So, you’ve been to school for a year or two
And you know you’ve seen it all
In daddy’s car, thinking you’ll go far
Back east your type don’t crawl[1]This classic 1980 Dead Kennedys track is largely just wistful fantasy, of course; the type of spoiled brat described here is precisely the type to never set foot in Cambodia, while still fully … Continue reading
Playing ethnicky jazz to parade your snazz
On your five-grand stereo
Braggin’ that you know how the n*ggers[2]Yeah, I censored it; don’t get me wrong, I otherwise love me some Jello Biafra and I get that his whole point here is to openly mock the sorts of white people who would brag about loving Black … Continue reading feel cool
And the slums got so much soul
It’s time to taste what you most fear
Right Guard[3]Brand of deodorant. will not help you here
Brace yourself, my dear
Brace yourself, my dear
It’s a holiday in Cambodia[4]Just to recap, yet again: Kissinger’s bombing campaign killed over 150,000 Cambodian civilians–including children murdered on Christmas eve–and injured and scarred hundreds of … Continue reading
It’s tough, kid, but it’s life[5]Kissinger’s brazen crimes against humanity in Cambodia (and East Timor, and Bangladesh, and Chile, and go on down the list…) were hardly a secret even in the ’60s and ’70s, … Continue reading
It’s a holiday in Cambodia[6]Noam Chomsky provides a useful contrast to Kissinger: both were Ivy-educated Jewish men born in the early-20th century to immigrant families who became towering figures and voluminous writers within … Continue reading
Don’t forget to pack a wife[7]I mentioned earlier that it practically became a cliché in college campuses throughout the ’60s and ’70s to oppose Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam war. A notable exception was of … Continue reading
You’re a star-belly sneetch, you suck like a leech
You want everyone to act like you
Kiss ass while you bitch, so you can get rich
But your boss gets richer off you[8]Numerous obituaries, incidentally, noted that Kissinger was pathetically thin-skinned, as well as a grovelling and obsequious weasel; in order to cling to power, he kissed ass as much as he fumed … Continue reading
Well, you’ll work harder with a gun in your back[9]Speaking of working harder: another interesting point of intersection between Nibley and Chomsky is in their approach towards the work ethic. Though both were voraciously hard workers themselves, … Continue reading
For a bowl of rice a day[10]Back in that same 1970 interview, the BBC interviewer pressed Chomsky on the feasibility of anarcho-syndicalism, arguing that no matter how egalitarian you try to make a society, with meaningful work … Continue reading
Slave for soldiers ’til you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one[11]The devil will of course always offer his satanic counterfeit to God’s United Order–one founded on compulsion, repression, and hierarchy, rather than freedom and egalitarianism, … Continue reading
Now you can go where they get things done
What you need, my son
What you need, my son
Is a holiday in Cambodia
Where people dress in black
Need a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll kiss ass or crack
Pol Pot, Pol Pot
Pol Pot, Pol Pot
Pol Pot, Pol Pot
Pol Pot, Pol Pot
And it’s a holiday in Cambodia
Where you’ll do what you’re told
A holiday in Cambodia[12]Penultimate track from Dead Kennedy’s iconic debut album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables.
Where the slums got so much soul
Pol Pot
References
| ↑1 | This classic 1980 Dead Kennedys track is largely just wistful fantasy, of course; the type of spoiled brat described here is precisely the type to never set foot in Cambodia, while still fully supporting the large-scale napalm-bombing of Cambodian civilian populations under the vague umbrella of “battling communism” or whatever while sitting comfortably at home.
That is, this kid is a young Henry Kissinger-type, whom we can only wish had been sent to Cambodia to be burned to death by his own bombers as well when he was Nixon’s Secretary of State. The man was a well-documented war criminal, genocidal and evil, and the only tragedy in his passing is that God gave him a full hundred years to repent of his murders, yet still he chose to die in all his sins. |
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| ↑2 | Yeah, I censored it; don’t get me wrong, I otherwise love me some Jello Biafra and I get that his whole point here is to openly mock the sorts of white people who would brag about loving Black music while still casually using anti-Black slurs; nevertheless, a white person using the n-word is always going to be severely misguided at best, even with the very noblest of intentions. Just trust us on this. |
| ↑3 | Brand of deodorant. |
| ↑4 | Just to recap, yet again: Kissinger’s bombing campaign killed over 150,000 Cambodian civilians–including children murdered on Christmas eve–and injured and scarred hundreds of thousands more. These war crimes led to the establishment of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, whom Kissinger actively supported and allied with (as he already had the Thailand military dictatorship) as a “counter-balance” to the Viet Cong. Pol Pot ended up massacring over 2 million Cambodians in genocide (including all the “intellectuals,” of which Kissinger would’ve been one), or roughly 25% of the nation’s population.
Pol Pot was later overthrown by the Vietnamese army directly in 1979, only four short years after they had forced the U.S. withdrawal (and only a year before this song debuted). That is, not only was Kissinger a sociopathic war criminal, but he was also an abject failure, defeated by the Viet Cong twice over. Indeed, not only did the ends not justify the means, but his means didn’t even accomplish his evil ends. Yet still there have been numerous news-outlets disgracing themselves by eulogizing this failed genocidal maniac as a “great statesman” with a “complicated legacy” or whatever, and finger-wagging those who have instead preferred to call a spade a spade–that is, they have been “Condemning the righteous because of their righteousness [and] letting the guilty and the wicked go unpunished because of their money” (Helaman 7:5). |
| ↑5 | Kissinger’s brazen crimes against humanity in Cambodia (and East Timor, and Bangladesh, and Chile, and go on down the list…) were hardly a secret even in the ’60s and ’70s, and were loudly protested by college students and university professors across America. Indeed, college campuses hating on Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam war practically became a cliché in this era–the defining figure of which was (and still is) MIT linguistics professor Noam Chomsky. |
| ↑6 | Noam Chomsky provides a useful contrast to Kissinger: both were Ivy-educated Jewish men born in the early-20th century to immigrant families who became towering figures and voluminous writers within their respective fields. Yet they landed in such different places! Kissinger was an unapologetic advocate of unbridled American power and neoconservative, while Chomsky has been a relentless and fiery critic of the same and an out-and-proud anarcho-syndicalist. Kissinger and Chomsky are almost perfect mirror images of each other.
Speaking of which: you know who else was born in the early-20th century, has Jewish ancestry, profound intellectual gifts, became a towering figure and voluminous writer in his field, was a relentless and fiery critic of Nixon and American imperialism, and a fierce advocate for a classless society? Mormonism’s own Hugh Nibley. |
| ↑7 | I mentioned earlier that it practically became a cliché in college campuses throughout the ’60s and ’70s to oppose Nixon, Kissinger, and the Vietnam war. A notable exception was of course Brigham Young University, which was overseen at the time by that McCarthy-ite Ernest P. Wilkinson. Hence, it bears emphasis that when BYU professor of Middle-eastern studies Hugh Nibley emerged as a very loud and fiery critic of the war, he was being a radical outlier in Provo, Utah (no matter how typical such was of university professors across America).
I don’t think we fully appreciate just what a singular unicorn Hugh Nibley was; in his religious beliefs and practices, he was by all accounts a thoroughly orthodox believer and Church loyalist. He turned down tenure-track positions at Berkeley and Chicago to continue at the Y. Indeed, if you ever work your way through his earliest Book of Mormon apologetics from the 1950s, you will see him make regular swipes at those so-called “liberals” at secular universities, who feign tolerance and open-mindedness but were anything but, in his estimation. Yet in his political beliefs and voting patterns, Nibley was a thorough-going West coast liberal himself (he was born in Oregon and educated in California, after all); and by the late ’60s and ’70s, he couldn’t even pretend to be a proper Utah conservative anymore, and turned the same incisive wit he once brought against anti-Mormon literature down upon Nixon and the Vietnam war as well. But here’s what’s so important to emphasize: for Nibley, there was no contradiction whatsoever between his orthodox Mormonism and his scathing left-wing activism! He treated them as one and the same! Indeed, for Nibley, it is of paramount importance that, for example, the Book of Mormon narrates an American civilization that was completely destroyed from off the face of the earth because they constantly sought for wealth, pride, power, and the oppression of the poor; this, in fact, is why the Book of Mormon is still so frighteningly relevant to our day. Nibley never once doubts or abandons his Book of Mormon apologetics, on the contrary: he merely switches from using the Book to critique academia’s faux-liberals to instead using it to lambast the materialistic pride of the Saints ourselves. Chomsky, incidentally, also had nothing but contempt for those purported “liberals” in academia who had no truck with using their positions to rationalize and justify American imperialism. Great minds and all that. |
| ↑8 | Numerous obituaries, incidentally, noted that Kissinger was pathetically thin-skinned, as well as a grovelling and obsequious weasel; in order to cling to power, he kissed ass as much as he fumed when others refused to kiss his. |
| ↑9 | Speaking of working harder: another interesting point of intersection between Nibley and Chomsky is in their approach towards the work ethic. Though both were voraciously hard workers themselves, they also had a keen sense that only certain types of work were worth doing, and that forcing others to work themselves to death in wage-slavery was inhumane and evil. Nibley in the early-’80s, for example, delivered a provocative talk entitled “Work We Must, But the Lunch is Free,” taking clear aim at the Protestant Worth Ethic and the rhetoric of no-free-lunches to force workers into abject servitude. The talk in fact caused such a stir that a year later he delivered a follow-up entitled, “But What Kind of Work?”, in response to those wise-guys who insisted that if we are not supposed to break our backs for money, then just what were we put on this earth to do?
Nibley’s answer, fascinatingly enough, is the same as Chomsky’s: creative work! To quote Chomsky directly, from a 1970 BBC interview: “Much of the necessary work that is required to keep a decent level of social life going can be consigned to machines–at least in principle–which means humans can be free to undertake the kind of creative work which may not have been possible, objectively, in the early stages of the industrial revolution.” (“The Relevance of Anarcho-Syndicalism” from Chomsky on Anarchism, ed. Barry Pateman, pg. 136-137). Nibley, too, makes the argument that any work that can be done by a machine, should be done by a machine; that there are hundreds of thousands of millionaires in this country, but only a tiny handful of first-rate artists, composers, authors, scientists, scholars–that is, the grind of getting rich is actually the easy way out, the avoidance of work, that creative work is what’s truly difficult and thus what’s most truly rewarding. For both Nibley and Chomsky, to be motivated by money is death–both to others and to one’s own soul–while to be motivated by creativity is life eternal. The only real difference between Chomsky and Nibley, I suppose, is what they choose to call their classless utopic idealizations: Chomsky called it anarcho-syndicalism (no matter how much Monty Python once gently teased it); Nibley called it the Law of Consecration and the United Order (no matter how much modern Mormonism likes to pretend those things never actually meant classless systems at all). Indeed, if you’ve ever wondered why this site leans a little heavy on relentlessly quoting Acts 2:44-45, 4 Nephi 1:3, 3 Nephi 26:19, D&C 42:20-30, D&C 49:20, Mosiah 4:19-21, etc. and etc., well, it’s because we first read it all in Nibley. |
| ↑10 | Back in that same 1970 interview, the BBC interviewer pressed Chomsky on the feasibility of anarcho-syndicalism, arguing that no matter how egalitarian you try to make a society, with meaningful work for all, there will still inevitably be those essential grunt jobs that nobody will want to do, and that someone must ultimately be incentivized to do so through greater financial pay; as Chomsky deadpanned back, all those essential grunt jobs are currently being done by the people being paid the absolute least–that is, when they aren’t being violently forced outright to begin with–so even granting that anarcho-syndicalism would not be a perfect system, that everyone would likely have to share to a certain extent in the grunt work, it’s still leagues better than our current one.
Of course, as Nibley himself once noted, Brigham Young himself believed in organizing an egalitarian United Order society wherein everyone would work the farm in the morning, pursue the developments of their talents and intellects in the afternoon, then enjoy each other’s sociality in the evening–which sounds remarkably similar to the system Chomsky is proposing. But then, Chomsky is Jewish, and a long-range descendant of the same peoples who adopted the United Order on the Day of Pentecost as found in Acts 2–and distant relations to the Lehites who did the same in the ancient Americas in 4 Nephi. |
| ↑11 | The devil will of course always offer his satanic counterfeit to God’s United Order–one founded on compulsion, repression, and hierarchy, rather than freedom and egalitarianism, “without compulsory means.” The former was promoted by both Kissinger and the communists alike, no matter how much they nominally opposed each other; the latter were promoted by idealists like Chomsky and Nibley. I know which side I’d rather be identified with, especially at the Great and Terrible Last Day. |
| ↑12 | Penultimate track from Dead Kennedy’s iconic debut album Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables. |