Watch Out for that Communist Folk Music
1/22/2010 4:50:08 PM

In the mid-1960s during summers when I was at the seminary I started a youth camp in northern Idaho. With a couple friends I took young people on probation on canoe trips on Priest Lake and mountain hiking in the Selkirk Mountains.

Around the campfire we sang songs, led mostly by my friend Peter Anderson, and these were mostly folk songs, and songs that were coming out of the civil rights movement at the time. Pete is the one who introduced me to this music which later I heard regularly when I became involved in the movement of Dr. Martin Luther King in Chicago. Now I find out that such music was a part of a dangerous ideological movement.

I stopped by the neoconservative journal First Things today and there was an article called Where Have All the Lefties Gone by a fellow named Lauren Weiner, a speech writer for Defense Sectretary Robert Gates. It seems a little hard to believe, but the piece is written from the point of view of a sort of Communist witch hunt like what was going on the 1950s. It proposes that we believe that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was able to infiltrate the folk music in this country with socialist propaganda, as if there is no validity to any human yearning for justice and peace in the world, at least, that no real American can have anything other than hatred for any such expression. And there is no recognition of the fact that cultural expression in this country has not been free, that folk singers like Pete Seeger were blacklisted, not allowed on major media networks. Sure we live in a free society, as long as no one criticizes monopoly capitalism. If you do criticize what corporations are doing today you are then placed in the camp of socialists and communists.

The article is very well written and entertaining and you will learn something by reading it, maybe. But it sure reveals what First Things is about, pure ideological justification of the current economic system. Maybe because I have written this someone will put me on a dangerous persons list.


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Cultural Redemption: The Jewish-Arab Peace Song
3/13/2009 3:14:50 PM

I ran across this Jewish-Arab Peace Song on You Tube which expresses a spirit which opens new possibilities. It represents a kind of "cultural redemption" in that cultural expressions can be foretastes of and preparation for real and actual peace among peoples.

A link at the site moves one to another item from the Free Gaza Movement, "a human rights group that in August 2008 sent the first international boats to land in the port of Gaza in 41 years."

I also received this email from a friend which represents cultural redemption.

Recently a group called Yuval Ron performed in Seattle. The musicians are Israeli, Muslim Arab and Christian Arab. They play a repertoire influenced by the period in Spain before 1492 when Queen Isabella evicted the Jews and the Moslems from Spain. I have heard other groups try to reconstruct Ladino music, but I felt that the performances by Yoval Ron are the most authentic.

The group is associated with a development started in Israel by a man who was born and raised Jewish in Egypt, moved to Paris and became a Catholic priest. Jews, Muslims and Christians all live together in that community in peace and as equals. This is all on a voluntary, grass-roots basis.

The community is growing and becoming more popular.

There is also a combination of Arab and Jewish music in the work of Cantor Nehari, who might have some clips on You Tube. He is Syrian-Yemenite and sings Jewish prayers and secular songs in the Arabic tuning system, of which he has an expert knowledge. Some of his melodies are based on famous Egyptian singers of the early 20th Century such as Oum Khaltsoum.

I hope the grass roots can achieve peace if the leaders can't.

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