Several weeks ago, I brought to the attention of my readership a song by the Cambridge, Massachusetts bard Tom Lehrer dating from the 1960s which seemed to be particularly relevant to the latest remark by Britain’s Foreign Secretary James Cleverly that what the Ukrainians do with the Storm Shadow missiles supplied to them by the U.K. is their business not his. The criminal logic of that remark very closely matched the comments that Lehrer put in the mouth of the American-German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, to whom his song was dedicated.
Now a day ago, I found in one of the daily digests I receive by email from the Financial Times the following curious paragraph:
And perhaps my favourite piece of the week is this lyrical defence of the periodic table. If you don’t know the Tom Lehrer classic, well now’s your chance. “There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium” . . .
That paragraph and the embedded links had no relevance whatsoever to the rest of the day’s news. The link took you to another of Lehrer’s brilliant songs of the ‘60s, this one reciting with inimitable speed the entries in Mendeleyev’s table of elements. However, if you just stayed online, the next song was….”Wernher von Braun”! I say without any sense of exaggerating the importance of my writings, that the gentleman or lady who compiled the digest must have read my article.
My point in raising the issue is that it confirms what I was saying in my impromptu speech at a Round Table in the European Parliament in March, a video of which I put up on this internet platform last month. Inter alia, I noted that while our mainstream media are viciously anti-Russian and it is their policy line that the title editors apply, their journalists are not all propagandists by disposition and occasionally give the editors the finger by putting in the middle of their articles material that contradicts the headings and the official policy line. I consider the link taking readers to Lehrer’s “von Braun” was one such sign of defiance.
In that same speech, I questioned the ability of all our talking heads on the side of the angels, like John Mearsheimer or Jeffrey Sachs, to have any influence on the course of U.S. and European policy with respect to the war in Ukraine, notwithstanding the very wide audience they enjoy, numbering in millions per given video appearance. I left for myself the more modest achievement of reaching thousands and sometimes tens of thousands with my messages.
I am pleased to say that my critical words on the awful divide and conquer policies being practiced by Washington in the hopeless cause of maintaining its global hegemony are now reaching a wider global audience thanks to hosting on India’s WION television. My 10 minute interview with them yesterday which I posted on this site has already been viewed by more than 90,000 people and likely the figure will go over 200,000 in coming days. The Comments section shows that many have their heads screwed on right and that they are listening not just from within India but from across the globe.
But the essential point remains unchanged as it regards me, just as it regards the Mearsheimer and Sachs duo: I do not believe that these viewers can change the course of policy at its highest level. And so, what is the purpose of these television appearances and articles? The purpose is to provide comfort to the many who doubt the veracity of their government officials and of the mainstream press, but who find themselves to be a tiny minority in their communities and begin to have self-doubts: could it be that everyone else is right? It is important to assure these open minded folks that not everyone in this world has lost his mind or is a willing slave to the Masters in Washington, London and Berlin.
As a reward for your patience in following my argumentation, allow me to offer you a link to another Lehrer song from the 1960s which, most regrettably, perhaps is his closest description of the fraught world in which we are living:
Tom Lehrer - So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III) - with intro - widescreen “So long, Mom (a song for WWIII)”
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2023