“War Anxiety,” Alisdare Hickson from Woolwich, United Kingdom, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
In case you missed the closing comments in last week’s Gordon Lightfoot review, I mentioned that “I’m not sure I will be able to continue reviewing music at all.” I gave no details because I didn’t want to steal Gord’s thunder by writing about my own problems, but I felt the need to explain why I might not have the chance to explore more of his work. I will now tell you why the altrockchick may fade into the sunset: the likelihood of a European war increases day by day.
The danger was apparent long before the Russian drone incursions into Poland and Romania and the violation of Estonian/NATO airspace, all of which confirmed my existing belief that Putin was looking for additional opportunities to sow disruption in Europe while testing potential weak spots in our defenses. In the past week there have been incidents of one sort or another every day, with Russian drones entering EU territory and NATO jets intercepting Russian reconnaissance planes. Meanwhile, France is falling apart, the right-wing continues to make advances all over Europe, and confidence in the EU is waning—all echoes of the defeatism that nearly destroyed Europe in WWII. Trump’s meddling will only serve to make Vladimir more desperate, and no matter what the Grand Cheeto says, we cannot be sure that the Americans will honor their NATO obligations. Trump is more likely to offer help with unacceptable strings attached, as he certainly does NOT “love Europe,” and neither he nor the flunkies in his administration would shed a tear if the EU faded into history.
Nothing is certain, of course—except confusion and ineptitude. Some pundits believe that Putin’s game is an attempt to distract the West long enough to help his pal Xi Jinping annex Taiwan; others worry that Putin would respond to perceived threats from NATO with his nuclear arsenal. Mark Rutte (the head of NATO) said that it would take another five years for Russia to have the strength to take on the EU, but last week he launched Operation Eastern Sentry to increase air and ground defense capabilities along the eastern flank. Several articles in Foreign Affairs argue that the EU still needs to improve its defenses and take a more aggressive stance with Russia and Belarus, but if not executed to perfection, aggressive moves could backfire. Trump tells Poland to go ahead and shoot down the planes; Marco Rubio says, “Whoa, hold on there, pardner!” The recent cyberattacks on European airports highlighted a continuing weakness that leaders have failed to address, and I have little confidence that European leaders and NATO members can stop squabbling with one another long enough to come up with a workable, continent-wide defense strategy before it’s too late.
Yesterday, the Russian Foreign Minister said that “Moscow has ‘no intention’ of attacking European countries, while warning that ‘any aggression against my country will be met with a decisive response.'” Yeah, yeah, yeah, Hitler tried to peddle the same crap a year before he invaded Poland: “We have given guarantees for the States in the West, and to all those States bordering on our frontiers we have given assurances of the inviolability of their territory so far as Germany is concerned. These are no mere words. That is our sacred determination. We have no interest in breaking the peace.” Just yesterday, The Guardian ran an article titled “Putin preparing to attack another European country, Zelenskyy says,” a view I believe is closer to the truth.
I guess I’m not the only one worried about an impending war. Hits on my previously ignored Song Series: Anti-War Songs post have increased by 130%.
Because Ireland is a neutral country and does not belong to NATO, I think I’ll be safe here, but if the shooting starts, my job at the EU may become a casualty of war, and Alicia could lose over half of her clients. While the job market in Ireland is pretty hot right now, no one can predict how a continental war might impact the Irish economy. Though the EU has offices in Ireland, job openings in those agencies are extremely rare, so if we decide to stay, I might have to return to the private sector, at least for a while. We’re doing what we can to prepare for the myriad what-ifs, including the unpleasant possibility of another relocation.
In response to the growing threat, I revised my review schedule a few weeks ago to prioritize must-do artists and albums, and Gordon Lightfoot came out on top. The other must-dos include The Pogues’ If I Should Fall From Grace with God, the four remaining Moody Blues albums, and a two-part review of Leonard Cohen, but I may not be able to complete those reviews if things go to hell in a handbasket in the meantime. I was looking forward to reviewing more music from Canada, Australia, South America, Africa, and Ireland, but if we find ourselves at war with the Russians, all my energy will be devoted to survival-level activities for who knows how long (and I doubt I would be in the mood to write anyway).
Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway), I’m very angry about these developments. I love my job at the EU and I feel great about working to advance human rights. I have seriously enjoyed writing about music, and I do not want to give it up. I’m very happy living in Ireland, and the thought of having to relocate to a different country for a third time due to incompetent leaders and stupid voters makes me sick to my stomach. Unfortunately, we live in a world where hate wins out over love, fiction supplants truth, and where compromise and collaboration are viewed as weaknesses. We are in the same fix that Yeats described over a century ago in the poem “The Second Coming.”
Are full of passionate intensity.
Lately I’ve been reading William Shirer’s A Native Returns, 1945-1988 and stumbled upon President Truman’s opening message to the delegates of the newly-found United Nations: “In your hands rests our future. Make certain that another war is impossible.” Lofty words, perhaps, but how I wish that dream had come true. It doesn’t hurt to hope, though, and I will continue writing for as long as I can while preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.
No matter what happens, the website will remain open unless the Americans order WordPress to shut it down for spreading far-left propaganda (you know, like advocating for human rights and trying to end domestic violence) or failing to show respect for the Führer (who can go fuck himself). You may think I’m suffering from paranoia, but there have been too many attempts on the part of the Trump administration to suppress free speech that the threat cannot be ignored. I’m obviously a small player compared to Jimmy Kimmel, and the odds that the American Nazis would pick on me or other bloggers are infinitesimally tiny, but Trump’s minions might try to shut down all channels of dissent by taking a page from Dr. Goebbels’ handbook and modifying it to cover internet-based discourse. When Shirer was reporting from Berlin for CBS, he had to submit his content to Goebbels and his crew before he went on the air, and there was always a faithful Nazi in the studio whose job was to shut down the broadcast if Shirer veered from the script. It’s easy to imagine how the Trumpians could modify the practice for the internet—when I’ve finished a review and clicked the Publish button, the review would be sent to an AI-driven censor that would scan the text for no-nos: “woke” ideology, anti-Israel sentiments, support for the Palestinians, and insults directed at the Führer. As the courts will always give Trump whatever he wants in the end, all it would take is an Executive Order, and poof! Bye-bye, First Amendment!
Just to prove that I’m not delusional, as I was halfway finished with this post, I read an op-ed by Fergus Finlay in the Irish Examiner with the tantalizing title, “The US is on the road from culture war to civil war.” I’d love to share the entire article with y’all, but you’d just run into a paywall. Here’s what Fergus had to say about the imminent death of free speech in the home of the stupid: “It’s fanciful perhaps to see the forcible silencing of Jimmy Kimmel as the first shot in a war. But don’t kid yourself. Donald Trump is determined to eliminate all dissent and to punish anyone and everyone who has ever offended him. He’s using all the means at his disposal, and they are considerable, to do it. He is well capable – he’s done it before – of inciting violence, and the members of his cult are equally capable of following him there.”
Mr. Finlay also eliminated the possibility that the opposition will come to the rescue: “There’s all sorts of Democrats sort of shouting from the rooftop, but there’s no leadership, no coordination, no strategy, no focus. They’ve given Trump the keys to the citadel and they’re sitting outside the gate complaining.” That is true, but Americans do have two advantages working in their favor in the battle to save the right to dissent: the administration is loaded with incompetents who are experts at fucking things up, and I’m sure that a cadre of concerned techies could form an online version of the Maquis to get around those morons.
In this week’s edition of The Economist, there is an article titled “Donald Trump is trying to silence his critics. He will fail.” The basic argument is that the American media is too fragmented for any one person to exert control over all sources of information, but the author does admit that Trump’s attempt to gag his enemies and the likely response from the so-called opposition will cause significant, long-lasting damage. “Yet even if Mr Trump does not win his battle, America could still lose. In a fragmented attention economy, the best way to break through is to call everything an apocalypse, urge revolution or denounce fascism. If all the rewards go to divisive political entertainment, then founding good government on a common understanding of facts becomes ever harder. America survived a partisan press in the 19th century; it will probably do so in the 21st. But the vaudevillisation of the public square is a heavy burden on an overburdened democracy.” The bottom line is that the United States is experiencing a revival of McCarthyism, an ugly period in history that destroyed lives and frightened many into silence.
Though I may have to go dark and into survival mode for a while if war comes our way, I am determined to continue my exploration of music. This stance might have something to do with accidental genetic engineering: my Irish half tells me to fight repression wherever and whenever it threatens my freedom, and my French half tells me that the only way to respond to evil is to engage in resistance. While I’m not thrilled about the possibility of having to transfer fourteen years of work to a non-American content management firm, if that’s what I have to do, I’ll do it. I’m not going to let some pathetic mother fucker who can’t take a punch mess with my right to free speech.
I’m an optimist regarding the future of humanity, but that doesn’t mean that the road for humanity ahead is going to be easy. A lot of pain will have to endured, like the effects of climate change in the late 21st century. Gene Rodenberry, creator of Star Trek, believed in a near-utopic future, he believed that humanity would someday grow up and fulfill its true immense potential for greatness, but he also believed that it was going to happen centuries ahead and not before we fall to some of our lowest points in our history. He thought that the 21st century would be miserable and that a World War III decimating hundreds of millions of people was going to happen. And recently, animated film Arco showed both a near-utopic future in the 30th century, when humanity is both incredibly advanced technologically while also living in harmony with nature and labor (a solarpunk vision of the future), but the film also showed a future in the late 21st century in which the planet’s climate is collapsing, people are extremely busy working despite so much automatization (leading to kids having to be raised by robots as the parents are too busy), and the level of social human contact is the lowest it’s ever been. It’s an exaggeration to make strong points, and yet with the hope that new generations and the power of seemingly small things, like a drawing (art overall) can change the world with time. Big changes often have small beginnings and take a lot of collective work and patience to happen, and you could easily not be alive to see the good results of your effor to make the world better.
I think about this scene every day—from DS9’s Past Prologue Part 2 when O’Brien is traveling backward in time to various spots in the the 21st Century searching for Sisko and Bashir:
O’BRIEN
Well, we know one thing. They arrived
before the year twenty-forty-eight.
ODO
How can you be sure?
O’BRIEN
Because we were just there. And
that wasn’t the mid-twenty-first
century that I read about in school.
It’s been changed. Earth history
had its rough patches, but never
that rough.
Powerful.
Don’t give up!!!!
You may find this Salon commentary a reason for hope. The writer conducts some prognostication on the next three years here in the US by observing music trends, specifically, Christian pop music.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maga-t-expand-christian-music-104527455.htmlhttps://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/maga-t-expand-christian-music-104527455.html
Oh dear I hope we are not doomed. I still wait in hope that you will review a Manic Street Preachers album ,although I suspect that their Holy Bible album is hardly the most cheerful although they also wrote Design for Life on the rather brilliant Everything must go Album , at least their left wing politics means that they are almost certainly opposed to the likes of Trump and Farage.
Once again thanks for all the brilliant reviews on music and it is very interesting to read about your other talents like working for human rights you ate truly a force for good in a troubled world but you are not alone.
The view from the brink
Provides thinkers perspective
To find solutions
I sincerely hope you don’t stop writing about music, Altrockchick.
I also hope war doesn’t come to Europe. (Shirer’s Berlin Diary is another fascinating day-to-day view of the events of the ’30s).
Praying for you and your wife.
I hope so too.
I’m on a Shirer binge. I read Berlin Diary right before this one, and next up is his The Collapse of the Third Republic. I’ve already read the Third Reich book twice!
I believe that, in times like these, music and measured commentary are more important than ever but if you decide that you can no longer continue with this then I completely understand. I just hope that you carry on because it would be like losing a friend. All the best to you and your family.
Nothing to add, everything to fear and to take into account.
While i do see war creeping nearer in this very decade I’m not sure what finally will erode first, our civil rights and human rights in our respective countries, remaining peace in Europe, the EU as the construct we are familiar with or nature at its various tipping points.
Be it as it is we’ll loose the USA to the axis of evil. Or one of those future ones…
Cheers and thx for your blog!
Thank you! Usually war goes hand in hand with the loss of civil and human rights, but those rights are under attack just about everywhere right now. As for the USA, they will never recover from Trump and will likely implode sooner or later. What a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into!
It’s basically how (most) humans are and how humanity evolves: 3 steps fwd, 10 back, rinse/repeat. now we’re 2 steps backwards already and way to go – the US just one of “us”.
Did you ever find yourself on kind of a slope slippery ever so slightly, a boating slip, maybe, an icy boardwalk: you think it will just take a small step and it’s level anyways. But your guts know you’ll eventually fall, gasp, drown even maybe. You stare at everyone else but they just stare back, blank canvas.
We call it “Erste Reihe fußfrei” (first row in cinema, where you can stretch your legs and just watch). It might even be funny at my age, at yours not so much.
Stay both safe.
Well, well…
You’re working for human rights? You’re not only a great music reviewer but a great human being, Altrockchick!
I assure you that I am flawed like all human beings, but thank you for the validation! Yes, I’m in the middle of a two-year consulting gig with the EU in the area of human rights, mostly concerning domestic violence, LGBTQ issues and immigrant protections.
I really hope you are wrong but the evidence is mounting, I never thought things would slide so far. It’s feeling quite grim here in the UK with our own domestic far rights forces massing. Selfishly I need music more than ever.
I wasn’t surprised to see Reform UK leading the recent polls, because neither the Tories nor Labour have provided competent leadership for quite a while. It does make me very sad that people would turn that far to the right; Farage is the second coming of Mosley in a well-tailored suit.
Given that the Trump Administration has all but abdicated its NATO commitments, I would not be surprised if Russia launches a full-scale invasion against a NATO member. Aside from Poland, Romania and Estonia, there is also the possibility that Lithuania or Latvia could be targeted as well. Sooner or later, Putin will act against one of these NATO members despite the staggering Russian losses in Ukraine.
Indeed, with Trump Administration’s reverting the Department of Defense to the Department of War, they have signaled they are at war with the American people be it by temporarily forcing Jimmy Kimmel off the air, sending troops to Portland, Oregon or the charges against former FBI Director James Comey which are to be prosecuted by a Trump WH aide who has never tried a case. I fully expect similar charges to be levied against the likes of NY Attorney General Letitia James, Fulton County DA Fani Willis and California Senator Adam Schiff for having the temerity to hold Trump to account for his civil and criminal misdeeds.
Trump has long made it clear he does not tolerate any criticism of him. On a personal note, I used to contribute articles to a conservative magazine called The American Spectator between 2009 and 2016. Some of these articles were about baseball and music. Anyhow, I stopped contributing when I was told to stop criticizing Trump directly by the publisher who had a personal relationship with the then soon-to-be President.
With that said, I think you will find Trump is a lot more tolerant of pro-Palestinian & anti-Israeli rhetoric given that a good segment of the MAGA crowd is aligned with that view (i.e. Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Candace Owens) not to mention that much of his cabinet were paid quite handsomely by the Qataris possibly for the benefit of Hamas (i.e. Kash Patel, Pam Bondi and Lee Zeldin). Then there is Trump’s ties to the Gulf Arab states and to Turkey’s Erdogan who have long clamored for the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Under the circumstances, I can understand your reservations about the viability of this blog. However, at the risk of sounding cliché, all you can do is hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Whatever disaster might lie on the horizon, I hope you will bash on regardless and continue to post your music reviews for as long as possible. If the time comes for you to discontinue or suspend this blog, then you will cross that bridge should it appear.
In the meantime, I look forward to your dispatches particularly on The Moody Blues’ “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour”, an album which has graced my ears since the earliest days of my childhood.
Until then, please take care.
Excellent analysis, but still, you never know exactly what will piss off Trump next. And you’ll probably see the EGBDF review a lot sooner than the end of December!
All sad. All true…
This machine kills fascists.
Thank you for articulating the fear and anger we are all feeling and a sense of incredulity that this is happening – have we learned nothing? Stay strong or “Kia kaha” as we say in Aotearoa New Zealand.
You are not paranoid. You are insighful and correct in seeing and deliniating parallels, in both of the fuckfaces'(Vlad and Don) words and deeds and the rise of nazism and the outbreak of chaos. War is coming, how dare we imagine otherwise or some immunity from the cycles of history? As a lifelong Francophile who has also enjoyed good years and dear friends in Germany, Europe falling in toilet makes me sad.
To paraphrase Chico, the SNL ballplayer turned broadcaster, Mexico has been berry, berry good to me. The people are sane, the leaders are sane and the
overall atmosphere is one of slow but steady improvement despite state of the world. I am not naive. Corruption and violence are rampant secondary to endless, bloody turf wars to control production and transport of fentanyl and meth to satisfy endless appetite in the miserable country to the north, but these horrors are intramural. As long as you remember to not hinder the making and moving of drugs ( I write myself little notes to keep out of cartel’s path), you are safe here. I have never once experienced any violence nor theft. The golden rule is alive and well in Mexico…people are beyond nice. The rights of women, all sexual and gender choices and immigrants are respected. It would be a bitter, early casualty to lose your words. Please keep the faith, take care of yourselves and remember, we’ll always have ‘A Passion Play’.
This piece reminds me of the new Robert Plant and Suzi Dian “Everybody’s Song” that I love… It binds the horrible away from us. You would love it.
I follow you all the way in your thinking and analysis – precisely written, as always 🙂