Englund, Peter 2008
Stridens skønhet och sorg. Førsta varldskriget i 212 korta kapittel
Atlantis, Varnamo
For understanding the last part of the 20th century, including the second world war, the earlier part including the first world war remains an enigmatic background. Here is a good research-based update, written to get the reader into the mood of 1914-18, by a pioneer Swedish historian. I have read the first third of the book, and although it is a bit too wordy, it gives a good picture.
Who is going to bear the costs, of Libya divided? Scenario one, a victorious Arab democratic revolution. Scenario two, some tyrants resisting, mixed picture, civil war. What is the best solution? The first, most of us would think, but how can it be achieved? The young generation “new configuration” of the new Middle East was created by the revolutions in Tunis and Egypt – but even there, each inch of progress is hard-won. In a recent event, pro-democracy protestors in Egypt, demanding their right to overlook the security service, were attacked and beaten. Should the Arab world face this democracy issue alone, or should the rest of the world support them? The answer obviously is yes, this is a global issue. We are not living in fascist times – are we? But then the question is, how to support the democratic struggle, with many divided voices. A debate going on while the democracy fighters of Libya and elsewhere are dying, taking the load for the world community. Unorganized idealists against a fascist thug army. Do we want a repeat of the Spanish civil war?
Gene Wolfe is one of the main voices of science fiction today. Watching current world news, especially the democratic struggles in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, I could not help thinking of his torturer and torture society portraits (e g The Shadow of the Torturer, 1980), and I have ordered two of his newer books, volume one (On blues) of a trilogy, and a historical work (Latro in the mist). We shall see. Whatever I read, from now on, is more influenced by the perspectives of Edward Said, Jonathan Littell, Victor Serge and other authors widening my understanding of democracy, some of them described in this blog.
PS A good introduction to Edward Said (e g Culture and imperialism, 1993) and post-imperialist culture, as it currently applies to the “Arab” world system issue, is Robert Fisk’s The Great War for Civilization (2006). For understanding more of the crucial “dignity” aspect, cf. Evelin Lindner and others on dignity and humiliation: http://www.humiliationstudies.org/
On humiliation, see further harassment and mobbing research – this is a wide research area. For world system theory cf Immanuel Wallerstein.
It is not often that broad new research on men, masculinities and gender equality is published. Here is a new case. 
An initial research report “Evolving men – Initial Results from the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES)” is now available from
http://www.icrw.org/publications/evolving-men
The report is based on a survey in seven countries (Brazil, Chile, Croatia,
India, Mexico, Rwanda and South Africa). The household and life course oriented survey questionnaire was to a great extent based on the “Gender equality and quality of life” survey questionnaire developed in Norway 2007.
Despite major socioeconomic differences between the countries, often influencing the results, the initial report surprisingly often confirms the main Norway survey results regarding gender equality. This includes the importance of material context and actual practices. The new report also sometimes offers better data, based on method improvements. A worrisome note concerns gender oppressive attitudes among some groups of men (especially, India).
How many people should die in the streets, before the world stops the killing? Where is the UN, stopping potential genocide in Libya? Is a revolution for democracy just a matter for a country on its own and isolated? Should a ruler be allowed to bomb his own people, Guernica style? Are we powerless to stop current-day fascism?
The revolutions in the Arab world requires the ability to speak with – even – the old dictators, the old fractions of power. They are not “mad dogs”. However if they want to participate at the speaking table, rather than stay in prison, they must stop their repression – right now.
As many, eventually, have noticed, Mike Hugg’s Neon Dream (1975) is a remarkable and overlooked record. Cf http://prognotfrog.blogspot.com/2010/04/mike-hugg-hug-neon-dream-1975.html
Broadly speaking it sums up a substantial part of the 1960s pop revolution experience, centred on the Mannfred Mann band case, and perhaps more intelligently, or at least as interestingly, reworked in Hugg’s case as in the case of Mannfred’s Earth Band. Hugg was more jazz-oriented, but perhaps also more true to the band’s prog roots. As on his two first albums, the cuts are often long and involved, yet less bleak, they often rock seriously, and deliver their pop message too.
I am in the unique position of having a master tape copy of this record, copied directly to tape. I got this copy tape in the late 1970s, often enjoying it played back on my Revox A77. What does a digital version of the analog master tape sound like, compared to digital version of vinyl records?
The object of this test is a digital SDS recording from the analog copy played back on the (possibly somewhat rusty) Revox analog tape recorder, using the Korg Mr-1 recorder, compared to vinyl digital recordings.
Not to surprise you – it sounds glorious. The limitations are interesting too. It sounds great within a more narrow soundscape than the one attempted by later technology. I have to overlook a certain amount of missing bass, and tune in on the middle tone. Some treble is missing too, but this is not as noticeable, since the sound coherence on the mid level is so good that it mainly makes up for it. The sound is more free and natural than what I often associate with digital and even SACD sound, more dimensional, even if it is in a limited sound envelope.
On my test player (Cowon D2) I have Passport: Looking Through (1974) after Hugg. It is a better but also more slick recording. It is hard to evaluate sound differences across recordings, but my main impression is, as many times before, that the “going through vinyl” method works remarkably well – considering that it should not work so well. It should clearly detract from the sound, but it doesn’t. Instead it creates a somewhat different kind of sound, not clearly inferior to the master tape copy, in my case. Some of it may be “being used to it”. The vinyl sort of “prolongs the case”, while the master tape has it “right there”. With a somewhat inferior master tape case, and a good vinyl reproducer, it is hard to decide, but this remains an impression.
The story of the battle ship Tirpitz is interesting, showing how some objects can become “prestige objects” in warfare, and in the background, how this is also a gendered story. The German battle ship Tirpitz was a great hope of the Nazis, but never made it as a ship of war – the performance was extremely weak, mainly, one bit of North Sea battling, and a single “disciplinary” trip to Svalbard. The German sea command was relatively new, weak, and seems to have been relatively non-nazified, and for this and various reasons including prestige, the potentially great war hammer Tirpitz was allowed to lay dormant, mainly, until the ship was destroyed by allied forces aircraft near Tromsø late in the war. A main interesting point is how something can become a fetish, even in practical warfare. Tirpitz was in fact a moderate military threat, yet all parties acted as if it was the big thug (see Tamelander, Michael; Zetterling, Niklas 2010: Tirpitz – kampen om Nordishavet, Spartacus, Oslo).
The “macho” exploits to destroy the ship may seem absurd, including one-man uboats in the Trondheim fjord, daredevil bomber flights, and other devices that lost a lot of men. They were not so strange however, considering the key importance of the convoy traffic to Murmansk and the western help to the Soviet Union. Even as a “moderate” threat, basically since Tirpitz was a battle ship and not an aircraft carrier design, it could count for much in this context. The Tirpitz evidence is interesting for showing how hard-line evidence can be mainly sensible and right, based on very real needs of the situation – and yet be wrong.
I will be on leave from my work for three months this spring, April to July, writing for a book project on gender equality theory. My aim is a book which is useful for students as well as researchers, a book that also works pedagogically.
Stalin’s killings created the first holocaust, destroying a whole generation of revolutionaries, the bloodiest counter-revolution so far in history. – Victor Serge (summary), in Susan Weissman: The course is set on hope,Verso, London, 2001
Serge was an independent Soviet revolutionary, a category closed to “official” history. Official history, often, says that the massive persecutions in Russia in the 1930s were caused by Stalin being mad and rid by paranoia, although recent research has attempted to calm down this picture (see e g Montefiore’s Stalin – The Court of the Red Tsar 2004). Stalin’s paranoia is not the best explanation angle, and Weissman’s excellent work on Serge helps to show the deeper sociological pattern involved, describing massive persecution, imprisonment and deaths.
Is it correct to classify this in a term like holocaust? This is my choice of word, using a later term, summing up Serge. I think, yes. Not only are the numbers possibly as massive as the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust – altogether, working over a longer period, Stalin’s camps killed more than Hitler’s, even if they used frost rather than gas, and were not as specialized towards killing as in the Nazi case (see e g Anne Appelbaum: Gulag – a history, 2004). It is also the case that the killing of independent revolutionaries, “a whole generation”, in Serge’s horrified words, was well-planned, systematic and in intent, on the same scale as the gas ovens in Auschwitz. Stalin’s murderers did not carry gas chambers around, but used pistols and other means – an ice axe, in the case of Trotsky – but the pattern was the same, the communists in Germany were the first inmates of the concentration camp system, “paving the way” in a negative sense for the Jews. The persecution of revolutionaries, across the Stalinist and Nazi regimes, was not “the” holocaust, but probably the main preparation for it, and in a sense, its overlooked sociological twin.
Babel Fish Depend on me did not make it to the final Norway Melody Grand Prix, but it should be said that it lost gracefully and indirectly perhaps helped pave the way, for a song like Stella Mwangi’s Haba haba to win. The winner can perhaps send out an even stronger signal about a new cultural message, a Kenyan face and a Norwegianized persona, as the media focus the event. The final, this year, was more than usually interesting, with quite different Norwegian traditions including variants of Norway (noway?) Americana. Some good independent Norwegians were squeezed out in the first round already, and subversive music was probably a bit downplayed in the final people’s choice round too, yet on the whole the MGP has emerged as a more democratic arrangement, no mistaking the team spirit as well as the competition in NRK’s handling. The people’s choice for the crosscultural message of Stella was, in one Norwegian newspaper’s words, a “knockout”.
Haba haba is an appeal about what to do, while the fathering in Babel Fish’s Depend on me is a more vague appeal what to be, what it consists of is less clear. True, in Haba haba, the doing is fairly basic, it is a about dancing, and social orientation and relations are far less pronounced, but everyone can do it, appealing to a basic element of pop music as a democratizing (and gender etc conflict resolving) force. Babel Fish has portrayed fathering as practice in other songs, eg. beautiful rendering of lullabyes – but not with the same dance and do it now factor. In the broader view, I agree with Blood Sweat and Tears, The Child is Father to the Man (or in modern words, children to their parents). The idea beyond the musical form is to capture a sense of a better society, a better future for young people, which is – in the sidelines – what the MGP and similar contests are all about.
Whatever the cause, the people’s judgement selecting Haba haba with several hundred thousand votes, is a calming note for “ethnic fear”. It is a slap in the face of racism in Norway and everywhere. It is perhaps a sign of people power, as in Egypt, so also in Norway, we shall see. Norwegians have some fire too.
One year in the early 1970s I helped create an alternative to the commercialization of MGP, an alternative and well visited music event in Oslo, arranged by the music organization Samspill. I was coeditor of the organization’s music magazine, that was critical of the MGP arrangement for failing to show what actually went on, advancing music, including new pop music. In later years, I must admit, I followed MGP at a more critical distance, with half-closed senses, sometimes just shutting off the TV in exasperation. This, also, is why it is interesting to notice the greater social dimensionality in 2011 and the more fair “doable” competition. Haba haba. All together now.