Fugs

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill, kill, kill for peace

In the Near, the Middle and the Far East

In the Far, the Near or the Very Middle East

If you don't like those people or the way they talk,

If you don't like the way they act or the way they walk

A phenomenal band, one of the towering examples of musicians who fathered the underground, pioneers - albeit marginal ones - of a wholly alternative way of approaching art, the Fugs embodied the most authentic soul of hippie counterculture and an utterly different take on American psychedelia, with no allegiance whatsoever to the rules of the market. Ironic and irreverent, anarchic and hostile to any compromise, capable of turning their shows into poetic musical-theatrical works, the Fugs bore authentic witness to the most sincere pacifism, so uncompromising as to come across as extreme even to the staunchest supporter of hippie ideals. Among the many merits of Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg's band is that of having embodied two fundamental contradictions, both of capitalist society and of the youth counterculture movement.

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill, kill, kill for peace

If you don't kill them, the Chinese will kill you

If you don't want America to play second fiddle

An emblem of this contradiction (seemingly endless, given recent events and Trump's recent statements) is the historic song "Kill For Peace", taken from "The Fugs" (1966), which, alongside tracks like the legendary "War Sucks" by Red Crayola, stands as the crowning achievement of hippie pacifism. "Kill For Peace" - in a bizarre folk-rock style reminiscent of the most sardonic Frank Zappa - screams out the deep contradiction of modern Western capitalism, forced to constantly chase new markets or new sources of raw materials in order to survive. So waging war for "peace", killing in order to "live", no longer looks like a dystopian Orwellian non-sense today (worth recalling here is the famous Socing slogan from the novel "1984": "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength"), but rather turns into a palatable idea that can be sold without shame by the manipulators of public opinion. An inevitable contradiction that the Fugs understood perfectly well. The natural tendency of capitalism is toward infinity, the myth of eternal growth, an endless contradiction that can only lead to endless war, to an ever-growing list of countries smeared with the label "rogue state", to be saved through a purifying work of destruction, always in the name of peace, of course.

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill, kill, kill for peace

If you let them live they might help the Russians

If you let them live they might love the Russians

But "Kill For Peace" is also an anthem to one of the greatest contradictions of the hippie movement, probably the main cause of its own premature demise. Tied to the most genuine idea of universal peace, of anti-racism, of equality between men and women, between Black and white people, and possibly between rich and poor, the hippies represent, from certain points of view, the very opposite of capitalist ideology, which regards man's domination over man as its religion, and the subjugation of the different and the weak as its inevitable outcome.

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill them, kill them, punish those yellow-skinned bastards!

The only yellow face an American can trust

is the one whose yellow head has been smashed in.

Opposed by the bourgeoisie, the bourgeois press and the police, the movement fractures and eventually implodes, as it becomes clear how hard it is to fight peacefully against those who use violence as a matter of course. Can you fight the people waging the Vietnam War without resorting to violence yourself? If you turn violent, do you risk becoming just like the enemy you oppose? These are legitimate questions, and they become unbridgeable rifts at the tragic Altamont Festival in December 1969 and in the bloodshed caused by the Hell's Angels. From that moment on, it's clear that innocence has been lost, that perhaps it's better for the dream to end right away, before it curdles into a nightmare. And considering that just a few months earlier — in August — the Manson Family had already carried out the Cielo Drive massacre, killing Roman Połański's wife Sharon Tate, it's easy to see how the Fugs' prophecy had by then become a grim reality.

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill, kill, kill for peace

Kill, kill, it'll make you feel so good,

killing will give you a great release

The song was used by Serbian director Dušan Makavejev in his film "W.R. – Misterije Organizma" (1971), where the entire track accompanies a hippie disguised as a soldier as he wanders the streets of New York, ending his journey by miming masturbation with his rifle — a metaphorical nod to the theories of psychologist Wilhelm Reich, who saw militarism as the bitter fruit of sexual repression and man's hyper-narcissistic urge to violently dominate his fellow man.

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06/04/2026