Holy Wars... The Punishment Due Lyrics

Lyric discussion by Agreenmachine 

Cover art for Holy Wars... The Punishment Due lyrics by Megadeth

The first half of this song is about the Holy Wars between the Irish Protestants and the Irish Catholics. Mustaine went to Ireland for a show, and basicly told the IRA what a piece of shit they were from the stage. The IRA is the Irish Republican Army. The two religious factions in Ireland have been fighting for hundreds of years. Mustaine had the balls to say during a show there, that he was of Irish ancestry and thought there stupid war needed to stop. He was boo'd by the crowd and had to leave early. He received death threats and barely escaped out of the country with his skin intact. He wrote Holy Wars about his experience over there, and The Punishment Due was based on the comic book The Punisher.

Nearly. But not quite right... It was at the show in Belfast (which is in Northern Ireland - part of the UK not Ireland). What happened was he saw people selling t-shirts outside the gig that said "the cause" on them which he believed to be referring to the cause of metal... i.e. "keepers of the faith".

He introduced one of their final songs by shouting "This one's for the cause" thinking that he was referring to "this one's for metal". However... "the cause" in Northern Ireland refers to the 'cause of the IRA (terrorists...

Yeah, that's what I heard.

About "IRA (terrorists - murdering scumbags - just like all the terrorist organisations here)"... Well, most of the murdering scumbags of the world aren't in "terrorist" organisations. In fact, now the US government consider people trying to stop torturing and killing of the REAL innocents (animals) terrorists so... objectively, 99.9% of humanity are fucking murdering scumbags.

BTW, regardless my opinion about the IRA, check WHY they became the IRA and so on. It's easy to judge.

Yeah the fuckin English