In an article called 'Watch out mate! Hitler’s on his way back ', printed in NME magazine in August 1975, Bowie is at his most adamant about the danger that is coming upon us, and at one moment, his reflections lead him to find a positive side to this impending dark age: "you've got to have an extreme right front come up and sweep everything off its feet and tidy everything up. Then you can get a new form of liberalism," he muses, and after elaborating about the rotten nature of the day's liberalism, he concludes: "so the best thing that can happen is for an extreme right Government to come. It'll do something positive at least to cause commotion in people and they'll either accept the dictatorship or get rid of it."
Here, as well, we've got to be careful not to misinterpret what Bowie is saying. This argument is presented from the perspective of an amateur historian, describing historical processes and predicting the future. So when he's saying "you've got to have an extreme right front come up", he isn't advocating this rise of the extreme right, but merely predicting it. He is speaking from the point of view of a liberal who wants to see liberalism prevail, but thinks that it cannot happen in the decadent state liberalism had sunk into, so he's pondering that the only way to get to where we want is to go through a Fascist phase, which would get rid of the current liberalism, and would elicit the creation of a stronger and better form of liberalism, which would defeat this rightwing front and banish Fascism once and for all. Bowie was still thinking as a liberal, but incorporating Fascism to come in and save liberalism from its own decadence.
This is quite a common conjecture, which we find in many ideologies: things must first get worse before they can get better. Bowie, however, appears to be disregarding the implications of this phase he seems to be wishing for. From his descriptions of this Fascist stage, it is clear that he is thinking of it merely as a phase when rules will become stricter for a while, forgetting that Fascism harbors other traits, ones that he is obviously opposed to, such as racism, imperialism, the erasing of individuality, the censorship of thought and the banishment of democracy, not to mention genocide. Bowie isn't that dumb. It is obvious that he wasn't seriously wishing for a Fascist state to come, but merely doing what he does best: finding the most provocative way to get his message through. That's what he's been doing, to great effect, since the days of Ziggy, and that's what he was doing now: he wanted to attack post-Hippie liberalism, so he was saying that we need Fascism to come and destroy it. This is a questionable tactic, and you can claim that one should be more careful about what he says in the press, but Bowie maintained that as an artist, he was entitled to be risqué. When backed to the wall by his interviewers, who ask him if they should take his statements at face value, he explains that it is all theatre. "I have to carry through with my conviction that the artist is also the medium. The only way that I can be this abrasive as a person is to be this confoundedly arrogant and forthright with my point of view." Bowie, in other words, was still being Pierrot, presenting a frightening mirror-image to society, and using the harshest concepts to do so. In another interview, while talking about the staidness rock'n'roll had sunk into, the interviewer hypothesizes that "the only thing left in rock & roll that would really affect people would be a Nazi rock & roll band"; Bowie agrees, and observes: "I think that there are two bands now who come close to a neo-Nazi kind of thing – Roxy Music and Kraftwerk." Bowie always contended that rock'n'roll should be like Pierrot, and in 75-76, that meant that it should adorn some Fascist accoutrements.
He was, once again, one step ahead of everyone else. A year later, the use of Nazi and Holocaust-related imagery to punctuate the distraught nature of the times could be heard on many punk records, while the use of Nazi iconography as shock tactics was already employed by Bowie's buddies Lou Reed and Iggy Pop (both of them Jewish), and then, in full shock'n'roll galore, by the Punks on the streets. None of them was neo-Nazi. The Fascistic image was essentially a way to lash at Hippie liberalism, to break away from it and regenerate. The Hippies believed that they liberated society and created a better world, and that they were still on their way to making it even better, but the new Punk generation felt that the Hippie freedom was a sham, sugarcoating a bleak reality. With the Nazi images, the Punks portrayed what they saw as the sickness of society, presenting a mirror image to it and shocking it out of its complacency. This is essentially what Bowie was talking about.
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