Rage Against the Machine - Testify Lyrics Meaning

"Mr. Anchor assure me, that Baghdad is burning"

I don't necessarily believe that this song is solely about the Gulf War. Having been written in 1999, the United States had already carried out airstrikes against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 1997. We also had sanctions in place, which Saddam used to starve over 500,000 people, and RATM was incredibly aware of that. I think this more related to our repeated and drawn out attempts to secure Iraqi oil fields for the world market. The United States continued it's aggression against Iraq throughout the 1990s, and the second Gulf War was on the planning table since 1997. It shouldn't have been difficult to predict that the United States would find a way to wage for in Iraq for control of its oil. Therefore, this song is about the past, it was about contemporary US foreign policy and it was prophetic. Stripped down, it's about the US's lust for control in that region. Citing the city of Baghdad could have meant a few things. It could very well be a song about Iraq, or Baghdad could have been used to represent US interests in the region as Iraq would surely be the first stepping stone to any US military action in the Middle/Near East.

And about the Aussie. I have an Aussie friend from college so let's get that out of the way. Americans are not little Bushes, we're not little Clintons, or Reagans, or Roosevelts either. Americans generally do not care about politics and this is the result of an economy based on mass consumerism. Americans are more worried about earning money and buying new cars, houses, iPods, jet skis to worry about the meddling our government might be doing in foreign countries that most people don't know exist. The media will decide who wins elections in this country as most people are not political thinkers and lack the historical insight to be so. I'm really sick of all of these myopic stereotypes of Americans being gung-ho and all pro-war because Australians descend from the English, and like the great George Carlin once said, "All English people deserve to die". Now of course I mean that lightly for our trans-Pacific brethren, but look, some of our largest critics are Europeans...the people that gave us nationalism, fascism, eugenics, the Holocaust, Social Darwinism. Europeans are among the greatest hypocrites on Earth, and yes, "American Democracy" isn't all it's cracked up to be either...by a long shot, but it's like a thief accusing another thief of thievery.