Politics As Art: No Sympathy for the Devil!

Though fighting for a just cause is often well-intentioned, and even noble, we are warned by Paul in the famous letter to the Church at Corinth that “though I give my I body to be burned, and hath not charity, I am nothing.” The poet Friedrich Schiller contended that it is through Beauty that one proceeds to true Freedom.” In supporting the cease-fire and reconstruction of Palestine/Gaza, and breaking from the United States Congress and the Biden’s Administration’s support for mass murder, now being carried out by students from scores of American campuses and activists from Jewish Voice for Peace, If Not Now, Code Pink and others for Gaza, the world has been inspired by the glimpse of the beauty of the now-partially-awakened American people. People around the world are overjoyed. They have seen Beauty reflected in the refusal by tens of thousands of students, faculty and citizens to condone the mass murder of innocent people in Gaza, including those about to be slaughtered in Rafah in the next days.

This university-based battle is not only against both the genocide that has occurred, but that upcoming in Rafah—a genocide condoned by Wall Street and the City Of London, who are the hand actually throwing Israel’s psychotic hand-grenade, Benjamin Netanyahu, for that purpose. Yet, there is a higher ground, that of cultural warfare, which is the actual domain where the next phase of the battle for the continuance of human civilization will be won, or lost, over the several months, or years at the most. This goes beyond Gaza, to Ukraine, China, and other conflicts, acknowledged and unacknowledged.

Lawfully, it is in the domain of music and poetry, that the battle is presently most lethally conjoined. First, there was the racialist banning of Russian performers and music at various music venues in the West. Now, with the recent announcement that conductor Kerri Lynn-Wilson intends to tour the world performing a butchered version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, substituting the word “Slava” for “Freude” —“Glory!” For “Joy”—as a supposed way of “standing up against Putin,” the 1930s Nazi practice of appropriating Beethoven for propagandistic ends has re-emerged. This cannot, and will not be tolerated.

Tonight’s Fireside Chat, held in the shadow of both President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon LaRouche, will propose what people, who still believe in freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, and freedom of advocacy, can and must do to roll back the new fascist onslaught on the human mind, a form of “menticide” which must be vigorously confronted and defeated. In only this way can we rebuild Gaza, rebuild the United States, and rejoin the human race’s commitment toward progress and an upwardly advancing humanity, a humanity whose highest expression is in the actual words and music of Friedrich Schiller and Ludwig von Beethoven. Speakers: David Shavin, John Sigerson