Eyeballing It

I went to the retinologist today to have my eyes scanned and get an injection in my left eye to prevent further damage from wet macular degeneration. The doctor said the scan looked good, with no indication of any further vascular eruptions, so I can go seven weeks this time before I get the next one.

It’s somewhat difficult to work at the screen right now, so posting will be light this evening. To tide you over until I get back up to speed, here’s a recording of a lovely young lady named Elisabet Wimark playing the “Little Fugue” in G minor (BWV 578) by Johann Sebastian Bach on the organ in Sollentuna Church in the suburbs of Stockholm (recorded and edited by Anders Söderlund).

This is possibly the most exquisite piece ever composed by Bach. It’s short, and densely packed with the fully-developed counterpoint at which the composer was so adept. This isn’t the best rendition of the Little Fugue that I’ve ever heard, but it’s fully competent, especially for an organist so young:

I chose this performance for a couple of reasons:

1.   You can see the organist’s hands and feet clearly and thus get a feeling for how the piece she is playing is structured; and
2.   Sweden is facing an important historical moment in the parliamentary election coming up next Sunday.
 

This is to remind our readers that there is another Swedish culture — a civilization, if you will — besides the lunatic asylum that we see in the news reports featuring metastasized feminism, rampaging political correctness, and an absolute surrender to aggressive immigrant invaders.

That other Sweden exists. It trained and mentored this young woman (in a church, of all places). It appreciates her work and comes to listen to her performances. She’s far from alone; just do a YouTube search on J.S. Bach’s organ works and you’ll find dozens of Swedish organists right there alongside the Germans, the Dutch, the French, and the Hungarians.

That other Swedish civilization may well be in its death throes. Its citizens may be largely unaware of what is about to happen to their country, which makes their plight even more poignant. So we should do all we can to celebrate and promote the existence of that other Sweden.

For the next few days — before, during, and after the election — I’ll ask readers to refrain from nasty, spiteful comments about Sweden and Swedes, as if they could all be lumped together as simulacra of Mona Sahlin and Fredrik Reinfeldt. They aren’t all like that, obviously. And we do them an injustice when we talk about them that way.

If we are witnessing the death of a civilization, we should pause to remember Sweden-That-Was, because that is what is in the process of being destroyed.

And don’t forget: Sweden isn’t fundamentally different from the rest of the West. It’s just a little further down the primrose path that leads to the Multicultural Utopia. We’re all on that same shining path, not far behind all those Swedes skipping gaily towards a doom they can’t even recognize.

10 thoughts on “Eyeballing It

  1. “For the next few days — before, during, and after the election — I’ll ask readers to refrain from nasty, spiteful comments about Sweden and Swedes, as if they could all be lumped together ”

    I’d really like to doublemark this, I periodically see comments of understandable frustration saying “so and so nation is gone, they voted for it” seemingly forgetting the sheer magnitude of weapons deployed against every country to get it under the globalist plan. Some are easier to crack than others, and all are normally suckered in by misplaced compassion. We are all frustrated at whats happening in this world, we all feel let down by our countrymen who didn’t heed the call to alarm or understand what was occurring.

    It’s like ridiculing one person for falling more to a certain disease than another, when every person and every culture has different levels of resilience against specific threats.

    It would make more sense to focus on solutions, and what can be done from this point forward, instead of complaining about what should have been done in the past. There are still things that can be done, even the American revolution looked like it would be a total failure… until they suddenly started winning battle after battle and the Brits surrendered almost unexpectedly. It was loss after loss after loss until it wasn’t anymore. Americans just need to remember their history, Europe needs to learn from America’s example.

    • I got my information on this from Robert Spencer’s “History of Jihad”,
      https://www.amazon.com/History-Jihad-Muhammad-ISIS-ebook/dp/B07D6X3TRT/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536243789&sr=8-1&keywords=robert+spencer+the+history+of+jihad
      which is as good a book as you’ll get on the subject, although not better than other such texts, including Coughlin’s “Catastrophic Failure”.
      https://www.amazon.com/Catastrophic-Failure-Blindfolding-America-Jihad-ebook/dp/B00X6GH8PA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1536244100&sr=8-1&keywords=catastrophic+failure

      One fact of history is that during the Muslim conquest of Spain, the Muslims had possession of virtually all Spain, except for a sliver of land in the North, which wistfully called itself the Kingdom of Asturias. It looked like the Muslim conquerors only needed a bit of mopping up, and Spain would be all theirs. But, they began attacking the Kingdom with small forces at first, with no success, so they eventually instituted a full-scale invasion of Asturias. But, they lost every battle, and Asturias was the base for the gradual reconquest of Spain, painful battle by painful battle.

      So, indeed, the war is not lost until it’s completely over. But, if I may draw a further lesson, it may be necessary to choose your battlegrounds and not overspread your forces. It’s much better to hold a small patch of territory as your own than to engage in large battles you have a marginal chance of winning.

      Drawing a further lesson for Sweden, their best strategy might be to atomize the country: concentrate on minimizing centralization and the power of the national government to dictate to the provinces. The Swedes might have to create a province which is to national Sweden as Hungary is to the EU: a homogeneous region determined to remain so.

      The biggest problem, as always, would be to forestall foreign invasions on the pretext of preventing damage to the Muslims. Ideally, the US would pull out of NATO, but that’s not going to happen. If the Muslims and Communists can infiltrate global bureaucratic tyrannies, why not nationalists infiltrate the command structures of NATO and any EU military that coalesces?

  2. This and other countless imponderables always assure me that the West is breathtakingly superior to Islam.

  3. Too much counterpoint; worse, Protestant counterpoint. 🙂

    It took last weekend and the cover and cover story from the current “Der Spiegel” to fully appreciate Sir Thomas Beecham’s joke.

    As for me, there can not be too much Bach. Thank you for posting more.

  4. I try and remember the Swedish men and woman I worked with one fall-winter-spring in Gavle. Also the people I met on my driving days, which is one way I have of enjoying different places.

  5. I have not played Bach on the organ in decades now, thanks for the reminder, this is a fine piece though there are better still. Both Germany (Bach’s region in particular) and Sweden are ancestral lands of mine, as fake-Sweden is out of bounds for righteous cursing on this thread, I will curse the arch-traitor and assassin Merkel and her fake-Germany instead. May they fall and fall soon! Otherwise Europe and the West are finished, and the culture they produced.

Comments are closed.