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IS there any political agenda in this lovely Russian folk song?

Not at all. It’s about simple pleasures and real life.

(Click on captions for translation.)

SINCE we’ve been discussing folk music lately, I’d like to examine this famous ‘Hilltop” Coca-Cola ad of the 1970s. It features a great example of what might be called anti-folk music, created with the specific intent of destroying the distinctive, life-giving traditions that create folk music. (Thank you to a reader for sending this and noting its significance.)

But first, what are “folk?”

Briefly, the folk are living and breathing communities, extended families, peoples, existing over the course of successive generations and over enough time to create their own traditions and their own communal spirit. In Latin, they are gens — clans, tribes, peoples and nations connected by blood and place. Folk are always changing. They are never stable and yet there are threads of consistency made up of ideas, experiences, and historic events, but also of the inherited, collective personalities of different peoples based both in biology and the supernatural as experienced collectively. That’s why we can speak of the folk as possessing a soul.

One of the oddest things about modern advertising is that commercials often have seemingly little to do with the products being sold. What in the world does this sentimental anthem sung improbably on a hilltop have to do with a sugary soft drink?

Let’s think about that.

The video with its repetitive, slow-moving melody features people of different folk in traditional dress — clothes which have been replaced in the real world by the universal, Marxist uniform of denim and T-shirts. They wear dreamy smiles and vacant looks, as if drugged. Unsurprisingly, young and beautiful whites take the lead. They are naturally at the forefront of the song’s utopian dream — a dream of “perfect harmony.”

Apple trees and honey bees and snow-white turtledoves …

How cleverly these words imitate real folk music. They are not used, however, to evoke everyday life, but a one-world paradise.

The song takes things fundamentally good — the natural affinity of different folks and the worthy ideal of peace among them — and twists them, promoting a dream that ironically results in the destruction of different peoples.

Dr. Jop Pollman wrote in the outstanding little songbook, Laughing Meadows (Grailville Publications, 1947): Read More »

ALAN writes:

Lawrence Auster was quite right to oppose the totalitarian ideology of multiculturalism and to oppose it for the right reasons.

In 1847, Engels wrote about Communism:

“What will be the attitude of communism to existing nationalities?

“The nationalities of the peoples associating themselves in accordance with the principle of community [ i.e., the principle of Communism ] will be compelled to mingle with each other as a result of this association and thereby to dissolve themselves, just as the various estate and class distinctions must disappear through the abolition of their basis, private property.”

— Cited by Thorin Reynolds in “Multiculturalism is Communism”, Faith and Heritage

By which he meant: Communists will force people who want nothing to do with each other to associate with each other. Each individual will thus be forced to erase his mind, his identity, and his capacity for thought, which are of course the most fundamental private property—which Communists also do not like.

You read it there—straight from the pen of one of Communism’s proponents.

Americans today are living in such a Communist nightmare, which of course is never called a Communist nightmare. It was achieved by the enactment of Communist tactics like non-discrimination, anti-discrimination, affirmative action, anti-racism, and racial and ethnic preferences; and the criminalization of the right of free association in an open marketplace.

Unfortunately there are no reasons to believe Americans will not continue to make it much worse than it is and has been for quite some years now.

SOME comic relief.

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Lawrence Auster, 1949-2013

“THE global conception of morality results, I would argue, in a distortion of morality rather than its fulfillment. Ethics could be defined as a sense of responsibility toward other human beings and the consequent willingness to put restraints on one’s own behavior. As a personal development, a sense of ethics normally originates in the family and among those we are close to and then is extended outward in widening circles to other human beings. The distortion of this natural basis of morality is brought about when it is applied in the abstract to collectivities of human beings, or even to the human race as a whole. Even thoughtful liberals are beginning to realize the impossible burden such an obligation places on human nature. As Christopher Lasch has written:

“My study of the family suggested … that the capacity for loyalty is stretched too thin when it tries to attach itself to the hypothetical solidarity of the whole human race. It needs to attach itself to specific people and places, not to an abstract ideal of universal human rights. We love particular men and women, not humanity in general. The dream of universal brotherhood, because it rests on the sentimental fiction that men and women are all the same, cannot survive the discovery that they are not.

“This sentimental fiction arises, I think, when we take our own personal experience of love of ethical responsibility and say: ‘because I feel this for one or a few people, and because this feeling is good, I must feel the same way toward everyone, I must act on the same basis toward the entire human race as a collective whole.’ Once people have taken this stand, and especially if they try to convert it into public policy, all rational limits of common sense or self-interest are thrown out the window. Ultimately, this obligation must be imposed by political force, since no one can actually love the whole human race. What starts, then, as a personal sense of compassion and responsibility for individuals ends as a collectivized ethics which compels men to love the foreigner (not just the individual foreigner, but all foreigners) more than their own.”

 — Lawrence Auster, The Path to National Suicide – An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism (American Immigration Control Foundation, 1990), p. 79. Read More »

“MORE immigration in 2022 alone than 1945-2000 combined, and off the back of the largest decrease in living standards in modern history. If you wanted a model for how to destroy a country, this is it.

“I can’t legally say what should happen to the MPs and others who enabled this. It’s historically the biggest demographic transformation since the Anglo-Saxon invasions to a people who wanted and voted for the opposite.”

— Maximus

“WINSTON had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey−fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean−mindedness which she managed to carry about with her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.”

— George Orwell, 1984

”THE more the virtue of a being is perfect and against its degree of goodness eminent, the more its desire for the good is universal and the more it seeks and works towards the good in beings which are distant from itself. For imperfect beings tend towards the mere good of the individual as properly understood; perfect beings tend towards the good of the species; and the most perfect beings towards the good of the genus. But God, Who is most perfectly good, tends towards the good of being as a whole. And thus not without reason it is said that the good as such is diffusive; for the more a being is good, the more it spreads forth its goodness to beings which are further from itself. And because that which is most perfect in each genus is the exemplar and measure of all which is contained in the genus, God, Who is most perfect in goodness and Who spreads forth this goodness most universally, must be the exemplar of all beings which give forth any goodness.”

— St. Thomas Aquinas, ” III Contra Gentiles, c. 24

“AVOID sloth, bad company, dangerous conversations, and games; remembering that time passes and never returns, that you have a soul, and that if you lose your soul, you lose all.”

—- St. Leonard of Port Maurice

THANKSGIVING DAY is a great American tradition, a day of gratitude, feasting and togetherness.

Among the many things I am grateful for today are my readers. May this day bring you simple pleasures, peace and an abundance of thankfulness.

Some comic relief:

I HAVEN’T viewed this yet, but it comes highly recommended.

Farm Boy, George Clausen

“[E]ACH SEX needs to deeply consider and be grateful for the gifts and talents of the opposite sex. In our time, what men give to the world is absolutely taken for granted. Men are disrespected by our culture and in law, are degraded in popular entertainment and by our institutions. While the world turns itself upside down to ensure the success of females and provide them help, male success and well-being are completely ignored even as men are blamed for the existence of all evils. Women need to stop and truly think about what the world would be like without men. Roads, buildings, running water, electric gadgets, centralized heat, air-conditioning, airplanes, antibiotics — as Camille Paglia put it, without men, we’d be living in grass huts. And women need to show some appreciation and respect for that fact. At the same time, we need to guard against overreaction to the brutal ways in which men’s lives have been taken for granted, and teach our children to have an ordinate respect for women, without whom men wouldn’t be inspired to build what they do, and would have no families to build for. Mothers, praise up little boys and men — and praise them up to little girls. Model having respect for the masculine to them. Fathers, teach your sons to respect and be ordinately protective of girls and women. Vive la différence!”

— Fisheaters

Gerard Dou, An Old Woman at Prayer before her Meal c. 1645-50

Thanksgiving for All God’s Gifts

O God, whose mercies are without number, and whose goodness is an inexhaustible treasure, we render thanks to Thy most kindly Majesty for the gifts Thou hast given, evermore beseeching Thy goodness, that whilst Thou hearest the prayers of those who ask, so deserting them not, do Thou prepare them for the blessings yet to come.

(Roman Missal)

More prayers of thanksgiving can be found here.

“AND so shall the world be so much beautified by the punishment of the wicked, as it hath been defiled and disfigured through their offences. When a man hath by reason of some great fall put his arm out of joint, the more it is out of joint, the more grief and pain must he afterwards abide, before it can be set in joint again, and brought to his due proper place. Now whereas the wicked have disordered all things in this world, and set them out of joint, and wrenched them out of their natural places, when that heavenly reformer shall come to restore the world by punishment of so many disorders, how great shall the punishment be, where so many and so great disorders have been?”

— Venerable Louis of Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation, “Thursday Night Meditation“

THE HOUSEWIFE’S LAMENT
(from the diary of Mrs. Sara A. Price, written between 1850 and 1900)

One day I was walking, I heard a complaining,
I spied an old woman the picture of gloom.
She gazed at the mud on her doorstep, ’twas raining,
And this was her song as she wielded her broom.

O, life is a toil and love is a trouble,
Beauty will fade and riches will flee,
Pleasures, they dwindle and prices they double,
And nothing is as I would wish it to be.

There’s too much of worriment goes in a bonnet,
There’s too much of ironing goes in a shirt.
There’s nothing that pays for the time you waste on it,
There’s nothing that lasts us but trouble and dirt.

In March it is mud, it is slush in December,
The midsummer breezes are loaded with dust.
In fall the leaves litter, in muddy September
The wallpaper rots and the candlesticks rust. Read More »