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Antifa? Yeah, They’re Kinda Sorta Skinheads.
Punk riots. Skinheads. Before special snowflakes, SJWs, or the alt-right’s revolt against “the tyranny of nice” became a thing, musical subcultures I can’t even pretend to understand fractured along white-nationalist and anti-white-nationalist lines.
I can’t claim to understand the punk ethos – or ethe, ethea, or ethoses (fittingly, there are multiple ways to pluralize “ethos”) – but the news of my youth was vaguely colored by incidental stories of “direct action,” of “taking it to the streets,” of punks getting their riot gear ready. Often, the “oppression” they fought was gentrification, one more manifestation, apparently, of “the tyranny of nice.”
I’ve heard middle-aged punk aficionados reminisce about NYC back before it was cleaned up – before it, too succumbed to “the tyranny of nice.” And of course there are the skinheads. Rude boys. Toughs. The way “skinhead” is used in the news, a gal could be forgiven for only finding out not all skinheads are racist when she looks them up on Wikipedia.
Skinheads didn’t start out racist, just working-class white youths who shared the same fashion and taste. Skinheads eventually fractured along racialist lines, some becoming white nationalists and others opposing white nationalism, with all the fervor of what to outsiders seems like the narcissism of small differences.
Skinhead fashions and tastes bled into punk. SHARP, or SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice, is linked to Anti-Racist Action, similar to what “anti-fascist action” (Antifa) called itself in the US until recently. The punk DIY ethos overlaps with the black bloc DIY ethos, and consequently black-bloc protest techniques spread from Europe “to North America via fanzines, personal contacts and punk music groups.”
Plenty of Ricochetians are bound to know more about the politics of punk than I do, so feel free to enlighten my complete outsider’s understanding in the comments. I only know what curiosity compelled me to look up. And that black-bloc techniques seem to have an annoying habit of perpetuating the patriarchy:
With regards to sexism, many critics of black blocs argue that militant direct action “partakes of a macho mystique and does not encourage women to join in” and that expressing one’s anger through destruction “simply [confirms] and [amplifies] aggressive masculinity.” Furthermore, the sexual division of labor is often reproduced, with a woman who took part in a number of black blocs in the 2012 Quebec student strike saying that it was women who often did the shopping “when fabric was needed to make flags and banners.”
Dupuis-Déri noted that the situation hadn’t changed, writing that “more than a decade earlier, during a meeting to prepare a black bloc in Montreal, the men ended up in the backyard of an apartment honing their slingshot skills while the women were in the kitchen making Molotov cocktails.” Thus, masculinity is not only reproduced in many black bloc circles, but also creates a space that rejects the participation of women and devalues their labor and thus their importance to the movement.
I hate it when teh menz order me into the kitchen to make ’em another round of Molotov cocktails.
Anyhow, when you see Antifa, you’re seeing something not too widely removed from SkinHeads Against Racial Prejudice. Which is to say, skinheads. Skinheads ready to brawl with the other, more widely-publicized, neo-nazi-type skinheads, the kind of skinheads we all already know and don’t love. These days, they’ve got more hair. They’ve got more press. They’ve gotten more recruits, and the anti-antifas are getting more sympathy.
My musical tastes run so old-fashioned that about the only riot gear my fellow concert-goers have ever been likely to have on them are handy canes. (“Featuring the super cool ‘stealth’ grabber!”) The whole “youth culture” rite-of-passage where you pay way too much money to be herded into unsanitary pens of half-hammered humanity to hear music so amplified you’ve gotta stuff your ears full of Hearos not to damage them just passed me by. A musical revolt against “the tyranny of nice” was never my scene. It is, however, a scene that more musically-inclined neo-nazis and Antifas have apparently shared for quite some time.
It can be easy for the mild-mannered, happily unhip conservative to suppose Antifa is just another manifestation of “the tyranny of nice.” That’s what I had supposed until Antifas’ dress and conduct at last jogged near-forgotten memories. I’d seen that stuff before, before “the tyranny of nice” was merely considered a stick the left uses to beat the right. Back when “the tyranny of nice” was something leftists thought oppressed them, too. Or mainly oppressed them from their perspective (as, I suppose, from their perspective, it still does).
@rickpoach is not the only one on Ricochet concerned that “the tyranny of nice” might drive vulnerable youth into the arms of neo-nazis, youth who wouldn’t be driven there otherwise. It’s a worry I hear expressed with some frequency here on Ricochet. And apparently, it’s a worry Antifa shares, though I’d imagine Antifa shares it for what it sees as roughly opposite reasons.
Antifas and neo-nazis aren’t alike merely because they’re both ideologically awful. They also share cultural roots the “nicer” among us might miss.
Published in Entertainment
Good post. Thank you, MFR.
In one of the various dustups with eastern europe trying to figure out what to do with their ethnic Russian enclaves, the women would bring their fighting men tea, and were happy to do so.
That is how you know that these people are a bunch of LARPing rich kids, because when the real fighting starts the patriarchy starts getting real popular with the ladies.
Which brings us to the adventures of Moldylocks and her quest to get 100 nazi scalps (nazi meaning everybody not antifa).
Its only because of Patriarchy that she only got punched once, and had to go have a cry about to the news. “The big meany punched me, I dindunuffin (except start the fight, and spend the previous hour hurling broken bottles at people), he should have known better than to punch a lady.” A more naked demand for patriarchy there never was. Everybody knows that had she been a man she would have gotten a good ol’ stomp to the grill too.
Nothing quite like violence to bring out the lady, even in the case of a revolutionary cultural appropriating hairy feminist porn actress with a stated intent to commit mass murder. I am sure that the sonnets written of her grace and beauty will last generations.
You may also enjoy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_Nazis_Must_Die
Both sides LARPing? I’ve heard each side mock the other for LARPing at this point, but then, as you also note, sometimes the confrontation rises to the level where the gals involved expect their guys’ protection.
Or the guys expect the gals to organize banner supplies for them, apparently. Although women generally knowing their way around an arts and crafts store better than men do would seem to apply in both war and peace.
I don’t like to admit that I am totally out of it, but I am totally out of it :) What is LARPing?
Live Action Role Playing. Like Dungeons and Dragons. Since you’ve done theater, you might’ve done improv exercises where every improviser adopts a character and all have to improvise with one another without breaking character. LARPing is rather like that, although sometimes with rule books, dice, and dress-up.
Protesters calling each other LARPers means they’re mocking each other for being inauthentic and unserious – and ultimately, weak, if the protest turned violent. Not being the sort to want to engage in violent protest myself, yes, I personally would abandon my “protesting persona” if a protest I was at turned violent. Of course, I have only ever protested at a few TEA-party rallies, which rallies earned a name for being particularly well-behaved.
Live Action Role Play: dressing up and playing pretend, sometimes quite roughly.
Yes, I have done this: funny story and totally off topic, but…. I was once at a political training seminar, where I was called upon to defend a liberal position I knew nothing about, with no warning. My improv training kicked in, and I immediately began to spin a tale that had nothing to do reality. This was in front of an audience; I went on for a while, and I really had them going, but then I just started cracking up, and was forced to admit that everything I had said was untrue.
This was 20 years ago, afterward, a young woman came up to me and started shaking my hand: “You are going to be big someday”, she said. “You are just like Bill Clinton”, she said. Which is still, I think, the most bizarre thing anyone has ever said to me.
Of course Bill Clinton does what he does without ever breaking character or laughing. She meant it as a compliment, and I appreciate that, but I am not just like Bill Clinton :)
If I don’t someone else would.
Yeah, it strikes me about like how the left is starting to use snowflake to describe anybody who disagrees with their nonsense and its just kinda sad.
You can sort of look at team A and team B and you can sort of tell the people who like to punch people for fun. Its kind of like the intramural nongendered college team vs the semipro prison rioters.
Although to be fair, the usage of “snowflake” for “disagrees with me” has been a long time a-brewin’, on the right, too. The phrase “virtue signaling” has enjoyed a similar (d)evolution. Has someone developed a Twitterbot yet which responds to random statements with, “Quit virtue-signaling, ya snowflake!”? I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody has.
Yeah except the virtue signalling is mostly true as well, I mean hell, even jesus gets in on the act
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+18%3A11-12&version=NIV
A sign of advanced decadence?
Cue mandatory reference to,
The Decline and Fall…
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes…
Those who forget the past are…
In the snow, uphill, both ways…
Only 3 channels…
Mods and rockers. Or is that too obscure?
Oddly enough, a search for insult-bots does turn up a hit: the Cuck-o-tron 3000.
It’s clunky, unnatural-sounding, and tries to cram too much in even for parody. Morbo would not be impressed.
I had heard of ’em as two rival youth subcultures that brawled, and mods as “ancestors” to punks and skinheads. But maybe more internecine brawls spark a special kind of loathing – for example like this.
There is some of this cultural and political violence in European and South American football. Ultra’s are supporters of football clubs and can be violent not only in support of their clubs but in politics as well.
For example in Rome, Lazio was originally supported by those that backed Mussolini. When Roma and Lazio meet fighting and stabbings have occurred. In Milan, Inter Milan was the Communist club, and AC Milan was the anarchist/Mussolini club. In fact AC Milan is known as the Red & Black, or in Italian, Rossa e Neri, the colors of the Anarchist flags. The same colors American anarchists display on flags to this day, and the same colors on AC Milan’s uniforms, or kit as it is called in soccer.
Politicians in both Europe and South America have courted Ultra’s when they need some muscle.
Celtic and Rangers in Glasgow have some political undertones, but their enmity is more sectarian. The Scottish Football Assoc. has tried to ban the singing of sectarian songs at their matches, the fans still sing them. At one time Celtic players were shown a yellow card if they made the sign of the cross when playing at Rangers. A heavy police presence has tamped down on the violence, but about a year or so ago a Ranger’s supporter sent a parcel bomb to the Celtic manager (coach), probably because he is a Catholic from Northern Ireland.
Russia has an Ultra problem, as do some other Eastern European nations. The problem in Germany is small, but they did have a fairly violent episode at one match last year.
Apropos for Antifa.
About 20 years ago I gave a speech that went over pretty good. My boss told me that one of the board members said I reminded her of Bill Clinton. Indignantly, I said, “So she thinks I’m drunk and horny?” He nodded sagely and said, “We already knew all that when we hired you”.
1.Punk was an urban-left reaction to the hippies. Yes, it was dominated by men in a way the hippies hadn’t quite been. It was about hate & war, as opposed to love & peace. Dunno’bout understanding. It proved the point that liberation would mean liberation of anger, too, not just free love.
It stated with singing about the urban blight of drugs in NYC & ended up with art school kids talkin’bout the miseries of the dole & joblessness in London.
I think the Clash were the one punk band that had talent.
2.Why in America do clubs for men end up being punk or heavy metal or worse? What souls commit to ‘straight edge’? Somewhere between a club & a death cult, these things show how badly young men can take the empire-over-your-mind quality of American democracy.
3.I do think there’s a connection between urban youth gangs & what led to punk & other such things. Ultimately, these are the people left behind when America moved to suburbia. But there was suburban kids who reacted to American safety the same way, so it’s not as easy as taking boys out of the city, if you want to pacify them. I suppose Americans had no pills to pop down their gullets at that point… In a way most people don’t want to confront, this is about what’s wrong with America as exemplified in municipal politics.–Conservatives especially in our time should ask themselves why they cannot run cities & what that says about how they conceive of the common good of politics.
4. Finally, the mob. Yes, mobs are mobs. Americans do not have political violence because there is so much in the country that blunts all ideological edges. Race was the big deal in political violence; there still are race riots, but because they’re still a matter of the urban North, nobody wants to pay attention to them. Have one South of the Mason-Dixon line, & boy do all the old prejudices come back in a hurry! It’s still worth a buck, & still smells of frankincense… Next to race, America once had some class-based violence in the days of unionization. That did not last long, however.–I don’t mean the dark passions of the soul that form the hard core of politics do not exist in America.–But they do not turn political. Not in Grant park in ’68 or at the DNC–not last week in Charlottesville. Not even the Battle in Seattle. Politics requires being public, not merely getting publicity, & antifa is no better at associating in the commons than other parts of America.
To those of us on the right, it can seem as if the “nice left” and the violent left always have a good-cop-bad-cop pact going on that turns them into one united machine. But that’s not how they see it: when leftists talk amongst themselves, they treat the conflict between the “hippies” (“nice left”) and “punks” (violent left) as if it were real. As economics shows, it is of course perfectly possible to achieve cooperation through competition, but, having visited some antifa punk sites in looking them up, man, are they ever angry at Noam Chomsky right now for stabbing them in the back by saying antifa violence is not the answer. Of course I suppose they’re usually angry about something. But them chuckling to themselves, “We know he secretly approves, he’s just maintaining his cover,” wasn’t what was going on.
Surely, an editor can get @joeescalante to pop back on Ricochet for a day.
Anthrax is as close as I ever got to punk rock. But most of my associates in early teenage years were punks, particularly of the Misfits variety. This was not an early generation of punk, but rather Generation X — one or two steps before the present skinheads. They wore spiked wristcuffs, steel-toed boots, and chains. Because this was surburbia and not gang territory, there was no one to fight but each other. Mosh pits — “dancing” as reckless and violent flailing in a cramped area — were normal at many concerts.
There’s something to what Titus says about heavy metal (more my style) as an anti-hippie movement. With so much pressure from all angles to feminize society this past half-century, it was inevitable that young men deprived of healthy and productive directions for masculinity would redirect their aggressive instincts into barbaric indulgences. Boys and young men naturally imagine themselves as soldiers. In absence of a cause to fight for, one must be invented.
My preference was the Texas metal band Pantera. Now that I think about it, that overlaps with a few conversations Ricochet members have had lately. The Rebel flag was commonly integrated into the band’s imagery (such as a T-shirt I own for the Great Southern Trendkill album). And some of the band’s fans were indeed truly racist skinheads, but that never deterred many other fans from enjoying the concerts. It’s often easy to ignore one crowd inside of another. There were moshpits. An earlier album was titled A Vulgar Display of Power, which gets right down to it.
Metal can excellently capture the spirit of war, which is why US military recruitment commercials often employ it. Like war, aggressive music is not inherently unjustifiable. If well directed, masculine instincts can support commitments to justice and daring productivity (jobs with danger or great stress, for example). Metal is by turns a war cry or a lament.
Pantera’s music was generally apolitical. Megadeth’s frontman Dave Mustaine is openly Republican.
Metallica is perhaps the most popular metal band of recent decades. They cite punk influences, and many songs are politically or socially critical. “And Justice For All” addresses our game-like trial system (“Seeking no truth / Winning is all”). “The Cure” criticizes Americans’ habit of pill-popping (“Everyone’s got to have the sickness / because everyone seems to need the cure”). “Don’t Tread On Me” is a popular song (“So be it / Threaten no more / To secure peace is / to prepare for war”).
But with rock more than country and other genres, many listeners pay little attention to lyrics. The rhythms and notes can be all that really matters.
Most of my family either are or have been skinheads. It’s genetic on both sides of my family tree. My youngest lost his hair at 19, however my oldest maybe the only one to have a full head of hair. I have retained just enough of mine as not to want to shave it and look like a movie star. Furthermore politics vary amongst us not in accordance to amount of follicles.
I’ve been away, and in my absence I keep thinking of all the great discussions that must be going on here. Lord knows every day seems to bring up a new, hot topic that I’m missing. Ricochet is always in my thoughts, but I know that if I do log on, it will suck up more time than I have available. And this is baseball season afterall. ;-)
This is a good post. No question that the Antifa extreme is the opposite side of the same coin as the Neo Nazi extreme. And I think you make a great connection to the Punk movements. I don’t have any extra insight as to why they develop. They seem to be connected to conspiracy theories and to this sense of being in constant outrage. This constant outrage goes on even in the non-extremist people, people who follow politics closely, for example. Whenever I feel I’m being sucked up into that constant state of outrage, I step back and just ignore it all for a spell.
By the way, I never heard of Antifa until this past week.
By the way, as to Punk Rock, I’ve always had a fondness for The Clash, because they expanded beyond just punk music, but when it comes to punk rock music, it mostly lacks any real musical merit. In short, it sucks.
Here’s a really good Clash song that few people probably have ever heard.
Fantastic post, M.F.R. .
You shouldn’t make an old woman with a weak bladder laugh so hard. I just loved the feminist perspective.
I’m several years removed from my time on aircraft carriers, but I remember there were several videos during Focsle Follies using metal music for background music, and it was very effective.
You left out one of the most interesting things about skinheads: originally they weren’t punks, but British fans of reggae, making the Nazi association all the more strange. Later the fashion was adopted by punks. UK band Skrewdriver were responsible for bringing in Neo-Nazism, though they were just the most prominent of the white nationalist bands who described themselves euphemistically as rock against communism. Non-racist skinheads continued to exist and not just of the SHARP or antifa variety.
Agnostic Front and Cro-Mags from the New York Hardcore scene were left-leaning to be sure, but their approach was more working class and macho than more high-minded punks were comfortable with, hence the integration of heave metal which was unthinkable to some punks for more than aesthetic reasons. (Similarly in the UK, there was hostility between the idealistic art-school anarcho-punks like Crass and dystopian gutter punks like The Exploited.) Agnostic Front caught flak for the lyrics of their song “Public Assistance” which reads like a talk radio segment as imagined by a writer on alternet.
Though they don’t criticize it from a feminist angle, Dead Kennedys “Nazi Punks F*** Off” similarly attacks violent punks who have the minds of a “jock”. “White Punks on Hope” by Crass likewise takes their own side to task: “Left wing violence, right wing violence all seems much the same”. Crass also expressed displeasure with the band name Millions of Dead Cops. Despite the predominance of leftism, punk has its share of conservative songs. “Holiday In Cambodia” by Dead Kennedys is a biting attack on the whitewashing of communist crimes. Their “Where Do Ya Draw the Line” reveals skepticism of the success of anarchism.
Minor Threat’s “Guilty of Being White” speaks for itself. “I Wanna Conquer the World” by Bad Religion is an ironic anthem of the liberal do-gooder. The Germs’ “Communist Eyes” isn’t as searing an assault on the titular ideology as one may hope, but it recognizes the failure of the Soviets. Antiseen bash vegetarianism and other lefty causes. Straight edge metalcore bands like Abnegation took a strict pro-life stance as part of their veganism. Johnny Ramone was a lifelong Republican and Johnny Rotten has recently come to the defense of Trump and Brexit.