Owing to your being so shut off from the world you have zero discernment, only empty slogans and double-tongued rhetoric.
Consider a teenager
politicised through the records of that label.
And subsequently even taking up with Tolstoi's and Gandhi's philosophy of "turn the other cheek".
The question is, can you live it?
If you had family for example, who came under threat, could you continue to live and uphold this philosophy?
Actually these punk messages held many of the same political messages as you found say in the student union politics or trade union politics.
We know today for a fact that these messages were to a large extent emanating from the old Soviet Union, whose agencies infiltrated many western organisations to give a cachet of credibility and legitimacy to their political messages.
But the key difference with punk was where the Soviets were very careful in their orchestrated western "Peace" campaigns to make the distinction between "unjust wars" and
“just wars” (which were those fought against capitalism, zionism, imperialism, and various other class enemies...), the message of punk was that
all war was bullshit.
And I think perhaps that underlies the essential difference between me and most of you on these fora. It is the point that the rest of the logic cascades from.
Actually I think most of us who frequent these fora are to a large degree under the effect of the political messages imbibed in youth.
On this forum, certainly, you can detect a lot of the old incoherent pub politics that perpetually casts around for someone else to blame for their discontents, grievances, unhappiness, failures to get on in the world, and congenital incapacity.
While over on p.ie there is a large contingent of whom it is evident that their student union politics form the basis of their world view.
Whereas the message of this punk record label, as I already alluded to, was that there is no "just war".
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0ddOmzQlgY
Also accompanying that message, was t
he visceral hatred of lies and bullshit.
Of course the Soviet propaganda at the end of the day, under the veneer and vindication of its radical left right-on "revolutionism", consisted in essence of carefully constructed and legitimised lies.
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m82Agr4Qg1k
But here's the thing. As a grown up with a family, past a youthful "punk" phase, is pacifism as a lived philosophy
realistic?
Now, I would perhaps be willing to live the pacifist philosophy if it was just me alone who had to live and abide by that decision, and accept the consequences, and suffer under its logic.
But what about when you're responsible for others?
There is also the recognition that there is in reality no half-way house. Violence inevitably
escalates.
As illustration, I remember at thirteen or fourteen, staying awake with my father's loaded shotgun under my bed for an entire week, ready to confront a pair of "older brothers" with infamous monikers and actual criminal reputations who were roaming the estate in their hi ace van looking for me.
They had said to some kids about me, "... tell him we're going to find him, and then he's dead, his family's dead. We're going to burn his house down. We're going to shoot his dog...".
All this from something that had started from standing up to a toe-rag, and teaching him a lesson.
So, later on, I think I was quite knowledgeable about the decision to take up the logic of pacifism, of this punk music, which seemed to me a fairly good resolution to the
conundrum of violence, which is that it
escalates.
Later on, the arrival of children made the choice seem not so clear cut. Because you're not going to turn the other cheek then, are you.
Also, one of my boyhood friends who was a born fighter, brave to an incredible extent, and who in adulthood naturally decided to become a soldier to fight to defend our values and way of life, strongly influenced me and my ideas.
So I consider that I may understand the choice to a fair extent. I have some insight into the dichotomy.
And actually there is more to the story of that "older brother" escalation that I described above - in that you could trace the ultimate beginning of that inevitable escalation to a time well before that, basically to when
one day I decided to stand up and fight back.
Yes, that was the beginning. It was a decision that I think was the only one I could have taken, and survived in the world.
But from that moment, its logic inexorably brought me to that week where I lay with the 12 bore under the bed, waiting for the car headlights outside in the night, and I would have got up, at thirteen or fourteen years old, and done what I needed to do to protect my parents, siblings, house and indeed our pet dog.
There was no other choice.
So that is what you are dealing with.
