I just spent the last week at the Ozora Psytrance music festival in Hungary and it was a pretty amazing experience, especially as it was the first music festival I’ve ever been to.
What I was not prepared for however, was the gobsmacking amount of Israeli propaganda just absolutely everywhere, and it only got more and more blatant as the week went. I’m being made to understand that this is actually fairly normal and apparently “Israelis love colonizing festivals”. Apparently they also really love psytrance festivals, and used every opportunity to invoke the memory of the NOVA psytrance festival that was caught in the crossfire on Oct. 7th.
I posted a direct response about it in the festival subreddit here, but I feel like there is so much left unsaid.
The whole thing being rooted in psychedelics just adds several additional points. First, it is straight up baaaad vibes, in place where “vibes” are super important, the constant barrage of blatant propaganda just absolutely pollutes the headspace. I found myself being unable to ignore it at multiple levels of tripping. The propaganda spanned from the more mild but still blatant “in remembrance of” sorta stuff, up to straight war propaganda including what I can only describe as “Star of David Totenkopf” which is probably the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in awhile (I’ll attach it as the main image).
It’s a psychedelic hippie festival, everyone wants to be yoga, free love, and good vibes, no one wants to escalate or fight the Israelis, so they go entirely unconfronted on their disregard for everyone around them.
I’m also trying to process how psychedelics revolutionary potential appears to be completely captured, how they were meant to be a tool to free the mind from fascism, but then here it appears to be made near totally inert, incorporated into this new sort of “Candy Fascism”. I get how a type of nihilistic hedonism is part of fascism, but how this has actually developed boggles me.
is it captured or was there never much there to begin with? I like psychedelics, but I feel like the idea of psychedelics as revolutionary has been dead where I live for decades, long disproven by history.
There was a ton of hippie theorizing at the time acid really hit big that it could revolutionize things if there was mass adoption because basically it makes you really silly and joyful, and unable to take anything seriously. I genuinely think that it was a threat of some sort, that the threat contributed to the need for a war on drugs.
That theorizing was what I was alluding to yeah, I just don’t see people taking those ideas seriously any more. Maybe there’s something I’m missing, but I’ve never believed in them really either. It didn’t seem to me that psychedelics actually did a lot for people, politically anyhow, at the height of their mass use in the US, the hippies who were most into psychedelics by and large all sold out and reintegrated into mainstream society, and I’m not sure if they were, in large part, ever seriously leftist. If anything I’ve heard at least as compelling arguments that the CIA or whoever was pushing psychedelics to derail or undermine revolutionary movements somehow. Again not something I wholeheartedly believe, but it seems to have at least as much substance to it.
psychedelics took away my revolutionary spirit and gave me false consciousness for a long time. I think they can be enjoyed as a tool for self reflection, surely, but their usefulness is vastly overstated, and the delusions it can give you can lead very easily down the crunchy right path.
I used to love Tim Leary, nowadays I tend to take the perspective of the Black Panthers when he went to Algeria with them, if you know what I mean.
Yeah, I never felt like they took anything from me except maybe a reprieve from depression lol, but I’m not that into them, and I’ve definitely seen LSD do not great things for others, just taking it a lot as an escape from shitty conditions/relationships, but ultimately just keeping them in that place more than helping.
Yeah, “tune in, turn on, drop out” is escapist, not revolutionary. From the jump the idea was less to change society and more to abandon it.
As someone else mentioned, they can help with self-reflection, but that’s just one component of adopting a socialist worldview, let alone doing anything to try and make it happen.
That said, psychedelics are great, do them responsibly.