Recorded while
Biafra was on the Spitfire Tour in November of 2001, this CD is a 33-minute-long speech about the war on terrorism and all things related and unrelated. Many of
Biafra's criticisms of Bush's shortsighted foreign policy in the war on terrorism are right on. He discusses Bush's comment that, "The only way to pursue peace is to pursue the people threatening it." He says that the U.S. government's response to September 11 should involve negotiating and addressing the root causes of terrorism. But like many other antiwar activists,
Biafra doesn't seem to fathom that the U.S. can ever handle any problem by military means without it being some form of imperialism. He doesn't mention whether he is for or against a military response to September 11, but rather suggests that pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, ending sanctions in Iraq, and other similar moves, will go farther in the fight against terrorism. It's a somewhat old school, peacenik view of the current problem, and one that has been better expressed by the likes of Noam Chomsky. There are also several problems with this CD. One is that a lot of the information is out of date. For instance, he talks a lot about airport screeners being privatized, but since then the whole system has been taken over by the federal government. And
Biafra has always been overly paranoid, which comes up many times in this speech, like when he suggests the anthrax scare might have been a government plot to distract Americans from antiterrorism legislation or as an excuse to expand the war into Iraq, but no facts are involved in that theory. So, this should only be of interest to people who haven't gotten a hold of other alternative points-of-view about the war on terrorism. But there are more up to date, less paranoid perspectives readily available in many newspapers and on numerous websites. ~ Adam Bregman