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ADAM PARFREY AND THAT FIN DE SIECLE FEELING

ADAM PARFREY'S Apocalypse Culture (Amok Press 1987) became an underground cult classic. It has since been followed by another collection of reports and essays entitled Cult Rapture (Feral House 1995) which deals with America's "cultural hotspots".

Besides running Feral House, Parfrey is a writer and investigative journalist, and the focus of his interest in these books are the paranoid millennial cults and other bizarre, exotic and fringey groups that America spawns so well. It's all here: space religion, fandom, disabled sex, neo-Nutzis, conspiracy theorists and Christian fundamentalist militiamen.

Parfrey is a hilariously funny writer, especially when he gets to grips with the horrendous Andrea Dworkin. Americans have a reputation in Europe for having no sense of irony. Hence their use of smileys on the Internet: :-) Only joking! Parfrey, however, is a Europhile and the gentle master of dry humour, understatement and short but tellingly suggestive observations.

But Parfrey has serious intentions as well. Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean to say the bastards aren't conspiring against you. Parfrey suggests that now the Cold War's over, the military-intelligence-scientific complex is turning its attention inwards. Waco, the siege of Randy Weaver, surveillance, disinformation and cointelpro ops, mind-control experiments and SWAT teams all point to the Feds planning to make war on their own citizens. America's capitalist establishment may have imposed a New World Order on the outside world, but America itself is falling apart.

Parfrey obviously does not go along with every loony idea advanced by dissident opinion. As an intelligent and courageous libertarian, however, he looks beyond the old left-right paradigm to identify the creeping authoritarianism of America's ruling clique.

Rik Dated: 25 March 1996

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