THE DAY THE MUSIC WAS KILLED by Neville Raymond

Love - music - peace - and over a million people

A dangerously heady combination.

One that leaves the Pathocrats rather jittery, I suspect.

Millions who can come together for music can just as easily come together for peace and harmony...

Have you ever wondered why America doesn’t have any honest-to-goodness Woodstocks any more? Why it has never been able to recapture the first fine careless peace-and-love rapture of the original? Are there no more young people wanting to be blissed-out by the party of their lives? Have they have all grown up and been sucked in by the daily grind?

Forty years ago there was Altamont: a few drug-crazed bikers run amok - and an entire era comes crashing down. Is that just too convenient for the Pathocrats or what!

The goods news - until now - is that Europe didn't get that memo.

There they still have Woodstocky events like the Love Parade - millions of souls, gathering for a music fest of love and togetherness.

Growing out of the euphoric days of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Love Parade was a celebration of peace…solidarity…and world harmony.

Now you just know that something like that was bound to set the nerves of the Pathocrats on edge.

So first they got the Love Parade chased out of Berlin....

Then they got it cancelled in the Ruhr Valley.

But obviously that wasn’t going to be the end of it.

The party-hearty spirit dies hard, and it’s going to take more than stonewalling bureaucrats for people to give up on an orgy of musical tribalism.

Obviously this sort of thing had to be stopped once and for all.

But how?

Well, the formula is a tried and true one.

First, choose the worst possible site. One that would never pass muster for a football game, let alone as a concert venue for hundreds of thousands of people. A cramped speedway at Altamont - little better than an auto junkyard - would do fine. Or an abandoned freight-train yard at Duisburg, for that matter.

Then cram it way beyond capacity. And for good measure, fence the whole thing off, instead of preserving the wide-open feel of previous venues...

And then have your goons in place to turn a shot at heaven on earth into a disaster zone.

In Altamont you hire the Hell’s Angel for security! You donate a 1000 hits of LSD laced with speed to this security force and watch them going to town busting the heads of concertgoers.....

Times change and in Duisburg you are more subtle. You strategically station the police at both ends of the tunnel - and make sure they have their marching orders to set off a stampede by exercising a chokehold at just the right moment - at the height of the concert.

All the reports seem to sing from the same playbook: “It was unclear what triggered the panic....” But then you read about people making a mad dash for the tunnel. Or how a mysterious surge in the crowd forces people to escape by climbing up a metal stairway in front of the tunnel - and then falling into the crowd where they are trampled or crushed.

All of this begs the question... why this panic surge all of a sudden?

You don’t even have to read between the lines to discover that the police triggered it. Yes, the Achilles heel of the whole venue was that tunnel - it was both an entrance into the concert and the exit. This is a big no-no as these things go. You never want hundreds of people, let alone over a million, going in and coming out the same way....

But the police used this to their advantage.

They could have stationed themselves far away from the tunnel altogether. As they made an elaborate point of fencing the area off, they could have turned people back long before they got to the bottleneck of the tunnel. In terms of crowd management and safety that was a no-brainer. There could be no possibility of a stampede in an open space.

But no, they decided to station themselves strategically at the tunnel. There it was that the cops made their disastrous stand by telling the revelers that the concert was closed. They blocked the stream of people who were already passing through the tunnel or were trying to get out. And they created a mad crush of people that surged back on itself in a narrow space, trampling those in or around the tunnel who were still trying to get in.

Even reports that those trying to escape the barricades fell turn out not to be true. According to eye-witnesses, they were forced back in - by the police. In other words, the police decided to turn the flow of the crowd back on itself at the worst possible time and place! A guaranteed crowd-crusher.

Of course, the police union screams that the cops are not to blame. The claim is that the cops actually opened a second exit before the accident. Much better that the cops should have refrained from sealing off the one exit that was fully crammed but operating fine until they decided to butt in.

You might think that this is a case of he-said, she-said. But when it comes right down to it, who are you going to believe? The cops who work for oligarchs who are made nervous by mass demonstrations of peace and harmony? Or eyewitnesses who are there simply to have a good time and who are adamant that the panic only broke out after the cops chose to block off the tunnel?

In any case, everything was fine until that riptide of ingressing and egressing crowds in the tunnel. Only the police would have the authority to set that off.

And then to add insult to injury, there are all the reports that the police just stood by on the bridge and did nothing while people were trampled underfoot below them.

20 people died gruesome deaths! And over five hundred more were injured.

It’s hard not to believe that those in charge - the city officials, the organizers and the police - did not collude to make this happen. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

For some observers, like the concert-manager for Shakira and Sting, the loss of life rose to the level of a crime. "This is not a tragic disaster, this is a crime", said Marek Lieberberg. Whether or not you want to believe that the powers that be were behind this crime, the clincher for me was how the event organizer jumped on it as a chance to shut down the Love Parade in perpetuity.

He didn’t vow to get to the bottom of it. He didn't promise to do everything in his power to ensure that such a disaster never repeats itself. Almost on cue, he lost no time in insisting that the era of the Love Parade was dead. Out of respect for the victims!

Have you ever heard anything more ridiculous?

People die because the organizers and police messed up - if you could call it messing up - and from now on there are no more free concerts of love and music and world harmony!

Can anyone stand up and scream Shill at the top of his lungs?

Don’t you just love the way that something like this can bring the whole communal party to a screeching halt? The oligarchs can make a big to-do about being welcomed with flowers and songs in Iraq, because they are bringing peace and freedom to the region. And after tens of thousands of dead and maimed U.S. servicemen, and hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqi men, women and children, the whole noble enterprise is still going as strong as ever! You don’t have the organizers of the whole fiasco standing up and proclaiming that it is time to cut and run: Well, that rings the curtains down on our efforts to bring peace and democracy to the world!

But here you have a wonderful open-air festival, pulsing with music and harmony, solidarity and world peace - a festival going on since the fall of the Berlin Wall. And then - either because of organizational foul-ups, in the most charitable scenario, or a deliberately orchestrated case of stampeding a crowd trapped in a tunnel - less than a couple of dozen people wind up dead. And you have the organizer standing up and piously bleating, No more Love Parades!

Come on, could you be more shockingly hypocritical?

The bad guys can mobilize to take over the world - and even in the face of hundreds of thousands of death, it is still all about staying the course for them so that those who have already died will not have died in vain.

The good guys mobilize for a world-class festival of music and love...and because less than two dozen lives are lost under decidedly suspicious circumstances, the era of world harmony and peace must be declared over and dead - and all in the name of the victims and their families, no less!

If only the urge to bomb and kill were as easily quenched as the spirit to party-hearty and have a blast! The world would be a much safer place, if not an altogether more joyous one.

And you thought that only the Taliban were down on music and dancing!

MANNING UP FOR THE MAN by Neville Raymond

“The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain.” Colin Wilson

The pressure to conform is the embalming fluid that mummifies societies. It gives humans the staying power to make sure that this cold, unfeeling world stays the same from one century to the next, no matter how desperately they may want it to change. You don't have to be a philosopher to know that. You could be a boarding school survivor. There we were, led around by the nose morning, noon and night, not a one of us dragging his heels or kicking up a fuss. Lining up for parades like clockwork. Filing in and out of classrooms and chapels. Learning whatever they wanted to teach us, when and where and how they wanted to teach it. Studying, playing, eating, sleeping, waking, showering at the strict times of their choosing.

A marvel of synchronized activity! All those callisthenic formations on Founder’s Day were a flash in the pan compared to the rigidly organized paces they put us through day after day, week after week, month after month, March through November. What mysterious mechanism could make us so docile? What pied piper had us following this hypnotic tune? Consider the odds! There we were, four or five hundred strong, miles from anywhere. They were fifteen or twenty masters, tops! David and Goliath were not so badly mismatched! Yet we remained their dutiful little robots, bobbing our heads each time we ran into them. Good morning sir! Good afternoon sir! What good little boys we must have been to let a handful of them run the show like a well-oiled machine!

Were we content by any chance with our lot? Would you be if you were dragged from home and whisked to a glorified orphanage-cum-bootcamp? The truth is we were homesick as hell. Why didn’t we put up a fight? Not necessarily with machine guns like the students in the 1964 film If, that savage satire of English public school life. A Gandhi-style revolution with sit-downs, non-violent protests, peaceful demonstrations, would have done just fine. Where was our spunk, our courage, our spirit of fair play when we really needed it? Was there nothing left in us of that rambunctious spontaneity and playful exuberance that comes so naturally to boys? Had the school regimen killed it all off?

One crisp fall morning we were massed in the quad, doing jumping jacks on the barked commands of a PE master. Feeling a tad frisky, I clowned around in the harmless way boys do when craving attention. It must have spoiled the orderly spectacle of that Hitler Youth Rally. The PE master got off his perch and headed straight for me. The crunching sound of his feet on gravel seemed to go on forever. Standing before me at last, he administered a ringing slap to my face.

Did I reel with hurt and shame? I’d have to be made of crushed rock not to. But what if I wasn’t the only one? What if every witness to that assault resonated with my pain? What if they were shocked enough to sit down en masse, refusing to go on till things changed? What if boys began boycotting classes, taking vows of silence until the masters gave in? An apology for starters - then a ban on corporal punishment. What if an outraged student body rose up and flexed its muscles for regime change? From now on we have a greater say in running our school. Optional uniforms, relaxed schedules. A choice of earlier or later meal seatings. We decide what, when and how we want to learn. We communicate with our parents when we feel like it. And so on… until a paramilitary-run orphan asylum turns into something more akin to a pleasure cruise ship.

What nipped this solidarity movement in the bud? What kept us imprisoned in our lonely shells, helpless to come together to change our corner of the world? We all know the secret of British rule. Divide and conquer. God knows, there was enough of that. The student body was divided into four Houses and pitted against each other every which way. That wasn’t the root of our failure to unite though. It was the stigma attached to feelings. Tears sprung to my eyes when I was struck. But that stiff upper lip never wavered. Just as I got a grip, everyone around me did too. I didn’t break - neither did anyone else break ranks. I held it together because there was nobody to hold me. So we all held it together and soldiered on. For the biggest taboo of all was to make a scene. If every last one of us was equally terrified of that, how could we sit down to make a mass spectacle of ourselves? If our worst fear was to be branded a sissy for raising a fuss, how could we raise a collective fuss? Solidarity as fellow feeling poses no threat if every fellow is in charge of cracking down on his feelings.

I used to cry myself to sleep the first week of the new school term. As a group we could never join hands to cry ourselves awake out of our stupor. You want an empire on which the sun never sets? Drill generations of boys to always let the sun go down on their anger and anguish and shame.

GENOCIDE AS FUN AND GAMES

How do sociopathic leaders get away with mass murder? Take Adolf Hitler for instance. He was guilty of mass murder, but he is not one of the ones who got away with it. Yes, he set up the machinery of mass destruction and got away with operating it. But in the judgment of history he has been exposed as a mass murderer. If didn't take his life in a Berlin bunker, he would have been haled before the court at Nuremberg and tried, found guilty and sentenced to death. So, in the eyes of posterity, at least, he cannot be said to have gotten away with it.

If you want to beat a rap like mass murder, you have to get up pretty early in the morning. If you want to sugarcoat the pill of genocide so that it goes down easily, you have to be a far more savvy and powerful politician than Hitler ever was. You have to convince people that you are noble and well-intentioned and that it is all in a good cause. You have to work overtime to brand the victims as the bad guys. And at the same time you have to go all out to glamorize the perpetrators as the good guys. You have to turn the whole thing into an epic struggle between good and evil - a thrilling adventure full of drama and suspense. And of course you have to churn out an endless stream of books and films that romanticize the ugly subject of genocide and make it seem as normal as childbirth by representing it as the birth pangs of a New World.

If you can do that, well, you can consider yourself home free. You have successfully covered up the greatest crime of the century. You can be said to have made genocide - the granddaddy of all crime - pay. And if all that is true, that means that right now there are people out there enjoying our respect and arousing our admiration who are, in the final analysis, no better than Hitler. That means that there are cultural icons on a par with the Nazis who enjoy our trust and bask in our acclaim and stand out as legendary role models for our kids.

It kinda makes it hard to tell your heroic friends from your villainous enemies. I mean, in the 20^th century there were all these God-fearing patriotic Americans who volunteered to fight in the Good War. It was an epic struggle between good and evil, and the great villain of the piece was Adolf Hitler. We are all familiar with Hitler’s M.O by now. He was a pathological liar whose word could not be trusted. He made treaties and promises but had no intention of living up to any of them. He set out to dominate the continent of Europe armed with a grandiose sense of destiny, yet stooped to all kinds of trickery and force to pull off his blatant land grabs. And worst of all, he targeted an innocent people for genocide, rounding them up and throwing them into concentration camps where they perished by the millions.

But where did Hitler come from? He wasn’t born evil, was he? I mean, we know that he had a rageholic of a father who beat the daylights out of him at least once a day. But besides that, what else could have transformed the innocent boy into a genocidal maniac? What influential books did he read? Whose crazy footsteps did he follow? What served as his sick role model?

To be sure, Hitler the man did terrible things in the 20^th century. But first and foremost he was a child of the 19^th century. Was there a power in the 19^th century that blazed a path of conquest for him to emulate? A jingoistic power that made repeated treaties and promises of peace but failed to honor any of them? A rapacious power that refused to stay within its borders and grabbed an entire continent as its prize? An arrogant power that armed itself with the myth of a grandiose destiny and used trickery and force to pull off its blatant land grabs? And last but not least, a bloodthirsty power that rounded up innocent peoples and slaughtered them in a systematic policy of genocide, until the only survivors left were sickly specimens in de facto concentration camps?

If you know the answer to that question, you know the truth. You know that Hitler had a sinister guiding star. And that guiding star was our own Uncle Sam. Long before the Fuhrer claimed it as his manifest destiny to conquer the Europe, our leaders invested themselves with a Manifest Destiny to conquer America. Long before he used trickery and force to push for his dream of continental expansion to the East, they did the same thing with regard to the West. Long before he came across as a pathological liar because he broke all his treaties and promises with White Europeans, they did the same thing with Red Indians. And worst of all, long before he targeted an indigenous population of Jews, Gypsies and Slavs for genocide, they did the same thing with an indigenous population of Sioux and Cherokee and Iroquois. And while the world was justly horrified by the ravaged specimens of humanity that survived the war of extermination in Hitler’s camps, there is nowhere near the same level of outrage over the demoralized survivors of the U.S. war of extermination who were herded into glorified camps known as Reservations

All this is historical fact. Any schoolboy can look it up. The United States gets all virtuous over its fight against Hitler - and such is the power of indoctrination that its citizens forget that their government is guilty of the same atrocities as the Nazis! Our side likes to paint Hitler as a madman for thinking in grandiose terms of overrunning a continent and using duplicity and force to get his way and launching a systematic campaign of genocide. And we conveniently forget that We the People and our homegrown leaders have the same shade of blood on their hands. As a matter of fact, if there were an honest-to-goodness accounting of the Native Americans butchered in the path of U.S. expansion - estimates run from less than ten million to fifty million - our leaders in Washington would be haled before some tribunal just like Nuremberg and held no less guilty of crimes against humanity than the captured Nazi leaders.

So you think you're one of the good guys? You think you can tell a villain when you see one? Don’t be too sure. In the decade right after America emerged victorious from World War II, a new medium called television took the country by storm. TV Westerns were all the rage in the 1950s. Little boys dressed up as the Lone Ranger and Roy Rogers, complete with plastic guns and Stetsons, and swallowed hook, line and sinker the dominant myth. Cowboys and cavalry kept order at the point of a six-shooter. Indians were savages lurking behind every bush and rocky boulder, waiting to wreak mayhem.

Well, think of one of those boys growing up immersed in this Western mystique. He devoured books that hyped the morality play of the Wild West. He loved playing Cowboys and Indians as a kid. He lived vicariously through stories of tough two-fisted white men meting out their brand of vengeance on Indian savages. Television may not have been invented in his day, but he was weaned on the literary equivalents of Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel. Who is he? John Wayne? Andrew Jackson? No, we know him as Adolf Hitler.

We like to think that Hitler was an evil seed, but when you look at his childhood, he was just a regular old German kid. He grew up obsessed with the novels of Karl May, Germany’s answer to Zane Grey. May had never been to America but he made the Western his special genre, cranking out stories about a swaggering white hero called Old Shatterhand who was murder on Indian savages. Hitler never tired of reading about this bloodthirsty hero as a kid, in candlelight and even in moonlight. In fact, he was still reading these stories in his final days in the bunker. And as his surprised generals could tell you, his fantasy world would sometimes get the better of him and he would catch himself referring to the Russians as Redskins.

So where does that leave us? We started out by wondering how anyone can get away with mass murder. Well, here's the key. In order to get away with mass murder you must have a culture that goes gaga over its perpetrators. You don’t find Hollywood's dream factories glorifying the Holocaust or presenting its architects as worthy role models for kids to emulate. But the film vaults are bulging with Hollywood classics that enshrine the Western hero as a worthy role model for children and spin his campaign of extermination against indigenous peoples as a noble cause to identify with and even embrace and emulate. You will never find American kids playing Nazis and Jews in their backyards. But you will find them playing Cowboys and Indians.

That is how you know you have arrived. Your version of genocide doesn’t carry the same level of stigma as the other guy’s. Our own City of the Angels shows how easily it can be done. On the Westside of Los Angeles is a famous museum dedicated to exposing the horror that was Nazi Germany by sensitizing people to the full magnitude of the Holocaust. And on the Valley side, at the foothills of Griffith Park, there is another famous museum dedicated to celebrating the mystique of the American West - and it does just that without ever really shocking us into recognizing the full magnitude of the holocaust perpetrated against its indigenous peoples.