Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts

Eurovision : "Non-political, strictly neutral, doesn't matter if you're good or brutal."

Eurovision Theme Song 2025 : 
"Non-political, strictly neutral, doesn't matter if you're good or brutal."

Right. In this line, the indeed acknowledge that some of the States being represented in the contest are indeed brutal. And that that does not matter. 

The writers outed the competition, thinking they were protecting the conception. 

We all know who they are referring to as brutal, States represented in the completion, and certain States banned from the competition. The whiff of hypocrisy is pungent. Every state engaged in warfare ought to be excluded from such a peace bringing song contest. 

War does not bring peace.

War does not bring peace, we know this : not in Ukraine, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Congo, Sudan, Kashmir or Palestine. The end of World War II did not bring peace to Congo, Vietnam, Korea, it did not bring peace to South Africa, Cuba, South America. War never brings peace. Peace is so much more than mere ceasefires. Peace is the dismantling of militarism, the redirection of our efforts towards healthy relationships at all levels of society, the adoption of the duty of care to avoid all known avoidable harms as the core of a healthy society.

Supporting one side in a war, arming one side or both in a war does not bring peace. Paying for those arms trades through Swiss bank accounts does not bring peace. 

I do not know who wrote the lyrics or the music. Their video does not list any credits.

If I was either, the lyricist or the music writer/arranger I would not want anyone to know I had any part in it. And I would not want a single cent of the royalties. Blood money. I am a song writer and producer. Largely unknown and unremarkable. I do know my craft, and its purpose as a folk roots musician.

Here is the song, 'Made in Switzerland', written with a Latin American beat.. (cultural appropriation?)
The majority of comments on the video are familiar to those who know the bot farm linguistic turn of phrase.

Hazel Brugger and Sandra Studer sung this song, and presented the competition.


Youtube video of the song 'Made in Switzerland'



the Lyrics:

Made in Switzerland
on television every year
in Switzerland
And now you finally understand 

that like the Swiss, Eurovision 

is unpolitical - 

strictly neutral!

Doesn't matter if you're
good or brutal!
Welcome but with decency! 
and so sparks of fire
and crazy lightning make
the staging far more frightening!


The song goes on to claim Switzerland invented Democracy and other wildly self aggrandising claims.


How frightening is the crazy bombing of Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank?


It doesn't matter, because good or brutal, Eurovision welcomes you! Here's a tiktok I made on this, juxtaposing the song and a recent Palestine Solidarity March in Cork, Ireland.

@egalitarianlovesongs ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re good or brutal?’ It does. It really matters. It matters when they refuse to stand up to brutality to take a fat wage… that makes them mercenaries. This may be the most abysmal cultural appropriation ever, to take a global south riddem and abuse it to give cover for Israeli Genocide and claim their are peace makers. complicit #enabling #eurovision #cork #fyp #irishtiktok #foryoupage❤️❤️ ♬ original sound - ❤️Corneilius Crowley Musician


Lead Commercial Sponsor of Eurovision


Lead commercial sponsorship for the Eurovision is an Israeli luxury hair and beauty product manufacturer, by the name of Moroccan Oil


Moroccan Oil is made from the nut of the Argan Tree, which previously was only grown in Morocco, where for centuries it has been tended, harvested and processed by women's collectives. 


There is a mythical story which tells us that the nut was traditionally fed to goats, and the post goat nut was then processed, using a complex process, to create the Argan Oil. It is a myth, a fabrication.


One manifestation of the world’s increased interest in argan oil is the development of a kind of mythology surrounding goats climbing into argan trees to harvest the fruit.


You’ve probably seen photos of this elsewhere, and there is some truth to the matter.


Goats are fans of argan fruit—and the leaves and any other food they can find. Left to their own devices, they’ll eat whatever is on the ground. When that’s gone, they’ll happily climb into the trees to find more, bounding out onto branches that bend under their weight.


The popular myth has it that oil producers rely on the goats to “process” the fruit through their digestive tracts and that nuts collected from goat manure are easier to open.


While it’s true that gathered nuts are indeed used in production, most argan oil is produced from fruit that matures and falls from the tree on its own.


In fact, goat herders and orchard guards work hard at keeping the goats away from trees with unripened fruit to ensure they don’t consume future harvests before they’re ready.


Unfortunately, this myth has led to the practice of forcing goats into trees along major roads for the benefit of passing tourists, with the worst offenders even chaining goats to branches for days. (If you visit, steer clear.) source : Curious Story


Morocco, long proud of this unique Beauty Oil, had a ban on exporting the tree, to protect their indigenous production. An understandable precaution. 


Some years ago, in 2003 we are told, some clever Israeli's took cuttings, tress and nuts from Morocco, breaking Moroccan Law, and they created hybrids which are now grown on stolen Palestinian land, processed there and sold as Moroccan Oil. Colonial beauty. 


I made a short TikTok about this.


@egalitarianlovesongs https://innerbeautymag.com/en/2018/11/23/carmen-tal-happiness-is-a-choice/ Moroccanoil has been the Official Sponsor of Eurovision for the past 3 years, cementing both the brand's reputation as an authority in hair trends, as well as bringing a real link between fashion, music and hairdressing Mortocan Oil is an Israeli haircare brand owned by Israeli, Carmen Tal. Moroccan Oil obscures its manufacturing and origins. It poses as a moroccan brand, however its products are all manufactured in Isreal. #relatable #humanity #share ♬ original sound - Trader Barry fx

I have to admit I have long disliked the Eurovision Song Contest, on artistic grounds, as a folk musician also rooted in electronic dance music and underground arts over a 35 year 'career'. I am wholly opposed to music being used and weaponised as a political propaganda tool and a wealth extraction practice. 


Music, folk music in particular, must serve the needs of the people, must tell our stories, our trails and tribulations, our struggles, our loves, our kindnesses and our shared humanity. 


Music can and is used for many purposes: weddings, funerals, community celebrations, for joy and for grief, and importantly, folk music  has a rile to play in building humane solidarity so as to inspire and fire up the natural urge to make peace through challenging oppression, confronting the violent, dismantling their status. 


It cannot do so when harnessed to political warfaring states and their objectives.

~

'Get off your Land' (see below) is a song of mine, about the Palestinian struggle, citing the long history of Zionism as a weapon of the British Empire that replicates the Plantation of Northern Ireland by the British in the 1600s, with the same patterns emerging of a population which holds an internalised religious identity that also includes a sense of entitlement to colonised lands, an identity passed from one generation to the next, exploited by the colonial overlords, weaponising people, parents and children, with rabid justifications for extremes of violence, for centuries.  In the song I note the deployment of British Government irregular combat units, known as The Black and Tans, tasked with the oppression of civilians in reprisal for resistance to the colonial domination, from Ireland to Palestine, in 1922.


Geopolitical long term strategy.


Being Irish, and well read, I have a different understanding of this aspect of history than most British people I have met, in my 45v years of living in London, the majority of whom appear to be timidly yet proudly unwilling to admit the horrors of their own ruling class, let alone be energised to hold the English Ruling Class accountable. 


Tony Blair walks free, a very wealthy man, one who ought to be in a cell at The Hague, for his War Crimes. We have the evidence.


I wrote this song 'Get Off Your Land' in 2020, produced this version in 2021, and am appalled to see its predictions so horrendously fulfilled. I am disgusted at the British and American and German State Governments enabling of a genocide, standing as staunch duplicitous allies in the international domain, arming Israel for commercial gain. I am similarly nauseated by their deliberate fuelling of war in Ukraine. Russia's invasion is odious, illegal and amoral, that is clear. And yet the slaughter on the fields of South Eastern Ukraine is not entirely the responsibility of the Russians. World War One demonstrated the odious practice of throwing fresh troops to a well defended frontline, to murder and ben murdered in their hundreds of thousands. I fail to see the benefits to Ukrainian civil society in such wholesale slaughter. 


Here is Mitch McConnell extolling the many virtues of exacerbating the Ukraine-Russian war, in less than two minutes.

 


Mitch McConnell's honesty regards the benefits of the Ukraine War is instructive.


The Civil War that plagued the Donbas for 8 years prior was egged on by outsiders, as a means of 'weakening Russia'. Some spoke of making this 'Russia's second Afghnaistan'. Rather than de-escalate, the USUK have exacerbated that shituation, leading to today, where estimates suggest a million have murdered each other, most gruesomely, egged on by US, UK and Germany, whose arms industry dividends are bloated with tax payers cash.


So here's my song about Palestine. 'Get Off Your Lands'


All in all, the competing warring states dynamic and its patriarchy, who curate racism, misogyny, xenophobia and many other forms of bigotry in order to weaponise ordinary people against each other, is a pox upon humanity. It does matter of you are good or brutal. It matters very much.


Our children's futures are on the line.  It does matter of you're good or brutal. Genuine neutrality is a stance of non-violent resistance to violence, a direct confrontation with the bullies, with the intent to hold the bullies accountable, as part of the process of making a genuine long term peace that leads to entire populations being nurtured rather than exploited.


We must build solidarity strong enough to hold the war makers accountable, all of them, no matter which state they represent.



Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

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Putin is wrong, he's not the only one - the entire industrial militarised competing powers dynamic is psychopathy institutionalised. Give Peace a Chance!

I may be poor, I may be traumatised, suffering from cPTSD from life long trauma, I may be depressed and at times profoundly distressed, and fearful. I may be worried, and I may  be obsessed with politics, power, community and permaculture.

I am not insane, and I am not a psychopath. I have had enough of the bully cult. Enough! What about you?

The entire industrial militarised competing powers dynamic is psychopathy institutionalised.


That’s got to be the first call in any discussion on these matters.

These wars are all abusive, psychopathy.

Russian invasion of Ukraine is amoral, illegal and blatantly wrong on every level. 

That said, so too has been every war ever fought - and just as much so, in spite of the cant and propaganda we have been exposed to since 1945, when the victors of that horror claimed 'victory' and declared, falsely, that 'Peace had broken out' and the wars never ceased, as Adam Curtis lays out in his documentary series "The Mayfair Set'. 

When one takes sides, any sides, among the bullies,  it shows one does not understand the problem. Militarism for profit, for market dominance, for resource access, for ego, for dick swinging, for whatever is the problem. 

The only way to stop war is to stop all militarism. There is no other way.

It's not an easy ask. It is the only way to achieve peace, globally. We seriously need to do this, not least to be in a position to be able to adapt safely to climate change (we cannot fight it, that's stupid language), to clean up pollution and to abolish poverty. All are possible. We have work to do.

If our political, economic and religious leaders and organisations will not do this, then we must select and empower new leaders and organisations who will.

We must reject all those who refuse this task.

Are you too busy?

Today, the Johnson Government sells state subsidised weapons to Israel, an Apartheid Crime Against Humanity State and to Saudi Arabia, a Religious Cult Misogyny State and a War Crime State.

Lots of countries have well developed weapons manufacturing industries, and the trade is booming, if you'll excuse the pun. Militarism defines this 'civilisation'. I call it a bully cult. 

Am I wrong?

What would you call it?

Today Blair and G W Bush still walk free having murdered between 600,000 and 2 million people in Afghanistan and Iraq, having displaced more than 12 million people and destroyed civil infrastructure, again and again and again.

Assad, Putin, Cameron, May and the leaders of Qatar and Saudi Arabia all walk free having destroyed Syria and murdered circa 250,000 Syrians between them, aided by a host of violent militia whom they funded, armed and supported as 'Freedom Fighters'. None of those who have blood on their hands are innocent of war crimes.

This is all insanity, dangerous, lethal craziness. It's entirely irrational and inhumane bullshit.

The second call is how do we de-escalate towards peace?

The answer is rather obvious: remove oligarchy - the wealth extractor class - from all civil and legal governance systems and put workers and parents in charge instead.

War is a business model, as Andrew Cockburn describes in his book.

The Spoils of War : Power, Profit and the American War Machine

https://www.versobooks.com/books/3855-the-spoils-of-war

The Global war machine can only be understood in terms of the private passions and interests of those who control it—principally a passionate interest in money.

If you really want peace, this is the work you will have to engage in. Make it more important than your mortgage, or your yearly vacations, or your pension. Make all our children's children's lives more important than any other consideration. Stop being so damn selfish and submissive.

Is that too much to ask?

Does that make you squirm? Are you uncomfortable with that thought, never mind the action it would require to make it happen?

Why?

Wars are a business model, they are 100% avoidable. They are chosen by evil people and good decent people get harmed by them.

No-one in NATO has a genuine interest in peace or detente.

It is a war alliance. It’s always been a warring states alliance. It’s been aimed at Russia since it’s formation.

It has been involved in numerous combat operations, wars since it's inception. Blood and guts, destruction.

The USUK are not peaceful states run by peace loving oligarchies. Neither is Russia, nor is India, Pakistan is not a peaceful State and neither is Myanmar. Saudi Arabia is not a peaceful state, and neither is Israel.

The entire industrialised militarised competing powers dynamic is psychopathy institutionalised.

That’s the bit everyone ignores, the truth that no one dares to mention : because it is the most honest assessment it is the least popular.

Why?

Because it confronts everyone.

Because it seems too big to resolve?

Well no. As soon as a population accepts the truth of that assessment of institutionalised psychopathy, the next steps are obvious.

Back in 2020, United Nations General Assembly demanded a global ceasefire.

www.un.org/en/globalceasefire

It was proposed by the GA and supported in the Security Council by China and Russia, in the context of dealing with a global pandemic (not as a general future trending strategic policy).

That call was was rejected by USUK.

Then the call rang out again, in 2021.

https://www.un.org/en/globalceasefire/un-security-council-demands-covid-19-vaccine-ceasefires

USUK rejected that call tool. Both continued to support the Saudi war on Yemen.

And at the same time USUK refused to waive Vaccine Intellectual Property Rights as both encouraged spread of the virus in their respective countries 'to protect civil liberties' and 'the economy' - result 1.2 million fatalities, 3 million cases of long Covid, economic damage to small businesses and self employed, increased poverty for unemployed.

All war is wrong, and all war makers are wrong.

When we pick a side in war, we become part of the wrongness. 

War is a culture and a business model - no war has ever been fought for justice, peace, freedom or kindness towards vulnerable people. Wars are fought for booty, political dominance, access to treasure, population control.

Violence wrapped in Flags is populist patriotic poison.

All wars are wars of the Wealth Extraction Class and they are always wars against the interests of working people, parents and children alike.

Why have we, the workers of the world, failed completely to stop our oligarchs from waging wars?

Are we ready yet to answer that question honestly enough to be able to drive a change in our psychological, political and economic behaviour, a change that would prevent further war making?

Because unless we do that, climate adaptation is not going to happen.

That’s a fact.

In each country, we must remove the military industrial complex and the wealth extraction oligarchy placemen and women  from all positions of power. 

That’s the task. Refuse to elect them, then regulate them out of existence. It's called healthy politics. No need for violence, and there is a great need for clarity, evidence based political organisation, demonstrable honesty, verified integrity and a robust determination to leave a nurturant and peaceful society for our children and their children in perpetuity. We can gift this to the future if we so choose.

Obviously, we need to break the spells of indoctrination, grooming, propaganda and manipulative bullshit in general.

Healthy Government will only come from a healthy population.

I wrote a metric for a healthy governance some time ago.

https://dwylcorneilius.blogspot.com/2017/05/a-metric-for-governance-uk-election-2017.html

Healthy Governance - A Metric

I think of Healthy Governance as being focused on the practical realities of administering a communities shared resources for the equal benefit of all members of that community. 

Healthy governance sets the context of governance as operating within as a shared responsibility of duty of care for one another.  In that regards healthy governance has to be evidence led at all times. Opinion and belief are insufficient to meet the responsibility of duty of care.

Healthy governance sets the global context of governance as nurturing, caring for and stewarding of the habitat within which the community lives and from which that community draws living materials and other resources. 

In the case of States, and in relation to healthy Governance we can apply this metric of care to taxation, which is collected from all, in one way or another, by the State, and is therefore a primary community shared resource. Healthy governance will determine that that resource is deployed with wisdom and equity to nurture the whole population.

Taxation is a resource which does not belong to the Government, as a possession, but is rather a resource held in trust, to be dutifully and carefully deployed on behalf of the whole of society, and the population the Government governs for.

Part of what stops us is our fear of honesty.

Stop it. Acknowledge that the Oligarchy and the War Makers are engaged in evil behaviour. They don't have to be evil bogie men, with horns and red eyes raging with cruelty. Their behaviour, their actions and their willingness to ignore or evade the meaning of the harms caused - that's where the evil lives.

Get over it and get on with it. Be honest. Live honestly, die honestly. Speak as honestly as you can. Free Speech is a responsibility to be really truthful.


"You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe!" 

Greta Thunberg September 2019

All the industrial militarised competing powers dynamic is psychopathy institutionalised.

There are no good guys. Believe it, because it is true.

WWII was not a war for workers freedom from oppression: it was a competing empires war.

At that time none of the so-called democratic states were anywhere near genuine grass roots democracy or healthy governance. If WWII was about freedom, then why did US and UK and others destabilise so many African and South American states seeking non aligned independence and a fair price for their resources, fair wages for their workers?

Exactly. Psychopathy and Wealth Extraction.

Why did USUK declare Russia and China as enemies within a year of the end of WWII, when both Russia and China took massive casualties and deaths in fighting Nazi Germany invasion and Imperial Japanese invasion?

Why did they declare these war time allies as enemies, having dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities?

Why then did Russia and China seek to gain Nuclear Weapons? Why did they reject the work of Peace?

Here's a clue: they were all profoundly traumatised due to the wars they had been waging since turn of the century. They were ruled by militarised Governments.

World War 2 was another Imperial War, flowing effortlessly from World War I, which itself flowed from the Scramble for Africa.

And so it goes, has gone, is still going.

All Wars are Imperial Wars.

No war is an isolated event.

These wars are part of a culture of States run by Wealth Extraction (pretending to be democratic, or socialist, or communist) competing for dominance, and in every war, the working people are the ones who pay the price.

Taking sides, especially when we, as workers, live in a Warring State, take sides is falling into the trap of participating in, and becoming complicit, whilst thinking we too are 'struggling for freedom'. That's insanity.

These wars are all part of the oppression culture. The Bully Cult.

As long as we workers take sides we are embroiled and entrapped.

If we don't call it out, we perpetuate it.

The militarised industrial competing powers thing is psychopathy institutionalised.

Trying to see with sides 'point of view' obscures that acknowledgement.

Taking either side of two bullies is co-dependent insanity. Trying to see both sides of view has, in some case some merit, yet ultimately, with regards to USUK/Russia it's missing the truth of the shituation we are faced with. The two powers are part of a bully cult. The bully cult is the problem we need to address in order to get to where we can prevent the powers from causing so much harm.

Without that acknowledgement up front, we are trapped within a malign co-dependency.

I've been getting ever more irritated with centrist, leftist and rightist cant on radio, in the press, on TV etc about Putin, NATO, this side, that side etc for a few weeks now... and it's this nugget that is the key to my frustration - no one in the media is saying it's all psychopathic insanity.

That point of view is completely blotted out. 

That frustrates me hugely.

I've had enough. What about you?

Here's my baseline...

I know I am fully evolved to be a caring, loving, creative, intelligent, warm, empathic, capable and robust humane being ready and willing to co-operate to nurture my community and be nurtured in turn. I know I do not need to evolve to resolve the problems we face.

Humanity does not need to evolve.

What we need is to resolve the problem of the Dominator Culture, the bully cult as I like to call it.

A problem fully understood is half way towards resolution - a problem incompletely understood is insoluble.

I hope this article in some small way adds to the work of many, many superb, creative, thoughtful, studious, warm hearted and intelligent people developing the clarity and understanding that leads to a resolution - a resolution is much better than a revolution, revolutions tend to be rotations on a fixed point, thus far they have merely replaced on set of bullies with another.

We need to move on. 


Kindest regards

Corneilius

Thank you for reading this blog.

"Do what you love, it is your gift to universe."

This blog, like all my other content creation work is not monetised via advertising. If you like what I present, consider sharing my content. If you can afford the price of a cup of coffee or a pint of beer/ale/cider for a few months, please donate via my Patreon account.

https://patreon.com/corneilius - donations gratefully received

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Peace is more than the Absence of War - Songs from 2001, 2002, 2003 and 2018

First off this 7 minute video by Joe Glenton on the realities of war is essential viewing. I'd go as far as saying watch this video, then there's no need to read my polemic or listen to my songs about war.

~
I still cannot get my head and heart around the idea that USUK and other NATO armies have Christian chaplains and other religious pastoral officers embedded in their ranks. For me critical thinking is grounded in empathy. But that is one dynamic my empathy cannot reach. A spirituality that blesses organised violence makes no sense to me. Other than it presents the psychology of dominator cults as rather cruel, callous and manipulative. The concept of God as an absolute hierarch is a mirror image, a projection of the bully culture. 

So  yeah, I can understand that and I can also really feel for everyone affected and afflicted by the horrific Twin Towers violent mass murder terror horror.  I really do. Utter horror, an atrocity beyond belief. Deliberate cruelty.


I was never one to say "America got blowback, got a bit of what it dished out, fair enough!" That's just the most venal, unthinking, heartless and debased way of framing that event. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. 

I know a little about trauma, and how it afflicts one after the events, how it can linger and contaminate one's life ever after. For some the impact is worse than for others, because we are all different. Comparisons are less than useful unless they are attended to with great empathy.

I can kind of imagine the pain, terror, grief, hatred, confusion, despair, loss, of anyone in the many situations that  morning, in offices, stairwells, clambering for safety, having to walk over dead bodies, fleeing for safety without really knowing what was going on...  by thinking of all the times I felt terror, trauma, fear of death, horror, disgust and grief and multiply all that, and make it head spinningly fast, turn my world upside down so I don't know what hit me until it's well over and the dust has settled feeling, the first quietness, that stillness when the grief really strikes.

I can kind of  imagine being on the streets seeing this happening, not knowing, making decisions to flee, or be rooted to the spot, to experience terror and horror and fear and outrage as a witness a mile away, two miles way, 100, 10,000 miles way, as it was then broadcast as a happening event.

Luck, accident of birth
 
I realise I am a very lucky human being to have been born where I was away from all that - it is a matter of luck and luck alone to be have been born in London, Paris, Rome, Moscow, Bejing, New York, or Baghdad, Gaza, Hanoi, Seoul, or born in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Myanmar, or to find oneself as an indigenous peasant in South America being attacked by militarised police waging war against drugs, or to be civilian in any one of any number of wars, or a bystander or a target in any number of mass shootings, or caught up in riots and crackdowns. 

I have missed so much trouble by luck more than by effort on my part. A little humility goes a long way towards a more realistic view of our culture.

I have my story, it's a minor tragedy in comparison. You have yours. Mine seems big to me, impacts me daily, and yet I see that it is only that big because I am close to my own trauma, and obviously it seems so impactful.

So many people are made to suffer through no fault of their own, by this dominator cult we call 'civilisation' - hierarchies of wealth, power and violence.

Propaganda, lies and The War Against Terror.


"Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way; stop  participating in it." Noam Chomsky

So when the propaganda vomits over the air waves and the light tubes this weekend, as they deny the War Crimes of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and so many others  from Vietnam to Troy, from Agincourt to Trafalgar, from Pearl Harbour to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from Gaza to Aleppo, from Sudan to Mali, I resist by reminding myself that war is the result of the behaviour of the leading bullies of the bully cult, Such behaviour is not an innate or inherent part of being human, it is a dirty, ugly, sick, depraved way of dominating for the sake of dominating..

I reject all fatalism about war's inevitability.

I have written anti-war, pro-peace, love songs for a nurturant culture for all of my working musicial life, and will continue to do so until I pass on or the wars stop - it's more likely the former, than the latter, yet my hope springs from the unfinished nature of life itself.

War is not inevitable. Dominator Cult is not inevitable.

Two score songs and more.

I have a reverbnation account that allows me to present MP3 files of my songs, for listening and for downloading, all for free and there's more than 50 there. The first six are arranged as my proPeace songs written in response/reaction to 9/11.

Below are descriptions of each song, why I wrote it, what the context was for each. Folk music is story telling.

Play them at least once this weekend, for me, for you, for your friends, for your children and for all their friends. Play them for the Afghani women and children, play them for the Yemeni people, the Libyans, The Iraqis, the New Yorkers, the people of Idlib, the people in Nablus and Hebron, play them the desperate people, the families with small children, trekking across strange lands, to get into in small dangerous boats to cross wide choppy waters just to find degrees of safety from wars our governments and oligarchy and businesses export for profit.

Play them to make sounds that are pro-peace, that are less anti-war than they are for peace.

I will be doing a  few live stream shows this weekend, from my Facebook Page and I will record them and put them up on youtube.

The theme will be this : Peace is more than the absence of war. Why can't we have Governments that avoid avoidable harms to human beings, to our shared environment, to the species that live with us? Is peace too much to ask for? 


1. TOWERS:  September 2001


This song was written the week after the awful 9/11 terror attacks in USA. This recording was taken at a Virtually Acoustic Club night, in Angel, London, first week in October, with additional layers added later on that month. I had been writing letters, sending emails and even spoke on LBC Radio phone in to John Gaunt, all to articulate my desire for honesty, healing, maturity and to urge the US and UK refrain from further violence, warning that it would only make matters worse globally.

I understood the pain, the trauma, the anger - on all sides. 

This song was my way of bringing that compassion to life in a song. It's not that I was 'right'. I was and remains that warfare is an abomination, is an irrational, reckless chaotic way to do foreign policy. Hierarchies of violence are toxic.


2.  WE ARE GOING TO WAR : November 2002


A youtuber account known as Edensounds, a purveyor of fine music, of selected tunes and mixes, well known in certain communities associated with electronic music dance events in London, (a stalwart of the DJ craft long before the acronym EDM was ever coined), made a video of the song, listing English/British Combat Deployments since 1900, noting that there was only 1 year where British troops did not engage in combat, in the 110 years between 1900 and 2010 when he made the video. 

Professional violence at the behest of the English parliamentarians has a long tradition, indeed. Ever since the New Model Army, and before. None of it is honourable. The two world wars erupted because the prevailing culture was a culture of violent Empire. Every war since then has emerged from the same dynamic. In that context no-one fights for ordinary people's freedoms - wars are fought to preserve violent hierarchies. That is why they fight.


This song was written in November 2002, while I was living in an art collective squat in North West London, Kensal Rise.   


What was this new war for? Was the outcome assured? Had we not already seen failure of War policy in Afghanistan? The Helmandi had not forgotten. Blair blatantly did not take heed of history.


3.  WAR TAX : December 2003


This song was written in late 2003, and produced in 2004, in response to the battle of Fallujah that March, This track was the first I produced in my first real home of my own, in London, after 6 years of homelessness after my flat was destroyed in a fire in 1997.

The tax bill to pay for war means all that cash and effort is not being directed into nurturing healthy communities, abolishing poverty, making life better for ordinary people.

Witnessing the appalling invasion of Iraq, in which it was already clear that it had brought, at great expense, chaos, blood, gore and horror to the people of Iraq and vast profits to Corporate America, I was really furious, and also terribly sad. I also safe in a new rented social housing home of my own after a long time of homelessness,  and I was imagining the unfortunate, innocent people of Iraq, so many displaced, surviving in camps, homeless due to the violence of USUK.

How lucky am I to live here, and not there, I would tell myself every morning, as I ate breakfast and took in the news.

4. DARK DESERT HIGHWAY. September 2003

A rewrite of Hotel California inspired, if that's the right word, by the images of US Military convoys on darkened desert roads heading towards Baghdad.
 

5. DEPLETED URANIUM BABIES May 2001

Inspired by Brian Haw's protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London. There were an inordinate or excessive degree of birth deformities post Gulf War I, across areas of Iraq exposed to aerial bombing with DU munitions.

Depleted Uranium munitions have been in use since the 1990s, in Iraq, The Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq II, Libya, Syria and elsewhere by US and NATO forces.. Arguments rage about the health impacts to troops and civilian populations exposed to DU. Typically exposure occurs within a war, where there exist multiple potential contaminants and stressors and not enough research has been diligently pursued to give definitive answers. The precautionary principle ought at the very least led to an examination of toxic effects before such munitions were ever deployed. No such examination was undertaken.



6. THUNDER RUN July 2003

Written after I read reports about an armoured 'charge' of US Military Battle group into Baghdad, The Thunder Run, which apparently involved competition between battlefield commanders for the glory of being the first to 'conquer' Baghdad. As the column was travelling through urban areas, they shot the shit out anything that moved or appeared in front, to the sides.... thousands of innocent civilians and their homes were raked with live rounds..

Then a year later it was being discusse in heroic, glowing terms as a suitable subject for a Hollywood movie.


7. ALL WAR IS CHILD ABUSE December 2018

My response to the odious  'celebrations' of the 'Victory' claimed by British Empire in November 1918. Nobody wins in war, apart from the war supplies industries. I wrote this song that summer, and blogged it in November 2019, with a more detailed piece exploring all the ways in which warfare is related to child abuse, from training young boys to become killers, to towns and cities destroyed, from comics and propaganda to toy soldiers and war movies.

I understood long, long ago that vast quantities of money that could have been used for social benefit was being wasted, and grifted into the bank accounts of already obscenely rich oligarchs.
 


We had known that environmental degradation, air pollution, climate change and poverty were becoming immense problems that really needed to be addressed. But no. 

"We are going to war, so PAY your taxes to guarantee our borrowings for this war!"


Afghanistan 2021 - USUK end the 20 year war, but deny it's harms.

In truth, nobody ever wins war. Everyone exposed to it loses, apart from the weapons suppliers and other material production logistics essential to the prosecution of any war.

Now, in August 2021, as the disastrous, pointless USUK and NATO war in Afghanistan is supposedly coming to an end and we witness yet again the reckless nature of the Governments involved. As it happens White Christian English Europeans have been importing war into Afghanistan for close on 200 years.

Given the most recent utter folly exposed in the awful, bungled, stupefyingly callous mismanagement of the 'withdrawal' of USUK/NATO Military forces (even as they still hold the threat of air warfare over the incoming Taliban as a future 'bargaining chip)' it should be blatantly obvious that the entire premise of imposing Democracy at the point of a gun is just a banal evil.  

Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Johnson, May, Cameron, Brown and Blair and their Cabinets are all War Mongering Hierarchs to the core. Watching the English Parliament discuss Afghanistan last week was sickening. Repeated claims that the mission was honourable defy all notions of honesty. These people are utter hypocrites. They do not represent ordinary, decent people and their dishonesty is repugnant, makes a mockery of the very idea of a healthy and honest democracy.

Refusing to acknowledge that their war mongering allows evil behaviour to prevail, collecting a wage from the tax payers. 

Clive Lewis

Here's an honest interview with MP Clive Lewis, who was in the Territorials, a Reserve of the British Army, and who is a combat veteran of Afghanistan, where he did one three month tour of duty.

One three month tour of duty, among men who had to do, who were ordered to do many, many more. I feel for the terrible burden those troops have to bear, to know they were placed where they had to kill or be killed, to endure loss, pain, woundings and grief and rage, and it turns out to have been a failure, because it was wholly illegitimate, even as they fought in good faith.

He speaks openly and honestly, informed by that experience and a wider understanding of the issues evolved since then. The theme was Afghanistan and his exclusion from being asked to speak in the House of Commons.





Kindest regards

Corneilius

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