By Mindy Menjou
Hijacking emotionally charged symbols to political ends may be fun, but is it worth it? Mindy Menjou reconstructs punk rock's deconstruction of the swastika.
Rock music has quite the legacy of political and social activism. From Vietnam War protest songs to a pledge by the Artists United Against Apartheid not to play Sun City to the Tibetan Freedom Concerts to Live 8, many of rock's favorite causes have involved the identification and indictment of instances of injustice and oppression. Not all of rock's political statements, however, have been so straightforward. Take the punks' dalliance with the swastika. The original punks weren't anti-Semites or neo-Nazis, so what did they mean by associating with fascist and specifically Nazi imagery, incorporating these themes into both their look and their lyrics? What was the point of their adopting the symbols of an outmoded political philosophy belonging to an enemy vanquished by their parents' generation? Rock music has always sided with and romanticized the underdog. It has also always been about rebellion against the dominant paradigm, with anti-Nazi sentiment certainly representing such a thing. And there was, of course, an "I hate my parents" spirit - a hallmark of virtually every youth subculture — to the whole thing. In this way, punk identification with Nazism as a romantic and rebellious statement would seem to make sense. This explanation, however, is too simple, too neat. Using the Sex Pistols' "Belsen Was A Gas" as a starting point, we can explore the various nuances of the punks' message and ultimately discover that it was deliberately ambiguous, engineered to highlight the fact that, while it may be a human tendency to think in terms of simple binaries (the good guys versus the evildoers), the world in which we live is far more complicated than that.
The Sex Pistols were not the first punk band, nor were they the first punk band to ever wear swastikas. Nevertheless, they are the archetypal punk band and their flirtation with Nazism was particularly bold (especially when compared with the more subtle World War II references found in such songs as The Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop"). In 1976 bassist Sid Vicious penned the song "Belsen Was A Gas." Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp; the title, therefore, represents an extremely tasteless play on words. The song, with vocals by lead singer Johnny Rotten, is rather schizophrenic, bouncing between the sick and juvenile pun of the title and a vague expression of sympathy for the victims, ending in a distinctly nihilistic fashion. Analysis of the song (which, on first listening, seems almost so ridiculous as not to deserve any such thing) does not offer any concrete answers to the question as to why punks would have decided to go so far beyond the boundaries of good taste. What it does do is add to the ambiguity surrounding the punks' message by suggesting several different motivations that the punks could have had for utilizing Nazi imagery.
