You were what you were
Clean cut, unbecoming
Recreation for the masses
You always mistook fists for flowers
Welcome welcome soldier smiling
Funeral march for agony's last edge
6 Million screaming souls
Maybe misery - maybe nothing at all
Lives that wouldn't have changed a thing
Never counted - never mattered - never be
Arbeit macht frei
Transports of invalids
Hartheim Castle breathes us in
In block 5 we worship malaria
Lagerstrasse, poplar trees
Beauty lost, dignity gone
Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria
Welcome welcome soldier smiling
Soon infected, nails broken, hunger's a word
6 Million screaming souls
Maybe misery - maybe nothing at all
Lives that wouldn't have changed a thing
Never counted - never mattered - never be
Drink it away, every tear is false
Churchill no different
Wished the workers bled to a machine
Clean cut, unbecoming
Recreation for the masses
You always mistook fists for flowers
Welcome welcome soldier smiling
Funeral march for agony's last edge
6 Million screaming souls
Maybe misery - maybe nothing at all
Lives that wouldn't have changed a thing
Never counted - never mattered - never be
Arbeit macht frei
Transports of invalids
Hartheim Castle breathes us in
In block 5 we worship malaria
Lagerstrasse, poplar trees
Beauty lost, dignity gone
Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria
Welcome welcome soldier smiling
Soon infected, nails broken, hunger's a word
6 Million screaming souls
Maybe misery - maybe nothing at all
Lives that wouldn't have changed a thing
Never counted - never mattered - never be
Drink it away, every tear is false
Churchill no different
Wished the workers bled to a machine
Contributed by Dead End - 2012/7/26 - 12:16
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Album “The Holy Bible”
Come Mausoleum, un’altra canzone scritta da Nick Wire dopo la visita che fece ai campi di sterminio nazisti di Belsen e Dachau ed anche al museo della pace ad Hiroshima.
“Mausoleum and The Intense Humming of Evil: these two can be twinned together, because they were both inspired in the same way. Last year we visited Dachau, Belsen and the peace museum in Hiroshima, and those three places had quite an intense influence on us, and on the whole album. Dachau is such an evil, quiet place. There's no grass, and you don't even see a worm, let alone any birds. all you can hear is this humming of nothing. In the museum at Belsen, there's the original sign which hung there. It says, 'Welcome to Belsen Recreation Camp'. It's the same with the peace museum in Hiroshima. When you're young, you're brought up to think that the americans dropped the bomb because they had to end the war, and loads of Americans would have been killed otherwise. But when you go there and see the pictures of the whole city completely flattened, and the black rain, and all the people who died from the secondary effects... If anyone goes to those places and doesn't feel an immense sense of loss, they've got no soul. The lines: 'Churchill no different/wished the workers bled to a machine' are about how Britain always thinks that it has a superior attitude. But as soon as the war was over, the attitude was: 'Let's get back to normal and exploit as many people as we can again. Keep the proles happy, tie them to their machines, and send them out to war again to be killed when we need to'.”
(Nicky Wire, Melody Maker 27.8.94)
Altri riferimenti nel testo:
- Il castello di Hartheim, nel comune di Alkoven, vicino a Linz, Austria, è il luogo dove ebbe sede il “NS-Tötungsanstalt”, principale centro dove i nazisti tra il 1940 ed il 1941 attuarono il programma “Aktion T4” finalizzato all’eliminazione (loro la chiamavano “eutanasia”) dei disabili fisici e psichici. Ad Hartheim furono gasati almeno 18.000 di loro.
- Il Block 5 era la sezione del campo di sterminio di Dachau dove venivano svolti esperimenti sulle cavie umane lì imprigionate.
- Sigmund Rascher (1909-1945) è stato un ufficiale medico nazista responsabile di esperimenti mortali sugli internati nel campo di Dachau. Perfido e ambizioso, Rascher cadde in disgrazia nel 1944 quando si scoprì che i suoi presunti figli erano in realtà bambini rapiti ad altre famiglie. Sottoposto a processo, fu condannato per questo e per altri crimini, compreso l’omicidio di un assistente e fu giustiziato insieme alla moglie poco prima che il campo di Dachau fosse liberato dagli alleati.
- Winston Churchill, il celebre primo ministro conservatore britannico, durante il grande sciopero dei minatori del 1926 propose di sparare sui dimostranti con le mitragliatrici ed elogiò il nostro Mussolini – salutandolo come “Roman genius” - perchè era stato capace di schiacciare nel sangue l’opposizione…