Aryan Aztlan: The Bizarre World of Aztec NSBM, by Alex Gendler – 3 June 2023

From The Battleground

When eight people were gunned down at a Texas outdoor mall in May by a guy with a swastika tattoo and a social media account full of racist rants, it seemed like a pretty clear-cut case of far-right terrorism.

But right-wing pundits weren’t buying it, and even perpetual Internet main character Elon Musk wondered whether the whole thing was a ‘psyop’. 

Since the shooter turned out to be Latino, the argument went, he couldn’t possibly have been a neo-Nazi. All of which can only lead to one conclusion: Elon Musk has never heard of Aztec Nazi Black Metal.

To be fair, Musk is not alone in this. Even to those who are aware of National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM), it’s generally been associated with the frostbitten forests of Northern Europe that spawned both the genre and the ideology in the first place. 

But globalisation works in strange ways. As metal audiences in the Western world have grown more diverse and begun to push back against the proliferation of Nazism within their spaces, the locus of the NSBM scene has shifted to places where what its fans deride as ‘woke liberalism’ has less of a foothold – places like Eastern Europe and, strangely enough, Latin America.

Let’s begin with the Mexico-based Organización Nacional Socialista Pagana (O.N.S.P.), a “political collective” dating back to 1999 that mostly functions as a record label. 

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Alex Gendler is a Brooklyn-based freelance writer, editor, and content developer with nearly two decades of experience in print, video, and digital media, specialized in adapting complex information into engaging audio-visual formats for a broad audience.

Except where noted otherwise, original writing and translations produced by the Left Renewal Blog Collective are published under a Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–ShareAlike 4.0 licence. Republished and translated material remains subject to the licence and terms of its original publication.