I have no love of communism but as my father was one himself, I make distinctions between those who turned towards the Soviet Union in the 1930s on the one hand and Lenin and Stalin on the other. It was an evil but within it all there is a softness I have always felt towards Pete Seeger, whom I first heard perform at my summer camp in 1955 because he was at the time unable to perform anywhere else in North America. And from that moment, I loved his voice, his music and the banjo, which I still play, sort of. And I have also given my grandchildren a banjo of their own so that when they turn 100 and are asked where did you get that banjo, they can say it was given to them by their grandfather on the day they were born.
Pete provided much of the soundtrack for the political awakening of several generations of activists. The songs he wrote, including the antiwar tunes, “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” “If I Had a Hammer” and “Turn, Turn, Turn,” and those he has popularized, including “This Land Is Your Land” and “We Shall Overcome,” have been recorded by hundreds of artists in many languages and have become global anthems for people fighting for freedom. He introduced Americans to songs from other cultures, like “Wimoweh” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) from South Africa, “Tzena, Tzena” from Israel (which reached number two on the pop charts), and “Guantanamera” from Cuba, inspiring what is now called “world music.”
Thanks to Seeger’s influence, protest songs — via folk, rock, blues, and soul genres — became popular and even commercially successful. He recorded over eighty albums — of children’s songs, labor, civil rights, and antiwar songs, traditional American folk songs, international songs, and Christmas songs. Among performers around the globe, Seeger became a symbol of a principled artist deeply engaged in the world.
Even if I do not in any way share his politics, I love his music which has deep deep meaning to me. What more is there to say than that? Well, perhaps there is this: the vile idiots on whose website this post was found are themselves a menace and evil to the core. If you are looking for a fight, it is these people you should take on and not the memory of one of the greatest folk singers who has ever lived. It would be as idiotic as refusing to play God Bless America sung by Kate Smith because of something she had said or done back in the 1930s.
From which the title of this post comes. Mark starts with a story from Melbourne about Barry McKenzie or something. Meanwhile, from today’s Cut and Paste in The Australian.
Oh dear. Annette Grossbongardt in Der Spiegel on February 7:
The East German state had a habit of taking children from politically undesirable parents and giving them up for adoption. It is a horrific aspect of the communist regime that has never received the attention it deserves.
Grossbongardt continues:
Parents were required to raise their children to become “active contributors to socialism”. If they didn’t do so sufficiently in the eyes of the state, then, in a worst-case scenario, their parenting rights could be withdrawn. This law, says a legal commentator, “opened the door” to punishing aberrant behaviour displayed by parents … Fleeing the country, or even attempting to, was considered a “seriously negligent breach of duty”, the lawyer says. Parents could also lose their children for “subversive agitation”. Indeed, “essentially anything that was adversarial to the state” was considered a violation, “including saying anything that was critical of the regime or reading the foreign press”. The law also foresaw another political justification for interfering in a parent’s rights: a “non-socialist lifestyle”. That applied to people who were active in the church, to those who did not fulfil the “obligation to work”, or to women who frequently changed partners and had many children.
The Supreme Court of British Columbia, Canada, has ruled that a 14-year-old girl can, without parental permission, get hormone treatments to change her sex, and it has also ruled that the father is guilty of “family violence” because he called her a girl.
Back in February of this year, the girl’s father was ordered to stop calling her a girl and calling her by her birth name, which he refused to do. To stop that crime, the Supreme Court issued a “protection order” mandating that her father be arrested immediately without a warrant, if calls her a girl privately or publicly or speaks about the case at all.
So the courts in Canada will now force parents to indulge the delusions of minor children who think they’re members of the opposite sex.
Virtually proving that the opposition to the move is correct in its belief that this is craziness, the court also expunged court records of the names of two doctors who were in favor of a gender transition for the girl, one doctor of whom, Dr. Wallace Wong, is catching flak for “diagnosing as much as 20 percent of the children in his local orphanage system with some form of gender dysphoria,” reported The Federalist.
The court also emphasized that Clark must not allow relevant documents (petitions, affidavits, letters, court orders, etc.) to come into the hands of third parties not “authorized by order of this court,” or with “written consent” from his daughter.
While forbidding Clark to speak to the public about his daughter’s case, [bc supreme Court Justice] Marzari stated that she was not overriding Clark’s “freedom of thought and speech.” “There is no requirement that [Clark] change his views about what is best for [Maxine],” she explained. “It is only how he expresses those views privately to [Maxine] and publicly to third parties that is affected.”
The fact that Clark is now not allowed to express his views publicly to anyone at all was, apparently, understood to be a fairly imposed consequence for his previous court-objected behavior. Had he strictly abstained from referring to his daughter “as a girl or with female pronouns,” he might not have been guilty of family violence and so subject to this order.
While the judge’s view of matters enjoys support on the political left, some feel the ruling is biased and politically motivated. Kari Simpson, president of Canadian pro-family organization Culture Guard, argued that Marzari’s decision severely limits Clark’s freedom of speech. Citing Marzari’s significant and recent history of LGBT and pro-abortion activism before her 2017 appointment to the BC Supreme Court, Simpson argued that she was operating as an “activist judge” more interested in delivering a ruling convenient to her cause than enforcing laws designed to protect families and children.
Unfortunately, the gag order on Clark makes it difficult to report his reaction to this new development in his case. In the meantime, his appeal of the court’s original ruling regarding testosterone injections is set to be heard on May 14.
Freedom of speech in Canada includes the provision that a judge can stop someone from saying what they think in public. A totally moronic age, perhaps, but actually an age of deep evil, which is getting worse! The thing is that everyone knows how insane all this is, but no one is allowed to say it.
There was this to me enigmatic bit in Cut&Paste today in The Australian.
During Bill Shorten’s press conference yesterday:
Journalist: A couple of days ago, your Senate candidate in the Northern Territory (Wayne Kurnoth) resigned after sharing anti-Semitic posts on social media. If one candidate is responsible and reflective of the entire party, aren’t Labor also in trouble on this?
Shorten: No. There’s a world of difference here. First of all, this fellow, who I haven’t met …
But what about the others? Shorten quizzed about Kurnoth last Friday:
Journalist: Should he be disendorsed?
Shorten: Let me know how you go with Morrison and what his candidate for Macnamara has said about people close to me, all right? So let’s not start giving a lecture here. I’ve said that this bloke is incredibly stupid. Has Morrison said that the candidate for Macnamara is incredibly stupid, which she is?
As it happens, I live in Macnamara (recently Melbourne Ports) and was curious what she had said that was equivalent to some candidate “sharing anti-semitic posts on social media”. So I went and looked, and this is the answer: Liberal candidate apologises for emoji post referring to Chloe Shorten as a pig. This is the full story.
A Liberal candidate has appeared to refer to Chloe Shorten, the wife of Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, as a pig on social media.
In what could be the first emoji gaffe in federal politics, Kate Ashmor, who is running for the Liberals in the ultra-marginal inner-city Melbourne seat of Macnamara, posted the emoji-comment on her personal Facebook.
“My post was related to Bill Shorten and his character and policies, and no one else.”
While not all political wives seek media attention, Chloe Shorten has established herself as a public figure. She has her own websites and social media channels, gives speeches and has released two books including her own cook book. She campaigns on gender equality and ending family violence and is associated with several not-for-profit organisations.
Nevertheless, politicians’ wives are usually considered off-limits for attack in Australian politics and a gender-based attack is especially rare.
The figure of speech previously caused a political storm when Barack Obama said “you can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” at a rally during the 2008 US presidential election.
His political rivals took great offence at it, saying Mr Obama’s comments had been directed toward the then Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who had previously remarked: “You know, the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”
The Republicans ran ads accusing the Democrats of sexism.
I might add that Sarah Palin was comparing herself to a pit bull. She also had an Israeli flag in her office when she was the Governor of Alaska. So there are two bits that are significantly different given the nature of the story. And speaking of anti-semitism, I might just mention this: What if the New York Times Cartoon had depicted … as a dog? by Alan Dershowitz. The dot-dot-dot represents any other ethnic, cultural or even gender that might have been represented which, given my own sensibilities, I would not repeat even though the words appear in the original title. Of course, it is unimaginable they would have shown any such thing. No one but a “hate group” would act in such a way. As Dershowitz says:
What is it, then, about Jews that allowed such a degrading cartoon about one of their leaders? One would think that in light of the history of the Holocaust, which is being commemorated this week, the last group that a mainstream newspaper would demonize by employing a caricature right out of the Nazi playbook, would be the Jews. But no. Only three-quarters of a century after Der Stürmer incentivized the mass murder of Jews by dehumanizing them, we see a revival of such bigoted caricatures.
No Jew in the world is unrelated to someone who was murdered because they were Jewish. It is not a trifle to be brushed aside, unless you are anti-semitic yourself.
An article about us with the ominous title, The Once-Lucky Country. You really need to read it for yourself, but essentially the argument is that Australians have developed the same pathologies found in the United States and Britain and they are rapidly taking us on a downward slide.
Over the last decade Australia’s luck has changed, as the country develops many of the pathologies of crowded, socially divided societies like the United Kingdom or the United States. Despite being highly dependent on resource sales to China—largely coal, gas, oil, and iron ore—Australia has embraced green domestic politics more associated with Manhattan liberals or Silicon Valley oligarchs than the prototypical unpretentious Aussie, often someone dependent on resource-based industries. The result: a dramatic reversal of the middle-class uplift that so long defined Australian society.
It is those pseduo-sophisticates like Malcolm and other dimwits of the same caste who follow the fashions of the Northern Hemisphere elites. A country which cannot do anything whatsoever to stop global warming insists on more than pulling its weight. Meanwhile we have bought into the apparent blessings of diversity as a way to help bind the nation together. I will take you to the final para but it bears reading it all. Seems accurate enough and depressing.
Today, many Australians face an uncharacteristically bleak future. Urged to settle where the planners and pundits prefer, they’re stuck in places both unaffordable and inhospitable, as part of a needless governmental drive to make life there more like that of the more congested, socially riven metropoles of Britain, the U.S., or China. What’s at stake are many of the long-established pleasures of life Down Under.
This is still the best country in the world in which to live. Although nothing lasts forever, it would be preferable if we could make it last a lot lot longer.
Which is why so many seek political power even if it the means to taking power leads to the death of Western Civilisation. They won’t have to live through the consequences of what they do so what do they care? The rest of this post was sent to me by a colleague.
“The Washington Post” (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”) spends the whole article discussing how various “far-right” figures and forces, from France’s Marine Le Pen to Germany’s Alternative for Germany, got angry at the coordinated Islamist terrorist attacks that targeted churches among other locations and killed some 300 people. When I was growing up and well into my adulthood, “far right” was a description for neo-Nazi skinheads; nowadays it’s being used for those who might merely be Eurosceptics or don’t believe in open borders. But never mind the ever-creeping redefinition – just what exactly is the message of the article? That only “far-right” is angry about attacks on Christians? Or that if you are angry about attacks on Christians you must be “far right” yourself? Is Christianity now to be considered a white supremacist dog whistle? And if you are concerned about Islamist terrorism and/or terrorism against Christians world-wide are you now supposed to keep it down lest you somehow give succor to the far right or actually risk becoming associated with the far right in the eyes of the sophisticates who feast on Bezos’s fish wrapper? Maybe all of the above.
The article ends even more disingenuously than it starts, by advising readers not to jump to conclusions because no one has yet claimed responsibility for the Sri Lankan attacks (unlike in the clear cut case of the Christchurch terror attack), and reminding everyone that the bloody civil war in the country’s past was an ethno-nationalist affair rather than a religious one. Sure, it was the Tamils and the Sinhalese and Buddhist against Hindus, with the Marxist Tamil Tigers being quite big on suicide bombing, but is the WaPo suggesting – hoping? – that the recent outrages were a return to that old conflict rather than an instance of Islamist terrorism? Quite possibly, because we are lastly reminded that “Although Christian minorities are targeted around the world, analysts say that the vast majority of terrorism victims globally are Muslims.” Omitted is any mention that the vast majority of these Muslim victims of terrorism are murdered by the Muslim perpetrators. Can we be angry about that or is that also some sort of a far-right trait?
“Far left” meanwhile is the name for the suicide cult of Western civilisation.
Today we merely saw a metaphor played out before us. What we have lost we have been in the process of losing for quite some time. The rest of this post is taken from here. And you should watch at least the first two minutes of Kenneth Clark’s opening.
There is no way to replace what Paris, what France, what Christendom, and indeed what humanity, has lost today. It is irreplaceable. For example, we literally cannot recreate the windows, which date from the time of Dante. We do not know how to do it. As a friend said to me, “You can rebuild the World Trade Center. You cannot rebuild Notre Dame de Paris.”
Kenneth Clark’s monologue opening his great 1969 TV series Civilisation (all of which is available on YouTube). Standing in front of the Notre Dame cathedral, Clark asks, “What is civilization?” He says he can’t define it in abstract terms, “but I think I can recognize it when I see it.” He then turns to the cathedral, and says, “I’m looking at it right now.” Watch:
They provide a major public service in alerting those who are capable of being alerted to the kinds of ideas that are harboured among the left. We either learn from it, or help them steamroll through our culture and civilisation and replace what we have with one of their own devising.
Law of Markets 