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.
Wishful “thinking” in the absence of evidence on the part of Trump. Not different from Democrats pushing the Putin-Russia elected Trump wishful “thinking.” Similar to the wishful “thinking” that takes place in the immediate aftermath of a mass or cop shooting/killing before the perp(s) have been found or identified. If the victims are white, the rightwing prays that the perp is a POC. When the perp turns out to be one of their own, they dump him/her in the loony basket and/or claim that it was a false flag and that there are no victims; only crisis actors. Those on the other side of the aisle engage in the same wishful “thinking.”
Yes to almost all of that about “popular music.” It is indeed “…an omnipresent, almost atmospheric, property of public space around the world…” and actually has been so since the beginning of history…certainly since before its massive commercialization after the advent of recording.
As far back as the classic Greek era people knew about the power of music. Plato wrote of Socrates cautioning about the power of music:
This is of curse a philosopical look at things in a very small…relative to how the future took shape across the world…and thus fairly easy to control section of Greece, but the idea holds. Music is quite capable of “unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions”…for good, for ill or anywhere in between. The kicker in that idea is exactly how the controllers of a given society define terms like “good” and “bad” as they relate to a given societal situation.
It has been my own lifelong observation that music which comes directly from the hearts, minds and experiences of the people has a “good” effect on the section of any given portion of that society, and further…when it is taken over by large commercial forces and/or the state…it loses this power and starts to produce negative influences in that society.
Hitler, for example, understood quite well the power of music. His own aim was to control the German people on every level so that they would not be led down a path that he considered “evil”…a path which at the time of his rise had recently risen from the hearts and experiences of the black population of the U.S.
Jazz.
The blues.
Swing.
Jazz musicians and scholars call the time from roughly the end of the ’20s through the late ’40s/early ’50s “The Swing Era.” It reached Europe at roughly the same time and had a dynamic effect on the existing cultures there as well.
The dedicated racist Adolf Hitler feared this music…as well he should, considering his own aims.
Here is a letter that was purportedly sent out all across Germany regarding what was and was not to be allowed to be played under Nazi rule:
It was transcribed by the Czechoslovakian author Josef Škvorecký, who also wrote the wonderful short novel The Bass Saxophone about his experiences in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. It may have been altered slightly, but the root is true to the facts as they existed.
This is turning into a long comment and I need to go to work soon, so I am going to sum up and get the hell outta here.
Our own controllers do not use so-called “moral” grounds as an excuse to change the music. Instead, they…as they do with just about everything else…simply monetize it and then let it go wherever the greatest (and easiest) profit lies with absolutely no moral guidance whatsoever.
And the result has been a general downward slide in the human aspects of the music as technology takes over.
Mechanized music for mechanized people. No real “soul” there. Machines…so far, at least…do not have souls, so the emotional part of the music is not covered..
Look around.
It ain’t working…societally…except of course in the profit and loss columns of the corporate world. And this kind of monetization is wreaking havoc on every level of the culture.
It ain’t working.
Not in politics, not in the health sector, not in the educational sector…nowhere.
Oui refers to me as above as “…AG, the Musician on Mainstreet. A survivor …”
That’s close.
I am more of a monk, actually….like the medieval monks who preserved the Greek and Roman culture during the dark ages, each wth their own speciality. IOr how I often describe myself, as a music worker. Acoustic, live music. There are hundreds and hundreds of us in NYC and many thousands more throughout the world, working to keep live music alive. Unmechanized music. New music that comes from the roots of the old. Music from the heart instead of the computer. And thousands…more like millions, probably…doing similar things in different disciplines. Cabinet makers fighting to preserve hand work. Organic farmers fighting to preserve unaltered genetic strains. Holistic doctors fighting to preserve the old ways of healing. Teachers fighting the inevitable bureaucratization that follows the monetization of education.
The list goes on and on and on…
Find whatever it is that you know and then fight to preserve our essential humanity while we still have it.
Trump isn’t the last word in this battle.
Neither is DisneyWorld or the Grammys.
Watch.
AG
Illinois state government union members (AFSCME) recently voted to give their bargaining committee the authority to call a strike. Huge insurance hikes, a 4-year wage freeze, and privatization are some of the main issues. In response, the governor has put up a “jobs website” to counter the union’s vote.