Green Nazis in Space: New Essays in Literature, Art, and Culture

by James O'Meara

  The real end of Halston was more subtle; after moving to San Francisco, he bought an 800k Rolls Royce and had himself driven through redwood forests in Northern California, a perfect image of archeofuturism.

  Ultrasuede is ultimately a failure, due to Smith’s vanity and ignorance (“Who’s Diana Vreeland?”). Despite himself, the story he tells has enough elements to suggest that Halston deserves a full-scale treatment of his role as an Aryan fashion entrepreneur. Smith, however, is just not the White Guy to do it.

  No matter; the Poet who will sing the tragic legend of Halston will someday appear:

  The Poet reminds us that we were not born yesterday. He restores the foundations of our identity, the paramount expression of an ethical and aesthetic inheritance that is “ours,” that he held in trust. And the principles that he brought to life in his models never cease to reappear to us, proof that the hidden thread of our tradition could not be broken.371

  “The scandal involved Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema in Sicily where he reportedly held Satanic type rituals of quite depraved character, and where shortly one of his acolytes died apparently from bad water.”

  —Kerry Bolton372

  While Ultrasuede presented us with the White Entrepreneur undone by the forces of Judaic Big Business, Limelight presents the parallel spectacle of the White Entrepreneur up against the forces of Judaic Big Law.

  Limelight, despite its name, is an altogether darker film. Halston’s bright, sunny ’70s are a thing of the past.373

  Peter Gatien, though born and raised in semi-rural Canada, presents an image of the Ultimate ’80s New Yorker—black clothes, black (at least back then) hair, and a unique touch, black eye-patch, the significance of which we’ll soon see. If we did not already know from the newspapers, we can sense Gatien is doomed, though unlike Halston, even now he lives—although, like the punishment Athens offered Socrates, it is a living exile.

  His world is not the bright world of Halston’s window-walled skyscrapers and runway shows. Gatien’s clubs are dark, actual tunnels and abandoned churches. Here though there is a kind of link, for while Halston at his peak looked down from Olympic Towers on St. Patrick’s Cathedral, here Gatien makes his greatest splash by taking over an abandoned Episcopal church, creating the legendary Limelight. While Halston set up an alternative home of the gods, from which he could look down on the Christian peasants, Gatien moved right in, reversing the historic trend of Christians taking over pagan temples and holy places (a favor returned by Islam). This would prove to be his greatest crime: defiling churches to provide spaces for kids to re-enact ancient Mystery rites of drugs, sex, music, and dance.374

  Being set almost a generation later also means that unlike Smith and his TV-derived image of Halston and “decadence,” I actually had some experience of my own to judge the portrayal of New York City club life in Limelight. Of course, my club life was very much among the anti- or rather simply non-Gatien circles, such as Jackie 60 and the other events held at the alternative club Mother, inspired more by Warhol’s Factory than Halston,375 and at a time when Gatien’s clubs were, as documented here, already invested with the “bridge and tunnel” crowd that The Tunnel, despite its name, was never supposed to cater to.

  On the other hand, Giuliani’s attack on Gatien was known to be only the symbol of a widespread attack on nightlife in general, so when Jackie 60 took Gatien’s trial as one of its weekly themes I found myself there, attired in ironically worn “New York City Black” and with black eye-patch; that I was actually mistaken by more than a few people for Gatien himself that night was due more to bad lights and too many drugs, especially since I did not alter what was then a full head of blond hair.

  Of Gatien’s own clubs—there were eventually four, including of course Limelight—I remember only attending Limelight once, and then only when a friend was DJ-ing some Gothic night off in one of the many little ex-chapel spaces. For some reason, although the idea of setting it in a church seemed genius, it never really appealed to me in actuality; considering what happened to Michael Alig, and the people around him—the subject of Party Monster as well as some parts of Limelight—that’s probably all for the best.

  We shift, then, from Halston among the California redwoods to another Aryan region, the Great White North of Canada. Little Peter is playing the implicitly—or not so implicitly—White game of hockey, when a puck or a stick cost him an eye. The settlement money—it’s not clear who or what was the party at fault, but one suspects a school system or public arena—provides Gatien with the stake he needs to start his first club.

  Is it too much to find here the archetypal Aryan legend, Wotan trading his eye to the Well of All Knowing for its wisdom?376 We will see.

  Speaking of Wisdom, his first club, still in Canada, opened with an early incarnation of Rush, the Über-White rock band. Rush, of course, is an extremely, though implicitly, White band, and while its relatively literate lyrics are more associated with Neil Peart’s Objectivist interests, they actually operate on a deeper level as explorations of the drug-induced Mystery experience that Gatien’s clubs would latter provide on a more massive scale.377

  Like many Canadians, after making a little money, Gatien traded symbolic but hostile polar regions for the more effectively sunny realms, opening the first Limelight club in Florida, then another in Atlanta, which quickly became known as “the hottest club in the South.”

  But Gatien knew that you’re never on top of an industry until you succeed in New York. Here we see the most important of Gatien’s Aryan characteristics, his desire to excel in his chosen field, and the willingness to do whatever hard work it took to get there.

  “I figured I had paid enough dues to compete with Studio 54.”

  “You need to be the best, you need to be innovative, you need to be the best in your industry.”

  “I want to be the best at what I do.”378

  “The only way to run not just one but 4 of the best clubs is to work 16 hour days, 6 day weeks.”

  —Gatien

  To compete with the post-Halston Studio 54, Gatien needed to be different. First, he’d play rock not disco. And he decided that “chrome and neon” had gone as far as it could be taken, so he made an archeofuturist move—“art and architecture” were the way to go—“If you could find me a church,” he told his agents, “that would be perfect.”

  Thus Gatien acquired the obsolete Church of the Holy Communion, a fitting setting for a club scene that would not only evoke the pre-modern pinnacle of White civilization, the era of the great cathedrals—yes, I know, it’s an Episcopal church from 1846, but good enough for an allusion, especially if you’re high already—but also, going even further, the drug-infused Mystery cults of the West and Tantric rites of the East.379

  AIDS, of course, put a damper on things for a few years, but by the ’90s, nightlife, and Gatien, were on the rebound.

  But at this point, Nemesis appeared, in the form of two shady characters who approached Gatien with cunning plans for taking his clubs to the next level. I suggest we continue the mythological approach and designate them as Loki and Fafner.

  Loki was Michael Alig, who arrived in New York with the idea of “being the next Andy Warhol”—although, as pointed out to him at the time, Warhol was still alive. Despite having bankrupted every club he’s been associated with, Gatien decides to give him a dead, unfashionable night. Inexplicably, his “Disco 2000” party becomes a hit.380

  Fafner is one “Lord Michael,” described as a “wannabe gangsta” and, several times, a “Staten Island scumbag.” He epitomizes the shaved-headed Negro-worshiping “White” Youth of Today. Lord Michael’s night, “Future Shock”—anti-archeofuturism defined—introduced a new drug—Ecstasy—and a new crowd—unfashionable “bridge and tunnel” types from the “outer boroughs”—think, Saturday Night Fever—a mixture of “soccer rioters and ravers.” Everyone, someone notes with pleasure, “on the same level.”381

  Typically, this moment of Nemesis ap
pears to be that of apotheosis; Wotan’s entry into Valhalla triggers what will eventually become Götterdämmerung. If I still seem to be hitting the Wotan theme too hard, consider how Gatien was portrayed at the time, from news reports—“A single cool, watchful eye looks over all. The eye of Peter Gatien, the Lord of Nightlife”—to rap songs: “Running New York’s night scene/with one eye closed like Peter Gatien.”

  And of course, it was the manic Alig who put him forward as the Face of Nightlife, insisting that he shouldn’t be “just this shadowy figure who would occasionally show up” but rather drag him out “to be seen to have fun!”

  Instead, Gatien ran smack dab into Rudolph Giuliani and his Neocon inspired program to “clean up” New York by focusing not on “real” crimes but on “quality of life” violations.382

  Here another mythological figure steps in: Alberich, in the person of one Sean Markham. Thrown out of Limelight for selling drugs, Markham will take his revenge by becoming a DEA informant, to prove Gatien . . . was selling drugs.

  The idea was to use New York’s “nuisance abatement” law; all Markham had to do was make a call, arrange a drug buy, and after two or more re-iterations, another Gatien club would be shut down as a public nuisance.383

  Various people, including even King Koch of the NeoCons, are quoted expressing puzzlement over the “Get Gatien at all costs” and “scorched Earth” tactics of the city, state, and ultimately Federal governments. This was “an irrational hatred” that went beyond Giuliani’s moral crusade. But the answer would require Koch to exert too much self-awareness of what drives the Neocon mentality.

  I suggest that Gatien was simply too White to be tolerated. His successful businesses, fueled by his perfectionism and hard work, his promotion, however unknowingly, of outlets for atavistic pagan rituals, and topping it all off, his mythological appearance, made him a target so tempting the Judaics lost all control in their lust to tear him down.384 To quote Michael Alig: “When you have an eye-patch [as well as] a face it makes an even more attractive person to target . . . an evil, sinister, eye-patched figurehead.”385

  In August 1995, they got just what they needed: some kid, whose family knows the Governor of New Jersey, winds up dead after visiting a club. Somewhat lost in the excitement was the actual death certificate: suicide. And the method? Hanging, of course. What other method would be associated with an attempt to take down Wotan?

  And who do the Feds get to conduct the prosecution? From the people who brought you, not so much the Marx Brothers as the Three Stooges: Michele Adelman, Lisa Fleishman, and Eric Friedberg.386

  For those inclined to buy into the NeoCon’s “anti-crime” notions, assuming “there must be something to it,” consider the absurdity of the case: that Peter Gatien had personal control over everything happening at every moment in four separate nightclubs; or that anything happening in them was any different from what went on all over the New York streets.387

  In fact, of the hundreds of people Gatien employed over the years, not one, despite the considerable amount of force the Feds could apply, could be found as a witness.

  Instead, the Feds mounted a “rogues gallery of Staten Island scumbags” (there’s that slander, I’m sure, against Staten Island).

  There was Alig, in jail for murdering his dealer—Feds would take him out occasionally for “questioning” so he could buy drugs. There was Lord Michael, who, when questioned about the “suicide” of his “houseboy” broke down in tears and begged the jury to believe “I’m not a murderer!” And there was Markham, who was now also claiming to have been hired as an escort—by the male prosecutor.

  The case against Gatien seems to have been yet another example of the classic Judaic technique of Projection: the unbelievably corrupt Feds388 fielded an array of drug dealers, perjurers, and murderers to convince a jury that Gatien was . . . a drug-dealing scumbag.389 They refused to go along and delivered eleven not-guilty verdicts.

  In the end, Gatien was saved by his Aryan rectitude. As Alig says, Gatien was making money hand over fist, why would he risk it all for a few thousand more? “Peter was a businessman but he wasn’t extraordinarily greedy”—i.e., not a Judaic New York businessman, “counting his shekels.”

  Indeed, asked by his lawyer what he would do now, Gatien replied: “I’m going to church.” Meaning, of course, reopening his clubs and earning an honest living.

  But the government was not done with him yet. The Empire struck back, in the form of a state prosecution for sales tax fraud, pursued this time by another tribesman, one Morgenthau. Yet another Judaic inversion, this time of the Fed’s famous attempt to get Capone for Federal tax fraud.390

  “I thought they got their pound of flesh.”

  —Gatien391

  Gatien paid a fine for some technical violations and went about his business. But the government Shylocks had one more trick up their sleeves. Despite having given Gatien a “Certificate of Relief” after the failure to convict, two years later they decided to use their unsuccessful prosecution as itself evidence of fraudulent activity, and thereby deport the Canadian citizen as an undesirable alien.392

  Gatien notes with some well-earned irony that he left the USA with less money than he entered with 30 years before. But he actually took more back with him than that. The club scene has been dead since he left, and, as several voices in the film emphasize, nightlife is the matrix from which art and culture arise.393 Not unlike Gatien’s Toronto when it was known, mockingly, as “Toronto the Good,” New York is now just a tourist trap and an international joke, presided over by its Judaic Mayor for Life, who has extended Giuliani’s no-nightlife crusade into every taxable and regulatable area of business and even personal life.

  Judging from viewer reactions on, for example, Amazon394 or the Internet Movie Database,395 the makers of Limelight have, unlike Sudley-Smith, managed to craft a film that gets their message across to, and accepted by, its audience. Gatien and even New York in the ’90s come over as stylish and sympathetic,396 while Halston and the ’70s seem to remain just a vaguely creepy childhood obsession of Smith’s.

  Even so, while the film, being an accurate record, necessarily contains the Aryan themes we’ve been highlighting, it seems unaware of them. Halston clearly still needs a film documentary,397 while it would be fascinating to see what someone like Ken Russell, or one of the great Germans, like Lang or Harlan, could have done with Gatien. (Or Harlan on Halston?)

  In fact, what the whole film industry, as well as our culture in general, needs is a wholesale return to White standards.398 Only then could justice be done to the lives of Halston and Gatien.

  Counter-Currents/North American New Right

  March 19 & 20, 2013

  REFLECTIONS ON

  SARTORIAL FASCISM

  “I like killing guys when I’m wearing a tux. Makes me feel like James Bond.”

  —Brock Samson, The Venture Bros.

  JOEL: You can bet that anybody seriously interested in world domination is going to end up looking like a real snickerdoodle.

  DR. FORRESTER: (wearing a pirate costume/fruit hat) What’s that supposed to mean? I’ll deal with you later, back to the drill, Frank. You will bow down before me, Son of Jor-El! Bow down!”

  —MST3K on The Castle Of Fu Manchu

  Americans, who tend to be either uneducated and therefore ignorant, or educated and therefore brainwashed,399 are wont to ask questions like “How could the most educated and civilized society in Europe fall for a madman like Hitler?” So great is their puzzlement over this apparent anomaly that, though a thoroughly respectable question itself—indeed, constitutive of respectable discourse—the answers tend to spill out past the bounds of respectable discourse, winding up in such otherwise verboten areas as UFOlogy, black magic, and perhaps plain old hypnotism.400

  Those of us reading Greg Johnson’s “Remembering Sir Oswald Mosley”401 and the articles recommended there, or the series of paperbacks and kindles being put out by Black House Publishing L
td. on and by the British Union of Fascists, have a similar, but very different question: how on Earth did Mosely fail?

  Hitler and Mussolini, after all, actually came to power, and it took the entire world to drive them from power; Franco died in his bed; Salazar was done in by his deck chair. But Mosely never came within a country mile of holding power in Britain.

  How could this man, with so much charisma,402 and with all the right answers to the nation’s problems (ideas already successful in NS Germany, and still relevant today403) fail so completely? How could Britain entrust its fate to that bloated, drunken buffoon, Churchill?404

  And even more generally: Why was there no significant “fascist” movement in the UK or (especially) the USA? After all, aren’t we constantly being told these are “fascist” states?405

  The answer, I think, is the uniforms.

  Now, Germany, Italy, even France, these are all countries that respect the uniform. Think Emil Jannings as the washroom attendant in Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). Brits and Americans are prone to find such things laughable, or sinister, muttering about “Prussian martinets”406 or comic operas407 set in places called Ruritania.408

  Probably the most devastating, long running (1938–1974) and, I suggest, archetypal attack on Mosely came from P. G. Wodehouse, of all people, in the shape of Roderick Spode, 7th Earl of Sidcup, known as Spode or Lord Sidcup.409 Wikipedia says:

  Spode is modelled after Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, who were nicknamed the blackshirts. Spode was at first an ‘amateur dictator’ who led a farcical group of fascists called the Saviours of Britain, better known as the Black Shorts. Spode adopted black shorts as a uniform because, according to Gussie Fink-Nottle in The Code of the Woosters, “by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left”—alluding to various fascist or right-radical groups: Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s brownshirts, the Irish Blueshirts and Greenshirts, the South African Greyshirts, Mexico’s Gold shirts, and the American Silver Shirts.