by Brett Stevens on January 4, 2018

Punk music never intended to live for long. It wanted to be a brief flash of intense insight followed by eternal darkness. In its original form, it attacked modern society as a whole, seeing it as a concept that went wrong somewhere. As part of that, punk periodically addressed race in a way that was forty years ahead of its time.

For example, we have Minor Threat with “Guilty of Being White”:

I’m sorry

For something that I didn’t do

Lynched somebody

But I don’t know who

You blame me for slavery

A hundred years before I was born Guilty of being white

Guilty of being white

Guilty of being white

Guilty of being white

And perhaps the song that inspired it, the archetypal Black Flag with “White Minority”:

We’re gonna be a white minority

We won’t listen to the majority

We’re gonna feel inferiority

We’re gonna be white minority White pride

You’re an American

I’m gonna hide

Anywhere I can

These songs point out the instability of the reigning 1980s view, which was that slavery and colonialism were unfortunate incidents of history that could be atoned for, following the reigning postwar Leftist view that race was a class issue that could be solved by egalitarianism. Thirty years later, we know that egalitarianism is broken and diversity will not work.

If we had to symbolize the difference between white nationalism and the Alt Right, it might be that the Alt Right incorporates more of this viewpoint:

So you’re gonna be institutionalized

You’ll come out brainwashed with bloodshot eyes

You won’t have any say

They’ll brainwash you until you see their way I’m not crazy – institution

You’re the one who’s crazy – institution

You’re driving me crazy – institution

They stuck me in an institution

Said it was the only solution

To give me the needed professional help

To protect me from the enemy – myself

We distrust the entire system based on mass culture and popular rule. People in herds are not geniuses, but the anti-genius. They are immoral. They are selfish, and they use the group to legitimize their selfishness. If we are looking critically at racial policy in the West, we also have to look at the whole thing, and oppose modernism — spawned of “equality” — itself.

Tags: black flag, captain thrash, guilty of being white, hardcore punk, institutionalized, minor threat, punk music, suicidal tendencies, thrash, white minority

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