The earliest evidence we have of musical instruments dates back to the Old Stone Age. We know that there were rich musical traditions in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, China and elsewhere. Indirectly, it is possible that some aspects of Babylonian musical theory and practice influenced the Greek, and by extension European, musical tradition. The ancient Greeks used various musical instruments such as harps, horns, lyres, drums and cymbals. Greek music theory evolved continually from Pythagoras before 500 BC to Aristides Quintilianus in the late third century AD, whose treatise De musica (On Music) is an important source of knowledge of the Greek musical tradition. Music was closely connected to astronomy in Pythagorean thought, as mathematical laws and proportions were considered to be the underpinnings of both musical intervals and the heavenly bodies.

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A few days ago Tehran expelled Britain’s diplomats and arrested some of the British embassy’s local staff. The semiofficial Fars news agency suggested that the latter had played a “significant role” in recent protests, inferring that Britain herself was fermenting unrest inside Iran. Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband has responded, however, saying that the suggestion was “wholly without foundation.” And the Czech EU presidency has also said that, “The harassment or intimidation of foreign and Iranian staff working at the EU embassies will be met with a strong and collective EU response.”
 
Speaking last year at ‘The Second Stage: Building Democracy in a Posttotalitarian World’ conference [video] hosted by The Hoover Institute, Richard Perle remarked on the difficulty facing diplomats working in authoritarian regimes. “It is almost always the case,” he said, “that encouraging [human] rights where they do not exist will not improve the relationship [between the diplomat’s nation and the other] – at least not in the short term – but will complicate it and even worsen it, so there is a natural resistance to doing what needs to be done to encourage human rights on the part of the diplomatic establishment.”

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Spaniards are currently debating a controversial plan by Socialist Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero to liberalize the country’s abortion law. The new measure would obligate the public healthcare system to provide free abortions without any restrictions for women 16 years and over up to the 14th week of pregnancy, and up to 22 weeks if there is a risk to the mother’s health or if the foetus is deformed. Women can also undergo the procedure after 22 weeks if doctors certify that the foetus has a serious deformity or incurable illness.

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George Handlery about the week that was. The Islamic Republic of Iran is openly transmuting into a theocratic dictatorshi. The virtues of applied Socialism. How about a charter to protect the endangered majority? Again they are fighting Coca-Cola. Property is theft, expropriation via taxes is what?
 
1. Any reaction to the days past must include Iran. The need is clear. Having witnessed the collapse of several systems, an attraction to follow comparable events develops. Admittedly, in some of its details, the wobbling of Iran’s theocratic dictatorship differs from the writer’s experience. Iran’s system is not supported by the probable intervention of a great power. The security organs of the régime are still obeying orders. Furthermore, a significant segment of the public not only tolerates, but also supports the system. Regardless of the caveats, one can foretell much about the years to come.

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Americans are proud, and rightly so, of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights, which, among other things, protects speech from government control. The Amendment says in part: “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

Increasingly, however, Americans seem content to regard the First Amendment not as the fundamental working tool of democracy, but as a national heirloom, a kind of antique to admire rather than put to use. I don’t think many of my countrymen perceive how profoundly their attitude toward free speech has changed. But there is a difference between having freedom of speech and exercising freedom of speech, one that has become glaringly and distressingly obvious to me since September 11, 2001. So, while it is true that the US government is not Constitutionally empowered to make laws that censor Americans, it is also true, I believe, that Americans have come to censor themselves. But why?

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Geert Wilders, the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), has already made four trips to the United States this year. He has also been to Italy and Denmark and is planning a couple of new trips to the US later this year, plus trips to Canada and Australia.

Why does the politician from the Netherlands travel so much? This is a question the Dutch media have been asking themselves. Last week, both the weekly magazine Vrij Nederland and the newspaper De Volkskrant wrote long articles about Wilders’ travels, written by journalists who followed him on a couple of his trips. The only reason why a man would so eagerly travel the world, is obvious, they say: He does it for the money. Wilders is said to be on fundraising tours, especially among the “American far-right.”

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In my previous Brussels Journal essay on Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen, I used the analysis of modernity undertaken by Eric Voegelin (1901-1986) as my critical framework. These current remarks constitute an extended footnote to the Borges-Blixen essay, in which I want to return to the text of Voegelin’s New Science of Politics (1952), particularly to its analysis of the Gnostic mentality, as that makes itself manifest on the contemporary political scene, and even more particularly to the book’s treatment of the Gnostic “second reality” or “dream world” in its remarkable Chapter 6, entitled “The End of Modernity.” I believe Voegelin to be central to any understanding of our condition.

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It pleases me a good deal that the citations from the work of Eric Voegelin – particularly from his New Science of Politics – in my recent Brussels Journal essay on Jorge Luis Borges and Karen Blixen appealed to the acuity of two Journal readers, the parties who identify themselves as “Wynne” and “Ribera.”
 
I first read Voegelin nearly thirty years ago at the moment when I began graduate studies at UCLA in Comparative Literature. The time was the mid-1980s, the watershed moment for postmodern thinking in North America due to the publication in English of books by Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and a host of lesser Parisian radicals. In the proverbial blink of eye, the literature faculties and the cohorts of graduate students fixated on the weird syntax and abstract, rather threatening vocabulary of De la gammatologie and Les mots et les choses, which constituted, from that epoch, almost the sole object of interest in the reading-courses and seminars. Together, Voegelin and René Girard gave me the intellectual tools for understanding what I was seeing. Girard, a Frenchman but not a Parisian, would have called it a mimetic crisis, with literature and all normative views as the sacrificial victim under the pejorative of “Logocentrism.” Voegelin, who was more central to my understanding at the time than Girard, would have seen it as another manifestation of metastatic faith, or rather of a metastatic – or contagious – pseudo-faith pitting itself in contest with received tradition.

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Victoria Station, London. Look around this 150-year-old rail station and you can see the rise and fall, and rise and now again decline of the British nation.

Victoria Station is just a few blocks from Buckingham Palace and was for many decades the connecting station with the "Continent" (Europe) and the greater world, much like the large international airports of the present day.

The kings and queens of England would greet the various European royals and other heads of state at Victoria Station.

Most of the parts of the station that were built in the late 19th century are still there - the great steel trusses and the Victorian brickwork. In its time, it was state-of-the-art, befitting what was the superpower of its day. After World War I, the station slowly was allowed to decay, as was the British economy.

Beginning with the Thatcher reforms, England had a quarter-century run as the fastest-growing major economy in Europe, but still slower than that of the United States. Yet the basic structure of Victoria Station was only partially renovated during the good years, even though rail privatization and sleek new trains began to reinvigorate rail travel.

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In one op-ed piece, Frank Schaeffer tells us that “the real lesson of Iran” actually has nothing to do with Iran, and everything to do with American conservatives.  Neoconservatives and the religious-Right are – so we’re told – trying their best to establish a Christian, pro-Israel dictatorship, replete with Old Testament law.

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The British Conservatives have finally left the European People’s Party (EPP), the Christian-Democrat group in the European Parliament. The intention to leave the EPP was first announced at the “Congress of Brussels,” a two-day conference, organized by Daniel Hannan, a British MEP (Member of the European Parliament), in Brussels in December 2005. The 2005 conference was attended by politicians from the British Conservatives, the Czech Republic’s Civic Democratic Party (ODS) of President Vaclav Klaus, Poland’s Law and Justice Party (PiS) of President Lech Kaczyński, and others, such as Alexandra Colen, a member of the Belgian federal parliament for the Flemish-secessionist Vlaams Belang party. The second day of the conference coincided with the election in London of David Cameron as the party leader of the British Conservatives. Before his election as party leader, Mr. Cameron had promised Mr. Hannan to pull his party out of the EPP within weeks of his election as party leader. It took him three and a half years to do so. Yesterday, the British Conservatives, the Czech ODS, the Polish PiS, and a couple of tiny parties from five other EU member states, announced the formation of a new group with a somewhat contradictory name, the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR).

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A recent article in the French newspaper Le Figaro reveals that sexual violence is on the rise in France. Rapes constitute three-quarters of the crimes committed by young persons under the age of 18. In Nº 40 of his weekly journal, available through subscription, Yves Daoudal analyzes the problem from a different perspective than that of the Le Figaro: “Today rapes represent three-quarters of the crimes committed by those under 18. And more than half of those under 13 who get into trouble with the law are indicted for acts of a sexual nature (yes: under the age of 13). One thousand adolescents are implicated every year in matters relating to sexual assaults or rapes: the figures have increased 50% in ten years.”

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George Handlery about the week that was. Bail outs, even for the cadaver class. Fleeing high taxes. Minimalizing taxes is a basic right. Respect criminals: get their consent for actions against them. Never say never unless it always pays. Crime, exposure and tolerance. The common denominator. Lip service rejecting past crimes frees from acting to fight their current version. Revelations, redeemers and repression.
 
1. The story is a widely circulating and, due to its relentless repetition, widely accepted. According to it, state intervention has saved capitalism from failure. Actually, even in the USA, capitalism did not exist in a pure form. Government-by-the-Clintons has interfered in the market system massively. With devastating ultimate consequences, government meddled in the process by which credits were granted and real estate prices evolved. Huge profits awaited those playing along. (Mortgages to those who could not afford them and the resulting house prices unrelated to value are meant.) Now the government is fixing wages for the employees of financial institutions. Will this interference be more beneficial than the one that originally regulated credits, mortgages and real estate prices?

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I am aware of the fact that some British people speak of Europe as “somewhere else,” to which they do not belong. In my opinion, Britain is very much a part of European civilization whether they want to admit so or not, but I am willing to grant them a special place within the European tradition. There is a reason why English became the first global lingua franca. While I focus mainly on the history of science in my essays these days, let us have a brief look at some of the political ideas and concepts championed by the British in the modern era.

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