Lemmy Kilmister

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Over twenty years ago while publishing my own magazine, I posed for a picture with my then-wife in front of a Nazi flag. I was also wearing a fake Hitler mustache and a T-shirt that said RAPE in huge block letters. It’s still one of the first pictures that shows up when you search my name on Google Images”€”in fact, it shows up repeatedly”€”which I suspect is the result of some little social-justice gerbil Google-bombing the image to forever defame me as EVIL. It didn’t matter that my wife was Jewish and the photographer was Israeli, just as it didn’t matter that I had a Jewish girlfriend by my side in Portland when some anti-racist skinhead cretins attacked me for wearing an iron cross. It didn’t matter that my entire point was that only stupid people get inflamed by mere symbols, because stupid people weren’t going to get the point, anyway. Always missing the point is an essential part of being stupid.

Both the Sex Pistols and The Clash”€”the two main standard-bearers of British punk music”€”had Jewish managers. For the Pistols it was Malcolm McClaren and for The Clash it was Bernie Rhodes. McLaren to some degree enabled Sid’s swastikas; the Pistols even had a song called “Belsen Was a Gas.” Shortly before he managed the Pistols, McLaren helmed a Soviet-chic incarnation of proto-punk glamsters the New York Dolls. And guitarist Ron Asheton of The Stooges”€”perhaps the pre-punk band that influenced punk rock more than any others”€”was known to rock a swastika armband, which even then was considered far more offensive than his singer Iggy Pop crawling through glass, being strung out on heroin, and smearing himself in peanut butter. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols didn’t mind being photographed in the midst of a full-on Sieg Heil. Other early punks such as Siouxsie Sioux and Captain Sensible of The Damned also sported swastikas before it became effectively verboten.

It was Clash manager Bernie Rhodes who seemed to play the largest hand in blacklisting all manifestations of fascist symbolism from England’s nascent punk rock scene. Hammers and sickles remained A-OK, because The Clash were full-on communist anyway. It was henceforth cool for punks to change genders or overdose on heroin or be completely nonproductive and inarticulate”€”just NO SWASTIKAS. Adolf Hitler and all he represented were designated as far too offensive even for those whose entire shtick was nothing more than lazy iconoclasm”€”refusing to openly recant one’s fascist proclivities was deemed much more transgressive than shoving safety pins through your cheeks, shooting up dirty smack, and vomiting Hep C-tainted blood on your girlfriend. Once the punk-rock thought police swept all traces of Hitler off the stage, all other forms of dysfunction were not only encouraged, they were celebrated. How else to explain the effete junkie Kurt Cobain blowing his head off, leaving his infant daughter with a psychopathic mother, and subsequently being elevated to cultural sainthood? The answer is because Kurt may have been a suicidal child-abandoning junkie loser, but at least he wasn’t a Nazi. Openly worshiping Satan is fine”€”just don’t dare say a nice thing about Adolf Hitler.

Hitler would admire the level to which people have been brainwashed.

Heavy metal, punk rock, drug addiction, and sexual confusion no longer bear any stigma in modern society”€”or at least not nearly the unpardonable Soul Stain that is attached to fascism. As long as they don’t “play Nazi,” the kids are encouraged to engage in officially sanctioned forms of rebellion”€”in other words, they are completely forbidden from rebelling.