” to emphasize that everyday human mindsets, rather than malevolent individual psychologies, can enable an environment where atrocities are possible, and that this environment is not confined to the context of World War II. The human propensity to take pleasure and even sexual gratification in killing, interrogation and torture has been testified to in accounts from Central America, the former Yugoslavia, Africa, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan (see Winlow and Atkinson). Far from presenting “civilization” as a restrictive barrier to utopia, The Holy Bible documents what can result from the unchecked “free play of your powers.”

After the dreamlike delicacy with which “4st 7lb” fades out, “Mausoleum” is a crude and furious reawakening. Guitars insistently jab throughout the song, a constant wounded throbbing, as though to reinforce the lyrical revulsion. As the J.G. Ballard sample dropped in halfway through makes clear, “Mausoleum” is primarily a song of outraged indictment. Addressing himself more to perpetrators than victims, but also taking aim at a culture of moralistic voyeurism, Bradfield revs through the breakneck chorus with contempt, tearing into the lines as though he cannot empty his mouth quickly enough of this particular subject matter. He ends it with another of the album’s extraordinary vocal moments, a repetition of “winter” that becomes a wordless cry pitched halfway between anguish and disgust.

“The Intense Humming of Evil” is pure atmosphere, a deliberately uneasy listen in which silence is as effective as sound. (It cuts in abruptly after the final, choked-off “I want to die–” of “Die in the Summertime.” So much of this album has been concerned with suicidal ideation, the idea of having nothing to live for, and the means of fashioning one’s own exit from the world through starvation or self-destruction, that a song which focuses so suddenly and unflinchingly on the deaths of those who did not choose, welcome or enact it on themselves might give us pause.) The album’s emotional palette, which on other songs might have blended rage, anxiety, mania and despair, here concentrates on painting only horror and abhorrence with relentless, suffocating strokes. Death again becomes a relief from suffering, but in this chillingly altered context. The sonic landscape is disturbingly industrial — metallic, cinematic horror redolent of doors clanging shut and the grinding of conveyor belts. A brilliant and harrowing invoking of the factory-line processing of humanity, it is the sound of human beings dehumanized, of individuals becoming numbers, products, matter to be mechanically rendered.

“Mausoleum,” its imagery drawn from the band’s visit to Hiroshima’s Peace Museum as well as from Dachau, questions the narrative which places one instance of mass death on the side of good and another on that of evil. In Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall connects the “modish fed-upness” of 60s counter-culture to living, post-Hiroshima, with the constant possibility of death. For the Western world to have embraced the use of the atomic bomb was, he considered, to have espoused an evil as great as the Nazi genocide, which induced a crisis of identity: “[if] we were also wrong, who was ever right? If no one was right, what was right [and] what could guide us through the terrifying freedom such a concept offered?” (21). Rather than embracing the “terrifying freedom” Nuttall sees in the expanded possibilities produced by World War II — a world of no horizons — The Holy Bible regards them with a mixture of mourning and fatalistic dread. The album’s perspective is still a Cold War one. The threat of nuclear war had burdened previous generations with the imagined horror of nuclear holocaust, an apocalyptic winter which would eradicate without discriminating by ideology or ethnicity. In 1994, that threat may have been lifted, but in its place was a burden less nameable and barely acknowledged: the burden of disbelief in “the end of history.”

DESIGNER AMNESIAC

Nicky: “The lines: ‘Churchill no different / Wished the workers bled to a machine’ are about how Britain always thinks that it has a superior attitude. But as soon as the war was over, the attitude was: ‘Let’s go back to normal and exploit as many people as we can again. Keep the proles happy, tie them to their machines and then send them out to war again to be killed when we need to’.”

(qtd in “Manics”)

“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

– Milan Kundera

In 2002, the Jewish Museum of New York’s Mirroring Evil exhibition included an artwork with the very early-Manics title of Prada Deathcamp, consisting of a model of Auschwitz made from a designer hatbox. Its artist, Tom Sachs, who claimed the work sought to challenge the coercive logic of consumer capitalism, was accused of producing “holocaust agitprop” which “failed to grasp the gravity” of the events it referenced (Solomon). Sachs’ choice of Prada may be baffling when a more direct connection is available via Hugo Boss, a company which in 2011 admitted its founder’s enthusiasm for Nazism and its wartime use of forced labour. Fascism involves, classically, the merger of state and corporate interests, and, in an age of mass processing and industrial exploitation, mutual admiration existed between Hitler and Henry Ford (see “Hugo” and Dobbs). Rather than constituting a return to pre-modern barbarism, Nazism had a peculiar industrial character which was inextricably linked to twentieth-century progress and modernization, the advancement of design, engineering and construction, and the subordination of individuals to the demands of mass production. In 1932, the UK’s Trade Union Congress produced a report on the productivity-maximizing Bedaux system, the brainchild of French-US industrialist and management consultant Charles Bedaux. Bedaux was to die in prison in 1944, after several years collaborating with the Vichy regime and the Nazi government itself. Criticizing the implementation of Bedaux’s scheme in British factories, the TUC reported:

…the worker under such a system is made to feel that he is a cog in a machine for increasing output. The tendency is to obliterate individuality and craftsmanship and make the worker merely a machine.

(Savage 298–99)

If it takes a certain chutzpah to end a remembrance of the Holocaust with the bait-and-switch “Churchill no different,” it also displays a valid understanding of twentieth-century history, in which Churchill’s views on imperialism and white supremacy were seldom far away from those of many fascists. In the hands of other bands, the lyrical sideswipe might have been a failed attempt at iconoclasm, as faux-edgy as “I know how Jeffrey Dahmer feels,” but as a summation of the century-long war in which the class from which the Manics arose found themselves unwilling conscripts, it makes grimly perfect sense. After Churchill’s dispatching of troops against striking miners in the Rhondda in 1910, the subsequent skirmishes of industrial history and their bloody 1980s finale fed into a certain perception that the country’s ruling class regarded provincial Britain as a restless colonial population, to be governed like an occupied territory. The late-Manics song “30-Year War” encapsulates this, but all their work bears traces of the same perspective. In the 90s, these resentful regional folk-memories stood in direct contrast to Britpop’s lionizing of national triumph — two world wars and one world cup — as a reminder that Britain remained a country divided. The Holy Bible is rooted in the 80s and their aftermath, which were foreshadowed in the economic crisis and struggle of the 20s and 30s. The album telescopes the twentieth century, with its brutal beginning and end for the working class and the Second World War as its cataclysmic centre.

James: “I didn’t think the first draft of Intense Humming of Evil was judgmental enough. It’s a song about the Holocaust and you can’t be ambivalent about a subject like that. Not even we are stupid enough to be contentious about that.”

(qtd in Maconie, “Smile” 35)

While most totalitarian regimes have been marked by an enforced forgetting, an erasure of the past, consumer capitalism has often seen memory and history as an enemy too. The Manics’ politics have always been tied to a concern with their own history and that of others, and both “Mausoleum” and “The Intense Humming of Evil” demonstrate anxiety over historical memory of the Holocaust and how this relates to our understanding of ourselves. Richey observed that attempts to qualify or erase the Holocaust were an example of “even truth being questioned,” which he considered more dangerous than the election in 1993 of Derek Beackon, the neofascist British National Party’s first local councillor (Bailie, “Traumatic”). The BNP’s rise in early-90s Britain, an example of the turn among the far-right from street violence to electoral politics, served as a reminder that fascism had not begun or ended with the Second World War, but merely reshaped itself.

Anti-fascist and anti-communist conflict in the 1930s had formed the backdrop to the Spanish Civil War, which drew volunteer fighters from all over the world, not least the left-leaning Welsh coalfields. After the defeat of Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, military dictatorships and corporatist authoritarian regimes remained in power in Spain, Portugal and Greece until the mid-70s, a decade in which Britain itself faced the possibility of a right-wing coup against its Labour government from panicky anti-communist elements (see for instance Beckett). The persistence of popular anti-fascist cultural alliances and street politics across most of postwar Europe to check and contain the resurgence of neofascism demonstrates that the liberal utopia of peace and stability only ever ran as deep as the surface. None of this diminishes the Holocaust’s unique dimensions, but rather lends them context as the apex of twentieth-century fascism and the nadir of the historical cycle of violence and victimization which The Holy Bible documents. “Of Walking Abortion” recognizes that the totalitarian impulse has guided far more of the twentieth century than the democratic principle has. Far from being dead and buried certainties, in the year of the album’s release these issues were still live.

Both “Intense” and “Mausoleum” are marked by gnawing selfdoubt and internal dispute over the meaning and significance of what they describe, what they present themselves as having documented and witnessed, as well as their capacity to do it adequate justice. This uncertainty reflects the 90s as a time of recalibrating, of abandoning the stability of twentieth-century narratives. In a postmodern age, every tear may be false. Truth could indeed be questioned, and was. In a series of essays, published in 1991 as The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, Jean Baudrillard argued that Western military action against Iraq was an atrocity masquerading as a war, in which it was impossible to tell the “real” experience of the conflict from the stylized and supervised media broadcasts through which it was presented to Western viewers. During the civil war and genocide in the Balkans, the accuracy of reported events was endlessly disputed.

In 1994, Stjepan G. Meštrović, in The Balkanisation of the West, predicted that rather than the liberal ideal in which democracy and capitalism spread to the former communist world, we were witnessing the incipient dissolution of the rest of the world, including the US and western Europe, into the kind of ethnic, religious and other pre-modern conflicts which were fragmenting the former Yugoslavia and which could easily be co-opted by fascist principles. Meštrović attributed this to postmodernism’s undermining of Enlightenment rationalism and the philosophical basis which democracy derived from it. With no secure moral foundations and no guiding narratives, as “Archives of Pain” argues, power — and, consequently, concepts like justice and truth — can revert to those strong enough to appropriate them.

The Holy Bible is conscious of the need to memorialize the particular impact of Nazism, but also recognizes the dangers of reifying it as the only form of fascism that matters and therefore as a dead and buried ideology, leaving us unable to recognize it in resurgent forms. In addition to revisionist accounts of the twentieth century which obscure or downplay the dimensions of the Holocaust, the twenty-first century has seen both the rise of neofascist movements and the rehabilitation of twentieth-century fascism. “Of Walking Abortion” describes the public veneration of the corpse of Hungary’s far-right ruler Miklós Horthy; in 2013 a bronze likeness of Horthy was unveiled at a church in Budapest (see Schiff). Across eastern and western Europe, parties extolling solutions adjacent to fascism have all seen notable electoral success, built on both postcommunism and, after the 2008 financial crisis, on the effects of rising wealth gaps, precarity, impoverishment and the imposition of austerity. Disadvantaged outgroups — refugees, claimants of welfare, the long-term unemployed — as well as women and minorities have become lightning-conductors for a build-up of unfocused resentment, in the absence of any concerted attempt at (and perhaps, any faith in) more progressive solutions from the left. As “Mausoleum” warns in what may be its most resonant line, prejudice burns brighter when it’s all we have to burn.

_________________

1   Wire’s evaluation of the line was “I don’t fucking want to know how Jeffrey Dahmer feels, and I think it’s quite appalling to put yourself in that position.” Therapy?’s response was, to my knowledge, not elicited, but relations between the bands seem to have remained friendly, with Andy Cairns joining them onstage for at least one gig on The Holy Bible twentieth anniversary tour.