There are names that now mean two things at once. And this simultaneity is, in itself, a crime.
Wagner wrote music that wanted to be larger than man. His sound is not about harmony – it is about a power that precedes any meaning. Primitive, pre-moral, the kind that asks no permission. To raise such a gesture, one needs a vertical axis of one’s own.
They never had one.
This is not a love for art, nor an understanding of it. It is the magical thinking of barbarians who cannot create but are masters at appropriation. They instinctively sensed: there is greatness here – and if you call yourself by this name, it will pass to you like a contagion. An attempt to steal another’s spine because one has no spine of one’s own. An attempt to drape Siegfried’s cloak over prison rags.
Murderers who call themselves an orchestra. A massacre labeled as an operation. Human flesh marked as a performance.
This is a systemic sabotage of language. If you call an atrocity a musical term, a cognitive dissonance arises in the listener’s mind. The brain freezes for a second – and in that second, they are already moving forward. For them, language is not a means of transmitting truth. It is a weapon of disorientation.
For Wagner, catastrophe is the Twilight of the Gods. A purification by fire for a new beginning. For them, catastrophe is merely mundane. They have no fire that cleanses – they have only a fire that devours.
Art is not a safety catch against evil. It is an amplifier. If you are a nonentity, Wagner will only highlight your nullity, making it large-scale. When they play the Ride of the Valkyries over the ruins of our cities, they do not become Valkyries. They remain rats that have learned how to turn on a tape recorder.
Using a page from an original score to wipe a knife after a murder.
But there is a problem they cannot calculate: Wagner is greater than their looting. Music does not become an accomplice just because its name is uttered by executioners. And it is precisely this indifference that destroys them.
They thought they stole greatness. Instead, they only documented their own emptiness. For to fill this black hole, they needed someone else’s name, someone else’s beauty, someone else’s vertical axis.
They never had one of their own. There is only noise, which they mistake for music.