The collapse of the New York Times’ “Russian bounties” campaign

By Patrick Martin WSWS.ORG  10 July 2020

Less than two weeks after it kicked off a media frenzy with its front-page report claiming that the Russian military intelligence agency GRU had paid bounties to Taliban fighters in Afghanistan to kill American soldiers, the New York Times published an editorial effectively conceding that there was no factual basis for its reporting.

The editorial appeared on Wednesday, July 8, one day after General Frank McKenzie, the commander of Centcom, with overall responsibility for Afghanistan and the Middle East, told the press that there was no evidence that any US soldiers had been killed because of the alleged Russian bounties.

“I didn’t find that there was a causative link there,” McKenzie said, “the intel case wasn’t proved to me.” In any case, he continued, no additional precautions were required because the US military already takes “extreme force protection measures” in Afghanistan “whether the Russians are paying the Taliban or not.”

McKenzie was speaking Tuesday by telephone to a group of reporters including the Associated Press, which ran a report. The Times did not report his comments, which diametrically contradicted the newspaper’s own reporting of June 27.

But that night, the newspaper’s editorial page threw in the towel, publishing an editorial on the Times web site which appeared the next morning in the print edition, under the headline, “Don’t Let Russian Meddling Derail Afghanistan Withdrawal Plans.”

The editorial begins with the admission: “There’s a lot still missing from the reports that Russia paid for attacks on American and other coalition forces in Afghanistan. That’s why it’s critical that emotions and politics be kept at bay until the facts are in.”

This appeal for waiting “until the facts are in” is remarkable since the Times itself had claimed to be in possession of the facts about alleged Russian efforts to murder American soldiers, citing unnamed “intelligence officials,” and it gave the signal for a vast media campaign aimed at whipping up a very specific “emotion,” hatred of Russia.

Moreover, the Democratic Party—with which the Times is closely allied—immediately seized on this report to resurrect its long-discredited claims that Trump is a Russian stooge and does nothing without Vladimir Putin’s direction and approval.

This was the basis, first of the Mueller investigation and then of the impeachment inquiry, neither of which developed any credible evidence to back the McCarthyite howling about the White House doing the bidding of the Kremlin. Now the Times report has become the basis for demands by Democrats, and many Republicans, that Trump take immediate action that would, in the words of one senator, result in Russians going home “in body bags.”

The editorial further admits that there was no independent reporting to back the claims of Russian bounty payments. Instead, its articles “cite intelligence findings.” In other words, the Times served as a conduit for unnamed officials, apparently in the CIA, who leaked uncorroborated and disputed claims, allegedly based on the interrogation of prisoners captured in the war with the Taliban. The CIA did not divulge who these prisoners are, where they are being held, and what torture or other mistreatment they may have been subjected to.

The editorial goes on to say: “Then there’s the question of the motives behind the leaks and the solidity of the information.”

One might think that a first rule of journalism would be to question the motives of officials when they come forward with such inflammatory allegations, as well as to seek confirmation of claims made by an agency which specializes in lying and political provocations. However, that is not the relationship between the New York Times and the CIA.

On the contrary, the Times has been a willing stenographer and propagandist for the US intelligence services for many decades, going back to the “weapons of mass destruction” fraud that paved the way to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and well before.

The editorial continues: “Other questions abound: When did the reported payments begin? Were they payback for American support of Afghan militants against Soviet troops there in the 1980s, or something else? Were the payments a factor in the deaths of any American or other coalition troops? Was the intelligence tweaked by people seeking to hinder efforts to withdraw American troops?”

These are the questions that should, of course, have been addressed before the Times published its front-page “exposé.” The fact that they are only raised now, in an editorial 12 days later, is a declaration of journalistic bankruptcy.

As the last question in the list suggests, as well as the headline of the editorial, it now appears that CIA officials opposed to Trump’s decision to pull most US troops out of Afghanistan on a timetable geared to the November 3 election leaked the “bounties” claim to the Times to generate political pressure to overturn that decision. They were successful, as the White House has now delayed the final withdrawal, meaning that it can be more easily reversed by an incoming Democratic administration if Trump loses the election.

The Times is not the only “news” organization with egg on its face after the collapse of the “bounties” campaign. NBC News published a similar retraction on its web site, under the defensive headline, “US officials say intel on Russian bounties was less than conclusive. That misses the big picture.”

NBC admits that a “growing chorus of American officials” say that the evidence of Russian bounties is “less than conclusive.” But it argues that the “big picture” is the unsurprising news that Russian and American interests in Afghanistan do not coincide, and that Moscow has sought to cultivate relations with the Taliban in recent years, and even provide indirect support.

NBC casts some resentful blame on the Times for calling the report on the bounties a “finding” of the intelligence community, i.e., a consensus assessment, which turned out not to be true. The CIA drew its conclusion with only “moderate confidence”—a term of art that means, in effect, “we made it up”—while the National Security Agency, an arm of the Pentagon, said “it could not corroborate” the reports.

None of this alters the fact that the allegation of Russian bounties has entered the bloodstream of American capitalist politics like snake venom for which there is no antidote.

Hence the spectacle of Representative Jason Crow, a former Army special forces officer in Afghanistan, one of the CIA Democrats whose rise was analyzed and exposed by the WSWS in 2018, joining with Republican Liz Cheney, the daughter of the former vice president and unindicted war criminal, to co-sponsor an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act barring the Trump administration from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan until it has taken action over the allegations of “Russian bounties.”

There is little doubt that Democratic candidates, from Joe Biden on down, will be making an issue of Trump’s failure to “punish” Russia for killing American soldiers right through November 3, regardless of the abject disavowal of these bogus charges by the Times.

Trump’s Postcard to America From the Shrine of Hypocrisy

by LYNNETTE GREY BULL

Mt. Rushmore Reimagined in Four Sacred Colors. Image: Alter-Native Media.

“This monument will never be desecrated,” Donald Trump bloviated at his second rally during the COVID-19 pandemic, a 4^th of July white supremacy-fest held in the shadow of Mount Rushmore. The mask-less crowd roared its approval. This is his response to a nation roiled by the dual crisis of an unprecedented pandemic and the racial reckoning rumbling through our nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In a time of unparalleled crisis, he chooses to make a promise to our nation. But not a promise to use his office to defend the country from a virus that has killed more than 130,000 of our fellow citizens, nor a promise to protect the livelihoods of millions who have lost their jobs during the pandemic. Not a promise to confront systemic and institutionalized racism. And certainly not a promise to defend our elections from foreign interference. No, Trump’s promise is to defend the Confederacy and the Lost Cause. Maybe Stephen Miller can find him a portrait of Jefferson Davis to replace the one of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office? But then again, Steve Bannon probably didn’t tell Trump who Jefferson Davis was.

At this moment, what does this promise really mean for the American people? What is protected by protecting Mount Rushmore? Who exactly is he protecting these MAGA masses from? He promised that Mount Rushmore would never be desecrated.

But Mount Rushmore is a desecration. It is important to understand that the Black Hills or Paha Sapa, where Rushmore is located, is the Holy Land of the Lakota and Cheyenne, and that our spiritual life-ways and Creation narratives revolve around this sacred sanctuary. In Lakota, it is He Sapa Wakan, or “The Heart of Everything That Is.” For the Cheyenne, Nóávóse, (Grizzly) Bear Butte, is the Center of the Universe. A day before he was arrested, Nick Tilsen, the president of NDN Collective and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation, told CNN that the Black Hills “are a sacred place that I take my family and my children to, like the Vatican for Catholics or Mecca for Muslims. The Hills are where I feel most connected to Creator.”

Tilsen led roughly 150 protestors, 15 of whom were arrested for refusing to disperse, in an attempt to block the road to Trump’s rally in the memory of our ancestors who gave all for this land. Calling Trump’s rally a racist political stunt, these indigenous-led activists denounced the United States occupation of the Black Hills and demanded that the monstrosity be removed. Tilsen has been charged with two felonies. This is “law and order” beneath Trump’s proudly waving “stars and bars.”

Tilsen is right. Mount Rushmore is a constant reminder of colonialism and an affront to the deep spiritual importance of the region. This religious significance is as true now as it was in 1927 when Gutzon Borglum set his chisel to stone, and defaced the natural “monument” our elders revered as the Six Grandfathers, a mountain that was seen by the Lakota as the embodiment of our guides and guardians, who provided direction.

Whatever patriotic association Americans may have with Mount Rushmore, it was originally planned as little more than a tourist trap — a grotesque eye saw of cowboys and Western explorers — not an edifice purportedly dedicated to presidents, democracy and freedom. Its entire purpose was economic development. Doane Robinson, the historian who dreamt up the monument, simply wanted to attract more visitors to an area that was struggling to keep up a stream of tourism without something similar to Yellowstone to pull in coastal dollars. Fittingly, Mount “Rushmore” was named after a forgotten New York City investor, Charles Rushmore, who liked to vacation in the region to kill our four-legged relatives. Locals named it after him, pandering to his ego, presumably to convince him to return more frequently.

Mount Rushmore has no actual connection to any US history that is worth celebrating. Instead, it is connected to death, hate, violence, colonialism, and war. It embodies the United States merciless pursuit of the material riches of indigenous lands and the serial breaking of treaties, which began with the theft of the Black Hills in 1877 and culminated in the eventual dissolution of the Great Sioux Reservation for white settlers to colonize and mine. According to the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, what became the entire western half of South Dakota was meant to be Lakota land, in perpetuity.

When the activists blocking the road to Trump’s rally said he didn’t have permission to enter the Black Hills and that the land was stolen, they were not being metaphorical. The sacred Black Hills are enshrined in the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, to have been set aside forever for the “undisturbed use and occupancy” of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and the allied Arapaho. But forever only lasted 6 years. After the Panic of 1873 and collapse of the Northern Pacific Railroad, Lieutenant Colonel George A. Custer furrowed the “Thieves Road,” the 1874 military expedition into the Black Hills which was mounted under the false pretense of seeking a site to build a fort to protect our people against colonists and prospectors. One of Custer’s “practical miners,” H.N. Ross, discovered gold, as was expected from the decades-old rumors, and within two months of Custer’s departure from the Hills, an estimated 15,000 illegal squatters mining for gold had invaded our Holy Land.

When the Lakota wouldn’t sell the Black Hills, the military was dispatched in 1876. It was Custer’s last foray into our territory, and it ended aside the Little Bighorn River. The Grant administration’s response was to literally starve our ancestors, who were placed in internment camps, and forced to enter into a bogus “agreement” to relinquish the Black Hills that is considered invalid by both by the tribal nations involved and the US Supreme Court. The land grab didn’t end with the Black Hills, as the Great Sioux Nation was continually broken up into smaller and smaller disconnected parcels of land that now compromise the current Lakota reservations.

“A more ripe and rank case of dishonorable dealings will never, in all probability, be found in our history,” stated the US Supreme Court on June 30^th, 1980, when it affirmed the decision of the US Court of Claims in favor of the Great Sioux Nation in US v. Sioux Nation of Indians. The US Court of Claims found that the Great Sioux Nation was never compensated for the broken treaty, and that the subsequent “sell or starve” duress invalidated the “agreement.” The Lakota rejected the monetary award from the Court of Claims, some $17.5 million, which with interest has grown to over $1 billion. Our people don’t want the money, we want the land returned. $1 billion is a fraction of the wealth amassed by the Homestake Mine which was illegally established in contravention of the 1868 treaty. If you consider $1 billion to be a lot of money, then ask how much does Mecca cost? How much for Jerusalem?

The problems with Mount Rushmore go beyond the land. The monument itself is riddled with white supremacist politics. When Gutzon Borglum was hired by Robinson to desecrate The Six Grandfathers, it was directly due to his association with the Ku Klux Klan. With the Klan behind him, Borglum created the largest bas-relief sculpture in the world at Stone Mountain, Georgia, where Trump heroes Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are heroically presented with CSA president, Jefferson Davis. Stone Mountain has been called “the largest shrine to white supremacy in the history of the world” by the NAACP. Borglum was a white-supremacist, openly anti-Semitic, and particularly hateful and prejudiced towards indigenous people. His views were warmly welcomed by the Klan, where he served on several committees and helped negotiate their resurgence.

When he insisted that Mount Rushmore be a celebration of US presidents instead of storied cowboys, Borglum knew what he was doing. He wanted to protect his legacy and knew the power that deifying “patriotic” historical figures could have after working with the KKK. But his destruction of the sacred was also motivated by political opportunism. If you ever thought it was strange that Teddy Roosevelt, a contemporary or the sculptor, was chosen, then you probably won’t be surprised that TR was a good friend and patron of Borglum’s, as well as an ardent eugenicist and Indian hater. It is doubtful that Trump and the “patriots” at his Mount Rushmore rally would be so protective or historically revisionist of a monument to Wild Bill, Wyatt Earp, or any number of other dime novel legends.

In this Trumpian dystopia, defacing Borglum’s monument would be to deface the United States itself; protecting it would be to protect the ahistorical and abstract ideals that each of those faces represents to the people attending Trump’s rally. Trump, too, is purposefully tapping into this blissfully ignorant patriotic haze of presidential deification to spread his campaign message of willful obliviousness and the demonization of the Democratic Party and the liberal left. For the Lakota, the desecration of the stolen Six Grandfathers is tangible historical trauma, but the subject matter itself adds insult to injury: American presidents, two slave owners, all four white supremacists, carved into a sacred mountain on stolen land, each face a reminder of genocidal Indian policies.

George Washington declared a total extermination of the Iroquois people in 1779. Thomas Jefferson supported the massacre of the Cherokee and the Muscogee, declaring that all Natives should be driven beyond the Mississippi. Lincoln was responsible for the public hanging of the Dakota 38 (+2), the largest mass execution in US history. Theodore Roosevelt is infamous for his racist musings: “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is a dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.” But it is often conveniently forgotten that Roosevelt used the military to ethnically cleanse the indigenous lands he declared as national parks and monuments.

As an ethnic minority facing centuries of poverty, health disparity, and systemic oppression, the continent’s first people – my people – are in the highest risk category for coronavirus vulnerability. Tribes endure levels of poverty that most Americans can scarcely imagine, and some reservations already have lower life expectancies than the poorest developing nations in the world. On the Pine Ridge Reservation, a Lakota reservation 90 minutes from Mount Rushmore, the life expectancy of 48 years-old for men and 52 for women is already lower than anywhere in the western hemisphere except Haiti. The unemployment rate hovers around 80 percent. Meanwhile, the Indian Health Service hospitals that serve Indian reservations have a total of 33 ICU beds nationwide, but Trump has responded with a total lack of concern, buoyed by the complicit silence of his regional enablers on Capitol Hill, Liz Cheney, John Barrasso, John Thune and Mike Rounds.

Like the Black communities we have seen disproportionately impacted during the pandemic, tribal members are ravaged by diabetes and other chronic health conditions caused by enduring environmental injustice and decades of American apartheid. From housing shortages and non-existent hospitals to reservation districts entirely without electricity, internet, or running water, Indian Country provides what Benjamin R. Brady and Howard M. Bahr described in 2014 as the “perfect storm” for a pandemic. Trump’s failure to act on Coronavirus has led to an immeasurable loss on the nation’s reservations, a disaster that only continues to worsen and claim indigenous lives as he swears to protect a monument which embodies this country’s broken promises to those same people.

The COVID-19 crisis has glaringly revealed what the indigenous people of this nation have known for generations: institutionalized racism infects every aspect of what is supposed to be the federal-Indian trust responsibility. The pandemic represents a stark example of the systemic failures of federal Indian policy and administration in Indian Country, and the immense costs these failures have for tribal members. The desperate need for broad and bold action has come and gone, and in its wake our officials have left us with inaction. The Global Indigenous Council (GIC) has advocated for a Marshall Plan for Indian Country, which was furnished to the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates and articulates the necessity of a sweeping approach to Indian Country.

The COVID-19 pandemic and the chaos it continues to wreak on tribal lands only emphasizes the urgency for this plan. A piecemeal approach to a systemic, century-plus crisis, will only perpetuate what has been a cycle of failure for generations of tribal citizens. We need bold initiatives that will begin to repair the utterly broken trust between tribal citizens and the federal government. The Marshall Plan for Indian Country is now an integral part of my policy platform as I challenge Liz Cheney for Wyoming’s US House seat.

By hosting his rally at the “Shrine of Hypocrisy,” Trump made a mockery of the pain and struggles of the indigenous people who consider the Black Hills sacred. When he tells his base that he will protect Mount Rushmore, he is telling them that he will protect them from the Americans who are tired of the mythology of American exceptionalism which allows the erasure and reinvention of history; the erasure of the inequality that diseases the heart of this nation and allows the continued oppression of Indigenous, Black and Brown people in this country. Yes, Trump will protect his faithful’s God-given-right to be racist. Farcically, Trump declared below Mount Rushmore that he “will never allow an angry mob to erase our history.” Whose history is really being erased, though? And who is the angry mob destroying our country?

More articles by:LYNNETTE GREY BULL

Lynnette Grey Bull is a candidate for US Congress. Lynnette serves as Vice President of the Global Indigenous Council and is featured in the critically acclaimed Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) documentary, Somebody’s Daughter. She is Hunkpapa Lakota and Northern Arapaho, and is the first indigenous woman and woman of color to run for federal office in the State of Wyoming, challenging the incumbent, Rep. Liz Cheney. If elected, Lynnette would become the first Native American from Wyoming to hold federal office. She can be contacted at www.lynnettegreybull.com

Morricone: Maestro of Music and Image

by DAVID YEARSLEY COUNTERPUNCH JULY 10,2020

Morricone in the Festhalle Frankfurt in 2015. Photo: Sven-Sebastian Sajak, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born in 1929, the masterful composer Ennio Morricone, who died this week at the age of 91, made his entrance into the world just after the advent of synchronized cinematic sound. The Jazz Singer had come out just two years earlier. Over a life that spanned the history of the movie soundtrack, Morricone shaped the combined arts of music and image as few others have or will.

His melodies tended to the simple, even fragmentary: groups of three or four notes stolen from nature or the imagination (assuming there’s a difference) or even lifted from someone else; then a hesitation or pause before moving forward again. His harmonies were rarely adventurous, however rich and compelling. Yet Morricone was a revolutionary, transforming, even inventing ways of making music for moving pictures that exerted a huge influence on his contemporaries, his admirers, and, most enduringly, his audience. He was born and died in Rome, but his music for films stretched across the globe molding the way we see and understand landscapes, people, and history, from the South American rain forest to the grasslands and deserts of the North American West.

As a boy Morricone wanted to become a doctor: he admired his pediatrician, who also looked after Mussolini’s children. It was the age of movies and of fascism. Morricone’s father was a professional trumpet player, who gave a horn to his son and told him music not medicine would be his livelihood. The boy obeyed, and also studied composition from an early age, and his father’s contacts in the Roman music scene landed him arranging gigs in film and television.

Even in the midst of his toweringly prolific career as a composer of soundtracks and concert music, Morricone continued to play the trumpet as a member of the composers’ collective Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza from 1964 to 1980. The ensemble’s impressive and varied output reflected Morricone’s own more innovative impulses and his talent for drawing on disparate musical sources. Listen to his trumpet work on The Group’s 1970 LP the feed-back, a recording that brings together experimentalism with free jazz and funk, and hear how he strove to avoid producing conventional sounds from his instrument. Yet his timbre echoes Miles Davis, whom he admired, and in these spontaneous ideas meant to contribute to the whole rather than burnish individual glory, one can hear the thrilling High Plains pyrotechnics he ignited in the trumpet soloist for his Western scores, Michele Lacerenza.

The improvisation ensemble’s work grew indirectly out of the required pilgrimage Morricone and some of his colleagues made to the summer courses at Darmstadt, mecca of the European musical avant-garde, in 1958. But he turned away from modernism’s isolating, mathematical strictures in order to produce works that were, in his words, “to be listened to, rather … than remain an incommunicative theoretical system.”

The accessibility and vividness of his film scores often had a searing quality informed by his profound knowledge of music history and technique. Morricone was an erudite musician, basing his work on a foundation of study and hard-won technical skill, commitments he advised younger musicians to adopt. Among the many who heeded that advice was his admirer, Alessandro de Rosa, who collaborated with the composer in a wonderful book published in Italian in 2016 and translated in 2018 as Ennio Morricone: In his Own Words—an honest, thought-provoking, often unexpected, and ceaselessly informative book about the composer, his modes of creation, his aesthetic ideas, and the cast of fascinating and influential musicians and filmmakers he worked with over his six decades of dogged labor.

Rather than subject his musical material to abstruse procedures (though he was capable of these, too), Morricone often turned to the past, reanimating it through intuition and imagination. Daunting, disorienting chromaticism was a hallmark of his modernist contemporaries, but Morricone had a gift—and the attendant skill—for bringing it into the service of cinematic and political action. The credit sequence of his score for Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966) in which the French forces raid the freedom fighters’ hide-out is driven by the gunfire tattoo of the snare drum. The heavier caliber of the piano adds to this barrage with a bass line that ascends through three half-steps then leaps down and presents the mirror image of that same figure.

Morricone took the motive from an antique Ricercar—a genre devised, as the word suggests, “to search” after new combinations of thematic material—by the seventeenth-century organist of St. Peter’s in Rome, Girolamo Frescobaldi.

Frescobaldi’s treatment of his theme was as recondite as anything the post-war intellectuals could devise. (Ten years before scoring The Battle of Algiers, Morricone had published a volume of piano pieces called Invenzione, Canone e Ricercari that paid homage to the ancient masters of polyphony.) But in his redeployment of Frescobaldi’s chromatic line, Morricone militarizes the researches of his Roman forebear from three centuries earlier like a commander barking orders at his musical troops. As the French counter-terrorist action unfolds on screen Morricone charges the brass to take over the same ascending chromatic figure but at a slower, warier pace, as if another unit were penetrating the Arab quarter. More winds then join the operation as it spreads through the Casbah. Through this ingenious contrapuntal collage the venerable motive is transformed into something unforgiving, remorseless, decisive. The music of attack becomes an attack on French colonial rule in North Africa, even an attack on oppression across the globe.

The theme for one of the leaders of the Resistance, Ali, is given to an African flute, straining at first against the shackles of European tonality.

The throaty notes rock incessantly between a pair of interlocking major and minor thirds heard above a tragically heroic orchestral accompaniment. The melody appears trapped in its own prison, but will not give up the fight. During preparations for the film, Morricone heard Pontecorvo, himself a musician, whistling the tune, but waited until the premiere of the film to disabuse the director of the notion that the theme had been transmitted to the composer clairvoyantly.

A distinctive melodist, Morricone proved himself equally adept at rhythm, whose possibilities imbued the images with energy and portent, as in the sequence from The Battle of Algiers where a group of Arab women, disguised as Europeans, place bombs in a café and club.

Morricone intensifies the urgency of this plot with North African percussion patterns that sound like motors: the machinery of history chugging towards tragedy, but continually slamming into the sounds of the city or, more terrifyingly, silence. These gaps in the soundtrack stretch the tension towards its terrible breaking point as the dancers and diners enjoy themselves in the final seconds before they are converted from occupiers to victims. A bass drone spurs a frenzy of wallops on the tenor drum that seems to detonate the bombs.

Kindred attempts—successful, if sometimes fraught—to clear sonic and ethical space for musical traditions that had resisted, or even been erased by European aggression moved Morricone to create one of his greatest, most opulent scores, that for Roland Joffé’s The Mission (1990). Set in eighteenth-century South America, the film elevates music to an affirmative force even in the clash between Old and New Worlds. The scene in which a Jesuit missionary (Jeremy Irons) captivates the Guarani warriors with his oboe (first alone, then with a studio symphony orchestra), can’t help but cast the European civilizer as Orpheus—and therefore the natives as wild beasts. With its tapestry of embellishments that Morricone gives to this Father Gabriel to play, his music evokes the baroque style of the film’s period.

Thanks to its rapturous melody and life-affirming orchestral backdrop, “Gabriel’s Oboe” became a huge hit, recorded by Yo Yo Ma and other international heavyweights.

Morricone was no ethnomusicologist, but he tried nonetheless to reclaim in The Mission something of what he imagined to be the lost music of the indigenous peoples by wedding simple choral acclamations with wistful Andean flute lines above yearning orchestral surges buffeted by the thump of jungle drums.

The result is romantic and utopian, exoticizing and intoxicating— a skeptic would rather say excessive, even schmaltzy. But this elixir can be so exhilarating because the ideal will be wrecked by the history the film portrays.

In counterpoint to the enchanting tones of the priest and the joyous music of the indigenous peoples, Morricone depicts the worldly imperatives of the Catholic church with quasi-renaissance vocal polyphony that could be (and probably by now, has been) heard in the Sistine Chapel. As the credits of The Mission roll Morricone brings all three elements together in a tour-de-force of polyphonic layering in a piece called “As Earth as it is in Heaven”—a final effusion of ambrosial, healing world music.

This reconciliation is celestial rather than terrestrial. The murdered will not be raised from the dead by the conquerors’ musket and sabre. Music, however radiantly ecumenical, cannot heal these wounds, forgive these crimes.

But this virtuosic, irresistible skill at contrapuntal combination in evoking places that Morricone had seen on film but never visited found its most famous expression in the films directed by his Roman schoolmate, Sergio Leone. In the first of the director’s Westerns, A Fistful of Dollars (1964), Morricone repurposed an arrangement he had made of Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty for a recording of that song by Peter Tevis, a California singer then popular in Italy.

Morricone’s setting called on the whistle and whip to summon visions of the open range. The tolling of the bell and the chanting of the chorus (its English tinged by Italian accents) seems to suggest that a lone singer is riding with his own posse, or perhaps being urged on by the voices of destiny. This was hard-bitten, intrepid music, leagues distant from Guthrie’s plaint of struggling dirt farmers and herders.

Guthrie had based his song on the nineteenth-century ballad “Pretty Polly,” so Morricone was well within his rights to equip that same accompaniment with a new melody. He gave the newly-inserted invention to his celebrated whistler, Alessandro Alessandroni, the wind-riffled tune shot through with bolts from the electric guitar of Bruno Battisti D’Amario.

However popular and crucial to the composer’s subsequent success this music became, both Leone and Morricone thought A Fistful of Dollars their weakest, ugliest work.

The blatantly anachronistic electronics and studio effects could reach unprecedented levels of viciousness, as when D’Amario’s guitar slashes across a devastated homestead until the camera finds its way to the perpetrator—blue-eyed Henry Fonda, taking an unexpected turn as the black-hatted bad guy in the greatest of the Leone/Morricone Westerns, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

A similar, if richer, texture to Morricone’s Pasture of Plenty /A Fistful of Dollars encompasses the three-way duel at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). The rocking guitar figure is now taken by the piano; rather than a clear male voice, an English horn intones a solemn, sweeping melody. The chime tolls. The bass now moves with the force of fate. The musical tableau expands inexorably, magnificently towards the horizon. Lacerenza’s trumpet soars. The incomparable soprano Edda Dell’Orso—one of the singers in Alessandroni’s choir, Cantori Moderni., that is also heard in these Westerns offers up a benediction for the death soon to descend.

These pastures of plenty are full of the dead and the loot, the spoils of war and the winning of the west.

At the end, the coyote cry of the famed opening theme returns to lacerate the landscape. That musical utterance is so much more violent than the sounds of the animal itself. The soundtrack tells us that human deceit and revenge are unique in nature.

That Morricone’s score soared over the credits after the battle was done proved that, however closely tied to the images like the noose around “the ugly” Tuco’s head, music wins the final duel between sound and image.

Morricone received an honorary Oscar in 2007, handed to him by Clint Eastwood, whose first starring role had come in A Fistful of Dollars. In his speech, Morricone said that the prize represented not a point of arrival but of departure. He kept on riding. Nominated for a sixth time for his grand score (the penultimate soundtrack of the more than 500 he delivered) for Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight in 2016, Morricone become the oldest winner of a competitive Academy Award. He was as old as Oscar himself: Morricone and Academy Awards had both been born in the fateful year of 1929.

That evening in Los Angeles, Morricone spoke in Italian, with Eastwood translating. In Morricone: In His Own Words, the composer expressed regret that he never learned English or another foreign language. For all its ennobling mixture of diversity and specificity, technique and imagination, Morricone’s soundtracks speak a global language, immediately and powerfully understood and loved. Morricone shrugged off Tarantino’s fawning comparison of him to Mozart and Beethoven. The Maestro was modest about how history would judge his work, but his music doesn’t just survive him, it glorifies him and his visionary hearing of the world.

Join the debate on Facebook

More articles by:DAVID YEARSLEY

DAVID YEARSLEY is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest book is Sex, Death, and Minuets: Anna Magdalena Bach and Her Musical Notebooks. He can be reached at  dgyearsley@gmail.com

SEE https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=MORRICONE

France investigates report of bodies 'left to rot' at Paris research centre

French investigating magistrates will probe claims that human corpses donated for science were left to rot and be eaten by rats at a university research facility, the Paris prosecutor's office said Thursday
Issued on: 10/07/2020 -

Paris-Descartes University, in the French capital, has been accused of "serious ethical breaches". © Wikimedia creative commons

Text by:NEWS WIRES

A probe into "violations of the integrity of a corpse" was handed over to the magistrates by prosecutors who handled the initial phase of the investigation after l'Express magazine reported the scandal last November.

The newspaper said the remains of thousands of people who donated their bodies for research were discovered in abhorrent conditions at the Centre for Body Donations (CDC) of the Paris-Descartes University in the French capital.

Bodies were strewn around naked, dismembered, piled one on top of the other, with even a severed head lying on the floor, l'Express reported, describing the scene photographed in 2016 as resembling a mass grave.

Some body parts were decomposing, others lay there chewed by rats amid overflowing garbage bags containing pieces of flesh.


Sept mois après les révélations de L'Express sur le fonctionnement du centre du don des corps de l'université #ParisDescartes, "le charnier de Paris-Descartes", une #enquete de l'Inspection générale des affaires sociales a été publiée mi-juin pic.twitter.com/fNQdyJSmGE— FRANCE 24 Français (@France24_fr) June 18, 2020

"This is very good news," Frederic Douchez, a lawyer for families who pressed charges, said of Thursday's announcement by the Paris prosecutor's office.

Investigating magistrates, he said, have much wider powers to get to the bottom of the affair.

Nearly 80 complaints have so far been lodged.

The revelations caused the French government to order the shuttering of the centre and an administrative inspection by a panel which said in June the university was guilty of "serious ethical breaches" in its management of the CDC.

The centre, opened in 1953, was the largest of its kind in Europe and, until its closure, received hundreds of donated bodies every year.

(AFP)

Seoul's mayor found dead in presumed suicide after #MeToo allegation


The mayor of Seoul, a former human rights lawyer and potential South Korean presidential candidate, died in an apparent suicide a day after being accused of sexual harassment

Issued on: 09/07/2020

Police officers stand guard in front of the residence of Seoul Mayor Park Won-soon as rescue workers conduct a search operation in Seoul, South Korea, July 10, 2020. © Kim Hong-Ji, REUTERS

Text by:NEWS WIRES|

Video by:FRANCE 24 AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE

The death of Park Won-soon, whose body was recovered early Friday on a mountain in the capital, is by far the most dramatic end to a #MeToo case in South Korea, a highly patriarchal society where the women's movement has brought down scores of prominent men in multiple fields.

If Park does prove to have killed himself he would be the highest-profile South Korean politician to do so since former president Roh Moo-hyun, who jumped off a cliff in 2009 after being questioned over corruption allegations involving family members.

There were no signs of foul play, police said, and according to Yonhap news agency Park was presumed to have taken his own life.

He had been reported missing by his daughter on Thursday, who said he had been unreachable after leaving a message that sounded like "last words".

A heavyweight figure in the ruling centre-left Democratic party, Park ran South Korea's sprawling capital -- home to almost a fifth of the national population -- for nearly a decade.

He won three elections while promoting gender and social equality, and did not shy away from expressing his ambitions to replace incumbent President Moon Jae-in in 2022.

But his death came a day after his former secretary filed a police complaint -- said to involve sexual harassment -- against him.

South Korea remains male-dominated despite its economic and technological advances, but the country has seen a widespread #MeToo movement in the last two years, sparked by a prosecutor who publicly accused a superior of groping her at a funeral.

The perpetrators have included a former provincial governor who sought the presidency in 2017 but was jailed last year for sexual intercourse by abuse of authority after his female assistant accused him of repeatedly raping her.

According to a document purporting to be the statement of Park's victim, who worked as his personal secretary from 2015, he committed "sexual harassment and inappropriate gestures during work hours", including insisting she hug him in the bedroom adjoining his office.

After work, she said, he sent her "selfies of himself in his underwear and lewd comments" on a messenger app.

"I brainwashed myself, bearing tremendous fear and humiliation, that all of this was in the interest of Seoul City, myself, and mayor Park," she said, according to the document.

The police confirmed a complaint had been filed but declined to confirm the details.

Park's death means the investigation will automatically be closed.

Jailhouse to courthouse

Park was a student activist in the days of South Korea's military dictatorship -- he was jailed for taking part in a rally against then-president Park Chung-hee -- and later became a human rights lawyer.

He defended many political activists and in the 1990s won South Korea's first sexual harassment conviction, in a landmark judgement.

He helped launch the People's Solidarity for Participatory Democracy, an influential NGO pushing to reform the conglomerates that dominate South Korean business.

Park also founded the Beautiful Foundation -- a philanthropic group that promotes volunteerism and community service.

It grew into one of the largest non-profit organisations in South Korea and launched the Beautiful Stores, a chain of charity shops modelled after Britain's Oxfam shops.

Reactions were mixed on Friday, including both condolences and criticism that he killed himself to avoid punishment.

There was an outpouring of grief from his supporters, some of whom wailed at Seoul National University Hospital as his body was brought in.

"Mayor Park, you were an excellent politician," one poster wrote on Daum, the country's second-largest portal site.

"But a twist of fate put an end to your journey. I hope you are at ease in heaven."

Others were more critical of the 64-year-old, accusing him of exploiting his power to harass a subordinate and then taking his own life to "avoid the fallout".

"The victim must have had painful times in the run-up to the filing of the complaint," wrote one user. "I hope Park reflects on his misdeeds and atones in the afterlife."

The Seoul city government said a memorial altar will be set up in front of the city hall for citizens to pay respects.

(AFP)

Decades on, 'hidden children' forced into orphanages of colonial France remain traumatised

Issued on: 10/07/2020 -

REPORTERS © FRANCE 24
By:Caroline DUMAY|Thaïs BROUCK|Sam BRADPIECE

During the French colonisation of West Africa, several thousand children born of relations between French colonialists and African women were abandoned by their father and taken from their mother. Owing to a decision by the Governor General of French West Africa, these mixed-race children were separated from the rest of society and placed in orphanages. Through a series of exclusive testimonies on what was long a taboo subject, FRANCE 24 retraces the forgotten history of these hidden children of France, deprived of their parentage and demanding recognition.

It all started in 1903, when Governor Ernest Roume, head of French West Africa, decided to create dedicated orphanages for children born to French fathers and "indigenous" mothers, youngsters sometimes known as the "bastards of the republic". In what was then the colony of Ivory Coast, the "Mixed-race Home" was set up in the majestic former Governor's Palace in Bingerville.

One of the first residents was André Manket, now 90. He has tears in his eyes when recounting his kidnapping. "They came to look for me in my fishing village of Anono and took me by force. I was seven years old. My auntie was crying," the old man told us. He remembers arriving in Bingerville surrounded by two colonial guards. They said, "Guerard, the name of your father, is finished. From now on, you will take the name of your mother."

André was also given a number: the 39th. This meant that before him there were 38 boys and girls, whose only thing in common was the colour of their skin: mixed-race.

Trauma

As for Maurice Berthet, he still does not understand. He is not French, but he owns land in France that he inherited from his father. "My father never abandoned me! But he didn't know what to do. He cut wood and lived in the forest," he explained.

They may be over 80, but the trauma is still very much alive. "We were everyone's laughing stock. Our mothers were treated like prostitutes," recalled Monique Yace.

"We were treated like bastards," added Philippe Meyer. "They knew what they were doing. They had legalised a system: have children, then send them to the home."

All of these "hidden children" today see themselves as "victims of colonisation".

Ivorians now want France to be inspired by Belgium, which in April 2019 officially apologised to mixed-race children born in its former colonies. Auguste Miremont, a former communications minister to longtime Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny and who also grew up in the Mixed-race Home, believes "it's now time to calmly put this debate on the table".

>> Watch our special edition: African advancement and the consequences of colonialism