Tuesday, July 27, 2010

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!