ARTICLE BY OLE REITOV
Ole Reitov is an internationally recognized expert and consultant on artistic freedom. In this article, he writes about the dark side of music, exploring several examples of its ability to provide a sense of identity and purpose, and how this is used within extremist groups.
A song describes how fighters will ‘crush the skulls of their enemies.’ A Russian war song in Ukraine? No.
A Nazi war song? No, a nasheed produced and performed by members of ISIS, the so-called Islamic State
The terror group has produced dozens of powerful songs to spread their messages. One of the most played on You Tube, Telegram and other media platforms is Salil al-sawarim (Clashing of Swords)[1].If you don’t speak Arabic, the vocals may just sound like a beautiful a capella song be a male choir. The sound is powerful. The voices are compelling – however, the message is militant:
Come on to righteousness
The banner has called us
To brighten the path of destiny
To wage war on the enemy
Nasheeds are in general neither militant nor used as propaganda for terror organisations. Nasheeds – meaning chants –mostly contain lyrics with reference to Islamic beliefs, history, and religion. Is it music? In traditional Islamic theology, religious chants are not considered music. In the Islamic world, there are dozens of very popular artists and groups using musical instruments. ISIS would never do that.
The Islamic State, like the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, do not tolerate musical instruments, but they certainly understand the power of chants. The biggest ‘musical difference’ between the two is that whereas ISIS make use of modern, sophisticated recording technology, the Taliban of the 1990s produced very simple chants based on original Pashto folk songs, recorded with a lot of echo, a technique which is commonly used for Quranic recitation in mosques. The Taliban distributed their works through audio cassettes. ISIS, on the other hand, uses social media. But both productions share militant messages and express their soldiers’ readiness to die for their causes.
When Islamic fundamentalists attacked Paris twice in 2015 killing twelve people at the headquarters of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, in January, and killing 130 people, including 90 at the Bataclan Theatre in November, the attacks were praised by ISIS. Shortly after they released the nasheed ‘Ma vengeance ’(My revenge), with French lyrics. The nasheed was also the sonic background to a militant video which plays out like a music video. The lyrics are filled with praise for the attacks in France and honour the ISIS soldiers of the ‘caliphate’ for answering the call for jihad. Words like ‘crusaders,’ ‘fighters,’ ‘soldiers of the caliphate’ are common- all packed in modern ‘musical’ and figurative expression. ISIS and their media production units are no foreigners to modern technology and video language. Originally developed in ‘the evil west’, such as MTV.
Making use of music and film as propaganda was not foreign to the Nazi regime of the 30s and 40s either. Best known is the Horst-Wessel-Lied (Horst Wessel Song), also known as Die Fahne Hoch (Raise the Flag), which became the official song of the Nazi Party. The lyrics were written by Wessel, a party activist who was killed by a member of the Communist Party of Germany. After his death, he was proclaimed a ‘martyr.’ When Hitler came to power in 1933, the song became a national anthem.
Like ISIS propagandists, the Nazi propaganda producers frequently found musical inspiration in traditional folk-songs – familiar songs that people somehow recognized. With a little twist, a familiar sound was conjoined with words of hate. Whether ISIS has found direct inspiration in Nazi propaganda songs and films can be discussed – but there are certain similarities in their use of media, as described by writer and curator Steven Luckert [2]:
In 1924, Adolf Hitler described propaganda as ‘a terrible weapon in the hands of an expert.’ For two decades, the Nazis showed the world what a devastating weapon it could be. They won over millions of Germans to their extremist goals in a democracy by branding their movement with powerful symbols and images of their leader, engaging in niche marketing, and crafting messages that appealed to a public disheartened by the economic dislocation of the Great Depression. Nazi propagandists employed the most modern communications technology of the time– radio, film, and even television – to spread their radical ideas.
Today, ISIS draws upon many of these same sophisticated techniques to win adherents around the world. And, like the Nazi regime, it understands that terror too can be an effective form of propaganda. Hitler and his Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, realized that targeted violence could shape public opinion and behaviour in support of the movement if it was portrayed as necessary and justifiable and the objects of the terror deemed deserving of punishment. In its provocative social media propaganda, ISIS does the same.
After the horrors of Second World War and the Holocaust, one might hope that the times of Nazi propaganda songs is long gone. Not so. White supremacist music is also big business in today’s world. Interpol (the International Police Organization) estimated that during 1999, the European neo-Nazi music industry was worth $3.4 million a year. When one company, Resistance Records. was raided in 1997-98, some 200,000 tapes and CDs worth $3 million were confiscated. [3]
White supremacy, nationalism and racism goes hand in hand by several neo-Nazi bands in USA, Germany, Norway, Sweden and some Eastern European countries. Concerts are frequently organised at secret locations. Musically you can find hardliner music in genres from country to death metal. Swedish Associate professor Heléne Lööw in 1990 wrote her dissertation on Swedish National Socialist movements. She studied the rise and development of Swedish Nazi music in depth, which led to serious threats to her life.
In an article in Index on Censorship in 1998 called ‘White Noise’ [4], she wrote:
Every revolutionary movement has its own music, lyrics and poets. They neither create nor lead the revolution; they articulate its dreams, visions and fantasies of the Utopian society pursued by the movement. The modern racist propagandist is not, as in the 1930s, a party strategist or skilled speaker, but a combination of rock star and street fighter. It’s no longer a question of music for national socialists or racists, the music itself has become the ideology. The choreography of ‘White Noise’ concerts makes it evident that the singer, strutting heiratically across the stage, is the high priest of a ritual celebration, the leader controlling the public as did his Nazi forbears. White Noise music and the extreme racist and xenophobic counterculture has grown during the past 10 years, particularly among the generation born in the 1960s and 1970s. Along with ‘separatist rock’, it came to Sweden in the late 70s and early 80s when the anti-immigration organisation Bevara Sverige Svenskt (BSS: Keep Sweden Swedish) started to distribute audio tapes labelled ‘Music for Patriots’.
Jihadism, Nazism – are they different expressions of similar ideologies? Ironically some Nazi groups, who would normally reject ‘non-whites’ have hailed jihadist groups. This has been pointed out by some researchers. Julien Bellaiche an Associate Fellow at the Global Network on Extremism and Technology writes[5]:
Some far-right extremists have also expressed admiration for jihadi groups and have sought operational knowledge from jihadi sources on occasions. Moreover, it seems that these similarities are reflected in their propaganda as well. Journalist Bridget Johnson shows through specific examples collected online that neo-Nazi and Salafi-Jihadi propaganda presents striking aesthetic and rhetorical resemblance.
In recent years, some neo-Nazi groups have visually materialised this ideological convergence by glorifying Salafi-Jihadi representations in their online communication. For instance, Ben Makuch and Mack Lamoureux revealed in 2019 that the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division, and its Canadian propagandist ‘Dark Foreigner’, created an image eulogising al-Qaeda’s former leader Osama Bin Laden. In June that year, the same group published a stylised picture of jihadists in a post entitled ‘The Islamic Example’ depicting Salafi-Jihadi’s culture of martyrdom as something to hail and replicate in neo-Nazi movements.
Music is powerful, as its use by hate movements prove. It has a direct emotional impact. This can be used to create feelings of solidarity, particularly when listened to in groups. Often, we see this power in positive terms – in the sense that a concert can bring together a diverse audience, and subsume them into a joyous shared experience. But it is a tool that can be used by anyone. The sense of belonging generated by music can also create exclusion, and become a vehicle for hate. It is important to pay hear the songs of terror and hate so that we can raise our voices too, and reclaim the power of music for us all.
[1] -read more: https://onlinejihad.net/2017/11/16/notes-on-the-salil-al-sawarim-series-the-theological-framework-from-amsterdam-to-the-islamic-state/
[2] https://www.voxpol.eu/what-nazi-propaganda-can-teach-us-about-isis/
[3] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/white-supremacy-music-what-does-it-mean-our-youth
[4] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/03064229808536482
[5] https://casisvancouver.ca/westcoastconference/speakers/julien-bellaiche/