Black Sabbath - War Pigs
To Whom Is It a Benefit?
Every Friday is Black Friday if you listen to Black Sabbath, and there’s always money for war if you’re a first-world country. Rich, power-mad, heartless politicians producing Survivor: Global Edition have always and will always make time and find money for wars they don’t have to personally fight. The boys in Black Sabbath agreed with the hippies’ anti-war position, but the lads grew up in Birmingham, England - a bleak, industrial slab of a town - and the hippie approach was clown shoes to them. They favored something… heavier. Uranium heavy. Osmium heavy. In Sabbath’s heavy-metal-beams-falling-from-the-sky vision, the begging war pigs are handed over to Satan. This is as it should be. War Pigs is a Molotov cocktail aimed at war and all the metric fuck tons of hypocrisy that come with it. It’s the entrance music for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, not the generals gathered in their masses treating the world like their own personal game of Risk.
As strange as it may sound, War Pigs is Jon Stewart shooting bazooka-sized holes in the pro-war arguments. Black Sabbath took a sledgehammer to the war machine with this massive satirical roast, skewering those who benefit from conflict while sending young people off to play real-life Call of Duty. Ask not what wars cost, but who profits the most. Cui bono? Who benefits? In the Afghanistan War, the answer is Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics. If one had purchased $10,000 of stocks and evenly divided it among just those five defense contractors – that money would now be worth almost $100,000, a greater return than the rest of the S&P over the last two decades. The war wasn’t about protecting American freedom. What the hell would American freedom be doing in Afghanistan anyway? How did it get there? That’s a bizarre place to holiday. The U.S. spent $300 million on the war. Per day. Do you feel more free? There’s copper in Afghanistan though. There’s $500 billion in gas under Gaza. Sudan has gold. There’s cobalt in Congo. Haiti has limestone. West Papua has crude oil. If you listen closely and read carefully you can hear freedom bells.
Hawkeye: War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse.
Father Mulcahy: How do you figure that, Hawkeye?
Hawkeye: Easy, Father. Tell me, who goes to Hell?
Father Mulcahy: Um, sinners, I believe.
Hawkeye: Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell, but war is chock full of them – little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.M*A*S*H, season 5, episode 20
War Pigs became the anthem for the anti-establishment crowd, the rebels with a cause, or maybe just rebels without a clue - but goddamn does the song just thunder. The bass line emerges from the molten core of the Earth (one of Black Sabbath’s original names), the lumbering and groundbreaking riff in E minor and that oh-so-ominous air raid siren let you know inside a minute this might actually be the soundtrack for Judgement Day
Now, in darkness, world stops turning
Ashes where their bodies burning
No more war pigs have the power
Hand of God has struck the hour
Day of Judgment, God is calling
On their knees, the war pigs crawling-Black Sabbath, War Pigs
Let the puppet masters crawl to their fate. I chose my words purposefully there. Metallica, sons of Sabbath, named their brutally masterful third album Master of Puppets, and it also deals with the hypocrisy of military and religious leaders. Hollywood and TV bigwigs aren't just raking in the cash from rom-coms and superhero flicks. They've also been cashing in on war. According to the script, war is this noble, valiant adventure where folks find their true purpose in defending the motherland. But hold your popcorn, because the reality is war doesn't just turn people into heroes; it's more like a monster-making machine, churning out moral chaos faster than a drama series cliffhanger. Guess who's laughing all the way to the bank? You already know – the puppet masters orchestrating the whole show, turning tragedy into financial triumph. War, my friends, where the only thing more twisted than the plot is the profit margins.
*The author is a decorated member of the U.S. Naval Service, 1998-2022*
Well said. I loved this song, Megadeath, Metallica, anyone who was growling what a lot of us knew to be true. The hypocrisy of the machine, I still hate it as it attempts to grind my bones to dust at every turn. Faith No More did a cover of the song, it’s one of my favorite covers.