Protest and Revolution (2021)

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold, Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity ... --W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming Note: I undertook to produce for this issue an article on the making of Salt of the Earth, but my discovery of James L. Lorence's magnificent and exhaustive book ('The Suppression of Salt of the Earth', University of New Mexico Press, 1999) has rendered this superfluous. I was also planning a far longer introduction, but the excellence and very generous responses of my contributors left me no space. I am going to restrict myself to two topics only: global warming and Aulis Sallinen. Global Warming One of my most vivid (if probably wildly inaccurate) childhood memories (I must have been fourteen, but a dreadfully introspective and hypersensitive fourteen) is of a newsreel I saw in the cinema of the end of Mussolini. The (perhaps imaginary) image I retain is of the body hanging upside down while people desecrated it with sticks, hatchets, etc ... I closed my eyes but it was too late. It haunted my nightmares for years. It seems to me that, ten? twenty? fifty? years from now something very similar will be enacted upon the bodies (dead or alive) of our corporate capitalists when the general populace finally awakens to what they've done to our planet. It will of course be too late--just as Mussolini's death was too late. And it's not my idea of justice: rather, it's the impotent rage of a mob who realize (but refuse to admit it) that it's their fault for not acting much sooner, for remaining what is dubiously called 'innocent: the corpses will be mere scapegoats, and life on our planet will already be beyond repair. According to many reputable scientists, there may be no life on our planet. The question of course is 'But what can we do?', and it's a very difficult one to answer. It's no use appealing to our governments to take the necessary drastic measures to curb pollution and the devastation of the planet: they rely on corporate capitalism for funding for their elections. They presumably know what risks they are taking, but apparently their careers are more important. The only hope is popular revolt and a massive swerve to the Left, and that seems most unlikely to happen, or to happen soon enough. The most powerful nation in the world (whose participation would be essential) has a president who 'doesn't believe' in global warming. It is also a nation from which the Left has been effectively eradicated: its voters are offered only a choice between a moderate Right and an extreme (or immoderate) one. Canada is not that much better, with a (very moderate) socialist party that seems primarily concerned with not offending anybody. It is not just the United States that is the enemy. The people of my own adopted country are either ignorant of the issues or simply so uncaring that they elected a conservative government, with entirely predictable results. So Canada has joined the United States in its inexorable progress towards universal devastation. Meanwhile, as climate change escalates, temperatures rise, 'natural' disasters (which are anything but natural) become more frequent and more extreme, corporate capitalism sees to it that its ever more mystified populace are deluded into what is generally regarded as happiness, with the availability of more and more gadgetry, newer and newer fashions, 'the latest', with which we all have to keep up, rock, pop, TV sitcoms, outpourings of emptier and ever more repetitive Hollywood sex comedies, crazy comedies, horror, torture, dumbing down ... And on we go to the ending of all life on our planet. The time for socialist revolution is now, not when it is too late. Tell your neighbours. And ask your candidates how they relate to the corporations. Aulis Sallinen: a composer for our time I read or heard recently (I'm no longer sure where or from whom) of 'the death of classical music' (which seems to me infinitely more important, as our inheritance, than the death of cinema, on which it has a start of several hundred years), with Stravinsky named as 'the last great composer'. …