Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Who Hates Whomw and What and Why?

THE ABSURD TIMES



We have been fortunate lately. After one of you sent along the ET warnings, another sent this bit of information. Actually, this and similar material has been posted here on the Times, but that hardly qualifies as mass distribution.

Anyway, here it is:


William Blum, a US foreign policy expert, also has a explanation from a different point of view:

From his article "Myth and Denial in the War on Terrorism":


Let us look at some actual cases. The terrorists responsible for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 sent a letter to the New York Times which stated, in part: "We declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region."[5] Richard Reid, who tried to ignite a bomb in his shoe while aboard an American Airline flight to Miami in December 2001, told police that his planned suicide attack was an attempt to strike a blow against the US campaign in Afghanistan and the Western economy. In an e-mail sent to his mother, which he intended her to read after his death, Reid wrote that it was his duty "to help remove the oppressive American forces from the Muslims land."[6] After the October 2002 bombings in Bali, Indonesia, which destroyed two nightclubs and killed more than 200 people, one of the leading suspects told police that the bombings were "revenge" for "what Americans have done to Muslims." He said that he wanted to "kill as many Americans as possible" because "America oppresses the Muslims".[7] In November 2002, a taped message from Osama bin Laden began: "The road to safety begins by ending the aggression. Reciprocal treatment is part of justice. The [terrorist] incidents that have taken place ... are only reactions and reciprocal actions."[8] That same month, when Mir Aimal Kasi, who killed several people outside of CIA headquarters in 1993, was on death row, he declared: "What I did was a retaliation against the US government" for American policy in the Middle East and its support of Israel.[9] It should be noted that the State Department warned at the time that the execution of Kasi could result in attacks against Americans around the world.[10] It did not warn that the attacks would result from foreigners hating or envying American democracy, freedom, wealth, or secular government. Similarly, in the days following the start of US bombing of Afghanistan there were numerous warnings from US government officials about being prepared for retaliatory acts, and during the war in Iraq, the State Department announced: "Tensions remaining from the recent events in Iraq may increase the potential threat to US citizens and interests abroad, including by terrorist groups."[11] ...... Jimmy Carter told the New York Times in a 1989 interview:

"We sent Marines into Lebanon and you only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or to Jordan to witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers -- women and children and farmers and housewives -- in those villages around Beirut. ... As a result of that ... we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what precipitated the taking of our hostages and that is what has precipitated some of the terrorist attacks."[14] Colin Powell has also revealed that he knows better. Writing of this same Lebanon debacle in his 1995 memoir, he forgoes clichés about terrorists not believing in democracy:

The USS New Jersey started hurling 16-inch shells into the mountains above Beirut, in World War II style, as if we were softening up the beaches on some Pacific atoll prior to an invasion. What we tend to overlook in such situations is that other people will react much as we would.[15]

(For references and full article, please visit the article) You can find it at: http://understanding-terrorism.blogspot.com/

According to Blum, Islamic terrorists hate the USA for all its bombings and killings, not for all its "freedoms."

Also, the US government seems to agree with this view: By early 2006, America's National Intelligence Assessment on terrorism concluded that the Iraq conflict was "breeding a deep resentment of US involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement".


Monday, December 28, 2009

Don't Worry About Al-Quaeda

THE ABSURD TIMES

Admiral Lord Hill-Norton
Admiral Lord Hill-Norton, July 2000
[We are grateful to James Fox for sharing this interview.]

Lord Hill-Norton is a five-star Admiral and the former Head of the British Ministry of Defense who was kept in the dark about the UFO subject during his official capacities. In this short interview, he states that this subject has great significance and should no longer be denied and kept secret. He emphatically states, “…that there is a serious possibility that we are being visited — and have been visited for many years — by people from outer space, from other civilizations; that it behooves us to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation, and not the subject of rubbishing by tabloid newspapers.”

I know a good bit about the Bentwaters incident. I’ve interviewed a number of the people who took part in it, and what I have decided after careful thought, is that there are only two explanations for what happened that night in Suffolk. The first is that the people concerned — including Colonel Halt, who was, at the time, the Deputy Commander of the Base, and a lot of his soldiers — claim that something from outside the Earth’s atmosphere landed at their air force base. They went and stood by it; they inspected it; they photographed it.

The following day they took tests on the ground where it had been and found radioactive traces; they reported this. Colonel Halt wrote a memorandum, which was sent to our Ministry of Defense. He has appeared on British television at least once, to my knowledge — possibly more often — in which he has repeated, effectively, what he said in that memorandum. What he said is what I have just described. That is one explanation — that it actually happened as Colonel Halt reported.

The other explanation is that it didn’t. In that case, one is bound to assume that Colonel Halt and all his men were hallucinating. My position is perfectly clear — either of those explanations is of the utmost defense interest. It has been reported and claimed — and I, myself, have raised it to ministers at the Defense Ministry in this country — that nothing they have been informed about regarding UFOs is of defense interest. Surely, to any sensible person, either of those explanations cannot fail to be of defense interest. That the Colonel of an American Air Force Base in Suffolk and his military men are hallucinating when there are nuclear-armed aircraft on the base — this must be of defense interest.

And, if indeed what he says took place, did take place — and why on Earth should he make it up — then, surely, the entry of a vehicle from outer space (and certainly not manmade) to a defense base in this country also cannot fail to be of defense interest. It simply isn’t any good for our ministers — and the Ministry of Defense in particular — to say that nothing took place that December night in Suffolk, or that it is not of defense interest. It simply isn’t true.

Since my name has become connected with UFO matters in quite a big way in this country, and in one or two other countries too, I have frequently been asked why a person of my background — a former Chief of the Defense Staff, a former Chairman of the NATO Military Committee — why I think there is a cover-up, or what the reasons may be for government’s wishing to cover up the facts about UFOs. A number of explanations have often been put forward. The most frequent, and perhaps the most plausible, is the government’s concern (which [is] primarily that of the United States, and that of my own country) over the public’s reaction if they [were] told the truth — which is that there are objects in our atmosphere which are technically miles in advance of anything that we can deploy, that we have no means of stopping them coming here, and that we have no defense against them, should they be hostile.

I believe governments fear that if they did disclose those facts, people would panic: people would rush about and jam switchboards like they did that famous day in New Jersey, when there was a spoof that the Martians [had] landed — people will go mad, and they will jump up and down. I don’t believe that at all — I’ve said so in print. I do not believe that people today, in the 21st century, are going to panic at that sort of information. After all, they have put up with the introduction of nuclear weapons and the destruction of two Japanese cities 50 years ago. They take as a matter of course that we can land vehicles on Mars — land to the precise instant, forecast years before. So why should they panic? They are much more interested in doing the pools or the lottery. They would shrug their shoulders and take it as a matter of course. Anyway, they don’t trust politicians, in my experience.

What I’d like to say is that there is a serious possibility that we are being visited — and have been visited for many years — by people from outer space, from other civilizations; that it behooves us to find out who they are, where they come from, and what they want. This should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation, and not the subject of rubbishing by tabloid newspapers.

It seems to me that the Bentwaters incident is a classic case where an apparent intrusion into our airspace — and indeed, a landing in our country — occurred, which was witnessed by serious-minded people in the military — responsible people, doing a responsible job. And, Bentwaters is, in a sense, a benchmark for how not to deal with these matters in the future.

[See the testimony of Larry Warren, MOD official Nick Pope, Clifford Stone, Lori Rehfeldt, and others regarding the Bentwaters landing event in the UK. I should also mention that I personally spent a couple of hours with Lord Hill-Norton, and he was very concerned about the secrecy surrounding this subject — and the fact that he had been deceived about it. Notwithstanding his five star Admiral status and his position as former head of the Ministry of Defense, he was never officially briefed on the subject. This is consistent with my experiences with President Clinton’s staff and his first Director of Central Intelligence (CIA Director) James Woolsey, senior members of Congress, very senior Pentagon officials, including the Director of Intelligence (J-2) for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a sitting Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) — all of whom I have personally briefed, and had been left out of the loop on this very important matter — or were directly denied information when inquiries were made. This is, of course, a dangerous situation. The secrecy itself is a great threat to the national — and world — security, makes a mockery of democracy and our constitutional form of government, and must be corrected by official action. SG]

Profile Pictures

Admiral Lord Hill-Norton



Monday, December 21, 2009

Reprint--The Gaza I know

THE ABSURD TIMES




I thought I'd share this with you:


The Gaza I Know

By Nancy Murray

De


For most Americans, the Gaza Strip is, at best, unknown territory. At worst, it is a hostile land whose "terrorist infrastructure" must be dismantled, no matter what the cost to its million and a half residents.


  • Nancy Murray: Later this month thousands of international solidarity activists will take part in the Gaza Freedom March to end Israel's blockade. They deserve your support.

The Gaza I have been visiting for the past twenty-one years bears little relation to the dehumanizing imagery to which it has been reduced by the mainstream media. The Gaza I know is home to friends and strangers who are as welcoming and humane as they are resilient and determined to achieve their freedom. They have maintained their humanity despite enduring a brutal forty-two-year-old Israeli occupation that has cost them the destruction of their homes, land, economy and future and the loss of more than 4,000 lives since the dawn of the twenty-first century.

For the past two and a half years, this spit of sand--just twenty-five miles long and a few miles wide--has been virtually a closed prison. Since June 2007 Israel's blockade has prevented the entry of all but a handful of basic items, and the exit of patients who urgently need medical treatment and students with scholarships to study abroad. Then, a year ago, came the "shock and awe" of Israel's "Operation Cast Lead," intended as a knockout blow not just to the crude rockets fired from Gaza but to its life-sustaining infrastructure and the will of its people to resist.

A month ago, I finally obtained permission from the Israeli military to cross into Gaza to visit therapy programs for traumatized children. Half of the Gaza Strip's 1.5 million inhabitants are children, and many have not emotionally recovered from Israel's military attacks.

And how could they? They are still living in the ruins of war. Blasted buildings tilt dangerously over streets. Unexploded ordnance lurks beneath concrete rubble. Israel, with the blessing of the United States, has prevented reconstruction materials and heavy machinery from entering the Gaza Strip - and just about everything else.

Aid agencies have at the ready the equipment needed to fix the destroyed sewage and waste water systems - but it is not permitted to enter. And so each day up to 80 million liters of untreated sewage spill into the Mediterranean and leach into the aquifer. Thousands of babies have "blue baby syndrome" and risk dying of nitrate poisoning; fish are dead; and the long sandy beaches--which had been the sole place of recreation in one of the most densely crowded places on earth --are now off limits.

The hundreds of dangerous, hand-hewn tunnels into Egypt through which Gazans haul bottled water, food and other supplies are at present a lifeline. So it is with a sinking heart that I read that Egypt, at the urging of Israel and the United States, is installing metal sheets under the ground to "curb smuggling."

I wonder how the head of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, John Ging, is digesting this latest calamitous news. When I met with him in November he told me that hope for tomorrow is just about gone. "We have run out of words to describe how bad it is here. Things are moving rapidly in the wrong direction. The best help we can get is to lift the siege and to begin to deal with human beings on a humane and legal basis."

In late December, to mark the first anniversary of Israel's war, some 1,200 internationals from forty-two countries will be doing what they can to get things moving in the right direction. They intend to enter Gaza from Egypt to participate in the Gaza Freedom March. Marchers include an 85-year-old American Holocaust survivor, Hedy Epstein, the acclaimed writer Alice Walker, civil rights movement veterans, Ronnie Kasrils, a leader of the South African liberation struggle and a substantial delegation from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).

Invoking the spirit of Gandhi's Salt March and the Civil Rights Movement, these internationals of conscience will encounter the Gaza I know - the vibrant civil society of children, students and teachers, refugee groups and women's organizations, doctors and therapists, farmers and fishermen, musicians and dancers who are planning a tremendous welcome.

Together they will take part in cultural and solidarity activities. Then, on New Year's Eve, they will call for an end to the blockade in a massive march toward the Erez Crossing with Israel, as Israeli solidarity marchers converge on the other side.

Simultaneously, around the globe there will be "end the siege" actions demanding that the prison doors be opened. The lives of Gaza's babies hang in the balance.

To find out more, go to Gaza Freedom March.


Thursday, December 17, 2009

Health Care Bill

THE ABSURD TIMES

This is about the best analysis of what is happening with health care with the pressure of the insurance companies. He sums it up in a clear and concise manner, and also educates as to other actions that can be taken. Most importantly, I thought, was the assurance that the public option CAN INDEED be inserted through reconciliation and thus would only need 50 Senators to pass it (VP Biden could cast a tie-breaking vote.

Note: if you are still stuck on dial up, use realplayer (download for free) and it can download the clip and then you can play it. Almost every computer now running can handle this clip that way. Anything pre-1984 might still have problems.




http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/34455431#34455431
<cid:part1.07060409.08000607@comcast.net>

And then we can kick Leiberlooserman out of all the committe chairs.

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Happy Birthday!

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If any composer deserves the name of revolutionary it is Beethoven. He carried through what was probably the greatest single revolution in modern music and changed the way music was composed and listened to. This is music that does not calm, but shocks and disturbs. Alan Woods describes how the world into which Beethoven was born was a world in turmoil, a world in transition, a world of wars, revolution and counter-revolution: a world like our own world.

"Beethoven is the friend and contemporary of the French Revolution, and he remained faithful to it even when, during the Jacobin dictatorship, humanitarians with weak nerves of the Schiller type turned from it, preferring to destroy tyrants on the theatrical stage with the help of cardboard swords. Beethoven, that plebeian genius, who proudly turned his back on emperors, princes and magnates - that is the Beethoven we love for his unassailable optimism, his virile sadness, for the inspired pathos of his struggle, and for his iron will which enabled him to seize destiny by the throat."

Igor Stravinsky

BeethovenIf any composer deserves the name of revolutionary it is Beethoven. The word revolution derives historically from the discoveries of Copernicus, who established that the earth revolves around the sun, and thus transformed the way we look at the universe and our place in it. Similarly, Beethoven carried through what was probably the greatest single revolution in modern music. His output was vast, including nine symphonies, five piano concertos and others for violin, string quartets, piano sonatas, songs and one opera. He changed the way music was composed and listened to. Right to the end, he never ceased pushing music to its limits.

After Beethoven it was impossible to go back to the old days when music was regarded as a soporific for wealthy patrons who could doze through a symphony and then go home quietly to bed. After Beethoven, one no longer returned from a concert humming pleasant tunes. This is music that does not calm, but shocks and disturbs. it is music that makes you think and feel.

Early years

Marx pointed out that the difference between France and Germany is that, whereas the French actually made revolutions, the Germans merely speculated about them. Philosophical idealism flourished in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries for the same reason. In England the bourgeoisie was effecting a great world-historical revolution in production, while across the English Channel, the French were carrying out an equally great revolution in politics. In backward Germany, where social relations lagged behind France and England, the only revolution was a revolution in men's minds. Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel argued about the nature of the world and ideas, while other people in other lands actually set about revolutionising the world and the minds of men and women.

The Sturm und Drang movement was an expression of this typically German phenomenon. Goethe was influenced by German idealist philosophy, especially Kant. Here we can detect the echoes of the French revolution, but they are distant and indistinct, and they are strictly confined to the abstract world of poetry, music and philosophy. The Sturm und Drang movement in Germany reflected the revolutionary nature of the epoch at the end of the 18th century. It was a period of enormous intellectual ferment. The French philosophes anticipated the revolutionary events of 1789 by their assault on the ideology of the old regime. As Engels put it in the Anti-Duhring: “The great men, who in France prepared men's minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognised no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions — everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism; everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head; first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down.”

Bonn in the 18th century

Bonn in the 18th century

The impact of this pre-revolutionary ferment in France made itself felt far beyond the borders of that country, in Germany, England, and even Russia. In literature, gradually the old courtly forms were being dissolved. This found its reflection in the poetry of Wolfgang Goethe – the greatest poet Germany has produced. His great masterpiece Faust is shot through with a dialectical spirit. Mephistophiles is the living spirit of negation that penetrates everything. This revolutionary spirit found an echo in the later works of Mozart, notably in Don Giovanni, which among other things contains a stirring chorus with the words: “Long live Liberty!” But it is only with Beethoven that the spirit of the French Revolution finds its true expression in music.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn on November 16, 1770, the son of a musician from a family of Flemish origin. His father, Johann, was employed by the court of the Archbishop-elector. He was by all accounts a harsh, brutal and dissolute man. His mother, Maria Magdalena, bore her martyrdom with silent resignation. Beethoven’s early years were not happy. This probably explains his introverted and somewhat surly character as well as his rebellious spirit.

Beethoven’s early education was at best patchy. He left school at the age of eleven. The first person to realise the youngster’s enormous potential was the court organist, Gottlob Neffe, who introduced him to the works of Bach, especially the Well-Tempered Klavier.

Noting his son’s precocious talent, Johann tried to turn him into a child prodigy – a new Mozart. At the age of five he was exhibited at a public concert. But Johann was doomed to disappointment: Ludwig was no childhood Mozart. Surprisingly, he had no natural disposition for music and had to be pushed. So his father sent him to several teachers to drum music into his head.

Beethoven in Vienna

At this time Bonn, the capital of the Electorate of Cologne, was a sleepy provincial backwater. In order to advance, the young musician had to go to study music in Vienna. The family was not rich, but in 1787 the young Beethoven was sent to the capital by the Archbishop. It was here that he met Mozart, who was impressed by him. Later one of his teachers was Haydn. But after only two months he had to return to Bonn, where his mother was seriously ill. She died shortly afterwards. This was the first of many personal and family tragedies that dogged Beethoven all his life. In 1792, the year in which Louis XVI was beheaded, Beethoven finally moved from Bonn to Vienna, where he lived till he died.

Vienna in Beethoven's time
Vienna in Beethoven's time

The portraits that have come down to us show a brooding, sombre young man with an expression that conveys a sense of inner tension and a passionate nature. Physically he was not handsome: a large head and Roman nose, a pock-marked face and thick, bushy hair that never seemed to be combed. His dark complexion earned him the nickname “the Spaniard”. Short, stocky and rather clumsy, he had the bearing and manners of a plebeian – a fact that could not be disguised by the elegant clothes he wore as a young man.

This born rebel turned up in aristocratic and fastidious Vienna, unkempt, ill-dressed and ill-humoured, with none of the polite airs and graces that might have been expected of him. Like every other composer in those times, Beethoven was obliged to rely on grants and commissions from wealthy and aristocratic patrons. But he was never owned by them. He was not a musical courtier, as Haydn was at the court of the Esternazy family. What they thought of this strange man is not known. But the greatness of his music ensured him of commissions and therefore a livelihood.

He must have felt completely out of place. He despised convention and orthodoxy. He was not in the least interested in his appearance or surroundings. Beethoven was a man who lived and breathed for his music and was unconcerned with worldly comforts. His personal life was chaotic and unsettled, and could be described as Bohemian. He lived in the utmost squalor. His house was always a mess, with bits of food lying around, and even unemptied chamber pots.Beethoven in the course of a stroll with the poet Goethe, the Archduchess Rudolph and the Empress

His attitude to the princes and nobles who paid him was conveyed in a famous painting. The composer is shown in the course of a stroll with the poet Goethe, the Archduchess Rudolph and the Empress. While Goethe respectfully gave way to the royal pair, politely removing his hat, Beethoven completely ignored them and continued walking without even acknowledging the greetings of the imperial family. This painting contains the whole spirit of the man, a fearless, revolutionary, uncompromising spirit. Suffocating in the bourgeois atmosphere of Vienna he wrote a despairing comment: “As long as the Austrians have their brown beer and little sausages, they will never revolt.” [1]

A revolutionary epoch

The world into which Beethoven was born was a world in turmoil, a world in transition, a world of wars, revolution and counter-revolution: a world like our own world. In 1776, the American colonists succeeded in winning their freedom through a revolution which took the form of a war of national liberation against Britain. This was the first act in a great historical drama.

The American Revolution proclaimed the ideals of individual freedom that were derived from the French Enlightenment. Just over a decade later, the ideas of the Rights of Man returned to France in an even more explosive manner. The storming of the Bastille in July 1789 marked a decisive turning point in world history.

In its period of ascent the French Revolution swept away all the accumulated rubbish of feudalism, brought an entire nation to its feet and confronted the whole of Europe with courage and determination. The liberating spirit of the Revolution in France swept like wildfire through Europe. Such a period demanded new art forms and new ways of expression. This was achieved in the music of Beethoven, which expresses the spirit of the age better than anything else.

Revolutionary France
Revolutionary France

In 1793 King Louis of France was executed by the Jacobins. A wave of shock and fear swept through all the courts of Europe. Attitudes towards revolutionary France hardened. Those "liberals" who had initially greeted the Revolution with enthusiasm, now slunk away into the corner of reaction. The antagonism of the propertied classes to France was voiced by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Everywhere the supporters of the revolution were regarded with suspicion and persecuted. It was no longer safe to be a friend of the French Revolution.

These were stormy times. The revolutionary armies of the young French republic defeated the armies of feudal-monarchist Europe and were counter-attacking all along the line. The young composer was from the beginning an ardent admirer of the French revolution, and was appalled at the fact that Austria was the leading force in the counter-revolutionary coalition against France. The capital of the Empire was infected by a mood of terror. The air was thick with suspicion; spies were ever-present and free expression was stifled by censorship. But what could not be expressed by the written word could find an expression in great music.

His studies with Haydn did not go very well. He was already developing original ideas about music, which did not go down well with the old man, firmly wedded to the old courtly-aristocratic style of classical music. It was a clash of the old with the new. The young composer was making a name for himself as a pianist. His style was violent, like the age that produced it. It is said that he hit the keys so hard he broke the strings. He was beginning to be recognised as a new and original composer. He took Vienna by storm. He was a success.

Life can play the cruellest tricks on men and women. In Beethoven's case, fate prepared a particularly cruel destiny. In 1796-7 Beethoven fell ill – possibly with a type of meningitis – which affected his hearing. He was 28 years old, and at the peak of his fame. And he was losing his hearing. About 1800 he experienced the first signs of deafness. Although he did not become completely deaf till his last years, the awareness of his deteriorating condition must have been a terrible torture. He became depressed and even suicidal. He wrote of his inner torment, and how only his music held him back from taking his own life. This experience of intense suffering, and the struggle to overcome it, suffuses his music and imbues it with a deeply human spirit.

Beethoven as a young man
The young Beethoven

His personal life was never happy. He had the habit of falling in love with the daughters (and wives) of his wealthy patrons – which always ended badly, with new fits of depression. After one such spell of depression he wrote: “Art, and only art, has saved me! It seems to me impossible to leave this world without having given everything I have felt germinating within me.”

At the beginning of 1801 he passed through a severe personal crisis. According to the Heiligenstadt Testament, he was on the verge of suicide. Having recovered from his depression, Beethoven threw himself with renewed vigour into the work of musical creation. A lesser man would have been destroyed by these blows. But Beethoven turned his deafness – a crippling disability for anyone, but a catastrophe for a composer – to an advantage. His inner ear provided him with all that was necessary to compose great music. In the very year of his most devastating crisis (1802) he composed his great Eroica symphony.

The dialectic of the sonata

The dynamics of Beethoven's music were entirely new. Earlier composers wrote quiet parts and loud parts. But the two were kept completely separate. In Beethoven, on the contrary, we pass rapidly from one to another. This music contains an inner tension, an unresolved contradiction which urgently demands resolution. It is the music of struggle.

The sonata form is a way of elaborating and structuring musical matter. It is based on a dynamic vision of musical form and is dialectical in essence. The music develops through a series of opposing elements. By the end of the 18th century the sonata form dominated much of the music composed. Although it is not new, the sonata form was developed and consolidated by Haydn and Mozart. But in the compositions of the 18th century we have only the bare potential of the sonata form, not its true content.

In part (but only in part) this is a question of technique. The form that Beethoven used was not new, but the way in which he used it was. The sonata form begins with a quick first movement, followed by a slower second movement, a third movement which is merrier in character (originally a minuet, later a scherzo, which literally means a joke), and ending, as it began, with a fast movement.

Basically, the sonata form is based on the following line of development: A-B-A. It returns to the beginning, but on a higher level. This is a purely dialectical concept: movement through contradiction, the negation of the negation. It is a kind of musical syllogism: exposition-development-recapitulation, or expressed in other terms: thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

This kind of development is present in each of the movements. But there is also an overall development in which there are conflicting themes which are finally reconciled in a "happy ending". In the final coda we return to the initial key, creating the sensation of a triumphal apotheosis.

This form contains the germ of a profound idea, and has the potential for serious development. It can also be expressed by a wide range of instrumental combinations: piano solo, piano and violin, string quartet, symphony. The success of the sonata form was helped by the invention of a new musical instrument: the pianoforte. This was able to express the full dynamic of romanticism, whereas the organ and harpsichord were restricted to play music written according to the principles of polyphony and counterpoint.

The development of the sonata form was already far advanced in the late 18th century. It reached its high point in the symphonies of Mozart and Haydn, and in one sense it could be argued that the symphonies of Beethoven are only a continuation of this tradition. But in reality, the formal identity conceals a fundamental difference.

In its origins, the form of the sonata predominated over its real content. The classical composers of the 18th century were mainly concerned with getting the form right (though Mozart is an exception). But with Beethoven, the real content of the sonata form finally emerges. His symphonies create an overwhelming sense of the process of struggle and development through contradictions. Here we have the most sublime example of the dialectical unity of form and content. This is the secret of all great art. Such heights have rarely been reached in the history of music.

Inner conflict

The symphonies of Beethoven represent a fundamental break with the past. If the forms are superficially similar, the content and spirit of the music is radically different. With Beethoven - and the Romantics who followed in his footsteps - what is important is not the forms in themselves, the formal symmetry and inner equilibrium, but the content. Indeed, the equilibrium is frequently disturbed in Beethoven. There are many dissonances, reflecting inner conflict.

In 1800 he wrote his first symphony, a work that still has its roots in the soil of Haydn. It is a sunny work, quite free from the spirit of conflict and struggle that characterises his later works. It really gives one no idea of what was to come. The Pathetique piano sonata (opus 13) is altogether different. It is quite unlike the piano sonatas of Haydn and Mozart. Beethoven was influenced by Schiller's theory of tragedy and tragic art, which he saw not just as human suffering, but above all as a struggle to resist suffering, to fight against it.

The message is clearly expressed in the first movement, which opens with complex and dissonant sounds (listen here). These mysterious chords soon give way to a central agitated passage which suggests this resistance to suffering. This inner conflict plays a key role in Beethoven's music and gives it a character completely different to that of 18th century music. It is the voice of a new epoch: a thunderous voice that demands to be heard.

The question that must be posed is: how do we explain this striking difference? The short and easy answer is that this musical revolution is the product of the mind of a genius. That is correct. Probably Beethoven was the greatest musical genius of all time. But it is an answer that really answers nothing. Why did this entirely new musical language emerge precisely at this moment and not 100 years earlier? Why did it not occur to Mozart, Haydn, or, for that matter, to Bach?

The sound world of Beethoven is not one composed of beautiful sounds, as was the music of Mozart and Haydn. It does not flatter the ear or send the listener away tapping his feet and whistling a pleasant tune. It is a rugged sound, a musical explosion, a musical revolution that accurately conveys the spirit of the times. Here there is not only variety but conflict. Beethoven frequently uses the direction sforzando – which signifies attack. This is violent music, full of movement, rapidly shifting moods, conflict, contradiction.

With Beethoven the sonate form advances to a qualitatively higher level. He transformed it from a mere form to a powerful and at the same time intimate expression of his innermost feelings. In some of his piano compositions he wrote the instruction: "sonata, quasi una fantasia", indicating that he was looking for absolute freedom of expression through the medium of the sonata. Here the dimension of the sonate is greatly expanded in comparison to its classical form. The tempi are more flexible, and even change place. Above all, the finale is no longer merely a recapitulation, but a real development and culmination of all that has gone before.

When applied to his symphonies the sonata form as developed by Beethoven reaches an unheard-of level of sublimity and power. The virile energy that propels his fifth and third symphonies is sufficient proof of this. This is not music for easy listening or entertainment. It is music that is designed to move, to shock and to inspire to action. It is the voice of rebellion cast in music.

This is no accident, for Beethoven’s revolution in music echoed a revolution in real life. Beethoven was a child of his age – the age of the French Revolution. He wrote most of his greatest work in the midst of revolution, and the spirit of revolution impregnates every note of it. It is utterly impossible to understand him outside this context.

Beethoven boldly swept aside all existing musical conventions, just as the French revolution cleaned out the Augean stables of the feudal past. His was a new kind of music, music that opened many doors for future composers, just as the French revolution opened the door to a new democratic society.

The inner secret of Beethoven’s music is the most intense conflict. It is a conflict that rages in most of his music and reaches its most impressive heights in his last seven symphonies, beginning with the Third symphony, known as the Eroica. This was the real turning-point in the musical evolution of Beethoven and also of the history of music in general. And the roots of this revolution in music must be found outside of music, in society and history.

The Eroica symphony

A decisive turning-point both in Beethoven's life and in the evolution of western music was the compsition of his third symphony (the Eroica). Up till now, the musical language of the first and second symphonies did not depart substantially from the sound world of Mozart and Haydn. But from the very first notes of the Eroica we enter an entirely different world. The music has a political sub-text, the origin of which is well known.

Beethoven was a musician, not a politician, and his knowledge of events in France was necessarily confused and incomplete, but his revolutionary instincts were unfailing and in the end always led him to the correct conclusions. He had heard reports of the rise of a young officer in the revolutionary army called Bonaparte. Like many others, he formed the impression that Napoleon was the continuer of the revolution and defender of the rights of man. He therefore planned to dedicate his new symphony to Bonaparte.

This was an error, but quite understandable. It was the same error that many people committed when they assumed that Stalin was the real heir of Lenin and the defender of the ideals of the October revolution. But slowly it became clear that his hero was departing from the ideals of the Revolution and consolidating a regime that aped some of the worst features of the old despotism.

In 1799, Bonaparte's coup signified the definitive end of the period of revolutionary ascent. In August of 1802 Napoleon secured the consulate for life, with power to name his successor. An obsequious senate begged him to re-introduce hereditary rule “to defend public liberty and maintain equality”. Thus, in the name of “liberty” and “equality” the French people were invited to place their head in a noose.

It is always the way with usurpers in every period in history. The emperor Augustus maintained the outward forms of the Roman Republic and publicly feigned a hypocritical deference to the Senate, while systematically subverting the republican constitution. Not long afterwards, his successor Caligula made his prize horse a senator, which was a far more realistic appraisal of the situation.

Stalin, the leader of the political counter-revolution in Russia, proclaimed himself the faithful disciple of Lenin while trampling all the traditions of Leninism underfoot. Gradually the norms of proletarian soviet democracy and egalitarianism were replaced by inequality, bureaucratic and totalitarian rule. In the army, all the old rank and privileges abolished by the October revolution were reintroduced. The virtues of the Family were exalted. Eventually, Stalin even discovered a role for the Orthodox Church, as a faithful servant of his regime. In all this, he was only treading a road that had already been traversed by Napoleon Bonaparte, the gravedigger of the French Revolution.

In order to find some kind of sanction and respectability for his dictatorship, Napoleon began to copy all the outward forms of the old regime: aristocratic titles, splendid uniforms, rank and, of course, religion. The French revolution had practically wiped out the Catholic Church. The mass of the people, except in the most backward areas like the Vendee, hated the Church, which they correctly identified with the rule of the old oppressors. Now Napoleon attempted to enlist the support of the Church for his regime, and signed a Concordat with the Pope.

From afar, Beethoven followed the developments in France with growing alarm and despondency. Already by 1802 Beethoven’s opinion of Napoleon was beginning to change. In a letter to a friend written in that year, he wrote indignantly: “Everything is trying to slide back into the old rut after Napoleon signed the Concordat with the Pope.”

But far worse was to come. On May 18 1804 Napoleon became Emperor of the French. The coronation ceremony took place at the cathedral of Notre Dame on December 2nd. As the Pope poured holy oil over the head of the usurper, all traces of the old Republican constitution were washed away. In place of the old austere Republican simplicity all the ostentatious splendour of the old monarchy reappeared to mock the memory of the Revolution for which so many brave men and women had sacrificed their lives.

When Beethoven received news of these events he was beside himself with rage. He angrily crossed out his dedication to Napoleon in the score of his new symphony. The manuscript still exists, and we can see that he attacked the page with such violence that it has a hole torn through it. He then dedicated the symphony to an anonymous hero of the revolution: the Eroica symphony was born.

Manuscript of Beethoven's Eroica Beethoven’s orchestral works were already beginning to produce new sounds that had never been heard before. They shocked the Viennese public, used to the genteel tunes of Haydn and Mozart. Yet Beethoven’s first two symphonies, though very fine, still look back to the relaxed, easy-going aristocratic world of the 18th century, the world as it was before it was shattered in 1789. The Eroica represents a tremendous breakthrough, a great leap forward for music, a real revolution. Sounds like these had never been heard before. The unfortunate musicians who had to play this for the first time must have been shocked and completely bewildered.

The Eroica caused a sensation. Up till then, a symphony was supposed to last at most half an hour. The first movement of the Eroica lasted as long as an entire sypmphony of the 18th century. And it was a work with a message: a work with something to say. The dissonances and violence of the first movement are clearly a call to struggle. That this means a revolutionary struggle is clear from the original dedication.

Trotsky once observed that revolutions are voluble affairs. The French Revolution was characterised by its oratory. Here were truly great mass orators: Danton, Saint-Just, Robespierre, and even Mirabeau before them. When these men spoke, they did not just address an audience: they were speaking to posterity, to history. Hence the rhetorical character of their speeches. They did not speak, they declaimed. Their speeches would begin with a striking phrase, which would immediately present a central theme which would then be developed in different ways, before making an emphatic re-appearance at the end.

It is just the same with the Eroica symphony. It does not speak, it declaims. The first movement of this symphony opens with two dissonant chords that resemble a man striking his fist on a table, demanding our attention, just like an impassioned orator in a revolutionary assembly. Beethoven then launches into a kind of musical cavalry charge, a tremendously impetuous forward thrust that is interrupted by clashes, conflict and struggle, and even momentarily halted by moments of sheer exhaustion, only to resume its triumphant forward march (listen here). In this movement we are in the thick of the Revolution itself, with all its ebbs and flows, its victories and defeats, its triumphs and its despairs. It is the French Revolution in music.

The second movement is a funeral march – in memory of a hero. It is a massive piece of work, as weighty and solid as granite (listen here). The slow, sad tread of the funeral march is interrupted by a section that recaptures the glories and triumphs of one who has given his life for the revolution (listen here). The central passage creates a massive sound edifice that creates a sensation of unbearable grief, before finally returning to the central theme of the funeral march. This is one of the greatest moments in the music of Beethoven – or any music.

The final movement is in an entirely different spirit. The symphony ends on a note of supreme optimism. After all the defeats, setbacks and disappointments, Beethoven is saying to us: “Yes, my friend, we have suffered a grievous loss, but we must turn the page and open a new chapter. The human spirit is strong enough to rise above all defeats and continue the struggle. And we must learn to laugh at adversity.”

To be continued...

Footnote:

[1] Beethoven was wrong about the Austrians. Two decades after his death, the Austrian working class and youth rose up in the revolution of 1848.

Thursday, December 10, 2009

sex scandel and mitch mcconnell

THE ABSURD TIMES





The Absurd Times knows nothing about any sexual liaisons between the Senate Minority leader (above) and the wife of Tiger Woods. Furthermore, his office has neither confirmed or denied any such rumors, which do not exist. We have also not attempted to reach his office for any reason whatsoever, including this sex scandal. There is no reason to believe that the hospitalization of her mother was related to this scandal, which, we repeat, does not exist.

Speaking of Tiger Woods, our President went to Oslo to accept his Nobel Peace Prize, but refused to have the traditional lunch with the committee that awarded it to him. I have heard rumors that they wanted it back.

Speaking of Obama, here is an excellent article on Afghanistan:

****************************************************

The Nine Surges of Obama’s War
How to Escalate in Afghanistan
By Tom Engelhardt

In his Afghan “surge” speech at West Point last week, President Obama offered Americans some specifics to back up his new “way forward in Afghanistan.” He spoke of the “additional 30,000 U.S. troops” he was sending into that country over the next six months. He brought up the “roughly $30 billion” it would cost us to get them there and support them for a year. And finally, he spoke of beginning to bring them home by July 2011. Those were striking enough numbers, even if larger and, in terms of time, longer than many in the Democratic Party would have cared for. Nonetheless, they don’t faintly cover just how fully the president has committed us to an expanding war and just how wide it is likely to become.

Despite the seeming specificity of the speech, it gave little sense of just how big and how expensive this surge will be. In fact, what is being portrayed in the media as the surge of November 2009 is but a modest part of an ongoing expansion of the U.S. war effort in many areas. Looked at another way, the media's focus on the president’s speech as the crucial moment of decision, and on those 30,000 new troops as the crucial piece of information, has distorted what’s actually underway.

In reality, the U.S. military, along with its civilian and intelligence counterparts, has been in an almost constant state of surge since the last days of the Bush administration. Unfortunately, while information on this is available, and often well reported, it’s scattered in innumerable news stories on specific aspects of the war. You have to be a media jockey to catch it all, no less put it together.

What follows, then, is my own attempt to make sense of the nine fronts on which the U.S. has been surging, and continues to do so, as 2009 ends. Think of this as an effort to widen our view of Obama’s widening war.

Obama’s Nine Surges

1. The Troop Surge: Let’s start with those “30,000” new troops the president announced. First of all, they represent Obama’s surge, phase 2. As the president pointed out in his speech, there were “just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan” when he took office in January 2009. In March, Obama announced that he was ordering in 21,000 additional troops. Last week, when he spoke, there were already approximately 68,000 to 70,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan. If you add the 32,000 already there in January and the 21,700 actually dispatched after the March announcement, however, you only get 53,700, leaving another 15,000 or so to be accounted for. According to Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, 11,000 of those were “authorized in the waning days of the Bush administration and deployed this year,” bringing the figure to between 64,000 and 65,000. In other words, the earliest stage of the present Afghan “surge” was already underway when Obama arrived.

It also looks like at least a few thousand more troops managed to slip through the door in recent months without notice or comment. Similarly, with the 30,000 figure announced a week ago, DeYoung reports that the president quietly granted Secretary of Defense Robert Gates the right to “increase the number by 10 percent, or 3,000 troops, without additional White House approval or announcement.” That already potentially brings the most recent surge numbers to 33,000, and an unnamed “senior military official” told De Young “that the final number could go as high as 35,000 to allow for additional support personnel such as engineers, medevac units and route-clearance teams, which comb roads for bombs.”

Now, add in the 7,500 troops and trainers that administration officials reportedly strong-armed various European countries into offering. More than 1,500 of these are already in Afghanistan and simply not being withdrawn as previously announced. The cost of sending some of the others, like the 900-plus troops Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili has promised, will undoubtedly be absorbed by Washington. Nonetheless, add most of them in and, miraculously, you’ve surged up to, or beyond, Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal’s basic request for at least 40,000 troops to pursue a counterinsurgency war in that country.

2. The Contractor Surge: Given our heavily corporatized and privatized military, it makes no sense simply to talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan as if they were increasing in a void. You also need to know about the private contractors who have taken over so many former military duties, from KP and driving supply convoys to providing security on large bases. There’s no way of even knowing who is responsible for the surge of (largely Pentagon-funded) private contractors in Afghanistan. Did their numbers play any part in the president’s three months of deliberations? Does he have any control over how many contractors are put on the U.S. government payroll there? We don’t know.

Private contractors certainly went unmentioned in his speech and, amid the flurry of headlines about troops going to Afghanistan, they remain almost unmentioned in the mainstream media. In major pieces on the president’s tortuous “deliberations” with his key military and civilian advisors at the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times, all produced from copious officially inspired leaks, there wasn't a single mention of private contractors, and yet their numbers have been surging for months.

A modest-sized article by August Cole in the Wall Street Journal the day after the president’s speech gave us the basics, but you had to be looking. Headlined “U.S. Adding Contractors at Fast Pace,” the piece barely peeked above the fold on page 7 of the paper. According to Cole: “The Defense Department's latest census shows that the number of contractors increased about 40% between the end of June and the end of September, for a total of 104,101. That compares with 113,731 in Iraq, down 5% in the same period... Most of the contractors in Afghanistan are locals, accounting for 78,430 of the total...” In other words, there are already more private contractors on the payroll in Afghanistan than there will be U.S. troops when the latest surge is complete.

Though many of these contractors are local Afghans hired by outfits like DynCorp International and Fluor Corp., TPM Muckracker managed to get a further breakdown of these figures from the Pentagon and found that there were 16,400 “third country nationals” among the contractors, and 9,300 Americans. This is a formidable crew, and its numbers are evidently still surging, as are the Pentagon contracts doled out to private outfits that go with them. Cole, for instance, writes of the contract that Dyncorp and Fluor share to support U.S. forces in Afghanistan “which could be worth as much as $7.5 billion to each company in the coming years.”

3. The Militia Surge: U.S. Special Forces are now carrying out pilot programs for a mini-surge in support of local Afghan militias that are, at least theoretically, anti-Taliban. The idea is evidently to create a movement along the lines of Iraq's Sunni Awakening Movement that, many believe, ensured the "success" of George W. Bush's 2007 surge in that country. For now, as far as we know, U.S. support takes the form of offers of ammunition, food, and possibly some Kalashnikov rifles, but in the future we'll be ponying up more arms and, undoubtedly, significant amounts of money.

This is, after all, to be a national program, the Community Defense initiative, which, according to Jim Michaels of USA Today, will “funnel millions of dollars in foreign aid to villages that organize ‘neighborhood watch’-like programs to help with security.” Think of this as a “bribe” surge. Such programs are bound to turn out to be essentially money-based and designed to buy “friendship.”

4. The Civilian Surge: Yes, Virginia, there is a “civilian surge” underway in Afghanistan, involving increases in the number of “diplomats and experts in agriculture, education, health and rule of law sent to Kabul and to provincial reconstruction teams across the country.” The State Department now claims to be “on track” to triple the U.S. civilian component in Afghanistan from 320 officials in January 2009 to 974 by “the early weeks of next year.” (Of course, that, in turn, means another mini-surge in private contractors: more security guards to protect civilian employees of the U.S. government.) A similar civilian surge is evidently underway in neighboring Pakistan, just the thing to go with a surge of civilian aid and a plan for a humongous new, nearly billion-dollar embassy compound to be built in Islamabad.

5. The CIA and Special Forces Surge: And speaking of Pakistan, Noah Shachtman of Wired’s Danger Room blog had it right recently when, considering the CIA’s “covert” (but openly discussed) drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands, he wrote: “The most important escalation of the war might be the one the President didn’t mention at West Point.” In fact, the CIA’s drone attacks there have been escalating in numbers since the Obama administration came into office. Now, it seems, paralleling the civilian surge in the Af/Pak theater of operations, there is to be a CIA one as well. While little information on this is available, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt of the New York Times report that in recent months the CIA has delivered a plan to the White House “for widening the campaign of strikes against militants by drone aircraft in Pakistan, sending additional spies there and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.”

In addition, Scott Shane of the Times reports:

“The White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, officials said..., to parallel the president’s decision… to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. American officials are talking with Pakistan about the possibility of striking in Baluchistan for the first time -- a controversial move since it is outside the tribal areas -- because that is where Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to hide.”

The Pakistani southern border province of Baluchistan is a hornet’s nest with its own sets of separatists and religious extremists, as well as a (possibly U.S.-funded) rebel movement aimed at the Baluchi minority areas of Iran. The Pakistani government is powerfully opposed to drone strikes in the area of the heavily populated provincial capital of Quetta where, Washington insists, the Afghan Taliban leadership largely resides. If such strikes do begin, they could prove the most destabilizing aspect of the widening of the war that the present surge represents.

In addition, thanks to the Nation magazine’s Jeremy Scahill, we now know that, from a secret base in Karachi, Pakistan, the U.S. Army’s Joint Special Operations Command, in conjunction with the private security contractor Xe (formerly Blackwater), operates “a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan.” Since so many U.S. activities in Pakistan involve secretive, undoubtedly black-budget operations, we may only have the faintest outlines of what the “surge” there means.

6. The Base-Building Surge: Like the surge in contractors and in drone attacks, the surge in base-building in Afghanistan significantly preceded Obama's latest troop-surge announcement. A recent NBC Nightly News report on the ever-expanding U.S. base at Kandahar Airfield, which it aptly termed a “boom town,” shows just how ongoing this part of the overall surge is, and at what a staggering level. As in Iraq from 2003 on, billions of dollars are being sunk into bases, the largest of which -- especially the old Soviet site, Bagram Air Base, with more than $200 million in construction projects and upgrades underway at the moment -- are beginning to look like ever more permanent fixtures on the landscape.

In addition, as Nick Turse of TomDispatch.com has reported, forward observation bases and smaller combat outposts have been sprouting all over southern Afghanistan. “Forget for a moment the ‘debates’ in Washington over Afghan War policy,” he wrote in early November, “and, if you just focus on the construction activity and the flow of money into Afghanistan, what you see is a war that, from the point of view of the Pentagon, isn't going to end any time soon. In fact, the U.S. military's building boom in that country suggests that, in the ninth year of the Afghan War, the Pentagon has plans for a far longer-term, if not near-permanent, garrisoning of the country, no matter what course Washington may decide upon.”

7. The Training Surge: In some ways, the greatest prospective surge may prove to be in the training of the Afghan national army and police. Despite years of American and NATO “mentoring,” both are in notoriously poor shape. The Afghan army is riddled with desertions -- 25% of those trained in the last year are now gone -- and the Afghan police are reportedly a hapless, ill-paid, corrupt, drug-addicted lot. Nonetheless, Washington (with the help of NATO reinforcements) is planning to bring an army whose numbers officially stand at approximately 94,000 (but may actually be as low as 40-odd thousand) to 134,000 reasonably well-trained troops by next fall and 240,000 a year later. Similarly, the Obama administration hopes to take the police numbers from an official 93,000 to 160,000.

8. The Cost Surge: This is a difficult subject to pin down in part because the Pentagon is, in cost-accounting terms, one of the least transparent organizations around. What can be said for certain is that Obama’s $30 billion figure won’t faintly hold when it comes to the real surge. There is no way that figure will cover anything like all the troops, bases, contractors, and the rest. Just take the plan to train an Afghan security force of approximately 400,000 in the coming years. We’ve already spent more than $15 billion on the training of the Afghan Army and more than $10 billion has gone into police training -- staggering figures for a far smaller combined force with poor results. Imagine, then, what a massive bulking up of the country's security forces will actually cost. In congressional testimony, Centcom commander General David Petraeus suggested a possible price tag of $10 billion a year. And if such a program works (which seems unlikely), try to imagine how one of the poorest countries on the planet will support a 400,000-man force. Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just suggested that it will take at least 15-20 years before the country can actually pay for such a force itself. In translation, what we have here is undoubtedly a version of Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule (“You break it, you own it”); in this case, you build it, you own it. If we create such security forces, they will be, financially speaking, ours into the foreseeable future. (And this is even without adding in those local militias we’re planning to invest “millions” in.)

9. The Anti-Withdrawal Surge: Think of this as a surge in time. By all accounts, the president tried to put some kind of limit on his most recent Afghan surge, not wanting “an open-ended commitment.” With that in mind, he evidently insisted on a plan, emphasized in his speech, in which some of the surge troops would start to come home in July 2011, about 18 months from now. This was presented in the media as a case of giving something to everyone (the Republican opposition, his field commanders, and his own antiwar Democratic Party base). In fact, he gave his commanders and the Republican opposition a very real surge in numbers. In this regard, a Washington Post headline says it all: “McChrystal’s Afghanistan Plan Stays Mainly Intact.” On the other hand, what he gave his base was only the vaguest of promises (“…and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011”). Moreover, within hours of the speech, even that commitment was being watered down by the first top officials to speak on the subject. Soon enough, as the right-wing began to blaze away on the mistake of announcing a withdrawal date “to the enemy,” there was little short of a stampede of high officials eager to make that promise ever less meaningful.

In what Mark Mazzetti of the Times called a “flurry of coordinated television interviews,” the top civilian and military officials of the administration marched onto the Sunday morning talk shows “in lockstep” to reassure the right (and they were reassured) by playing “down the significance of the July 2011 target date.” The United States was, Secretary of Defense Gates and others indicated, going to be in the region in strength for years to come. (“...July 2011 was just the beginning, not the end, of a lengthy process. That date, [National Security Advisor] General [James] Jones said, is a ‘ramp’ rather than a ‘cliff.’”)

How Wide the Widening War?

When it came to the spreading Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, the president in his speech spoke of his surge goal this way: “We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” This seems a modest enough target, even if the means of reaching it are proving immodest indeed. After all, we’re talking about a minority Pashtun insurgency -- Pashtuns make up only about 42% of Afghanistan’s population -- and the insurgents are a relatively lightly armed, rag-tag force. Against them and a miniscule number of al-Qaeda operatives, the Pentagon has launched a remarkable, unbelievably costly build-up of forces over vast distances, along fragile, extended supply lines, and in a country poorer than almost any other on the planet. The State Department has, to the best of its abilities, followed suit, as has the CIA across the border in Pakistan.

All of this has been underway for close to a year, with at least another six months to go. This is the reality that the president and his top officials didn’t bother to explain to the American people in that speech last week, or on those Sunday talk shows, or in congressional testimony, and yet it’s a reality we should grasp as we consider our future and the Afghan War we, after all, are paying for.

And yet, confoundingly, as the U.S. has bulked up in Afghanistan, the war has only grown fiercer both within the country and in parts of Pakistan. Sometimes bulking-up can mean not reversing but increasing the other side’s momentum. We face what looks to be a widening war in the region. Already, the Obama administration has been issuing ever stronger warnings to the Pakistani government and military to shape up in the fight against the Taliban, otherwise threatening not only drone strikes in Baluchistan, but cross-border raids by Special Operations types, and even possibly “hot pursuit” by U.S. forces into Pakistan. This is a dangerous game indeed.

As Andrew Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, wrote recently, “Sending U.S. troops to fight interminable wars in distant countries does more to inflame than to extinguish the resentments giving rise to violent anti-Western jihadism.” Whatever the Obama administration does in Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, the American ability to mount a sustained operation of this size in one of the most difficult places on the planet, when it can’t even mount a reasonable jobs program at home, remains a strange wonder of the world.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

© 2009 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175176/

Wednesday, December 02, 2009

Afghanistan Saying



The Flag of Afghanistan -- Friend of Foe?


It doesn't matter.

I was reminded last night of a well-known saying. An Afghan man went up to the head of a would-be occupying army (which one is anyone's guess). He said "You have all the watches, but we have all the time."

Saying

Above: The flag of Afghanistan.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009

Let's Get Real

THE ABSURD TIMES

www.whatnowtoons.com


We have lost all sense of relative importance. Some commentator mentioned the war in Afghanistan because Obama was giving a speech about it. Have we lost all sense of what is important?

Tiger Woods crashed into a fire hydrant! He could be fined up to $150! Now that’s news! Some chick with mousy blonde hair says she didn’t have any affair with him! We must give this attention.

Sarah Palin walked out on a book signing! And we are just going to let the story die after three weeks?

Some blond bimbo from California walked out of an interview with Larry King, for God’s sake! And we are talking about $1,000,000 per soldier we send there? I mean, she got a free pair of enhanced tits! Let’s pay attention to important details!

Huckleberry Hound pardoned a big black guy while he was Governor of Arkansas and he might not run for President! (“He” is definitely left vague here just to keep in style.)

And gee. Another blonde bimbo and her suspiciously named husband crashed the party!! Let’s see the clip again!

What about the balloon boy? He brought so many Americans together! Let’s run those tapes again!

So what if we are sending $30 billion to provide human targets in Afghanistan? Let’s pay attention to what is really important.

Does Annette Funicello still like peanut butter?

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Guest Author -- On Noise

THE ABSURD TIMES

>

ON NOISE.

Kant has written a treatise on _The Vital Powers_; but I should like to

write a dirge on them, since their lavish use in the form of knocking,

hammering, and tumbling things about has made the whole of my life a

daily torment. Certainly there are people, nay, very many, who will

smile at this, because they are not sensitive to noise; it is precisely

these people, however, who are not sensitive to argument, thought,

poetry or art, in short, to any kind of intellectual impression: a fact

to be assigned to the coarse quality and strong texture of their brain

tissues. On the other hand, in the biographies or in other records of

the personal utterances of almost all great writers, I find complaints

of the pain that noise has occasioned to intellectual men. For example,

in the case of Kant, Goethe, Lichtenberg, Jean Paul; and indeed when no

mention is made of the matter it is merely because the context did not

lead up to it. I should explain the subject we are treating in this way:

If a big diamond is cut up into pieces, it immediately loses its value

as a whole; or if an army is scattered or divided into small bodies, it

loses all its power; and in the same way a great intellect has no more

power than an ordinary one as soon as it is interrupted, disturbed,

distracted, or diverted; for its superiority entails that it

concentrates all its strength on one point and object, just as a concave

mirror concentrates all the rays of light thrown upon it. Noisy

interruption prevents this concentration. This is why the most eminent

intellects have always been strongly averse to any kind of disturbance,

interruption and distraction, and above everything to that violent

interruption which is caused by noise; other people do not take any

particular notice of this sort of thing. The most intelligent of all the

European nations has called "Never interrupt" the eleventh commandment.

But noise is the most impertinent of all interruptions, for it not only

interrupts our own thoughts but disperses them. Where, however, there is

nothing to interrupt, noise naturally will not be felt particularly.

Sometimes a trifling but incessant noise torments and disturbs me for a

time, and before I become distinctly conscious of it I feel it merely as

the effort of thinking becomes more difficult, just as I should feel a

weight on my foot; then I realise what it is.

But to pass from _genus_ to _species_, the truly infernal cracking of

whips in the narrow resounding streets of a town must be denounced as

the most unwarrantable and disgraceful of all noises. It deprives life

of all peace and sensibility. Nothing gives me so clear a grasp of the

stupidity and thoughtlessness of mankind as the tolerance of the

cracking of whips. This sudden, sharp crack which paralyses the brain,

destroys all meditation, and murders thought, must cause pain to any one

who has anything like an idea in his head. Hence every crack must

disturb a hundred people applying their minds to some activity, however

trivial it may be; while it disjoints and renders painful the

meditations of the thinker; just like the executioner's axe when it

severs the head from the body. No sound cuts so sharply into the brain

as this cursed cracking of whips; one feels the prick of the whip-cord

in one's brain, which is affected in the same way as the _mimosa pudica_

is by touch, and which lasts the same length of time. With all respect

for the most holy doctrine of utility, I do not see why a fellow who is

removing a load of sand or manure should obtain the privilege of killing

in the bud the thoughts that are springing up in the heads of about ten

thousand people successively. (He is only half-an-hour on the road.)

Hammering, the barking of dogs, and the screaming of children are

abominable; but it is _only_ the cracking of a whip that is the true

murderer of thought. Its object is to destroy every favourable moment

that one now and then may have for reflection. If there were no other

means of urging on an animal than by making this most disgraceful of all

noises, one would forgive its existence. But it is quite the contrary:

this cursed cracking of whips is not only unnecessary but even useless.

The effect that it is intended to have on the horse mentally becomes

quite blunted and ineffective; since the constant abuse of it has

accustomed the horse to the crack, he does not quicken his pace for it.

This is especially noticeable in the unceasing crack of the whip which

comes from an empty vehicle as it is being driven at its slowest rate to

pick up a fare. The slightest touch with the whip would be more

effective. Allowing, however, that it were absolutely necessary to

remind the horse of the presence of the whip by continually cracking it,

a crack that made one hundredth part of the noise would be sufficient.

It is well known that animals in regard to hearing and seeing notice the

slightest indications, even indications that are scarcely perceptible to

ourselves. Trained dogs and canary birds furnish astonishing examples of

this. Accordingly, this cracking of whips must be regarded as something

purely wanton; nay, as an impudent defiance, on the part of those who

work with their hands, offered to those who work with their heads. That

such infamy is endured in a town is a piece of barbarity and injustice,

the more so as it could be easily removed by a police notice requiring

every whip cord to have a knot at the end of it. It would do no harm to

draw the proletariat's attention to the classes above him who work with

their heads; for he has unbounded fear of any kind of head work. A

fellow who rides through the narrow streets of a populous town with

unemployed post-horses or cart-horses, unceasingly cracking with all his

strength a whip several yards long, instantly deserves to dismount and

receive five really good blows with a stick. If all the philanthropists

in the world, together with all the legislators, met in order to bring

forward their reasons for the total abolition of corporal punishment, I

would not be persuaded to the contrary.

But we can see often enough something that is even still worse. I mean a

carter walking alone, and without any horses, through the streets

incessantly cracking his whip. He has become so accustomed to the crack

in consequence of its unwarrantable toleration. Since one looks after

one's body and all its needs in a most tender fashion, is the thinking

mind to be the only thing that never experiences the slightest

consideration or protection, to say nothing of respect? Carters,

sack-bearers (porters), messengers, and such-like, are the beasts of

burden of humanity; they should be treated absolutely with justice,

fairness, forbearance and care, but they ought not to be allowed to

thwart the higher exertions of the human race by wantonly making a

noise. I should like to know how many great and splendid thoughts these

whips have cracked out of the world. If I had any authority, I should

soon produce in the heads of these carters an inseparable _nexus

idearum_ between cracking a whip and receiving a whipping.

Let us hope that those nations with more intelligence and refined

feelings will make a beginning, and then by force of example induce the

Germans to do the same.[8] Meanwhile, hear what Thomas Hood says of them

(_Up the Rhine)_: "_For a musical people they are the most noisy I ever

met with_" That they are so is not due to their being more prone to

making a noise than other people, but to their insensibility, which

springs from obtuseness; they are not disturbed by it in reading or

thinking, because they do not think; they only smoke, which is their

substitute for thought. The general toleration of unnecessary noise, for

instance, of the clashing of doors, which is so extremely ill-mannered

and vulgar, is a direct proof of the dulness and poverty of thought that

one meets with everywhere. In Germany it seems as though it were planned

that no one should think for noise; take the inane drumming that goes on

as an instance. Finally, as far as the literature treated of in this

chapter is concerned, I have only one work to recommend, but it is an

excellent one: I mean a poetical epistle in _terzo rimo_ by the famous

painter Bronzino, entitled "_De' Romori: a Messer Luca Martini_" It

describes fully and amusingly the torture to which one is put by the

many kinds of noises of a small Italian town. It is written in

tragicomic style. This epistle is to be found in _Opere burlesche del

Berni, Aretino ed altri,_ vol. ii. p. 258, apparently published in

Utrecht in 1771.

The nature of our intellect is such that _ideas_ are said to spring by

abstraction from _observations_, so that the latter are in existence

before the former. If this is really what takes place, as is the case

with a man who has merely his own experience as his teacher and book, he

knows quite well which of his observations belong to and are represented

by each of his ideas; he is perfectly acquainted with both, and

accordingly he treats everything correctly that comes before his notice.

We might call this the natural mode of education.

On the other hand, an artificial education is having one's head crammed

full of ideas, derived from hearing others talk, from learning and

reading, before one has anything like an extensive knowledge of the

world as it is and as one sees it. The observations which produce all

these ideas are said to come later on with experience; but until then

these ideas are applied wrongly, and accordingly both things and men are

judged wrongly, seen wrongly, and treated wrongly. And so it is that

education perverts the mind; and this is why, after a long spell of

learning and reading, we enter the world, in our youth, with views that

are partly simple, partly perverted; consequently we comport ourselves

with an air of anxiety at one time, at another of presumption. This is

because our head is full of ideas which we are now trying to make use

of, but almost always apply wrongly. This is the result of [Greek:

hysteron proteron] (putting the cart before the horse), since we are

directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas

first and observations last; for teachers, instead of developing in a

boy his faculties of discernment and judgment, and of thinking for

himself, merely strive to stuff his head full of other people's

thoughts. Subsequently, all the opinions that have sprung from

misapplied ideas have to be rectified by a lengthy experience; and it is

seldom that they are completely rectified. This is why so few men of

learning have such sound common sense as is quite common among the

illiterate.

* * * * *

From what has been said, the principal point in education is that _one's

knowledge of the world begins at the right end;_ and the attainment of

which might be designated as the aim of all education. But, as has been

pointed out, this depends principally on the observation of each thing

preceding the idea one forms of it; further, that narrow ideas precede

broader; so that the whole of one's instruction is given in the order

that the ideas themselves during formation must have followed. But

directly this order is not strictly adhered to, imperfect and

subsequently wrong ideas spring up; and finally there arises a perverted

view of the world in keeping with the nature of the individual--a view

such as almost every one holds for a long time, and most people to the

end of their lives. If a man analyses his own character, he will find

that it was not until he reached a very ripe age, and in some cases

quite unexpectedly, that he was able to rightly and clearly understand

many matters of a quite simple nature.

Previously, there had been an obscure point in his knowledge of the

world which had arisen through his omitting something in his early

education, whether he had been either artificially educated by men or

just naturally by his own experience. Therefore one should try to find

out the strictly natural course of knowledge, so that by keeping

methodically to it children may become acquainted with the affairs of

the world, without getting false ideas into their heads, which

frequently cannot be driven out again. In carrying this out, one must

next take care that children do not use words with which they connect no

clear meaning. Even children have, as a rule, that unhappy tendency of

being satisfied with words instead of wishing to understand things, and

of learning words by heart, so that they may make use of them when they

are in a difficulty. This tendency clings to them afterwards, so that

the knowledge of many learned men becomes mere verbosity.

However, the principal thing must always be to let one's observations

precede one's ideas, and not the reverse as is usually and unfortunately

the case; which may be likened to a child coming into the world with its

feet foremost, or a rhyme begun before thinking of its reason. While the

child's mind has made a very few observations one inculcates it with

ideas and opinions, which are, strictly speaking, prejudices. His

observations and experience are developed through this ready-made

apparatus instead of his ideas being developed out of his own

observations. In viewing the world one sees many things from many sides,

consequently this is not such a short or quick way of learning as that

which makes use of abstract ideas, and quickly comes to a decision about

everything; therefore preconceived ideas will not be rectified until

late, or it may be they are never rectified. For, when a man's view

contradicts his ideas, he will reject at the outset what it renders

evident as one-sided, nay, he will deny it and shut his eyes to it, so

that his preconceived ideas may remain unaffected. And so it happens

that many men go through life full of oddities, caprices, fancies, and

prejudices, until they finally become fixed ideas. He has never

attempted to abstract fundamental ideas from his own observations and

experience, because he has got everything ready-made from other people;

and it is for this very reason that he and countless others are so

insipid and shallow. Instead of such a system, the natural system of

education should be employed in educating children. No idea should be

impregnated but what has come through the medium of observations, or at

any rate been verified by them. A child would have fewer ideas, but they

would be well-grounded and correct. It would learn to measure things

according to its own standard and not according to another's. It would

then never acquire a thousand whims and prejudices which must be

eradicated by the greater part of subsequent experience and education.

Its mind would henceforth be accustomed to thoroughness and clearness;

the child would rely on its own judgment, and be free from prejudices.

And, in general, children should not get to know life, in any aspect

whatever, from the copy before they have learnt it from the original.

Instead, therefore, of hastening to place mere books in their hands, one

should make them gradually acquainted with things and the circumstances

of human life, and above everything one should take care to guide them

to a clear grasp of reality, and to teach them to obtain their ideas

directly from the real world, and to form them in keeping with it--but

not to get them from elsewhere, as from books, fables, or what others

have said--and then later to make use of such ready-made ideas in real

life. The result will be that their heads are full of chimeras and that

some will have a wrong comprehension of things, and others will

fruitlessly endeavour to remodel the world according to those chimeras,

and so get on to wrong paths both in theory and practice. For it is

incredible how much harm is done by false notions which have been

implanted early in life, only to develop later on into prejudices; the

later education which we get from the world and real life must be

employed in eradicating these early ideas. And this is why, as is

related by Diogenes Laertius, Antisthenes gave the following answer:

[Greek: erotaetheis ti ton mathaematon anankaiotaton, ephae, "to kaka

apomathein."] (_Interrogatus quaenam esset disciplina maxime necessaria,

Mala, inquit, dediscere_.)

* * * * *

Children should be kept from all kinds of instruction that may make

errors possible until their sixteenth year, that is to say, from

philosophy, religion, and general views of every description; because it

is the errors that are acquired in early days that remain, as a rule,

ineradicable, and because the faculty of judgment is the last to arrive

at maturity. They should only be interested in such things that make

errors impossible, such as mathematics, in things which are not very

dangerous, such as languages, natural science, history, and so forth; in

general, the branches of knowledge which are to be taken up at any age

must be within reach of the intellect at that age and perfectly

comprehensible to it. Childhood and youth are the time for collecting

data and getting to know specially and thoroughly individual and

particular things. On the other hand, all judgment of a general nature

must at that time be suspended, and final explanations left alone. One

should leave the faculty of judgment alone, as it only comes with

maturity and experience, and also take care that one does not anticipate

it by inculcating prejudice, when it will be crippled for ever.

On the contrary, the memory is to be specially exercised, as it has its

greatest strength and tenacity in youth; however, what has to be

retained must be chosen with the most careful and scrupulous

consideration. For as it is what we have learnt well in our youth that

lasts, we should take the greatest possible advantage of this precious

gift. If we picture to ourselves how deeply engraven on our memory the

people are whom we knew during the first twelve years of our life, and

how indelibly imprinted are also the events of that time, and most of

the things that we then experienced, heard, or learnt, the idea of

basing education on this susceptibility and tenacity of the youthful

mind will seem natural; in that the mind receives its impressions

according to a strict method and a regular system. But because the years

of youth that are assigned to man are only few, and the capacity for

remembering, in general, is always limited (and still more so the

capacity for remembering of the individual), everything depends on the

memory being filled with what is most essential and important in any

department of knowledge, to the exclusion of everything else. This

selection should be made by the most capable minds and masters in every

branch of knowledge after the most mature consideration, and the result

of it established. Such a selection must be based on a sifting of

matters which are necessary and important for a man to know in general,

and also for him to know in a particular profession or calling.

Knowledge of the first kind would have to be divided into graduated

courses, like an encyclopædia, corresponding to the degree of general

culture which each man has attained in his external circumstances; from

a course restricted to what is necessary for primary instruction up to

the matter contained in every branch of the philosophical faculty.

Knowledge of the second kind would, however, be reserved for him who had

really mastered the selection in all its branches. The whole would give

a canon specially devised for intellectual education, which naturally

would require revision every ten years. By such an arrangement the

youthful power of the memory would be put to the best advantage, and it

would furnish the faculty of judgment with excellent material when it

appeared later on.

* * * * *

What is meant by maturity of knowledge is that state of perfection to

which any one individual is able to bring it, when an exact

correspondence has been effected between the whole of his abstract ideas

and his own personal observations: whereby each of his ideas rests

directly or indirectly on a basis of observation, which alone gives it

any real value; and likewise he is able to place every observation that

he makes under the right idea corresponding to it.

_Maturity_ of knowledge is the work of experience alone, and

consequently of time. For the knowledge we acquire from our own

observation is, as a rule, distinct from that we get through abstract

ideas; the former is acquired in the natural way, while the latter comes

through good and bad instruction and what other people have told to us.

Consequently, in youth there is generally little harmony and connection

between our ideas, which mere expressions have fixed, and our real

knowledge, which has been acquired by observation. Later they both

gradually approach and correct each other; but maturity of knowledge

does not exist until they have become quite incorporated. This maturity

is quite independent of that other kind of perfection, the standard of

which may be high or low, I mean the perfection to which the capacities

of an individual may be brought; it is not based on a correspondence

between the abstract and intuitive knowledge, but on the degree of

intensity of each.

The most necessary thing for the practical man is the attainment of an

exact and thorough knowledge of _what is really going on in the world;_

but it is also the most irksome, for a man may continue studying until

old age without having learnt all that is to be learnt; while one can

master the most important things in the sciences in one's youth. In

getting such a knowledge of the world, it is as a novice that the boy

and youth have the first and most difficult lessons to learn; but

frequently even the matured man has still much to learn. The study is of

considerable difficulty in itself, but it is made doubly difficult by

_novels_, which depict the ways of the world and of men who do not exist

in real life. But these are accepted with the credulity of youth, and

become incorporated with the mind; so that now, in the place of purely

negative ignorance, a whole framework of wrong ideas, which are

positively wrong, crops up, subsequently confusing the schooling of

experience and representing the lesson it teaches in a false light. If

the youth was previously in the dark, he will now be led astray by a

will-o'-the-wisp: and with a girl this is still more frequently the

case. They have been deluded into an absolutely false view of life by

reading novels, and expectations have been raised that can never be

fulfilled. This generally has the most harmful effect on their whole

lives. Those men who had neither time nor opportunity to read novels in

their youth, such as those who work with their hands, have decided

advantage over them. Few of these novels are exempt from reproach--nay,

whose effect is contrary to bad. Before all others, for instance, _Gil

Blas_ and the other works of Le Sage (or rather their Spanish

originals); further, _The Vicar of Wakefield_, and to some extent the

novels of Walter Scott. _Don Quixote_ may be regarded as a satirical

presentation of the error in question.

FOOTNOTES:

[8] According to a notice from the Munich Society for the Protection of

Animals, the superfluous whipping and cracking were strictly forbidden

in Nuremberg in December 1858.