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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
I don’t like punk except for The Clash is the same as I don’t like country except for Taylor Swift: in other words, I only like the neutered version. Invariably the people expressing this view know practically nothing about the genre outside of “Blitzkrieg Bop” and the first half of Never Mind the Bollocks. The Slits, Chumbawamba and X-ray Spex were as adventurous as The Clash. Bad Religion has better hooks and the occasional guitar solo. Nomeansno were more complex and heavier. Hell, The Damned are a million times the band the Clash ever was. Proof:
If you’d rather listen to the squawking of Joe Strummer’s nasally anus than those songs, it makes me wonder who decided to let you have ears.
Pro-life vegan straight edge called Abnegation? Goddamned Jedis! The only way to really make this work, though, is to redo The warriors & get all the factions in…
Now, as to the Ramones–it’s true about Johnny. It’s also true that they had a strange post-Holocaust Jew fascination with Nazi paraphernalia.
It’s also true that the Dead Kennedys wrote Holiday in Cambodia. But that doesn’t make them conservative or the song. It’s just anti-liberal in a way that’s morally right.
Funny you should mention them. I loved TubThumper, which was my first exposure to them, but when their next album came out I just couldn’t get into it. Just too disjointed, too many short tracks that seemed to jump around. Never gave them a listen after that, and never combed through their back catalog.
Oh, thanks! I was hoping folks would leave nice, juicy comments like this one explaining what I missed.
I… guess that makes sense.
Yeah, I’d heard of their politics. But of course political affiliation alone doesn’t give a complete picture of where someone’s coming from.
That is beautiful.
“Tubthumping” was a bizarre breakthrough hit for a band that had previously lived in a squat and preached anarchism. They were always eclectic in sound. I’m no expert on their back catalog, but I like what I’ve listened to. Also they have a song called “Hey, Hey We’re the Junkies” which itself deserves high praise. Here’s a good one:
They definitely don’t sound like your typical punk band.
I had heard that one before and it is a good one.
My favorite punk has always been Dead Milkmen:
Like pro-lifers opposed to capital punishment there is a logic to it, but it’s failed to catch on even as much as that view.
Definitely not, though that doesn’t stop people (including me) from regrettably making judgments based solely on that.
I forgot a few examples of anti-liberal punk. Exene Cervenka who sang with Los Angeles legends X, now has a career making country music and her crankish right-wing views don’t sit well with lefty publications. Bad Brains are notoriously homophobic, owing to one of the less talked about aspects of Rastafarianism–a religion treated softly by the left because it involves smoking weed and it’s practitioners are mostly black.
The Cro-Mags who I mentioned earlier looked like this:
They became practitioners of Hare Krishna. Harley Flanagan, pictured on the left, was sent to prison for stabbing a guy in 2012, just in case this comment wasn’t weird enough.
Can’t believe I forgot about X in regards to punk bands better than The Clash. Other examples of creative, unorthodox bands are Black Randy and the Metro Squad, Patti Smith, Devo and the Butthole Surfers.
Skip is right: Dead Milkmen are good, goofy fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYGoougMHSQ
Butthole Surfers
Skinheads are also a minor segment of black metal, a subgenre notorious for its ties to European conservatism and outright fascism. The earliest and most prominent example is the Canadian band Blasphemy who are apolitical. They’re hugely popular on the alt-rightish NWN forum, which is odd considering their guitarist, Caller of the Storms, is black. Mr. of the Storms supposedly punched KK Warslut of Destroyer 666 for using a racial slur, though they’re on good terms now.
Apparently Synthwave is also popular on alt-right forums? Oh brave new world that has such people in it!
Can’t say I’ve noticed that trend, though synthwave isn’t really my bag. On NWN, there is diversity of taste. I’ve seen members praise hip hop, pop and leftist punk. From what I’ve seen, lefty music fans are less likely to enjoy far right musicians (or admit they do). Even Ted Nugent is a bridge too far for many. Be careful drawing conclusions from my personal observations. It could be that the right is more accepting of differing opinions or maybe it’s just easier to avoid right wing artists in the current musical landscape. Also, when it comes to political extremes, liberal, pinko and commie sympathies are more socially acceptable than traditionalist, racist and fascist ones, so it wouldn’t be surprising if expressing the former is more common. And don’t forget the freakout over The Dixie Chicks.
Another trend I’ve observed is that power electronics and other noise genres are fashionable among extreme righties. I like to think of myself as an open-minded person who can appreciate the avant garde but this stuff is, so far, beyond my comprehension. It makes sense that marginal people would be attracted to marginal culture, but there’s an irony in Neo-Nazis embracing art that would certainly have been declared degenerate by the NSDAP.