I’ve got two different opinions on this, basically. My personal opinion is “Fuck them.” There’s plenty of beautiful music out there, certainly including neo-folk, that doesn’t play around with fascist imagery for an immature shock value effect. There’s an excellent article “Decadent Politics” in the first issue of Graceless (www.graceless.info) that deals with how goths who are obsessed with fascist imagery and culture are fooling themselves into thinking they’re acting the rebel, when in fact they’re acting quite the conformist.

But my second opinion is more nuanced. For myself, “fuck them.” But I’m willing to let other people have their opinions on the matter, let them make up their own minds on the subject. I know that a number of people involved in the bands from that time have since spoken out against their earlier-held nationalist beliefs, and I know that many people simply held a naive fascination with nazism because it’s well, so fucking dark. Fascism must be destroyed, yes, and I’ve no interest in promoting its influence into subculture, but I suppose it gets a bit more nuanced in the goth scene than it does in, say, the skinhead scene.