Santiago de Murcia Pieces

Paul O'Dette Baroque Guitar

Amazing what you can do with, essentially, five strings.

Thank You Jeffrey McFadden: Of Interest To Guitar Players

I have mostly recovered from my accident last December and can play piano again. But my brief retrospective return to playing guitar has been lots of fun.  I'll probably keep it up a bit.

Looking at the massive corpus of classic guitar music and lute music available for free online was quite an eye opener for me.  If we had such resources available in my student days and computers to make writing papers and producing finished scores so easy a lot of us would have had much different lives in music.

One thing that I found this week is so excellent, so practically vital to guitar players that I'm astonished to find it is available for free.  Fretboard Harmony for University Study: Method and Historical Context, the doctoral dissertation of Jeffrey James McFadden of the University of Toronto contains the best practical advice on improvising harmony in a classical (or any) context that it's an act of real charity that it's being given away for less than twenty dollars a copy. I recommend it and if I ever have an occasion to teach guitar again, I'll use it.

The exercises are so good I would advise people interested in historical performance to adapt them to lute tuning.  While they are general and not geared to historical practice they will get you a lot farther down that road than anything else I'm aware of.   Also available are the two facsimiles of the very rare early treatises dealing with this subject, both in the original Spanish.  Here is the pdf for Santiago de Murcia's Resumen de acompañar , this and other articles available online can go a long way to clarifying the text and the tablature.   Somewhat less clear and more suggestive than explicit is this text by the famous Gaspar Sanz, the part relevant to this post, his "short treatise on how to accompany perfectly" at the end of the text.  Reading the tablatures from the originals is challenging but kind of fun.  But I'd master McFadden's exercises first before honing them to any particular historical period.

Update:  Someone pointed out this file of the Murcia Resumen to me, which is displayed much more clearly on my browser.  I haven't tried printing out pages from it.

Boring Music Covered By A Shtick Too Boring To Be Offensive On A Cracker

Missed this little item about a metal-rock themed burger joint trying on PZ Meyer's shtick of "communion desecration".   The joint is called "Kuma's Corner" and its slogan is Eat beef. Bang your head.   After making the huge sacrifice of listening to some of the Swedish metal band "Ghost" which it is honoring with its stupid allegedly edgy "communion burger" publicity stunt, I think what's left from all that head banging has a lot in common with the meat on the buns.   Of course the "communion host" is unconsecrated so it's not a "communion host", like the "host" used in PZ Myers' own publicity stunt, it's just a cracker.  

I would be interested to see the patrons that this place attracts because I suspect they might make the average crowd at iHop look merely plump.  There must be a jillion fat calories in one of those things.

And the music?  Fourth generation Black Sabbath as imagined by the products of a cradle to grave welfare state.  Not that I'm at all opposed to cradle to grave welfare states, just that it's disappointing one would produce the kind of crap pop culture that comes out of Sweden.  They so want to be daring and edgy but they lack the experience that requires, something they've got in common with lots of American schlock pop culture.   I won't link the the music which is crap but here's an, uh, interview I tried out of sheer boredom.  It supports my contention that all that head banging has made them meat heads.

When Robert Johnson sang about selling his soul to the devil he was convincing, these boys are just idiots playing dress up and thrilling an audience stupid enough to buy them.  Johnson was alleged to have gotten his brilliant technique and music in the bargain.  If these kids got theirs in the bargain it is clear Johnson's soul was worth more.   Or maybe he was just too smart to settle for so little, something that rock fans have been doing for the past sixty years.  Rock is what is left when you take everything interesting out of the blues.   It's a rare rocker who can put something interesting back into it,  metal substitutes volume and play-time, would be outrageousness for what is real.  As can be seen in this publicity stunt.

Louis Vierne

I am not very familiar with the music of Louis Vierne so I'm going to be listening to all of his organ symphonies.  Here's the first one.

Ulf Norberg, organ
Maria Norberg, assistant
Anders Söderlund, recording

Score

Thursday Recommendation

You might want to read this article by Jim Hightower about how the Trans-Pacific Partnership that is being pushed like NAFTA was could destroy even more of the only things that make life possible for hundreds of millions here and billions around the world.

Like NAFTA the WTO and others of these corporate designed ways to destroy democracy by treaty, any elected official that pushes or supports these things should be informally considered guilty of treason.  That the "founders" didn't include selling out The People during peace time, for the profit of the oligarchs in their definition of legal treason shows that they were not the perspicacious, omniscient sages they are sold to us has having been.   That the media has not forced the pull out from these things only shows how unreliable they are, as well.

Update:  And before I begin my long day, for those who like a bit of a brawl. Here's my comment from last night.

Ah, Alternet gives the Jesus bashers another round. I've been looking at the number of hits these posts get and the comments, Alternet is practicing hate talk in order to up its hit numbers, no doubt getting more ad revenue from it.

The Reverend Martin Luther King jr. was the last really effective leader that the American left has had, changing laws, changing lives for the better. The anti-religious talkers, notably not doers, never producing anything but futility, have a long record of ineffectiveness. It would be stupid to continue to follow them into political impotence.

Thoughts About The Week of Shutdown and Beginning of Affordable Healthcare

You've, no doubt, heard the assertion being made that the Republicans who have shut the government down have been acting out of principle.  Which is an odd thing to call the bald and sordid and gleeful harming of poor people, poor school children, those whose lives depend on federal programs, federal workers, for political gain.  

The Republicans who have shut down the government are also credited with some kind of adherence to philosophical principles.  Which is presented as some kind of virtue.  I have to say that I used to be somewhat suckered with that stupid idea in the past, that adherence to an abstract philosophical principle even as it harms people was shielded from its results by the claim that it was the result of philosophical rumination.   Criminal conspiracies, especially the successful ones, are also the product of intellectual activity.   Perhaps the fact that the ones with clean hands and good clothes are so freely let off for some of the biggest crimes committed is a related delusion.   Especially as in a number of cases it involves the same people and their circle of family and friends.  

Not much of anything that comes out of the Washington press corps is worth of listening to,  it is certainly not worthy of belief.   As I type this that's where my inspiration is coming from.  The problem isn't that our government services are centralized, made equally available around the country, it's that the politically effective media is centralized in Washington DC, New York City,  Los Angeles. What's more, it is centralized in the hands of the obviously interested rich.   Including "public radio" and TV.   The last time I saw figures, Steve Inskeep was making more than 300,000 dollars a year to lie on behalf of Republicans and I suspect he, looking at the salaries of others in his job feels he is a poor man.  Not to mention their benefits package which certainly contains full health coverage.   Since I'm hearing what Steve is saying reflected in his local equivalent here in Maine, I will not be giving them any of my money to promote the Republican party that has shut down the government and the wealthy people who they all work for. 

This would never have happened under the media rules in place during the 1960s. The tea party was the product of hate talk radio and cabloid TV, the impotence of the Democrats in office is as well.  That is a direct result of releasing TV and radio from their public service obligations, their obligation to not lie, their obligation to provide equal time under the Fairness Doctrine.  It is a direct result of allowing people like Murdoch and corporations like Clear Channel to feed endless lies to the American People.   That Ronald Reagan was the one who gave that desideratum to the "free speech" industry to them and that it has been the right-wing liars who have been the beneficiaries shows what a wrong-headed idea it was all along.  

Democracy cannot be made without some raw resources, without which it cannot exist.  One of those is accurate information had by a sufficient number of people to keep them from being duped by their enemies.  The People have a limited number of hours to obtain that information and they are entirely dependent on other peoples' reports of reality to get it.   That is a resource as limited as the bandwidth that is considered a public property assigned for use.   Any abuse of the limited hours available for people to devote to public affairs by broadcasting lies - including the lies told by the cabloids - is damaging to self-government, it destroys the ability of The People to govern us in order to produce an effectively beneficial result.   

The First Amendment to the Constitution is there to enable that self-government, it isn't there to cripple and destroy it, yet that is the clear experience of thirty years of electronic media being allowed to serve itself instead of the public.  Pretending that print is going to have the effect it did in the past, ignoring that electronic media has entirely and permanently changed the facts under which the First Amendment exists from now on, serves the enemies of democracy, it serves the enemies of The People and our common good.   You might want to consider that as the Republicans on the Supreme Court use it to destroy democracy this term.   You might want to consider that as you hear NPR, or as I think of it, the FOX farm team, distort the shut down and Affordable Health Care.   They're doing that out of philosophical principle too, the same one that is keeping poor kids from going to Head Start, damaging their ability to learn what they need to know to have a decent life.   Ain't the intellectual class a wonder to behold. 

Shut Down

The Republican Shut-Down of Government Starts Today.  

Let's work to make it as much of a success for them at the polls as the last one.

Horatio Parker Was A Pretty Good Composer

Horatio Parker is known today mostly as being Charles Ives' teacher at Yale.  In most presentations he's presented as what Charles Ives had to overcome to become one of the earliest of the truly avant garde composers.   But Ives was well on his way to being the composer he was long before he went to Yale.

I listened to this Pipedreams program of Parkers music after listening to some of Elgar's music last night.  The result of that is that I think Parker was the better composer of the two.   Unlike Elgar, Parker's music doesn't have a nationalist music establishment to promote it.

There was a time when, as a devotee of "modern music," I'd have passed Parker's music by but I got over that and listen to everything now.    It's a stupid, narrow-minded attitude to have and I'm glad I'm over it.

You can find the scores of some of Parker's music here and some of his choral music here, though, unfortunately, not much mentioned in the program and not the really masterful anthem, Now Sinks The Sun, included in it.

I used to love listening to Pipedreams before my public radio station took it off, no doubt so they could have more NPR junk like Wait Wait Don't Tell Me on.  Now I listen to it online as I do so much else now that public radio as it should have been, is dead.   To compare Parker's and Ives' music, you can listen to this program from their archive in the Real Audio format.

It's Not A Damned Game, Liberals Advocate For The People And Posterity Not A Level Playing Field

Seven years ago, when I began regularly writing out my ideas, confronting fragments of ideas I'd been tossing over in my head for decades, trying to put them into a coherent form that could then be tested against real life, a lot of the previous assumptions I'd made turned out to be wrong.  One of the most wrong ones was the assuring that fair rules for the fight would be sufficient to do what was necessary. What is necessary is  to change laws, to change policies that would achieve economic justice, civil rights, peace and a sustained environment.   It turns out that when things are as grossly unequal as they are virtually everywhere in the world, as they have increasingly become in the past thirty three years, that a level playing field favors those with the most power and wealth.  As if that outcome is not entirely predictable, the most obvious of intuitions.

It is exactly in the matter of outcomes that real, American liberalism* lies, not in the "fairness" of the process that produces it.  I have called the kind of "liberal" who pretends that their work is done when everyone has that weird invention, "more speech" "process liberals".  But I've come to realize they really aren't liberals at all, they belong to a sect of libertarianism.   And, really, that mythical "more speech" which, somehow, never seems to work, unlike that "money-speech" invented by the Supreme Court in Buckley vs. Valeo, is about the only thing that the lib-libertarians have ever produced.   "Money-speech" would seem to prove that it is more equal than "more-speech".

The impotence of that "more-speech" is sufficient to explain why the "liberal" Barack Obama, chasing after enough money-speech to do what has been done so seldom in recent years, win as a Democrat, will not produce a truly liberal administration.  The legalistic language he learned at Harvard Law soothes whatever scruples might trouble him by his role in it.  It also explains the impotence of Democrats in post-Buckley vs Valeo American politics.  Money-speech, owned by those with the most money, turns out to not work on behalf of the poor and destitute.    Notably few of the "civil liberties" lawyers, the media professionals and the academics who push this tripe are in much danger of being poor and destitute, certainly not as long as they are promoting something that so obviously benefits those with lots and lots of money-speech.

The thing that blinds real American liberals to the counterproductive aspects of a lot of this chasing after the abstract ideals that turn out to be counterproductive - leading to such things as the deregulated media that lies on behalf of the highest bidder, grossly unjust laws that enable the most massive theft on behalf of the ultra-rich, the sustenance of racial and gender oppression, etc. - is the reduction of the words used to advocate those into mere slogans, neglecting to see if the slogans address reality as it is today instead of as it was in the 1780s.

But real liberalism is all about outcomes, about results.  There is no room in real liberalism that allows a complacent acceptance of economic, racial, gender injustice merely because the rich and bigoted can obtain results producing those.   Though many who are represented as being liberal do accept those results and there is every reason to consider those faux liberals as favoring those.  Enough of them benefit from the status quo.   Having a free press, after all, is important mostly and most seriously in so far as it aids voters to make informed decisions, changing politics and laws in order to produce an effective beneficial result.  A real liberal believes that justice, true equality and the sustenance of life is that absolutely necessary beneficial result.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press... Those are ringing words and generally admirable, all things being equal, but when "the press" means the massive, electronic media proven beyond any shadow of a doubt to rally exactly the kinds of unthinking and violent mobs that the "founders" endlessly worried about, there is every difference between that and a printing press that could print a four page weekly newspaper.  The medium isn't the message but it certainly makes all the difference in the world when it comes to the speed and violence of the effect that it can have.   And it isn't only the alleged news that has a real, violent effect endangering the lives and rights of people.  The film Birth of a Nation helped promote the most extensive fascist movement in American history, the Klu Klux Klan.   The "freedom of speech" and of "the press" that D.W. Griffith, Thomas Dixon and Frank Wood exercised, ended up in people being murdered by the Klan revived at Stone Mountain Georgia under the explicit inspiration of that movie.  There is a direct line from the movie to those murders through the Klan that used it to organize and inspire its fascist terror.

As an aside, it is notable that Woodrow Wilson, one of the most famous progressives of the Progressive era, a scholar and academic of unimpeachable elite status, made Birth of A Nation the first movie shown in the White House, giving its "more speech" more of a boost in the national consciousness.  It's something that is allowed in the rules of the "level playing field".  Only later he regretted his role in it.

Since the advent of cabloid TV, it has been instrumental in promoting racism in shows like C.O.P.S, through FOX and through things such as CNN's Lou Dobbs Tonight.  It has certainly promoted anti-Islamic hysteria that of the kind that has led to attacks against people of perceived middle-eastern ethnicity, including Sikhs. Dobbs has probably done more than anyone to promote bigotry against Latinos. The people influenced by the American media aren't generally a very informed lot. And that is not to mention the media promotion of the hatred of the poor,  often by depicting poverty in America as having a black or brown face, though it has no problem depicting poor white people as trash as well. That people like Dobbs** successfully depict themselves as populists while working against The People, even the poor whites who they use, is one of the putrid flowers of our deregulated media.   "Populist" should mean a lot more than a rich white racist controlling poor white racists by appealing to their racism.   But the destruction of real populism is a large topic which I haven't studied in sufficient depth to write about it.

I would recommend studying the history of NPR as a good example of where the kind of process "liberalism" I'm talking about leads.  In each and every case, in the end the process liberal will sell out the poor, the destitute, those who are discriminated against - accounting for such exceptions as those made for wealthy, white gay men and women employed by them.   Process liberalism is an elite pose, allowing the P.L. to pretend to be liberal while actually serving P.L.U.

If you find yourself tearing your hair while listening to Morning Edition, as I would be if I were not writing this, or some other NPR show, that's the reason more often than not.   The organs of process liberalism should be dumped and defunded, they are a big part of the problem.

*  As the living thinker who has had the most profound effect on me in the past decade, Marilynne Robinson,  has pointed out, traditional American liberalism is entirely different from European liberalism in that it assumes a higher goal than mere ability to do what you want.   Economic justice instead of lassiez faire economics is one essential difference.   Matched with real equality it accounts for a complete difference.

**  I was recently unsurprised to find out that Dobbs, like so many in our elite ruling class, liberal and conservative,  the first black president, Barack Obama, to racists like him,  is a Harvard product, fruit of the foremost of the training grounds for our ruling class.   Those Ivy League boys love their games with their winners and their losers.  And they hate to lose.

I'm Holding My Sunday Post Hoping You'll Read This Article

Robert Parry has written an excellent short history of how the United States has had to struggle against the financial enemies of democracy and justice all through our history,  The Four Eras of the American Right.

Surprising to many will be his naming of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henrey, George Mason and, in his later life, James Madison as the founders of the problem.  But, as I've read more of them and more of what they did instead of what their hagiographies cover up, it's a view of American history which I've come to share.  Later crooks and thugs named will come as little to no surprise.  It's only those of the "founding" generation that we're required to genuflect to, slave owning, self-interested subverters of democracy and justice, every one of them.  That the more genteel modern right is tied to them is a point proven by what should be an infamous quote by the perfumed northerner, William F. Buckley, the brother of James Buckley of Buckley vs. Valeo

On the need to keep blacks under white domination, urbane conservative William F. Buckley declared in 1957 that “the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.”

In my comment to the post, I said that he'd gotten almost the whole thing said, leaving out things like the topic of yesterday's post, the liberalish-libertarians who, somehow, begin by asserting civil rights but who, somehow, always seem to end up enabling the super-rich and their political allies in the ideological right.  I said:

Excellent article, showing the ties among today’s conservatives and those of the slave owning past. And in mentioning the Ayn Rand influence you almost get the whole way. The frightening truth is that there is a large faction of the functional right which is commonly mistaken as some species of liberal or leftist who are, actually, motivated primarily by a primitive libertarianism. A good example of that is the ACLU lawyer Joel Gora and his like who are engaged in aiding and abetting the wounding, if not murder of informed self-government through exactly the language of “free speech”. Of course what they and the Supreme Court have done is make “speech” anything but free by embedding monetary value in it. That gives the millionaires and billionaires, the heirs of the slave power and the robber barons, the kind of political power that their ancestors less often had. Until real liberals, the real left gets over the ridiculous scruple that turns “free speech”, for it what the “second amendment” is for gun nuts and the paranoid right that feeds and sustains them, liberals are their suckers.

Dumping the ACLU for its enabling of this could be a way to start. A more realistic analysis, based in the political reality of what the rulings under the Buckley vs. Valeo line of rulings and the broadcast-cable libertarian dogma, and the line of truly awful presidents and congresses that we’ve had under them is necessary before any progress is made. The infantile notion of free speech absolutism turns out to be a danger when corporations are people and money is speech. Who could have guessed that would happen except anyone with a working mind and the slightest experience of the world as it really is and not in some law class what if.

Dump The American Civil Liberties Union, Opponents of Democratic Self-Government Since At Least 1976

I am slowly making my way through a long article by Joel Gora,  law professor at the Brooklyn School of Law and one of the major ACLU lawyers who has been steadily undermining campaign finance reform since the mid-1970s.   I know, as if the billionaires don't have enough money to hire the hacks that are hacking democracy into splinters. The slow going is because I can only take just so much dishonest oligarchic empowering doublespeak in one sitting before my boiling point is reached.   The piece is published in the Howard Law Journal [ You can read it here beginning on page 763].

Figured I should catch up with what the ACLU was doing to attack self-government before the Roberts Court completely handed our elections systems over to the billionaires* and to the likes of Shaun McCutcheon.  And there is no figure who has done more on behalf of the billionaires than Gora.   Reading his article I am hard put to understand why he isn't considered as infamous and repugnant a figure as Roy Cohn or Rupert Murdoch.   Here is how he describes himself in a footnote on the first page.

I should also note that as an ACLU lawyer I helped challenge the campaign finance restrictions and requirements at issue in many of the cases discussed in this article, most notably, Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).

You would think that the man who was instrumental in allowing the demigods on the Supreme Court to turn money into speech, enabling the strongest force in lying to people in order to control politics would be widely vilified but, since he is associated with the ACLU,  my guess would be that alone would be enough for people on the left to respect him.  Well, I don't respect him because he has made a career trying to do what he has.   As far as I am concerned, he's at least as worthy of disdain as the Koch brothers,  Rupert Murdoch and all of those more public names.  No, he is more worthy of it because he was working under the prestige of the ACLU and with the slogan of "free speech" while making sure speech isn't free because it now has a monetary value embedded in it.   As I pointed out, by doing that you give more speech to those with more money and you dispossess those who have no money.  That has been the real world effect of Joel Gora's life work as can be seen in the total and absolute disempowerment of, first the destitute and poor and, increasingly, the middle class.   When you allow the richest to own information you allow them to dispossess us of the ability to cast an informed vote, the first and most important guarantee against despotism.  By allowing the successful selling of lies to an effective margin of voters,  you turn what should be a sacred act into one bound to produce government by the liars, for the liars and against The People.  That is the real result of the ACLU's participation in these issues.  That is why we have been suffering though the appalling series of administrations and congresses, governors and legislatures we have had since that fatal bicentennial year.

Gora and his fellow well tailored enablers of oligarchy hide behind a pretense in the form of instructive legal fables, leaving out the reality of the world as it really is.  There isn't enough George Soros money, used boldly and effectively on behalf of the poor and middle class that will effectively counter the combined forces of the super rich who 1. collectively own more money than the large majority of The People, 2. have shown no intention of doing anything but corrupting government to allow them to get even more of it through unillegalizing what they want to do, 3. are psychotically willing to even destroy the biosphere in order to do that.   Allowing Gora and the other enablers of oligarchy to pretend that Buckley vs. Valeo enables some heroic billionaire savior of democracy as much as the oligarchs is not something we are required to do.  We live in reality not in some Socratic fable discussed in a law class.  One of the foremost products of that teaching method seems to be to allow lawyers and judges and justices to avoid dealing with real life depending on the self-interested "what if" pretenses of alleged possibility that never seems to happen in real life.

I was brought up on all of the propaganda that the great and good American Civil Liberties Union told about itself and promoted.   I bought it for a long time.  The ACLU began to lose me exactly at the point of Gora's win in Buckely vs. Valeo. Finding out its role in that abomination was only the beginning of my total disillusionment with them.   It increased two years later with the ACLU role on the side of the Nazis in the Skokie case.  As a past contributor to them I suddenly realized that by giving them money my "speech" was going to support the "right" of Nazis to torture Jewish survivors of the Nazi rule in Europe,  on my behalf, the "Civil Liberties Union" was supporting the political organization and the propaganda of Nazis.  To put it mildly, I stopped giving them my "speech" to use that way.   I would very strongly encourage you to ask if you want to hand them your "speech" to promote things like the "citizens" of "Citizens United".

*  You can read what Gora and the ACLU are up to in this case coming up in the Court session that is just about to start.

But here is the brutal reality if the Court agrees with McCutcheon: Presidential candidates, House and Senate party leaders, and individual members of Congress could then form joint fundraising committees with national and state party committees and leverage contributions from individuals into huge sums to support their campaigns — maximums of more than $1 million for individual presidential candidates, more than $3.5 million for committees formed by congressional leaders, and nearly $200,000 for individual congressional candidates. We know, based on past experience, that presidential candidates, congressional leaders, and candidates would quickly spring into action to create the maximum number of joint fundraising committees and maximize the number of $3 million donors — and, of course, every candidate and office holder would know who was ponying up the amounts.

What if Congress then moved to outlaw joint fundraising committees (as if that could really happen!)? It would make the massive contributions a bit more cumbersome; donors (or their accountants) would have to write a lot of individual checks to individual party committees and candidates, instead of one or two big checks. The candidates and officeholders would still know clearly who had given the big bucks — and would open their office doors happily to them when they wanted or needed something from the government.

And as an example of the kind of willful unreality that the elite law schools teach their graduates to use to cover up their most self-interested lies:

Justice Anthony Kennedy, in his Citizens United opinion, made the astonishing assertion that unlimited sums spent “independently” of candidates and parties by corporations could not possibly have a corrupting influence. But Citizens United went out of its way not to make the same claim for contributions to candidates and parties. The corruption standard for limits on individual contributions undergirds Buckley and every major campaign finance decision since. Ruling in favor of McCutcheon would knock the pins out from Buckley and set us down a path to obliteration of all remaining campaign-reform limits.

In his confirmation hearing, John Roberts emphasized repeatedly that he would respect the previous decisions of the Court, would look to narrow the scope of decisions so that he could aim for 8-1 or 9-0 decisions instead of the frequent 5-4 divisions, and would bend over backwards to respect the role of other institutions, especially Congress. Citizens United demolished those pledges. A case brought on narrow grounds was abruptly broadened by Chief Justice Roberts and his conservative colleagues to include grounds that had never been initially asserted or briefed by the plaintiffs bringing the case, and the decision threw out one issued by the Court just a few years earlier, and effectively discarded decades of established law, jurisprudence, and practice over the appropriate role of corporations and unions in campaigns.

That is the corrupt, lying, corruptly perjured, real world that Joel Gora's and the ACLU's platitudes and absurd propositions cover up and depend on.   With their record in this line of cases they negate every amicus brief they might have ever issued for any poor defendant in their history, in reality as well as in fable.

The Maoist Roots of Al Qaeda Revisited

My post on Tuesday was too short.  I know people who read what I write are probably laughing now but I reconsidered it and think I jumped to my theme with too little preparation.

The article I was commenting on points out that Al Qaeda's own literature proves that they have been extensively influenced by the ideas of Mao and other allegedly Maxist, and so atheist political-military thinkers.  Contrary to stereotype the founders and leaders of Al Qaeda aren't parochial fanatics who see any thought but that of their branch of Islamic fundamentalism as unclean but are at least as able to do research and study history as secular thinkers in the west and, I'd say, seem to be somewhat more likely to consult their ideological opposites to see what they can usefully learn from them.   What serious attempt at a revolutionary movement wouldn't look at Mao and the winning side in Vietnam who defeat the greatest military power in the history of the world?  They've obviously learned more from that long and terrible war than the big thinkers and movers in the United States have.

It is the double bigotry of the racist establishment and the racists, both atheist and otherwise, who present Muslims as ignorant, fanatical religious fanatics - all billion and a half plus of them - that has set up the west for the disasters of the past and those which will, no doubt, come in the future.  When it comes to people in the Islamic world, most of us turn out to be Doug Feiths.

Of course this was bound to interest me since I've become something of a critic of the conventional atheist POV of what passes as an intelligentsia in the United States, Britain and elsewhere.   Looking long at things like that gives you a taste for the more bitter varieties of irony.   Considering how the Sam Harrises and Christopher Hitchens of fashionable atheism talk about Muslims, how their assertions sound like the worst of the old line racists of the 1950s and before and how those figures have been taken to the bosom of so many who believe themselves to be sophisticated non-racist members of some kind of left, commenting on the article was irresistible to me*.   I only wish I'd taken more time to develop my response to it.  Though this is a topic which isn't going to go away.

In order to defeat something like Al Qaeda it is necessary to really understand them and what they are doing.  The rather insulting and condescending appeal to racism to rally what elites believe are the ignorant masses,  exposing their own ignorance and racism in the process, precludes having enough respect for your adversary to see them as they really are, in all of their malignant intentions but, also, admitting that they are not genetically or culturally unable to think.   Muslims are presented in the American media, most often, as if they are some kind of dangerous animal.  That has been an ongoing effort in the west for centuries.   Among the people who like to think of themselves as the educated class I suspect there is a large component of self-congratulation involved.   Our educations seem to come with an over sized section teaching a satisfying and pleasurable assumption of superiority that reality doesn't justify.  If conceited self-regard built on the backs of the ignorant and inferior masses were true it would have worked out a lot better than it has.  One word, Iraq.   Another word, Vietnam.   When we don't learn from our own massive and horrible mistakes, who's being stupid?

*  The most influential strategic documents appear to be anything but religious in origin. For example, Al Qaeda strategist and trainer Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri wrote in his voluminous “The Call to Global Islamic Resistance” that one of the most important books on guerrilla warfare has been written by an American. That book, published in 1965, is “War of the Flea,” by Robert Taber, an investigative journalist who covered Castro’s operations in the late 1950s. The title refers to Mao’s often-cited analogy that guerrilla warfare is like the attack of a weak flea against a powerful dog. The flea first agitates the dog with a few bites, and then the dog attacks itself in a frenzy but is unable to kill the flea; as the bites multiply and other fleas join, the dog is weakened and eventually dies.

Taber’s book, a classic popular study of insurgencies, examines how guerrillas end up succeeding or failing in wars against overwhelmingly powerful enemies. The book’s title was translated into Arabic as, approximately, “The War of the Oppressed”; a more literal translation would be “the war of those thought to be weak.” The message is clear: If you feel weak, this book shows you how to be strong.

Except for history and military buffs, few Americans today read Taber’s book in English; similarly, few Al Qaeda terrorists would have read it in Arabic. But its lessons ended up embedded in Al Qaeda’s philosophy and insurgency campaigns. Al-Suri even recorded a lecture course on the book, and both the failed mid-2000s terrorist campaign in Saudi Arabia and the current war in Yemen bear its imprint.

I'm Going To Be Taking Thursdays Off

I've got a really full schedule building up on Thursdays so I'm going to have to start taking a break from blogging that day.   Maybe another day too, but my schedule's still in flux.

Ted Cruz is 

The Cat Who's All Hat

The Amazing Stupidity of Ted Cruz

I haven't been one of those glued to Ted Cruz's grab for stardom so it wasn't until this morning that I hear him distorting one of the greatest works of one of America's greatest writers and artists, a long time and well known liberal-lefty,  Dr Seuss.

The idiot product of Harvard Law would have known how stupid and clueless using Green Eggs and Ham in his bid to stop Obamacare was if he'd done what we were all told to do in 1st grade READ EVERY WORD TO THE END OF THE BOOK.

If the widely declared genius had done that he might have read what happens when Sam I Am finally talks the grouchy nay-sayer into trying what he spent the entire previous book saying he didn't like.  

He found out that once he tried it, he liked it.

Schubert Erstarrung From Die Winterreise Two Hermanns, Two Interpretations

Hermann Prey and an unnamed piano player

Hermann Jadlowker with Bruno Seidler-Winkler  Piano  c. 1917-1918

Both of them were great singers.  Prey was a very great singer but  Jadlowker's voice was very unusually  fine and used with great artistry.   You don't hear tenors with such a dark, rich sound used with the flexibility of a real bel canto singer.  Hearing him live must have been a singular experience.  It's a shame there isn't more of him singing this repertoire on record and that the recordings were made in the low-fi period.       

Here's Hermann Prey singing Der Leiermann about as well as it's ever been sung.  

                                                

Is it Just Me Or Is Google Software Acting Up All Over The Place?

I've been having all kinds of trouble with Google based software, Gmail, Blogger, the browser.  Weird stuff going on.  

Maybe it's the NSA.  Maybe it's the advertisers.   I don't know which direction to point my paranoia in. 

Or maybe it's my dissing that Google doodle a few weeks back. The Empire Will Not Be Mocked!

The Maoist Roots of Al Qaeda

In an article by Michael W.S. Ryan published in Sunday's Boston Globe, he points out that a lot of Al Qaeda's theory and strategy seems to be derived, not from the Quran and the Haith but from Mao Zedong and General Giap.

Al Qaeda’s strategic foundations are laid out in a variety of documents written by its ideologues and trainers. Originally produced secretly for training recruits and as a legacy for future generations of jihadi guerrillas, the documents began to emerge in the early 2000s—published on jihadist forums, stored on commercial websites, or confiscated from terrorist safe houses and training camps by local police or military

What this body of work reveals might strike even informed readers as surprising. When it comes to strategy, close readings of the documents suggest that Al Qaeda draws its ideas less from classical Islam than from a broad array of sources in 20th-century guerrilla warfare, as well as older European and Chinese military strategists. Its books and articles refer to the ideas of Mao, Che Guevara, Regis Debray, the Vietnamese strategist General Giap, Fidel Castro, and even the somewhat obscure Brazilian urban guerrilla Carlos Marighella. They are secular and analytic, and do not rely on religious arguments as a detailed guide to action.

To study Al Qaeda’s strategic literature is to realize that we should understand it primarily as a new type of revolutionary group—one that is, in fact, less classically “Islamic” than Maoist. It is a modern ideology built on Al Qaeda’s distorted version of Islam, one that is rejected by mainstream Islamic scholars. And this deeper understanding may give us new tools in what is shaping up to be a long fight against Al Qaeda’s influence.

Which forces the question, does the anti-Islamic, openly racist propaganda campaign launched in the wake of  9-11 not play into the hands of  the people who attacked the United States?   Not to mention the two wars that resulted, especially the one in Afghanistan which was a long shot, based on the history of foreign invasions of that country.  If the Soviet Union, sharing a common border with it and without having to worry much about an anti-war movement to restrain its response, it is absurd to think that an aggressive war would do it.  The American mind, trained by movies and fiction, has been misunderstanding all wars as being WWII.  It's obvious that the people who were planning Al Qaeda didn't make that mistake any more than the North Vietnamese government did in the 1960s and 70s.

We have payed an enormous cost for racism and bigotry over the course of our history and a lot of that cost has been through the attempts of elites to use that racism and bigotry to their own ends.  I won't go over those, they are as obvious as the corporate media's attempts to use Barack Obama's race and middle name to win elections.

In this case, the anti-"Arab", generally anti-Islamic branch of that vine has the potential to destroy us.  I have no doubt that the racism of Cheney and his band of neo-cons allowed them to ignorantly underestimate the intelligence and dedicated perseverance of what are, essentially, nationalist groups.  It's a repeat of the Western mindset that allowed it to deceive itself about national liberation movements which produced Mao and General Giap and the others on that list of works cited by Al Qaeda.

One of the more interesting things about this from a liberal view point is the use of 9-11 in anti-religious bigotry.   There is Sam Harris whose flagrant racism and bigotry knows no bounds and it has made him a rich man.  Following on that are other figures in new atheism, one of the most sleazy and massively hypocritical is the late Christopher Hitchens who went from Trotsyite to Bush II invasion supporter. They stirred up a large amount of bigotry that is exposed regularly in allegedly lefty venues, though I would say that the presence of that bigotry is a definitive refutation of a person's or venue's genuine liberalism.  It is a disproof of it.   If you changed the names called and the used what gets said in white supremacist, neo-Nazi circles.  It's especially ironic among those whose anti-religiosity falls in line with old-left, vaguely Marxist and anarchist rhetoric. In my time the ideological predecessors of those who slam Al Qaeda and pin them to all of Islam and all religion, generally, supported and venerated the same thinkers that inform Al Qaeda today.

A lot of the religious trappings of Al Qaeda are exactly the same kind of cynical use of religious language and appeal is exactly the same kind of thing that the Republicans have used in the United States.  The entire thing is all about political power and economic control among people to whom nothing is sacred, nothing beyond exploitation, no one beyond exploitation.   And there is nothing religious about that, it's an entirely secular thing.  Anyone who believes that Bush and Cheney have any real religious motivation are as foolish as the poor dupes that Al Qaeda ropes in to do the killing and get killed. In the run-up of their attack, a number of the 9-11 hijackers, including Mohammed Atta, went out partying at strip clubs.  I'm unaware of any aspect of Islam that would countenance that.   Or any traditional understanding of any of the other Abrahamic faiths. All of which forbid the killing of innocent people in a way that Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens and atheism do not.

Response to a Deleted Comment

More on the Virtue of Moral Relativism

Remember just over a week ago when I wrote about the Celebrity Atheist New Flavor of the Season Stephen Fry?   Remember when I gave the stirring battle cry repeated over atheist blogs and websites everywhere that includes this passage?

...they [The Catholic Church] try to accuse people like me who believe in empiricism and the enlightenment of somehow what they call moral relativism as if it's some appalling sin whereas what it actually means is thought... 

I remembered it while reading the latest very important but horribly depressing post by Chris Hedges when I came to this passage:

“I killed every Chinese I saw,” Congo remembers as he tours the Chinese area of Medan in a car. “I stabbed them all! I don’t remember how many, but it was dozens of Chinese. If I met them, I stabbed them. All the way to Asia Street, where I met my girlfriend’s dad. Remember, I had two motives: crush the Chinese and crush my girlfriend’s father, so I stabbed him, too! Because he was Chinese too! He fell into a ditch. I hit him with a brick. He sank.”

“Killing is the worst crime you can do,” says one of Congo’s former associates. “So the key is to find a way not to feel guilty. It’s all about finding the right excuse. For example, if I’m asked to kill somebody, if the compensation is right, then of course I’ll do it, and from one perspective it’s not wrong. That’s the perspective we must make ourselves believe. After all, morality is relative.”

The post is about the documentary “The Act of Killing,” by Joshua Oppenheimer, the part about the American backed genocide campaign in Indonesia, Oppenheimer interviews those who did the actual killing. You can see from the excerpts from the interviews, lots of thought has gone into the planning, training, framing and justification of the mass murderers.  

Congo patiently explains to Oppenheimer his technique of garroting his victims with a piece of wood, a pole and wire, a technique he adopted to avoid the mess of excessive bleeding.

And they are sharing their thoughts with younger generations of potential mass murders.

There is a scene in the Oppenheimer film where Congo—who parades across the screen like a prima donna, his outsized vanity and love of fine clothing on display—is interviewed on “Special Dialogue,” a program of a state-owned television station with national coverage. I have substituted the word “Jew” for “communist” to put the moral bankruptcy of the Indonesian regime into a cultural context better understood by Americans.

“We had to kill them,” Congo, wearing a black cowboy hat adorned with a gold sheriff’s star, tells the female host.

“And was your method of killing inspired by gangster films?” she asks.
“Sometimes!” Congo says. “It’s like. ... “

“Amazing!” she says. “He was inspired by films!”

The audience, mostly made up of members of the Pancasila Youth in their distinctive orange and black shirts, applauds. At the start of the show, Ibrahim Sinik, a leader of the paramilitary group, lauded the Pancasila Youth as having been “at the core of the extermination.”

“Each genre had its own method,” Congo says. “Like in Mafia movies, they strangle the guy in the car, and dump the body. So we did that too.”

“Which means Anwar and his friends developed a new, more efficient system for exterminating Jews,” the woman says enthusiastically, “a system more humane, less sadistic, and without excessive force.”

Obviously, moral relativism isn't only for celebrity Britatheists who went to Cambridge and are supplementing their career on the movies with a sideline of peddling hatred of a quite similar kind.

I am seriously worried about Chris Hedges who seems to have taken more of the horrors of the world on his shoulders than anyone can carry.  But his post should be read by millions more who would have some hope of stopping some of this from happening again.   He makes it entirely relevant to today's issues, no doubt knowing that those already murdered as best honored by preventing recurrences to the extent possible.

These same human bonds, along with the same schizophrenic self-delusion, can be glimpsed in photographs of off-duty Nazis in the book “Nein, Onkel: Snapshots From Another Front 1938-1945,” or in the photographs of off-duty SS camp guards at Auschwitz. One of the pictures in the Auschwitz album shows the SS leadership, including the commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Hoess, and Dr. Joseph Mengele, who carried out inhuman medical experiments on children, in a raucous “sing-along” on a wooden bridge with an accordion player at Solahutte, an SS resort about 20 miles south of Auschwitz on the Sola River. Mothers and children not far away were being gassed to death, some of the 1 million people murdered at Auschwitz. And it is this disquieting moral fragmentation, this ability to commit mass murder and yet to see oneself as a normal, caring human being, that Oppenheimer astutely captures. The bifurcation between work and life—a bifurcation that many in the U.S. military, today’s fossil fuel or health insurance industry or Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs also must make—allows human beings who exploit, destroy and kill other human beings to blot out much of their daily existence.

Only, first, we'd have to get past the stupid and appallingly irresponsible fad for yelling "Godwin's Law", in itself a tool for avoiding thinking about these things in terms relevant to what we're doing today instead of the past which is beyond our help.