That makes five songs recorded to edit and mix, plus maybe another two that I'd like to record. This was meant to be a four song EP, but...well, there's two kinds of project - those that get more grandiose the longer you stay with them, and those whose ambition decreases inversely with time.
Oh, three kinds - there's also undertakings whose aims change all the time. They can achieve lots but only incidentally to failing to reach the stated goal. Most research and experimentation is like that.
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Jon S sent me an email asking:
I was asked a question the other day and could not find an answer.
"had the nazis not based their ideology on racism, would they have still been evil"
I'm not an expert on nazis or evil, but I know a bit about ideology and racism, so I threw together an essay in response. Here it is:
I'm not sure the nazis did base their ideology on racism. But it depends exactly what you mean by 'racism'.
The original racism was a justification for slavery, and is the only case I can call to mind of a new prejudice artificially created from scratch to serve a specific economic and political purpose. Of course, once it had been created, it could develop a life of it's own, mutating and generating offshoot species - different kinds of racism which resembled but weren't identical to the parent.
Some of these offshoots were themselves artificially generated through mass media propaganda, by simultainiously stoking up and modifying forms of racism that had been 'slumbering' for years. The current racism against asylum seekers is a good example of this.
The original racism focused on skin colour as an supposed indicator of various kind of inferiority - moral, intellectual, spiritual etc.
One second generation of racism was antisemitism. Instead of skin colour indicating inferiority, religion now indicated threat. Whereas previously blacks portrayed as were stupid, unorganised and childish, jews were now portrayed as cunning, organised and collaborating against the rest of the world. Blacks had been regarded with contempt, now jews were regarded with fear.
However, this second generation contained remnants of the first. Under racism against blacks, much was made of the supposed great physical differences between blacks and whites. Broad noses, knit hair, large buttocks, high navels and of course the (in)famous enormous penises became exaggerated in popular art, and seen as indexes (or even causes) of ethical, social, intellectual and creative ineptitude.
This also meant that stereotypical 'white' features, defined by the absence or opposite of stereotypical 'black' features came to be seen as indicators of superiority. Roman noses, low navels, broad hips, wavy hair and unsunken eyes indicated 'good breeding'.
Now we have a third generation of racism, where the indicator isn't the physical form of the victim - though it sometimes pretends to be. And it isn't really religion - though there is the pretension that the divide is between the christian west and muslim east, in spite of the fact that most of the west is more-or-less atheist, and Islam is only one religion of the east.
The new racism is based on nationality. The facts that nationality has been rechristiened 'ethnicity', and that religion is foregrounded in a nonreligious conflict over land, show the way older racisms retain echoes in the new.
What 'naziism' meant to the original nazis wasn't a constant - much as the meaning of 'socialism' could change from week to week in Soviet Russia under Stalin.
We remember the nazis as the people who, as they were losing a world war, diverted resources they couldn't afford into a mechanised genocide - mainly but not exclusively directed against jews. But this was a late development in WW2.
Naziism had mystical elements. Folk traditions of corn dollies, thatched cottages and fertility dances were promoted and usurped as symbols of an ancient and noble past. Physical geography was reconceptualised as a mother which gave birth to the german people, nurturing and sustaining them with rain, sun and crops.
Often high ranking SS officers held midnight ceremonies on the supposed burial sites of their ancestors, to draw ancestral strength into themselves for battle. The swastika was a pagan symbol of unity and harmony, and it's red background symbolised german blood, connected deeply with the land. All this paganism existed alongside the christian mysticism.
Naziism was also the promise of economic prosperity - a way out of the economic mess left by WW1. In the early days, the communists, jews and trade unionists who would later be gassed regarded their own persecution as an acceptable price to pay for full employment and a decent standard of living.
Towards the end of the war, as so often happens, the ruling class started to believe their own propaganda about sacred land and worldwide jewish conspiracies - Orwell famously called this kind of confusion 'doublethink'. For reasons I don't understand, the antisemitism floated to the top of their mass of conflicting obsessions.
So, I don't think naziism was primarily an ideology of racism - rather it was an incohearant mish-mash of utopian promises and mercurial alliances, fake history and real economic investment, and whichever scapegoating was convenient at that moment.
Obviously I'm not claiming that the nazis weren't racist - they clearly were. I'm just suggesting that racism wasn't the single most important and defining feature of the ideological componant of naziism. Why? Because the ideology of naziism wasn't that well defined. It was vague and shifting, according to the needs and whims of it's leaders.
Now, brushing the question of exactly how we define 'evil' under the carpet, there's the question of whether the nazis would have been evil (or *as* evil) had there been no racism in their belief system.
One answer is that, if they had invaded Europe but used a non-racist series of excuses to do so, then invading Europe would still be an evil thing to do. However, the racism would not have 'taken over' later on and motivated the attempted extermination of the jews, so these hypothetical nazis from a parallel universe would be less evil than the ones we know, because they would not have built the concentration camps.
Another possible answer, incompatible with the first, is that, although nazi ideology was a mish-mash, it was nontheless a mishmash which would have been radically different had it not included racism. This is the idea that the structure of nazi belief, and the patterns of collective nazi behavior (such as invading Poland and building the Autobahn) simply would not be possible without a foundation in racism. In effect, that if the nazis hasn't been racist, they wouldn't have done *any* of the things we know them for, and there would have been no second world war.
I tend towards the first anwswer, because I regard racism as an excuse for persecution of one group by another, rather than the real reasons, which I take to be economic. However, I can't be absolutely cirtain.
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