King Carl Gustaf XVI has become the next in a long list of world leaders to throw his weight behind the war to end all wars, The War On Metal. Using a medical controversy to justify his actions, King Gustaf has issued an edict that bans windmilling in public and private places until further notice. The ban effects all of Sweden, and states that anyone found windmilling will be fined 10,000 krona and will be exiled to picking up litter around the fjords wearing a rotary sensitive shock collar.
Sweden, which many may know, is famous for its Swedish fish candies and it’s ratio of 87 Viking metal bands to one synthpop band, is the windmilling capital of the world and this ban is seen as a royal overreach aimed at subduing the metal subculture into irrelevance. Many Swedes feel that this move was inspired by the recent outbreak of fighting in the hills of Afghanistan, where drone attacks are indiscriminately targeting mosh pits and corpse paint store fronts. The metal community in Sweden has been reeling from several previous attempts to link them to harmful behaviors, the last being a fabricated whistle blower hit piece in which many bands were accused of testing music on lab animals.
Several news agencies received anonymous VHS tapes with footage that can only be described as criminal and twisted, that shows scenes from inside an alleged “Sound Chamber of Satan” where hundreds of Eurasian Pygmy Shrews are strapped into very small cots and subjected to hours of death metal at a time. At one point in the video, the shrews have been moved into what looks like a coliseum and are hacking away at each other with swords and axes. Later shown to be a fraud , the tapes irreparably damaged the reputation of metal in Sweden and began to move public attitudes in a negative direction.
Capitalizing on this momentum, the Ministry of Health investigated a study done by Arch Enemy titled, “Windmill Your Way To A Healthy Thyroid” and alleged that the positive results could not be duplicated during double blind testing and they then turned their attention to similar reports released by the bands Dismember, Bloodbath, and At The Gates. The health benefits of windmilling hearken back to the early Vikings, and it is used in many holositc metal health treatments. Windmilling is said to cure seasonal allergies, planters warts, and even hypothyroidism, but is dismissed as pseudo science by the medical community.
In a full on media blitz, the Ministry of Health released a document dump of 2200 “studies” which linked windmilling to ailments ranging from male pattern baldness to spinal kyphosis. Public service messages were aired featuring so called “Ex-millers” giving their testimonies of how windmilling had destroyed their health and MP3 collections.
Arch Enemy vocalist, Alisa White-Gluz, says she is saddened by the political weaponizing of the innocuous tradition of windmilling and has begun to form a coalition of the milling to resist further stigmatization of the windmilling community. In the wake of the prohibition, small, secret cells of windmillers are springing up to provide practitioners of this gentle art an outlet to let their hair down and avoid the prying eyes of the law. Lobbying efforts to overturn the ban have begun by the powerful and influential cervical collar industry, as the criminalization of windmilling has brought cervical collar sales to levels not seen since the Swedish disco craze of the 1990’s.
