Why the Resistance Needs Music

Lots of folks are desperately wondering how we build the resistance.  If such efforts have any chance of success, history shows that it had better be a resistance that sings together.

Preface

Trump has been in power now for a week (second time around), imposing tariffs, deporting people, encouraging annexation and ethnic cleansing in Palestine, trying to change longstanding citizenship rights, and all kinds of other horrors, which are sure to continue and get worse.

Naturally, people all over the US and all over the world are freaking out.  Just as naturally, what in the US seem like the far fewer numbers of people who were freaking out just as much about Biden's facilitation of Israel's genocide over the past 16 months are continuing to freak out, for all the same reasons, under Trump.

Suddenly, for the first time since 2016, we're hearing a lot about the "the resistance," and the lack of it, and a lot of talk about the prospects for building a serious opposition to all of this madness here.

Obviously the title of this piece gives you some indication of where I'm going here.  Whatever resistance is going to happen, if it's going to happen, if it's going to get off the ground and become something, it'll have to be musical.  History is full of lessons on that front, the verdict is clear, and we ignore it at our collective peril.

It'll also need to be radically inclusive, it'll need to have clear vision for what kind of society it wants to bring into being -- not just what it's against -- and it'll need to be a vision that clearly rejects both of the failed corporate imperial parties that so many Americans have in so many ways  been trying to say they generally reject altogether for a long time (though without a viable alternative party to vote for, it's harder to illustrate this assertion).

I was asked by a friend who organizes for a German labor union to write something for their union's journal.  As I look at the piece I wrote -- which is more or less in a finished state, or could be -- it occurs to me to share it with my broader audience, in English, because I think what I'm trying to say is so relevant outside of Germany as well.  

And the examples I share in the piece are especially relevant when we're thinking about building a resistance movement to the Trump regime.  All of the examples I chose to illustrate my point about the importance of culture and music in movement-building are just as relevant as examples of how the most effective, most popular social movements have not just been the most musical ones, but they have also been ones possessed of a vision for the world they sought to build, ones that were radically inclusive, and, very importantly, movements that existed independently of which party was in power.

OK, on to the essay.

The Power of Culture in Movement-Building

When I was asked to write something for a journal coming out of the German labor movement, I knew what my contribution would be about.

Before I start trying to make my case, a little introduction will help it all make a bit more sense.

I'm a musician, originally from New York, of the sort that the US media would have called a “protest singer” back in the 1960's.

It's a musical orientation that long predates the 1960's, and of course exists globally, far beyond the borders of the US. But “protest singer” is a more or less familiar description now, with whatever deficiencies it may have as a term, so I'll use it.

As a protest singer, I've sung at a lot of protests since the 1980's, in around 25 countries. Some of the best of them, in every way a protest rally can be measured, have been in Germany.

During the same period of the past few decades, singing at protests in other countries, the trend in so many of them towards a much less musical orientation is very obvious, and very disconcerting, since it's also so clearly a move in the wrong direction.

The question I'll strive to answer over course of the next few thousand words is why would I say this? What's so powerful about protest music, or music in general, at protests, or more broadly in the context of the labor movement?

What I've learned from experience is just because something seems abundantly obvious to everyone at one moment doesn't mean this will be the case in the next moment.

At German protests I've sung at over the past few decades, whether they were happening within the auspices of the labor movement, the global justice movement, the environmental movement, or the anti-nuke movement, what they all had in common was more than 80% of everything that happened on the stages was music.

In all of the countries that I tend to call the Anglosphere (Great Britain, the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), the program at every protest is always completely dominated by speakers. Another difference that's also easy to observe is the protests in Germany tend to be much bigger and better-organized, in addition to much, much more musical.

Before I was on the scene as a protest singer, it was different. There were much bigger social movements in places like the US, and they were also vastly more musical, so much more plugged in to many different forms of actually popular culture, nothing like the sad little gatherings of talking heads that protests in the Anglosphere are usually like today.

Obviously, the world is a complex place, and it would probably be impossible to eliminate other factors and measure how much the success or failure of German or US labor unions has to do with their embrace or lack of embrace of music and culture.

We can make some generalizations, though, perhaps.

All of the most successful labor movements and other social movements around the world, throughout history, have been deeply musical ones. And if we can say that – and we can – then we might want to explore possible reasons why this is the case, and make sure to keep embracing culture, if we already are doing that – or to think about how we can start embracing culture, if we're not already doing that, or could be doing it better.

I'll spend most of this piece exploring some of the movements that have deeply embraced culture, how they did that, and how this might have been helpful in building different movements.

But first, maybe it's useful to talk a little about the role of culture in other areas of society that we're all familiar with.

Imagine for a moment a commercial on TV with no music in it, advertising a product with no jingle for us to associate the product with. If you're at all like me, it's hard to even conceptualize this. We are so used to things being advertised using songs and jingles, it's hard to even imagine a commercial without such elements.

Those responsible for selling the products know about the power of music and culture, of course. If you know a gainfully-employed working musician, actor, or filmmaker in the US, they are probably making commercials. Because whether a corporation is pushing cars, shampoo, or life insurance, they're all going to use mediums like film and music to market whatever they may be selling.

In the US, where there isn't the kind of support for the arts that can be found in EU countries, one area where arts spending doesn't lag is within the military.

Most federal government support for the arts in the US comes in the form of military spending, for military bands, USO tours, and other forms of support for the arts. The US military, like its counterparts around the world, understands the importance of music and culture for recruitment and to maintain troop morale. This has probably been the case since the very beginning of organized warfare.

The role of music and culture in everything from branding products to maintaining troop morale is ubiquitous around the world, now and historically. The same can be said of the role of music and culture in the labor movement around the world, and in social movements generally.

It's fairly easy to observe that the least grassroots, least sustained organizing efforts tend also to be the least musical ones, and the most top-down in terms of how they are managed. It's also easy to observe that the biggest, most participatory, most sustained social movements are always deeply musical ones.

It's vital that we're conscious of this, and that we think about how music and culture can work to simultaneously build and enrich the labor movement.

To that end, I'll explore a few different examples from US twentieth-century history for us to consider.

The Industrial Workers of the World

If we were to focus on the numbers of workers unionized or the numbers of strikes that were victorious, in the US we might be particularly impressed by decades like the 1930's.

This focus would be a very limiting one, however. As challenging as it may be at any time to organize workplaces and build a labor movement, for most of the 1930's in the US, the federal government led by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was sympathetic to organized labor. Before FDR there was decidedly less sympathy for unions in the White House.

The first two decades of the twentieth century had a cataclysmic conclusion in so many ways, with World War 1, a global pandemic, followed in the US by a massive nationwide crackdown on the radical labor movement.

But in the years prior to and following what they were calling “the war to end all wars,” the organization – or social movement, depending on how you look at it -- that the powers-that-be were most concerned about was the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW. The IWW led the Winnipeg and Seattle General Strikes, and was the primary target of the nationwide Palmer Raids, that saw most of the union's leadership in the US arrested, and many members deported.

The IWW was a pioneering union in many ways at the time, welcoming immigrants, women, and people of color who had all been regularly excluded from the ranks of other unions.

But one of the ways I would argue the IWW was most pioneering, and one of the reasons for its out-sized impact on history, and for the mythological level of popularity it had as a union during its heyday – with millions more people who considered themselves part of this union movement, even if they were never card-carrying members of it – was its use of art, music, and culture.

Members of the IWW were (and are) nicknamed “Wobblies.” The Wobblies put out a songbook – “songs to fan the flames of discontent” – which came with every member's Red Card of union membership. Songs, street theater, comic strips, and other forms of art were primary tools for the IWW, for education, for recruitment, and for fostering solidarity and community.

IWW songs were generally written to the tune of a song most people would have known, such as one of the chart-topping songs of the day, or to the tune of a religious hymn everyone would have heard.

The religious songs were especially useful for a number of reasons.

In the same working class neighborhoods where the IWW was actively organizing, the Salvation Army was also actively trying to save souls for Jesus while feeding the hungry. This meant there was a ready-made band playing music right there in the middle of town – so it made good sense to have songs at the ready that were to the tune of whatever the band might be playing.

It also made good sense because it brought into focus the differing visions, that Joe Hill captured in “Preacher and the Slave” – the Christian message people were often getting being one of waiting until you die before you get a chance to live the good life, whereas the Wobblies were saying if we organize we can have Heaven on Earth. 

Over a century after this syndicalist era of American labor, the IWW member most remembered today was a poet, musician, and cartoonist, the Swedish-born Joe Hill, who was executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1915.

As Joe Hill said:

"A pamphlet, no matter how good, is never read more than once, but a song is learned by heart and repeated over and over. And I maintain that if a person can put a few common sense facts into a song and dress them up in a cloak of humor, he will succeed in reaching a great number of workers who are too unintelligent or too indifferent to read a pamphlet or an editorial on economic science."

The CPUSA in the 1930's

The 1930's in the US began a period of several decades of a vibrant and large labor movement.

With the 1930's, it's easy to see that the labor movement was having great success – you can measure it in the numbers of workers and workplaces organized during this time. You could correctly surmise that the major reforms involved with FDR's New Deal programs were as major as they were because of pressure from below. It is still very much the case today that some of the best of this country's crumbling infrastructure dates back to this period of large-scale public works programs.

But there's so much more to be said about this period, and why the labor movement was as big, as militant, as inclusive, and as successful as it was in the 1930's.

There's so much more to be said, in fact, that it's easy to lose track of a lot of important details, when faced with the big historical trends we think of when looking at the development or suppression of the labor movement in different countries during that extremely eventful decade.

Optimism about the future was widespread among a very significant cross-section of the American population in the 1930's – particularly that element of the population that was inspired by the example they believed was being set in the development of the Soviet Union, where everyone seemed to be very busy building a modern society, which contrasted greatly with the bread lines across much of the Depression-era western world. There was also great optimism to be found in the widespread solidarity within the ranks of the newly-impoverished millions during the Great Depression, with the public kitchens, and the successful anti-eviction campaigns of the unions of the unemployed.

I would argue that all of this optimism and widespread solidarity also had deep roots in the role of culture, and the successful use of culture as a tool for popular education and movement-building by networks of people represented under the banner of names like the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Communist Party, USA, which was in important ways a sort of backbone for the CIO.

Almost a century later, if people know anything about the labor movement in the US in the 1930's, and the Communist Party of the time in particular, they know the names of musicians like Paul Robeson and Woody Guthrie.

The Communist Party, or just “The Party,” as it was generally known to millions of people at the time, wholeheartedly embraced the kind of street theater that the IWW employed so effectively.

They also embraced folk music, and actively promoted artists like Woody Guthrie. Woody had a column in the People's World newspaper. Party members started up Sing Out! magazine as well, which for many decades would continue to have an appeal within the folk music crowd generally, while maintaining a decidedly leftward bent politically.

The rise of folk music in particular was embraced by social movement leaders who thought this more clearly local, popular form of music might communicate better to local people than what in other left circles they called “Workers' Music,” which the folk music crowd saw as too erudite.

Another phenomenon that was part of life for so many people associated with the Communist Party and the broader labor movement of the 1930's and beyond were working class resorts, summer camps, places in the countryside where children, or families, or other combinations of people would come together and engage in many different activities involving popular education and fun, including lots of music.

I would note here that this idea of using summer camps as a means of building community and doing popular education among the youth within the context of a political movement isn't unique to the left, and wasn't invented by communists in the 1930's. Politically educating the youth at a summer camp has also been popular with all kinds of religious groups and all kinds of political tendencies, covering the entire spectrum. As with so many things, music can be used for good or ill.

The Civil Rights Movement

Looking back at things like the eventual desegregation of the southern United States in the 1960's, a full century after the American Civil War, it might seem like something that was inevitable, bound to happen as it did. History, once it's happened, generally has that kind of feel to it. But who knows what would have happened with the Civil Rights movement if it had not been such a musical movement.

Music was at the heart of the movement. The IWW had been called “the singing union,” and the Civil Rights movement earned the same reputation as a singing movement. People sang together in churches, they sang together on the buses in the Freedom Rides, and they sang together as they marched towards the lines of riot police and barking dogs.

Ask anyone who was involved with the Civil Rights movement about their memories, and they'll talk about the music. Many people have said if it weren't for the fact that they were all singing together, they would have turned and ran.

It is undoubtedly the case that the music of the Civil Rights movement overwhelmingly came straight out of the Black church in the US. But it's also worth noting that many of the songs sung at Civil Rights movement sit-ins were the same songs sung at union pickets by Wobblies half a century earlier.

And many of the same people and organizations that were responsible for promoting the use of culture within the movement in the 1930's were also deeply involved with the Civil Rights movement -- perhaps most infamously Pete Seeger, responsible for the “shall” in “we shall overcome,” and the Highlander Center in Tennessee.

And still today, when people remember the Civil Rights movement, after Martin Luther King, the recollections are likely to be musical, and the figures most fondly remembered are often the musicians who sang the songs that had such profound impact -- Billie Holliday, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald.

The 1960's/1970's Antiwar Movement

Generally overlooked when it's not being broadly vilified is the influence of music and culture within the context of the movement against the US war in Vietnam, which was a hugely popular movement across the US and around the world.

Looking back on this history, many people are apt to dismiss it all, observing that the war dragged on for many years while the antiwar movement did, too, and the antiwar movement didn't put an end to US imperialism going forward.

On the other hand, the antiwar movement was so popular among the US troops that soldiers all over Vietnam started regularly refusing to leave their bases, and when they got home to the US, so many of them joined the antiwar movement. The antiwar movement also arguably had such an impact on US society that it caused what was known for decades as “Vietnam Syndrome,” a “syndrome” that means the US was disinclined to invade other countries, with its own troops, for over a decade going forward.

The experience of the Vietnam War is impossible to disentangle from the experience of the antiwar movement, just as the antiwar movement is impossible to disentangle from so much of the popular music of the day. But some combination of these things effectively demilitarized the hearts and minds of American society for some time to come.

For those who were seeking to use music as a vehicle for social change during this time, there was a strategy involved with this.

The regular, large, free festivals being held, at first in places like San Francisco and soon far beyond California, were often painted by the media as spectacles of hedonism and depravity. For many of those involved with organizing them, they were a vehicle for the transformation of society, a vehicle through which we might win the hearts and minds of America, and demilitarize them.

The belief in the power of the music of the time was so widespread that across North America, when anyone tried to organize a festival where tickets were being sold, a certain set of society would be outraged, because they had internalized this idea that the music came out of the movement, and it was a vehicle for the movement that must be free in order to work best.

From the vantage point of labor, and working musicians, it's very easy to poke holes in this idea that everything should be free. But this was the orientation of a big part of the antiwar movement of the time, and I would argue that it was one of the most successful efforts on the part of a social movement to influence a society ever undertaken.

Once again, when we remember this movement today, half a century later, and look at some of the music that was most influential within it, some of the artists continue to be some of the most listened-to of the modern era, such as Bob Dylan or Jimi Hendrix, and other artists that still have the kind of cult following they had fifty years ago, like Phil Ochs or Jefferson Airplane.

The Global Justice Movement

Fear of the power of art on the part of authoritarian regimes goes way back. Art can be banned outright, and artists can be jailed and executed. These things have happened often in the past, and continue to take place.

More commonly in the west is the active promotion of harmless art, and suppressing the more incendiary forms of it more by not promoting it, rather than by actions like the targeted assassinations of poets.

What we can observe unmistakably in one city after another during the course of the global justice movement in the late 1990's/early 2000's in the US was the systematic targeting of art and culture everywhere.

One of the great challenges with protests is messaging, and creating effective messages that can capture the interest of the general public around you, and the media-viewing public out there in the world as well. If people might just get a few seconds to figure out what is going on here, how might you best represent it? How might you even win hearts and minds to the cause, in those few seconds?

Many of us found that there's no better visual than a giant puppet, or a bunch of them, to capture the imaginations of protesters and passersby alike, along with the media.

Coming out of cultural traditions born out of the 1960's such as Bread & Puppet Theater in Vermont and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, groups like David Solnit's Art & Revolution could be found in advance of the big protests outside the meetings of the G8 or WTO or IMF/World Bank summits, working with many other people to build giant puppets and other props for very effective street theater.

In the case of the giant puppets and the global justice movement, the observation that may be most relevant to make is not about how effective the messaging was, but how tenaciously it was opposed by the authorities.

More often than not, in one city after another, local police would find some reason they needed to raid the warehouses where all the puppet-building was taking place, and confiscate the puppets.

Learning from the Secret Police

In 1971, people involved with the antiwar movement in the area of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania held a meeting and formed what they called the Citizens' Commission to Investigate the FBI. The group proceeded to successfully burglarize FBI offices and steal a thousand secret documents.

What the world learned from these documents and others that would be forthcoming as a result of Congressional and other investigations was that the national secret police force of the United States, the confusingly-named “Federal Bureau of Investigations,” had been engaged in a constant campaign, from the beginning of the Bureau to the present, involving infiltrating certain groups, spreading disinformation within them, occasionally committing assassinations of group leaders, and otherwise engaging in the systematic suppression of certain elements of society.

The groups especially targeted for “neutralization” began with the IWW. The main focus of the FBI in the beginning was the destruction of the IWW. The union was against participation in World War 1, which they called a “bosses' war.” Therefore they were labeled “German agents,” the leadership was arrested, many members were deported, and union halls across the US were burned down. All of this was done at the initiative of the FBI.

As time went on, the next major target of the FBI in the 1930's would be the Communist Party. Later it was Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights movement generally, and what FBI leadership described as the New Left, by which they meant anyone that opposed the US's war in Vietnam or supported civil rights for Black or Brown people.

What the FBI has been focused on over the past century – the movements they've been particularly intent on undermining and destroying – have especially included all the ones I've mentioned with the exception of the last one, which came later than the 1971 exposure of the FBI's Counterintelligence Program they nicknamed “Cointelpro.”

There are many threads connecting the groups throughout history that the FBI has been most concerned with. They've all been associated with the left, in one form or another. They've also all been groups that were known to have connected deeply on a cultural level with a big part of society – or were at least threatening to do so.

Music Matters

Just as we can look at the twentieth century in the US and see that the most influential social movements were also the most musical ones, as well as the ones more targeted for neutralization by the FBI, we can look at the 21^st century social movements and observe certain trends.

Without knowing what the secret police might be doing in more recent years the way we know, at least to some extent, what sorts of nefarious activities they were engaged in for so much of the twentieth century, one trend that's been impossible not to be impacted by has been the increasing disappearance of live music from almost all social movements in the US.

Traveling extensively throughout a couple dozen countries over the past 25 years especially it has become a more and more pronounced phenomenon to witness.

At least from 2000-2016 in Germany I could list many protest rallies I sang at that were huge, and mostly music. But these were not concerts – the folks at the rallies would in many cases be the same ones committing civil disobedience a couple hours later.

By contrast during this period in the US, and more so since 2016, the rallies that might have been half music in 2000 are now almost completely, or completely, bereft of any live music. Not only that, but they are often lacking any speakers who know how to engage emotionally with an audience by telling a relevant story, rather than just shouting slogans.

History can teach us many different sorts of things -- perhaps as many different sorts of things as we care to focus on. But I would suggest that one clear take-away from the examples I've shared is music and culture matters for people generally, and for social movements in particular. Social movements that have understood this have sometimes done especially well.

By the same token, those seeking to undermine social movements have also figured out how important culture is, and that's why US history features episodes like the execution of Joe Hill, the loss of Paul Robeson's passport, Pete Seeger testifying for the House Unamerican Activities Committee, the systematic raiding of the puppet warehouses, and the active suppression of the careers of a multitude of leftwing artists during the course of Cointelpro.

A protest rally is, of course, only a small part of the activities of a real social movement, but an important, and revealing, part. We can only imagine exactly how it came to be that the American left got so completely detached from music and the arts, how we got to this stage where protests for vitally important causes have anemic attendance and no live music on the stages, but here we are.

What is also unmistakable to observe is that this collapse in artistic expression within American social movements has not happened to nearly the same degree outside of the US. When one goes further from the Anglosphere, labor unions and social movements of various kinds all seem to be more connected to culture, and tuned in to the important role it has in maintaining and building organizations and social movements, along with neighborhoods, cities, societies. These tendencies need to be reinforced at every opportunity. And they need to be revived in the US.

The power of culture to inspire resistance, to help build social movements, and to sustain them for future generations is an essential one to remember, because we humans are fundamentally musical creatures.

Will the Real Wobbly Please Stand Up?

If you're a card-carrying member of the IWW or just Wobbly-adjacent, this message is for you.  (If you've never heard of the IWW, it's also for you.)

As recently as 2015 I did regional tours in the US themed around the history and current activities of the Industrial Workers of the World, which involved local IWW branches organizing the gigs.  In more recent years, whenever a local Wobbly tries to get their local Wobbly branch involved with organizing something involving me, what tends to happen is the local IWW branch doesn't want to be involved, or they start out being involved and then somewhere along the line decide to pull out, with their members avoiding the gig if it eventually happens.

Oftentimes when this happens -- as it just did with a planned visit to Wisconsin, as it did in another visit to Virginia in 2023, and a couple months ago in Gothenburg, Sweden -- the local branch loses one or more members.  So, rather than hosting an event that might help build their branch, raise funds, educate people about IWW history, and rather than having a musician in town to sing at a union rally or at local picket lines that may be happening, instead nothing like that happens, and the branch loses a member. 

If this sort of thing is taking place regularly -- and it is, not just with me -- then it's a wonder that there are still any active IWW branches left in the US, since they were mostly very small before adopting the contemporary leftwing circular firing squad mindset.

The way out of this hole, for the IWW and for anyone with a brain, really, in my humble opinion, is to embrace the principles and the practices that the IWW embraced when it was at its peak, when it had millions of members and millions more supporters, when it represented syndicalism in North America.

These days there are many kinds of people who are not welcome in IWW spaces.  If you have the wrong views on one subject or another, and you're deemed therefore to make some people feel unsafe, you should then be excluded from all IWW spaces, which is a modern term that applies to everything both online and in meatspace.  Indeed, when you enter some IWW-adjacent venues in the US today, the first thing you'll encounter is a big sign with the word "NO" being the most prominent among all the sorts of things that aren't welcome -- racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

These days I hear from a lot of disaffected former members of local IWW branches who had wanted to be part of a radical labor union, but found themselves spending most of their time engaged in debates over questions that seemed completely and even absurdly unrelated to organizing the working class.

There's nothing neat and clean about history or current events.  There are so many intersecting complexities to the whole picture.  But specifically for my Fellow Workers and anyone else who might identify with syndicalism, libertarian socialism, anarchism, democratic socialism, or any number of related orientations around how to organize, and how to organize a society, I want to point out that for much of the past century, these sorts of political perspectives could be said to have occupied a certain "independent left" pole, in a complex and changing landscape with many other poles.  Two others of which we could characterize as the Moscow-aligned Communist Party pole, and the fascist (National Socialist) pole.

I mention this historical political dynamic which most especially evokes the political struggle and the struggle on the streets in some places -- and at some times -- more than others, especially in the 1930's, because this period has in one way or another dictated so much of the politics that have come along since then -- but it's been almost a century since then, and most of us have no idea how deeply we are impacted by the political lines that were drawn during that period.

The point I'm trying to make here about different political tendencies may be a bit more complicated still by the fact that by the 1930's and since then, the IWW was no longer a force to be reckoned with.  Whether people would like this to be the case or not, the IWW since 1924 or so has played the role much more as a sort of placeholder for a very important historical epoch that we all have so much to learn from -- it has not been a major union since that period.  Not since the FBI formed for the purpose of destroying the organization, and launched the nationwide Palmer Raids in the fall of 1919.  So the IWW, and syndicalism generally, didn't play the kind of role in the debates and struggles of the 1930's that it had played twenty years earlier, and this was true on both sides of the Atlantic.

The way of thinking represented by groups like the IWW, however, did continue to persist through the ages, and it existed in the 1930's as well.  And I bring up the 1930's specifically because this was the period that gave rise to Antifa in Germany, whose influence continues today in a profoundly problematic way.

Before the 1930's, before the Comintern, before Stalin, and before the German Communist Party organized Antifa, with its hyper-sectarian, street-fighting orientation towards both fascists and social democrats, and even before the Russian Revolution of 1917, there was the heyday of the IWW, of the One Big Union as it was known in Canada, and of syndicalism generally, from Denmark to Ukraine to Japan.

What set the Wobblies apart from unions that existed prior to them was a lot of things, including a radical inclusivity.  This was the union for the entire working class, regardless of skill set, nationality, immigration status, race, creed, color, gender, etc.  The union was famous for using street theater and musical performances to do popular education and to recruit, and build the movement.

The IWW was not a pacifist organization by any means, and the Riot Squads were famous for beating up scabs, including down the road from where I am sitting right now, in Portland, Oregon.  But by and large, the IWW preferred to reach out to anyone who might join their ranks, with whatever flaws they came with, which could be ironed out along the way through the same methods the union used to organize the union, through popular education in the forms of street theater, cartoons, collective singing and collective action.

A case in point when it came to both the IWW and the Canadian OBU's orientation towards recruiting the entire working class is the veterans returning from World War 1, when it ended, and the flu pandemic of 1918 began.

Many returning soldiers were recruited into veterans groups that served the interests of business and empire, such as the American Legion, which was so deeply involved with destroying the IWW during the times of the Palmer Raids.  But in cases where the IWW was taking the stage locally, such as in Winnipeg and in Seattle, returning veterans were a vital part of the whole operation of the General Strikes in those cities -- which would never have happened if the Wobblies had just written off certain groups as regressive, if they weren't actively trying to recruit the entire working class.

Moving on to the 1930's, though the IWW wasn't really part of the equation, especially in Germany, if it had been, what would the IWW position have been on Antifa's tactics of physically attacking fascists, social democrats, and other political tendencies Stalin and the German Communist Party didn't like?

There were lots of people on the left in Germany who were opposed to these hyper-sectarian, hyper-militant tactics.  Lots of people who tried to say we needed to talk to these people rather than attack them, recruit them to a vibrant, exciting, musical social movement with vision, rather than call them counter-revolutionaries and acquaint their heads with the sidewalks.

The IWW, with all its vision and brilliance, was destroyed by the Palmer Raids and the extremely repressive political atmosphere that followed them.  But the position represented by Antifa and the German Communist Party also failed, spectacularly, as Hitler came to power in 1933.  Which is not to hold Antifa exclusively responsible for Hitler being invited into the government, but to say that when I look at this history what I see are tactics that not only failed, but were usually counter-productive, and broadly helped inspire more support for fascism.

If the IWW were a force in German society in the 1930's, hypothetical as this notion may be, it would not have been part of the Moscow-sponsored Antifa faction of the German left, in my humble opinion.  It's conjecture, of course.  But I think it would have been part of the independent factions of the German left that were then advocating for communication with and recruitment of the entire working class.

Antifa, and the intolerant tactics advocated by and practiced by Antifa in the 1930's and far too often in various parts of the world in the present day, was one of many bad ideas promoted by the leadership of the Soviet Union throughout that country's existence, which served to cause historic levels of devastation and disaster in the world.  One of the most horrific examples of Soviet meddling on the left in other countries is what the USSR and its adherents in Germany did to the German left, through their puppet "mass organization," Antifascist Action, known popularly then and now as Antifa.

Today -- and in various parts of the world, since the 1970's or thereabouts -- the politics of Antifa have been widely revived.  No longer led by directives from Moscow, in my lifetime the orientation has become more associated with anarchists than with communists.

For those of us who might identify with terms like "anarchist," but who associate anarchism with syndicalism, and horizontal methods of organizing the entire working class such as those employed by the IWW in the early twentieth century and occasionally since then, the idea that what remains of the anarchist-adjacent community represented by groups such as local IWW branches has largely adopted the sectarian orientation that was once promoted by Stalin in the 1930's seems totally bizarre.

According to my understanding of history, reality, and Wobbly ideas of organizing, we aren't part of that tradition.

You may be a person from wherever who has grown up without questioning the idea that if there are intolerant people in your midst then it is your responsibility to actively exclude and possibly attack them, rather than to try to communicate with them and recruit them, and win their hearts and minds to the cause of the working class.  If you are such a person, then know that you are continuing a tradition that was promoted by Stalin, and that has had nothing but disastrous impacts on German, American, and other societies since the 1930's, very much including in recent years, leading up to our present situation with a world increasingly ruled by people like Trump.

If you believe that this whole hyper-sectarian orientation of exclusion, ridicule, and attack has been terribly destructive to society and has helped recruit for the right, and the old IWW orientation of building community, singing together, and recruiting the entire working class into One Big Union is the far better orientation, then you are part of the syndicalist, libertarian socialist, Wobbly tradition.

Now, there are many reasons the many canceled organizers and artists and professors, etc., have been canceled, had their careers destroyed, etc.  Once a cancelation campaign gets going, the way social media platforms are organized tends to make it extremely easy for just one person to keep the whole atmosphere of fear and suspicion surrounding your target rolling along.  But there is generally some kind of point at which the process got started, for all of the many people to whom this happens.

In my case, to complicate matters, there have been at least three different cancelation campaigns led by different political factions:  the Antideutsche group in Germany, the Zionist lobby in England, and the element of the Antifa tradition here in the US that mirrors the Antideutsche, represented by organizations such as Rose City Antifa here in Portland, Oregon, websites like It's Going Down, and modern-day Antifa gurus like Shane Burley.

The offense that seems to be causing all the Wobbly branches anyone tries to recruit to organize a gig for me with to pull out is that I dared to interview an organizer of the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on my YouTube channel, during the siege of the Capitol in 2021.  As an organizer of another violent rightwing event, I thought Matthew Heimbach might have some important insights into what was happening right then, the siege on the Capitol, which he was not involved with, despite some news stories at the time that falsely indicated he was.

Anyone who knows me at all, or knows my work, music, writing, life history, etc., knows I'm deeply opposed to fascism, or any other form of authoritarianism.  All the more reason to talk to fascists!  Is this not obvious?  I hope, dear reader, it is obvious that if we disagree with people, we need to convince them that there is a better way, and show them what it is -- not attack or exclude them and hope they go away.  This orientation is not working, if the rise of the right here and in other countries where similar dynamics are at play is any indication.

Now I want to say something about the impact on the IWW in its current, diminutive form, of having branches so widely impacted by hyper-sectarian, Antifa-style thinking, that want to boycott my shows or pull out of organizing them, where just ten years ago they might have sponsored them and used them to help recruit for their branch.

When I do a search on Grok for a list of people who were most influential in spreading the ideas of and keeping alive the memory of the IWW in the twentieth century, the first three names that come up are Utah Phillips, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn.

This makes sense.  When I was in my late teens and I discovered all three of these wonderful people.  Which is also when I first learned about the IWW, and this incredible history of a radically inclusive, deeply musical, extremely popular, very militant, and very heavily repressed union/social movement.

In A People's History of the United States, coming to Zinn's chapter on the IWW was an absolute revelation.  I was shocked and thrilled in equal measure to know that such a group ever existed.  Then hearing the album, "Utah Phillips Sings the Songs and Tells the Stories of the Industrial Workers of the World" was another revelation -- these songs Zinn wrote about actually exist, and can be sung today!

As soon as I heard Utah singing these songs, while cutting vegetables in the kitchen at a vegetarian restaurant in Seattle, I began to learn all of them, and soon, by my early twenties, I was standing on a sidewalk in the University District singing IWW songs, with a cardboard sign about the General Strike of 1919, and I started meeting lots of other like-minded people from there.

Utah traveled all over North America singing these songs, telling these stories, and spreading the ideas and the memory of his union, our union, the IWW -- our methods of organizing, our aims, the deep values of inclusion, recruitment, and the use of culture the union was most known for, and most successful with.

I wanted to continue in Utah's footsteps, with some variation -- more original songs than he did, fewer old Wobbly songs, but following in his footsteps in the sense of recruiting for the movement through popular education, through telling stories and singing songs about organizing, about social movements and what they can accomplish, and specifically about the IWW and all the lessons it has to teach us about these things.

For many years, I did just that, with local IWW chapters, student groups, peace groups, and others organizing gigs all over North America, Europe, and elsewhere.  I'm still at it, but not much in the USA anymore, because the economics of small gigs collapsed a long time ago, with the demise of funded leftwing student groups, with the rise of Spotify, and with the housing crisis.

In Germany, when I started getting targeted by Antideutsche there in 2002, I adapted to the new situation by not playing in squats or other anarchist-adjacent venues, because of the tendency for these venues to cave in to Antideutsche pressure for them to cancel the gigs, when the Antideutsche people would tell them I was an antisemite (despite my Jewish lineage), because of my opposition to Zionism and support for the Palestinians.

It pained me greatly to adapt to my new reality like that, and stop playing in the very venues where people I once thought were most aligned with my political perspective could be found.  But that's how it was, and that's very much how it still is, in Germany.  In an interesting twist of history, I find I'm still very much welcomed by communist and socialist groups that don't identify with Antifa, who communists and socialists in modern times tend now to see as an anarchist-affiliated sectarian tendency.

Now, as a card-carrying member of the IWW who has songs in recent editions of the Little Red Songbook and a new series of history podcasts that tell the story of the IWW's rise and fall and lots of other relevant material I could be presenting to live audiences for Wobbly branches here and there, I will be henceforth telling anyone who wants to organize a gig that they should probably not bother looking to see if the local IWW branch wants to be involved.

I hesitate to say this because I don't want to make the people who dedicate their lives to canceling my career happy, but I think it's important for people to know how badly many IWW branches across the country are currently compromised by Antifa-style sectarian thinking -- and how much this has harmed and will continue to harm any hope for a revival of syndicalism in this world, if this kind of navel-gazing, exclusionist tendency doesn't radically change.

Yours for the One Big Union.

The Coming Fires

Los Angeles is burning.  What comes next?

Sometime in the 1980's, as a young college dropout living somewhere in the Boston area, and spending a lot of time hanging around the hub of activity of all sorts that was Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day I got word that Pete Seeger was going to be speaking at a class.  Back then you didn't need an ID card to enter a building, you could just walk in.  Maybe the public were welcome to that class, I don't remember, but it was just me and a couple dozen students, in any case.

I think Pete might have played a song or two, but all I remember was the story he told.  Maybe I remember the story in particular because he cried a bit in the course of telling it.

It was a fictional story, about how some scientist had discovered that by mixing together several commonly-found, easily-available compounds of the sort you might use to clean your bathroom floor, you could create a powerful bomb.

There were efforts to suppress the information but eventually word got out, and humanity braced for impact.  In Pete's tale, what happened next was both sides of the civil war in Peru that was then very violently ongoing used the new bomb recipe, to apocalyptic effect.  

The whole country was just destroyed, with a staggering death toll.  Watching the millions of refugees streaming out of their ruined land, in Pete's tale the rest of the world came together and made a plan to prevent this kind of thing from happening anywhere else.

Realizing that if any disgruntled person could so easily just make a bomb that would destroy the neighborhood, the only way forward was radical equality and empathy, with societies focused on taking care of each other, and making sure no one wanted to blow up the neighborhood.

For days now I've been glued to the news even more than usual, watching these hurricane-strength winds blow flames all over the Los Angeles area, with thousands of homes destroyed already, and so many people, including friends of mine, waiting to find out what will become of theirs.

As I hear the horror stories from a burning megalopolis, I'm reminded of Pete's little parable, in so many ways.

Of course it's the combination of the parched Earth, steep hillsides, fast winds, all in an urban setting, that make the LA area so susceptible to fire, along with poor infrastructure and other factors.  But most of the fires start out with either some kind of accident, like a cigarette butt, or a chain dragging behind a car, or with arson.

At a juncture like this, especially, every individual has the power to blow up the neighborhood, essentially, either by accident or on purpose, with no particular effort at all.

Not only does everyone have the power to burn down the neighborhood with a cigarette, but every individual's home or business is completely interdependent on everyone else's homes and businesses, in terms of how their properties are prepared for fire.  It's no good if just some of the homes in a neighborhood are well-designed for fire.  They all need to be, in order for the fire not to have a foothold to spread from.

At times when there isn't such a crisis going on, I hear frequent news reports about the difficulties they have up and down the west coast trying to retain sufficient numbers of firefighters.  The firefighters are chronically underpaid -- pay that never nearly keeps up with the ever-worsening housing crisis -- and the departments are chronically understaffed, as a general rule.

LA completely embodies the concept of the endless American suburb, where people have historically gone to buy their little patch of paradise, or their big patch of paradise, depending on how wealthy they may be.  But now paradise has burned, again.  And whether you're one of the estimated 70,000 people in Los Angeles County living on the streets (some of whom may be staying warm in the winter with propane heaters in their tents), or a movie star in a mansion with a nice, safe, fireplace, we're all equal under the Santa Anna winds, just as prone to the errant cigarette butt as everyone else, just as strong as the weakest link in the chain.

As terrible as the ongoing burning of LA continues to be, if we don't radically change course as a society, the future is absolutely guaranteed to be astronomically worse.

If we continue to follow our current path here in the USA, which can mainly be characterized as what they call the "free market," then after the fires in LA, just like after the fires in Santa Rosa, Paradise, Talent, Phoenix, Detroit (Oregon), and so many other cities and towns, what comes next is fire insurance becomes either far more expensive or unavailable, while the cost of buying or renting continues to increase far beyond most anyone's earnings do, forcing people to move further and further away from urban centers, into more fire-prone rural areas.

Here in Portland, Oregon, so far away from Los Angeles, we can be sure that the housing crisis will continue to worsen, as we welcome our friends who will be moving here from LA.  Anyone from Portland can tell you that that's going to happen, because most of the people that most of us know around here these days are from southern California.  I would also have moved here if I were from southern California, I understand completely, and hasten to add I certainly don't harbor the least bit of ill will towards people from California, Mexico, China, or anywhere else.

But as soon as someone who does blame people from California or Mexico for the rising cost of housing around here -- and someone will -- then they will be playing the game of the land-owning banks and hedge funds anyone who rents or bought a house in the past two decades or so is probably deeply beholden to right now.

Yes, what comes next along with the rising cost of housing and more migrants from LA and wherever else will be more of the blame game accelerating.  Some will blame the migrants for the rising costs -- deport them!  Others will blame the racists for attacking the migrants.  

No one will blame the corporations doubling and tripling our rents.  The algorithms won't promote that sort of thing, and the FBI doesn't want to promote it, either, and neither does the corporate media.

That's what's coming -- more of the same repercussions from the fires, along with more fires.  At least, that's what's coming if we continue along the route of housing as an investment market for people to do whatever they want with.

It could all be radically different, but then we'd have to first collectively acknowledge that there's such a thing as society, and that we need to live in a country that makes policies accordingly.  And then we'd need to build a social movement powerful enough to force the political class to implement those policies, starting with things like real rent control, and a real plan for adapting to climate change, and to implement the other sorts of policies one can commonly find in so many other, more functional countries where there is a widespread belief in the existence of society.

Where it's not just talk about everyone having an "equal shot," as our outgoing president loves to say, but having actual equality -- the kind of equality that is not just morally right, but that our future absolutely depends on.

Demonetizing, Deleting, and Disappearing David

YouTube has just informed me that my channel has been permanently demonetized — not just a 90-day suspension as I had previously been told. There is no possibility for redress, they say. It’s a lifetime ban on making any more income through this major streaming platform. I’m shaking involuntarily.

I posted the above paragraph on Facebook earlier today and a lot of people in the comments said very nice things and asked repeatedly why this happened, so given that there's now a fairly dramatic update to discuss, let's do it.

But first of all, for those of you who might not get to the end of this post, I am being deleted from the internet bit by bit, on all the sorts of platforms where this tends to happen to "controversial" people. There are alternative platforms that are, for now, less susceptible to this kind of thing, but they are akin to replacing the smooth highways with bumpy dirt roads. You can drive on them, but few people will be doing it with you. I am on those other platforms, and in this time when I'm being deleted from the big ones, I need your support more than ever in order to keep writing, recording, and touring. If you want to help me do that in this time of demonetization and deletion, and you're able to and not already doing it, you can sign up as a patron on Patreon, as a paid subscriber on Substack, or directly via my website at davidrovics.com/subscribe.

In the fall of 2023 I posted a Houthi Army press release after Yemen was bombed by the US and the UK, because I had written a song on the subject and was otherwise posting about this conflict. A week ago someone apparently flagged this video, and YouTube took it down and notified me that my account was demonetized for 90 days. They said the demonetization would end if I didn't commit any further violations, and if I took a short "training."

I took the "training," which was basically an explanation of what kinds of videos are acceptable and what kinds aren't, with regards to sharing videos, or clips of videos, put out by proscribed organizations. I had apparently violated this policy by not contextualizing the Houthi video in the video itself (rather than in the description), and by not condemning the Houthis in the process of contextualizing the video, if I understood the training correctly.

Then today I got another email from YouTube that my channel was permanently demonetized. I got in touch with them on chat, and a nice YouTube employee looked up my account and confirmed that there was nothing to be done, my account was permanently demonetized.

This is all happening the day after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be ending their efforts at content moderation in the US. I just checked, and it does seem like my Facebook account may no longer be overtly restricted. At least, I just created a Facebook Event and successfully used the Invite function to invite people to it, twice in a row, with only one error message in the process.

It's the algorithms -- what "goes viral" and what doesn't -- that have approximately a million times more impact than anything any of their content moderation teams ever do, however, and the algorithms are never part of the debate.

If YouTube is planning on following Facebook's new "anything goes" approach to content moderation, my permanent demonetization from their platform might indicate they're not going that route yet.

This of course all comes in the wake of Spotify deleting my most popular album of 2024 from my discography, from anyone's playlists where any of the songs on the album, Notes from a Holocaust, were present, and from existence, generally, so that any mention of the album or the tens of thousands of streams it got were not part of my 2024 #SpotifyWrapped at all, as if it never was.

What I am talking about here are more or less the trifecta of platforms that are of paramount importance to any working musician today -- YouTube, Facebook, and Spotify. It would be impossible to overstate how crucial these platforms are for musicians to be heard in today's world, to develop or sustain an audience, to promote gigs, and to earn income.

What's especially alarming about the way all of these platforms seem to enforce rules is the way they are unaccountable, opaque, and completely ham-fisted in their approach. I committed one violation over a year ago, and so my whole YouTube account is demonetized for life. I recorded one song that perhaps violates their rules, and so Spotify deleted the entire album it's on, with no notification or explanation. I did whatever it was I did that bothered Facebook, and they restricted my account severely and blatantly for half a year at least, again with no notification or explanation.

It's hard to even imagine how severe the impact of the content rules these platforms are enforcing is having on any efforts anyone might want to have to engage in any kind of real discourse on important subjects of global significance, such as the war between the US, the UK, and the Houthi Army that is currently ongoing.

Any praise of the Houthis I make in a song or in any other form is illegal, let's be very clear about that. It is illegal to say, write, or sing anything positive about this group that is trying to stop Israel's genocide of the Palestinians by sanctioning trade on Israel, by force of arms when necessary. Yes, really, this is illegal. Not necessarily in the US, but in the UK -- it violates the Terrorism Act of 2000 and could result in me getting a 14-year prison sentence there at some point, theoretically.

Though praising the Houthi Army isn't illegal in the US, to my knowledge, as far as the speech of it goes, profiting from a song praising the Houthi Army may be another matter altogether, or at least that may be what people at YouTube who decided to permanently demonetize my channel were thinking -- who knows. I'm just guessing that this may be why they demonetized the channel, rather than deleting it altogether.

It's already a gigantic problem for all of us that lies and slander and disinformation tend to get seen so much more than anything else on these platforms, because of the way the platforms work, the way "virality" works on such platforms, and the way their algorithms work. But if we can't even attempt to have a conversation without some of us having albums deleted and channels demonetized, the whole thing is skewed even more in the direction of a social media landscape in which only those who hold sufficiently establishment views on proscribed organizations may speak, or be heard.

If it's true that one person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter -- and it is, including in the particular case of Ansar Allah, aka the Houthi Army -- then you're increasingly unlikely to discover this truth on YouTube.

Lao Tzu, the Syrian Revolution, and Anti-Social Media

Talking about critical analysis of history and current events (or not), and some ancient Chinese philosophy.

Thousands of years before Karl Marx was writing about dialectical materialism, Lao Tzu was also approaching the subject of how best to navigate the real world, armed with a deep understanding of the kinds of changes that take place in the world, and how best to relate to these changes.

In the ancient Chinese text, The Book of Changes, the I Ching, we get a very good lesson in the ins and outs of applying nuanced thought to real life.

The idea is basically if you take the metaphor of the world as the banks of a river, and the people as the water, if the goal in life is to navigate the riverbanks as gracefully as the river does, then we must know how to act like the water does.  We have to know, as the water does, when to be calm, when to surge ahead, when to slowly work away at smoothing surfaces, when to smash through them, when to flood.

In the old translations of the I Ching that I read when I was young, there was much talk of "the superior man" and "the inferior man."  In a given situation, the superior man does this, while the inferior man does that.

When traveling, for example, the superior man keeps a low profile, observes, and learns from his new surroundings.  The inferior man makes a spectacle of himself, even though he doesn't yet understand the society he's traveling in.

The book is full of lots more advice along these lines.  Sometimes it's a good time to take the initiative, other times it's a good time to keep preparing to do that.  Time to build alliances and network, time to go forward and fight.  At some point your ally can become your enemy, and vice versa.  The united front may be the way to go in many instances, in others, striking out on your own.

For people who maybe think there's only one correct way to behave in every circumstance you might encounter in life, the advice within the pages of the I Ching may seem devious, or Machiavellian (which is the term we use for "devious" when it's on a grand scale).

Rather than devious, I would suggest that the I Ching represents the idea of nuanced thinking, and having an appropriately complex, nuanced approach to complex, nuanced realities.  It's an approach to nuanced thinking and action that also holds much in common with Marx's dialectical materialism, and Mao Zedong's talk of primary, secondary, and tertiary contradictions, and how the revolution or the revolutionary needs to reorient depending on how the lines of the contradictions may be changing.

It seems to me that the world has not gotten any less complex in recent years, compared with how it was in Mao's, Marx's, or Lao Tzu's times.  No less complex, and no fewer reasons to abandon nuanced thought or critical analysis.

Black-and-white thinking today, however, seems to be more prevalent than at any time in my life, and I see few signs of this situation improving, given the basic reasons for the worsening of the trend further and further away from critical analysis or complex thought.

The revolution in Syria is the most recent major case I'd put out there to illustrate some of what goes on, and why modern systems of communication make real communication harder.

For people who might benefit from a little backgrounder, though:

After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, the victorious colonial powers did what colonial powers had already been doing in other parts of the world, and drew borders between countries they now ruled, in such a way as to exacerbate ethnic and religious tensions, and to give the colonial powers a more compliant group within the country in question that would do the work of ruling the country on their behalf, and that would benefit slightly from the arrangement as a group.

In Iraq this group was the Sunni minority.  In Lebanon it was the Maronite minority.  In Syria it was the Alawite minority.  (It's always a minority, by design, with this kind of colonial arrangement.)

In the century since the borders were drawn by the colonial powers, obviously a lot has happened.  But despite all kinds of wars, coups, revolutions and other notable developments that have taken place in the interim, the comparative privilege of the Alawite minority in Syria has persisted.  It's been much the same with the Maronites in Lebanon and the Sunnis in Iraq.

Under the rule of the secular nationalists in countries like Egypt, Iraq, and Syria for more than a half century there has been a lot of industrial development, development of institutions of higher learning, health care, etc.  But class divisions based on ethnic and religious lines continued to be a problem, as did political corruption, with family members of political leaders benefitting from their positions in obvious ways.

Given the many fundamental issues with the setup that a lot of folks in these societies had with various forms of inequality, the perception of a lack of political representation for many groups, and various forms of repression people experienced coming from the authorities, the past half century has featured a fair bit of violent instability.  

There have been other reasons for the violent instability, too, such as massive interference in the national affairs of all of these countries by regional and global powers with different agendas.  Generally this meant exacerbating pre-existing divisions, rather than creating entirely new ones, however.

Without understating the role of outside interference in destabilizing everything in Syria over the past many decades and in particular since 2011, or the role outside powers had in setting in motion events that led to violent crackdowns against popular movements, what can be said regardless is the regime was corrupt and used a lot of violence against its citizens, including torturing huge numbers of them in prison.

Long before 2011, and especially since 2011, the nations of Iran, Russia, Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, the US, Israel, and the Lebanese Hezbollah movement have been the countries or groups most active in funding, training, arming, bombing, and/or protecting various elements involved with the Syrian Civil War.  (Obviously the use of the term "civil war" does not imply that outside forces are not involved, since outside forces being involved with civil wars is not the exception historically, but the norm.  If most of the people fighting on both sides are from the same country, it's a civil war.)

When there's an actual war going on, this is the classic example of the point at which a lot of people in a country and beyond the borders of the country have to take sides, in one way or another, or in many different ways.

Whatever anyone may think of a corrupt secular dictatorship, the Kurdish struggle for autonomy, Islamic State, or the coalition of rebel groups that weren't Islamic State or the Kurds, these have basically been the main poles in the conflict for the past decade or so, along with fighters or armies and others involved from outside of Syria aligned with all of these different sides, including troops, tanks, and planes from Turkiye, the US, and Russia.

Individuals, movements, and other countries that got involved did so for lots of reasons.  Sometimes to protect a community that was under attack, and often to oppose the side whose potential victory seemed most threatening.  The way to do that is generally to pick a side to support that isn't the one you oppose.

Naturally, the relevant PR departments are going to lionize the leaders of every faction.  In reality, the leadership of the different factions vary wildly, from principled supporters of feminism and democracy to those who would prefer to cut off the heads of the feminists, from grassroots movements engaging in widespread solidarity to those seeking power and control.

A long time ago, when Russia was part of the Soviet Union, the Syrian government was less corrupt and more believable in laying claim to having a socialist orientation, and it was viewed by many leftists around the world as being part of the pan-Arabist wing of global socialism, which was a phenomenon seen to be led by central committees in Moscow or Beijing by many people.

Even way back when, when it was still possible to be back in the USSR, a lot of people, movements, and national leaders around the world were very critical of domestic and/or international Soviet policies, but they critically supported or sought help from or otherwise aligned themselves with the Soviet Union or with China, because having a strong relationship with them was often considered far better than the alternative of domination by the US.

There's your backgrounder.

Now, there's been another revolution in Syria.

I'm not there, and I'm entirely dependent on what I hear from the various journalists that are over there covering events to know what's really going on.  But certainly what's coming through certain major pipelines on anti-social media among the English-language commentariat is a whole lot of outrage, of a sort which I think deserves some examination.

The outrage rhetoric might be confusing, even to people who are closely following developments in Syria in the past few decades, because in order to understand the basis of it, we really have to go further back in time, to when the struggle, for many, was characterized as one between socialism and capitalism, between solidarity and imperialism, between humanity and barbarism.

Most countries in the world in the twentieth century were part of the Nonaligned Movement, attempting to carve out a neutral position in between what the western media referred to as the superpower rivalry.  Other countries, especially those that were being bombed, sanctioned, or threatened by American, British or French imperialism, tended to abandon the whole neutrality gig and aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, in the hope of having a trade relationship with a country that grew wheat and made steel and other essential things for the survival of a people and the development of a country.

Most sensible people on the planet may have opposed US imperialism, but in so doing, they didn't necessarily embrace Soviet socialism.  They had different orientations towards that, and a wide variety of ideas about how a country can best organize itself economically, politically, and in other ways.  They might recognize that the US was playing an obviously villainous role in engaging in genocidal warfare against the population of one country after another, and in supporting so many dictatorships in the name of "fighting communism."  But this rejection of US villainy didn't automatically translate into a blanket support for anyone who opposed it.

Well, for some it did, for others it didn't.  For some, whichever political camp they aligned with, and the leaders of it, could do no wrong, or if they could, it was counter-revolutionary to publicly admit that they had any flaws.

This same socialism vs. capitalism mindset continues, confusingly, to be the framework through which certain people with an outsized presence on anti-social media view reality.

Of course it's not just on the platforms where they're waging their information wars, but that's mainly where it's visible to anyone who isn't attending one of the small gatherings of people who turn out for a protest organized by PSL or a similar group, so they can stand around and get yelled at.

The framework being pushed involves the idea that the leadership of Russia, China, and Iran represent socialism and solidarity in the world today, while the US and NATO represent capitalism and empire.  And any country that sees fit for one reason or another to align themselves politically with either of these poles is then seen entirely through this lens, with their leadership either becoming paragons of good or paragons of evil.

Reality is so much more complex, however, than what the crowd that is lamenting the fall of the house of Assad and condemning the crimes committed by various participants in the Syrian Civil War/revolution would have us believe.

What I find especially terrifying is how, at least in progressive/left circles in the US, this kind of black-and-white thinking used to be more or less relegated to certain small, cultish parties such as the Party of Socialism and Liberation or Worker's World, but with the help of the platforms that reward anyone who's good at creating drama and stirring up controversy within the confines of 240 characters, the weight of the opinions of the black-and-white thinkers represented by such parties seems massive, and tends to relegate any more nuanced conversations anyone might be trying to have to the internet's dustbin.

On anti-social media today, the attacks against people involved with the Syrian Revolution that are coming from Zionists and the attacks that are coming from American or British pro-Assad leftists are completely indistinguishable from each other -- incidentally in exactly the same way as attacks on me on social media coming from Zionists or from self-styled leftists are impossible to distinguish from each other.

In reality, today, as in the twentieth century, the countries that align themselves in one way or another with what we could increasingly call "the east" vs. "the west" not only do this for different reasons, but these countries vary tremendously in terms of how they function, and how they treat their citizens.

Within the US/NATO/capitalist orbit you have some of the most egalitarian countries in the world represented by some of NATO's newest Scandinavian members, you have corrupt dictatorships that engage in widespread torture of their many prisoners, such as Egypt, and you have countries currently engaged in genocide, such as Israel.  You also have nominally democratic countries that imprison the highest numbers of their citizens and engage in widespread torture of them, such as the US.

Within the Russia/China/Iran orbit you also have astounding numbers of prisoners.  You have countries like Cuba within this orbit, which is one of the most egalitarian countries on Earth in terms of wealth distribution, and you have countries like Syria, which was run for decades by a corrupt family dynasty of one-time billionaires siphoning off the country's wealth.  And when the corrupt billionaires in Syria or Ukraine can't get along at home anymore, they flee to Russia, just as the deposed US-sponsored dictators flee to Saudi Arabia -- or Florida, depending.

There are conclusions to be drawn from reading Lao Tzu, and from Syrian politics, the Syrian Civil War, and the Syrian revolution.  Also from what countries or groups align themselves in different ways with which outside powers.

One of them is that reality is complex, and the ability to understand in which ways this is the case, and how you want to try to move forward under the circumstances, whoever "you" may be, is probably the most relevant question.  Who's the good guy and who's the bad guy probably isn't.

There are conclusions to be drawn from the way the anti-social media platforms dominate our communications, and from the way they are organized to promote conflict and suppress reasonable discourse, regardless of whether posts are being censored or not.  One of them is that if you allow a bunch of billionaires to hijack your means of communication, reasonable discourse and any kind of nuanced understanding of reality will suffer.

And we can be absolutely certain that whatever forms of sectarian goading, disinformation, and algorithm-boosted, incendiary lies that can be found on X or on Facebook or on VK in English can be found on those very platforms on a far more pernicious scale in Arabic.

Four Things That Happened on January 1st

2025 began with several massacres, the demonetization of my YouTube channel, and other notable developments.

It's all very repetitive, and I often think I really have nothing more to say about that, whatever that may be.  And then there are days like the first day of 2025, when the coincidences line up too neatly not to comment on.

There are four things that happened on January 1st that I'd like to highlight.

1. I spent New Year's Eve and New Year's Day celebrating the occasion at home with small groups of friends and family
2. There was a terrorist attack in New Orleans
3. In between the small New Year's gatherings, I wrote, recorded, and posted a song about the siege and destruction of Kamal Adwan Hospital in Gaza
4. By evening, I received an email and other notifications informing me that my YouTube channel had been demonetized

These things are all intimately related in various ways, though they're probably not all directly related in the causal sense.  But in case it's not all obvious -- or even if it is -- I'll expand on these occurrences a bit. 

There are a lot of different reasons for having a small gathering of friends and family for the New Year holiday.  For me, a gathering of twelve adults and children is just a perfect size.  Like any other performer, I'm always happy to sing for large audiences at every possible opportunity, but on a social level if it's not a gig, I tend to find larger gatherings overwhelming.

But also I live in the United States, where there's a massacre somewhere in the country about every day on average, and an outrageously high overall homicide rate to go along with it.  Some of the favorite targets of the people who want to randomly kill members of the public are big events where large crowds are gathering, such as holiday celebrations.  I think about this reflexively whenever I'm in a large crowd somewhere in North America or Europe, and I often wonder how many other people around me are thinking the same thing.

More often I wonder who's not thinking the same thing.  Most people in the western world out partying to welcome the New Year don't seem like they're particularly concerned about what might happen.  They also usually don't seem to be particularly preoccupied with the babies freezing to death with no blankets in their flooded tents on the beach in Gaza.

I know the people who prepare the messages they send out to citizens for the Japanese consulate in Portland think about the holiday-time massacres in Europe and North America.  Sometime in December we got an email from the consulate reminding us that throughout the US and Europe, terrorists like to target the types of large gatherings that tend to happen during the holiday season.

This is probably a particularly important reminder to send to people with Japanese nationals in their families, because as a general rule, Japanese people love holidays, and celebrating holidays collectively, as do lots of other people.

To underscore the warnings from the consulate, there was the vehicular attack at another Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, followed by an identical effort in New Orleans -- both modeled after still other vehicular attacks on the public that have been carried out with terrible results in New York, Berlin, France, Spain and elsewhere.

Between the vehicular attacks on the Christmas Market and the one on Bourbon Street, the Israeli military has been systematically starving and freezing the remaining population of the Gaza Strip, preventing people from having food, water, medicine, shelter, or even blankets.  In between these two vehicular attacks on innocent civilians in the western world, the Israeli military has been systematically  killing Palestinian children for daring to leave their tents to look for food or water, often assassinating them by drone strike.  In between Christmas and New Year's, the Israeli military completely destroyed the last remaining hospital in the north of Gaza, physically kicking out critically ill patients and arresting the staff who were caring for them.

Now, we can be sure that the Israelis are torturing their prisoners, because that's what Israel does with Palestinian prisoners, of whatever age or gender -- with the torture frequently including rape, of prisoners of whatever gender, and confinement in tiny cages, just like the Syrians used to do.  We don't have to wonder whether the Israelis are torturing the doctors, nurses, and administrators of the Kamal Adwan hospital, because we know for a fact that this is what they did to the other hospital staff they detained, after destroying other hospitals in the Gaza Strip, because destroying hospitals, torturing doctors, and assassinating children out looking for water is the daily practice of the Israeli military in Gaza right now, this week, this minute.

Civil society groups around the world have been mobilizing to try to highlight the arrest of the medical staff after the hospital's invasion and destruction by the IDF.  In trying to play my part in this effort, I wrote a song about it, which I posted on YouTube and elsewhere in the morning of January 1st, Portland time.

Twelve hours later, my YouTube channel was demonetized, supposedly, I was told, for a Houthi Army press release I posted on my YouTube channel over a year ago, now deleted by YouTube.  I had put it up after the US and the UK bombed Yemen, in the interest of providing a little context, for whichever of my fellow Americans or Brits might see it, about the motivations of the people our air forces were attacking this time around.

The mass murderer in Louisiana apparently did a little broadcast from his truck en route to the French Quarter, where the police say he pledged allegiance to Islamic State.  The video was deleted, so I don't know what else he said.

If whatever he said was anything like the words of other people who have engaged in similar acts of mass murder, like, oh, Osama Bin Laden, then he might have made reference to the constant slaughter of innocent civilians in places like Gaza right now, and he might have said something about wanting to make westerners understand what their tax dollars are doing in other, far-away parts of the world.

Whether or not we'll ever find out what the terrorist from Texas said in his truck on the way to the scene of the crime, who knows.  It's against Facebook's policies, and against YouTube's as well, to post anything sympathetic with a proscribed organization.  So they'll take down your videos and otherwise punish you for your transgressions, even if your only transgression was expressing a bit of sympathy with those who are resisting genocide.  So of course if you pledged your allegiance to Islamic State, that's coming down right away.

Israel, on the other hand, is not a proscribed organization.  So videos praising the brave soldiers of the IDF and their efforts to cleanse Gaza of the evil terrorists that they claim are using schools and hospitals as their hubs of operation, regardless of how outrageously detached from reality the claims may be, are perfectly fine.  Songs praising the Israeli military's high moral standing are also fine, regardless of how many children they assassinate per day.

No wonder, again and again, we have to listen to everyone from national leaders to your man on the street talk about "senseless killing."

They're either never told, or they actively hide from us in as many ways as they can, depending, the fact that these acts of senseless killing are in so many cases retaliatory.  In so many cases, their actions are very consciously and intentionally meant to replicate, in a comparatively tiny way, what the people they identify with or empathize with or seek to represent are going through every day.

No wonder, again and again, we have to listen either to the imperial elite vilify those crazy Muslims and their violent ways, or to the clueless followers of the imperial elite, who have no idea why anyone would be upset, because they've been kept in the dark.  Most of whatever they might encounter in the form of any kind of media that does a decent job of contextualizing these violent times is actively suppressed.  Contextualizing the "friendly" state violence, and what are so often retaliatory acts of mass murder in response to it, is apparently a bad thing to do.  History always began with the latest act of terrorism, and terrorism is, by definition, something Muslims do to westerners.

Context is actively suppressed in so many different ways, from the top to the bottom.  From the agendas of the billionaires and energy companies that own so much of the world's mass media to the suppression of content, by algorithm or by censorship, on the corporate-controlled online platforms that are our primary means of communication today.

It's a new reality where the already very powerful, brainwashing influence of the corporate media is joined by the various forms of control over our communications exerted on us on social media, that happens in so many ways that are completely invisible to the vast majority of us, the vast majority of the time.

And it's a new reality that was eloquently, and mostly quite violently, underscored on the very first day of 2025.