By Mindy Menjou

As one punk fan put it, she wore a swastika, not because she identified or agreed with fascism, but because "Punks just like to be hated" (qtd. in Hebdige 116). According to David Johansen of The New York Dolls (an NYC proto-punk/glam rock outfit known for its cross-dressing antics), a band's use of the swastika didn't necessarily have anything to do with the ideology of its members:

In grammar school you get a looseleaf book and the first thing you draw in it is a swastika and a skull and crossbones. You carve a swastika in the desk. You don't know what fascism is, it's not anti-Jewish at all. Kids don't care anything about that shit. When you want to make a statement about how BAD you are, that's how you do it. (qtd. in Savage 63-64)

However, while at first the swastika was adopted by the punks because of their affinity for all things "ugly or offensive to the general public" (Henry 80) — especially to their parents — and a desire to be bad, it would prove to be about more than simply being shocking for the sake of being shocking. The punks' appropriation of the swastika was more about "unhing[ing] established hierarchies of meaning and value" (Ward). It was about calling into question the meanings with which society has imbued this symbol in order to purge it of meaning or at the very least to force people to think about why it might be considered shocking in the first place.

In other words, the punks' co-optation of the swastika was about challenging the things that their society purported to know — its values, traditions, and truths — and, then, exposing them as delusory myths. Siouxsie Sioux, a punk fan turned frontwoman of her own band, Siouxsie and the Banshees, explains it in terms that are a bit more crude, alluding to the bratty nature of what the punks were doing while also lending insight into why the punks chose to break this particular taboo:

It was always very much an anti-mums and anti-dads thing. We hated older people — not across the board but particularly in suburbia — always harping on about Hitler, 'We showed him,' and that smug pride. It was a way of saying, 'Well I think Hitler was very good actually': a way of watching someone go completely red-faced. (qtd. Savage 241)

Siouxsie's statement reveals that the punk kids were very much aware of the offensive nature of what they were doing. That was the whole point. If they were insensitive, the punks certainly were not ignorant; they were not unaware of Hitler's atrocities. They were, however, sick of having their parents' victory over him shoved down their throats especially since, to them, it did not seem that their parents had much of anything to show for it. The swastika as a punk symbol had a great deal more significance for British youth than it did for American ones. The United States enjoyed a postwar economic boom and rapidly rose to prominence as a superpower following World War II. The United Kingdom, however, became further and further removed from its past as a major world power; it could no longer be said that the sun never set on the British Empire. The fact that the empire was in decline was painfully apparent to the punk kids who came largely from poor, working-class families and whose futures seemed bleak or even nonexistent. Unable to get work for the most part, they felt alienated and abandoned by society. They were perpetually shiftless and bored and often turned to petty crime for pocket money and kicks. To them, Britain did not seem very "Great" at all. Nevertheless, their parents still clung to "the threadbare fantasy of Victory" (Savage 241). Thus, the punks mocked their parents' constant invocation of a past victory and their willingness to rest on their laurels, seemingly oblivious to the reality of what Britain had become.