UPDATE-1 :: So today the fools in the kabuki theater here at the pond are still throwing 2’s around!! What a sad bunch of idiots. [March 3]
[In flagrant contradiction to Martin Longman‘s request to stop harassment of downratings, a specific group continues the bullying.
I will once again limit comments and look for timely posting of diaries. McCarthyism revived. 🙁 ]
Trump on recent anti-semitic attacks …
NY Daily News: President Trump suggests anti-Semitic threats across U.S. are coming from within Jewish community
Middle East Eye: Trump reportedly says anti-Semitic attacks may be done to make others ‘look bad’
ADL’s Greenblatt: #NeverAgain
Yep, minds work differently, that’s how easily fake news spreads and propaganda is a “hit” in today’s political world of narcissistic people lacking empathy. Trump doesn’t discriminate between Afro-Americans, Jews, Latinos, Muslims … history repeating itself.
More to follow …
Donald Trump in a speech to the National Governors Association today, suggested that his own enemies might be behind the series of anti-Semitic threats (including a bomb threat at our local Stroum Jewish Community Center) and attacks on Jewish cemeteries over the past few weeks. In intelligence circles, this is known as a false flag attack (Trump’s weird locution saying the attacks could be credited “in reverse” sounds like a botched version of false flag). That is, someone engineers a terror or sabotage operation and attributes it to a third party in order to deflect blame from itself and attribute blame to an innocent party.
These sorts of activities are usually attributed to intelligence agencies of authoritarian regimes, and sometimes even democratic ones. But very rarely have they been attributed to the enemies of U.S. presidents.
…
It seems clear now that Trump has a definite Jewish Problem (and a Muslim Problem and a Black Problem, etc.).On a related matter, Israel’s Opposition leader, Isaac “Bouji” Herzog is so alarmed by the overturning of a few Jewish gravestones that he’s calling for an all out airlift of America’s 4-million Jews a la Operation Moses. The logic is a bit hare-brained. But apparently he believes there are mass pogroms imminent and a full-scale exodus is the only thing to save us. And he believes he can score a few cheap political points on Bibi Netanyahu by out-Zionizing the PM:
…Herzog…expressed outrage over the wave of anti-Semitic incidents and threats in the United States and said Israel should be preparing for the worst – a wave of Diaspora Jews fleeing to the Jewish state.
“I call on the government to urgently prepare and draw up a national emergency
plan for the possibility of waves of immigration of our Jewish brothers to Israel.”
Protest songs and turning America Blue again …
Continued below the fold …
About AG, the Musician on Mainstreet
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“A survivor …”
A turning point, the protests of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. In 1971 the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile by the CIA and trained military. Torture, rendition and executions of thousands across South America. The US in the meantime turned to the right and became more conservative. The year 2016 is just another pivotal point from a slow opening to diversity and peeling back discrimination under President Obama to Trump and doom, gloominess, self-interest and full-blown discrimination. A bully on the world stage. US tools of policy have changed from direct military invasion and intervention to regime change by any means. The world will not accept these primitive methods anymore as the US empire and might will slowly erode/decay. Self-declaration of “exceptionalism” and “make America great again” are just loud burst of a minority who believes the US should remain white and christian. How medieval can one be!
Music and Politics in the Modern World
Music as a voice of protest and social commentary goes far back into history. In the early eighteenth century Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote: “Give me the making of the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.” You can write the history of Ireland or Brazil or the United States through folk songs about work, social change, and politics.5 U.S. history is replete with the use of music for social and political organizing. The antislavery movement sponsored many touring groups and also utilized the black spirituals that had their roots in protest. The union movement always involved the heavy use of songs, most famously with labor minstrels like Joe Hill at the turn of the century and Aunt Molly Jackson in the 1930s. Woody Guthrie and his Dust Bowl ballads were influential during the Depression era and long after. The civil rights, antiwar, women’s, and environmental movements from the 1950s-1970s utilized musicians and songs on a substantial scale. Hence, during the 1960s in the U.S. folk and rock musicians took part in the national dialogue over the Vietnam War, civil rights, the youth movement, and the role of women. Songs like “We Shall Overcome,” “Blowing in the Wind,” “The Times They Are A’ Changing,” “For What It’s Worth,” “Give Peace A Chance,” and “San Francisco” got people thinking and talking. The study of political music and musicians is a particularly useful way to get at the history of common people, “history from the bottom up.”
One of the major forces bubbling out of the cauldron of change and tension in the modern world has been popular music, an omnipresent, almost atmospheric, property of public space around the world, in cafes, nightclubs, shops, buses, taxis, homes, providing a continual counterpoint to the rhythms of everyday life. Popular music can be distinguished from other types of music by two essential features: it is disseminated largely by the mass media, and it is the byproduct of the mass basis for marketing commodities. I will skip the passionate scholarly debates on the political role of music and assume that popular music does interact with, and often reflects, the values, aspirations, and attitudes of many people and can contribute to both social and political changes.
Like all art forms, music is a method of communication and education as well as of creativity and pleasure. In many societies around the globe music, including rock and rap, has been increasingly used as a vehicle for social and political comment. Governments strongly hostile to Western rock music, such as the Soviet Union in the pre-Glasnost era, have tended to fear rock as something a little out of control, on the edge, and hence a likely subversive force in a closed political system. To be sure, much of popular music is escapist in orientation, characteristically dwelling on romantic feelings or relationships. As one well-known record producer in Malaysia told me: “no love, no sales; no romance, no chance.” Most songs on the American or Kenyan or Filipino hit parade deal with romantic themes. Often political interference or control prohibits or inhibits more political or challenging music.
In many parts of the Third World (or Global South), popular music has clearly carved out a sustained niche. Popular musics in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean reflected these countries’ modern history, society, and political economy, all shaped by colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism, capitalism, industrialization, urbanization, underdevelopment, cultural imperialism, transnationalism, the mixing of ethnic groups and cultural traditions, and the interplay between the local, national, and global. The spread of new media technologies like radio, films, television, recordings, and now iPods and multipurpose cell phones reconfigured and spread widely urban and foreign cultural products. Popular musics could divert people from their problems but also reflect political instability, social change, economic hardship, and feelings of powerlessness in a world dominated by a few powerful industrialized nations and corporations.
The local popular music industries often provided one of the few accessible venues to present criticism and protest. Where governments have made that difficult through banning, censorship, or arrests, musicians can often spread their music underground, even at times in highly repressive countries like Burma and North Korea. Like Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia banned jazz. A Soviet propaganda poster from the 1920s warned citizens: “From the saxophone to the knife is just one step. Today he’ll play jazz, and tomorrow he’ll betray his country.” Yet, some observers credit the underground rock musicians in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with helping undermine the communist system. Rock also played a pivotal role in China where rock musicians were in the forefront of movements to liberalize cultural expression. Rockers like Cui Jian became symbols of conscience and freedom for disaffected youth.
