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.
Never went to Ozora, but pre covid, i went to psytrance events in Europe on a regular basis. There was always a strong presence of Israeli DJs and promoters because psytrance is fairly huge there, but never any overt propaganda like this. What was there in regard to bad vibes where conspiracy types that often were straight-up sovereign citizens and esoteric fascists, and funnily enough these guys who where often well-connected in a community full of fans of Israeli artists where usually not too subtle about their antisemitism, either. They didn’t have to be subtle, that crowd is just full of idealist and brainwormed takes, and nobody understands any racist dogwhistles. It doesn’t surprise me at all that this shift to open apartheid propaganda is taking place now.