Siouxsie & the Banshees:
Two Pop Songs for the Alt Right

Siouxsie Sioux

1,420 words

As universal as pop music tries to be, there are some songs which cut into profit margins by drawing distinct lines between large groups of people and cast aspersions or judgment across those lines. And depending on how sanctified or protected the victim group is — or how known or unknown the singer/songwriter is — the song might actually become popular. For example, Mick Jagger made a career out of doing this to women, and Bruce Springsteen to the wealthy. But very rarely does pop music draw lines along racial barriers. This is perhaps why folks on the Alt-Right hardly ever call upon popular music as a means to bind them.

“Black Messiah” by the Kinks is one song that bucks this trend.

So do a pair of early songs by punk/new wave group Siouxsie and the Banshees. One is “Hong Kong Garden” (released as a non-album single in 1978) and the other is “Arabian Knights” (released on their Juju LP in 1981).

Although not quite as explicit as “Black Messiah,” these two songs could never be released today without vicious and widespread backlash. Essentially, our white singer, one Siouxsie Sioux (née Susan Ballion), is caught saying not-so-nice things about non-whites. Of course, a pop song has to do something other than disparage other races to achieve meaning for the alt-right. I would say that “Hong Kong Garden” doesn’t quite get there while “Arabian Knights” most certainly does.

“Hong Kong Garden,” despite being one the band’s earliest tunes, is a pop-punk classic. It opens with a faux Chinese melody, played on an electronic xylophone, and follows up with a powerful and catchy punk jam. It ends with the obligatory smack of the orchestral gong. It’s one of the songs that made Siousxie and the Banshees a popular recording act in their native Britain and set Siouxsie Sioux — along with Poly Styrene of the X-Ray Spex — as one of the great female punk singers.

But what is the song about? According to Siouxsie Sioux herself, it’s about feeling sorry for the Chinese people who worked at a Chinese restaurant in England called “Hong Kong Garden.” Apparently, racist skinheads would often come in and harass them, and Siouxsie disapproved. Well, this sounds nice and all, but you couldn’t tell from the lyrics. Here they are:

Harmful elements in the air
Symbols clashing everywhere
Reaps the fields of rice and reeds
While the population feeds
Junk floats on polluted water
An old custom to sell your daughter
Would you like number twenty three?
Leave your yens on the counter please
Hong Kong Garden

Tourists swarm to see your face
Confucius has a puzzling grace
Disoriented you enter in
Unleashing scent of wild jasmine

Slanted eyes meet a new sunrise
A race of bodies small in size
Chicken Chow Mein and Chop Suey
Hong Kong Garden takeaway
Hong Kong Garden

Apart from Siouxsie Sioux’s ex post facto commentary, it is tempting to think that she was originally attempting to draw some kind of racist conclusion about the Chinese with all this negative imagery. More likely, she was just young and hadn’t had too much experience writing songs at that point. Did the Chinese actually sell their daughters in 1978? Are we talking wives or prostitutes? And for what reason are we dinging them for having small bodies? The song lyrics, basically, are a muddle — and very difficult to make out over the music’s joyous blare. But it is interesting from a White Nationalist perspective since the songwriter felt that non-whites were a perfectly acceptable song topic, even if she cared to cast aspersions at them.

Such a song would be verboten today. A modern group serving up something similar to “Hong Kong Garden” would be met with hostility and violence — not so much because of the anti-Chinese messaging, but because of the race of the musicians. Yes, folks. Not sure if you’ve noticed, but there are a whole host of things white people are not allowed to say in public, and the list is growing daily.

This is the insidious nature of political correctness: It’s a form of Soviet-style mind control. If you can control what people say, you can ultimately control what they think. Furthermore, you cannot find a truer form of racism than political correctness since really only whites are expected to adhere to it. Is anyone pressuring black rap groups to tone down their anti-gay messaging? Not really. Yet, whenever Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits plays his mid-1980s hit “Money for Nothing” these days he replaces the word “faggot” with “maggot.” The fact that he was using this term ironically through a close-minded narrator is immaterial. Even the fact that he is Jewish is apparently no protection.

“Hong Kong Garden” serves to remind us of a time when whites weren’t targets and we could speak and sing freely without fear of violent repercussions. It is this kind of world we wish to return to one day with a white ethnostate.

“Arabian Knights,” on the other hand, is a much more cohesive song with fully realized lyrics. Musically, it succeeds as well as “Hong Kong Garden.” The song is more of a mesmerizing dirge than an upbeat punk rocker. It really does put you in an enchanting zone that you are reluctant to leave when it’s over.

This time around, however, Siouxsie Sioux knew what she was doing with the lyrics. The point of the song is to skewer the Arabs for mistreating their own people, and Siouxsie twists the blade deep:

Myriad lights
They said, I’d be impressed
Arabian Knights
At your primitive best

A tourist oasis
Reflects in seedy sunshades
A monstrous oil tanker
It’s wound bleeding in seas

I heard a rumor
What have you done to her?
I heard a rumor
hat have you done to her?

Veiled behind screens
Kept as your baby machine
Whilst you conquer more orifices
Of boys, goats and things
Ripped out sheep’s eyes
No forks or knives

No forks or knives, eh? Egads. What is the world coming to?

Seriously, while this is a pretty scathing indictment of the Arabs (and God know, they deserve it), it’s not explicitly pro-white. After all, those weren’t white women being employed as baby machines. Those weren’t white boys being raped along with the goats. One does not need to be an ethno-nationalist of any kind to disapprove of this sort of thing. On the exoteric level, Siouxsie is expressing her contempt at Arab barbarism. Specifically, she is shaming them for their misogyny, pederasty, and bestiality. She outright calls them primitive despite how attractive they attempt to make their cities look.

And this is great. This all needs to be said. Just like with “Hong Kong Garden” we have a white songwriter passing judgments on nonwhites. But where “Hong Kong Garden” takes baffling digs at a fairly innocuous target, “Arabian Knights” uses evocative lyrics to seize the moral high ground over the issue of human rights. And Siouxsie is telling the truth. Many Arabs do behave as she describes. So perhaps that is why the anti-white backlash to this song has been fairly muted.

So while the exoteric interpretation of “Arabian Knights” may not involve the Alt-Right, the esoteric certainly does. This song provides an eloquent reason why whites need to have their own ethnostate. It proves that we are not just a bunch of hateful bigots. There is truth behind much of what we say. Many of these third-worlders, Arabs included, are just as barbaric as Siouxsie says they are, and are importing their pathologies into our homelands. This is causing real pain along with a slow erosion of our racial security. In England since the late 1980s, Muslim men from Pakistan, North Africa, and the Arab world have raped and sold into sexual slavery over 100,000 white girls. So these ‘baby machines’ of Siouxsie Sioux’s Arabian dystopia are becoming white after all.

“Arabian Knights” by Siouxsie and the Banshees should become a rallying for those of us who want to end these kinds of abominations now. Europe must be for Europeans. We must evict these barbarians posthaste and make a world in which whites are free from such atrocities. We must eschew racial egalitarianism and adopt a pan-European tribal identity to reclaim our own destinies.

Otherwise, we’ll wind up like the oppressed wretches Siouxsie Sioux sings about in “Arabian Knights.” And after the 100,000 victimized girls, I’m sure boys and goats are soon to follow.

And they won’t even have the decency to use forks and knives.