Is it Time for Chorus Discussions Again?

Posting by John Brightly (YRC 1953-1956)  (JBrightlyYRCCorrespondence@gmail.com)

Is it Time for Chorus Discussions Again?

Thinking about singing again with the Chorus in NYC, looking forward to meeting again with always gracious George Litton -- Chorus member way back, president of the Russian Club -- and singing at a place with a very positive activist history, all leads me to think about the reasons why we early Chorus members came together, reasons that perhaps have always been there, and to question what further role(s) we might play. 

Reasons:  There were many of them of course.  The music we love.  But also, as students, trying to understand Russia, the USSR, and the world we lived in. Singing and discussing, more singing and more discussing.  Some, like Boris Pushkarev  no doubt would have liked to storm the Kremlin and introduce a better system.  Although we thought we had the better system, mostly we wished to know, to understand.

George brought speakers:  Kerensky, seemingly a pleasant academic in a tweed jacket, not evidencing even moderate personal power -- how could it be that he once headed the provisional government of Russia?  William Sloane Coffin, relating tales of his liaison with the Red army in WWII and singing Russian folk songs with us  – Coffin, who later powerfully opposed the US devastation of Vietnam, and who had to worry as an individual about being jailed for dissidence.  Reinhold Niebuhr discussing the relationship between individual morality and the purposes and actions of the state.

Endless discussions and then going to Russia – to try to understand, to engage in cultural exchange with people in a repressed society.  What could we bring to that exchange? What did we bring?

At one point, it may have been at Denis’s suggestion, we wrote papers about the USA: small histories, statistics, compilations, to acquaint ourselves with our county, so we might know something, so that we could say something to the people we would meet on the streets in Russia and its colonies, and at the Youth Conference sponsored by the Soviets in Helsinki , monitored by their goon squads.

We were quite innocent in our understandings then.  What might we learn now? What can we do? Now that we are presumably less innocent, more mature, might we not have important things to communicate to each other? What have we since learned about the USA?  Might we not consider the roles we might yet play, what we might yet effect, either as Chorus members or as individuals working in other organizations? To perceive why this might be important for our children and grandchildren, we need only to look around at the devastation in our own society and around the world caused by our own actions.  But why we as individuals? Can we not look to our institutions? Alas, the answer is clear; our major institutions and we have caused this devastation.

In this vein, the following quote is from an essay about the early history of the Chorus written by John Francis:
“But have no doubt, Denis was engaged in educating an elite. It was not part of a strategy, there was no plan or plot. It was more the nature of an assumption than an intention. On one occasion following an afternoon rehearsal, a lengthy discussion arose around some notion of Ortega, who figured commonly in our discussions. Casually Denis made reference to our future roles as arbiters of value, again by presupposition rather than direct assertion. I [John Francis] balked at the presupposition and queried it. Denis looked about, wide-eyed into some imaginary vacant space, and said, as if puzzled: ‘If not you, who? ‘  Denis’s question was not thrown out as a challenge. But the impact was seismic and unforgettable.  This power came from its status as an observation, from its simple logic and from the irrefutable assumption that others were no different from us, that there was no one different from us to fill those roles in our stead.  Not that others were excluded, but no alternate allocation of responsibility was more ready, likely, or plausible. It was this sense, a sense largely unacknowledged and unarticulated, that in those days was the source, in part at least, of the energy required by the range of tasks we took on.”

There is reason to believe in the Chorus as having something beautiful to communicate as singers.  But there has always been something more to the Chorus -- revealed in discussions and plans and actions.  Denis has said that the kind of unity in communication that may be achieved in a musical performance was extremely difficult, possibly impossible to attain in other areas -- such as politics. Without doubt.  But, we still have common values, do we not?

But where are we in our values, in our understandings?  In our lifetimes we have seen the USA become completely transformed into a military empire, funded by us at about a trillion dollars a year with hardly a ripple of dissent here, with military installations in most of the counties of the world, a military empire that thinks it knows what to do in and with the world. But we are no longer as innocent as we once were; we now know what we have done in Iran, Guatamala, Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Rwanda (omission), Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.  We now know that the dominant theme of our foreign policy has been total disregard for the lives and well-being of other peoples abroad and at home. But we also know that there are still counter themes that we can contemplate and support.

If there is any reason to question these matters, there are of course any number of sources, including Chalmers Johnson’s “Nemesis, The Last Days of the American Republic”, also his last book, “Dismantling the Empire, Americas Last Hope”, Andrew Bacevitch’s “Washington Rules, America’s Path to Permanent War”, Amy Goodman’s journalism, following in the footsteps of I.F. Stone, at DemocracyNow.org. 

Or, on the other side, we can contemplate the world militarized in space by the USA and fighting a global war in 2050, as extrapolated by Stratfor’s  founder George Friedman in  “The Next Hundred Years,  A Forecast for the 21st Century”.

Chalmers Johnson tells us, as do others, that now there is no one else but us to deal with these issues.  He has, as do others, suggestions for us to come together in organizations to act, to try to save what’s left of our legacy for our children.

One final note here.  We all know now about our CIA’s overthrow under Eisenhower and Dulles of the first democratically elected government in Iran’s history, our reinstatement of the Shah, the training of his brutal, torturing secret police, and the consequent suffering of the Iranian people that led to the rise of the Mullahs and to the current state of affairs with Iran. We know about our actions in Vietnam under Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. We all know now how we supported Saddam as an ally even as he gassed his own people – the precedent being the British using poison gas on the people of the country of Iraq, the country they cobbled together for their own reasons of empire – and we know about our giving military intelligence to both sides in the Iraq Iran war. We know how our sanctions on Iraq and our destruction of its civilian infrastructure led to the deaths of perhaps a half million Iraqi children (and how it was condoned by Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Blair). We know about the consequences of our invasion of Iraq. We now know how we funded the war against the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan by supporting Ben Laden , Al-Quaeda, and other fundamentalists, and how that has come back to harm us.  We know how our vaunted defense establishment could not protect the US and whose actions under our incompetent political leadership create enemies on a grand scale for us.  We now know that the military industrial complex is more powerful than Obama who otherwise appears to be a reasonable and moral person.

But what we were shocked to learn, even though by now we should no longer be shocked by the actions of our government, just outraged, was that Carter and Brezinski  intended, attempted and succeeded in provoking the Soviets into invading Afghanistan – to give the Soviets their own Vietnam.

We did not know that Carter and Brezinski began to arm the mujahideen and support their guerilla actions against what was then a left-leaning but relatively stable Afghan government (in a relatively peaceful Afghanistan) not after, but before the Soviet invasion;  that Brezinski in an interview admitted to this and justified his and Carter’s actions in spite of the consequent suffering of the Afghani people -- two million dead with similar numbers of refugees back  then -- in spite of the years of civil war in Afghanistan subsequent to the Soviet withdrawal , when we threw the country away like a used paper cup, leaving it to the warlords we had armed -- and in spite of the rise of Al-Quaeda and our current quagmire.

And finally what about the complicity of our fourth estate, both the commercial media and most of the time our public media in dealing with our military empire?  Of course the commercial media is hopelessly complicit. And when our public media talks endlessly about Afghanistan it doesn’t tell the simple truth, that the war was lost when we provoked the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan (when we lost our own country as well), that it was lost when Bush dealt with Al-Quaeda and the Taliban in his ill-conceived and self-defeating way, even while promising  hope to the Afghan people which he and we never delivered; that it continues to be lost, and that Obama cannot get us out in any simple fashion because of the history and consequences of our actions there and because of the enormous  influence of the military industrial complex on politics in the USA. That the only sensible thing we can do now is to try to modify the underlying structure that leads to permanent war – to try to avoid the next war.

The question remains. What can we do to redeem ourselves -- so that there will be something left for our grandchildren?

John and Ellen Brightly
        John, Chorus member in ‘53, John and Ellen were married with the Chorus singing and very present in ’64, Ellen sang with the Chorus in “Life for the Tsar” by Glinka
       JBrightlyYRCCorrespondence@gmail.com