have any of you guys heard this backwards yet?

OK, I'm planning on reviewing each song in order, but it's late (I don't know why I'm up) and I'll have to stop here for tonight.
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This is a really catchy song. Like all the singles on American Idiot, it does not advance the story a lot. This is the most political song on the album. It's also one of the catchiest. This song is more anti-Bush than "American Idiot". There are anti-war references, protests against the anger against gays and French people (I'm not making a comparison by putting the two groups next to each other). It doesn't directly protest, but it is blatantly subtle.

Any way, good song. The meaning is obvious. It doesn't do a lot for the plot of the album, but it's a catchy single designed to get radio air time and get people to buy the album.
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wats da zeig hell bit all about... i know its kind political but wat does it mean xactly???
BTW luv this song soooo much - really depressin lyrics dat mke me feel happy!!! luv da lyrics as wel...BJA is a genius!!! yea im gonna shut up.

Really agree wit da whole anti-bush n anti-war thing - dats y he says "trails by fire settin fire is not a way thats meant 4 me"!!! The whole bombs goin off thing!!!
and since wen was Billie Joe an outlaw anywayz... o wel he;s still soooo HOT!!!

BTW my fav bit of the whole song has 2 b wher Billie Joe goes "The representative from California has the floor" OMG his voice ther so damn kwl.
n da video is kwl...all of it... jst cracks me up!!! Jeez *goes on2 launch.com* *laughs* i cood get hi on dis alone - wel more hi!!!
n plz stop postin SUCH LONG msgs - hu can bothered 2 read em?
i only wish i cood go 2 Milton Keynes ... damn how cood i hve been ill wen dey performed in Brixton ... damn it (cum bck here soon Billie)

I found this on Wikipedia and had to send it along:

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In a talk given in 1997, [Noam] Chomsky ridiculed the concept of "anti-Americanism" as a symptom of totalitarian thinking:

It's the kind of term you only find in totalitarian societies, as far as I know. So like in the Soviet Union, anti-Sovietism was considered the gravest of all crimes. ...

But try, say, publishing a book on anti-Italianism and see what happens on the streets on Rome or Milan, people won't even bother laughing, it's a ludicrous idea. The idea of Italianism or, you know, Norwayism or something like that would just be objects of ridicule in societies that have some kind of residue of a democratic culture inside people's heads, I don't mean in the formal systems. But in totalitarian societies it is used and as far as I know the United States is the only free society that has such a concept.

PGM: "Zieg Heil" was what the Nazis would say while saluting Hitler/their country. It means "Hail Victory". They would say it when they would do their Hitler salutes. I would argue that rather than comparing Bush to Hitler, they are comparing our country to Nazi Germany. I think they are saying that our country follows its leaders blindly (much like Nazi Germany did). Bush tells us to do something, and we run off and do it (a lot of people not even questioning it because he's our "supreme commander).

I love the "kill all the fags that don't agree" line, not because i agree with it but because it is sarcastic. This is the first band i've heard tackle homosexual rights in this way. I salute Green Day for this. A lot of people are afraid to stand up for homosexuals because they're afraid of negative repurcusions throughout the country.

I absolutely loved Green Day till I listened to the lyrics on this one. Guitar rifts and melody are amazing. With that said....Green Day lost all respect I had for them. Album should have been called American Liberal Idiots or American Traitor. Keep putting out crap lyrics like this and they can brand themselves the Jane Fonda's of their generation. Traitors.

Forgot to quote the line that angered me the most :
"Pulverize the Eiffel towers
Who criticize your government"
"Your" not "Our"
Move to France

Forgot to quote the line that angered me the most :
"Pulverize the Eiffel towers
Who criticize your government"
"Your" not "Our"
Move to France

Jane Fonda has more dignity than all the trailer-park Bush fans who ever disgraced the earth--and so does Green Day.

Maybe GD were talkin to a worldwide audience seeing as Holiday was not just sold in America, but worldwide, where (no matter how hard they try) the American Government will never control.
As well as this it wasnt just America involved in the war... Britain as wel... so they could be referring to us as well, and then those lyrics would not effect us if they said our, as GD are not British.

Wow, I don't own any Green Day albums but this is my favourite single from the new album...I seriously didn't expect the lyrics to be this good, though. Generally speaking I think politics and music don't mix well often, but I really like the way this is written - very poetic but still gets the message across.

But yeah, maybe they should have kept their mouths shut politically. They're no more informed than any of us could easily be.

Some more comments related to the story. Following the introduction of Jesus of Suburbia, he becomes increasingly aware of the world around him. In this song, he sees the problems with war and the government.

I don't know the meaning but this song is kool as!!! It makes me happy!!!

I don't know the meaning but this song is kool as!!! It makes me happy!!!

this song poetically fits on to the rock opera known as american idiot but does make a very strong stand against bush. but the video suggests more towards the plot of the story

I am from the USA and the greatest thing about this song is.... he is able to sing it to the world, sell out concerts, make tons of money on a so far everlasting career that's roots sprouted under the watchful eye of our massive voluntary Air/Armed forces funded by billions of sometimes misused tax dollars. He is able to do all this without fear or abandonment by the very government that affords and protects his freedoms that sponsors his ability to voice his opinion to the world. In no way am I a 'liberal' or 'conservative' or even care so much to discuss how how pulverizing music can be to troops or how bush has failed his people. Its AMERICA and if your from here you surely take for granted your freedoms except for 'the select few". Ya so what if green day has an opinion... some will follow some will criticize and some just like the beat. The main reason I like this song is because I heard a solider tell a reporter he was communicating to a group of Iraqis explaining how under the western laws we can criticize the very people that offer the services and leadership without any repercussions or fear of being tortured. They stood in awe gasping... some started to dance and the kids, not knowing really what was said, followed in by jumping and clapping in place. Pull all the lines off the globe and look at it from above... we all sit back and think we know what its all about... but really were just spoon fed typos with the luxury to voice our opinions.... I hope someday every country has a green day, and a George Bush, it will make the world a better place... if u know what I mean.

i think this song is about greenday creating controversy to get people to buy and listen to there horrible music again

this is way cool I love green day so much they are so brilliant and famous

[Read the facts and see if you can guess who they are attributed to...]


Taken from "When Democracy Failed"
by Thom Hartmann

Published on Sunday, 16 March 2003 by CommonDreams.org


His government received reports of an imminent terrorist attack. A foreign ideologue had launched feeble attacks on a few famous buildings, but the media largely ignored his relatively small efforts. The intelligence services knew, however, that the odds were he would eventually succeed on a larger scale.

The man who claimed to be the nation's leader had not been elected by a majority vote and the majority of citizens claimed he had no right to the powers he coveted. He was a simpleton, some said, a cartoon character of a man who saw things in black-and-white terms and didn't have the intellect to understand the subtleties of running a nation in a complex and internationalist world. His coarse use of language - reflecting his political roots in a southernmost state - and his simplistic and often-inflammatory nationalistic rhetoric offended the aristocrats, foreign leaders, and the well-educated elite in the government and media.


Nonetheless, he knew the terrorist was going to strike (although he didn't know where or when), and he had already considered his response. When an aide brought him word that the nation's most prestigious building was ablaze, he verified it was the terrorist who had struck and then rushed to the scene and called a press conference.


"You are now witnessing the beginning of a great epoch in history," he proclaimed, standing in front of the burned-out building, surrounded by national media. "This fire," he said, his voice trembling with emotion, "is the beginning." He used the occasion - "a sign from God," he called it - to declare an all-out war on terrorism and its ideological sponsors, a people, he said, who traced their origins to the Middle East and found motivation for their evil deeds in their religion.

Two weeks later, the first detention centre for terrorists was built to hold the first suspected allies of the infamous terrorist.


Within four weeks of the terrorist attack, the nation's now-popular leader had pushed through legislation - in the name of combating terrorism and fighting the philosophy he said spawned it - that suspended constitutional guarantees of free speech, privacy, and habeas corpus. Police could now intercept mail and wire-tap phones; suspected terrorists could be imprisoned without specific charges and without access to their lawyers; police could sneak into people's homes without warrants if the cases involved terrorism.

Immediately after passage of the anti-terrorism act, his federal police agencies stepped up their program of arresting suspicious persons and holding them without access to lawyers or courts.

Playing on this new nationalism, and exploiting a disagreement with the French over his increasing militarism, he argued that any international body that didn't act first and foremost in the best interest of his own nation was neither relevant nor useful. He then negotiated a separate naval armaments agreement with the United Kingdom to create a worldwide military ruling elite.


His propaganda minister orchestrated a campaign to ensure the people that he was a deeply religious man and that his motivations were rooted in Christianity.

With his number two man - a master at manipulating the media - he began a campaign to convince the people of the nation that a small, limited war was necessary. Another nation was harbouring many of the suspicious Middle Eastern people, and even though its connection with the terrorist who had set afire the nation's most important building was tenuous at best, it held resources their nation badly needed if they were to have room to live and maintain their prosperity. He called a press conference and publicly delivered an ultimatum to the leader of the other nation, provoking an international uproar. He claimed the right to strike pre-emptively in self-defence, and nations
across Europe - at first - denounced him for it, pointing out that it was a doctrine only claimed in the past by nations seeking worldwide empire, like Caesar's Rome or Alexander's Greece.


It took a few months, and intense international debate and lobbying with European nations, but, after he personally met with the leader of the United Kingdom, finally a deal was struck. After the military action began, the Prime Minister told the nervous British people that giving in to this leader's new first-strike doctrine would bring "peace for our time."



[Beginning to sound familiar...? ]





Thus it was that Hitler annexed Austria in a lightning move, riding a wave of popular support as leaders so often do in times of war. The Austrian government was unseated and replaced by a new leadership friendly to Germany, and German corporations began to take over Austrian resources.


In a speech responding to critics of the invasion, Hitler said, "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say; even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier [into Austria] there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."

To deal with those who dissented from his policies, at the advice of his politically savvy advisers, he and his handmaidens in the press began a campaign to equate him and his policies with patriotism and the nation itself. National unity was essential, they said, to ensure that the terrorists or their sponsors didn't think they'd succeeded in splitting the nation or weakening its will. In times of war, they said, there could be only "one people, one nation, and one commander-in-chief" ("Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer"), and so his advocates in the media began a nationwide campaign charging that critics of his policies were attacking the nation itself. Those questioning him were labelled "anti-German" or "not good Germans," and it was suggested they were aiding the enemies of the state by failing in the patriotic necessity of supporting the nation's valiant men in uniform. It was one of his most effective ways to stifle dissent and pit wage-earning people (from whom most of the army came) against the "intellectuals and liberals" who were critical of his policies.

Nonetheless, once the "small war" annexation of Austria was successfully and quickly completed, and peace returned, voices of opposition were again raised in the Homeland. The almost-daily release of news bulletins about the dangers of terrorist communist cells wasn't enough to rouse the populace and totally suppress dissent. A full-out war was necessary to divert public attention
from the growing rumbles within the country about disappearing dissidents; violence against liberals, Jews, and union leaders; and the epidemic of crony capitalism that was producing empires of wealth in the corporate sector but threatening the middle class's way of life.

A year later, to the week, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia; the nation was now fully at war, and all internal dissent was suppressed in the name of national security. It was the end of Germany's first experiment with democracy.

As we conclude this review of history, there are a few milestones worth remembering.

27 February 2003, was the 70th anniversary of Dutch terrorist Marinus van der Lubbe's successful firebombing of the German Parliament (Reichstag) building, the terrorist act that catapulted Hitler to legitimacy and reshaped the German constitution. By the time of his successful and brief action to seize Austria, in which almost no German blood was shed, Hitler was the most beloved and popular leader in the history of his nation. Hailed around the world, he was later Time magazine's "Man Of The Year."

Most Americans remember his office for the security of the homeland, known as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt and its SchutzStaffel, simply by its most famous agency's initials: the SS.

We also remember that the Germans developed a new form of highly violent warfare they named "lightning war" or blitzkrieg, which, while generating devastating civilian losses, also produced a highly desirable "shock and awe" among the nation's leadership according to the authors of the 1996 book "Shock And Awe" published by the National Defence University Press.

Reflecting on that time, The American Heritage Dictionary (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983) left us this definition of the form of government the German democracy had become through Hitler's close alliance with the largest German corporations and his policy of using war as a tool to keep power: "fas-cism (fbsh'iz'em) n. A system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership, together with belligerent nationalism."

Today, as we face financial and political crises, it's useful to remember that the ravages of the Great Depression hit Germany and the United States alike. Through the 1930s, however, Hitler and Roosevelt chose very different courses to bring their nations back to power and prosperity.

Germany's response was to use government to empower corporations and reward the society's richest individuals, privatise much of the commons, stifle dissent, strip people of constitutional rights, and create an illusion of prosperity through continual and ever-expanding war. America passed minimum wage laws to raise the middle class, enforced anti-trust laws to diminish the power of
corporations, increased taxes on corporations and the wealthiest individuals, created Social Security, and became the employer of last resort through programs to build national infrastructure, promote the arts, and replant forests.

To the extent that our Constitution is still intact, the choice is again ours.

Thom Hartmann lived and worked in Germany during the 1980s, and is the
author of over a dozen books, including "Unequal Protection" and "The Last
Hours of Ancient Sunlight." This article is copyright by Thom Hartmann,
but permission is granted for reprint in print, email, blog, or web media
so long as this credit is attached.


..

"Just cause, just cause were on holiday"...i hear just cause, just cause, because were all the same...am i the only one?

it's so annoying, all their songs are soooo political, boriiiiiiiiiiiiing

Following the whole theme of the parallels between current US policy and that that took place in Nazi Germany, I would imagine that the line "Bang bang goes the broken glass" would be a reference to November 9th, 1938, otherwise known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. One that night, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned and looted throughout Germany. Dozens of Jews were killed in the chaotic riots and 30,000 Jews were arrested the morning after only for being Jewish.

It is now widely considered that Hitler and his propaganda minister Goebbels orchestrated this whole charade so as to focus and utilize the discontent of the German people to their advantage. Hitler set the spotlight on the Jews and their supposed crimes, this infuriated and drove the German people to action. In the process they rallied behind their leader.

If one wanted to examine parallels between President Bush and Hitler, one could look to Bush's 2004 reelection strategy. In this instance, Bush following the advice of his senior political advisor, Karl Rove, decided that he could mobilize large segments of his base by drumming up homosexual issues, with special emphasis on gay marriage. By focusing attention on something that he knew his followers disliked (gay marriage) he was able to drive them to the polls. In this way, George Bush was able to draw attention to a particularly unpopular portion of the population in order to bolster his power.

This is reflected in the line following "Bang bang goes the broken glass" which is "Kill all the fags that don't agree." For those not in the know, fag is a derogatory slur meaning homosexual. And language like "kill all the fags" I would imagine to be drummed up so as to make the link more visible.

I would like to point out that the actions taken by George Bush in no way compare to those of Hitler and the Nazi Party. While there may be reoccuring themes, these are as different as a toy gun and an Uzi. So, I urge you to consider that while the approach or methods may be similar, there are immense degrees of separation between looting, jailing, and killing Jews and talking tough about gay marriage.

Following the whole theme of the parallels between current US policy and that that took place in Nazi Germany, I would imagine that the line "Bang bang goes the broken glass" would be a reference to November 9th, 1938, otherwise known as Kristallnacht or the Night of Broken Glass. One that night, thousands of synagogues and Jewish businesses were burned and looted throughout Germany. Dozens of Jews were killed in the chaotic riots and 30,000 Jews were arrested the morning after only for being Jewish.

It is now widely considered that Hitler and his propaganda minister Goebbels orchestrated this whole charade so as to focus and utilize the discontent of the German people to their advantage. Hitler set the spotlight on the Jews and their supposed crimes, this infuriated and drove the German people to action. In the process they rallied behind their leader.

If one wanted to examine parallels between President Bush and Hitler, one could look to Bush's 2004 reelection strategy. In this instance, Bush following the advice of his senior political advisor, Karl Rove, decided that he could mobilize large segments of his base by drumming up homosexual issues, with special emphasis on gay marriage. By focusing attention on something that he knew his followers disliked (gay marriage) he was able to drive them to the polls. In this way, George Bush was able to draw attention to a particularly unpopular portion of the population in order to bolster his power.

This is reflected in the line following "Bang bang goes the broken glass" which is "Kill all the fags that don't agree." For those not in the know, fag is a derogatory slur meaning homosexual. And language like "kill all the fags" I would imagine to be drummed up so as to make the link more visible.

I would like to point out that the actions taken by George Bush in no way compare to those of Hitler and the Nazi Party. While there may be reoccuring themes, these are as different as a toy gun and an Uzi. So, I urge you to consider that while the approach or methods may be similar, there are immense degrees of separation between looting, jailing, and killing Jews and talking tough about gay marriage.

The song isn't calling Bush "Hitler" It's calling Sadam "Hitler" He's the one that gassed his own people, as the President of Iraq.

"Zeig Heil to the president gasman
Bombs away is your punishment..."

The rest of the song is definitely critical of the Bush Administration and their handling of foreign policy, but the first two lines aren't.