Saturday Commentary and Review #107

How Britain Built Diversity, Istvan Hont Revisited, al-Qaida and China, Laibach on Art and Europe, The Crypto Art Crash

“The Great Replacement isn’t real” but the Great Replenishment is…..or something. It wasn’t all that long ago that the Brits voted for #Brexit because they did not want to see happen to their country what Angela Merkel was doing to Germany. They voted for #Brexit and Boris Johnson went on to deliver it. In the meantime, migrants continued to flood the UK, the precise thing that supporters of #Brexit voted (in spirit) to discontinue!

#Brexit was one of two populist revolts in the Anglosphere that actually won what it set out to do….initially. Unlike Trump’s subverted #MAGA, #Brexit was instead co-opted by the party that pushed it through (albeit unwillingly), delivering on the promise of exiting the EU, but doing absolutely nothing to halt the steady flow of migrants washing ashore. Control over state borders is a key feature of national sovereignty, the restoration of which was supposed to occur via #Brexit. It would be one thing if Brits were in favour of the large-scale migration happening in their country right now, but they clearly are not. This is being done over their heads despite their best efforts to stop it. In short, it is an elite-driven policy.

Why is this being done to Britain? The economic reasoning is obvious: wage suppression to increase profits and market competitiveness for what little the UK manufactures these days. The other reasons are much more politically charged and have required ex post facto justification. “Diversity” as inherently good is one of these justifications, and is the subject of this interesting essay that seeks to debunk the ‘Windrush Myth’ upon which Britain’s current diversity-mania is built.

Until recently the UK’s population was still over 99% British. Even as late as the 1991 census, “White British” accounted for almost 95%. But by 2016, the native-born share of the population had fallen to less than 80%, and the current figure is likely to be lower still.

In short, in twenty years, the UK has transformed from an almost ethnically homogeneous country to one in which around a quarter of the population is either an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. And yet most have only the vaguest notion of when these new arrivals came, and why they came. What they have instead are myths.

Of special significance is the myth of the Windrush Generation, which over the last decade has become the dominant narrative of the arrival of the bulk of Britain’s Afro-Caribbean population. Like every good myth, the story is disarmingly simple. So simple, in fact, that we can summarize it as follows:

Following the Second World War, shattered by the Blitz and bereft of laborers, Britain invited its West Indian colonial subjects to the imperial motherland to help the country rebuild. The first group arrived in England from Jamaica aboard HMT Empire Windrush in 1948, and have been making invaluable contributions ever since, despite confronting constant racism and discrimination since their arrival.

Versions of this story have been reiterated at every level of society, from Channel 4 and BBC documentaries, by King Charles III when he was still the Prince of Wales, and by the late Queen Elizabeth II. But it is entirely untrue. 

This is the accepted narrative, and deviation from it invites contempt, demonization, and possible sanction.

What actually happened:

None of the postwar Caribbean immigrants were invited to come to Britain, least of all those aboard the Empire Windrush, a troop transport ship en route from Australia to Britain via Jamaica. Because she was expected to leave Kingston under capacity, her operator advertised heavily in the three weeks before her arrival that they would offer private passage to the United Kingdom for £28 10s – around half the usual price. The novelty of several hundred Jamaicans voyaging across the Atlantic was so great that a Pathé newsreel crew arrived to film the passengers disembarking in Britain– a detail which explains a significant part of the event’s later prominence.

Nobody at the time was particularly happy with the news. The British government was completely unaware of the imminent arrivals until it was too late to stop them. In a debate in Parliament it was noted that there would be no guarantee the Windrush’s passengers would be able to find work, and Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee suggested redirecting the Windrush to East Africa.

Civil servants from the Colonial Office were dispatched to the Caribbean to orchestrate campaigns explaining that jobs in the UK were scarce, conditions were poor (rationing remained in place until 1954 for food, furniture, fuel, and clothing), and immigrants could not be guaranteed employment or housing (of which there was a chronic shortage).

Tied hands:

Nevertheless, neither the British nor colonial governments had any power to prevent Commonwealth migration after the British Nationality Act (1948) formalized the right of all colonial subjects to settle in Britain. The framers intended this as a symbolic gesture against decolonization; they did not expect it to lead to mass migration.

I didn’t even know about this act!

Mass Caribbean immigration to Britain didn’t take place until almost a decade after the war. According to Home Office statistics, between 1948 and 1955, net immigration to the UK from the West Indies amounted to 16,000 people. Between 1955 and 1958, a further 80,000 arrived, and between 1960 and 1962, 151,000. From 1962 to 1968, another 60,000 arrived, after which large-scale immigration ceased until the 1990s.

The origin of the myth of a post-war labor shortage seems to be the conflation of two actual events. The first of these was a very real labor shortage during the war, caused by manpower allocation problems. These were partly addressed by the movement of a small number of colonial volunteers into Britain. Several thousand volunteer colonial servicemen also served in the UK. This has come to be conflated with postwar economic migration.

The second was a direct recruitment campaign that was small in number. As for the third:

The third plank of the Windrush myth concerns the racism and hostility faced by the migrants. This element is undoubtedly true to some extent, but must be put into context. It’s clear from direct testimonials that many West Indians had an extremely distorted view of Britain and British culture, largely informed by their experiences with middle-class colonial administrators. It’s also likely that many had also been sold a bill of goods by shipping companies.

The hostility which many Caribbeans encountered was the hostility of tight-knit communities in the face of any outsiders, and particularly those competing with them for a living. This attitude was heightened by an apparent apathy from the government towards the economic reality of the issue despite persistent agreement at all levels that uncontrolled immigration was an issue that needed to be addressed.

Like all myths, it was codified in steps long after the actual founding event:

In fact, the story’s sudden prominence coincides with the coming of age of the children of the “Windrush Generation” in the 1980s, in the aftermath of a series of riots, chiefly in 1981 in Brixton. 

The political climate following these riots (and official responses such as the Scarman Report, which called for increased integration) created a demand for a narrative of Afro-Caribbean immigration that could help to justify the existence of Britain’s black population, which would have still seemed highly out of place even at this time.

For many Britons, including the vast majority of the black British population itself, Windrush first emerged through a series of BBC2 documentaries created to mark its 50th anniversary in 1998. The New Labour government enthusiastically adopted the arrival of the ship as a cultural watershed moment as part of its effort to redefine Britain as a diverse and inclusive “post-national” country.

Following the 1999 MacPherson Enquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, as various public institutions scrambled to find ways to demonstrate commitment to newly imposed “equality” mandates, the story took on its ‘standard’ form and began to be promoted by a network of nonprofits, activists, and government agencies, before being sacralized in Isles of Wonder, the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Olympics – a spectacle that still stands as the perfect representation of what the modern British middle-class now believes (and is supposed to believe) about their country’s history.

But its position as a marked event on the official British ecclesiastical calendar wasn’t cemented until the “Windrush Scandal” emerged in 2018 to serve as a ballast for the narrative of widespread “systemic racism” in British institutions, despite being caused almost entirely by Home Office incompetence and a historic refusal to collect accurate data on incoming migrants (which had been a subject of parliamentary record for decades). 

In the aftermath, the Conservative government declared that July 22nd would forever be celebrated as Windrush Day.

And now the Brits are stuck with it informing and guiding their politics around migration and what it means to be British.

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Are politics the result of economic interests, or do economics flow from politics? Did capitalism’s victory over communism resolve historical tensions? Would globalism usher in an era of diminishing importance of the nation-state?

These are some of the questions that Istvan Hont busied himself with while largely going unnoticed outside of the academic world. He was rejected for a tenured position at Harvard by Larry Summers due to having a lack of published materials and Summers’ favouring of younger candidates (wunderkinden), but is posthumously being given his due such as in this retrospective essay.

Outside of a few scholarly circles, Hont is hardly a household name. But his revisionist readings of Enlightenment authors led him to make a number of prescient observations — observations that seem more relevant today than when Hont began publishing, in the 1980s. Hont held that the “triumph” of free trade over national protection was far from certain. The upheavals brought about by global commerce and economic inequality might lead to domestic unrest, even “Caesarism.” The current waves of authoritarianism and protectionism in Western politics, combined with new military and economic conflict with Russia and China, lend weight to his insight.

The nation-state is here to stay:

For Hont, the end of the Cold War solved little. The collapse of the Soviet Union may have proved that capitalism was more efficient than a planned economy. But it offered “no victory” for Western values. The events of 1989-91 broke no new “conceptual” ground. Hont predicted that sovereign states would remain the key players in world politics for the foreseeable future, and he saw little reason to assume that nationalist passions could be extinguished. The fall of the Berlin Wall did not change the fact that nation-states must still defend their borders and contend for status in the context of an ever-expanding global market.

A ‘revisionist reading of The Enlightenment’:

Hont liked to quote Hume’s observation that the 18th century was the age when trade became “an affair of state.” In other words, the competition between France, Holland, Spain, and Britain for political superiority went hand in hand with their quest for economic advantage. Yes, Hume attributed the rise of liberty in modern Europe to commercial growth. Yet Hume also argued that interstate rivalry could easily end in debt, bankruptcy, military conquest, and “a degree of despotism” never before seen on earth. Hont was preoccupied by this tension between commerce and war, between liberty and despotism. Eighteenth-century political economy captured both the promise and peril of a globalizing world.

Rich country-poor country:

Hont’s first major publication, an essay in his coedited volume Wealth and Virtue, focused on what he titled the “rich country-poor country problem.” Was a poor country like Scotland destined to lag permanently behind its richer English neighbor? Or would lower wages bring the Scots competitive advantage? Hume and Smith had answered yes to both questions. Wealthier countries would continue to retain the upper hand, thanks to their manufacturing capacity and greater division of labor. Yet poorer countries could narrow the gap if they were willing to meet the unyielding demands of the international market. Hont stressed that there was no moral victory in this realization. The “rich country-poor country” debate revealed that globalization would transform, but not overcome, international rivalries.

Rejecting Marx:

The driving claim of Hont’s work is that “the economic determination of politics,” in either its Marxist or pro-market varieties, has never really come to pass. Just as often, he observed, it is politics that determines economic policy. States calculate their success in international trade in terms of their relative military and geopolitical standing, not necessarily as a measure of efficiency or overall prosperity. Vladimir Putin’s resolve to invade Ukraine despite wide-ranging financial sanctions would seem to confirm Hont’s point. The same goes for Brexit, Donald Trump’s presidency, and preparations for a new Cold War between the United States and China.

more:

Above all, Hont urged readers to see that the “economic determination of politics” was a pipe dream. Commerce may have reshaped politics, yet political actors will continue to repurpose commerce toward their own ends.

In a world of sovereign states, politics and economics are always intertwined but never congruent. And in an era when the study of the humanities must compete with more “practical” or “relevant” disciplines, Hont’s work suggests that the simplest and oldest justification is the most compelling: Historia magistra vitae est. History remains our best teacher. As long as jealousy of trade persists, Hume, Smith, and Rousseau might still count as our contemporaries.

Trade with China was supposed to open it up and lead to class conflict whereby a new rich class of business owners would challenge the CCP, ushering in a multi-party democratic system. The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union was supposed to result in Russia becoming a liberal democracy, ‘finally’ westernizing itself.

Politics got in the way of both of these ‘certainties’.

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The common assumption is that NATO was the USA’s most important alliance during the Cold War, but there is an argument to be made that its alliance with Saudi Arabia was just as important, if not more so due to its cheap oil fueling its post-war prosperity. This is a discussion for another time, however.

In my opinion, the most important American ally of the past 40+ years has been militant Islam. When Zbigniew Brzezinski went to Afghanistan on behalf of the Carter Administration to strike a deal with the Pakistani ISI, Saudi Arabia, and the local Mujahideen fighters to bleed the Soviets who just invaded the country, the world was fundamentally changed. Afghanistan was proof-of-concept of the viability of the Jihadi Network, a template that was later applied to Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, the Central Asian Stans, and so on. They were not universally successful, but they all served US foreign policy objectives. Any country not in the USA’s orbit and with a potential restive Muslim population contains the ingredients for an insurgency if financed and activated.

It may sound absurd to normie ears to suggest that militant Islam is an ally of the USA, but the above cases make the argument clearly. It may sound insane to suggest that al-Qaida fits within this mould as well, but they too have appeared in all of these hot-spots ever since their founding three decades ago. Sure, their leaders have gotten killed via drone strikes, but those are just roll-up operations. Any objective analysis will show who has worked with whom in whichever conflict one looks at.

It is no coincidence that Balochi separatists are attacking Chinese interests in Pakistan these days as the USA continues its pivot to Eastern Asia. It is also no coincidence that al-Qaida is taking a more belligerent stance against China as well, as Lucas Webber and Riccardo Valle explain:

Over al-Qaeda’s more than 30 years of existence, the organization’s public stance on China has changed quite dramatically. Al-Qaeda has moved from trying not to agitate Beijing, to fleetingly listing “East Turkestan” (i.e., Uyghur-dominated lands, primarily China’s Xinjiang province) amongst a host of other locations where Muslims are oppressed, to directly criticizing, and at times even threatening, China for its domestic security measures in Xinjiang as well as its foreign policy actions in the Islamic world. Furthermore, al-Qaeda’s grievances against China have become markedly more numerous and nuanced and purveyed by a wider range of individuals, branches, and publications in recent years.

Interesting how this maps perfectly onto the USA’s shift in its approach to China.

Attitudes to China then:

Al-Qaeda’s initially favorable position towards China was made quite clear in a series of media interviews with Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Following the 1997 Urumqi bus bombings, in which Uyghur separatists detonated explosive devices on three public buses in the capital of Xinjiang, bin Laden accused the CIA of conducting the attacks as a ploy to stoke hostilities between China and the Muslim world. Bin Laden even proposed something akin to an alliance with China, saying at the time that “if Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and China get united, the United States and India will become ineffective.” He therefore advised Beijing to avoid conflict with Muslims and to instead focus on America, which he referred to as the “the real, big enemy.”

At the time of this interview, al-Qaida was still lingering in Bosnia and on their way to Kosovo, while taking over Chechnya via agents Shamil Basayev and Ibn al-Khattab.

More:

Nevertheless, in an interview with the Pakistani press in the late 1990s, Osama bin Laden claimed ignorance of the plight of the Uyghurs and events in Xinjiang, saying, “I often hear about Chinese Muslims, but since we have no direct connection with people in China and no member of our organization comes from China, I don't have any detailed knowledge about them.”4 In the same interview, bin Laden cautioned Beijing to beware the United States, remarking that the “Chinese government is not fully aware of the intentions of the United States and Israel . . . [to] usurp the resources of China.” Bin Laden further advised China “to be more careful of the US and the West” while urging the country to “use its force against the United States and Israel” and requesting that China “be friendly towards Muslims.”5 In one later speech, bin Laden stated that “every rational individual today is aware that Crusading America, backed by Britain, Germany, France, Canada, and Australia, poses a greater danger and greater animosity to the Muslims than do Japan, both Koreas, China, and others.” Additionally, in a September 28, 2001 interview, bin Laden included China among a shortlist of ostensibly anti-imperialist nations, that included Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria, and “the former Russia” [sic]. Per bin Laden, these nations were “upholding their freedom” and refusing to become “slaves” to American hegemony.

The authors list the geographically-proximate Haqqani Network as a dissenter to OBL’s China position.

Shift:

By 2006, Osama bin Laden had adopted a discernibly more critical tone regarding China. That year, he criticized Beijing’s role as an influential actor within the United Nations (UN), which he referred to as a “hegemonic organization of universal infidelity.”11 He claimed that the UN “exists in order to prevent rule by sharia and to guarantee submission to the rule of five of the greatest criminals on earth,” a reference to the UN Security Council nations. Bin Laden further stated that “Crusader International and pagan Buddhism” dominate the UN Security Council, elaborating that “America and Britain represent the Protestant Christians, Russia represents the Orthodox Christians, and France represents the Catholic Christians, while China represents the Buddhists and pagans of the world.”12 Also in 2006, Ayman al-Zawahiri, then the deputy emir of al-Qaeda, began to sporadically make reference to “East Turkestan” in his statements.13

The following year, the Jordanian professor Akram Hijazi, whom Brian Fishman has described as “a major intellectual figure for jihadi strategists,” wrote a three-part analysis dedicated to warning of the specter of China supplanting American primacy to become the new “head of the snake.”14 Hijazi’s detailed work has proven to be successful and enduring seeing as jihadists have continued to translate and republish it up to the present day. For example, al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) featured a translation of the work in its magazine, Hitteen, in 2017. Similarly in 2007, al-Qaeda’s chief propaganda organ, as-Sahab Media, released a video in which Abu-Umar al-Baghdadi, the then-leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (the Islamic State predecessor that was then loyal to al-Qaeda), promoted the establishment of an Islamic state spanning from Spain to China.15 In fact, bin Laden had similarly hinted at an interest in expanding al-Qaeda’s influence into China in the early 2000s when his rhetoric towards China was limited or otherwise conciliatory. In 2003, bin Laden celebrated anti-American jihadist activity around the world, exalting the militants of the day as the successors to an earlier generation of Islamic warriors, “those great knights, who carried [the message of] Islam eastward until they reached China.”

An increasingly harder line:

Al-Qaeda’s shift towards more explicit and frequent criticism of China, including direct threats of violence, and its more direct support for the TIP were spurred, in large part, by the outbreak of the 2009 Urumqi riots and Beijing’s subsequent crackdown on Muslims in Xinjiang. The Urumqi riots actually began in coastal Guangdong Province after several Uyghur men were accused of sexually assaulting ethnic Han women. The incidents in Guangdong sparked several days of ethnic clashes in Xinjiang which resulted in at least 200 casualties. In response, the Chinese government expanded its security and policing apparatuses in the province, relying heavily on the aggressive tactics that then-Party Secretary for Xinjiang Chen Quanguo had previously used during his service as Party Secretary in Tibet.20 The riots and subsequent crackdown attracted widespread media attention and jihadist organizations began to increasingly link “East Turkestan” to the plight of Muslims around the world.

Shortly after the Urumqi riots, al-Qaeda officials and affiliated jihadists changed tack and began criticizing or directly threatening China. Hostile remarks were issued by a global range of the network’s leadership figures, regional branches, and allies. To take a few examples from 2009 alone: Senior al-Qaeda official Abu Yahya al-Libi urged Uyghurs to wage war against China in October of that year, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) threatened attacks on Chinese workers in Algeria as reprisal for the Urumqi riots, and the Islamic State in Iraq released a video promoting the Uyghur cause and threatening Beijing.

Cranking up the volume:

The 2010s saw an unprecedented volume of anti-China rhetoric and propaganda from a linguistically and geographically diverse range of prominent officials within the al-Qaeda network. For instance, AQAP’s Anwar al-Awlaki accused the Chinese of occupying Muslim lands in a 2010 edition of Inspire magazine. In 2011, Dokku Umarov, the Chechen leader of the Caucasus Emirate (an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant group that later fought in Syria), and the prominent blog Kavkaz Jihad published messages of solidarity with the Uyghurs.24 Additionally, in 2012 the TTP murdered a Chinese tourist in revenge, per the group’s official statement, “for the Chinese government killing our Muslim brothers in the Xinjiang province.”25 The following year, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in East Africa, released a video identifying with the Uyghur cause. That same year, the al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Zaid al-Kuwaiti appeared posthumously in a video in which he gave advice to the Uyghurs and Abdullah Mansoor, a prominent leader of the TTP, wrote about the history of the Chinese occupation of East Turkestan in the magazine of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), a former splinter faction of the TTP headed by veteran leader Omar Kahlid Khurasani that has since been reabsorbed into the TTP.26 In 2014, al-Qaeda’s Global Islamic Media Front referred to Xinjiang as a jihadist battlefront and the TTP/JuA spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan wrote critically of China. Most notably, in 2015, al-Shabaab claimed to be intentionally targeting Chinese nationals after killing a Chinese security guard in an attack on a hotel in Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu.

Xinjiang/East Turkestan is one of the avenues open to the USA to destabilize China when it sees fit to apply pressure, just like it did in Hong Kong when the CIA launched protests in the name of “democracy” not too long ago.

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Alongside Goran Bregovic, Laibach are the best musical act to have come out of the ex-Yugoslavia. If you are a fan of Industrial music, you are automatically a fan of Laibach. If you like Rammstein, you will immediately realize how much of a debt they owe to Laibach, a band whose sound they lifted from greedily.

Laibach hail from the Slovene capital of Ljubljana and were formed in the last decade of Communist Yugoslavia’s existence. The regime was already beginning to wobble when a group of young lads around the military magazine Mladina formed a musical act with the intent to provoke. In fact, their name Laibach comes from the German language name for Slovenia’s capital of Ljubljana. They adorned themselves in quasi-Nazi and fascist gear to troll local communist authorities, often getting in trouble for it. Flirting with Germanisms and trolling via pseudo-fascism was to mock the very foundations of the communist state: its victory over fascism in WW2. Check out their cover of Opus’ (Austrian pop act) LIFE IS LIFE and compare the two:

Laibach continue to tour and continue to provoke, never betraying the ambiguity that they have consistently maintained throughout their existence vis a vis their use of totalitarian motifs. Samo Burja recently reached out to the band to ask them about the state of art (and politics), with the gents answering collectively, expressing some disappointment with the state of affairs in Europe today.

On Europe:

Samo: In the song “Eurovision,” Laibach notes Europe is falling apart. The song seems to implore the listener to open their minds and hear this message, yet also states that this message cannot be heard. Why is Europe so stubborn and unwilling to listen?

Laibach: If we ignore its deafness, Europe is actually quite accommodating and prone to listening to the U.S. Europe is, in effect, still paying the price for its liberation in the Second World War, as well as the price for the collapse of its colonial empires. Europe has become entangled in a dependency from which there is no quick or painless exit. NATO is a tangible American occupational force in Europe and, in a sense, a self-destructive, quasi-self-defense system that really threatens the establishment and homogeneity of a strong Europe—of a Europe that could rival the US and China if it invited Russia in as well. But because of American geostrategic interests, Europe is pushing Russia out of the continent and cutting it off from its body.

The song “Eurovision” is thus a metaphorical vision of a disintegrating Europe. But from a historical perspective, this is nothing new or alarming. It would actually be undialectical if Europe didn’t disintegrate—and probably alarming. From a historical perspective, Europe is constantly disintegrating, but it seems that through this, it manages to establish itself as a community. Each time it tries to rebuild itself, it fails. But it also fails better each time. Brexit and the war in Ukraine are both extreme paradoxes of this process. Europe without Great Britain is not what it could be, but it is more European. Great Britain never really wanted to be part of Europe, so Europe is now more homogenous.

The war in Ukraine, as well as Russian blackmail over oil and natural gas, have at least partly brought out a new solidarity in Europe. They have also sped up the process of energy streamlining, which will have a positive impact on ecological balance in the long run.

On Slovenia:

Is Slovenia occupied? What do you understand occupation to be?

Of course, Slovenia is occupied—what country or place on Earth isn’t? Today, occupation is the natural state of things. We are talking, of course, about economic, cultural, political, touristic, fiscal, climate, technological, ideological, navigational, religious, patriotic, defense, material, and sports occupation (among others). We are talking about interdependence in a global world, and Slovenia cannot just isolate itself, or move away somewhere else. Slovenia cannot even decide this on its own. 

But in the international context, Slovenia is, in reality, rather charming “spare change” that often gets overlooked or not taken into account. Its smallness, backwardness, and insignificance—in short, its specific weight and historical (lack of) position between East and West and North and South—is actually its great advantage. Every occupation of the Slovenian territory is, because of these characteristics, always somewhat porous, benevolent, and inconsistent. This means that occupation in Slovenia is at a much more acceptable level than elsewhere. The most aggressive occupation is that of tribal kinship, which unleashes more corruption than would be found otherwise, and more provincial homestead primitivism that often crosses the boundaries of taste and acceptability.

On adversity as the engine of art:

Laibach has roots in industrial imagery and soundscapes—it was founded in Trbovlje, a mining town. Over time, as developed economies outsource industry elsewhere, do you find that this changes the ethos of the music that gets produced? Where is the most interesting work being done today?

The most exciting and compelling music always seems to emerge from the most dire circumstances. This point was famously made by Orson Welles in the film The Third Man. Speaking about Italy, he said: “For thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Although the cuckoo clock actually originated in the German Black Forest, the sentiment of Wells’s statement holds true. One notable example is the interwar children’s choir Trbovlje Nightingale (Trboveljski Slavček), comprised of barefoot children from the poorest mining families. Despite their lack of musical training, they made a significant impression both domestically and internationally in their ten years of activity. Their success largely owes to the work of their then-conductor, Avgust Šuligoj, who founded the choir and gathered around 100 pupils. Far from being content with performing children’s songs, the choir connected with numerous notable poets and composers, who succeeded in incorporating contemporary labor conditions in their music. Šuligoj wanted the “cry” of working-class children to be heard.

In ten years, his “nightingales” performed 255 concerts, traveled 20,000 kilometers by train, and filled halls throughout Europe. Their music even reached across the Atlantic. Their brilliant execution of demanding choral compositions left even the most renowned musicologists in awe. In 1936, they were even selected as the world’s best choir, surpassing the famous Vienna Boys Choir. And due to their achievements, in 1938 they were asked to perform a concert for the American school radio from the Ljubljana studio in a pioneering live radio broadcast from Europe to America. Later, the choir was invited on a three-month tour of America. Because the Second World War was imminent, the tour unfortunately never happened.

In this same spirit, Laibach has spent the last three years preparing a project partly based in Iran and Afghanistan. In both countries, the current government is not amenable to art, and especially not music, since the metaphysical language of music can be closest to God. And yet we have received exciting composition elements from both countries, which form part of our new sonic-symphonic project inspired by Vladimir Bartol’s novel Alamut. We are collaborating with Iranian composers, conductors, and vocal choirs, and have also discussed the possibility of working with the Tehran Symphony Orchestra for the world premiere of this work. Regrettably, the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the undiplomatic actions of the Slovenian government, the recent war in Ukraine, and the bloody unrest in Iran have delayed this event. 

A criminally underrated avant-garde collective, please join Laibach and dance with them:

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As SBF is arrested and extradited to the USA due to the FTX Scandal, we end this weekend’s Substack with a timely piece looking at the crash of the crypto art market.

There was considerable euphoria when NFTs came into the focus of the general public at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Crypto technology, which makes digital goods tradable, had existed for some time, but it became much more important during the global lockdowns as life shifted to the digital realm. NFTs have database entries that can be used to certify files as being authentic. This transformed everything that had been circulating on the Internet for free up to that point into potential objects for purchase: memes, GIFs, avatars, profile pictures. A potentially huge business.

Most of it had little to do with art. Still, most of it was referred to as such, and buyers of these NFT objects were often primarily concerned with profits. Auction platforms reported record price after record price in 2020 and 2021.

The art market quickly adapted. Museums began buying computer art, and auction houses hired crypto specialists. Gallery owners bolted monitors to their walls and learned technical words like "token."

Meanwhile, celebrities from Madonna to Marina Abramović crafted their own NFTs and threw them into a market where virtually anything sold, especially if there were big names behind it. The impact created by NFT technology in the art world was more important in 2021 than all other painters and sculptors combined, ArtReview magazine found in its annual ranking of the 100 most influential artists.

But in November 2021, the price of the digital currency Bitcoin began to crater, dragging the other major cryptocurrencies down with it. When Russia attacked Ukraine in February, the world changed, stock prices plummeted and the appetite for risky investments waned. In the time since, the cryptocurrency market has lost more than half of its volume. In July, OpenSea, the largest NFT art department store, laid off 20 percent of its staff.

You can still buy the once sought-after profile images of the "Bored Ape Yacht Club," an edition of 10,000 computer-generated cartoon monkey faces. Monkey "#7827," which sports earrings, yellow cap and glasses, was sold 15 months ago for 8,794 Ether, which was valued at 19 million euros at the time. Today, you can buy "#7827" for the equivalent of around 172,000 euros. Objects, some of which were selling for many millions at the beginning of the year, have lost an average of 92 percent of their value. Today, the general mood on the market is rather downcast.

Read the rest here.

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