Amerika

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”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuDx6_PLIVk

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