DrokkIt wrote:Aneris talked about how antifa is a a considerable part of the punk/hardcore underground community and a lot of them are pacifists.
Just wanted to second this, as it's a totally accurate observation.
If one departs on a hard-road EU tour of squats etc it's not uncommon to be playing on "stages" with antifa flags as the backdrop.
I want to impart some observations about this:
1: Punk music attracts lots of 'outsider' type disaffected teenagers looking for 'rebel' status.
2: As a general movement it's developed from the squatting scene/DIY culture of the 80s simultaneously with 'crusty' hardcore/anarcho music.
3: A considerable part of punk's core appeal is surface-level aesthetic- very obvious when it's liberty spikes or tattoos etc
4: Opposition to 'the system, man' is an intrinsic aspect of this surface-level aesthetic. It's the mythology of punk, if you will.
5: It's not a very intellectually free space, you tow the line or shut up- it's a clique with established parameters. And it's Hierarchical.
6: Large groups of directionless, apathetic young people are a good target for recruitment to your ideology. Especially if it requires active and complete commitment like veganism or radfem or hare krishna, in the 90s.
7: Kids get peer=pressured/influenced into all kinds of stuff they 100% regret and leave behind later.
8: The counter-cultural setup is a perfect place to go if you simply want to be violent and boss people around.
Now I'm not claiming this is everyone in punk music, as it's clearly a niche, but the above observations are all first-hand for me. Some of you may recall my first post saying I'd come here due to feeling despondent with the amount of this stuff I was encountering as it was spoiling the spirit of individualism and self-expression that had drawn me into the scene decades earlier.
However I must point out that most millennial antifa types are no threat, but feeble people with deep seated personal issues drawn to a movement that conveniently contextualises these problems as 'society's fault'.
There are only so many vegan bakery workshops on cyclist revolution one can hear about before one realises 99% of this stuff is selling a middle-class eco-dream exactly like the wooly bullshit ads for 'healing energy medicine' in the back of the Guardian's weekend magazine.
Antifa has become violent recently; I suspect this is due to people looking to be violent flooding in. It's still mostly a bunch of garbage posing though.
I agree to almost everything you wrote. Except the last part. There were always violent parts within the Antifa, but extremist violence on both sides of the spectrum
has gone up, reports the Guardian. The Financial Times goes further, titles
"Far right drives rise in extremism and violence in Germany". One caveat is that this matter overall is
not as trivial to define as it seems. Though to be clear, nobody doubts who sets asylum and refugee shelters aflame.
It’s very clear to me that the vocal majority here want to draw super-fine grained distinctions between 88 flavours of Right Wing, like Tumblerinas would with their genders, just so that there is enough space between Richard Spencer and some other liked candidate. However, according to what I read here, “The Left” is just one thing. The Left are the Regressives, the Regressives are Antifa. And they are all violent bullies.
I realized recently that the Illuminatus! Trilogy was written based on the same kind of ideology that is now associated with the Alt Right. Would Wilson and Shea write it today, they might observe JP Watson, Carl Benjamin (Sargon), Alex Jones, Brittany Pettibone, Lauren Southern and the likes, and their comment sections instead of reading loon letters sent to the Playboy magazine where they worked at the time. Discordianism is strongly influenced by and against that kind of thinking. And I now appreciate some of the finer references. For example, one encounter a few days ago, I was confronted with what is half-seriously called a "Reality Tunnel". The inability to hold several facts in their mind, which don't agree to their bias, and which is sabotaging abductive reasoning. This idea is heavily inspired by Tim Leary, and now somewhat subsumed by Confirmation Bias, but shows another aspect, that is quite subtle. Wilson had this "simultaneous apprehension" talk, which seemed one of the more outlandish ideas -- of where there are many. But I now see the point.
While I am at it, there's more with memes and meme magick, satirical occultism, FNORD and so forth, being selective, being half-serious-non-serious-in-jest-maybe, in the Discordian lore (one connection can be seen via Moore to Anons, Vendetta etc). I was down a bit from what happened, but there are actualy fun times ahead now that I consider the implications of this. :)
