Pagans at the End of History
Michael Alig/Varg Vikernes
Notes…
In The End of History and the Last Man (1992) Fukuyama writes, "Liberal democracies, in other words, are not self-sufficient: the community life on which they depend must ultimately come from a source different from liberalism itself." The "post-historical" 90s began with an interest in paganism. The decade would see two pagan subcultural figures commit Viking murder: American Michael Alig of saturnalia-cult "Club Kids" killing Andrew Melendez in New York 1996, and Norse identitarian, literal pagan or "Odinist" and Black Metal icon Varg Vikernes of one-man-band Burzum killing Øystein Aarseth or "Euronymous" in 1993. Both murders were of scene-insiders, former friends and collaborators of the murderer. Alig was convicted of first-degree manslaughter in 1997, released from jail in 2014, dying of an overdose in 2020. Vikernes was found guilty of first-degree murder (and arson of Christian churches among other things) in 1994, released from prison on parole in 2009.
Both pagan movements had a relationship with McDonalds. Alig and the Club Kids famously held Dionysian parties at the restaurant. Vikernes physically attacked Norweigan McDonalds as he believed that neoliberal globalisation—hand-in-hand with Christianity—were committing cultural “genocide” against “Indigenous Norweigan culture,” which he wanted to decolonise from the “Jewish religion” of Christianity and its liberal democratic capitalism and/or socialism (in favour of a highly scalable medieval political economy). The Club Kids are said to have been ultimately destroyed by Rudy Giuliani's Reaganite "Quality of Life" campaign. Vikernes played with the aesthetics of far-right politics but was ultimately—and remains—as functionally a-political as the hyper-liberal hedonist Club Kids. Their essence was purely cultural and aesthetic, and in this sense they did exactly as Fukuyama wanted, providing the “courage, imagination, and idealism” otherwise replaced by “economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands."
YBAs Jake and Dinos Chapman made dioramas throughout the 1990s and 2000s depicting mass crucifictions of Ronald McDonald(s) and accompanying characters from the McDonalds Universe, often by armies of Nazis and Nazi skeletons/zombies. These dioramas allude to Fukuyama's self-critical suggestion that “end of historical” liberalism would not produce culture successfully. Jake and Dinos Chapman dioramas speak to the tensions between pagan subculture—and globalised mass culture—that fashioned the cult-value of Alig and Vikernes: Ronald McDonalds (symbolising the Fukuyamist End of History), are crucified by an army of black metal club kids, a proto-internet carnivalesque peasant revolt, but never an actual form of political resistance as some might imply.
Christian Kanye West became a fan of church-burner Vikernes. He’s either an irrational prod, or playing with pagan symbols as Michelangelo did with the Sibyls of the Sistine Chapel (meanwhile, JD Vance and Trump have proven themselves as Hichite New Atheist Liberals, as any real Christian would know that Vodou is the only remaining unalloyed form of Catholicism, and that eating pets is part and parcel of transubstantiation).
Former Club Kid Chlöë Sëvïgny in Burzum shirt performed the ultimate synthesis of Alig and Vikernes, which is why she’s the ideal Fukuyamist liberal subject, Neitzche’s famous Last Woman, who has a great time.
