Tuesday, April 20, 2010

A Video Interlude: Victor Jara

I hate letting a day go by without at least a simple entry about current events, but so much is happening it's hard to focus on just one item of interest -- I'm working on longer pieces on teabaggers, the war presidency, reclamation of leftist symbols, and other areas of personal interest.



But, in the interest of not letting too much time go between posts, here's another video interlude, this time focusing on one of my personal heroes, Chilean guitarist, singer/songwriter, labor activist, and communist Victor Jara, who was assassinated on 15 September 1973 by the fascist junta -- led by Augusto Pinochet -- that overthrew -- with CIA involvement -- the democratically-elected government of Salvador Allende during the "original" 9/11.

Before Jara was killed, they broke his hands, and mockingly threw his guitar at him and told him to "play now" -- such was the power of his words and his songs and the threat they meant to the fascist regime.

Victor Jara knew then -- as did his killers -- what Woody Guthrie knew years earlier -- "this machine kills fascists."

While many of Jara's songs were about the obvious things like love, he also sang songs of revolution. This song honors Che Guevara, the Argentinean doctor who helped overthrow the fascist and corrupt regime of Fulgencio Batista of Cuba, and who then went on to foment revolutions in Africa and other parts of Latin America:



And, taking the internationalist angle a little bit further, Christy Moore, legendary Irish musician, sings a song about Victor Jara:

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