Due to interpretations of particular comments that Moynihan has made and some of the imagery he has employed, Michael Moynihan has been a controversial figure.
Matthias Gardell
Swedish professor Matthias Gardell writes in his
Gods of the Blood: "Featured in different contexts, Moynihan projects many different faces and has been classified as an "extreme rightist" (Coogan 1999) an "extreme leftist", (Wulfing One 1995) a Nazi, a fascist, and an anarchist."
Gardell also writes about Moynihan, that he had "developed an early interest in things beyond the ordinary, from extremist politics to occult sciences. Intelligent, energetic, and creative, his inquisitiveness soon began to manifest in music, art and writings." As people to whom Moynihan is attracted in his ideas, Gardell lists Charles Manson, Muammar al-Gaddafi, Michael Bakunin, Julius Evola, James Mason and Miguel Serrano.
In accordance with one of the main theses of his book (that "the conventional left wing-right wing binary has become increasingly insufficient to map out the scene of contemporary politics"), Gardell concludes that Moynihan may "best be described as a heathen anarchofascist, with all the paradoxes and ambiguities that follow from such a categorization."
Mattias Gardell further writes that: "While certainly [Moynihan] does not care about the majority of mankind, he cares even less about building gas chambers" and that "Moynihan is hardly anti-Semitic or a White Supremacist and is definitely not a radical right "leader" of anything".
Kevin Coogan
The investigative journalist Kevin Coogan has linked Moynihan more explicitly with the extreme right but states that Moynihan does not fit into a "conventional definitions of fascism". Coogan has classified Moynihan unspecifically as an "extreme rightist". Coogan states about
Lords of Chaos:
Yet what really makes the book fascinating is that its main author, Michael Moynihan, is himself an extreme rightist whose fusion of politics and aesthetic violence shapes a not-so-hidden sub current that runs throughout LOC.
Coogan states that
Lords of Chaos "itself, however, is not a "fascist" tract in the strict sense", since Moynihan co-wrote it with Didrik Søderlind and Feral House editor Adam Parfrey wanted to publish a popular book on black metal, not a "political polemic." Coogan then points out: "Nor does Moynihan himself fit easily into the more conventional definitions of fascism."
Coogan continues with an account of Moynihan's biography and mentions "rumours" about Moynihan having a "blood fetish" and that he was suspected "of setting fire to a manger scene on the Cambridge Commons" in 1987, and further gives an account of Moynihan's involvement with the Church of Satan and industrial music. Coogan views certain tendencies of the industrial music subculture as similar to a phenomenon of the time before World War II: "The sense of despair felt by industrial culture was not unique. A similar heroic/pessimistic worldview appeared in Europe after World War I." Coogan describes this worldview as "counter-cultural fascism," and in this milieu he says Moynihan is said to have operated, too.
Further accounts
Schobert (1998) considers Moynihan a musical lightweight who profited from association with Rice and successfully and managed to style himself as a provocative "cult figure". Examples for such provocative behaviour include a 1994 interview with
No Longer A Fanzine (no. 5, p. 8) which led to activist allegations that he was "a major purveyor of Neo-Nazism, occult fascism and international industrial black metal music."
The controversies stirred Moynihan as a topic of interest in industrial music, experimental music, metal music, Satanic, Neo-Nazi, and Neo-völkisch movements, and the album
The Gospel of Inhumanity released at the same time met with favourable reception from an amount of these quarters; the US Nazi skin journal
Resistance (no. 6, 38) praised it as a "fascist symphony". The album also brought Moynihan to the attention of the German Neo-Nazi scene, a favourable review appearing in
Einheit und Kampf. Das revolutionäre Magazin für Nationalisten (no. 18, p. 29, Aufruhr-Verlag, Bremen). As a consequence, Moynihan was targeted by anti-fascist activists in the late 1990s. Blood Axis performances attracted protesters, on one occasion in 1998, "about 75" San Francisco protesters mobilized by a flyer denouncing Moynihan as "a fascist and a hatemonger" succeeded in preventing his appearance. Moynihan dismissed activists labeling him a Nazi or a Fascist as misinformed hysterical alarmism.
German social scientist Christian Dornbusch remarks that Moynihan's work "evokes a mindset which wants to design a future based on völkisch and fascist respectively national socialist thinkers. It's the same goal that the British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley rants about for minutes in the sample at the beginning of the live album
Blot — Sacrifice in Sweden: »... we are fighting for nothing less than the revolution of the spirit of our people ...«".
SPLC report
Consequently, Moynihan was listed on the Southern Poverty Law Center's 1999
Intelligence Report as a "leader of new a generation of hate mongerers" amongst convicted felons and right wing activists. The section in the report regarding Moynihan was criticized by Decibel Magazine in 2006, who stated that:
The main problem with this particular part of the article...besides being totally misleading...is that Blood Axis is not a black metal band. Rather than interview Moynihan, the authors of the article excerpted quotes from an issue of Compulsion zine published in 1998.
Moynihan responded to the report:
“Regarding their attacks on me, these too have been packed with misinformation and outright errors,” Moynihan adds. “They ignore my artistic work as whole...it’s clear they’ve never even listened to the records they’re condemning...and merely focus on a few provocative statements selectively culled from interviews done nearly 15 years ago. These statements become far more ambiguous when contextualized into everything I’ve said and done over the years. From the very beginning I have said that Blood Axis represents a grey area of Nietzschean amorality and paradox; the inability of people to handle it, or even grasp it on these terms, only proves how successfully it embodies this.”
Moynihan's response
Moynihan has repeatedly denied political ties.Zach Dundas. Willamette Week culture feature: "Lord of Chaos: ACTIVISTS ACCUSE PORTLAND WRITER AND MUSICIAN MICHAEL MOYNIHAN OF SPREADING EXTREMIST PROPAGANDA, BUT THEY'RE NOT TELLING THE WHOLE STORY. Available online: [3] "They (both Nazis and Communists) [a]re all deluded. People should worry about what happens on their block. They should get along with their neighbors before they worry about the great ills of society and about telling someone who lives 200 miles away what to do." In response to the various political accusations leveled against him, Moynihan calls the Far right "a bunch of isolated losers" and further that:
Whether they're the Marxist/Communist/Socialist people who think that humans want to get along on a grand scale, or whether it's the Nazis, who think that if everyone was just of the same race, they'd all get along perfectly, or the anarchists, who think everyone would love to live this way if you just took away the police.
They're all deluded. People should worry about what happens on their block. They should get along with their neighbors before they worry about the great ills of society and about telling someone who lives 200 miles away what to do.