"Just Like the Nazis Did" VIDEO

Subtitled in Farsi!

One person with video skills who heard my recent song, "Just Like the Nazis Did," took the initiative to make this video, with subtitles in his native Farsi language. It's full of the sorts of tragic and outrageous imagery that those of us watching non-western media are seeing all the time since October, as the Gaza Holocaust continues to unfold by the hour.

I want to encourage people with video skills to consider employing them the way this man did. Just as songs that are recorded professionally and involve a backing band tend to get a lot more attention on music streaming platforms, songs with a good video will get much, much more attention as well.

People who understand the value of culture in general know that songs like these serve a variety of purposes. Songs that communicate a reality or effectively tell a story can play a role in popular education as well as in sustaining social movements, and struggling individual people who benefit in a therapeutic sense from having what they're thinking all the time anyway expressed in musical form.

Another way such songs can have value, from my experience over many decades of playing music in many different countries, is perhaps a bit more subtle, and I think worth exploring here a bit, in the context of this video.

Everywhere is different, and I don't want to generalize too much. But when I first starting singing regularly at pro-labor protests in Germany, I found organizers tended to quickly embrace the idea of having an American musician on the stage, singing about the stuff they were protesting about. They would likely have been similarly enthusiastic if I had been German, but being American was probably an advantage much more than anything else.

Why? Because when they're protesting against pro-capitalist "free trade" agreements on behalf of the working class, the last thing they want in Germany, for various reasons, is to be labeled anti-American because they are anti-capitalist. Therefore it can't hurt to have an American anti-capitalist on the stage.

The same principles absolutely apply when it comes to being against Israeli apartheid or the unfolding genocide being waged against the people of Gaza. Being against apartheid or genocide are not anti-Jewish, anti-western, or anti-American sentiments, and for many people around the world, it is not only important that reality is conveyed on the news, in song, and in every other possible form, but it is important that this reality be conveyed as well by westerners, and specifically perhaps by Americans and Jews, those most associated with supporting the state of Israel.

This is important because it helps dispel the myth of Israel's popularity among regular people in the west. Showing that lots of westerners are outraged by Israeli war crimes -- as the media outside of the west is doing daily, showing the demonstrations in London and New York City -- matters as well. Because whatever impressions you might have, the west and what a lot of people think of as western values are very popular in large parts of every society around the world, by my observation, troubling as this may be. So telling these stories is not just an important thing to do for itself, but as westerners, for a western audience, as well as for anyone else who understands English or can read the subtitles.