Pointless video post – ‘Vid Rosornas Grav’ by Falconer and ‘Upon Raging Waves’ by Mithotyn

My gentle readers will likely be aware that I am a Falconer fan. Stefan Weinerhall has a great depth of creativity in his compositions and a style of songwriting all his own (though it may indeed be an acquired taste), and Mathias Blad’s singing is truly incredible: it is not often in metal that one comes across a theatre- or opera-trained baritone who hits each note perfectly and still comes out sounding like a rocker, yet this is precisely Mathias’ blessing. The two others I can think of off the top of my head are Powerwolf’s Attila Dorn and Saviour Machine’s Eric Clayton. And here, on ‘Vid Rosornas Grav’ (‘By the Rose’s Grave’), from their most recent album Armod (Poverty), all of Falconer is really playing at peak capacity (and entirely in Swedish this time, as opposed to the mostly- or wholly-English lyrical content of their previous releases). These sorts of bands really hit all of the right notes for me - with both a sense of the melodic and beautiful (and wistfully melancholic in the way few outside Scandinavian can truly pull off without sounding corny), without sacrificing the metal (the solid, chunky riffs and the relentless, aggressive tempo).

Guitarist Stefan Weinerhall’s and drummer Karsten Larsson’s (and Mathias Blad’s sister Heléne’s) former band Mithotyn, as well, was also an incredibly awesome band. Here is their song ‘Upon Raging Waves’, from their 1997 album In the Sign of the Ravens:

Autolatry

Just came across an interesting story on National Public Radio recently, about an evangelical activist who is attempting to identify unregistered Christians in the United States and get them registered to vote by using data-mining techniques. This story does tend to reflect the habitual blind spots of NPR when it comes to Christianity (namely, associating Christianity solely with American ‘conservative’ evangelicalism and fundamentalism), but it does end up being somewhat edifying. Some of the variables used by the evangelical activist organisation ‘United in Purpose’ are relatively straightforward: being on an anti-abortion list, for example. But others of them are a bit stranger: Home schooling? Being an angler? Being a NASCAR fan? How do one’s sporting or entertainment habits or educational preferences have anything to do with one’s faith? Are Christians not to be found either in state or in private schools?

This is one of the major problems in American Christianity, and one of the major roadblocks to recovering and reasserting the latent, radical-orthodox Jacobitism and suspicion of unrestrained capital and empire which undergirded much of the early discontent of the American colonies. Our civic religion runs completely at cross-purposes with classical Christianity; instead of destroying idols and interrogating the uses of both state power and private wealth, we have come to a point where we are mostly apathetic about accumulations of private wealth and pathological in our relationship to state power (enthusiastic about using it abroad to enforce an ideological hegemony, but mortally afraid of using it at home to regulate moral issues - whether ‘economic’ or ‘social’). And we have erected idols in place of Our Lord. I read the comment by one of UIP’s volunteers with great irony: she prays that America will face ‘a Red Sea experience’, but it seems to me that her invocation of the Mosaic tradition is misplaced. The Hebrews, being led about in the desert for forty years, were later subject to ‘a Mount Sinai experience’, though instead of accepting the laws of the God of Israel, they erected in his place the image of the Golden Calf. That UIP could mistake NASCAR fandom for strength of Christian faith as such, or that they would seek out Christians acting in accord with the Gospels or with the Pauline exhortations in gated communities and amongst people who home-school their children, is actually quite mind-boggling to me.

The legacy of Mao – it’s kinda complicated, actually

Mao Zedong is, was and will continue to be one of the most controversial figures in all of Chinese history for many years to come. To many (including most commentators in the United States and Europe), Mao is a total, unredeemable monster – someone for whom the deaths of millions were to be counted as a blessing if they fell in with the pursuit of his goals, someone who sacrificed all of the best things in Chinese culture upon the altar of his own ego. To a handful of others (increasingly few in this day and age), Mao is to be regarded as a great hero and a patriot: a man whose vision paved the way for all of modern China’s triumphs. The Chinese Communist Party maintains (as in everything else) a sort of neutral, offend-no-one balance, painting him as a well-intentioned revolutionary whose thought was – according to Nicholas Kristof – 70% correct and 30% mistaken. And the Chinese Communist Party, as in everything else (or so it seems), believes and does exactly the wrong things for all of the right reasons: in this case, upholding the main bulk of Mao Zedong’s thought and merely revising the terms of his involvement in the economy – when, on the contrary, they ought to be praising his great economic accomplishments and dumping his ideology. They do this, purportedly, to promote ‘stability’ and ‘harmony’ – yet Mao’s ideology (as expressed in the Cultural Revolution) devalued nothing so much as the stability and harmony of the family, calling on children to insult their parents, students to berate and shame their teachers, all in the name of rooting out the ‘capitalists’ and ‘rightists’ who ended up being the penultimate beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution.

I was recently reading an article by Noam Chomsky on the subject of the Vietnam War which made a rather startling claim with regard to Mao’s China. The conventional wisdom about Mao in the West, of course, is that the economic policies during the early part of his reign were unmitigated disasters that led to the starvation of millions of people. (Thankfully, my high school Chinese area studies teacher, Mr Mjaanes, was a bit too dignified to follow the conventional wisdom on… well, much of anything, really.) And yet, the statistics show otherwise – the Noam Chomsky article cited a paper in Science magazine (written by Peng Xizhe of Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University) which showed the total death rate in the country falling from 14.0 per thousand in 1953 to 11.6 per thousand in 1964 to 6.5 per thousand in 1982; with the bulk of this decrease in death rate happening between 1950 and 1975 – precisely the years of Mao’s ascendancy. Peng attributes these decreases to purely economic accomplishments: development of industry, mass education and improved health services, as well as the public hygiene campaign which accompanied the Great Leap Forward. The primary beneficiaries of Mao’s economic reforms were precisely the very young and the very old. By the end of the 1970’s, infant mortality was cut to a third of what it had been in 1950 (and was cut in half again between 2000 and 2010). This campaign was so successful that by the time of Deng Xiaoping’s capitalist reforms – 1978 and 1979 – the Chinese Communist Party had come to see the rise in population as a burgeoning threat, and implemented the One Child Policy alongside the market reforms. It should be noted as well that the crude death rate (not counting the abortions or sterilisations accompanying the One Child Policy) actually rose again during the ‘reform and opening’ period, and is now at 7.1 deaths per thousand population.

Thus, indeed, Mao Zedong has done some incredibly great things for China. He put an end to polygamy and child marriages, thus giving Chinese women an unprecedented degree of freedom and dignity. He introduced universal education, such that anyone could be given opportunities to which, up to that point, only a small fraction of people had access. He brought massive material benefits to the Chinese people in ways even the Qing Emperors could only dream of, and improved the lot of China’s peasantry to a massive degree through the breakup of large estates. The great problem with Mao Zedong – the exact point where the hero becomes the monster – is to be located precisely within his ideology, what came to be known as Maoism.

Mao believed – wrongly – that the revolutionary potential within the peasant class, which has made itself manifest at numerous points in Chinese history, could be harnessed to an ideology of infinite progress along Marxist lines. When Mao read Shi Naian’s Water Margin 《水滸傳》 and the legendary feats of the bandits who resisted the excesses of Song officials and robbed the wealthy to benefit the downtrodden, he noted with disdain that the heroes were ‘capitulators’ to the Emperor, and thus robbed their own movement of its revolutionary potential. But this is precisely wrong: the very revolutionary potential of the movement itself was predicated (in the novel) on the categories of Confucian morality and reciprocal duties which the Song government – particularly at the level with which Song Jiang and his compatriots were dealing with it – was busy neglecting or trampling over. Though 《水滸傳》 is semi-fictional, the revolutionary sentiments it portrayed are indeed far from it – the Chinese people have not, as a rule, suffered tyrants lightly, not since Shang Zhouxin, and neither have they had (historically) a great tolerance for greed or other abuses of power. Confucianism (at least under the influence of Mencius and Zhu Xi) has proven – time and again – that it is quite capable of very deep and persistent critique of both state power and private interest, and of mobilising people to take action on the basis of these critiques. And yet, in his zeal for demolishing all remnants of the old society, Mao Zedong not only broke the lives and livelihoods of millions of his innocent countrymen, but he also tore up the social fabric and paved the way for the cronyism and gangster capitalism that was to follow and made much more difficult the restoration of this ancient and venerable tradition of virtue-ethics with radical potential. It would be more accurate to say that Mao himself – though unknowingly so – was ‘capitulating’ to Deng and Jiang in pursuing the Cultural Revolution.

Of course, the agrarian, distributist, traditionalist and ritualist nature of the ‘old’ Chinese society (and the political instincts of still quite a few of its people, it should be noted) is now at odds with both of the loudest strains in modern Chinese political thought – those pushing for a return to Mao and those pushing for further economic ‘reforms’ in the spirit of Deng. And all the while the ruling class is pursuing a middle course which may prove untenable, unless it makes a radical return not to either Mao or Deng, but to the Doctrine of the Mean.

But this will require acknowledging the accomplishments of Mao whilst disavowing his ideology, rather than the other way around.

Sofa-sitting on Google+

Oh, dear.

President Obama’s Google+ page is apparently experiencing a massive shortage of sofas. They’ve all been claimed by Chinese internet users, a sadly remarkable high percentage of which are the same sort of newbs we have over here who take to spamming forums and comment threads with ‘first’ comments. Also sadly remarkable is the high percentage of mei fen dang yuan and general idiots posting there, in jest or not, asking the President to ‘liberate’ China the same way he did Iraq and Libya. Not funny, dudes. Our military men and women are not toys – something all too many of our own politicians forget on a regular basis. You didn’t hear me asking the PLA to invade the US back when Bush was president, did you? And we all know, of course, that post-Saddam Iraq and post-Gadhafi Libya are such shining models of freedom, human rights, democracy and liberation in today’s world…

Oh, well. Boys will be boys, and trolls will be trolls, no matter what their nationality.

China, Iran and Reality - the undiscovered countries

An excellent article by John Feffer in Foreign Policy in Focus may be found here.  It is indeed quite worth reading, particularly given that it offers a coolly realistic counterweight to the idealistic and borderline-arrogant rhetoric of American and European news outlets such as the Economist, the New York Times, CNN and Auntie Beeb. (Though, just in case some idiot accuses me of being a wu mao dang yuan, it’s very much worth noting that we don’t do this just for China at all. It’s quite a longstanding pastime in Eastern Europe as well.) Here is the money quote:

This latter point, that China has its own national interests, invariably eludes Western observers no matter how often Chinese leaders repeat it. Sure, a Chinese leader might like American basketball or admire American business. But the essential fact is that he leads a political, economic, and military apparatus dedicated to preserving itself and the country’s territorial integrity. The same can be said for the leaders of most countries, including the United States. Certainly no one in Beijing expects the 2012 U.S. elections to produce an American president who embraces state capitalism, a global trade order that disproportionately favors Chinese economic growth, or a ceding of U.S. military position in the Pacific to the up-and-coming superpower. And yet for some bizarre reason, U.S. observers expect the latest Chinese leader to suddenly tear off his clothes and reveal a Captain America suit underneath.

Mr Feffer also very calmly and very objectively speaks of Iran’s military capacity, as well as its willingness to come to the table and negotiate. Given that the only regimes in the region that they truly trust are Syria and Turkey (cultivating much closer relations with the Christian world power in Russia and the secular-agnostic world power in China than with any states in the Sunni Muslim world), it is really not difficult to see that their behaviour in all this mess has been quite rational (at least from a foreign-policy perspective). Perhaps it is time that we demand from our leaders that our foreign policy reflect a similar grounding in reality; though that would almost certainly mean throwing away all of the exceptionalist and jingo rhetoric which has been a sad, dull and predictable staple of American political oratory for every president (Democratic or Republican) since Reagan.

Pointless video post – ‘Honigtraum’ by Totenmond

Totenmond. Are they crust punk? Are they thrash? Are they metalcore? Are they death metal? Are they doom? One thing is for sure; this power trio is awesome! (An opinion not very widely shared, sadly.) These guys are known for making massive, aggressive, blunt songs with quite frankly baffling lyrics; but that doesn’t stop their music from being strangely alluring. ‘Honigtraum’ is one of their earlier songs, from the EP Väterchen Frost; it has a more ‘punkish’ vibe than much of their later work, which veers into the doomy side of things. I was actually introduced to them through their self-described links-anarchistischen Propaganda (left-anarchist propaganda), their album Auf dem Mond ein Feuer (which consists primarily of covers from classic Deutschpunk bands: Slime, Chaos Z, Inferno, Razzia, OHL and Ton Steine Scherben), which is a massively enjoyable maelstrom of crossover thrash. Only later did I get into their other material, which is equally enjoyable if not more so. Solid band, greatly underrated.

A brief history of Hong Kong housing on chinaSMACK

Time Out HK has a highly interesting article on chinaSMACK recently, on the topic of the housing market (or sad lack thereof) in Hong Kong, which increasingly is appearing to be a case of laisser-faire capitalism gone bad on each possible level: a highly-unregulated housing market that eventually fell into the hands of a very few people, who in turn used their newfound wealth and influence to cultivate close relationships first with the British colonial and then with the Chinese communist government in order to stifle both economic competition and political action that could limit their activities in the public interest. Definitely worth a very careful read, even if Time Out HK’s prescriptions ultimately end up sounding a bit… shall we say, resigned.

It is a very thorny problem, and it is not one (it should be noted) which has remained confined to Hong Kong. In the mainland, large developers have been following exactly the same pattern; protected by the government, they acquire massive tracts of agricultural land often for dirt-cheap prices from cooperative local administrations for new urban developments. These are generally seen as good investments because they are sponsored by the local governments as a good source of revenue and because the rising population of China (and the social norms which have come to demand that young people attempting to attain any kind of social status - to get married, for example - must purchase a house and a car) ensure that demand for these new developments will always be there. Meanwhile, prices continue to inflate, and the people who end up out in the cold are the new homeowners and, of course, the vagrant peasants whose land was expropriated in the first place, often on remarkably unfair terms.

Mainland Chinese and Hongkongers are, if truth be told, really on the same page here (or rather, the Mainlanders will be arriving on that page quite soon). And yet, now more than ever, there seems to be a growing, completely misdirected resentment between the two groups. Whipping up ethnic- or linguistic-nationalist sentiment (and all the epithets that come with, ‘locusts’ and ‘dogs’ and so forth), in the end, serves no one’s true interests except for those who benefit by the broken systems on either side of Shenzhen Wan.

Thanks to Aaron Posehn and Rob Klugerman for the link!