Billy Idol Says This Is Why Some British Punks Used to Wear Swastikas

Billy Idol recently spoke out about old school British punks wearing nazi swastikas as “performance art,” and… he is clearly not reading the room.

During a new episode of the Turned Out A Punk podcast, Idol was attempting to explain the difference between English punks and French punks, and recalled a very tense situation that took place when he and Siouxie from Siouxie And The Banshees went to see the Sex Pistols play in Paris.

“Siouxsie was wearing her night porter gear, where she had the swastika on,” he recalled, “and she was driving these left-wing French people crazy because they didn’t get that it’s a performance art kind of thing.”

“They just thought she was – because they were practically communists – they were thinking she was an anti-communist,” Idol went on to say. “They didn’t realise it’s part of punk performance art.” After the symbol of hate seemed to “really upset,” Idol says that he and Siouxie has to “escape across the stage” to get away from angry concertgoers.”

“They just didn’t understand the sort of London fashion performance art aspect of punk,” he said, then going on to get to the core of his point, which was: “We were reflecting back on the British society what they were doing to us by wearing these sort of political symbols.”

“Like Vivienne Westwood would combine the swastika with communist symbols, Karl Marx. And that was all a bit of a fuck you to the conservative forces in England that we were sort of feeling that they were going fascist,” Idol continued. “So we were going, ‘Oh, if you’re going to go fascist, then we’re going to reflect that back to you.’”

Punk Swastikas Were a ‘Reflection’ of British ‘Fascists,’ Idol Says

“It was a kind of a reflection back on the powers that be. ‘This is what you want us to be? You want us to be fascist? Oh, what about we’ll dress like that to frighten you?’ And it worked,” he added.

Look, I get what he’s saying — even if back then the practice was still wildly tone deaf — and this all mostly sounds like he’s trying to offer an explanation rather than a blatant defense, but there is just never a good time to be all “it’s ok ’cause we wore swastikas to piss off the politicians we didn’t like.”

Please don’t defend nazism

Literally look around at society, Billy, and maybe just say, “Yeah we did this, and it wasn’t cool, because Nazis are racist genocidal scumbags who don’t deserve acknowledgement.” I feel like it’s fair to say that British punks in the ’70s were not living under the same conditions as Jewish people in 1940s Germany.

Here’s a lesson for every celebrity who has an opinion on Nazis and swastikas and Hitler… you do not want people Googling your name and have something come up that also mentions these keywords if those search results are not you fully condemning every bit of it. Full stop.