ZJW
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
‘Maigh Eo Abú’, you say.
An Gaeilgeoir tú, a Bhijou? Or are you citing from a supporter-shirt? (Or both?)
As to national anthems, the best of the very few better sounding ones I’ve ever heard has got to be the Greenlandic one (about which you can read here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunarput,_utoqqarsuanngoravit ).
Here is an extremely cute video (promo for the Arctic Games in some year or another) of it being sung. A rag-tag collection of smiley families and couples on a beach, attempting — sometimes with text in hand — to sing it. I suspect that some of the smiling is on account of sheepishness about not knowing the words. (As for that couple who are not even pretending to sing, I presume they are in the shot at all purely because they are decked out in exotic national-garb.)
If you are wondering about why they look as they do, that’s because …
‘Because of past limitations in samples and genotyping technologies, important questions about the history of the present-day Greenlandic population remain unanswered. In an effort to answer these questions and in general investigate the genetic history of the Greenlandic population, we analyzed ∼200,000 SNPs from more than 10% of the adult Greenlandic population (n = 4,674). We found that recent gene flow from Europe has had a substantial impact on the population: more than 80% of the Greenlanders have some European ancestry (on average ∼25% of their genome). However, we also found that the amount of recent European gene flow varies across Greenland and is far smaller in the more historically isolated areas in the north and east and in the small villages in the south. Furthermore, we found that there is substantial population structure in the Inuit genetic component of the Greenlanders and that individuals from the east, west, and north can be distinguished from each other. Moreover, the genetic differences in the Inuit ancestry are consistent with a single colonization wave of the island from north to west to south to east. Although it has been speculated that there has been historical admixture between the Norse Vikings who lived in Greenland for a limited period ∼600–1,000 years ago and the Inuit, we found no evidence supporting this hypothesis.’
(More of that at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289681 .)
For great lyrics there is also the surrealist poem used for Schoenberg’s 1912 ‘Pierrot Lunaire’.
A performance of it conducted by Schoenberg himself in 1940:
The English translation of the sung German is here: https://yellowbarn.org/sites/default/files/pierrot_lunaire_translation.pdf
The music is not quite as good, but if you don’t want to be bothered by reading that English text while listening to the sung German and wondering where you are now in the proceedings, this is more accessible: an English-subtitled music-video based on it, in visual content nothing if not surrealist. Done by the film and theater director Oliver Herrmann in 2002:
And the other one is the lyrically and musically stunning ‘Heroin’ by the Velvet Underground. I mean what’s on the 1967 album, not the inferior versions.
For the most exquisite match of music and lyrics, I have two songs in mind. One of them is Schoenberg’s putting to music of Byron’s anti-Napoleon poem. Here it is divided into two videos.
(And if you want, here is the text of the poem along with explanatory footnotes: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_Lord_Byron_(ed._Coleridge,_Prothero)/Poetry/Volume_3/Ode_to_Napoleon_Buonaparte )
Figures from the Spanish-language Wikipedia on turnout etc figures for the recent presidential election in Argentina:
Participación — 77.65 % [down] 3.7 %
Votos válidos — 26 291 718
Votos en blanco — 554 161
Votos nulos — 224 864If the turnout was only 75%, how is the ‘mandatory’ character of voting in Argentina to be explained? That it is not enforced, i.e. non-voting is not fined or otherwise penalised (as is claimed to be the case in, say, Australia)?
Analysis by the left-communist group Mouvement Communiste of the war:
https://mouvement-communiste.com/documents/MC/Leaflets/BLT2310ENvF.pdf
As someone who has spent his life usually ignoring lyrics to the extent possible in favor of just pitches and (if any) rhythm, I often repeat to myself the old adage ‘there’s no telling for taste’. I find nearly all of the music posted on this thread — however commendable [???] it may be in its lyrical content — to be unlistenable at the level of music. Further I think the Internationale has to be one of the worst melodies ever conceived, sung by the garden-variety leftist Billy Bragg or not.
As a politically non-tendentious break from it all —
‘She Moved Through the Fair’ (aka ‘White Summer’ and other names) is a folk-melody collected from County Donegal by a musicologist in c. 1909. Everyone and their dog has sung it, often in a sappy manner, but there are good renditions.
Below you will find the Yardbirds’ genius Indianisation of it (in two versions; one with an oboe) from 1967. This is a studio recording, not a later watered-down live rendering, a derivative Led Zeppelin version etc
Under that you will hear it played by folk-guitarist Davey Graham on TV in 1963. (The Yardbirds’ rendition is based on Graham for reasons that will be clear from the presenter’s introduction.)
Lastly, under that, you will find it sung in traditional (and non-sappy) manner by Anne Briggs (also 1963).
Or, if you want to go in reverse order — from least to most exoticised — start at the bottom and work up.
in ALB’s #87109:
‘Mind you the Marxist-Humanists are not likely to think too much of Mattick after his hatchet job on their founder, Raya Dunayevskaya […].She returned the compliment in her review of Mattick’s Marx and Keynes, in which review you will learn that ‘[Mattick’s] anti-Leninist obsession is, in reality, anti-Marxism’.
Not much different from what was common to the statements from the ICC, Třídní Válka, and CWO, but for reference sake, from the hispanophone group Barbaria:
‘Against Israeli and Palestinian Nationalism’:
Thanks, Alamamater, for the history and good links in your
#247621.You mention:
‘[…] Argentina was considered a first world country due to its vast industrialization, social benefits for the workers, and large agricultural production […].
Question: Approximately when was this? From when up until when?
On Hamas as a Frankenstein-monster product of Israeli anti-PLO machinations and further developments:
https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/israel-fostered-the-rise-of-hamas
I was going to point out that good ICT (CWO) article, but Robbo has beat me to it.
Here though are a couple of things by estimable libcom poster Craftwork:
1) https://libcom.org/discussion/solidarity-proletariat-abolish-israel-and-palestine
and the more general
2) https://libcom.org/article/anarchism-nationalism-war-and-peace , in which that quote from Wolfgang Pohrt is especially good.
(In link (1) among the comments, ‘westartfromhere’ is suddenly sarcastic (I doubt it) or confused when he writes ‘Abolition of the nation state? I thought the task of the working class of each nation state was to raise itself to be the foremost class, to form its dictatorship over all other classes. It is certain globalist factions of the bourgeoisie that would wish the demise of the nation state to better lord it over the proletariat.’ At my time of writing no one has replied to it yet.)
1) ‘From Gaza to Tel-Aviv and to the whole World… No War But Class War!’: https://www.autistici.org/tridnivalka/from-gaza-to-tel-aviv-and-to-the-whole-world-no-war-but-class-war
2) Alan would no doubt recommend looking at, or post articles from, one or both of these two Israel-unfriendly news resources:
http://www.middleeasteye.net
and
http://www.middleeastmonitor.comand then there’s Mondoweiss too:
https://mondoweiss.netof which in particular see:
“Hostages?” How the U.S. media is distorting the news from Palestine
3) Electoral systems and ‘democracy’: Hamas 2006; Sinn Féin 1918:
I notice that a recent entry on the SOYMB blog includes this quote ‘Hamas was […] democratically elected […].
In fact, Hamas’ win in 2006 was, and is, touted as an ‘overwhelming’ victory.
Hamas took 74 seats out of 162 seats, yes; but that’s because of the electoral system. What about the vote percentage? Hamas only took 44.45.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Palestinian_legislative_election
It’s a bit like the myth of Sinn Féin’s ‘landslide victory’ on the island of Ireland in the 1918 UK general election.
SF had said they were going to form an Irish parliament if they took a majority of the seats.
Well they certainly did, but look at the vote percentage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_Irish_general_election
SF just 47% of votes, not a majority of votes (and under party-list PR, no majority of seats).
And a lot of seats were just left uncontested because it was obvious SF would take them. (Meaning fewer non-SF votes than there might have been.)
The democratic glory of first-past-the-post!
Alan would have posted this:
https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1459/witch-hunt-bang-to-rights
The PLP liked ‘Sorry to Bother You’ but its 2010 split did not. What split? The split says of itself: ‘The International Communist Workers’ Party (ICWP) was formed from a split with the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) in order to mobilize the masses for communism and to reject PLP’s reformist line.’ And what did the split say of the movie? In an article titled ‘Sorry To Bother You” Is A Ruling-Class Trojan Horse’ , it said:
[start of quote]
[The] May 27, 2018 New York Times (NYT) Magazine [says] that Riley has been a self-described Communist since his teens when he joined the Progressive Labor Party.
What are the convictions of this self-described Communist? In the NYT article, Riley says that he aims “to help build a mass movement that can use withholding of labor as a strategy for social change.”
What is that social change? The NYT article lists his involvement in some political/social movements: Palestinian rights, Occupy, and Oakland renters’ protests against evictions. Riley says nothing in the article about getting rid of capitalism, the source of the injustices and miseries depicted in his film. The activism and film of this self-described Communist actually support reforming capitalism and thereby maintaining it.
No fight for Communism here.
[end of quote]
Well yes, ‘Sorry to Bother You’ might well be described as simply propagating a rather harmless and unradical labor-solidarism + capitalists-need-not-be-so-greedy-ism. Right, it’s no Communist Manifesto. But Riley’s later ‘I’m a Virgo’ is much better on that score.
‘I’m a Virgo’ (2023) was a seven-episode television series. About 3.4 hours in all. I watched it all and was bored or irritated part of the time during the non-political content. But two things made it well worthwhile:
1) Depiction of the ‘crisis-of-capitalism’/exploitation (à la Riley) presented in a spectacular-surrealist manner. That’s in episode 4 from 14:20 to 17:26 or so.
2) just as spectacularly, how crime and violence is an inevitable and necessary outcome of capitalism.
That’s in episode 7 from 18:30 to 25:10.This latter gave me piss-shivers.
There is also implicit condemnation of vanguardism/leaderism and/or propaganda of the deed running through the story. For example in episode 3 from 11:56 to 13:33, the conversation-dispute between Jones and protagonist’s mother over tactics. (This dialogue contains at one point, the line ‘Look, I’m a communist. I want the people to democratically control the wealth we create with our labor’.)
You can watch it for free (selecting separate episodes) here: https://watchseries.id/tv/im-a-virgo-vqw64/1-1
