I suppose the text we have in the Digital Tradition could use some cleaning up. I copied the text from Sing Out! Reprints and compared with the other three transcriptions we have. Rich R's is probably the most accurate, but I think I added an "s" somewhere. Here's what I come up with for a corrected text to submit to the Digital Tradition.

Click to play

-Joe Offer-

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WE DIDN'T KNOW
(Tom Paxton)

"We didn't know", said the bourgomeister, "about the camps on the edge of town
It was Hitler and his crew that tore the German nation down.
We saw the cattle cars, it's true, and maybe they carried a Jew or two"
They woke us up as they rattled through, but what did you expect me to do?"

CHORUS
We didn't know at all, we didn't see a thing.
You can't hold us to blame, what could we do?
It was a terrible shame, but we can't bear the blame.
Oh, No, not us! We didn't know.

"We didn't know," said the congregation, singing a hymn in their church of white
"The Press was full of lies about us, Preacher told us we were right.
The outside agitators came, they burned some churches and put the blame
On decent southern people's names to set our colored people aflame
And maybe some of our boys got hot and a couple of niggers and reds got shot
They should have stayed where they belong
And Preacher would've told us if we'd done wrong."

"We didn't know," said the puzzled voter, watching the President on TV.
"I guess we've got to drop those bombs if we're gonna keep South Asia free.
The President's such a peaceful man, I guess he's got some kind of plan.
They say we're torturing prisoners of war, but I don't believe that stuff no more
Torturing prisoners is a Communist game, and you can bet they're doing the same!
I wish this war was over and through, but what do you expect me to do?"

Words and music by Tom Paxton
Copyright 1965, United Artists Music Co/EMI
(c) Tom Paxton/Deep Fork
Recorded on "Ain't That News", Elektra EKS-7298

Source: Collected Reprints from Sing Out! Vol 7-12, 1992

filename[ DIDNTKNO
RB GF RR PR
apr00

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Notes from Sing Out! Reprints

I have this friend who was a flight cadet in the Air Force a few years ago. During the course of his training he was called before a board of examining officers and asked whether or not he would obey an order by a superior officer to drop a nuclear bomb on an American city. The mere fact that questions like this are being asked of elite military personnel points up graphically, I think, how far into limbo the Cold War and the arms race have carried us. The fact that the biggest of the big brass in the Pentagon are approaching such questions scares the hell out of me, because you can bet your last dollar that they can find the people who could be persuaded that their duty lay in doing just that unthinkable thing. The world is full of zealots and most of them are content to hold their beliefs and attempt to persuade others. But when those zealots get their hot little hands on a nuclear arsenal, I think it's time to get worried.

The Nuremberg War Crimes trials examined only German atrocities. The standard cop-out was either "Orders are orders" or "We had no idea that such things were going on." There will be no war crimes trials, apparently, in Mississippi, Alabama, or in Vietnam. Political considerations must, of course, come first.
-Tom Paxton-

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This thread (click) makes an interesting comparison between this song and Dylan's "Who Killed Davey Moore."