What's Your Favorite Song About Peace?

Once again, America has gone to war. Here at WAIM, we're marching for peace and we are gonna need a soundtrack. What anti-war jam is your favorite?

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Late on Saturday night, June 21, 2025 American B-52 bombers carried a massive payload of bunker buster bombs and dropped them on suspected Iranian nuclear sites. Once again we find ourselves headed towards a possible war which will likely cost billions, or perhaps trillions of dollars, and end the lives of thousands or more. Whatever happens moving forward, we have once again chosen to use violence to solve our disputes. Despite what you might have been taught growing up, this is the American way.

I grew up the son of parents who graduated high school at the height of the Vietnam War. If it were not for a heart defect, my Father would have been drafted and shipped off to Southeast Asia. Without that heart issue, there would be no Matty C on this Earth. My mother was a quasi-pacifist attending college when she met my Dad. While she didn't actively work in the protest movement, she held anti-war views that had been shaped by the protest music of Bob Dylan, Donovan, Barry McGuire, Simon & Garfunkel, Joan Baez, and others.

As a child, these records were ever present and shaped my own views towards the idea of war at an early age. Nevermind that I also rabidly gobbled up war pictures like The Big Red One or Red Dawn and played military games with friends throughout my childhood years. Even in my unformed mind, I knew with certainty that one version of war was a game, while the other was fatally realistic.

Growing into my teenage years, I absorbed the songs of Billy Bragg, U2, Sting, and R.E.M. to form an ardent opposition to armed conflict. By the time I was just a year into college, my lifetime had already seen the ignominious end in Vietnam, witnessed our failed policies in Central America, suffered through the lies of Iran Contra, and watched a war called Desert Storm play out like a video game on CNN. It was clear, even to my young mind, that war was an expensive and ineffective foreign policy strategy.

Thirty years later we have seen what little two plus decades in Afghanistan were able to accomplish. We have also been forced to bear witness to what it actually cost everyone involved in terms of blood and treasure. Still, after all of that expenditure and death, the Taliban once again rules the country.

Peace can only be achieved through peaceful means. Using weapons of war as a way to wage peace is the most destructive of hypocrisies. I first learned that lesson from the songs of my childhood and then refined those beliefs by absorbing the music happening around me as I came in to adulthood.

This week on WAIM Radio, we are waging peace with songs. It’s a full hour of anti-war tunes urging us to shelve the guns and talk this through like civilized human beings. What is your favorite tune about fighting war with peace? Tell us all about it?

Be sure to tune in Friday live at Noon Eastern on Suburbs Radio to hear the show live as it airs. New episodes are also archived here at WAIM each Tuesday. Feel free to go back and listen to any of our episodes at any time in the WAIM Radio archive.

Cheers,
Matty C