View source for Weapon of Musical Defense Announces First Album comment - November 27, 2008 by Hugh Fitzgerald

{{Web citation
|web link=http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_display.cfm/blog_id/18173
|title=Weapon of Musical Defense Announces First Album comment
|author=Hugh Fitzgerald
|source=Iconoclast at New English Review
|date=November 27, 2008
|extract=27 Nov 2008
Hugh Fitzgerald

The graphics look good, and now one must hearken to the music. The effort is based on the intelligent recognition -- one that till now has escaped almost everyone -- that among those who most need to be reached , their mental defenses breached,  or indifference overcome, are people for whom the usual means will not work. For they are unused to spending hours in a library, may find following an argument difficult, may even be put off by the briefest of observations, but are quite at home with the CD that can be slipped into the player. Should one give up on such people, or give up on the idea, for others who do read, of aurally reinforcing certain ideas? The setting to music of words that introduce certain concepts -- Jihad, dhimmitude -- may work better in some songs and less in others. But the strategy is sound: to enroll a music recording studio, and lyricists, and musicians, in the general war effort. Once upon a time - in World War II, say, or World War I -- a government office of war propaganda would have produced its own material, including jingles or songs. Now all that, out of timidity and rigidity and stupidity, has been left for private parties to produce;  governments in the Western world are fearful of telling the truth about Islam, for fear of "offending Muslims." (Don't those Muslims know perfectly well what Islam teaches? Of course they do. But they are "offended" if non-Muslims dare to find out the same thing). These songs, by introducing listenes to certain words, and then hammering home -- but to a beat behind and before and under and over -- the message, that this is Jihad, and this is dhimmitude, can reach the heretofore unreachable. Once the very words "Jihad" and "dhimmi" are entered into the Western consciousness, and then demand discussion, a great victory will  have been achieved. And it will have been achieved not by our governments, whose responsibility it is to instruct and thus to better protect us, but by private parties, recognizing the lapse, taking up the slack.

A snatch of song, a jingle, can do a lot. That's why they use them on Madison Avenue, as recommended since the days of Edward Bernays. Music isn't just the food of love. It's also a way to smuggle in ideas, and possibly to inflame the passions about those ideas, for was it not Hume himself who said that the passions ruled our reason? 

Think of what "Casablanca" did for the war effort in the United States. Think of the most important scene in that movie, with dueling songs and singers: on one side, at Rick's, wearing white, those French men and women, and those refugees from the Nazis (and in real life, many of the former were also the latter), sing the Marseillaise with such fervor, and so loudly, that they drown out the sullen and malevolent Germans, sitting at a table together, trying unsuccessfully to complete their rendition of Die Wacht am Rhein. 
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