Friday, May 24, 2024

Ten Ways Israel Is Different from South Africa

 I wrote this piece for the March-April 1988 issue of Palestine Focus. It was reprinted all over the world, including by the PLO in Tunis, though they did not include my name as the author. Note that I have never seen the Israeli document with the same title. I have very slightly edited it for clarity. You can see the original at https://digicoll.lib.berkeley.edu/record/277043?v=pdfUn

Ten Ways Israel Is Different from South Africa

By Steve Goldfield

The New York Times recently reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry had issued an internal briefing paper entitled “Ten Ways Israel is Different from South Africa.” The Times did not publish the content of that paper. The Israelis were, apparently, hurt by increasingly widespread comparisons, such as by ABC News, between their military occupation over Palestinians and the apartheid system in South Africa. A list of such differences is not easy to compile, but the Palestine Solidarity Committee has risen to the challenge.

  1. In South Africa, people can be held without charge under administrative detention for fourteen days without seeing a lawyer. Under Israeli occupation, it is eighteen days. More than three-quarters of African men have been imprisoned, many for pass violations. More than half of Palestinian men have been imprisoned, many for identity card violations.

  2. Although in both Israel and South Africa there are both town and house arrest, South Africa has no refugee-camp arrest: it has no refugee camps. To be fair, Israel has no Bantustans.

  3. In South Africa, 87 percent of the land is reserved for whites. In Israel, 92 percent of the land is reserved for Jews. In the West Bank and Gaza, more than half the land has been taken from Palestinians … so far.

  1. In South Africa, green, black, and gold—the colors of the African National Congress—are illegal. Blacks use it anyway. The African National Congress was banned in 1960; it is illegal to quote ANC leaders. Under Israeli law, red, black, green, and white—the colors of the Palestinian flag—are illegal. Palestinians ignore that law, too. The Palestine Liberation Organization is, of course, banned, and Palestinian newspapers have been closed for publishing interviews with PLO leaders.

  2. South Africa has the death penalty and has put many activists to death. Many, such as Steve Biko, have died while in custody. Israel does not have the death penalty, but Palestinians seem to die anyway from beatings and other forms of torture in detention and from shootings on the streets. Photographs published in Israeli and U.S. Newspapers have documented Palestinians entering custody in good condition and leaving Israeli prisons in shrouds.

  3. South African Blacks carry passbooks and are punished if they are in the wrong place or do not have a passbook. Palestinians instead have identity cards which they must show to soldiers and police. One form of punishment is to confiscate an identity card, which can lead to immediate deportation and is thus a form of house arrest. Palestinians in the West Bank (except in Jerusalem) and Gaza are also issued different-colored license plates from the ones Israeli citizens receive.

  4. African workers cross into white areas to work but are forbidden to sleep there, and many must return to homelands or racially segregated suburbs at night. Working in white-run factories, farms, and mines for very low wages is virtually the only means to earn a livelihood. Palestinians who cross over into Israel to work are also forbidden to sleep there and must return to the West Bank and Gaza at night. Working in Israeli factories, farms, construction, hospitals, or sweeping streets is virtually the only means available to them to earn a livelihood.

  5. South African Blacks have no vote, though so-called Coloureds and others have token representation but no real power. West Bank and Gaza Palestinians have no vote, though Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have token representation, virtually no government funds are spent on their needs, and they have no real power.

  1. South Africa is a settler state in which the indigenous people greatly outnumber those of European descent. The same was true for Palestine before 1948. Israel is a settler state from which the indigenous people were driven out so that today Israeli Jews outnumber Palestinians.

  2. South Africa calls its suppression of the majority of African descent: “Apartheid.” Apartheid is based on a system of privileges granted to those declared “white.” South Africans of Asian and mixed ancestry are second-class citizens. Blacks are not considered citizens and have no rights whatsoever. Israel calls its suppression of Palestinians: “Military Occupation.” Israel's system of privileges, based on its Zionist ideology, gives privileges first to those descended from European Jews, second to Jews from other places, and last and least to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Other Palestinians are not considered citizens and have no rights whatsoever.

WOULDN'T YOU RISE UP?

The above are some of the “differences.” A list of similarities between Israel and South Africa and of the longstanding and very close military, political, and economic ties between the two countries (an Israeli journalist described South Africa as “Israel's best ally after the United Statess”) would be very long, indeed. Consider the comments of Raphael Eitan, chief of staff of the Israeli army during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon and currently a member of the Israeli Knesset.

I don't understand this comparison between us and South Africa. What is similar here and there is that both they and we must prevent others from taking us over. Anyone who says that the Blacks are oppressed in South Africa—is a liar. The Blacks there want to gain control of the White majority just like the Arabs here want to gain control over us. And we, too, like the White minority in South Africa, must act to prevent them from taking us over. I was in a gold mine there and I saw what excellent conditions the Black workers there have. So there are separate elevators for Whites and Blacks, so what? That's the way they like it.--Guest lecture at School of Law, Tel Aviv University, December 14, 1987 in Yediot Ahranot, December 25, 1987

Americans oppose apartheid in South Africa. Isn't it about time we stopped our government from supporting and funding the Israeli form of apartheid?

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

My 1983 Interview with Johnny Makatini, head of international affairs for the African National Congress of South Africa

 In 1979, I met a man named Mfanafuthi (Johnny) Makatini in the lobby of the Polana Hotel in Maputo, Mozambique. We became friends. Johnny was the director of the International Affairs Department and later also the Chief Representative to the United Nations of the African National Congress of South Africa. Had he not died before independence, he likely would have become the minister for foreign affairs in Nelson Mandela's government.


In September 1983, Johnny and I were both in Geneva, Switzerland for the United Nations International Conference on the Question of Palestine. I interviewed him for Palestine Focus. I also published the interview in the appendix of my 1985 book, "Garrison State: Israel's Role in U.S. Global Strategy" and I aired the interview on a series of 30-minute radio shows on KPFA in Berkeley based on material I collected in Geneva. This is the text of that interview, which has very strong echoes in contemporary events.

SG: How does the ANC view the relationship between Israel and South Africa?

MM: The South African regime, presently led by people were were active collaborators with Nazi Germany and, therefore, strongly anti-Semitic, has now become the closest ally of Zionist Israel. This is a strange alliance. But, as David Ben-Gurion said in 1969, they justify it on the basis of so-called comradeship between two regimes under peril.

One thing that brings them together is their total opposition to the right of self-determination for the indigenous people of South Africa and for the Palestinian people. Of course there are other parallels: the use of religion as a basis, or spiritual rock, for the denial of the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples; the claim of predestination, or divine right; and the view of Palestine and South Africa as "promised lands."

The first statesman to visit Israel after the proclamation of Israel was Dr. Malan, the prime minister of South Africa. A number of people who ended up as officials in Israel are South African-born. I could mention [former foreign minister] Abba Eban, [current president] Chaim Herzog, and many others. Financial regulations are relaxed whenever Israel is in serious trouble; a lot of money gets shipped off from South Africa.

Now this collaboration has reached a very high level in the field of economics, in the field of military and nuclear collaboration, and both these regimes, of course, enjoy the support and alliance with the United States. They enjoy the protection of the United States whenever the international community seeks to impose punitive measures for their acts of aggression.

Both the Israeli Zionist regime and the South African regime play a complementary role; both serve as permanent bases for aggression. The role of Israel has been to destabilize and foment insecurity in the Middle East in addition to the oppression of the Palestinian people. Israel engages in total aggression against the Arab countries and operates as the regional gendarme in the service of the United States, international imperialism, whereas Israel extends a carrot to the African countries south of the equator. This is part of the strategy to divide the continent of Africa.

The apartheid regime engages in total aggression against the immediate African countries, i.e., the front-line states that are supporting our struggle, while it seeks to neutralize the Arab countries, since they are the only source where it can get oil which helps to fuel the machinery of oppression and aggression,

This strategy is a pincer movement, and we believe that every Israeli official in Africa, even a technician, is an extension of the South African intelligence service. Therefore, it is out of the question that African countries can have relations with Israel. We welcomed the severance of diplomatic relations in 1973, not just because Israel was occupying Egyptian soil, an African country. For us, it's because Israel is an enemy of the continent of Africa. We deplore the role that Israel is playing--for example, the visit by Sharon to Namibia, to the bases there, making public statements literally calling on the international community to put an end to the arms embargo against South Africa.

Israel's training of Savimbi's forces is an act of hostility to the supreme objectives of the Organization of African Unity [now called the African Union] because the African countries are all supportive of the struggle for the liberation of Namibia and they are all against the destabilization policies carried out by South Africa against Angola. When Israel seeks to establish diplomatic relations with African countries, it is a matter of a Trojan horse, playing the part of a friend, but in fact a total enemy of the continent of Africa. We can go on and on insofar as this collaboration is concerned; the list is very long.

SG: What is the significance of Israel's special relationships with the Bantustans, such as the Ciskei?

MM: First and foremost, it is important to recall that the so-called Ciskei is a tribal entity created by the apartheid reime as part of its policy of Bantustanization, or tribal fragmentation of South Africa. This policy aims to prevent the exercise of the right to self-determination of the indigenous people of South Africa. The international community rejected this policy in 1976 when the first Bantustan, the Transkei, was proclaimed. The General Assembly condemned this as null and void and called on all governments not to recognize or have any contact whatsoever with this tribal entity. Therefore, any regime or government that establishes contact, direct or indirect, with such entities is acting in a hostile manner.

So far, these tribal entities have only been recognized by the apartheid regime, the creator of the problem. The second closest recognition that has come so far is from Israel. There have been visits to Israel by some of these tribal puppets, and there have been promises of assistance and even granting of assistance to the Ciskei puppets. This scheme derives from the collusion between South Africa and the Israeli Zionist reime and also the United States. In other words, we are witnessing an attempt to prepare the ground for the eventual recognition of these tribal creations,

And this takes place at a time when the regime in South Africa has embarked on massive forced removals of the African people who are being taken out of the cities in their millions and dumped in these Bantustans. Already 3.5 million have been removed, and another 2 million are scheduled to be removed pretty soon. This double-pronged approach--the removals and the offensive to win some recognition from certain countries--is aimed at bringing about a situation where the African people can be totally deprived of South African nationhood. Not one African, not one black is to be recognized as South African. In other words, Israel is now in the forefront in policies that are tantamount to total hostility to every position adopted by the Organization of African Unity.

SG: What dangers do you see in the joint Israeli/South African/Taiwanese development of nuclear weapons and cruise missiles which has been exposed since about 1980.

MM: These three--South Africa, Israel, and Taiwan--are all pariah states, regimes that are totally isolated internationally. The United States, in pursuit of its so-called global strategy, users these pariah regimes as regional gendarmes in order to foment instability in certain areas. South Africa is playing that role in southern Africa, creating, training, financing, and equipping dissidents or counterrevolutionaries, such as the Savimbi elements, the LNA in Lesotho, the so-called Mozambican armed resistance, and the Selous Scouts in Zimbabwe.

These counterrevolutionaries have the role of destabilizing the legitimate governments through the destruction of the economic and social infrastructures. Anything done to strengthen the military position of these pariah states is part of that strategy. We have seen nuclear collaboration between the United States and South Africa, between the United States and Israel, as far back as the sixties. But this now includes Taiwan.

Taiwan and Israel have also served as conduits for the arming of South Africa. But now the biggest danger to world peace is that these three pariah states have achieved nuclear capacity thanks to the collaboration between them and some of these western countries.

What dangers do we see? Yes, we see the danger of them being a nuisance. The whole purpose is to try and intimidate international opinion into capitulation. It is intended to bring about a situation whereby the third world or the nonaligned countries can be intimidated into abandoning support of the struggle of the Palestinian people or the South African people. But nothing of that sort will happen. Nothing is going to deter the struggles in both Palestine and in South Africa and Namibia, despite the fact that Israel and South Africa have this nuclear capacity.

It is very important, however, to focus on the role being played by Taiwan because this has tended to escape the notice of a number of countries. Taiwan has friendly relations with some Arab states who were aware of the role that Taiwan is playing. We are absolutely convinced that, once this role is publicized, the Taiwan regime is going to run into serious problems to the point of relations being cut.

Otherwise, the danger is nothing special. We know we are dealing with desperate regimes which are not even signatories to the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, but when you take up arms, nothing can deter you, not even the threat of the use of nuclear weapons.

Monday, December 25, 2023

December 25, 2023

 I don't really mean to offend anyone, but I am unable to resist finding it amusing that an obscure Jewish heretic (historians say he didn't have many followers while he was alive) is worshipped by more than 2 billion people as a god. And, although he was born in the spring, if you believe the descriptions of the stars in the new testament, his birthday is celebrated just after the winter solstice. And, of course, most of the myths about him (virgin birth, betrayal by an apostle, coming back to life, walking on water, turning water to wine, etc.) were borrowed from much earlier religions. What a strange world we live in. I would say that you can't make this stuff up, but obviously someone did.

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

A Taxonomy of AI Risks

Notes Toward a Taxonomy of AI Risks

Steve Goldfield, November 2023


Let me start by stating that I am not an expert on artificial intelligence (AI). However, I started programming computers in 1966, and I have held a number of jobs where I used those skills culminating in my last such job at Sun Microsystems, where I worked from 1996 to 2011 in IT support and development. So, to some extent I am drawing on those skills.

Let's first divide AI into two categories which I will call AI as a tool for humans and AI with independent consciousness or sentience, which I will call science fiction AI. As far as anyone now knows, the latter is not imminent. One good example of it is in Isaac Asimov's “I, Robot” science series. Asimov was a scientist as well as a writer of SF. In his books, Asimov presented what he called the three laws of robotics. These are his three laws.

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov later added a fourth law, also called the zeroth law, which takes precedence of the other three. A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Some of the plot elements in Asimov's novels deal with how a robot can manipulate the ambiguity in these laws in unexpected ways. In Asimov's novels, these laws are hard-wired into his robots' positronic brains which are all built by a single company called US Robotics. That, of course, begs the question of whether other more unscrupulous companies could build robots with different laws or whether robots will these three laws could be tampered with to modify the laws. Stanley Kubrick's film, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” also deals with these issues.

As far as I am aware, we are not close to achieving science fiction AI. That, however, could change when quantum computers become available, which may not be far in the future. In any case, how to contain sentient AI is a thorny question. I'll give a few examples. First of all, we have no guarantee that the human developers of sentient AI will follow any rules. Second, it is possible that machine sentience could take us by surprise and arise in an environment without any safeguards or with insufficient safeguards. We certainly know that humans have in the past and will in the future create dangerous technologies which are difficult or impossible to fully control. Consider nuclear weapons as one example.

It might be possible to isolate sentient AI from the physical world, but that would still be a very risky situation. AI might be able to influence humans to do things which break that isolation or to convince them to carry out dangerous strategies. In this taxonomy, I am not nor am I able to provide solutions to risks. I'm only trying to classify them.

So, let's move on to AI as a tool for humans. In some senses, we have that already. For instance, huge investment firms have used AI to manipulate the stock market for years. They use superfast connections (they place their equipment as physically close to the markets as possible) and superfast computers to follow stock trends and then fairly simple AI can react to those trends to make money for those firms and their customers. The rest of us without access to those tools cannot compete.

Let's consider other criminal uses of AI. We already have legions of skilled and unscrupulous hackers who break into supposedly secure systems. They look for vulnerabilities of various kinds, both technical and human. It would be very easy for them to adapt AI to do that. For example, we now use encryption keys which are theoretically unbreakable. However, we know that when quantum computers become available, those unbreakable encryption protocols will likely become easy to break. We know that bots and trolls are used on the internet to shape and channel public opinion. The use of AI could raise that risk by orders of magnitude and also make it much more difficult to detect. We have growing risks to privacy on the internet which would also be multiplied with the use of AI. AI can also be used to generate massive denial of service attacks by overwhelming online servers. That already happens frequently.

Finally, there are the social risks of AI. AI will increasingly be capable of performing tasks which were previously done only by humans. We saw that as a major issue in the recent screen writer's strike and also in the actor's strike. Our current social and economic organization does not offer viable solutions to AI displacement of humans.

In summary, it is highly likely that there are other risks which are not now visible: Risks that we have not or cannot anticipate and, therefore, which we cannot prevent. To some extent, AI could also be used to combat risks, but that would require substantial investment, too. Right now, for example, many of us run anti-virus programs on our personal computers to filter out many known risks. However, the generators of risks, by default, are always one step ahead because you cannot easily devise protection from a risk until you have seen it already.

Monday, May 8, 2023

Me and My Banjo: 60 Years

I bought my first banjo, a Gibson RB-100, in August of 1963 when I was 16 years old.  I had worked all summer at a day camp near the Great Swamp. They paid me $25 a week to maintain the pool and life guard. My older brother, Mike, took me to Roger Sprung's apartment (maybe it was his mother's) in Manhattan. Roger had each of Gibson's four models on a plush chair. The RB-100 was the cheapest and the only one I could afford. But Roger wanted $155 for the banjo and $40 for the case. My local music store, Gregory's, in Plainfield, New Jersey, sold the same banjo and case for $165 so I bought it there.

My first musical instrument was a plastic song flute that every kid in school in North Plainfield was given. At age 8, my parents bought me a Conn clarinet, which I played in the band and orchestra at North Plainfield High School and in the marching band at Columbia later. At the age of 12, I bought a harmonica. I went to a class. All the others were younger kids. I found that I could play the harmonica by ear with no instruction. But the discount coupon they gave out at the class helped. Later, I bought a Hohner chromonica, but that's another story.

When I was 13, I was given a Harmony ukelele. I learned to play it. I can still play “Blue Moon.” The first LP I ever bought, in 1962, was from the Newport Folk Festival. I probably bought it because Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl were on it. But it had four cuts of Flatt & Scruggs on it. I still have that LP. I wanted to learn to play like Earl. I bought Pete Seeger's book, “How to Play the 5-string Banjo.” I tuned the ukelele like a banjo so that when I did buy the Gibson, I could play a tune the first day, probably “Skip to My Lou.”

A few years later, I heard a rumor that Earl was working on a banjo instrucdtion book. I wrote him a letter. I got a reply from his wife and manager, Louise Scruggs. She confirmed that the book was not yet finished. Much later, I learned that Bill Keith had stayed at the Scruggs' house and put the book (I have a copy now somewhere) together. I don't think Bill got any credit for doing that.

I used to sit on our front porch for 8 hours a day working through Pete's book. I recall that he said in it that to learn bluegrass banjo, it was better to talk to his brother, Mike. I actually met Mike about three decades later, and we became friends. When I bought the banjo, I didn't know anybody else who played. However, I brought it to the day camp I mentioned, and one of the counselors, a guitar player, showed me a few things. I recall that on one Monday, he told me that an old friend had come to visit him the previous weekend. The friend's name was Bob Dylan, who was not so well-known in 1963. The counselor told me that they played outside and his neighbors complained about the noise.

When I started at Columbia in 1964, I brought the banjo with me. I recall that one day as I approached my dorm, Hartley Hall, a guy I recognized was sitting on the steps playing his guitar. It was David Bromberg, whom I had seen play at Lincoln Center for the Herald Tribute World Youth Forum. I didn't know David well, but in April of 1968, my friend Kathy Whelan suggested that we go see him with Jerry Jeff Walker at a club in Greenwich Village. Kathy had done art work for the cover of Jerry Jeff's first LP, and we were comped in. After the show, we went to David's apartment on the upper West Side. We smoked an interesting substance, and David played us some of his recordings. I think he had already played on two Bob Dylan albums by then. The next day, the Columbia strike started. I made the mistake of bringing my banjo to campus and left it in an unlocked room. When I returned, I had no banjo.

Once, at Columbia in 1966, I saw a few people in a bluegrass jam on South Field. One of them was Pete Wernick, later to become Dr. Banjo and play with Hot Rize. On guitar was David Nichtern, who wrote the song, “Midnight at the Oasis,” which was a huge hit for Maria Muldaur. My friend Steve Schneiderman told me he was in that jam, too. In fact, an absolutely gorgeous young woman in a peasant shirt walked up with her fiddle and joined us. It was Maria, who was then Maria D'Amato. About 35 years later, I was at a party at Eric and Suzy Thompson's house in Berkeley. Maria and I started playing Gaither Carlton tunes in the kitchen, and Suzy joined us. Maria had visited Gaither (Doc Watson's father-in-law) in North Carolina.

One more story about Maria fits here. In 1996, I was at a conference of the Folk Alliance in a hotel in Washington, DC, listening to a jam with Hazel Dickens, Alice Gerrard, Ginny Hawker, and Ginny's singing partner (Ginny's husband Tracy Schwarz was playing fiddle) in the basement. On my left was a woman named Kate Long, who had written a song called “Who Will Watch the Home Place,” that Laurie Lewis recorded. On my right was Peter Siegel, who had been in the Even Dozen Jug Band with Maria and a bunch of other musicians, most of whom became very famous. I asked Peter why Maria didn't sing much on their LP; my brother had given me a copy. Peter said that the recording engineer didn't think Maria's voice sounded good through a microphone. We had a good laugh about that. Peter incidentally did a lot of recording back then, including some of Hazel and Alice.

I went on to UC Berkeley to get my Ph.D. in chemistry and couldn't afford a banjo. But after I got my degree in 1972, I got a job at the US Postal Service in Oakland, and I bought a 1972 Gibson Mastertone at the legendary Berkeley music store, Lundgren's. I think I paid $750, and I still have that banjo though I rarely play it. I could have bought it for $400 on music row (48th street) in Manhattan, but the difference in price was about the same as the airfare. I started to play and sometimes perform with friends, usually at political events. I remember writing a song about Oman using a Palestinian melody; I was very actively supporting the liberation movement there at the time.

The political organization I joined in 1970 supported liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia, Guinea-Bissau, and later, too, Eritrea and East Timor. When Angola got its independence in 1975, I wrote a song, appropriately called “Angola is Independent (People's Power is Resplendant).” The UN had a conference on habitat, and the Mayor of Luanda, Angola attended. We hosted him. I remember that we took him up a mountain where he saw snow for the first time. We sang that song for him, and he insisted that we record it on a cassette that he took home with him.

One day, Robbie Osman, who then hosted a show on KPFA radio, announced a musical get-together after the show in a park in Berkeley. I went there with my banjo. There were only 5 or 6 musicians and a lot of listeners, who wanted us to play Beatles songs. But two of the people I met then are still good friends.

In 1982, I was working at the Institute for Food and Development in San Francisco. They had hired me to enter the text of a book on Nicaragua on a Radio Shack computer at Francis Moore Lappe's house in Oakland. I met Rodney Freeland, who had found the Magic Wand software that ran on it. Rodney showed me how to use it. Then there was an event at a house with music, and Rodney was playing mandolin there with friends. Rodney lived close to me but didn't have a car. So, he would phone me and ask if I wanted to go to a San Francisco Folk Music Club jam at Faith Petrick's house in San Francisco. Rodney would go into the basement to play old-time tunes. I'd play my banjo with people singing folk songs.

Rodney also told me about the monthly Fiddlin' and Pickin' potlucks, mostly held in Berkeley. The first one I went to was at Moe Hirsch's house in Kensington. I recall that it cost $.50 to get in, and they had a keg of Anchor Steam beer. I thought that was amazing, but they never did that again. I met lots of people at those potlucks. First, bluegrass people and later, old-time musicians. At one point, I became an organizer of the potlucks. My job was to recruit volunteers to set up and clean up.

In 1985, I started working at UC Berkeley. A friend of mine who also worked there, Jim Allison, was a bluegrass fiddler. He told me about a weekly old-time jam on campus. I brought my Mastertone there, but it was too loud, even when I took off the resonator and finger picks and stuffed a rag in the back. Soon after that, I bought my first open back, a Wildwood Troubadour, made in Arcata. At that jam, I met fiddlers Lani Herrmann and Moe Hirsch, mandolin player Bob Black, and a few other folks. Rodney occasionally dropped by, too. We didn't have a guitar player so they kept asking me to strum chords. I learned lots of tunes on the fly. Moe was a math professor, and we played a few events for his department. We also played for a potluck at Cowell Hospital (it's gone now and replaced by the business school) one year. I got a call afterward that one of the employees at the picnic had come down with hepatitis. So, all the musicians had to come in for a shot.

When I started going to the weekly campus jam, I was still playing in a three-finger bluegrass style. But that didn't seem to suit the music to me so I changed to a two-finger style of my own devising. I also tried to play clawhammer, but Pete Seeger's book had got me playing in a very weird down picking style. Later, I took three lessons from Jody Stecher to fix my clawhammer right hand.

At the potlucks, I made some good friends: Mike Gix, Craig Fixler, Mark Kartman, and many more. Mike and I used to drive to jams and some festivals together. Mike moved up to Vancouver, BC. I played with Mark until his shoulder stopped allowing him to fiddle.

Every summer, Lani would come home from the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, Washington. She would play tunes she had learned there. I decided to go there in 1992. I announced at a potluck old-time jam that I was driving up and looking for someone to ride with me. A woman I didn't previously know, Susan Sullivan, said she was looking for a ride. So, we agreed to drive up together and did so. Her husband, Mark, drove up and picked her up at the end so I drove home down the coast on my own. I was so tired that I didn't even get out of Washington the first day.

Mike, Susan, and I started jamming together after that, either at my cottage in north Oakland or at Susan's apartment in San Francisco. Later, Mark Kartman and Bobbi Nikles joined us, and the jams moved to Bobbi's house in the El Cerrito hills with a panoramic view of the bay. All four of them played fiddle, but one would usually play guitar.

At one point, I suggested to the Freight & Salvage that they have some old-time jams on nights when there were no shows. First, I talked to director Steve Baker and to music director Randy Pitts. They each said it would be a good idea but that the other wouldn't allow it. So, I went to a board meeting, and they agreed to do it. I think there were only two such jams and then the Freight started having shows every night.

At one of those jams, a fellow named Michael Shames, whom I later got to know better at Sweet's Mill, let me play his fretless banjo. I found it very easy to play and decided to buy one. Lark in the Morning was selling a mountain banjo at their store in Mendocino. I didn't want to buy it without seeing it so one cold December day I drove 4 hours up there. They didn't have the fretless in stock, but they had a fretted model. The goatskin head had sunk down in the cold and I had to put it in front of a heater for a few minutes before it became playable. I liked it and ordered a nylon string fretless, which was shipped to my house.

Incidentally, Michael Shames, who departed us long ago, told me a great banjo story. He was at McCabe's music store in Los Angeles. I think he was working there. He was in a room with lots of banjos hanging on the walls. Someone he didn't know came in and asked him which banjo he would buy. Michael pulled one down and played it. The other person left the room. When Michael went up to the counter, the person there said, “Michael, that person just bought you a banjo.” It was the one he had demonstrated.

My banjo and I started traveling. At first, we just went to the CBA festival in Grass Valley and to Fiddle Tunes. I remember going a few times, too, to a festival in Fiddletown in the Gold Country. I also went to the Midsummer Bluegrass Festival, the Strawberry Festival, and to the Wolf Mountain Festival. We also went to the Solstice festival near Malibu in 1995-96. I met Bruce Molsky and Rafe Stefanini there in 1995. I also went to a New Year's camp in Malibu. Then I started going to the San Francisco Folk Music Club's New Year's camps in northern California and still go to those.

In the early 1990s, some friends of mine came back from the annual IBMA meeting back east and told me about a new Email list called bgrass-l that was started there by a fellow named Frank Godbey at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. I was member number 12. That list discussed bluegrass and old-time music, and I met a lot of old-time musicians there. Chirps Smith, Brad Leftwich, and lots of others participated.

Somebody started a clawhammer newsgroup and one of the first things we discussed was what if we want to talk to fiddlers, too. So, I said that if nobody else volunteered, I would start an old-time newsgroup. There was an extensive process to go through to do that. First, I had to choose a name. I wanted to call it rec.music.old-time, but the gatekeepers for such groups said that in the UK, old-time music was music hall music. So, it was named rec.music.country.old-time. Then we had to have 30 days of discussion. The biggest issue was whether the name would have old-time or old-timey. We voted, and 80 percent wanted old-time. Then we had to allow 30 days for voting. The vote was overwhelmingly positive, something like 286 to 36.

As a result, I was then connected to old-time musicians all around the country. I was invited to a conference on Old-Time Music and Radio to be held in Mt. Airy, North Carolina before the annual June fiddler's convention. At that time, old-time music was mostly available on cassette tapes or LPs. There were very few CDs. Rounder Records had issued a compilation which was released in Mt. Airy.

Not long before that, Henry Koretzky, who had participated in the newsgroup, told me that Bluegrass Unlimited magazine was looking for an old-time music reviewer, and he would suggest me if I were interested. He had read my posts in the newsgroup. The first two CDs I was sent to review were Marvin Gaster's Rounder CD and a CD by the Piney Creek Weasels, a California old-time band I knew well. I mailed in those two reviews from Mt. Airy. I met Bob Carlin there. I told him that I had described Marvin as a thumb lead banjo player. Bob said that Marvin, whom I had never seen, actually played index lead. I got it corrected before it went into print.

On the way to Mt. Airy from South Carolina, where I visited relatives, I stopped overnight in Union Grove. I was invited to jam by a fellow from Indiana, who was camped near me. He said his neighbor, who had won Fiddler of the Festival, was going to join us. It was Ralph Blizard. I had met Ralph at the Freight & Salvage in Berkeley. He mistook me for someone he knew and came up to me to talk. The three of us played together for about an hour. Then several others, including Henry the Fiddler, joined us. Ralph became a good friend after that, and I played with him many times.

At the conference, I met lots of people, including Alice Gerrard, Mike Seeger, Ken Irwin (of Rounder Records), and many more. Alice asked me to write an article for the Old-Time Herald about the newsgroup I had started, and I did. I also became the keeper of the Email list for the Old-Time Music and Radio group. At the fiddler's convention, I think there were something like 35 people I knew from the internet. One was Gail Gillespie, who later replaced Alice as editor of the OTH. Gail introduced me to lots of people, including Mac Benford, whom we jammed with. Mac and I traded banjos in that jam. Chirps Smith and I had a nice jam inside John Hatton's setup where he sold recordings. I met a West Virginia fiddler named Doug Van Gundy, and we hung out together and jammed there.

There were a few other people there from California that year. I remember Jim and Amber Mueller from San Luis Obispo, whom I had met at Fiddle Tunes in 1982, and Barbara Reid from San Diego. I never saw Barbara again, but her ex-husband W. B. Bruce Reid later became a good friend.

When I returned home, I wrote an article about the trip for the CBA's monthly newspaper, Bluegrass Breakdown, entitled “Knocking on the Gates of Old-Time Heaven.” The Northern California Bluegrass Society asked to reprint it, and they also gave me their Alton Delmore writer's award that year.

I went back to Mt. Airy in 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2001. Some of the other people I met there who became good friends were Betty Vorn Brock and Billy Cornette and, though them, J. P. Fraley.

In 1996, I also started learning fiddle, but since this is about banjos, I'll let that lie. I brought my banjo many times to a small festival in Tennessee called Breaking Up Winter. In 1998, I went to the Appalachian String Band Festival in Clifftop, West Virginia for the first time, and I went to the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, WV right after that to study fiddle with Tom Sauber. But I jammed a lot on banjo and met Bill and Libby Hicks, Scott Prouty, Chris Coole, and others there. Six years later, I was sitting behind Sammy Lind in a jam at Grass Valley. He turned around and said, “Weren't you at Augusta six years ago?” So, I guess I first met Sammy there, too.

I'm going to skip ahead a long time since this is about banjos. For many years, I had two old-time banjos plus the Mastertone. However, one year at Grass Valley, a fellow showed up who was a strong old-time fiddler. I jammed with him, and he let me play his 1902 Whyte Laydie banjo. That was the finest sounding banjo I had ever played. I later learned from Al Hart that he had had two Whyte Laydies and sold that one to the person I was playing with.

In 2018, my mom died, and I inherited some money. I had heard that Eastman, a Chinese company, was making an excellent replica of a Whyte Laydie. Those of us who know a bit about old-time banjos know that the great Whyte Laydies were made between 1900 and 1906 when there was a fire in the factory. After that, they were still good but not as good. My friend Mel Durham, a southern California fiddler, told me that he had a 1902 Whyte Laydie with a bill of sale for $150, which was a lot of money in 1902. I never saw it, and I have no idea what happened to it after Mel died.

My friend, Harry Liedstrand, had an Eastman, but he was out of town. So, I decided to order one, which I could always return if I didn't like it. None of the well-known banjo sellers had it in stock, and I don't think they have been available since then, but I found a Florida music store selling one on Ebay and purchased it. I wanted a skin head on it. So, bought one from Bob Smakula in West Virginia, and I had my go-to banjo luthier, Larry Cohea, put it on. I recall that he phoned me to tell me that it was too tight and wouldn't go on, but when I got to his shop behind his house, he had managed to do it. Needless, to say, that quickly became my favorite banjo. I still have the Wildwood, but I don't play it often because it has a design flaw.

I should mention that I have seen about a dozen other Wildwoods of the same model, but they all weigh a lot more than mine, and they don't sound as good. Someone once said to me, “I hate Wildwoods, but I like yours.” When Jason Romero first started selling banjos—he was still living in Arcata—he told me he had worked for Wildwood. I showed him my banjo, and he said that maple comes in a wide range of densities, and mine is near the low end. Thus it has less mass and rings more. He also said that Wildwood had put bluegrass lugs on instead of old-time lugs. Many years later, I replaced those.

I had a fretless that I could play in G or C, but I wanted to also be able to play fretless in A and D, and nylon strings do not want to be retuned. A friend mine was making fretless banjos. He had one in A, but it had violin tuners, and I didn't want to buy it. Then I got an Email from Elderly Instruments in Michigan. They had a Kevin Enoch Tradesman fretless for sale. I had met Kevin back east, and he showed me his prototype Tradesman before he started selling them. At that point, he thought he could sell them for $500. Needless to say, they cost a lot more than that now. Again, I decided to buy the banjo in the knowledge that I could send it back if I didn't like it. Of course, I liked it a lot. However, it came tuned to G with Nilegut strings. I tried tuning it up to A, but it did not want to go there. So, I Emailed the people who sell those strings in the USA. They figured out the diameters of strings I should get to play in A and D. I ordered them, and they work just fine.

I left out another banjo I purchased in 2018. I had bought a ticket to the CROMA old-time festival in Colorado. My mom was living in Denver, and my plan was to drive out to visit her and go to the festival in July and visit her, too. However, she died in June. I decided to buy an RV and just managed to get it in time to drive it to Colorado. However, I was discombobulated by my mom's death, and this was my first trip in the RV. When I packed my car, I always packed my instruments in the back seat, but there was no obvious place to put two fiddles and two banjos in the RV. As I was driving over the Sierras, I realized that I had forgotten to bring a hat, but I knew I could get one in Colorado. But, halfway across Nevada, I realized that I had forgotten my instruments.

When I got to the festival, my friend, David Brown (not the one in California), loaned me his fretted Enoch Tradesman. He said it was OK to tune it up to A, and I did. I put it in the case. I saw a California friend playing in G and he invited me to join him. I took the banjo out of the case and one of the Nilegut strings had broken. David said he didn't have more strings or a capo. At the end of the festival, he told he had been wrong and had them. There was a luthier who had two Pisgah banjos he was trying to sell. However, they didn't suit my style. So, I bought an inexpensive Harmony banjo from John Hatton, which got me through the festival. I later donated it to the CBA's youth instrumen lending library.

I should also mention that I own a banjo uke and a banjo mandolin, that I bought to learn fiddle chords.

I have also judged a couple of banjo contests. In 1996, Peter Feldman, who was still running the festival in Goleta near Santa Barbara then, recruited me on the internet to judge banjo there. Much later, a friend recruited me and another friend, to judge what was billed as the California state banjo contest in Red Bluff. That happened only once, since the festival lost so much money. I was also recruited to judge a string band contest at the Golden Old-Time Festival in Yreka in 2005 and 2006. The first year only one band entered. The second year, there were nine. I was also asked to MC. They lost money, too, unfortunately. However, we kept the name. There were two Golden Old-Time campouts in Boonville. A few years later, the CBA recruited me to be its old-time music coordinator, and I organized six Golden Old-Time campouts at Lake Sonoma north of San Francisco. That campout is still going, though I passed on the torch and it has moved to another location.


Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Identity Politics and White Supremacy

 I heard on the radio today that Nicky Haley will run against identity politics in her 2024 presidential campaign. I doubt that she will oppose the most pernicious and dangerous form of identity politics: white supremacy. It seems that people who self-identify as "white"--I certainly don't--believe that their lighter skin tones entitle them to special treatment compared to everyone else. Haley was governor of South Carolina, which is one of the strongest bastions of white supremacy anywhere. I once went to a barbecue in Columbia with my cousin when she was living there. She cautioned me not to talk politics there since it could be dangerous.

I hope Haley will be confronted about this issue. The false notion of white identity, which was created by English settlers to create and maintain majority control and to justify brutal oppression of everyone not included, is one of the cornerstones of our very sick society. People of Irish or Italian descent, for example, were not originally classified as white. None of us comes from Whiteland. There is no such thing as white ethnicity or nationality. White culture is an absurd notion. It is long past time to completely scrap the notion of whiteness along with white skin privilege.

The absurdity of the idea of whiteness was very clear in Apartheid South Africa. I used to receive a publication summarizing the South African press from the African National Congress of South Africa. One article has stuck in my memory for decades. There was an annual report on racial classifications in South Africa, which defined many races. For example, Asian was a race, though Japanese were honorary whites for economic reasons. The key sentences from the report gave the number of people classified white from colored, colored from white, black from colored and colored from black. However, the number classified from white to black or black to white was zero. Sometimes, two siblings with the same parents were classified in different races.

The notion of race is scientific nonsense, of course. All humans originated in Africa, and nothing in our DNA corresponds with racial distinctions in use. However, it derives its power precisely from its use in deciding who gets privileges and who does not. I learned a lot about race from South African scholar Fred Dube. He explained that racial definitions are completely arbitrary, as the previous paragraph illustrates. In apartheid Israel, race is defined by whether you are Jewish or not.

An otherwise progressive rabbi once told me that I could not be Jewish because I don't believe in the existence of a supreme being or practice the religion. That definition makes about 85 percent of Jewish people not Jews. Indeed Jews are not a coherent grouping in any way. We speak different languages, live in different countries, and have very little in common. I used to know a Moroccan Jew who had come to study at UC Berkeley. We used to joke that the only things we had in common were that both of us spoke English and both of supported Palestinians.

When I describe myself as Jewish, I mean that my ancestors were eastern European Jews. Three of my grandparents spoke Yiddish, though one did not. Only one of my grandparents believed in a god, and she died before I was born. When I asked my mother in my teens why I had been sent for religious training and bar mitzvah, she replied that she wanted me to know what I would be rejecting. That was an excellent strategy.

Friday, February 25, 2022

We Must Admit that Elements of the US Left Have Aided the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

 I am afraid that this blog will have an element of "I Told You So" because I have been arguing this point for eight years, but telling the truth is unavoidable and that is what I intend to do. Before I start, I want to make one observation. Ukraine has had absolutely no role in the eastward expansion of NATO; therefore, that can never be any part of an explanation, let alone a justification, for Putin's invasions of Ukraine. I am absolutely in favor of dissolving NATO, and its expansion is certainly a crime. But I repeat that Ukraine had nothing to do with it.

I want to begin by focusing on a Democracy Now! interview this morning (Feb. 25, 2022) with a Ukrainian journalist who has covered the Donbass from the Donbass. She made a statement which I am afraid will be ignored by many left pundits who have been spouting nonsense about Ukraine for the past 8 years. She said that Russia has been in the Donbass since 2014 even though they pretended not to be there. Russian citizens, Russian mercenaries, and Russian soldiers have been there since 2014. In other words the so-called Lukansk and Donetsk republics (LPR and DPR) are Russian creations, not the creation of Ukrainian citizens, though I am certain that some Ukrainian quislings have participated in them. There has been plenty of evidence of that, not least, the repatriation of dead uniformed Russian soldiers to Russia from Ukraine. In Russia, they were buried without fanfare or acknowledgment; This has been a Russian invasion since 2014.

It must be stated, however, that the Ukrainian government has played into this Russian ploy in a few ways which have alienated the Ukrainian people in the Donbass. First of all, their conduct of the war has endangered civilians, and that, of course, generates tremendous anger. I have a friend from the Donbass who was very supportive of the popular uprising in 2014, but now, she is so angry at the Ukrainian government that she has abandoned those views.

Second, it was simply idiotic to pass laws making Ukrainian the only official language when about half of Ukrainian citizens are Russian speakers, though many Ukrainians are, of course, bilingual. They haven't made it illegal to speak Russian, as some mistakenly charge, but all official documents are in Ukrainian only, and even movie theaters are no longer allowed to show films in Russian.

Third, Ukrainian citizens from the Russian-occupied Donbass have different identity papers from other Ukrainian citizens. When they present those, they are often greeted with hostility and a lack of cooperation. When you fight a foreign invasion, you must be very careful not to fight your own citizens.

The next point is the total swallowing by many on the left of the Russian propaganda about the influence of fascists in Ukraine. I heard a very interesting interview on KPFA this morning with an expert on Eastern Europe who debunked that fiction. He said that there were fascist elements in the Ukrainian military in 2014-15 but not since then. There are two fascist political parties in Ukraine, and they received a combined 3 percent of the vote in the 2015 presidential elections. Ukraine is not a fascist country, and its government, however inept it has been, is not a fascist government. Those who kept trumpeting false Russian propaganda about fascist Ukraine have a lot to answer for.

Next is the totally false characterization of the 2014 popular uprising as a US-supported coup. Yes, US officials tried their best to make use of the uprising, but they did not start it and it had overwhelming support in most of Ukraine because it was an uprising against massive corruption, oligarchs, and a dysfunctional economy much like the 2004 uprising. To call that uprising a "coup" is an insult to the Ukrainian people. To make this point clear, would you call the US revolution a coup? Would you call the French revolution a coup? What about the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions? Those were all popular uprisings which removed existing governments. In the case of Ukraine, President Yanukovich took the advice of Vladimir Putin and stationed snipers on rooftops from which they shot and killed protesters. He then fled the country and was replaced by the elected parliament. Those facts are not the facts of a coup. And let me add that the Ukrainian parliament unanimously impeached Yanukovich; does that constitute a coup?

In my view, there are many grounds for self-criticism about the conduct and statements of what I call the chauvinist left who swallowed blatant Russian propaganda hook, line, and sinker and spread it as widely as they could. Unfortunately, I doubt that they will be self-critical. I call them chauvinist because of their servile acceptance of even the most absurd Russian propaganda.

At the bottom of all this is their failure to perceive Ukraine as a country of people with legitimate aspirations independent of great power conflict over Ukraine. I heard one commentator, the publisher of the Nation, admit on the air that she knew nothing of what was going on inside Ukraine, which she demonstrated over and over again. I heard people talk about a "civil war" in Ukraine when there is no civil war, no east/west divide. In 2014, I heard one of the experts on Ukrainian history, Prof. Paul Robert Magocsi (I read his 700-page history of Ukraine when I was in Ukraine in 2010) debunk this on NPR. He said there was what he called a young/old divide, which accords more with the Ukraine I know and with Ukraine as reflected in public opinion polls.

I urged various people at KPFA and also Democracy Now! to interview Prof, Magocsi, who heads Ukrainian studies at the University of Toronto. None of them did so. When I suggested that recently to Dennis Bernstein and criticized the misinformation and lies his guests were presenting, he responded very defensively by accusing me of name calling and attacking them rather than addressing any of the issues I raised. To be an expert on Russia is not necessarily to be an expert on Ukraine, and the commentators I have heard on these radio shows have demonstrated that over and over again.

My interest in Ukraine was kindled first by the fact that two of my grandparents were born in Ukraine (one was born in Odessa when it was a Russian city). Then I met Ukrainians and decided to visit the country in 2010, including a week's vacation in Crimea. I don't pretend that I am an expert on Ukraine, only that I know enough to be able to detect nonsense when I hear it. My primary expertise is on the Middle East (I was a founder and the first national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Committee in the 1980s) and southern Africa, and I visited socialist Yemen (a country which no longer exists) in 1979 and Palestine, Jordan, and Syria in 1986. In the 1970s, I also worked actively with the Gulf Committee, which supported progressive movements in Oman and Bahrain.

My goal is justice for Ukraine and Ukrainians and acknowledging their history and present accurately is a first step toward achieving that. Unfortunately, huge swathes of the US left have done the opposite,