Reactionary Pacifist Garbage - MC49
The Cranberries's have a new song "Zombie" with reactionary pacifist politics that is getting a lot of air time. The song focuses on the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and condemns the armed liberation struggles of the oppressed while maintaining complete silence about the greater violence of the oppressors.
Most insidious, it appeals to the masses' strong and just desire for an end to war and violence and diverts that desire into counterrevolution and continued oppression.. As Mao Zedong said, "We [revolutionary communists] are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."(1) To rid the world of war and violence, we need to first rid the world of the gross inequalities which make the violence of the oppressed against their oppressors just. To do so requires armed struggle which "Zombie" opposes.
Also insidious about "Zombie" is that it is pretty good musically, and likely to appeal to many potentially revolutionary youth on the grounds of musical quality alone.
About the only thing MIM can be happy about in "Zombie" is that it's hard to understand. The lyrics are printed in microscopic type, and unless you know that the Irish armed struggle started in 1916 and you saw an interview with the Cranberries where they explain that the dead person in the song was killed by the IRA, you won't get it. MIM tries to be as clear as possible in our limited media. If the reactionaries want to be muddled, that's fine with us.
Youth are a large part of MIM's organizing efforts, and the way in which some bands use their cultural popularity with youth to propagate reactionary politics is disturbing. The Beatles were probably the most popular band in this century, and they used their influence to spread pacifism and attack revolutionary science.
The Beatles' "Revolution," told youth to forget about upholding Chairperson Mao's revolutionary line and instead "free their minds," presumably with drugs, religion, psychology, Beatles music - i.e., with selfish, individualistic escapism. The Beatles, too, appealed to the young masses' hatred of war: "We all want to change the world, but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out. You know it's gonna be all right.... [So don't worry about fighting imperialism, capitalism and patriarchy. After all, Maoists] want money for people with minds that hate."
Similarly, the Cranberries tell their young audience that the revolution is a result of a psychological problem, not a result of a real force: imperialism. According to the Cranberries, centuries of military, political and economic violence imposed on the Irish masses by British imperialism doesn't exist except in the delusional minds of Irish nationalists.
The song opens with a description of the death of a young British casualty of Ireland's just war for national liberation: "Another head hangs lowly...." The Cranberries say that "It's been the same old theme since 1916," when the Irish masses rose up against British imperialism.
Like the Beatles, the Cranberries ignore the violence of the oppressors and determine that the cause of war is revolutionaries' lack of individualism. To the Cranberries, revolutionaries are mindless zombies, hence the song's title.
Revolutionaries need to combat imperialist ideology in all arenas, including "alternative" pop music and culture generally. Young people who agree with us on this point should create anti- imperialist culture for MIM, or work in other ways to build MIM-led anti-imperialist institutions. By doing so, we can build towards the day when the airwaves are controlled by the people to serve the people, and reactionary pacifists like the Beatles and the Cranberries do not get disproportionate, unrebutted airplay.
NOTES: 1. Mao Zedong "Problems of War and Strategy" Vol. II, p. 225.