Song 478: The day after International Peace Day seems like an appropriate moment to add Kill For Peace by The Fugs to the playlist, and you can find a YouTube video of it by clicking on the title. Not long after I arrived at NU in the fall of 1969, I started hearing a lot of music I hadn't heard before, thanks mainly to a group of new friends who shared their gems, and one of them introduced me to the humor of the Fugs, which I found quite entertaining. However, I did not get to hear all of their recordings, and I only became aware of this one recently when I posted a query on Facebook asking people about their favorite anti-war songs. Someone suggested this cut, providing a link to it, and even before I got through it the first time, I had decided to add it to my YouTube playlist Dave Elder's Favorite Anti-war Song Videos, which you can check out by clicking on the title. Far or near or very middle east, sadly, plenty of Americans have gone there in the last few decades to kill for peace. The attitude expressed in the lines If you don't like the people or the way they talk, if you don't like their manners or the way they walk, kill, kill, kill for peace might remind you of how some folks feel about immigrants, but when the group did this tune, a large share of the U.S. population feared those gook creeps (the Vietnamese), whereas, these days, plenty of those in the so-called opposition feel that if you let them live they might support the Russians. As the Fugs understood when they created this parody, the real problem is not the target, but the people who need to kill in order to get a mental ease and a big release.
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