UK’s General Election is striking some familiar chords. SchNEWS has called the scapegoating of immigrants for all of UK’s problems by Neo Labour and the Tories a “race-to-the-bottom.” lenin links to the website So Now Who Do We Vote For?, set-up by author John Harris, where Respect candidates are clear favourites in the visitors’ poll. He found the same results in other polls by way of Make My Vote Count, a coalition campaigning to reform the voting system. They think if the House of Commons reflected a broader proportion of people and their values it might foster a “more civil, rational, problem-solving political discourse.” Imagine!
294 signatures and counting. It’s new.
John Pilger’s address to the antiwar demo in Australia’s Sydney Hyde Park is up at Z-Net. He rails against Kevin Rudd for reducing the Labor Party to little more than a bad joke.
He calls Murdoch-style propaganda typical of repressive regimes and shares part of a song given to him while working undercover in one by the protest singer Marta Kubisova. It was written by the Plastic People of the Universe, a band that discovered Lou Reed’s Velvet Underground and psychedelic rock around the same time Czechoslovakia was invaded by the Warsaw Pact to crush the Prague Spring.
“Prague Spring resembled nothing less than San Francisco 1967. Hippies and drugs were everywhere, and rock music flourished in the clubs and the streets. It was a special time while it lasted, but the Kremlin felt Dubcek had gone too far.”
Eventually banned by the Czech govt. they started performing – in remote locations – shows arranged by word-of-mouth. When police beat people with clubs at a March 1974 concert in Budovice the “Second Culture” festivals began. The second of those festivals, held in 1976, ended with homes searched, belongings tossed and confiscated, friends and fans detained without trial. After 6-months most were released but four of the musicians received jail sentences including Vratislav Brabenec who “went into Canadian exile in the early 1980s.” Paul Wilson was expelled.
A brief look at ‘protest’ music plus the underground scene in Czechoslovakia from 1968 – 1989
When playwright Vaclav Havel organised a campaign for their release the foundations for continuing dissident protest and the human rights charter, Charter 77, were laid.
The thread of that protest led to the eventual imprisonment of Havel and others; extensive persecution of dissidents escalated in the early 80s under the infamous Asanace campaign which used state-sanctioned violence and intimidation to force opponents of the regime to flee the country. But, despite the crack-down, continuity within the underground movement prevailed right up until the eve of the Velvet Revolution, and indeed, beyond, when the tables turned: Havel went from playwright and human rights activist to president. And, eventually, he brought the Plastics with him to perform at Prague Castle. Things had come full circle.
Pilger’s artefact:
They are afraid of the old for their memory,
They are afraid of the young for their innocence
They are afraid of the graves of their victims in faraway places
They are afraid of history. They are afraid of freedom.
They are afraid of truth. They are afraid of democracy.
So why the hell are we afraid of them? …for they are afraid of us.
Kerry’s terrible campaign was only part of the equation. Even more crucial to understanding what happened at the polls on November 2nd is the complete capitulation of the anti-war movement to the idea that we have to get behind the so-called “lesser evil” in the name of beating Bush at all costs.
There was not a single national anti-war demo for over a year prior to the election, despite the April uprising of Fallujah and al-Sadr and despite the Abu Ghraib torture scandal which could have cost Rumsfeld his job. Instead of organizing anti-war marches, the main anti-war organization in this country, United for Peace and Justice, sent busloads of activists to swing-states like Pennsylvania to campaign for Kerry despite the fact that he said that war spending should be increased “by whatever number of billions it takes to win.”
They won. And they‘re not scared.
Now take that cigarette out of your mouth and tune your guitar.