AMERICAN LIES

I decided to call my latest album 'American Lies' because I wanted to provoke thought in Americans and people around the world. I wanted to remind them that America is a country built upon, and driven by lies and hypocrisy, starting with the mass genocide of millions of Native Americans, destroying their culture, their whole eco-system and relationship with animals and the earth, to today's horrible and miscalculated war on terrorism, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Throughout American history we have closed our eyes to genocide all over the world, and the American government will only get involved if it can somehow benefit the United States of America financially.

We praise freedom and peace, but we still keep people segregated because of their ethnicity or gender. All the people, the USA citizens, that would strive to invoke change and bring people together in a peaceful way, were, or will be eliminated - Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert F. Kennedy and the list continues. The roots of these murders go a lot deeper than the accused murderers. Why were the Warren Commission files sealed on the Kennedy assassination in 1963 - sealed until the year 2029? This is obscene! The records would not be sealed if there wasn't anything to hide.

Americans should never presume to think that their country is the only place without the blood of genocide, racism, sexism, and the gross corruption of capitalism on its hands. Land of the free, home of the brave? Bullshit! I am proud of people who take the values that are promoted about what America should represent, and try to live up to these values and introduce other Americans to these values. We have to remember that this is a country that promotes freedom of speech, but does not like to be talked about.

At 18 years old, you can join the armed forces and go to war to kill hundreds of people, but back in America you're not able to even drink a beer! That's true American freedom! LET THE TRUTH BE TOLD!

As a black American coming from a lower middle class family, I have seen and experienced the other side of America - the outrageously corporate and ruthless, to the unbelievably poor people in the ghettos. I have also challenged what was told to me by the media and the Republican propaganda machine that is a direct comparison with that propaganda machine of Hitler's Nazi Germany. That right-winged agenda is not an agenda of hope, but of control, lust for power and greed, making the rich richer and the poor poorer. There are some wonderful people who believe in the truth and don't abuse the word 'freedom' - a great word which because of the George W. Bush administration, has become a guttural laughable nothing. It's not just Americans that have to respond to the abuse of the words freedom and peace, but the whole world! If we don't react we will have no world left! Rock on and spread peace!

Lord Bishop, August 2004

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