Oriana Fallaci And The Suicide Of The West

By

 Jason Maoz

http://www.jewishpress.com/

15 September 2016

Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist who late in life did a profound about-face – going from leftist supporter of revolutionary movements to resolute defender of the West and vocal opponent of Islamic fundamentalism – died ten years ago this week in Florence.

The 77-year-old Fallaci had been battling cancer for years, but her illness had no discernable effect on her legendary combativeness – which after 9/11 was directed almost exclusively at what she described in vivid, often angry, prose as the threat posed by radical Islam to Western values and the suicidal indifference to that threat on the part of Western elites, particularly those in Europe.

Fallaci was always a fighter; raised in an anti-Fascist family, her father was a leader in the underground battle against Mussolini and she herself was involved at a young age in the Resistance. Although for decades as a journalist her worldview was decidedly left wing and shot through with an abiding cynicism toward the U.S., her thinking underwent a swift evolution with the rise of jihadism.

Her book The Rage and the Pride, published in Italy just months after the 9/11 attacks and in the U.S. in September 2002, unabashedly celebrated the United States as a bastion of freedom even as it acknowledged the country’s “flaws and mistakes and faults.”

In a follow-up book, The Force of Reason, published in the U.S. a few months before she passed away, she detailed the legal attacks – Muslim groups in France and Italy filed lawsuits against her and called for a ban of The Rage and the Pride while the Swiss government asked that she be extradited to stand trial for incitement – and the death threats that had come her way since she’d begun writing on Islam.

In The Force of Reason she stated that Islam “sows hatred in place of love and slavery in place of freedom” – a choice of words that reflected the tone of her writing in her final years and that led critics to slam her for what they said was a blanket condemnation of all Muslims.

Although Fallaci was for decades decidedly pro-Palestinian, she painted a wholly unflattering picture of Yasir Arafat after interviewing him in 1972.

“He was…five feet three, I’d say. And even his hands were small, even his feet. Too small, you thought, to sustain his fat legs and his massive trunk, with its huge hips and swollen, obese stomach.”

When he spoke, “His voice had a kind of funny whistle in it. And something feminine.”

But when Arafat got angry, “his soft voice becomes a loud one, his eyes become pools of hatred, and he looks as though he would like to tear you to pieces along with all his enemies.”

Under Fallaci’s prodding, Arafat inadvertently exposed the shifty parameters of the then-still nascent myth of Palestinian nationhood.

Fallaci: But what does Palestine mean?…The Turks were here, before the British Mandate and Israel. So what are the geographical borders of Palestine?

Arafat:…. From an Arab point of view, one doesn’t speak of borders; Palestine is a small dot in the great Arabic ocean. And our nation is the Arab one, it is a nation extending from the Atlantic to the Red Sea and beyond….

When Fallaci continued to press him on the matter of borders, a flustered Arafat reiterated: “I repeat that borders have no importance. Arab unity is important, that’s all.”

In April 2002, Fallaci publicly repudiated her longtime (and largely uncritical and unquestioning) support for the Palestinian cause in a scorching essay on anti-Semitism.

As the journalist Ruth Ellen Gruber described it, “Repeating over and over the assertion ‘I find it shameful,’ Fallaci unleashed a brutal indictment of Italy, Italians, the Catholic church, the left wing, the media, politically correct pacifists and Europeans in general for abandoning Israel and fomenting a new wave of anti-Semitism linked to the Mideast crisis.”

In Fallaci’s memorable words, she was “disgusted with the anti-Semitism of many Italians, of many Europeans” and “ashamed of this shame that dishonors my country and Europe.”

“I find it shameful,” she wrote, “and I see in all this the resurgence of a new fascism, a new Nazism.”

Acknowledging that in the past “I fought often, and bitterly, with the Israelis, and I defended the Palestinians a lot – maybe more than they deserved,” Fallaci was characteristically unambiguous about where she now stood:

“…I stand with Israel, I stand with the Jews,” she wrote. “I defend their right to exist, to defend themselves, and not to allow themselves to be exterminated a second time.”

In an interview published shortly before her death, Fallaci drew the battle lines for what she viewed as an escalating war between the West and an enemy all too similar to the Fascists her family fought in the 1930s and ‘40s.

“I am convinced,” she told The New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot, “that the situation is politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when England and France did not understand a thing.

“With the Muslims, we have done the same thing…. I reject them, and this is not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism.

“Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism. With Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

THE ISIS TERRORIST THE LEFT LOVED

A left-wing hero kills and dies for ISIS.

Daniel Greenfield

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

February 27, 2017

Isis posted a picture of Harith grinning in a bomb-laden car shortly before the attack.

Before Jamal Al-Harith blew himself up near Mosul, he had been a celebrity and a hero of the left. He had received a million pounds for his “suffering” at Gitmo and been impersonated on stage.

He was played by Shaun Parkes at London's New Ambassadors Theatre and by Andrew Stewart-Jones in the New York production at the Bleecker Street Theatre. The play was Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The title was an interesting one considering that the play was defending Taliban and Al Qaeda terrorists who had been fighting for the freedom to murder non-Muslims and oppress women.

Andrew Stewart-Jones has a role on Gotham, Shaun Parkes has appeared on The Nightmare Worlds of H.G. Wellsand Jamal Al-Harith headed off to join ISIS where he got to star in his own martyrdom video.

As Shakespeare’s Jacques declaims, “All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players.” Jamal Al-Harith was a better actor than any of the actors who played him. And he knew that the secret to great theater is to bring down the house. But he also had an audience of leftists eager to suspend disbelief when an Islamic terrorist is lying to them.

A year before the 7/7 bombings tore apart London, West End theatergoers were treated to these sad sack stories of Muslim terrorists with British citizenship being detained at Gitmo. Then it was the turn of New Yorkers at a theater barely a mile from Ground Zero under the auspices of the Culture Project and its mission of “socially conscious theater”. And what’s more socially conscious than Islamic terrorism?

The actors playing the ISIS killer, in a production Variety dubbed a “chilling expose of the U.S. government policies”, recited his lies that he only went “to find out about the religion”. In the version of the terrorist’s fairy tale distributed by the left from the Guardian to the New York Times, he was actually a victim of the Taliban, wrongly detained and tortured by the Bush administration.

Night after night, melancholy actors in orange jumpsuits wearing steel chains, declaimed Al-Harith’s lies and excuses to lefty audiences who fueled their outrage with imaginary Muslim suffering. Meanwhile Americans, Brits, Iraqis and Afghans were being massacred by the friends of their real life counterparts.

Progressive theatergoers glowed when Al-Harith compared his time in Gitmo to the suffering of concentration camp inmates. "I got put in isolation for because I refused to wear my wrist band. I said, 'In concentration camps they were given tattoos, and now they've given us these, it's just the same really.'" And who could be more similar to a Jewish concentration camp inmate than a member of an Islamic ideology that believes in exterminating all the Jews?

How many of them cheered when he declared, “You know, I'll walk out from here when I leave free, because I haven't done anything at all.”

And he did walk out of Gitmo. The US sent him to the UK along with the “Tipton Three” who were the stars of Michael Winterbottom’s Road to Guantanamo anti-war flick. Al-Harith was part of their Rasul v. Rumsfeld lawsuit with the aid of the Center for Constitutional Rights. The radical left wing group’s Report on Torture, Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment of Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay” drew in part on Al-Harith’s claims.

In the CCR’s report, the ISIS terrorist claimed that he had been abused at Gitmo for keeping too many salt packets in his cell. No one rolled their eyes. Any silly lie by a Muslim terrorist was treated as truth.

The UK paid him as much as a million pounds in compensation for his salt packet “suffering”.

Then Jamal Al-Harith headed to Syria. He had started life as Ronald Fiddler before converting to Islam and becoming Jamal Udeen Al-Harith. In the Islamic State, he changed his name yet again and became Abu-Zakariya al-Britani. In his final killing spree, he took unknown numbers of Iraqi soldiers with him.

In his years with ISIS, how many Yazidi girls did the martyr of the salt packets rape? How many Christians, Yazidis and even Muslims did the pampered terrorist who whined about the air conditioning in his cell to the even more pampered audiences of London and New York leftist elites behead?

The left gave Al-Harith’s impersonators a stage to weep over his Gitmo air conditioning and his salt packets. Will they bring the little girls he raped and the teenage boys he beheaded on stage to tell their stories?

It goes without saying that they will not because they are complicit in Al-Harith’s crimes as in the crimes of every Muslim terrorist whom they have defended. A parade of Gitmo detainees has returned to terror. How many Islamic terrorists have stepped off to applause on the London stage to stand over the beds of bloodied and beaten little girls in Mosul or the severed heads of Christians in Fallujah?

Many are the crimes of the left.

The co-authors of Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom went on to find new ways to support Islamic terrorists. Gillian Slovo, the daughter of Communist Party leaders Joe Slovo and Ruth First, and co-author Victoria Brittain went on to call for a cultural boycott of Israel.

Slovo hatefully urged blocking the travel of Israeli writers. She insisted that the Israelis weren’t really trying to stop terrorist attacks. “They’re not really looking for arms or guns. What they are doing is putting people in their place and trying to stop the free movement of a whole people.”

Next month, Muslim terrorists kidnapped and murdered three Israeli teenagers.

But it was easier for Gillian Slovo to claim that the security situation in Israel had been made up or that Jamal Al-Harith was just an innocent victim. It is always easier for the left to believe Muslim terrorists than to believe their victims. It is not because the left is stupid, but because it is evil.

Slovo's latest play is titled, Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State. The idea comes once again from Nicolas Kent, the man behind Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. Once again Islamic evil gets a stage to blame its horrific crimes on discrimination or Israel.

"The fact that they see the (anti-IS) coalition as being totally against one country, against one religion, I mean, that’s very important," one character declaims.

Even fighting ISIS is Islamophobic.                                  

Another World: Losing Our Children to Islamic State is obsessed with understanding Islamic terrorists rather than their victims. To the left, perpetrators are important while their victims, as Stalin said, are only a statistic.

But the final epitaph for Jamil Al-Harith was not written by Gillian Slovo or The Guardian, but by ISIS. It was simple and to the point.

It was also the first true thing told about him.

“The martyrdom-seeking brother Abu Zakariya al-Britani - may Allah accept him - detonated his explosives-laden vehicle on a headquarters of the Rafidhi army and its militias in Tal Kisum village, southwest of Mosul.”

In his last moments, the truth finally emerged about Jamal Al-Harith. Before his death, he stopped playing the victim and came out of the closet as a killer. You can see him grinning broadly on his final picture as he prepares to kill. This is the real Jamal Al-Harith. This is who he was all along.

Jamal Al-Harith was a monster who won the affection of a monstrous left who loved him for his monstrousness. This was not something that they could admit to each other or to themselves.

The terrorists at Gitmo weren’t victims. They were perpetrators. They were evil. The left defended them because it is evil. There is a simple and unbreakable truth in the calculus of human affairs.

Those who defend evil are evil. They seek out evil to defend to excuse the evil inside themselves.

Jamal Al-Harith is dead, but there will be many to take his place. And the lies will go on. Terrorists will be transformed into victims. And progressive theatergoers will cheer their crimes with bloody hands.

Religious Speech and Action Silenced

In Scorsese’s adaptation of Endo’s novel, a stark depiction of statism against religion

By Thomas S. Hibbs — February 25, 2017

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Decades in the making, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, based on Shūsaku Endō’s 1966 novel, about 17th-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan, is ambitious and alternately gorgeous and horrifying. It is surprising that a film of this magnitude would be all but completely snubbed for Oscar nominations, particularly in the now-expanded category of Best Picture, where the competition is soft indeed. Silence’s sole Oscar nomination is for cinematography, and that is well deserved. With its focus on valleys and mountains shrouded in fog, the film often has the look of the movies of the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

Commentary on the film has focused on the dilemma facing the two Jesuit priest protagonists, Father Cristóvão Ferreira (Liam Neeson) and Father Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield): Can renouncing faith ever be a path of faith? Yet the commentary has tended to ignore a more striking issue and perhaps one more relevant to our own time: namely, what happens to religious faith in a totalitarian political environment that actively and violently repudiates any religion that is not perfectly consonant with the dictates of the political regime.

Sixteenth-century Jesuit missionaries to Japan were for a time welcomed and had enormous success. Political changes in the country led to growing suspicion of foreign influences and to a fear that the allegiance of the Japanese people would be ssplit between nationalism and the new religion. The governmental response was ruthless and systematic. By the use of bribery and threats, it set ordinary citizens against one another and especially against any priests remaining in the country. The centerpiece of the elimination project was a very public form of repudiation of the faith: the so-called fumi-e (literally, “to step on a picture”), the stepping, and in some cases spitting, on an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary.

Around that ritual act, Japanese authorities construct a series of protracted, gruesome inducements to apostasy. Particularly terrifying is the threat that the torture of Japanese converts will cease only after the priests themselves publicly renounce their faith. Suppression was already underway when Father Rodrigues, a priest in Portugal, heard reports that his spiritual mentor, the missionary to Japan, Father Ferreira, had succumbed to Japanese terror and renounced his faith in Christ. Eager to be a missionary himself and to find out the truth about Ferreira, Rodrigues departs for Japan and immediately enters a world of systematic viciousness toward Christians, confronting a horror that he could never have imagined.

The only religious film that is remotely akin to Silence is Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Both are blood-soaked carnivals of torture that explore the way in which violence is the meeting point, the testing ground, in the contest between good and evil or, more precisely, between the witness of holiness and diabolical malevolence. Both films draw out to the point of excess the suffering of those who would maintain their faith in the face of betrayal and persecution. One slight weakness in the film is the performance of Andrew Garfield as the principal vehicle for the exploration of the trials undergone by the would-be faithful priest. With his performances in Silence and in Hacksaw Ridge, Garfield seems headed to stardom as a dramatic lead actor, but he is better suited to the role of the underestimated man of action in Ridge than he is to the brooding, anguished Jesuit in Silence. 

The book and the film are much better at holding onto the tragic tensions in the character of Rodrigues than are many of the commentators. One of the film’s consultants, Father James Martin, S.J., editor of America, argues that the film underscores the inadequacy of black-and-white moral theology of the Jesuit priests when confronted with a “world of gray.” But that observation only underscores the inadequacy of the banal categories of contemporary moral theology when applied to a great work of art. The world of Silence is not gray; it is surreal and nightmarish, and its dramatic depiction at the hands of Scorsese moves the film precariously close to the genre of horror.

While the priests are generous and sacrificial, they are also rightly accused of arrogance, of desiring primarily the esteem of the people they have come to serve. They are indeed focused on themselves and their tribulations. One of the key questions is whether Rodrigues hears a divine voice urging him, “Trample!” Jesus himself seems to speak from the icon placed before Rodrigues. If He does, then apostasy would seem to be a path of faith, not just an act of betrayal from which one can repent and return to grace. But it is far from clear how we are to interpret this scene.

This is a world where nothing is as it seems. The film leaves us with questions: Is this a divine voice? Or is it, given Rodrigues’s mentally strained condition, a hallucination? (How odd that God would break His apparently steadfast silence only to assuage the conscience of a Western Jesuit priest.) Or is it, as any Jesuit who had read Saint Ignatius carefully would know was possible, a communication not from the divine but from a malign spirit whose aim is to destroy souls? To seize, even in the spirit of advancing a moral theology of ambiguity, on any one of these interpretations would violate the tortured ambiguity of the film itself.

That is clearly the aim of the Japanese officials who, even as they expend enormous effort to extirpate the Catholic faith, taunt the priests for their failure to realize that Japan is “a swamp” in which Christianity cannot take root. That claim is belied both by the initial spread of the faith and by the lengths to which the Japanese go to rid their country of its presence.

While the lives of ordinary Japanese seem primitive indeed, the mechanisms that the officials deploy are far from crude. Instead, they exhibit a complex, diabolical rationality. The methods are totalitarian in both intent and form. The intent is to uproot completely any residue of Christian faith, to eliminate the presence of any force contrary to that of the government. Buddhism is praised but appears in the film only under the guise of a civil religion. The form is capacious, encompassing any expression of the faith, and sustained through time.

The instruments of torture and execution evince the power of totalitarian reason prior to, and in the absence of, modern technology. Torture is designed to work slowly over time and to be a kind of public display of the cost of belief. Public repudiation is as much about humiliation and mockery as it is about officially recanting. These methods deprive the potential martyr of any sense of glory. Both before and after their apostasy, priests are kept alive. Before their desecration of an icon, they are forced to witness the torture and murder of others, whose potential freedom rests, the priests are told, on the willingness of the priests to deny the faith. After their apostasy, the priests are kept around as examples of the falsity and cowardice of Christian leaders. They are given public roles, forced to break their vows, takes wives, and assist the government in its ongoing detection of forbidden Christian elements in the country. 

What sort of religion can survive in this setting, where religious liberty is systematically denied? If anything endures, it is minimalist and completely privatized; indeed, what remains is so private that it cannot emerge from the interior of the soul. In everything external to one’s thoughts and feelings, there must be complete conformity to the dictates of the state. Nothing less than public complicity with and docility toward the state is acceptable. If the film raises questions about the silence of God, it draws our attention equally to the silencing of religious speech and action.

In the service of a totalitarian ideal, government agents exhibit a kind of enlightenment rationalism. They are meticulous, patient, thorough, articulate, and confident in their control and ultimate victory. One of the more instructive characteristics of Japanese rule in the film is that it is not just a regime of terror, desecration, and destruction. The surrealist nightmare of isolation, torture, and death that it constructs for believers stands in contrast to the world enjoyed by apostates, to whom, the officials offer comfort, work, community, and the esteem of both the elites and the common people. The strategy is smartly designed to suppress memories of, and longing for, any higher calling, any end beyond the scope of the state.

— Thomas S. Hibbs, the dean of the Honors College at Baylor University, is the author of Shows about Nothing.

Trump, Milo, and the War on Cops

We can expect more riots like those in Berkeley unless police show unwavering determination to restore order.

Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/

February 23, 2017

Protesters patricipate in a rally against Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos in Berkeley, California, USA, 01 February 2017.

On February 1, rioting broke out in Berkeley to prevent a flamboyantly provocative Donald Trump supporter from speaking on the University of California campus. Black-masked anarchists beat and pepper-sprayed supposed attendees of the event and hurled explosive devices at police officers; the vandals ransacked and torched banks, retail businesses, and campus facilities. University and city police did nothing to quell the mayhem.

The Berkeley riot is a wakeup call, representing several converging trends in American culture: the virulent anti-cop hatred spread by the Black Lives Matter movement; police departments’ withdrawal from proactive policing in response to that hatred; academic victim culture; and anti-Trump hysteria. Such political violence is likely to spread if law enforcement does not resolve to suppress it at its first outbreak.

The roots of the police inaction during the recent anarchy can be traced back to a vicious, four-day anti-police riot in Berkeley in December 2014, in which Black Lives Matter and other radical groups participated. City police had used tear gas on the first night of violence to stop rioters from throwing bricks, rocks, metal pipes, glass bottles, and other dangerous objects at them. Nearly a dozen officers were injured; one officer, hit with a bag of gravel, sustained a dislocated shoulder. The next day, local leaders sharply criticized the police for what activists termed a “police riot.” So on the second night of anarchy, the department refrained from any crowd-control tactics, such as skirmish lines, that allegedly rile up protesters. The violence against civilians worsened, including multiple assaults, a robbery at gunpoint in the name of “No Justice, No Peace,” and shots fired at a homeowner trying to prevent damage to his backyard. Nevertheless, the second night of riots was deemed a relative success from the police perspective because officers had not had to use force to protect themselves. The official takeaway from the four-day breakdown of law and order was that it is better to allow widespread property damage than to use preventive tactics that risk confrontations with rioters and that might require officers to forcefully (and untelegenically) defend themselves. The department would only intervene in group lawlessness to protect life.

This distinction between preventing property damage and preventing personal assaults is of course specious. Rioters do not compartmentalize their behavior; allowing attacks on property will regularly lead to attacks on persons, in a literal demonstration of Broken Windows theory.

Fast forward to 2017 and the planned speech at Berkeley of Milo Yiannapoulos, an in-your-face provocateur who revels in violating politically correct taboos. (Scandal engulfed the Yiannapoulos brand this week, with the revelation of an interview in which he coyly jokes about adult sex with minors, including his own underage experience with a priest. The Conservative Political Action Conference disinvited Yiannapoulos from its annual event—he had been slated to speak—and he resigned his position at Breitbart News.)  On February 1, both campus and city police were woefully understaffed in preparation for Milo’s speech, undoubtedly due to the prevailing law enforcement philosophy of not looking “confrontational.” Bay Area activists had complained during the 2014 “F—k the Police protests,” as such anti-cop riots are locally known, that seeing police in riot gear made them feel anxious. But serious conflict at the Milo event was a certainty, and the appearance of dozens of so-called “black bloc” anarchists should not have been a surprise; these lawless assailants have been a regular feature of Bay Area protests since the early 2000s.

When flaming rockets started flying at the student union where Yiannapoulos was scheduled to speak, the University of California campus police retreated to the inside of the building and never reemerged. When the rioters fanned out to city streets (even though Milo’s speech had already been cancelled), police commanders had neither the tactical tools nor the manpower to crack down on the chaos. Only one arrest was made the entire night, by school police, for failing to disperse. The rioters most certainly took notice of their unimpeded reign. The violence continued the next day, with physical assaults against Berkeley student Republicans, both on and off campus.

The next week, the Berkeley student newspaper invited several current and former columnists to justify the anti-Milo violence. It was an easy assignment. The writers needed merely to recycle the maudlin victimology rhetoric that university administrators and faculty had fed them for years. It is a given on college campuses that an ever-expanding congeries of victim groups is under virtually lethal assault from all-encompassing racism. Allegedly “marginalized” students need “allies” in order to survive their college experience, as if they are attending classes in a war zone. Berkeley’s Division of Equity and Inclusion has erected banners on campus that urge students to “create an environment where people other than yourself can exist,” as if anyone is at risk of not being allowed to “exist” on Berkeley’s welcoming campus.

People protest against Milo Yiannopoulos' planned appearance at UC Berkeley

So it was no surprise that one of the pro-violence columnists wrote that he would “fight tooth and nail for the right to exist.” (And fight he did, by his own proud confession.) Allowing Yiannapoulos to speak “could have endangered campus students . . . over their identities,” he said. Another columnist opined that the black bloc’s attacks were “not acts of violence. They were acts of self-defense.” Such thinking accords with the hundred-plus faculty who sought to close down the speech on the ground that Yiannapoulos “actually harms students through defamatory and harassing actions.”

The police were the real culprits, according to another columnist. They are “violent agents of the state” who “create an atmosphere that perpetuates violence on community members” merely by their presence in riot gear. The expectation of “peaceful dialogue” was itself a “violent act.”

Several Berkeley professors circulated emails downplaying the significance of the violence. Déborah Blocker, associate professor of French, reported to her fellow profs about the anarchy on campus: “Mostly this was typical Black Bloc action, in a few waves —very well-organized and very efficient. They attacked property but they attacked it very sparingly, destroying just enough University property to obtain the cancellation order for the MY event and making sure no one in the crowd got hurt” [emphasis in original]. (In fact, a woman was pepper-sprayed while giving an interview and her husband was beaten so badly that several ribs were broken, among other assaults on campus.)

A San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Otis Taylor, paid poetic homage to the “soft raindrops” and “artificial snow” of the riot’s shattered glass and echoed the notion that it was Yiannapoulos who “incites” violence; the rioters were merely rejecting bigotry. Taylor correctly observed that the “protest” (a.k.a. riot) was as much about Donald Trump as about Yiannapoulos: “If the president thinks his inauguration was a celebration of his views, the after-party taking place in the streets should be a potent reminder of how differently people view the world. And him.”

Taylor’s analysis provides a window into the future. Absent a radical change in police morale, periodic rioting and assaults on perceived Trump supporters and other disfavored persons will likely continue. Those assaults began before the inauguration; they have continued since then. In the Black Lives Matter era, police officers are hunkered down, fearful of using lawful tactics that will be labelled racist by politicians and the mainstream media. This is not just a Bay Area phenomenon. The listless response to the Baltimore rioting in 2015 anticipated the Berkeley passivity. The ideology of victimhood, pumped into the body politic by universities, easily morphs into a justification not just for the suppression of speech but also for violent resistance to imagined oppressors. College graduates have been told for years that the U.S. is systemically racist and unjust; the rioters’ nauseating sense of entitlement to destroy other people’s property and to sucker-punch ideological foes is a natural extension of this profound delegitimation of the American polity.

In 1838, speaking at the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln warned that “there is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” When the perpetrators of such injustice go unpunished, Lincoln said, “the lawless in spirit are encouraged to become lawless in practice.” The nation’s police must show an unwavering determination to restore order when it collapses; intelligence officers, including the FBI, must pay particular attention to rooting out mask-wearing anarchists. California and other states have laws against wearing masks to facilitate the commission of crimes. Politically correct concerns about head scarfs should not inhibit a crackdown on this pernicious trend.

Various pro-Trump groups have announced a freedom of speech march in Berkeley for March 4; By Any Means Necessary, a left-wing organization that participated in the Milo riots, has declared: “Bring it on.”  Depending on who shows up, it may be the next test of the condition of law and order in the U.S.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of The War on Cops.

Today's Tune: Lord Huron - Meet Me In The Woods (Live on KEXP)

Today's Tune: Lord Huron - I Will Be Back One Day (CARDINAL SESSIONS)

Getting Lost in Lord Huron’s Immersive Worlds

By Mike Hilleary

https://www.pastemagazine.com/

April 14, 2015

Every track on Lord Huron’s 2012 debut Lonesome Dreams took its title and lyrical inspiration from an anthology of old western adventure tales. George Ranger Johnson, a prolific, but relatively underappreciated writer, wrote 10 installments of his series between the ‘60s and ‘80s, with an eleventh incomplete work that never saw the light of day. Though Johnson does maintain a relatively sparse website, those interested in his writing will inevitably hit a brick wall in finding any of his out-of-print books, because Johnson does not actually exist.

Inspired by Kilgore Trout, the shapeshifting sci-fi writer referenced throughout Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, Johnson is but a piece of band founder Ben Schneider’s longstanding fascination with narrative world-building. When conceptualizing music videos for the various singles featured on Lonesome Dreams, Schneider and his bandmates Mark Berry (drums), Tom Renaud (guitar) and Miguel Briseno (bass) went so far as to re-enact the adventures described in Johnson’s stories. Naturally, Schneider played the role of the recurring protagonist “Lord Huron.”

“I really like when I work on something to have as much background and context as I can possibly have,” says Schneider in the backyard of his Mount Washington home located just outside downtown Los Angeles. “It helps me write the songs and and feel like it’s more fleshed out. The concepts are more real.” Providing listeners with several layers of meaning is key for Lord Huron. “I’ve always been drawn to stuff I can really inhabit and immerse myself in. We wanted to create projects that you engage on multiple levels. If you’re just interested in the music that’s totally cool. Just listen to the music. But if you’re interested in getting into some of the ephemera that we create around it, there’s this whole sort of world you can dive into. I’ve always sort of appreciated storytelling and these days it’s really easy to craft a very rich world across multiple media.”

Lord Huron is once again exploring this interconnectivity of art forms on their sophomore LP,Strange Trails. The 14-track album was recorded at Whispering Pines, a formerly abandoned studio Schneider and his bandmates renovated themselves last year. Located down an alleyway behind an auto shop in L.A.’s West Adams neighborhood, the space was discovered by the group after answering a Craigslist ad. Left unused for over 20 years, the place was in significant disrepair. But after stripping out a lot of old gear, cabling, and other equipment, the fixer-upper now functions as a legitimate clubhouse for recording, rehearsals and upcoming in-house performances.

No longer faced with the time-constrained restrictions that come with renting someone else’s space on a per diem basis, Schneider says recording lent itself to more experimentation. “It felt a little more natural,” he says. “We were able to live with the material a little bit more and I think that tightened up the songwriting and the arrangements.” The extra time also allowed Schneider to expand on the setting and tenor that was established with the group’s first record. Whereas Lonesome Dreams glided exclusively on a frontier, man-with-no-name romanticism, Strange Trails takes that same pulp aesthetic and broadens its scope. Here Lord Huron veers narratives into weirder, darker places such as vintage sci-fi or horror. From being confronted by a “visitor…from the great beyond” on “Until the Night Turns,” to a living corpse that refuses to buried in “Dead Man’s Hand,” to a cursed spirit on a path of vengeance and death in “The World Ender,” the band’s campfire cast of characters all endure more otherworldly journeys.

Schneider says horror genre comics such as Alan Moore’s run of Swamp Thing and the work of Charles Burns—best known for the graphic novel Black Hole—were a large influence on this tonal shift. “On the road touring I was reading a lot of comics. When we were in a new town I would go to the record store and the comic store and I’d come back with a couple things.” As the rollout for Strange Trails kicks into gear, Schneider has already begun building the album’s multi-media world around this comic book inspiration. The artwork for their most recent single, “The World Ender,” consists of an aged comic book cover starring a protagonist decked out with a Ghost Rider skull and leather jacket. Taking things even further, Schneider says he plans to publish his own limited comic series, co-written with his sister, featuring characters and connective threads born out of certain songs. With his own chapter-based music videos and short films also in the works, Schneider says, “We’ll see what else we come up with. We started this whole other world with Strange Trails that revolves around the stories in these songs.”

As Schneider and his band continue to push the boundaries of an album’s visual element beyond a well-crafted cover sleeve, the focus of Lord Huron always returns to the music and its ability to transport audiences somewhere else—like any good tale should. “For me it’s more about communicating a story,” Schneider says. “If it’s not a literal story, some sort of mood and vibe which communicates a narrative in its own way. That’s the main thing I’m trying to do: communicate a narrative that comes in varying degrees of storytelling.”

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2015/04/getting-lost-in-lord-hurons-immersive-worlds.html

Meet Lord Huron, a Musical Project That Is Also an Alternate Reality Game

NICOLE PERLROTH

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/
February 19, 2014



OAKLAND, Calif. — Ask Ben Schneider to name the inspiration for his band, Lord Huron, and he will name George Ranger Johnson, one of the more prolific Western adventure novelists you’ve never heard of.

That’s because Mr. Schneider, Lord Huron’s frontman, made him up. He made up George Ranger Johnson’s website, too. Admirers looking to buy one of Mr. Johnson’s novels will be disappointed to find they are all, conveniently, out of print, and that all the book titles are identical to Lord Huron songs.

George Ranger Johnson is, in fact, just one character in the digital fantasy world Mr. Schneider has created for his band, Lord Huron.Lord Huron songs have accompanying video “trailers” on YouTube, each featuring the band’s protagonist, Lord Huron, played by Mr. Schneider, his trusty companion, Admiral Blaquefut (drummer Mark Berry), and band members Miguel Briseno (bass, percussion), Tom Renaud (guitar, vocals) and Karl Kerfoot (guitar, vocals) as they venture across deserts, mountaintops and tundras re-enacting the adventures of a fake novel series written by an author who does not exist offline.

“People are always lamenting the loss of the record sleeve, which I understand,” Mr. Schneider said recently over coffee. “I loved looking at the artwork and imagining the people who made the music and the lives they inhabited. But now I think we can create an even richer experience with new technology available to us.”

The effect is a digital scavenger hunt of sorts with multiple entry points to the band’s music beyond Pandora, Spotify and old-fashioned tours and radio. Some of the band’s YouTube trailers have received half a million views. Fans also find their music on Vimeo and via Lord Huron’s digital “postcards,” short snippets of song and art the band posts to its Facebook page and Twitter account.

“The more places you are, the more people you can reach,” Mr. Schneider said. It also explains Lord Huron’s diverse audience, which ranges from enthusiastic 16-year-old girls to 60-year-old men.

Mr. Schneider, the soft-spoken digital artist who started Lord Huron as a solo visual and musical project four years ago, is a long way from his hometown, Okemos, Mich. Lord Huron is now headlining its first tour, after touring with Alt-J, the futuristic indie band, last September. The band made the rounds at the Coachella, South by Southwest, Outside Lands, Bonnaroo and Firefly music festivals last year and popped up on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Kimmel Live and, conspicuously, in a recent Zales ad.Four years ago, Mr. Schneider was working in a job he loathed as art director at a small advertising agency in Los Angeles, developing projects for pizza chains and an online poker outfit.

He found a creative outlet in alternate reality games, or A.R.G.s, interactive games that use multiple media and game elements to tell a story. A.R.G. designers will often leave digital crumbs and puzzles on various websites — some for fake organizations or fake people (like Mr. Johnson) — for players to follow. Players often try to solve the games communally by pooling clues together in online discussion forums, where commenters are often suspected of being the game designers themselves.

A.R.G. historians often pinpoint Pink Floyd’s “Publius Enigma” as the first Alternate Reality game, which began when someone named “Publius” began posting enigmatic messages in a Pink Floyd Usenet forum in 1994. Later that year, the words “ENIGMA PUBLIUS” appeared in the band’s concert lights at a New Jersey concert. (Spoiler alert: the Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason said in his biography that Publius Enigma was the work of the band’s record label.)

Mr. Schneider designed visually elaborate A.R.G.s of his own. The most intricate involved a fake history exhibit for a fake scholarly society that believed Antarctica was once inhabited by a fake ancient civilization. He built a website for the society, which included biographies for some of its most respected scholars. At one point, the site promoted a real world exhibit, where Mr. Schneider hired actors to play members of the society and an opposing society who boycotted the exhibit outside. The exhibit included music, but mostly as an afterthought.

Not many showed up. Those that did were a little perplexed. “People really didn’t know what to make of it,” Mr. Schneider said. “The actors I could afford weren’t exactly the best. So people got there and they were just kind of confused.”

He never claimed authorship and, to this day, he will not name the project because he likes the idea of the puppet master remaining forever anonymous. (Perhaps this article will offer resourceful players the final clue.)

But his projects floundered and the day job was creatively draining. “I just couldn’t find a place for myself in the art world,” he said. “It wasn’t for me.”

In 2010, Mr. Schneider left Los Angeles for a week to regroup on the shores of Lake Huron, in his home state, Michigan. He recorded a few songs and created the artwork for what would later become Lord Huron. With some nudging from his sister, he left some of his CDs and art on a merchandise table at the Woodsist festival in Big Sur, Calif., where they were picked up by the San Francisco music blogger Yourstru.ly.

Soon people were asking when Lord Huron would be going on tour. That presented a few logistical problems. “I didn’t really know any other musicians.”

He called up the only musicians he knew: His childhood friends from Okemos. They played their first show in May 2010 and are still touring together four years later.

Mr. Schneider says he was determined to give Lord Huron some of the immersive flavor of his multimedia installations. “You can enjoy the music on your own if you want to, but I also wanted there to be more to dig into.”The band worked with Jacob Mendel, a friend from Michigan, to create their first official music video, “The Stranger.” Videos for “Lonesome Dreams”, “Time To Run” and “Mighty” and followed. Lord Huron offered The New York Times an exclusive look at the new video for “She Lit a Fire”.

Each video claims to be based on chapters in George Ranger Johnson’s “Lonesome Dream” novel series. They feature the band wandering across icy plateaus, rocky coasts, and deserts, often in locations that are difficult to pin down. In one, Lord Huron is chased by a group of what appear to be Villista bandits yelling “We will kill you” in Indonesian. Lord Huron replies, “Kau tidak akan pernah membawaku hidup-hidup!” The band’s EP covers and Facebook page are filled with imagery that doesn’t quite make sense: elephants in oceans, rivers running backward, a palm tree-filled Machu Picchu.

Mr. Schneider said the band’s videos and art were intended to be disorienting and foster a sense of dislocation, like his music. His lyrics dwell on lonesome themes and strange places, and though Lord Huron’s sound has been compared to indie bands like My Morning Jacket and Fleet Foxes, it has an undeniable world influence, too.

“It’s a hodgepodge of different music and cultures that you can’t quite put your finger on,” he says.

The band is working on its next album and experimenting with new digital entry points. Before heading out on tour last January, Mr. Schneider made a brief pit stop in Michigan to see his family and put together a treasure hunt for his 18-month-old nephew to discover when he turns 5.

He is trying to do something similar for Lord Huron. The band is contemplating using a smartphone app that would force listeners to visit a specific physical location — perhaps a strange mountain top, desert or icy tundra — to unlock a Lord Huron song.

“Maybe that’s what I’m trying to create,” Mr. Schneider said. “A musical place that is a little bit of a getaway.”

https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/meet-lord-huron-a-musical-project-that-is-also-an-alternate-reality-game/?_r=0