Mausoleum is the eighth track on The Holy Bible and like the penultimate track The intense humming of evil concerns itself with the holocaust inspired by their visits to Dachau and hiroshima Peace museum as a band.
Dachau is such an evil, quiet place. There’s no grass, and you don’t even see a worm, let alone any birds. All you can hear is this humming of nothing.
Nicky Wire
Includes the quote:
“I wanted to rub the human face in its own vomit… and force it to look in the mirror.” – British author J.G. Ballard (1930 – 2009) explaining in an interview his motivations in writing the novel Crash (1973).
Wherever you go I will be carcass
Whatever you see will be rotting flesh
Humanity recovered glittering etiquette
Answers her crimes with Mausoleum rent
Regained your self-control
And regained your self-esteem
And blind your success inspires
And analyse, despise and scrutinise
Never knowing what you hoped for
And safe and warm but life is so silent
For the victims who have no speech
In their shapeless guilty remorse
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Your meaning, your meaning
No birds, no birds
The sky is swollen black
No birds, no birds
Holy mass of dead insect
Come and walk down memory lane
No one sees a thing but they can pretend
Life eternal scorched grass and trees
For your love nature has hemorrhaged
Regained your self-control
And regained your self-esteem
And blind your success inspires
And analyse, despise and scrutinise
Never knowing what you hoped for
And safe and warm but life is so silent
For the victims who have no speech
In their shapeless guilty remorse
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Obliterates your meaning
Your meaning, your meaning
No birds, no birds
The sky is swollen black
No birds, no birds
Holy mass of dead insect
And life can be as important as death
But so mediocre when there’s no air, no light and no hope
Prejudice burns brighter when it’s all we have to burn
The world lances youth’s lamblike winter, winter
An amazing essay that delves into the holocaust sections of the holy bible:
https://227lears.com/2021/12/06/this-world-of-negation/
The intense humming of evil
“The court has come. The court of the Nations. And into the courtroom will come the martyrs of Majdanek, and Oswiecim. From the ditch of Kerch, the dead will rise. They will arise from the graves, they will arise from flames bringing with them the acrid smoke and the deathly odour of scorched and martyred Europe. And the children, they too will come, stern and merciless. The butchers had no pity on them; now the victims will judge the butchers. Today the tear of the child is the judge. The grief of the mother is the prosecutor.“
The sample comes from a 1947 Soviet-made English language documentary on the Nuremberg Trials, where leaders in the Nazi Party or individuals responsible for the Holocaust were tried for their war crimes and genocide.
https://archive.org/details/Nuremberg_Trials
You were what you were
Clean cut, and unbecoming
Recreation for the masses
You always mistook fists for flowers
Welcome welcome soldier smiling
Funeral march for agony’s last edge
6 Million screaming souls
Maybe misery – maybe nothing at all
Lives that wouldn’t have changed a thing
Never counted – never mattered – never be
Arbeit macht frei
Transports of invalids
Hartheim Castle breathes us in
In block 5 we worship malaria
Lagerstrasse, poplar trees
Beauty lost, dignity gone
Rascher surveys us butcher bacteria
Welcome welcome soldier smiling
Funeral march for agony’s last edge
6 Million screaming souls
Maybe misery – maybe nothing at all
Lives that wouldn’t have changed a thing
Never counted – never mattered – never be
Drink it away, every tear is false
Churchill no different
Wished the workers bled to a machine
Andy Johnson wrote the article below which can be found in this link https://manicsdiscog.wordpress.com/2013/03/04/72-the-intense-humming-of-evil/
It was inevitable that a song explicitly and very obviously based on the band’s trips to a pair of Nazi concentration camps would end up becoming the darkest and most difficult listen in the entire discography. It isn’t just a question of subject matter: the Manics’ experiences in those places impacted enormously on the musical composition of the (fantastically titled) ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’. It isn’t anger, confusion or madness that drips from every drum beat and guitar figure in the song: it is pure horror. Portraying horror in music is something that few bands seriously attempt, and that fewer still can actually pull off. ‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ was never exactly single material, but it is devastatingly effective at what it aims to do.
A surprisingly large part of the atmosphere comes from the very long opening quote, which comes from the English-language Soviet documentary film – not a news report – about the Nuremberg Trials which took place between 1945 and 1949 at the Palace of Justice in the German city of Nuremberg. The quote uses the Russian name for Auschwitz (“osventsim”) instead of the more commonly heard German one. The unusual ringing, metallic sound which repeats throughout much of the song alongside Moore’s drums is also a key part of the deeply disturbing atmosphere. The outro is also noteworthy – it sputters to a stop like a failing engine, or a life ending. It is harrowing stuff.
‘The Intense Humming of Evil’ is significant in a more subtle way than its sheer darkness – in being neither a rock song nor an acoustic piece, it is a very early example of a Manics track which is primarily about atmosphere and creating a particular feel. This type of approach would become much more prominent on later records, although of course the band would never record anything quite like this track again.
The song is also one of the only ones about which a bit of internal dissent over lyrics has been recorded: it is said that Bradfield requested that changes be made to be words to make them more judgemental (“you can’t be ambivalent about the Holocaust”). Given his own comments about the song, it is possible that Edwards intended it to be partly about Holocaust denialism, which he described as “one of the few examples where even truth is being questioned” and which has continued to pop up in the media occasionally since 1994. The final lines also criticise Winston Churchill, usually thought of as a hero of the United Kingdom. The line “Churchill no different / wished the workers bled to a machine” is probably a reference to his fierce opposition to and determination to destroy Bolshevism (and by extension, leftist politics in general).
Choice Lyric
“in Block Five we worship malaria”
References
Arbeit macht frei – German for “work brings freedom” or “work makes you free”. Inscribed over the gates of Auschwitz.
Transport of invalids – an official Nazi euphemism for the transports used to take people to the death camps.
Hartheim Castle – a castle near Linz, Austria used as one of several euthanasia centres during the Nazi era. Around 18,000 physically and mentally disabled people were murdered there under the “Aktion T4” programme.
Block Five – a specific block at Dachau camp used for medical experimentation, including deliberately infecting prisoners with malaria.
Malaria – an often deadly infectious disease carried by mosquitoes and widespread in tropical and subtropical regions.
Lagerstrasse – German for “camp street”. Used to refer to the main avenues in concentration camps.
Rascher – Sigmund Rascher (1909 – 1945), German SS doctor known for various barbaric and deadly experiments at Dachau. Executed in 1945 by the Nazis after his attempts to please Heinrich Himmler backfired spectacularly.
Churchill – Winston Churchill (1874 – 1965), Prime Minister of the UK during WWII and again from 1951 to 1955.
My own thoughts on the songs are they are bleak and are obsessed with the horror of the holocaust, I was introduced to new words and phrases such as Arbeit Macht Frei which the irony of having that emblazoned above a concentration camp will never lose me.
Above is my own obsession with the holocaust with my image of an Aryan woman breastfeeding whilst oblivious to the horror that surrounds her.
This image features a lot in my artwork and reappears in different forms.
Rusty'sArtWerk 