Don't put your dirty hands on punk

Recently, I heard a well-known Spanish artist comment that the extreme right had appropriated punk.

Specifically, Bolsonaro, Ayuso and Trump.

I understood the argument, it spoke of populism, of how they played to play the victims to identify themselves with a jaded and polarized society, and thus generate identification and maintain their power.

Later, like many educated people who think the same, he exhibited the constant contemporary complaint: the puritanical left does not know how to laugh at itself, it thinks before laughing.

And he insisted on the concept: the right has appropriated punk.

It got me thinking.

What did he mean by punk?

I understood that he was not talking about the appropriation of fascist symbols to subvert them, precisely because neither Trump nor Bolsonaro have disgusted Holocaust deniers.

Let us remember the recent dinner of the former president of the United States with white supremacists like Nick Fuentes or the rapper Ye (Kanye West), who confessed to loving Hitler.

There was no symbolic appropriation here, but literal worship.

Then I thought: are they referring to punk as an anti-establishment movement?

It is true that the world extreme right is using rhetoric against the system of which they are a part, but no one with half a brain can buy that speech, especially not someone intelligent.

Speaking of discursive issues, let's do the exercise of getting rid of them, and let's go, as many insist, to the material: Amnesty International presented a study in which it revealed that, under the mandate of Bolsonaro, the Government of Brazil could have prevented 120,000 deaths , only in the first year of the pandemic, if it had adopted the appropriate public health measures to fight covid-19 instead of decreeing austerity measures that affected the health system.

During his tenure, the press was constantly attacked, and the rule of law was frequently threatened.

Access to firearms was expanded, taking into account that it was already one of the countries with the most deaths from firearms in the world, and deforestation was promoted with a denialist discourse on climate change.

The former president's speech

Let's focus on the United States, the cradle of that supposed

puritanism that is causing another supposed wave of cancellations by artists and intellectuals.

Tennessee has become the first US state to ban

performances in public or around minors.

The law was approved by Republican Governor Bill Lee, and it follows the constant harassment by the extreme right of events for

and the trans population.

For his part, the ultra-conservative governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, wants to approve a law that restricts sexual education in minors.

Teachers will need to teach abstinence from sexual relations outside of marriage, while teaching the benefits of monogamous heterosexual marriage.

The law has already passed the Florida House of Representatives.

But the puritan was not the left?

Allow me a bit of

, so there are no more misunderstandings.

Perhaps it should be remembered that punk originated in the seventies from working class consciousness and its frustration in the face of a decade of inequalities.

The youth shelter is a subculture as a place of resistance.

And his ideology?

Varied and free, but very focused on mutual support, gender equality, civil rights, and against authoritarianism, racism and sexism.

That is why when England found itself in a serious economic and social crisis in the 1970s, with the extreme right-wing National Front on the rise and the complicity of high-ranking police officers in the streets, a cultural revolt arose that knew how to weave alliances among white, black and Asian youth as well as joining forces with feminists, anti-capitalists and the Anti-Nazi League.

That was called

.

He was also responding to statements by several far-right rock stars.

Remember, Eric Clapton proclaimed a “white Britain” and demanded that foreigners be expelled.

Rod Stewart publicly defended the ideas of the National Front.

And the punk?

On the other side, standing up.

,

and

played at the festival organized by

Punk is not Bolsonaro, they are

, imprisoned for criticizing Putin.

Punk are my colleagues Marc Giró, Isa Calderón, and Irantzu Varela messing with the extreme right, machismo and the system every day.

Is Bolsonaro punk?

I still remember the burned photos of Judith Butler in Brazil shouting "witch."

Please, let's leave the punk alone.

Or emulating it: don't put your dirty hands on punk, damn it.

Lucía Lijtmaer

is the author of the essay

and the novel

(both in Anagrama).

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