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.
I say as someone who used to be really into psytrance, but the whole scene is bougie white, coloniser, and Israeli AF. It's been this way for decades. I wouldn't be this harsh if I haven't gone to a fuckload of festivals myself and experienced it firsthand.
Honestly doing psychedelics and dancing to trance are fine in moderation. But coming into it with a real expectation of personal growth is just idealism. There's all this pseudo Eastern religion promising betterment, which aligns so closely with classical fascism that it's almost funny. Not to criticise OP, but rather many people who align with psytrance, the woo health and spiritual promises of the community are never going to be fulfilled.
You are right, tho, festivals didn't have explicit Israeli propaganda until recently, at least from what I've seen. Israelis were always there, and it felt weird, but it seemed like the ones who were there wanted to disconnect from politics.
Funny story: I went to a re-birthing ceremony maybe 8 years ago. My city is majority non-white although yes I'm white. I looked around in this re-birthing ceremony and saw 300 posh white people and not a single non-white person. I walked out feeling weird and never went back.