NSK is controversial because of the use of totalitarian imagery in art. Even if this method – often labelled as ‘over-identification’with totalitarianism–is used since 1980 by Laibach and NSK, it can still cause scandals. You told me about an artist in Bavaria who was sentenced before court for allegedly portraying the Bavarian Minister-President in a uniform resembling an SS-uniform.What is the trouble is about? As you may know, Germany has introduced laws after WW2 to prevent Nazi symbols from being used to reinvigorate the politics of the German ‘Reich’ of the 1930s and 40s. On the other hand, Bavaria introduced laws providing police with means to arrest people on the basis that they MAY commit crimes – pre-crime, if you recall “Minority Report” from 2002 – in order to prevent supposed Islamist terrorism. Yet like any proper powergrasping state, this was first used in practice to jail climate protesters without charge, for weeks, since they are much worse than fundamentalist mass bombings, obviously. Also, the mere act of passivity towards police arresting you is no more simple resistance but counts as an attack on officers – with the unsurprising steep rise in statistics recording such supposed ‘attacks’. We are witnessing the slow transformation of Bavaria and other German federal states following this authoritarianmodel into police states. The artist in question, Fabian Zolar, created a large openair graffiti – legally, I should add! – of police brutality. It - 29 - was a reaction to him and his brother having been beat up and abused by officers. Remember: don’t even defend yourself or you’ll be declared an attacker! The graffiti was crowned by a portrait of a uniform-wearing, halfdecomposed head (partly a skull, xk) that reminded certain people of the Bavarian prime minister. Upon this, the Bavarian chancellery in Munich, by order of the prime minister, charged Fabian with defamation and use of anticonstitutional symbols, punishable by the aforementioned anti-Nazi-law. The scandal here is not that a politician was supposedly portrayed as smiling at the scenes of police brutality – currently, investigations are being led against the officers in question, but rest assured that there will be no legal consequences for them -- , but that the court denied that the work is actually a piece of art! A state where judges decide whether or not something is art has definitely left the grounds of the German constitution, even if Bavaria does indeed have an individual constitution. Fabian will have to defend himself through all instances until a federal court takes up the case,as chances are slim to find a judge in Bavaria with the guts to tell Herr Söder and the Munich chancellory to fuck off and behave like professionals, instead of conjuring up the Streisand effect by abusing the judicial system in order to satisfy Herr Söder’s vanity and fragile ego. They are turning a formerly anti-Nazi-law expressly disregarding artworks into a tool to suppress justified artistic criticism on a flimsy legal basis. If the court’s rule stands, ALL depictions of skulls in Bavaria must therefore be regarded as SS death’s heads. Every depiction that Herr Söder doesn’t like can thus be denied the status of artwork. These are assets of dictatorial regimes but certainly not of liberal democracies. Bavaria, Saxony and a number of other German federal states headed by the prime ministers dreaming about becoming some mini-Orbàn, are on a steep and very slippery slope regarding the validity of our constitutional rights; a trend I’ve termed ‘soft totalitarianism’ in the 90s. (Read more on wwww.peek-a-boo-magazine.be) Xavier Kruth https://nskstate.com/ article/weapons-massinstruction/ www.peek-a-boo-magazine.be
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