Power Makes Wars
In their song „War Pigs“, the British heavy-metal pioneers Black Sabbath ask who is behind wars: it is always politicians who sow the hatred for which others must die.
How did we come to a point where people today – among them, sadly, even midlifers who once refused military service – hold forth so carelessly and unreflectively about war and the necessity of armament and weapons deliveries, as if it were about the fate of a football club? Who or what has mined their minds so thoroughly that they no longer dare to think the obvious? Who could possibly have any interest in military readiness and war? Analog people certainly not. They are the future sacrificial victims. So where is the resistance?
There were other times: artists, musicians above all, took a stand against the fascistoid great-power ambitions of the USA, which plunged Latin America, East Asia and the Middle East into chaos. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, protest songs generated the sound waves on which the peace movement surfed. Black Sabbath’s song „War Pigs“ reminds us who wants wars and who has to pay for them.
Vanity, imperialism, anti-communism, power, geopolitics, greed … Many roads lead to war. Concern for human rights, however, has never been among them – which would also be absurd: violating human rights in order to protect human rights. And yet they are invoked again and again. And again and again, simple minds fall for the propaganda fairy tales, apparently failing to recognise the contradiction in this line of argument. Neither NATO’s assault on Yugoslavia in 1999 was about human rights, nor was the USA’s assault on Iraq in 2003. Least of all the Second World War or the Vietnam War. What was always at stake here was global supremacy, the influence of the value-driven West, for which no means is too brutal, too contemptuous of humanity, when it comes to enforcing these „values“.
No other country since the mid-twentieth century has been so obsessed with visiting the values and notions of its monetary elites upon the world as the USA. No ruler put in power by a coup was too corrupt or too cruel for Uncle Sam to grant him the requisite support, as long as he dutifully served as Uncle Sam’s extended arm, promoted exploitation and multiplied the wealth of American moneybags.
On 16 March 1968, US soldiers slaughtered over 500 people in the Vietnamese village of Mỹ Lai. Women, children and the elderly, not a single soldier among them who might have justified anything like „self-defence“. Some women were raped before they were murdered. Apparently that too is among the „Western values“ that must be defended at all costs against the Empire of Evil.
Julian Assange sends his regards. That this massacre was noticed by the public at all we owe, among others, to the army reporter Ron Haeberle and the journalist Seymour Hersh.
The Vietnam War was at the same time a „Body Count“ contest between the American units. The winner was whoever generated the most enemy corpses. Search and destroy. It can all be read up in Bernd Greiner’s book „Krieg ohne Fronten – Die USA in Vietnam“, which appeared in 2007.
Soldiers may rape, murder and massacre. But they rarely start wars. That takes politicians. They stoke the hatred of other people and cultures.
They poison the brainwashed minds, as Black Sabbath put it: Poisoning their brainwashed minds. Politicians drum the nonsense into soldiers that they are defending some kind of freedom by slaughtering others. Yet people who are prepared to let themselves be stuffed into a uniform have lost both their freedom and their dignity by that moment at the latest.
Like no other event, the Vietnam War moved the then still young rock and folk music scene to resist the establishment. And not only in America. With their song War Pigs from 1970, the English hard-rock band Black Sabbath directed the gaze at those responsible. They sit in comfortable armchairs, coddled by a bloodthirsty media pack that serves as their mouthpiece, and never risk the smallest scratch. Perishing – that is the task of the common people, the rabble, the scum. Born to die on demand.
„Politicians hide themselves away
They only started the war
Why should they go out to fight?
They leave that all to the poor, yeah“
War Pigs runs almost eight minutes – to be heard on Black Sabbath’s second album Paranoid. The song is wrapped in the gloomy, dragging sound with which the band had already, on their first album, provided a soundtrack for the imagined wisps of fog between the gravestones. Add to that the tortured graveyard voice of the then 22-year-old Ozzy Osbourne. References to the song’s original title Walpurgis can be found right at the beginning:
„Generals gathered in their masses
Just like witches at black masses
Evil minds that plot destruction
Sorcerer of death’s construction“
Black Sabbath crown war and its instigators the ultimate evil. That fits the occult heavy-metal attitude of the band from the former English industrial city of Birmingham.
In the final verse these politicians, the War Pigs, stand surprisingly before the Last Judgment:
„Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling
Begging mercies for their sins
Satan, laughing, spreads his wings“
That almost sounds ironic. For the USA are the Untouchable States of America. World legislator, world police, world judge and world media all in one. The prospect of an earthly court that might condemn these War Pigs is even more naive than believing that some god or the universe would provide justice.
Which US president was ever held to account for the terror with which he descended upon other countries?
Kennedy? Johnson? Nixon? Ford? Reagan? Bush? Clinton? Obama? Biden? Everyone can answer that for themselves. The historian and critic of decaying systems Karlheinz Deschner wrote in 1992, in his book Der Moloch about the history of the USA:
„The only thing that makes me a little less disconsolate as I set down this chronicle (…) is the thought that one day, of Washington and New York, of all the cities of West and East, of North and South, that of this whole ghastly history (…) nothing more will remain than solitude, than wind, and beneath it nothing but sorrel or maquis, than grass.“
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