Reddit reviews Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century

I agree with a lot of what you say about the dangers of figures on the left becoming sympathetic to the far right and vice versa, but this part is maybe a little simplistic:

> It is, to put it bluntly, a marketing strategy. Siouxsie Sioux co-opting fascist iconography to be provocative is exactly the same impulse as 'triggering the libs' is for these internet centric far-right troll factions today.

I don't think it's "exactly the same impulse", in that those far-right troll factions sincerely believe in a lot of Nazi principles, whereas when groups like Siouxsie and the Banshees or the Sex Pistols or Joy Division use Nazi imagery, I think the purpose was often more about a kind of disgust with their present society and its ideals as opposed to genuinely endorsing a fascist alternative (of course it's true that some groups that started out using such imagery in more nihilistic way did slide over into genuine fascism, but others did not). I've recently been reading the old blog of Mark Fisher (author of Capitalist Realism and "Exiting the Vampire Castle" who was discussed by Amber in ep 78), he had a post on the movie Downfall which talked briefly about what these groups may have been expressing with that imagery:

>Meanwhile, the glimpses we have of the Berlin above show a landscape out of The Triumph of Death, a city devolving into total anomie: child conscripts, vigilante hangings, intoxicated reveling, carnivalesque sexual excess. While those scenes play out, you can almost hear Johnny Rotten leering, 'when there's no future how can there be sin?' (Although for Germany, in fact, there was nothing but the future: immediate postwar Germany was subject to a willed amnesia, a disavowal of cultural memory). It's no accident that post-punk in many ways begins here. As the Pistols pursue their own line of abolition into the scorched earth nihilism of 'Belsen was a Gas' and 'Holidays in the Sun', they keep returning to the barbed-wire scarred Boschscape of Nazi Berlin and the Pynchon Zone it became after the war. Siouxsie famously sported a swastika for a while, and although much of the flaunting of the Nazi imagery was supposedly for superficial shock effects, the punk-Nazi connection was about much more than trite transgressivism. Punk's very 1970s, very British fixation on Nazism posed ethical questions so troubling they could barely be articulated explicitly: what were the limits of liberal tolerance? Could Britain be so sure that it had differentiated itself from Nazism (a particularly pressing issue at a time that the NF was gathering an unprecedented degree of support)? And, most unsettling of all, what is it that separates Nazi Evil from heroic Good?

The book Lipstick Traces, which was one of Fisher's favorites, is kind of hard to summarize but it makes a lot of connections between punk and other movements like the dadaists and the situationists, and there's a bunch of stuff in there about the meaning of punk's use of Nazi imagery too. In modern times I wouldn't be inclined to give much benefit of the doubt to a band that used fascist imagery (well, except maybe for Laibach), but I don't think we should assume bands that did this in the 70s were genuinely fascistic.

Meanwhile, unlike the punks I don't think Chelsea was associating with alt-right figures to be transgressive or nihilistic, I think she's likely being honest when she says her original purpose was to infiltrate and gain useful information, though it's definitely possible that in doing so she started to empathize with them on a human level and get too chummy. But as long as she's said she's not going to try to do this anymore and isn't seen continuing to casually socialize with fascists, I'm not inclined to go for the "Chelsea is bad now" idea.

I'd recommend just reading the book. It talks about important concepts but is (I find) very readable.

If you'd like an interesting discussion about the Situationists and their influence on culture, check out Greil Marcus' Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century.

IMHO, Debord was spot on.