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:

A video interlude: Woody Guthrie on Cde. Pavlichenko

In lieu of a "real" blog entry today (work has a way with interfering with an in-depth piece I'm wokring on), I'm going to start a weekly (if not more frequent) "video interlude" section here focusing on lefty music and other treasures.... This particular entry has been lifted almost verbatim from a previous FB posting, so apologies to those who cry "rerun!".

So anyhow, appropriately enough, with all the talk of militias and fascists, I bring you the story of Ludmilia Pavlichenko. Credited with killing 309 fascist soldiers (including 36 enemy snipers) during the nazi invasion of Russia (making her the most successful female sniper in history), Miss Pavlichenko was a rare breed of Soviet sniper -- just one of 2000 female snipers, she was also one of only 500 who survived the war.

Wounded in 1942, she was pulled away from the front, and sent to Canada and the US (where she met with FDR in the White House). She was made a Hero of the Soviet Union and trained other Soviet snipers until the war ended.

This here is a song by anti-fascist folk musician Woody Guthrie, who, as the intro below notes, recorded this song in 1946.



And while we're on the subject of Woody Guthrie and killing fascists, here's another song he did, way before Billy Bragg got a hold of it: