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Popular Culture Review
crush overt opposition to the capitalistic status quo. Throughout their career, Dead
Kennedys painted a picture of an America that touted itself as a peaceful nation
despite a record of political assassinations, police-state scenarios, and the
American war machine’s imperialistic interventions in Vietnam, Central America,
and elsewhere throughout the world. The use of official violence to silence the
restless masses is at the core of the controversial 1980 song, “Kill the Poor,” with
an enraged Biafra declaring:
Efficiency and progress is ours once more
now that we have the neutron bomb
it’s nice and quick and clean and gets things done
away with excess enemy
but no less value to property
no sense in war but perfect sense at home.
Here, the band is assuming the vantage point of an American government
considering various options to rid this country of its slums, including eradicating
them with nuclear weapons. And in the 1982 song, “Bleed for Me,” Dead
Kennedys stake out the position that America will resort to any violent means in
order to protect its financial interests and to secure petroleum. Biafra sings:
In the name of world peace
in the name of world profits
America pumps up our secret police
America wants fuel
to get it, it needs puppets
so what’s ten million dead?
If it’s keeping out the Russians.
The band’s examination of fascism mirrors Staub’s analysis of groupinduced violence and genocide. Staub maintains that rarely is the state’s use of
official violence directed only at people who cause suffering. Instead, its intensity
and the circle of its victims tend to increase over time, as reflected in the history
of torture. For example, in the Middle Ages, when torture was part of the legal
system, the circle of victims expanded over time. Starting with low-status
members of society accused of a crime, progressively higher-status defendants
and then witnesses were tortured in order to extract evidence from them (26). In
examining group-related acts of violence, such as political torture, as phenomena
representing human evil, Staub concludes: “Ordinary psychological processes and
normal, common human motivations and certain basic but not inevitable
tendencies in human thought and feeling (such as devaluation of others) are the
primary sources of evil. Frequently, the perpetrators’ own insecurity and suffering