Half a Million Strong

Part One: On Yasgur's Farm

'"Three Days of Peace and Music,"' says Pauline, reading from the press release. 'A rock festival in the Catskills - sound like fun?'
'Sounds like pure hell.'
'Well, you're going.'

Thus begins Patricia Kennealy-Morrison's unorthodox take on the Woodstock Festival of August 1969. She was there, eventually and reluctantly, in her capacity as jazz-and-rock music journalist.

It sounds like hell to me as well. Too much like Waterloo Station at rush hour. I was sixteen when Woodstock took place, and taking a keen interest in all things 'alternative'. A few years down the line and I would be a counterculture hero myself, but in very different vein. I never wished I was at Woodstock.

Much has been made of the event by the mainstream media on this, its fiftieth anniversary. Organisations like the BBC appear to thoroughly approve; and why shouldn't they? 'Three days of music and peace' is the mantra churned out about Woodstock. In truth, I suggest that it posed little real threat to the established order. It is understandable that the 'love and peace and rock music' theme seemed vaguely revolutionary within the context of late '60s USA, with Vietnam, riots about race and war, and the rest; that stereotyped story is well-known. But most people who were really serious about creating a viable alternative were not in attendance. They were away, doing their thing....

The media's enthusiasm for Woodstock should instantly arouse suspicion: what's in it for them? Scratch  beneath the surface, and it's not difficult to see. With a little subterfuge, twisting, and distortion, the stereotyped memes of the Woodstock culture elegantly morph into much of what the modern mainstream holds as closest to its deeply-corrupted heart. Put in a different way: Woodstock has become hardcore establishment.

Love, peace; oneness; caring, sharing: who wouldn't want to be part of that? The problem is that it's all too easily taken up by vested interests who have little love for peace, really, and is simply used to further their own ends. Plenty of present-day Woodstock-lookalike dudes will show an uninformed enthusiasm for globalism. Sounds like oneness, doesn't it? Caring for one another. The thing is that globalism is anything but. 'Oneness' properly understood is an individual experience, possibly the result of decades of disciplined spiritual practice, sometimes more serendipitously the consequence of ingesting consciousness-altering substances. It highlights the unity and interconnectness underlying manifold experience. Globalism, in contrast, is a collective political stance, a recipe for the masses. It does not promote enlightened experience of the individual. It promotes uniformity, anonymity, sameness, the human identikit robot. A seething mass of sub-human soup, overseen by a small, unaccountable 'elite'. Not 'love and peace' in the slightest.

And what about national borders? Well, oneness and caring for everyone else; borders must be bad, mustn't they, creating divisions between people. Wrong again. As in the life of the individual, the social human being requires borders, boundaries. It is well-known that a human being without a sense of their boundaries, and/or too open to every influence from the world around them (over-sensitive), will struggle to function healthily, and to define a sense of personal identity. Similarly with groups of people. They need boundaries, they need a sense of social identity; remove them, and their integrity will be destroyed (which is the idea, when it comes to open-borders globalism).

Part Two: Snakes in the Garden

And then there is nature, the environment as it is abstractly called nowadays. "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden" intoned Crosby, Stills, and Nash, in their iconic anthem to the festival.
This 'garden' comes with a hint of ambiguity. Maybe it's the Garden of Eden, the paradise before the fall. The original place of primal innocence. But 'the garden' also suggests countryside, nature, back-to-the-land, all primary themes in the Woodstock sentiment.

I'm all for nature, and dealing with the issues related to it: plastics, pollution, decimation of rainforests and other habitats for personal profit. Trashing of nature for housing, and wind and solar energy. Toxic practices in over-industrialised agriculture. These are all real, tangible problems which demand urgent attention - and against which practical action is perfectly feasible. But environmental politics, the bastard offspring of Woodstock's garden worship, hasn't adopted any of these as its prime focus. Instead, it had decided to whip up mass-hysteria about the one 'environmental' issue which is more nebulous, controversial, uncertain, and which nobody actually understands: human-induced climate change or global warming; or, since this doesn't seem to scare people enough, climate emergency.

The politics surrounding this has become increasingly that of histrionics, departing from both rationality and nature (it is mainly promoted by people living in big cities). There is little honour and integrity involved. Instead, it is a crude but effective manipulation of the Woodstock instinct that alienation from the natural world is a bad thing. Climate change hysteria is a key ingredient in the globalist programme rolled out by not-very-nice people. Greta Thunberg may be the divine love child of the unthinking sector of the Woodstock generation, and an extremely irritating one, but I fear for her future.

Not enough people who consider themselves liberal, intelligent, caring, and generally right-on, have woken up to some harsh realities. That there are people out there who don't care if you are left or right, black or white, up or down, nice or nasty. Some will be outright sociopaths or psychopaths; others will be less extreme, but only too willing to cast aside any sense of morality, of democracy, of freedoms to speak and act for the individual, in the service of their own agendas. 'We need to do this in the name of the greater good': hear this phrase, and immediately go on red alert.

Whatever, you are easy meat for manipulation of your own feelings and attitudes, if you are not awake to what can happen on deeper levels. You don't need a PhD in parapolitics (you won't find one anyway), but you do require a good instinct for the games that take place beneath the surface of things. A bit of basic education in such things. If not, you will likely end up as part of the legacy of Woodstock, the twisted anthem for 'progressives' of today. Your nice feelings mangled and manipulated into service to those who will feign to care, all the while furthering their own programmes and agendas. The elites, the deep state, empire, the control system. They have many names, and we know they are out there...… Don't be a blind pseudo-hippie activist. Look out.

Footnote#1: Patricia

Patricia Kennealy (Morrison)'s account of the Woodstock festival is singularly dispassionate, and compassionate. She was there, and she was not seduced by the hype. She feels uncomfortable as she sits in the comfort of the rain-proof Pavilion provided for her and her fellow journalists, music promoters and rock stars, guzzling Moet and whatever else might be on offer; outside, meanwhile, the unwashed youth, the foot soldiers of the revolution, are cold, wet, and hungry. She feels troubled when she looks at some of the kids there: ".... kids who haven't got faces yet, kids filled up with drugs they don't know how to make proper use of, and only take them because they think it's required of them, because they want to be hip and cool and accepted...."

Some Doors aficionados really don't like Patricia at all. She is the 'pagan priestess' who underwent a pagan marriage, or handfasting ceremony, with Jim Morrison. Some consider her Jim story, 'Strange Days', to be a product of neurotic fantasy. Some details may be off-course, I do not know. But there is an overall ring of authenticity about some of her writing, at least. Incisive and intelligent, her view into the rock music world of the time is a good read. Her story is, above all else, on a theme increasingly rare nowadays, that of undying love.

Footnote#2: Love and Peace

Love and peace never really did it for me. In 1967, when California's Summer of Love sent its gentle ripples across the Atlantic to our fair shores, I saw the cowbells and flowers, but remained unconvinced. Spaced-out smiles on hippies dancing and blowing bubbles was all very well, and some of the music was great. But it all came over as a bit vapid, vacuous. I couldn't put my finger on it, but even to my fourteen-year-old mind something was missing.

Midsummer, and the Beatles released their own anthem to the year's happenings: 'All You Need Is Love'. John Lennon had reputedly been tripping on acid non-stop for the past two years, which sounded interesting. But if this was the best he could come up with after all that time, I wasn't impressed.

Then the Beatles went to India and teamed up with the Maharishi. You knew this was a mistake, just by looking at the photos, and all a bit silly. vapid and vacuous again. It was then that I gave up on the Fab Four. There had been a time when they were truly inspirational to a new teenager, but no more.

My mind drifted off elsewhere, and eventually came upon some kind of solution. The Doors. Jim Morrison, mainly. Nothing vapid here. Unlike the Beatles, and Woodstock a bit later on, he was perceived as a real threat by the powers-that-were, and he paid the ultimate price.

Twenty years after all that, I was finally able to give a name to what had been so patently missing, and what Morrison possessed in abundance: 'Shadow'.

Footnote#3: Greta

As I write this piece, our young saviouress is mid-Atlantic, on her boat en route to some extremely important climate change conference in the USA. This is well-known. What is less well-known - strangely, the mainstream has omitted to mention this part of the story - is the logistics involved in all of this. Greta, of course, is on the boat because she is against air travel, as it is contributing to global warming. We do, however, have the captain of her boat, who will need to get back to Europe from the USA - which he will do by plane. In addition, a team is required to go from Europe to the USA to bring back the boat. They will do so - yep, you got it - by plane. In other words, far more air travel is involved in all this than if Greta had done the reasonable thing, and just got herself a low-profile, economy class flight from Sweden to USA. But no. In other words again, it's a publicity stunt, and a feel-good trip for our pigtailed heroine.

Yes, Greta is very irritating. But maybe we shouldn't be too hard on her. Being famous so young can be tricky: ask Martina Hingis or Jennifer Capriati. And they actually possessed rare talent, unlike Greta.

I haven't followed the Greta story very much. I have other things to do. But it is likely far deeper, darker, and more complex than most people would like to think. I mean, what's it about? Really. There will be people behind the whole weird narrative of elevating her to saintly status. And we have some of mainstream media's obscene fawning over her. What's in it for all these questionable entities? Is it a shaming of older people, that they haven't done enough to save the planet, so we need a schoolgirl to show us all up as the irresponsible good-for-nothings that we are? The more time passes, the more I feel that there is something very sick about using a girl in this way, for whatever purpose. Some comments on a YouTube presentation I watched recently likened the phenomenon to child abuse. I think they have  a point.

In the meantime, don't be surprised if things don't end well for Greta. On the other hand, maybe she will be appointed Big Chief at the UN, and single-handedly save us all from the impending flames of hell. It is being suggested that she may receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Should anyone be in doubt as to the real meaning of this accolade, then here is final proof.

The thing is: on climate change we don't know. Nobody knows. Nobody. Don't be conned into thinking otherwise, that's my advice, not that anybody asked for it. Planetary climate can indeed change, rapidly and radically, both heating and cooling in next-to no time. It has happened before, without the aid of humankind, and can happen again. It's simply part of living on this planet: everything's a bit uncertain.

Footnote#4: The Garden

Actually, there has been substantial progress in reclaiming the garden in recent decades. In some areas, at least. Some things are being preserved, some things are being conserved.

I am thinking especially of some of the cities. Far cleaner, less polluted, quieter, less traffic, healthier in general, with the return of wildlife to urban areas. Some animals, in fact, seek refuge in the city from the 'countryside', where industrial farming poisons them and people try to shoot them with guns. In the city, no predators.

I was recently in Newcastle, a good example. 'Grim' and 'grime' are words which would once have been automatically coupled with this city, along with the other urban conglomerations adjacent. No longer. The central areas of Newcastle are a pleasure to stroll around, and to be in generally (this is probably not the case on a Friday evening....). Lots of money has been put into the place, and the riverside and city centre have been impressively transformed.

Inverness centre, in sad contrast, is a bit of a dump. It was a dump when I moved here fourteen years ago and, despite a little tweaking here and there, it remains a dump. The place survives largely because coachloads of tourists are disgorged onto its shabby streets for a few hours, where they spend a fistful of money on Highland souvenirs, before heading off to the Isle of Skye later in the day. Meanwhile, the outskirts of Inverness continue to spread relentlessly outwards in an urban sprawl that could be anywhere in the UK.

Inverness notwithstanding, some of urban Britain gives cause for optimism. Something which appears to pass Extinction Rebellion by.
                   

                 

Identity and Hate: Notes to a Diary

Part One

Dear Diary:

A number of things have piqued my interest of late - all a bit separate, but all connected in some way or another. Firstly, those unsolicited enquiries about whether I am right-wing. My response: I have no label - it took long enough to shed the label 'Buddhist', and I'm not going to take on any other label in a hurry, especially a highly charged political one. And how the question itself was curious: what might make me right-wing in anyone's eyes anyhow? And the fact that I didn't know what 'right wing' and 'left wing' signified, nowadays, and maybe for ever. If these terms mean anything at all, that meaning has changed radically over the past twenty or thirty years.

And then there was a comment from a friend of mine about how, referring to a Hillman quote that I used, he preferred 'fairness' to 'profit', and clearly felt that these were descriptive of left and right wing respectively. And how I felt this was not really the case, not now in 2019.

This, dear diary, is my meander through the highways and byways of my mind, consequent to these initial little puzzles.

Part Two

'Politics': it's changed. A decade ago, and when this blog first started up, it was pretty much a non-starter. Nothing to say. In the UK, there was only one political party: LibLabCon, as it was sometimes called. A few details were different, but the underlying belief systems, the ideology, were pretty much identical.

Who came and went? I barely recall their spectral images. Miliband, Brown, Cameron; Clegg, May. In Scotland, we also had the SNP and Salmond. But though these ghostly personages were pretty good at slinging mud at one another if expected, they were all signed up to an identical vision of the world: globalism and all that it implies, including a blind devotion to 'multiculturalism' (whatever that may mean) and the strictures of political correctness. This was what it was all about, and if that meant subservience of local (eg national) interests to those of supranational concerns, so be it.

Democracy under LibLabCon offered no choice. The sham is well described in a quote from Naom Chomsky. "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." I talked about it in terms of 'apples and pears'. You go into a fruit shop, and they tell you that they sell fruit. You have a choice: you can have apples or pears. That's all very well. But if you ask for a mango, they will tell you that you can't have a mango. Ask for an apricot, and you'll be told  not to be ridiculous, apricots don't exist. Ask for a strawberry and the cops will be knocking on the door at 5 in the morning to take you away.

Then, as if by a miracle, two things happened that were not on the agenda at all - Trump and Brexit -, and all hell was let loose. It was as if the owner of the fruit shop went in to open up one day, and found all his nice neat trays of tasteless Golden Delicious on the floor, and a bunch of unwelcome new fruit doing a tango on the shelves. A gooseberry, maybe. A classical English fruit, common in my youth but almost an endangered species nowadays. Sour and prickly if you treat it carelessly, but sweet and tasty if cooked properly.

In the UK, LibLabCon with their buddies in the media went apeshit, as did their equivalents in the USA. For twenty years they had had everything their own way; suddenly spanners were in the works, and they showed their true colours. They were not good losers, and tried every trick in the book, democratic or undemocratic, honest or underhand, to stop the Trump-and-Brexit party pooping.

But with these new developments, politics suddenly and clearly became relevant again to the likes of me. What had been the case for a while was now thrown into full and inescapable relief. What politics was really about, in the UK, USA, and Europe north of the Alps at least (it possibly remains less so in many nations elsewhere). Money - 'fairness or profit' - is a marginal concern in the political world of today. The new politics is not about economics; it is about what can be termed 'culture'.

Part Three

Let's return, dear diary, to James Hillman's statement of 'more fairness, less profit' as characterising the left-wing. On examination, it's not very clever at all. First up, it's a false dichotomy: you can have both fairness (whatever you decide that vague term may mean) and profit simultaneously. In fact, you need some profit in order to have anything to be fair with. This has been the problem for various communistic regimes over the years: 'we'd be fair, but we haven't got any money to be fair with'.

What's more, profit is not the prerogative of the right nowadays. In the USA it's super clear. The various big tech companies make enormous profits, as well as exercising enormous influence and power. But they are all paid-up supporters of the Democrats, who by American standards might constitute the more left wing. Conversely, the 'far right' Trump has the support of many of the poorer folk in the country.

The 'left' and 'right' of the past are unrecognisable today. Thirty years ago, if you were anti-censorship, pro-free speech as a priority for a civilised society, it would be the left to whom you would turn. No more. The left - as in certain factions of Labour in the UK, and elements in the Democratic Party in the USA - are highly censorious in approach. Freedom of expression is fine, provided your 'free speech' does not go against the political programme - Chomsky again. If you are politically incorrect, your freedom will be precarious, and likely be curtailed - it happens on a daily basis. Personal freedom comes a poor second to the Big Agenda. Thus, any upholder of freedom of speech finds themselves curiously lumped in with folk who are, in groupthink terms, named 'conservative', 'right'. If you want kindred spirits for freedom of speech, you need to turn to Sargon of Akkad, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Morrissey.  

But, to reiterate: economics is not the lynchpin of politics any longer. That went out twenty years ago. Maybe economics should feature more focally. Who would have thought, twenty five years ago, that Britain would have food banks, for crissake? And that's a development that has occurred, not under the devious authority of right-wing governments, but those of the centre and centre-left (so-called).

What is important these days, dear diary, is identity politics. Political correctness. Globalism. They all go together, by the way. This is what the headlines are full of, day after day. Racist tweets, sexist Facebook posts, Islamophobe politicians, LGBT rights, you name it. If you want to destroy your reputation, your livelihood, your career, in one fell swoop, all you need is one little misconstrued sentence on Facebook, and BBC and the Guardian will gleefully pick it up and crucify you publicly. It's their mission. They love it. And why not? That's what it's all about today.

Part Four

So, Diary, we've finally got there. Identity and politics. In truth, how did we get here in the first place? Take a step back, and you'll see what a bizarre, unreal juncture we have indeed arrived at.

The politics of identity. Political correctness (they go hand-in-hand). I've put time in recently. Videos. Books. Articles. Mulling things over, allowing things to sink in. Listening, learning. Turns out that it's not really a politics of universal love and peace after all. The opposite, in fact. Politics of Identity is the politics of never-ending conflict. The politics of hate.

There was a time when championing certain groups of people was sorely needed. Fifty, sixty years ago, discrimination based upon colour of skin, gender, race, sexual orientation, religious affiliation, was real. It is a triumph that such prejudices have been largely removed by now, certainly socially and legally. There are, I'm sure, bits of tweaking here and there which could still be done. But, speaking generally, the battles have been fought and won, and society is all the better for it (remember, oh Diary, I am focussing on the UK and the USA here). In fact, minority groups are sometimes legislated for advantageously today.

But instead of rejoicing and moving on, 'getting a life' as the saying goes, our minority group activists have hung in there, like limpets on the side of a hull, hardening their position and morphing into something altogether more sinister. What was once (I assumed, anyway) a pragmatic movement for 'equal rights' is now an ideology, an entire way of interpreting the world of human affairs. People are now no longer unique, marvellous individuals. They are identified according to their group: straight, gay, transgender, black, white, Hispanic, abled, disabled, Muslim, Christian. You name it, you're part of a group with its own group interests. And your group will be pitted endlessly against other groups, which will create an interminable cycle of bad feeling.

All of this is unnecessary. In Britain, most people rub along together more-or-less OK. Problems are more likely to arise because your neighbour plays music loud at night, or their dog poos in your front garden, than anything concerned with race, sex, and the rest. Yet the 'political establishment' doesn't care about this stuff, and continues to obsess about Facebook posts, joking tweets, searching desperately for ways to accuse and demean those who 'deserve it' (primarily critics of their politics of identity fanaticism).

It's not a level playing field. There are good guys and bad guys. Minority groups are labelled as helpless victims, while majority groups are marked as oppressors. What's more, they can be put onto a scale of wickedness, an activity known as intersectionalism. As a white, English, predominantly heterosexual male, I find myself on the very bottom rung of the ladder, along with other white, English, predominantly heterosexual friends and acquaintances. We are evil personified, the cause of all injustice and wickedness on the planet. Imperialists, heartless oppressors. Funny, really. I look at these guys and find them not too bad at all.

It is against this background that Trump was elected, and the EU referendum went the way it did. Vast numbers of people (and not just white, English etc...) felt desperately let down - forgotten - by decades of politicians more intent on being generous with 'minorities' and appeasing faceless, unaccountable EU bureaucrats than with doing anything to benefit 'ordinary working folk'. People just trying to get on with their lives, normally quite conventionally, but being ignored by government after government. "What about me?" "Shut up, white privileged bastard."

Part Five

We are nearing this journey's end. The truth now stares us in the face. The politics of identity, with its mind-numbing correctness, and the will to globalism are one and the same thing. At least they are inextricably interwoven. Group identity is the most potent of weapons in the drive towards globalisation - which is a polite term for one-world government and control.

'Divide and conquer': one of the oldest tricks in the book. Insert a whole variety of 'groups' into a host culture, indoctrinate the unwary into the goods and evils of their respective labels, stand back, and watch the whole thing descend into hate-fuelled conflict. It's a matrix, a synthetic mental construct, placed upon the natural flow of events between people. It is a weird, artificial, and wholly perverse way of looking at the world, designed for chaos, break-up, breakdown.

It is, some say, a continuation of the Marxist will to power. That's a suitably bizarre proposal; but bizarre situations sometimes require bizarre explanations. The traditional Marxist view of history didn't work out, so the theory goes: the proletariat refused to do their revolutionary thing in the western world. Even after being decimated by two world wars, they refused to rise up against their oppressors. The opposite was true, if anything. After World War Two, they wanted nothing more than a job, a house, and a family, ushering in a generation of stultifying conventionality.

Thus, with the proletariat a complete disappointment, a new tactic for the revolution was needed. The emphasis shifted from 'economics' to 'culture'. The oppressors were no longer the bourgeoisie, but western culture. It was hoped that 'minority groups' would succeed where the proles had failed so miserably. Mass immigration would be a prime tool in the new revolution, especially immigration from cultures at considerable variance with the host. With its unique blend of guilt and personal responsibility, western culture was perfect to be infected with a sense of its own sinfulness, and would acquiesce willingly to its own destruction. If your aim is 'globalisation', if you find this to be a good prospect, then niceties such as the west's unique nurturing of creativity, responsible for most of what people like these days, and the west's freedom of speech (they go hand-in-hand) can be happily sacrificed for the 'greater good'.

Though strange and seemingly far-fetched, the theory succeeds in offering some explanation for the extraordinary mentality which holds sway over much of the western world today. I have come across no other explanation of our current weirdness.

So that's it for now. Signing off. Putting the diary to bed. Sleep tight.....

Images: Gooseberries; Cezanne's fruit; the original Sargon; Antifa, a face of radical socialism today