To commemorate the 2011 International Day of Peace, I thought it would be a nice idea to create a playlist that features all the songs of PJ Harvey‘s latest album Let England Shake. Its theme is war, so that makes it quite apposite for this day.
The album has generally garnered critical acclaim as well as PJ Harvey’s second Mercury Prize. Recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset with long time collaborator Flood who co-produced the album with PJ Harvey, John Parish and Mick Harvey. Let England Shake was also mixed by Flood.
It was also accompanied by twelve videos for all the songs which were made by photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. The playlist below contains all those videos in the order in which the songs appear on the album.
The songs are, in order (the links open up the lyrics for each song from pjharvey.net):
Science and religion came together to help shape the attitudes of the British and Europeans towards the rest of the world, whose inhabitants were increasingly regarded as socially inferior and spiritually ignorant. This lecture looks at how these ideas framed the growth of overseas Empire in the latter part of the nineteenth century, how Britain and those European states that possessed colonies governed them and what were the consequences for politics and ideology at home, above all in the growth of the Social Darwinism, racism and extreme nationalism that led to the end of the ‘Victorian’ era in the First World War.
To Sell A War is a documentary which first aired in December 1992 as part of CBC programme The Fifth Estate. The programme was directed by Martyn Gregory and produced by Neil Docherty.
It exposes the Citizens for a Free Kuwait campaign as public relations spin to gain public opinion support for the Gulf War. As well, it reveals that Nurse Nayirah was in fact Nijirah al-Sabah, the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States Saud Nasir Al-Sabah, coached by Hill & Knowlton to forge her infamous testimony about Iraqi soldiers removing babies from incubators, which was widely reported and repeated throughout the media.
The story that Iraqi troops murdered 312 babies in hospitals by removing them from their incubators broke at a time when American public opinion was wavering over President Bush’s call to arms to defend Kuwait. It tipped the balance and helped persuade the Americans and their allies to go to war against Saddam Hussein.
On-screen participants include John MacArthur (Publisher, Harpers & Queen), Nasir al Sabah (Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US), Congressman John Porter (Co-Chair, Human Rights Caucus), Dr Ibrahim Behbehani (Red Crescent, Kuwait), Dr David Chiu (World Health Organisation, British Columbia Institute of Technology), Dr Ian Pollock (Physicians for Human Rights), Sean Stiles (Amnesty International), Andrew Whiting (Middle East Watch), Dee Alsop (Wirthline Group).
A 6-part documentary series from the UK’s Channel Four in which Niall Ferguson asks why it was that Western civilization, from inauspicious roots in the 15th century, came to dominate the rest of the world; and if the West is about to be overtaken by the rest. It accompanies his book Civilization: The West and the Rest.
Ferguson reveals the killer apps of the West’s success – competition, science, the property owning democracy, modern medicine, the consumer society and the Protestant work ethic – the real explanation of how, for five centuries, a clear minority of mankind managed to secure the lion’s share of the earth’s resources.
Competition: The first programme in the series begins in 1420 when Ming China had a credible claim to be the most advanced civilization in the world: ‘All Under Heaven’. England on the eve of the Wars of the Roses would have seemed quite primitive by contrast.
Science: In 1683 the Ottoman army laid siege to Vienna, the capital of Europe’s most powerful empire. Domination of West by East was an alarmingly plausible scenario. But Islam was defeated: not so much by firepower as by science.
Property: Professor Ferguson asks why North America succeeded while South America for so many centuries lagged behind. The two had much in common (not least the subjugation of indigenous peoples and the use of slavery by European immigrants), but they differed profoundly on individual property rights, the rule of law and representative government.
Medicine: The French Empire consciously set out to civilize West Africa by improving public health as well as building a modern infrastructure. Yet in other European empires – notably Germany’s in southwest Africa – colonial rule led to genocide. What was the link from medical science to racial pseudo-science?
Consumerism: Today the world is becoming more homogenous and, with increasingly few exceptions, big-name brands dominate main streets, high streets and shopping malls all over the globe.
Work: The sixth element that enabled the West to dominate the rest was the work ethic. Max Weber famously linked it to Protestantism, but the reality is that any culture, regardless of religion, is capable of embracing the spirit of capitalism by working hard, saving, and accumulating capital.
ABC: From lefty anti-war activists to conservative gun slinging republicans, Hollywood has had an enormous influence on American politics and the fundamental nature of the American political system.
Ten years ago, Steven Ross reached a crossroads in his academic career. A bright kid from a working class background, he had fought his way through college and university and established himself as a leading academic and historian on the subject of “industrialization and the development of the class system in 19th century America”. Fascinating though his findings were, few people outside of the academic circuit were interested in reading his book, the dryly titled: “Workers On the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati”.
These days he’s still writing about the class system and the nature of power in America, but he’s doing it through the star-studded lens of Hollywood. From Charlie Chaplin to Arnie (The Governator of California), Ross has painstakingly examined the lives of Hollywood’s political elite and come up with some delicious revelations.
His new book is called: ‘Hollywood Left and Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics’. And surprise, surprise, he’s suddenly got himself a huge audience.
This talk was presented by Sydney Ideas and the US Studies Centre, who flew Ross especially into Australia to deliver this lecture.
Steven J Ross is Professor of History at the University of Southern California. His new book received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Film Scholars Award, the academic equivalent of an Oscar.
To commemorate the 2011 International Day of Peace, I thought it would be a nice idea to create a playlist that features all the songs of PJ Harvey‘s latest album Let England Shake. Its theme is war, so that makes it quite apposite for this day.
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