By Tom Morello



AVAILABLE NOW (CLICK BELOW TO PURCHASE IN iTUNES)

http://bit.ly/UnionTown-iTunesUS

Earlier this year I performed in Madison, Wisconsin at the massive demonstrations against anti-union legislation put forward by that state’s right wing governor. While I’ve played hundreds of demonstrations, I’ve never seen anything quite like Madison. Bratwurst chomping Packer fans and Molotov tossing anarchists standing shoulder to shoulder fighting for justice everywhere you looked. (To read my dispatches from the front check out: Frostbite and Freedom: Tom Morello on the Battle of Madison: http://bit.ly/fgCCYp)

I was inspired by the 100,000 people marching in the street on a freezing cold Saturday afternoon. I was inspired by the solidarity of students, steel workers and firefighters of all ages, colors and creeds who had occupied the Capitol building. And I was inspired by the fact that there was something in the air that made nurses, teachers, farmers, and musicians realize that it was time to get off the sidelines and make history.

The day I got back I wrote the song “Union Town”. The next day I decided I was going to record an album of unapologetically pro-labor, pro-working class, pro-UNION songs and donate 100% of the proceeds to the union struggles across the nation. The Freedom Fighter Orchestra (Wayne Kramer, Carl Restivo, Eric Gardner, Chris Joyner and Anne Preven) lent a hand and I recorded the album in four days because I wanted to capture the energy I felt in the streets of Madison before my frostbitten fingers had thawed.

Some of the songs are mine. Some are class war classics. Here’s a breakdown of the tracks:

UNION TOWN (by Tom Morello): I just wrote down what I did, what I saw and what I felt during that whirlwind 36 hours in Madison. Then I added a badass guitar solo. Check out the union made video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5ZT71DxLuM

SOLIDARITY FOREVER (by Ralph Chaplain): This song was written by IWW member Ralph Chaplain in 1915 in the midst of a West Virginia coal miners strike and stakes out that groundbreaking union’s radical manifesto. As a card carrying member of the Industrial Workers of the World myself this labor classic was a must include. I just put an Irish fighting song beat to it and hit the gas.

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON? (by Florence Reece): This song was written in 1931 by a twelve year old Kentucky coal miner’s daughter when her father was out on strike with the United Mine Workers. I tried to capture the vibe of a whispered invitation to a secret outlawed meeting.

A WALL AGAINST THE WIND (by Tom Morello): May Day, May 1st, is celebrated around the world as International Workers Day and commemorates the struggles, sacrifices, victories and achievements of the labor movement. Although commemoration of May Day was inspired by events in the United States (The Haymarket Affair), our “worker’s holiday”, Labor Day, was moved to September during the Cold War era to disassociate it from global demonstrations of international solidarity. With “A Wall Against The Wind” The Nightwatchman is bringing May Day back home.

16 TONS (by Merle Travis): The 1955 recording of this song by Tennessee Ernie Ford reached number one on the US charts and went on to sell more than 2 million copies, which is incredible given the grim subject matter. My family were coal miners in the small town of Marseilles, Illinois and I remember hearing stories as a child of the Morello men going down into the mine before dawn and not coming back up until after sundown, their entire lives lived in the dark. I first heard about this song via The Clash who did a “16 Tons Tour” of England. Like coal miners, bands sometime find themselves “another day older/and deeper in debt.”

THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND (by Woody Guthrie): This song was written in 1940 by Woody Guthrie as an angry class war anthem. It was written specifically in answer to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” which Woody thought missed the whole point, and left out a lot of people. When you learned this song in the third grade they censored out the more “controversial” verses. I put ‘em back in. As a bonus you get three generations of Morellos singing the chorus on this one.

I DREAMED I SAW JOE HILL LAST NIGHT (by Alfred Hayes/arrangement by Tom Morello): I first became aware of this song when reading a biography of the great IWW songwriter/martyr Joe Hill. I was leveled by the lyrics but I’d never heard a recording of it so I just made up my own music, melody and arrangement. It’s actually the very first piece of music I ever sang around the house as The Nightwatchman was rounding into form. In the studio we turned down all the lights and tried to capture a conversation with a ghost.

UNION SONG-LIVE-CAPITOL SQUARE, MADISON, WISCONSIN FEB. 21, 2011 (by Tom Morello): This song first appeared on my ‘One Man Revolution’ album. I wrote it in the aftermath of the FTAA protests and riots in Miami in 2003. That day our peaceful demonstration of tens of thousands of workers got tear-gassed. Afterwards I performed at a union rally and realized that I didn’t have any of my own songs to play on days like that. So I wrote this one. Problem solved. In this live version from the steps of the Capitol building you can feel the frost in the air and the power in the streets.

THE ‘UNION TOWN’ EP IS AVAILABLE NOW ON NEW WEST RECORDS AND ALL PROCEEDS GO TO THE AMERICA VOTES LABOR UNITY FUND. YOU CAN GET IT HERE: http://bit.ly/UnionTown-iTunesUS

I’d like to express my support and thanks to all the unions that are standing up and standing strong in this ongoing struggle and those that have pushed this music forward, some of which are listed here:

American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), Sheet Metal Workers’ International Association (SMWIA), Change to Win, Utility Workers Union of America (UWUA), International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), National Education Association (NEA), International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Transport Workers Union (TWU), International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), American Rights at Work (ARAW), Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Union Label and Service Trades Department, International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) 

Later this summer a brand new full length Nightwatchman album, ‘World Wide Rebel Songs’ and tour will be fanning the flames of discontent in a Union Town near you. Until then, take it easy…but take it.

Solid,

Tom Morello/The Nightwatchman

Web: http://nightwatchmanmusic.com/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/TomMorello
Twitter: http://twitter.com/tmorello

I met my friends at a local townie bar across the street. At this bar were two big, burly, drunken Packers fans. The kind of fellas I might normally avoid if I ran into them on tour, but things are different here in Madison. These big, teddy bear Packer fans were even more militant in their support of the union and of the protests than the kids in the Capitol. Together they led the entire bar in blaring pro-union chants (and anti-Governor Walker slurs); and they may have even bought a round of shots or two for some of the skinny musicians in the corner.

After a few spirited hours, I was certain: these people in Wisconsin are not going to give up, they are not going to give in and if there is any justice in this world these good people will defeat Governor Walker’s awful anti-union bill. This right-wing governor has tried to take advantage of a recession brought on by Wall Street malfeasance to try to ram through legislation that would roll back decades of social progress. But he and his corporate shot callers miscalculated by taking on THESE people. We didn’t ask for this fight; Governor Walker tapped us on the shoulder and said, “Let’s fight.” Okay, dude, it’s on. And now we’re going to knock your legislative teeth out.

The next morning, we met with union representatives and each of the musicians was assigned a local Wisconsin worker to do our interviews side-by-side, because it was important for all of us to keep the emphasis on the workers involved in this struggle on a daily basis. I spent the next few hours doing press with Natalie Parker, a nurse and member of SEIU 1199, and her young daughter. I learned from them that this is not a fight about fixing a broken state budget as the Governor claims. The unions have already conceded every single economic issue at hand. The only issue that they won’t concede, that they should never concede, is the right to collectively bargain – the right to be in a union and the right to stand together. Especially in the area of education this is crucial. The five states where collective bargaining is currently outlawed (S. Carolina, N. Carolina, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia) are the five states with the lowest SAT/ACT scores in the country. Where does Wisconsin rank with it’s strong teachers’ union? Second in the nation.

At noon we were off to Capitol Square, to finally play some music. Madison’s Mayor estimates that more than half a million people have marched here over the past ten days, without a single arrest. So despite the frigid temperatures and a whipping icy wind, the crowd was huge, peaceful and pumped. First up was Ike Reilly, whose homespun tales and improvised lyrics about the struggle struck a chord with the crowd of thousands. Next up was Street Dogs who played an inspired cover of Billy Bragg’s “There is Power in a Union” and an original called “Up the Union” that had the crowd roaring. Wayne Kramer then rocked a number of great tunes as we awaited the rest of the day’s labor delegation to arrive. Poor Wayne’s luggage had not made the trip to Madison, so in a thin coat, Wayne was out there fighting the good fight as his fingers turned frostbite blue. Tim from Rise Against somehow played dexterous versions of Neil Young’s “Ohio” and Credence Clearwater’s ” Who’ll Stop the Rain” while his angelic punk-rock voice echoed through the streets.

Next up was yours truly, The Nightwatchman. I opened my set with “Union Song,” a song I wrote for days like this. (”Now dirty scabs will cross the line/while others stand aside and look/but ain’t nobody never got nothin’/that didn’t raise their voice and push!”) By the end of “Union Song,” I had no feeling in my fingers and it felt like I had frozen crab claws at the end of my arms. I actually dropped my guitar pick at one point and didn’t even realize it because I couldn’t feel my claws. For the finale all the musicians came on stage for a version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” We re-inserted the radical verses that were censored when you learned this People’s Jam in the third grade, like: “In the squares of the city/in the shadow of the steeple/near the relief office/I see my people/some are grumblin’/and all are wonderin’/if this land’s still made for you and me?” The crowd pogo-ed all around the capital, and with the spirit of solidarity in the air, it was clear to me that if we stick together we are going to win this fight.

Next, the whole gang went into the Capitol building, which was thunderous with a wild drum circle punctuating a speech given by the President of the International Steel Worker’s Union, who vowed to keep steel workers in the capital building 24/7 to defend the protestors from being evicted. He dared Governor Walker to come and debate this issue face to face. The rotunda was DEAFENING with chants and drums. It really felt like the eye of a hurricane, the dawn of a thrilling new movement. The scene made me think of the famous Gandhi quote: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

I was standing down the hallway from the speeches wanting to get a closer look, when all of a sudden several union reps started yelling, “Clear a path for The Nightwatchman! Clear a path for The Nightwatchman!” Well, The Nightwatchman and his crab claws just wanted to warm up and watch the festivities, but all of a sudden someone shoved a bullhorn in my face and stood me up on top of a rickety chair, and I was pressed into delivering an impromptu speech. I related our experiences so far and what an inspiration the people of Wisconsin were to me and to all those who support workers’ rights around this country. I told them that I’ve been a proud union man for 22 years, as part of Musicians Local 47 in Los Angeles, and a Red Card carrying member of the IWW, and that for me this fight was personal, because my mom, Mary Morello, was a public high school teacher for almost three decades in Libertyville, Illinois. And while we never had much money, we always had enough food on the table and we had clothes on our backs because my mom was a union teacher. And if Governor Walker is going to attack the rights of people like my mom, then The Nightwatchman is coming for his ass.

The Clash Legacy

by Tom Morello

I had the good fortune to see the Clash play at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago when I was a teenager. It was an experience that changed my life. Even before the first note was played the transformation began. I bought a t-shirt in the lobby. I was used to buying heavy metal t-shirts with lots of garish wizards and dragons on them, but this Clash shirt was different. It just had a few small words written over the heart. It said, “the future is unwritten.”

And when I saw the Clash play, I knew exactly what that phrase meant. The Clash performed with passion, commitment, purpose, righteousness, and an unflinching political fire. There was such a sense of community in the room that it seemed like absolutely anything was possible. I was energized, politicized, changed by the Clash that night, and I knew that the future was unwritten. And maybe we fans and that band were going to write it together.

Joe Strummer was even playing through the same little amp that I had in high school. They proved to me that you didn’t need walls of Marshall stacks and a castle on a Scottish loch to make great music. All you had to do was tell the truth, and mean it. I had never seen a better band before that night, and I have not seen a better band since.

The Clash were one of those rare bands that were greater than the sum of their parts, and yet the parts were amazing. Mick was the brilliant arranger and tunesmith, always looking forward musically, and pushing the boundaries of what was possible for a punk band, of what was possible for any band. Paul was just so damn cool looking, and the image of him smashing his bass on the cover of London Calling sums up the fury and beautiful force of the band. He also wove in the reggae influence that completed the Clash chemistry of three chords, a funky groove, and the truth. Terry Chimes provided the cavalry charge beats that propelled some of their early anthems, but it was Topper who made it all possible with his drumming. He effortlessly, and with great originality and skill, steered the band through genres undreamt of by their peers. But really, they had no peers, because at the center of the Clash hurricane stood one of the greatest hearts and deepest souls of twentieth century music, at the center of the Clash stood Joe Strummer.

Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002.

But when Joe Strummer played, he played as if the world could be changed by a three minute song, and he was right. Those songs changed a lot of people’s worlds forever, mine at the top of the list. He was a brilliant lyricist who, with anger and wit, always stood up for the underdog. His idealism and conviction instilled in me the courage to pick up a guitar and the courage to try to make a difference with it.

In the great Clash anthem White Riot, Joe sang:

Are you taking over,

Or you taking orders?

Are you going backwards,

Or are you going forwards?

When I first heard that, I wrote those four lines down, put them on my refrigerator, and answered those four questions for myself every day. And to this day, I still do.

Joe Strummer was my greatest inspiration, my favorite singer of all time, and my hero. I miss him so much and I was so looking forward to him standing on this stage, and rocking with his friends tonight. And I know he was too. I am grateful though, to have the tremendous legacy of music that the Clash left behind. Through it, Joe Strummer and the Clash will continue to inspire and agitate well into the future.

In fact, the Clash aren’t really gone at all. Because whenever a band cares more about its fans than its bank account, the spirit of the Clash is there. Whenever a band plays as if every single person’s soul in the room is at stake, the spirit of the Clash is there. Whenever a stadium band, or a garage band, has the guts to put their beliefs on the line to make a difference, the spirit of the Clash is there. And whenever people take to the streets to stop an unjust war, the spirit of the Clash is definitely there.

Tonight we will honor the Clash and Joe Strummer with toasts and applause, but the best way to honor them is by putting the Clash’s philosophy into practice, by waking up each morning knowing that the future is unwritten, and that it can be a future where human rights, peace and justice come first. But it is entirely up to us.

To me, that’s what the Clash was all about. They combined revolutionary sounds with revolutionary ideas. Their music launched thousands of bands and moved millions of fans and I can’t imagine what my life would have been like without them.

During their heyday, they were known as “the only band that matters,” and 25 years later, that still seems just about right.

Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.

I stood with hundreds of thousands of rebellious Czechoslovakians in 1989 on a cold winter night in Prague’s Wenceslas Square as the singer Marta Kubišová approached the balcony of the Melantrich building. Kubišová had been banished from the airwaves in 1968 after the Soviet invasion for her anthem of defiance, “Prayer for Marta.” Her entire catalog, including more than 200 singles, had been confiscated and destroyed by the state. She had disappeared from public view. Her voice that night suddenly flooded the square. Pressing around me were throngs of students, most of whom had not been born when she vanished. They began to sing the words of the anthem. There were tears running down their faces. It was then that I understood the power of rebellion. It was then that I knew that no act of rebellion, however futile it appears in the moment, is wasted. It was then that I knew that the Communist regime was finished.

“The people will once again decide their own fate,” the crowd sang in unison with Kubišová.

I had reported on the fall of East Germany before I arrived in Prague. I would leave Czechoslovakia to cover the bloody overthrow of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu. The collapse of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was a lesson about the long, hard road of peaceful defiance that makes profound social change possible. The rebellion in Prague, as in East Germany, was not led by the mandarins in the political class but by marginalized artists, writers, clerics, activists and intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel, whom we met with most nights during the upheavals in Prague in the Magic Lantern Theater. These activists, no matter how bleak things appeared, had kept alive the possibility of justice and freedom. Their stances and protests, which took place over 40 years of Communist rule, turned them into figures of ridicule, or saw the state seek to erase them from national consciousness. They were dismissed by the pundits who controlled the airwaves as cranks, agents of foreign powers, fascists or misguided and irrelevant dreamers.

I spent a day during the Velvet Revolution with several elderly professors who had been expelled from the Romance language department at Charles University for denouncing the Soviet invasion. Their careers, like the careers of thousands of professors, teachers, artists, social workers, government employees and journalists in our own universities during the Communist witch hunts, were destroyed.  After the Soviet invasion, the professors had been shipped to a remote part of Bohemia where they were forced to work on a road construction crew. They shoveled tar and graded roadbeds. And as they worked they dedicated each day to one of the languages in which they all were fluent—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, Spanish or German. They argued and fought over their interpretations of Homer, Virgil, Dante, Goethe, Proust and Cervantes. They remained intellectually and morally alive. Kubišova, who had been the most popular recording star in the country, was by then reduced to working for a factory that assembled toys. The playwright Havel was in and out of jail.

The long, long road of sacrifice, tears and suffering that led to the collapse of these regimes stretched back decades. Those who made change possible were those who had discarded all notions of the practical. They did not try to reform the Communist Party. They did not attempt to work within the system. They did not even know what, if anything, their protests would accomplish. But through it all they held fast to moral imperatives. They did so because these values were right and just. They expected no reward for their virtue; indeed they got none. They were marginalized and persecuted. And yet these poets, playwrights, actors, singers and writers finally triumphed over state and military power. They drew the good to the good. They triumphed because, however cowed and broken the masses around them appeared, their message of defiance did not go unheard. It did not go unseen. The steady drumbeat of rebellion constantly exposed the dead hand of authority and the rot and corruption of the state.

The walls of Prague were covered that chilly winter with posters depicting Jan Palach. Palach, a university student, set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square on Jan. 16, 1969, in the middle of the day to protest the crushing of the country’s democracy movement. He died of his burns three days later. The state swiftly attempted to erase his act from national memory. There was no mention of it on state media. A funeral march by university students was broken up by police. Palach’s gravesite, which became a shrine, saw the Communist authorities exhume his body, cremate his remains and ship them to his mother with the provision that his ashes could not be placed in a cemetery. But it did not work. His defiance remained a rallying cry. His sacrifice spurred the students in the winter of 1989 to act. Prague’s Red Army Square, shortly after I left for Bucharest, was renamed Palach Square. Ten thousand people went to the dedication.

We, like those who opposed the long night of communism, no longer have any mechanisms within the formal structures of power that will protect or advance our rights. We too have undergone a coup d’état carried out not by the stone-faced leaders of a monolithic Communist Party but by the corporate state. We too have our designated pariahs, whether Ralph Nader or Noam Chomksy, and huge black holes of state-sponsored historical amnesia to make us ignore the militant movements, rebels and radical ideas that advanced our democracy. We opened up our society to ordinary people not because we deified the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the sanctity of the Constitution. We opened it up because of communist, socialist and anarchist leaders like Big Bill Haywood and his militant unionists in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

We may feel, in the face of the ruthless corporate destruction of our nation, our culture, and our ecosystem, powerless and weak. But we are not. We have a power that terrifies the corporate state. Any act of rebellion, no matter how few people show up or how heavily it is censored by a media that caters to the needs and profits of corporations, chips away at corporate power. Any act of rebellion keeps alive the embers for larger movements that follow us. It passes on another narrative. It will, as the rot of the state consumes itself, attract wider and wider numbers. Perhaps this will not happen in our lifetimes. But if we persist we will keep this possibility alive. If we do not, it will die.

All energy directed toward reforming political and state structures is useless. All efforts to push through a “progressive” agenda within the corridors of power are naive. Trust in the reformation of our corporate state reflects a failure to recognize that those who govern, including Barack Obama, are as deaf to public demands and suffering as those in the old Communist regimes. We cannot rely on any systems of power, including the pillars of the liberal establishment—the press, liberal religious institutions, universities, labor, culture and the Democratic Party. They have been weakened to the point of anemia or work directly for the corporations that dominate our existence. We can rely now on only ourselves, on each other.

Go to Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, at 10 a.m. Dec. 16. Join dozens of military veterans, myself, Daniel Ellsberg, Medea Benjamin, Ray McGovern, Dr. Margaret Flowers and many others who will make visible a hope the corporate state does not want you to see, hear or participate in. Don’t be discouraged if it is not a large crowd. Don’t let your friends or colleagues talk you into believing it is useless. Don’t be seduced by the sophisticated public relations campaigns disseminated by the mass media, the state or the Democratic Party. Don’t, if you decide to carry out civil disobedience, be cowed by the police. Hope and justice live when people, even in tiny numbers, stand up and fight for them.

There is in our sorrow—for who cannot be profoundly sorrowful?—finally a balm that leads to wisdom and, if not joy, then a strange, transcendent happiness. To stand in a park on a cold December morning, to defy that which we must defy, to do this with others, brings us solace, and perhaps even peace. We will not find this if we allow ourselves to be disabled. We will not find this alone. As long as a few of us rebel, it will always remain possible to defeat a system of centralized, corporate power that is as criminal and heartless as those I watched tumble into the ash bin of history in Eastern Europe.

Hear Rage’s take on the whole thing here.

UPDATE

Rage Against the Machine has now announced that if their single wins, they will play a “massive free victory gig in the UK”. Saturday’s sales will determine the winner.

The roots of this struggle lie in the dying days of the Ottoman Empire in the midst of World War I.  The rulers of this Turkish Empire, the Young Turk Party, set in motion a plan to, once and for all, rid their borders of their largest minority, the ancient Christian Armenian population of more than two  million spread across the Anatolian landmass.  In systematic fashion the Empire’s armed forces killed over a million subjects, starting with intellectuals and able-bodied men, and then marched the rest to near certain death in the Syrian desert, resulting in the near annihilation of an entire people and the exile of a nation from its home of more than 3,000 years.  These atrocities were widely reported at the time and are today one of the world’s most thoroughly documented mass murders.

To this day, against all evidence and in defiance of even the most basic human standards of morality, the Republic of Turkey denies this crime. They have also mastered Orwellian Newspeak by convincing generation after generation of Turkish citizens that the genocide never occurred.

They spend millions of dollars each year, hiring expensive lobbying firms, creating university chairs that sponsor genocide deniers, buying into foreign policy think tanks here in the U.S. and around the world while at the same time threatening to close U.S. bases in Turkey, block access to our troops in Iraq, threaten trade, or retaliate against Armenia with blockades and economic pressure. They think that by erasing a word, genocide, they will somehow escape responsibility for the wholesale death and suffering, theft and dispossession they have caused. Turkey can no more evade either the verdict of history or the requirements of justice by imposing a gag-rule on the word genocide, any more than a killer can escape punishment by insisting the word murder does not exist.

I’m personally very familiar with the word genocide.  All 4 of my grandparents were survivors. In the case of my grandfather, Stepan Haytayan (whose life story is told in the documentary “Screamers”), Turkish soldiers came to his village, took away his father and all the Armenian men never to be seen again.  This was a standard practice by Turkish soldiers, who typically rounded up the men to take them off to “labor camps” where they were to be executed, leaving the women and children unprotected and subject to forced marches, described by Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Ambassador at the time, as a “death warrant to a whole race.”

The similarity between the treatment of the Armenians and the genocide today in Darfur was pointed out last year by Barack Obama, who noted that, “tragically, we are witnessing in Sudan many of the same brutal tactics - displacement, starvation, and mass slaughter - that were used by the Ottoman authorities against defenseless Armenians back in 1915.”  It’s no coincidence that Turkey is one of only a handful of nations, along with China, that still sells arms to the genocidal Sudanese regime, or that Ankara is trying to shield its leader, Omar al-Bashir, from an International Criminal Court arrest warrant.

Even before international lawyer Raphael Lemkin, a Pole of Jewish heritage, coined the term genocide, it was clear to the world that a systematic plan of race extermination had been executed by the Ottoman Turks.  Lemkin’s motivation in inventing this term and leading the charge for the Genocide Convention was, in great measure, his study of the Armenian Genocide, which he, with great foresight, saw as the blueprint for the coming destruction of Europe’s Jews by Hitler and the brutal machinery of the Nazi German state.

For many years, Turkey has leveraged its NATO membership, its former Cold War role, its lobbying power, and military-industrial alliances to buy, bully, or threaten other nations into silence on the Armenian Genocide.  Far too many countries, the U.S. included, have been held hostage to Turkey’s warnings of retribution, but more and more are standing up to this intimidation.  Among these are Canada, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Russia and a growing list that includes 12 NATO allies.  Here in the U.S., 41 states have recognized the Armenian Genocide.

Today, as we approach April 24th, the global day of remembrance of the Armenian Genocide, we look to both the President and Congress to stand up for what’s right; to speak against the Armenian Genocide and all genocides at the level of American values, and to never again allow the United States to be dragged down to the level of Turkey’s threats.

This April, Turkey will again try to block both the White House and Congress from condemning and commemorating this crime, giving itself a vote that it does not deserve in our American democracy.  A foreign government, particularly one that so violently suppresses free speech by its own citizens, should never be allowed to dictate U.S. human rights or genocide prevention policy.

We have, sadly, not learned our lesson.  Here we are, nine decades after the Armenian Genocide and fully six years into the Darfur Genocide, and the international community has yet to forge a durable, effective response to genocide.  Global leaders have proven themselves unwilling to intervene effectively to stop the ongoing slaughter in Sudan, and they’ve been unable to summon the courage to end Turkey’s denials.  Why?  Because, genocide remains a political issue, bartered like a commodity by the great powers, and not a moral imperative that all nations and all peoples must, at all costs, act to prevent.

President Obama is the best-positioned American president in generations to bring about real change to how America and the international community confront mass inhumanity, and our best hope to bring the peoples of the world together to end the cycle of genocide.  He has said that, “America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the Armenian Genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides.”  He’s right.  That’s the moral leader America and the world need and deserve.  In the coming days he has the chance to be just that man.

For more on Serj Tankian’s campaign to urge President Obama to affirm his pledge and officially recognize the Armenian Genocide, please watch:

At the time, I was playing in a punk rock band. Most of our songs were amusing, funny ditties with names like “She Eats Razors” and “Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Feel Cheap.” A week after my first listen to London Calling, I penned the first political song of my life, a song called “Salvador Death Squad Blues,” a rocking commentary on the Reagan administration’s egregious practices in Central America. Shortly thereafter, there was a rebellion at the school paper. The conservative teacher didn’t want us writing articles about apartheid, or U.S. support of death squads, or the fact that the dean was a dick. There was a mass exodus from the paper and a very popular underground paper was born called “The Student Pulse.” The Clash pushed me into making political music and taking a political stand as a teenager.

Later that year, I got the chance to see the Clash at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago, and was totally blown away. Not only were they the greatest live band of all time, but they also cured my musical inferiority complex. Before this show, I had thought that you had to have a $10,000 Les Paul and a huge wall of Marshall amplifiers in order to make “real” rock and roll music. But Joe Strummer had the same cheap little Music Man amp that I did. It was just sitting on a chair, much like my amp sat on a chair at my high school band’s rehearsals. And yet they were making the most passionate and compelling music I had ever heard. A lot of kids left the hall that night knowing that they could do it too. The Axis of Justice motto, “the future is unwritten” is taken from a t-shirt I purchased that night.

On the early Rage Against the Machine tours, Clash tapes and bootlegs were always the most important part of my on-the-road music collection. They were a tremendous inspiration and consolation on those long, freezing European bus rides. And in listening to those crappy quality bootleg tapes, you could still always hear in Joe Strummer’s voice that he did truly believe that the world could be changed with a three minute song, and that each night, he was up there not playing for ego, self-gratification, money or rock star glory. He was playing with the determination to save the soul of everybody in the room, his included.

The Sex Pistols were the flashpoint that made the world notice punk rock. The Clash, sewed politics into punk and rock and roll irreversibly. And Joe Strummer was the heart, the soul, and the conscience of the Clash.

No one had more of a true punk rock look than Joe Strummer. I always thought he had the greatest no-sell-out teeth in the business. The Clash were great because they realized that it did not in any way impinge their integrity to be a “performing” rock and roll band, and they looked, sounded and dressed the part of the rebel rockers they were.

One thing I always admired about the Clash was their great attention to what it meant to be a band, outside of the music. They would have countless meetings where they would discuss their lives, their opinions, their political views, what they meant to each other, and what it was important for them to say in their songs and how to maintain the highest level of integrity and commitment to continuing to be “the only band that matters.”

Joe was also insistent on choosing singles not based necessarily on their potential hit value, but rather based on their relevance. The Clash wrote and released “The Call Up” as a single in response to the reinstitution of draft registration in the United States. It was a huge issue at the time and with the shadows of Vietnam creeping across Central America, a song like “The Call Up,” with its poetic and brutally true lyrics helped a lot of young people make up their minds about what they would do if a draft actually came.

I’ve always been really pissed at the way that the British press turned its back on the Clash. There seemed to be a real petty jealousy that British publications had towards the Clash after their debut album. Once the rest of the world caught on to their hometown little secret, they stomped their feet like spoiled brats and turned their backs on such amazing albums as London Calling and Sandinista (The London Calling album, by the way, was voted the album of the decade by Rolling Stone magazine).

The Clash always resisted the temptation to reunite for the big money. And their reasons spoke to the greatness of the band and the people in it. It wasn’t out of some elitist pomposity that they dare not reconvene for fear of besmirching their “legend,” but rather because their friend and drummer Topper Headon, a heroin addict, wasn’t healthy enough to do it. And as Joe says near the end of the great Clash documentary “Westway to the World,” a band’s chemistry is everything. Joe gives a tearful speech lamenting the dismissing of first Topper Headon and then Mick Jones. It’s a speech worth listening to, because it truly is a band chemistry that matters. There is a potency to that classic Clash line-up that, had they stayed the course, it is likely that to this day, U2 might still be opening for them.

Throughout my time in Rage Against the Machine, journalists would always ask the question, “what the hell is a band with the politics of Rage doing on Epic Records?” I would often answer with long and flowery sermons about spreading an important message around the globe. But I really could have answered with two words: The Clash. I was energized and politicized and changed by the Clash. And the reason I heard about them was because Dave Vogel bought London Calling at Musicland Records at the local Hawthorne Mall in tiny Libertyville, Illinios. And the reason Dave could get his hands on this album at a nearby mall was because the band was on Epic Records. If in the history of Rage Against the Machine we were able to energize or politicize one person in the same way that the Clash effected me, the decision to sign with Epic Records was not just well worth it, but was crucial.

A couple years ago, I had the opportunity to play on a Joe Strummer record. He was doing a song for the South Park soundtrack, and Rick Rubin asked me to come down and play guitar, because the guy that they had doing it (who incidentally plays in a very popular rock-rap band) just couldn’t cut it. I had never been more nervous in my life as I drove up in my 1971 muscle car to the studio and was introduced to the great Joe Strummer. Joe did not disappoint. While the song was not the best, he certainly was. It seemed like very little recording got done, but a lot of storytelling over quickly ingested bottles of red wine did. Joe told us the story of how he used to always travel with an enormous flight case filled with all his music. Everywhere he went, he carried every cassette and album he owned, so they would always be at the ready for him to listen to. After a couple of decades of doing this, he had grown very weary of having to show countless customs agents his entire reggae collection. So he had boiled it all down to one scratchy 30-minute cassette of an obscure Mexican band that he played for us. He absolutely loved it, and it was the only tape he brought with him from then on. I sat the re listening and beaming like an idiot.

Joe was fascinated with my muscle car. It’s a 1971 hemi-orange Dodge Demon. It was a bizarre site for me to see my greatest rock and roll hero crawling around the front seat of my car marveling over the original Demon-designed floormats with his unique and unchanged accent.

At the studio, he would disappear for hours at a time into his ancient Cadillac, where he would work on lyrics for the song, and listen to the latest mixes that were coming out of the control room. Rick Rubin and I would sit in the control room waiting as a gofer would shuttle notes back and forth from Joe that would read like “I think there could be more treble” or “I’ve almost got the second verse.” Or sometimes they’d be obscure quotations or ramblings that kept us in stitches as we waited for Joe to come back in the room. I took one of these opportunities when Joe was in his Caddy to pick up and strum for myself his famous Telecaster with the “Ignore Alien Orders” sticker on it. Joe was of course the reason why I play a Telecaster, and holding this amazing, historic guitar that had written and performed my favorite songs through the years was a sublime moment. And don’t think I didn’t bring my camera to preserve that moment. Taped to the guitar was an ancient Clash s! etlist , and I marveled over it and wrote the setlist down to keep for posterity, although Joe couldn’t remember what show it was from.

The last time I saw Joe Strummer was when he and his band The Mescaleros played at the Troubadour a year and a half ago. I was truly impressed. Joe played with all the passion and intensity that he had in the Clash’s heyday. And his new music and lyrics were forward-looking and challenging. He was clearly a vital artist to the end. And when he threw in the Clash gems Bank Robber and London’s Burning, the place went absolutely nuts. I yelled so loud I lost my voice for about a week.

In the song “White Riot,” Joe sang:

“Are you taking over
or are you taking orders?
Are you going backwards
Or are you going forwards?”

Write those four lines down, put them on your refrigerator, and answer those four questions for yourself every day. I do.

Joe Strummer was my greatest inspiration, my favorite singer of all time, and my hero. His passing came as such a shock and surprise, and I am deeply saddened by it. I already miss him so much, and I am grateful to have the tremendous legacy of music he left behind. The Clash was one of those bands that even their most remote b-sides are far superior to anything on the radio today. If you haven’t checked out this great band, run don’t walk to all the Clash albums. I am certain that Joe Strummer and the Clash will continue to inspire and agitate well into the future. God bless you, Joe.

The L.A. Forum is a huge arena venue for sports and concerts in Inglewood, CA. Several years back, new owners of the venue hired powerful management corporation SMG to run the venue. SMG pushed deep, deep cuts in the salaries of the stagehands and janitors of the facility, and when these workers sought a new, fairer contract, they were fired. Over 120 workers continue to fight to get their jobs back, at a decent wage.

This video was taken back in March of 2008, and features Serj Tankian interviewing members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees union (IASTE) Local 33, out picketing the Forum. They explain the beginnings of their campaign, and what people like you can do to help.

For more information, you can visit the Justice at the Forum website. You can also get information on how to contact the venue owners, or help spread the word about the struggle here.

I met Hrant Dink at the L.A. premiere of “Screamers”, the documentary by Carla Garapedian featuring System Of A Down. Hrant is interviewed by Carla in the film where he explains how the “deep state” in Turkey is utilizing an outdated penal code, Article 301 to try him, Orhan Pamuk, and other journalists, writers, and human rights activists for “insulting or offending Turkishness.”

In his newspaper Agos, Hrant discussed issues important to the Armenians of Turkey. He was quite careful not to insult anyone in Turkey present or past regarding the Armenian Genocide or any other “sticky issues” that may be taken negatively. He instead tried to truly understand why so many people in Turkey were in denial of their past, why it was important to have a “real democracy” there where everyone can speak freely without worrying about retributions. He was by no means a fanatic nor extremist, but was a humble, kind, yet truthful individual who cared about Turkey, his country, and being Armenian, his culture and heritage.

He yearned to bridge the understanding between Armenians and Turks to get over the pains of the past stemming from the Armenian Genocide by the Ottomans in 1915. The difference between Hrant Dink and Orhan Pamuk and other writers or journalists incriminated under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code was that Hrant Dink was of Armenian descent and therefore may have been viewed more so as a traitor than other Turks of Turkish descent.

After many attempts at appealing the 3 different cases brought against him in reference to Article 301, Hrant was ready to take his case of freedom of speech to the European Court of Human Rights. In the last article he wrote for Agos on Jan. 10th, he made it very clear that the overwhelming amount of death threats against him were psychologically punishing him for speaking out. He felt his life was in extreme danger and asked for help from security officials of the country, but was not given any. When friends encouraged him to leave Turkey to avoid danger, he said that if he left now, he would be betraying the fight for democracy in Turkey, and that wouldn’t be fair to others in his situation. I am not that heroic, I would have left. And funny enough when we met, he mused with me, calling me heroic, the whole time while I looked into his gentle eyes and knew in my heart that he was the true hero. It’s easy for me to speak out against things, because at worst, I’ll be faced with brutal disagreement, where he was faced with prison terms, harassment, psychological torture, and now death.

So he was killed, brutally, in daylight, with bullets to the head, another beautiful soul silenced no more.

Hrant Dink’s cases along with Orhan Pamuk’s past case and many others facing incrimination in Turkey under Article 301 of the penal code encouraged me to work with Amnesty International in getting the word out and working on trying to reverse this unjust incrimination of the freedoms of speech there.

Preface: Two days after the attacks on September 11, 2001, Serj Tankian posted an essay on System of a Down’s official website, which seemed controversial at the time. It was promptly taken down by Sony, the band’s record label. Sony’s opinion was that Tankian had tried to justify the terrorist attacks and that his claims were unfounded. Others have noted that Tankian’s essay, which called the 9/11 attacks “brutal”, explicitly stated that the need to understand the motivations of terrorists “does not mean that we should not find the guilty party(s)..and..try them [in court]” words cited to suggest “it is impossible to say that Serj tried to justify the 9/11 attacks” in his essay, which “advocated peace and the research and development of alternate fuels”.

The brutal attacks/bombings this week in New York, and Washington D.C., along with threats of attacks there and elsewhere in the country have changed our times forever. While the mass media concentrates on the details of the destruction, and the blanketed words of politicians, I will attempt to understand and explain the events from the fence. BOMBING AND BEING BOMBED ARE THE SAME THINGS ON DIFFERENT SIDES OF THE FENCE.

Terror is not a spontaneous human action without credence. People just dont hijack planes and commit harikari (suicide) without any weight of thought to the action. No one in the media seems to ask WHY DID THESE PEOPLE DO THIS HORRIFIC ACT OF VIOLENCE AND DESTRUCTION?

To be able to understand the answer to this, we must first look at our U.S. Mideast Policy. During most of the 20th century, U.S. businesses have worked on attaining oil rights and concessions from countries in the Middle East and Eastern Europe. After WWI, secret back door deals by our State Dept. yielded oil rights from then defeated Turkey to fields in what is now Iraq and Saudi Arabia, in return for looking the other way at a crime against humanity, the Genocide of the Armenians by the Turks. Oil profits have been the motivating factors behind many attempts at counterinsurgency of democratic regimes by the CIA and the U.S in the Middle East (such as Iran in the 1950s, where the Shah replaced the Prime Minister who refused to give up oil rights to the U.S., and since the people couldnt deal with the Shah, an extremist government headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini ultimately prevailed). During the Iran-Iraq war, America supplied both sides with weapons and advice. These are not the actions of a rich superpower wanting peace. Lets not forget that Saddam Hussein, before being Americas vision of the Anti-Christ, was a close ally of the U.S., and the CIA. So what was the firm belief system of consecutive American administrations that caused all this to occur ? PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST WILL LEAD TO HIGHER OIL AND GASOLINE PRICES. Lets not also forget the power of the Arms industry, disguised as defense, that still sells billions of dollars of weapons to the area. Therefore it has not been in the short-term economic interest of the U.S. to foster Peace in the Middle East. Using the above reasoning, the U.S. has encouraged extremist governments, toppled democracies, as in the case of Iran to replace it with a monarchy, rigged elections, and many more unspeakable political crimes for U.S. businesses abroad. Lets not also forget the Red Scare. During the war between the then Soviet Union and Afghanistan, the U.S. armed and supported the Taliban, a fundamentalist Muslim organization, and allowed them to export opium and heroin out of their country to pay for those weapons. Therefore the Taliban rose to power and control with the help of the U.S.A. Today, the bombing of Iraq still continues, no longer covered by the media, the economic embargo still remains, killing millions of children, and recently, while the world and the U.N. General Assembly have cried out to bring in peacekeeping forces into Israel and Palestine, to end the escalated war and recent assassinations, the U.S. has vetoed the rest of the Security Council and has halted the possibility of peace, there, in the most volatile place in the world.

People in Serbia, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Afghanistan to name a few have seen bombs fall, not always at military targets and kill innocent civilians, as the scene in New York city yesterday. The wars waged by our government in our names has landed smack in the middle of our living room. The half hour of destruction closed down all world financial markets, struck the central headquarters of our military, and had our leaders running into bunkers, and our citizens into fear and frenzy. What scares me more than what has occurred is what our reactions to the occurrences may cause. President Bush belongs to a long generation of Republican Presidents who love war economies. The media has only concentrated on the bombings, if you will, and what type of retaliations are looming for the perpetrators. What everyone fails to realize is that the bombings are a reaction to existing injustices around the world, generally unseen to most Americans. To react to a reaction would be to further sponsor the reaction. In other words, my belief is that the terror will multiply if concrete steps are not taken to sponsor peace in the middle east, NOW. This does not mean that we should not find the guilty party(s), Bin Laden, or whoever they may be, and not try them. Put simply, as long as a major injustice remains, violence precipitates to the surface of life.

Native American folklore, the Bible, Nostradamus, and many other major religious beliefs point to this era with the visuals of yesterdays disasters, and conditions of ecological disasters we experience daily in our lives today. War, rumors of war, famine, long burning fires, etc., are at our doorstep. We can prevail over this possible vision with the power of the human spirit, understanding, compassion, and peace. ITS TIME TO PUT OUR NEEDS FOR SECURITY AND SURVIVAL, ACHIEVED ONLY THROUGH PEACE, ABOVE AND BEYOND PROFITS, ESPECIALLY IN THESE TIMES.

SOLUTION:

The U.S. should stop sidestepping the U.N. Security Council, and allow U.N. Peacekeeping troops and missions to the Middle East. Stop the violence first.

Stop the bombing and patrol of Iraq.

With todays gains in the use of alternative fuels, develop them to full usage with autos and other utilities, to make the country less dependant on an already depleting natural reserve, oil.

By initiating peace, we would have already shaken the foundations of support for Bin Laden, and/or all those that sponsor activities like those we saw yesterday, and break the stronghold of extremists on the world of Islam. On the other hand, if we carry out bombings on Afghanistan or elsewhere to appease public demand, and very likely kill innocent civilians along the way, wed be creating many more martyrs going to their deaths in retaliation against the retaliation. As shown from yesterdays events, you cannot stop a person who is ready to die.

Source: www.armeniapedia.org