As it did with Beethoven and Bach, so BBC Radio 3 is dedicating a period of unbroken play-time to the greatest of piano composers, Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849).  The Chopin Experience will last be broadcast over 17-18 May 2008.  It will include all his compositional output, about which a fellow genius wrote:-

He did not task himself, nor study to be a national musician. Like all truly national poets he sang spontaneously without premeditated design or preconceived choice all that inspiration dictated to him, as we hear it gushing forth in his songs without labor, almost without effort. He repeated in the most idealized form the emotions which had animated and embellished his youth; under the magic delicacy of his pen he displayed the Ideal, which is, if we may be permitted so to speak, the Real among his people; an Ideal really in existence among them, which every one in general and each one in particular approaches by the one or the other of its many sides. Without assuming to do so, he collected in luminous sheaves the impressions felt everywhere throughout his country - vaguely felt it is true, yet in fragments pervading all hearts. Is it not by this power of reproducing in a poetic formula, enchanting to the imagination of all nations, the indefinite shades of feeling widely scattered but frequently met among their compatriots, that the artists truly national are distinguished?

... Chopin must be ranked among the first musicians thus individualizing in themselves the poetic sense of an entire nation, not because he adopted the rhythm of POLONAISES, MAZOURKAS, and CRACOVIENNES, and called many of his works by such names, for in so doing he would have limited himself to the multiplication of such works alone, and would always have given us the same mode, the remembrance of the same thing; a reproduction which would soon have grown wearisome, serving but to multiply compositions of similar form, which must have soon grown more or less monotonous. It is because he filled these forms with the feelings peculiar to his country, because the expression of the national heart may be found under all the modes in which he has written, that he is entitled to be considered a poet essentially Polish. His PRELUDES, his NOCTURNES, his SCHERZOS, his CONCERTOS, his shortest as well as his longest compositions, are all filled with the national sensibility, expressed indeed in different degrees, modified and varied in a thousand ways, but always bearing the same character.

From Franz Liszt’s Life of Chopin.

The Chopin Experience can be appreciated on-line, of course, and for 7 days after broadcast.

I wouldn’t normally run two pieces sent to me by Welf Herfurth in quite such proximity.  But this one by Andreas Faust, a Tasmanian writer of the New Right, gave me a good laugh, and reminded me that political activism is often most effective when it is most irreverent.
GW

This article has been researched and compiled for the purposes of educating New Right and N-A activists in the use of humour as a political weapon. There is a paranoid feeling amongst many on the New Right that the mass media is our greatest enemy. Not so. This article looks at the ways in which activists can use and manipulate the media, rather than the other way around.

As an example: mention the 1932 opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge to any older Australian, and the first image that will spring to their mind is a man on horseback, galloping forward to slash the ribbon with his sword, before the ‘official’ representative could get to it. The swordsman was a member of a political group called the New Guard. And while this stunt was not especially humorous, it was certainly eye-catching – it remains in the mass mind to this day. In that same city in 2007, the crew of television show The Chaser made world headlines when they infiltrated the APEC forum (one of them dressed as Osama bin Laden), making a complete mockery of the forum’s expensive security measures.

In general, the media doesn’t give coverage to alternative politics (the recent 9/11 Truth Forum in Sydney was completely ignored, even though one of the speakers was a prominent Japanese MP). But ‘fringe’ views can get past the editors if they are presented by means of some humorous prank or stunt. Humour equals saleability…it’s as simple as that. People like to laugh, and the editors know it. For the mass media, the dollar is the bottom line…and the skilled prankster can actually make this work in his or her favour. A prankster called Mark Pauline claimed that “the media can never deny coverage to a good spectacle. No matter how ridiculous, absurd, insane or illogical something is, if it achieves a certain identity as a spectacle, the media has to deal with it.” In other words, instead of letting the mainstream media pigeonhole and stereotype them, activists using humour and spectacle can turn this around and actually use the media.

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By Martin Hutchinson

The first quarter Gross Domestic Product rise of 0.6% was greeted with considerable relief by most Wall Street commentators; they had expected the chaos in the housing market and the banking system to have pushed the US economy into recession. This was unreasonable; the huge monetary stimulus currently being hurled at the economy was always likely to prevent immediate recession, while the fiscal stimulus of the $110bn rebate package is likely to prop it up through July or so. Beyond that, the future becomes less clear: at some stage the monetary and fiscal stimulus must run out.

As I have frequently written, monetary conditions have been pretty lax since 1995. It had been becoming difficult to determine how lax since March 2006, when the Federal Reserve stopped reporting M3 money supply, the measure used by the European Central Bank and other monetarist organizations. However the St. Louis Fed, which for the decade until April was run by the monetarist William Poole, has constructed its own measure of broad money, Money of Zero Maturity, which is a reasonable proxy for M3; it consists of M2 plus institutional money market funds minus small time deposits. Like M3, MZM began to expand excessively in early 1995; in the 13 years to March 2008 it grew at an average annual rate of 8.88%, compared with growth in nominal GDP during that period of 5.25%.

Thus monetary policy, however measured, has been excessively expansionary since 1995, in the sense of expanding the money supply faster than output. As I have written previously, the inflation-creating effect of this excessive monetary expansion has been suppressed for a decade by the Internet, which has had a similar deflationary effect through enabling outsourcing to cheap labor countries that the railroads and refrigeration did in the 1880s through allowing cheap agricultural produce from the Midwest, Canada, Australia and Argentina to be shipped worldwide.

From the beginning of 2008, however, monetary expansion has sharply accelerated. In the three months to April 21, the latest data available, MZM expanded at an annual rate of no less than 28.7%. This extra-rapid expansion is not surprising – the Fed has been terrified that the US financial system was about to collapse, and has been making funding available in large quantities in a variety of ways. Indeed on May 2 the Fed, concerned about the credit card financing market, allowed banks to use credit-card-backed AAA bonds as security for Fed loans – needless to say this involves yet more monetary expansion and further risk to the taxpayer. Monetary stimulus of this extraordinary magnitude will have an effect, it has to.

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By Welf Herfurth

The global May Day events by workers the world over stand for the rights of the people to determine their own destiny as workers or students, it also stands against Corporations and Government standing over working families struggling to make a living. To demonstrate our support for a fair go for Australian workers, some local National-Anarchists decided to mobilise in the Melbourne CBD and join the planned march.

We had discussed our aims and tactics a week or so previous to the date of action and comrades were designated tasks. Our banner was designed and made with the help of a local fabric business and read “People Before Profits,” the people are more than worker bee’s or economic beings, we have an identity and spirit much deeper than our careers or petty consumerism.

Once the day arrived, we met at a designated location with time before the march to discuss in more detail what our “plan of action” would be. The conversation became more casual as we waited for the neo-Communist and Unionist groups to begin their march from Trades Hall. Our main goal was to make a presence representing National-Anarchist ideas in support of struggling working folk, our secondary aim fell in line with the Strategy of Tension; showing the traditional Left that they no longer had a monopoly on their sacred May Day and we have as much a right as they do to march.

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By Bo Sears

Slurs that never happened

USA TODAY ran an article on 4/8/08 headlined “Obama’s grandmother set own trail”.  It shines a light on US Senator Barack Obama’s willingness to lie about his own grandmother using negative language about one panhandling African-American at a bus stop in Hawaii:

Obama and Soetoro-Ng lived with their grandparents Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, and later with their mother, Ann Dunham, in 1970s Honolulu, where white people were routinely the target of discrimination.

Sam Slom, a Bank of Hawaii economist then, who is now a Republican state senator in Hawaii, recalls that as a part of the white — or “haole” — minority in Hawaii, he would regularly see housing ads that made no effort to hide racial preferences. He says he remembers ads that read, “No haoles” or “AJAs (Americans of Japanese ancestry) Only” or “No Japanese.”

“That’s the way it was,” Slom said. “Did people talk about race? We had local jokes … like that ‘pake’ (Chinese) guy or the ‘yobo’ (Korean) who did this or that. I certainly got my share of haole jokes.”

Madelyn Dunham’s views on race came into play in a speech Obama gave March 18 in Philadelphia designed to both denounce and defend his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

In the speech, Obama linked Wright and his grandmother when he said, “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed her by on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”

Obama’s campaign declined to make Dunham available for interviews or to say whether the Illinois senator alerted her before delivering the speech.

Dunham has repeatedly declined to comment to reporters, and Soetoro-Ng declined to comment on Obama’s speech about Wright or their grandmother’s attitudes on race.

Others who know Dunham were caught off guard by that mention in Obama’s speech.

“I was real surprised that he indicated that,” said Dennis Ching, who was a 23-year-old management trainee under Dunham beginning in 1966. “I never heard her say anything like that. I never heard her say anything negative about anything. And she never swore.”

“I never heard Madelyn say anything disparaging about people of African ancestry or Asian ancestry or anybody’s ancestry,” Slom said.

One of Obama’s two books describes his learning of his grandmother’s allegedly abusive language from his slacker grandfather who confided that alleged information to Obama. But Obama in neither of his books mentions any slurs toward any demographic said in his presence by his grandmother. The article referenced above states that there is no record and no witness to corroborate Obama’s remarks.  One witness even confirms that the grandmother never engaged in hateful speech. So Obama is not just involved in left-wing racialist politics and hate speech (“acting white,” “white resentment”), he appears willing to lie about his own grandmother (“a typical white person”) on that point. In contrast, his former pastor, Rev. Wright, made remarks in his recent PR binge this past week that he would never accept slurs against his own parents—apparently that lesson didn’t stick with Obama.

Haole and beatings

But the second thing to notice in the article is the matter-of-fact way in which the writer (Dan Nakaso) speaks of “haole” as an accepted name for the diverse white Hawaiians even back in the 1960s, and of rampant discrimination against them.

This is a cautionary tale that says, while we wait for the general awakening and the return of the freedoms of association and contract, we must act to resist defamation for our children’s sake, to preserve their right to a decent sense of self-respect. Although it is not mentioned in the article, it is well-known on the West Coast that the last day of school in Hawaii is what we have on May 1 in schools here in California, namely a “beat-up whitey” day. In California it is known in graffiti as “JWD” day, an acronym for “Jump Whitey Day.”

Yes, even though Resisting Defamation is limited to fighting slurs, hate caricatures, negative stereotypes, and white-baiting canards, it appears obvious that a second measure that will need to be taken will be the creation of self-defense voluntary units to protect young diverse white American and European students.  What can the white Hawaiian parents be thinking to allow their children to be targeted for slurs and beatings just because of the color of their skin?

Thursday’s tranche of local authority elections, which comprised about 37% of the country’s council seats, have delivered a withering if hardly unpredicted verdict on Gordon Brown and his exhausted administration.  At 24% of the total of votes cast, Labour is languishing in third place behind the LibDems (25%) and twenty points adrift of David Cameron’s Tories.

In general election terms such dominance could deliver Cameron a parliamentary majority in the range of 150 seats.  Labour will now slowly, but slowly come to terms with its two available choices:-

1. The high-risk strategy of dumping Brown within the next twelve months to give young master Balls time to win the public over, or

2. Running with Brown in the knowledge that the 2010 election cannot be won, while accepting that the zeitgeist has shifted away from them and a lengthy period of self-examination must be entered upon before change is made.  In this event Harriet Harman would shoulder the task of temporary party leader, as Margaret Beckett did after the sudden death of John Smith in 1994.

I think the party will choose the second option, and I will predict now that the run-off for the leadership will be between Ed Balls and John Cruddas, with David Miliband as the kingmaker.

Either way, it will be Cameron in Downing Street.  That is clear.

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I think the most interesting thing about the following site is Mark Green’s webcast video interviews, but I’m sure the book is worth a look too:

This is the sort of thing that I believe Osama Bin Laden was referring to when he declared that the West would undergo an “ideological collapse” if it invaded Iraq for Israel.

By David Hamilton

Slowly, and the elites hope imperceptibly, we are being brought under repressive state control operated by not only the police but also bureaucrats.  It goes largely unnoticed because the new laws and regulations seem unconnected, and journalists and opposition politicians are part of the same ruling caste.  But if you look at the new laws and regulations as a trend rather than independent Acts it becomes clear.

“Your papers please” is a phrase associated with Hitler’s Gestapo at a time when people without papers were taken to detention centres.  But it is beginning here. The Daily Mail of 21st March 2007:-

British citizens will be quizzed on up to 200 different pieces of personal information in a 30 minute grilling when they apply for a passport.  Those who fail to convince the bureaucrats they are who they say will be denied a travel document or face a full investigation by anti-fraud experts.  There is no formal appeal process.

Peter Mandelson, the European Trade Commissioner, once said: “We are now entering the post-democratic age.”  To put it more directly: an era of the totalitarian control of people by the state.  Politically, w are in the grip of a narrow ruling elite, an “Ideological Caste” that admits only those into power with the same views, and expels in disgrace any who dissent, as in the public humiliation and sacking of leading scientist Dr.James Watson.

The Ideological Caste is the emergent elite of the Cultural Marxist era.  They do very well out of it … earning vast sums of money, living in the best areas, sending their children to the best schools.  But impose equality on the rest of us.  They claim to be correcting centuries of unfairness.  But they police our thoughts and oppress us if our views different from theirs.

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