WhatFinger

From the 'it can always get worse' file.

Indonesia: Musical tribute to Presidential candidate combines Nazis and Queen in bizarre anthem

By Robert Laurie ——--June 26, 2014

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It's an election year and, if you own a TV or radio, the odds are you're already sick of the ads, the celebrity endorsements, and, well, basically the whole thing. We get it. It's tedious. But we're also here to tell you it can always get worse.
Ahmad Dhani is an Indonesian musician who supports the presidential candidacy of Prabowo Subianto. To help his favorite politician, he decided to sing a version of Queen's "We Will Rock You" to rally the troops behind his favorite politician. Unfortunately, it seems those "troops" may have come pouring out of Berlin in the 1930's. From Time.com:
In the video, an adaptation of the Queen classic “We Will Rock You,” musician Ahmad Dhani sports a fascist-style uniform and holds a golden Garuda — a mythical bird that is Indonesia's emblem but which, against the black of his paramilitary attire, looks uncomfortably like the German imperial eagle that the Nazis incorporated into their iconography.
Bali-based filmmaker Daniel Ziv described the video as bringing “Nazi skinhead imagery to Indonesian politics.” That turns out to be an apt description. German news magazine Der Spiegel pointed out that Dhani’s military costume is eerily similar to the uniform worn by SS commander Heinrich Himmler. “Dhani wears the same emblem on the lapel and the same red breast-pocket lining,” it said Tuesday, comparing the photos of the two in a photo gallery.
Dhani says it's no big deal, since there's no connection between Indonesia and Hitler's regime "We, the Indonesian people, didn’t kill millions of Jewish people, right?” For the record, Prabowo Subianto seems pretty excited about it. He thanked the band via Facebook and said the video had boosted his campaign's "fighting spirit." That's probably not a surprise since:
Over the weekend, American journalist Allan Nairn posted on his blog a 2001 interview in which Prabowo said that Indonesia needed “a benign authoritarian regime.” The former general, who made clear his admiration toward Pakistan's then ruling strongman Pervez Musharraf, told Nairn: “Do I have the guts, am I ready to be called a fascist dictator? Musharraf had the guts.”
Hmmmm. that's almost as unsettling as Dhani's "We Will Rock You" cover is terrible. It's also one more reason to be thankful you live in the United States and not Indonesia - no matter how annoying our elections get...
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Robert Laurie——

Robert Laurie’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain.com

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