The Zenith of the Peace Movement
In their music video for „Boom!“, the metal band „System of a Down“ captured the largest peace demonstrations in the world against the United States’ Iraq campaign.
On 15 February 2003, around ten million people worldwide demonstrated against the Iraq war the United States was planning at the time. The protests took place in more than 600 cities. It was the largest peace demonstration there had ever been up to that point.
Among those taking part was the metal band System of a Down, who took to the streets in their home city of Los Angeles together with a further 30,000 people. Even then, the group was known for its America-critical stance. Their lyrics mostly revolved around themes such as war and peace, brainwashing and thought control, or greed for profit and injustice. Their albums were released on the record label „American Recordings“, whose products bore an upside-down US flag — a symbol of disagreement with the country’s political direction.
What was special about the peace demo in Los Angeles, however, was that System of a Down shot their video clip for „Boom!“ there, the single released from „Steal This Album“, their work that had come out in November 2002.
The video for the song was actually meant as a protest against the Iraq war. We wanted to release it before the war broke out, but only finished it once the war had begun. So basically it was all for nothing.
singer and frontman Serj Tankian said afterwards.
In the video itself, the band members can be seen marching along in the procession, filming the events on the ground with handycams and interviewing protesters. Their statements were later worked into the video as well. It was really very cool to walk around and ask people why they were coming to the demo, and to hear their stories
, Tankian explained.
The video also contains a little animated cartoon in which the protagonists of the day — US President George W. Bush, the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — fly through the air on rockets. To this, System of a Down sing: „Why must we kill our own kind?“ The video was directed by none other than the US filmmaker Michael Moore, who at the time was landing one box-office hit after another with documentaries such as „Bowling for Columbine“ and „Fahrenheit 9/11“.
In „Boom!“, the piece of music itself, there are also some interesting details to discover. The lyrics contain an allusion to the book „Manufacturing Consent“ by the US intellectual Noam Chomsky, which was reissued in 2002 and deals with the „system-sustaining role“ of the US media. The band also takes up a theme from „Mars, the Bringer of War“, the first movement of the orchestral suite „The Planets“ by the British composer Gustav Holst, which he composed during the First World War.
In the end it turned out that System of a Down and all the other demonstrators who took to the streets against the Iraq war in 2003 were right. For none of the reasons for war that the US government cited at the time actually existed. Iraq neither maintained close ties to the terror network Al-Qaeda, nor did it produce nuclear weapons, nor did it possess operational biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction. The evidence that the then US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to the UN Security Council turned out in hindsight to be fake news. In the end, however, the Iraq war cost at least 120,000 people their lives, as US scientists determined ten years later.