Punk has ALWAYS been about kindness and freedom and making things better.
No it hasn’t! This is literally exactly the kind of ahistorical take on punk that drives me off the wall, and you’re exactly the kind of person I was vagueing about!
Punk hasn’t always been about freedom, from the start it was being subversive, and what exactly punk was trying to subvert has always been extremely broad and open to interpretetion by different groups!
The Ramones were conservatives. The Sex Pistols had no intended political message beyond being offensive and their frontman supports Trump now. These initial groups were not acting to make a statement about freedom or kindness but to push against the increasing conformity, cleanliness, and smooth production of mainstream rock music. That did not necessarily entail standing up for freedom or left-wing causes. Of the initial “big three” old-school punk bands, The Clash were the only ones that were politically progressive!
Lots of punks in the 80s wore Nazi armbands for the express purpose of being shocking and offensive to mainstream sensibilities because that is what punk was about. And soon enough, the “ironically edgy” Nazi punks gave way to actual goddamned Nazis in punk. Fuck, have you even heard of Skrewdriver? Do you even know that Nazi punks were the reason that “skinhead” became modern shorthand for “neo-Nazi?”
It’s not possible to deny punk to fascists by is by playing “no true Scotsman.” All that does is make it easier to pretend they’re not there, and not a real problem. If you want to tell the Nazi punks to fuck off, you have to first acknowledge that they have a deep history in punk, and you have to face that reality and confront it! You can’t just bury your head in the sand and pretend the problem isn’t real.
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