THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 23 December 1961

  At #2 this week, yet another jazz classic: Acker Bilk's 'Stranger On The Shore':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

17 December: 'The Zimbabwe African People's Union (ZAPU) was founded by Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo with the goal of eliminating white colonial rule in Southern Rhodesia (which would become, in 1965, Rhodesia and in 1979, Zimbabwe. The two would later become President and Vice-President of the Republic of Zimbabwe.'

18 December: 'At 5:15 am, Operation Vijay was launched by the Army and Navy of India, as 30,000 troops invaded the Portuguese colonies at Goa, Damao and Diu... collectively known as Portuguese India... By 5:00 in the afternoon, all but the capital had been taken. [19 December]: At 2:30 pm, Portuguese India's Governor-General Vassalo e Silva signed an unconditional surrender in front of Indian Army Brigadier General K.S. Dhillon, bringing an end to the colony to 451 years of Portuguese rule. Goa, Daman and Diu, Dadra and Nagar Haveli were incorporated into India as a single Union Territory. In 1987, Goa would become the 25th State of India.'

19 December: 'Indonesia's President Sukarno announced a military campaign that he called "Trikora" (Tri Komando Rakyat, or "Three Commands to the People"): (1) Take over the Netherlands' territory of West Papua and put an end to creation of a republic there (2) Take over the Netherlands' territory of West Irian; and (3) Mobilize all of Indonesia's resources for those purposes.'

20 December: 'UN General Assembly Resolution 1723 (XVI) was passed, declaring that the large-scale exodus of Tibetan people was linked to a violation of its human rights and the suppression of its culture and religion.'

21 December:  'At the U.N. military base at Kitona, in the Congo, Katangan President Moise Tshombe and Congolese Prime Minister Cyrille Adoula signed an 8-point agreement, bringing an end to Tshombe's attempt to create a separate nation out of the mineral-rich Congolese province.' Tshombe would later (in 1964) become 5th President of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

UK chart hits, week ending 23 December 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1	Tower Of Strength	Frankie Vaughan	Philips
2	Stranger On The Shore	Acker Bilk	Columbia
3	Moon River	Danny Williams	HMV
4	Midnight In Moscow	Kenny Ball	Pye
5	Take Good Care Of My Baby	Bobby Vee	London
6	Johnny Will	Pat Boone	London
7	Toy Balloons	Russ Conway	Columbia
8	Let There Be Drums	Sandy Nelson	London
9	Walkin' Back To Happiness	Helen Shapiro	Columbia
10	I'll Get By	Shirley Bassey	Columbia
11	My Friend The Sea	Petula Clark	Pye
12	Take Five	Dave Brubeck	Fontana
13	When The Girl In Your Arms Is The Girl In Your Heart	Cliff Richard and The Shadows	Columbia
14	Big Bad John	Jimmy Dean	Philips
15	His Latest Flame / Little Sister	Elvis Presley	RCA
16	The Time Has Come	Adam Faith	Parlophone
17	I Love How You Love Me	Jimmy Crawford	Columbia
18	Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen	Neil Sedaka	RCA
19	So Long Baby	Del Shannon	London
20	I Understand	The G*Clefs	London

Waco's message for our times?

Either Andy McNab was taking unconscionable liberties with the facts, a mere dozen years after Waco (and ten years after the connected Oklahoma Bombing), or the handling of events there was even more brutal than I remembered from the coverage at the time.

According to 'Aggressor' (publ. 2005), the FBI besiegers were not constantly broadcasting 'loud music' at the Christians in their residential complex, but an endless loop of 'horrible, high-pitched noise like baby rabbits being slaughtered.'

In the story, when a five-year-old girl is on the line to a negotiator - critically, not on-site but miles away on an Air Force base, observes McNab's hero - she asks, 'Are you going to kill me?' and the answer is a bland reassurance the adult is in no position to give.

As armoured vehicles crash through the walls, accompanied by the message 'this is not an assault, do not fire any weapons', they inject into the buildings - occupied by many women and children as well as the men - not 'tear gas' but some gas designed to put people into bone-breaking convulsions, lethal in confined spaces. There are no ambulances on hand; this operation is not intended to result in a mass of surrendering survivors. 

In the book, the FBI commander on the ground, Jim D. Bastendorf' aka 'Bastard' is a swaggering, rhino-skinned bullyboy and his men are utter oafs, dropping their trousers at the modest Branch Davidian women and yelling victoriously as the 'compound' is trashed and a massive fire breaks out.

It all sickens the Brits, but when they protest they are brushed off as 'faggots'. 

Police and Delta Force are there, too, together with a mass of rubberneckers and TV outfits come to watch the fun as the 'cult' is tackled in its 'compound.' There is a barrel organ, a fairgound, stalls selling fast food and T-shirts.

McNab's character sees this episode as a PR job for the authorities and a bloody-handed revenge for an earlier, failed attack on the Davidians that resulted in four ATF officers dead and sixteen wounded:

    'The Davidians returned fire, as they were entitled to do under American law. They even called 911 to      tell the police they were being attacked, and begged for help.'

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the use of military force against US citizens; but McNab says, President Clinton had signed a waiver in the case of 'drugs interdiction operations' and despite being invited to see for themselves that there were no drugs on-site the authorities used this excuse to militarise. 

According to a Vox post, Clinton pooh-poohed claims of official culpability the day after the raid, saying, 'I do not think the United States government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of religious fanatics decided to kill themselves.' One could wish that instead of screening louche rubbish about his affair with Monica Lewinsky the BBC would look at more serious aspects of his Presidency - including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (which he signed off in 1999) that arguably initiated the process of destroying our financial system.

And now we have the Biden Administration pushing at Russia's borders in the usual ham-fisted way, risking an absolutely dreadful sequence of events. Given enough distance, reality transforms into fantasy and myth; perhaps the chess-players of Washington imagine that the Ukraine is so far away that not one blade of American grass will bend in a Northern-hemisphere-wide nuclear firestorm.

I hope McNab wasn't faking the facts; though on reflection I wish he was. Either way, the crucial element is mindset, and it seems it's not only anarchists and Trump's good ol' boys who are moronic and thuggish. Perhaps the American Establishment depends on a poor education system and cheerleading dross from the mass media to help them get away with their crass and dangerous behaviour at home and abroad.

WEEKENDER: Stoicism - A Worthy Trait ? by Wiggia

This from the Daily Fail, the story of Mary Berry breaking her hip while out walking her dogs:

“Her daughter Annabel was at a tennis tournament so she phoned her son-in-law Dan, who arrived within ten minutes.

"She said: 'He saw me and said, 'I'll get an ambulance'. I said, 'Oh, no, I'm fine', but he overruled me. He rang for the ambulance and they said, 'We're very, very busy'. It was Sunday afternoon and there were lots of football injuries and whatever.'

"The star, whose two dogs Darcy and Freddie were at her side the whole time, continued: 'We waited for three-and-a-half hours, until 6pm, and quite right too! I was perfectly happy."

Nothing against the old girl, but it is this hero worship of the NHS which enables it to never change. If she thinks three and a half hours waiting for an ambulance 'is fine' she is living on planet Zog. What if she had had no son-in-law to phone, what if it had been below freezing, would she still have said that is fine? Yes, the older generation, which I am now part of, have a certain resilience when emergencies crop up, but not this, when we all pay for a service that in many areas is now almost non-existent. To me it is just another example of a service we pay for not being fit for purpose.

Yet Mary Berry’s action or inaction is typical of a generation who had no health service when they were born, certainly nothing like the fledgling NHS when it emerged post war. Youngsters today have no idea what a world without the State taking care of things, or pretending to, was like and would not understand why Mary Berry or anyone else would just lie there in pain and take that attitude to seeking help.

My late mother had a fall from which she could not get up. Fortunately my sister who lived nearby had given her a phone to use in emergencies, but she didn’t use it as she thought that she did not want to make a fuss. By luck my sister called round and through the letter box heard my mum cry out; she had a key and let herself in, to find my mother on the floor were she had fallen and been there for eight hours not able to get up.

The emergency services were called and all eventually was well, but that attitude among so many of that generation pales into insignificance against the entitled-to-everything brigade today.

It was also interesting how my sister, God bless her, was well-informed after previous encounters with local services and the NHS not to take the first answer as the final one. Even getting my mother moved to a place nearer her so she could be on hand showed how a council, Hackney that shut down at 2 p.m. on Fridays and were quite blatant about the fact, could be an obstacle that being a stoic would never have overcome.

My mother like Mary Berry would not have wanted to be ‘a bother’; admirable in wartime, but now one cannot help but feel those who think and act that way are simply taken advantage of and bypassed.

There was a similar example of a lady who fell and was on a cold floor for over eight hours recently; she managed to phone for an ambulance, but it appears she was not a priority and that was why she spent eight hours on the floor.

You get the feeling that unless there is someone else on hand, in many cases the elderly can be ignored with impunity, such is the chaos and breakdown of the NHS and subsidiaries, but sadly some of the problem is a contempt that permeates through sections of the NHS and society in general for anyone who is deemed disposable and can be dumped at the bottom of the queue.

The dumping of the elderly without complaint into care homes may well turn out to be the worst example in our recent history of a deliberate decision to override the obvious hazards entailed with that action - and a disaster it proved to be. If so, in an ever-selfish, divided world stoicism is shown to be a trait that may well have run its course. As we have seen in the last couple of years, those who shout loudest and threaten regardless of the paucity of their claims get the biggest slice of the cake; stoicism won't get you anything today.

Of his many quoted sayings, this one by Seneca was never more apt:

"Misfortune weighs most heavily on those who expect nothing but good fortune,"

FRIDAY MUSIC: A Selection For Christmas, by JD

"Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat

Please put a penny in the old man's hat

If you haven't got a penny, a ha'penny will do

If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!"

THURSDAY BACKTRACK: Music and news from 60 years ago - week ending 16 December 1961

 At #5 this week, another classic: Kenny Ball's 'Midnight In Moscow':

Some memorable events (via Wikipedia):

10 December: 'The Soviet–Albanian split was culminated when the Communist government of Albania confirmed that the Soviet Union had severed diplomatic relations on December 3, marking the first time that the U.S.S.R. had ever withdrawn its embassy from another Communist state. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had criticized Albanian leaders Enver Hoxha and Mehmet Shehu at the 22nd Soviet Communist Party Congress after the Albanians refused to repudiated Stalinism. The People's Republic of China then began a program of emergency aid to the Balkan nation.'

11 December - Vietnam War begins: 'The Vietnam War officially began for the United States, as the USS Core arrived at Saigon Harbor. The ship brought in two helicopter units, the 8th Transportation Company from Fort Bragg and the 57th Transportation Company from Fort Lewis, with 33 H-21 Shawnee helicopters, and 400 U.S. Army personnel.'

12 December: 'Police in Tokyo arrested 13 men in a pre-dawn raid after uncovering a plot to assassinate Prime Minister Hayato Ikeda and the 16 members of his cabinet. The plot, under the cover of the "Society for Japanese History", was financed by industrialist Toyosaku Kawanami with the assistance of former Lt. General Tokutaro Sakurai.'

13 December: 'In Geneva, the United States and the Soviet Union announced that they had come to an agreement on the formation of a multinational discussion to reduce nuclear weapons, in a group described as the "Eighteen-Nation Committee on Disarmament". The United Nations General Assembly endorsed the idea one week later, and the group first met on March 14, 1962. The 18 nations were the U.S., the U.K., Italy, Canada and France; the U.S.S.R., Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania; and the non-aligned states of Mexico, Brazil, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Egypt, Sweden, India and Burma.'

14 December: 'The Presidential Commission on the Status of Women was created by Executive Order 10980 by U.S. President Kennedy, with former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt as the honorary chairman. The Commission's report, American Women, was published in 1965 and described the unequal treatment faced by women in American society.'

15 December: 'The United Nations General Assembly declined a resolution to allow the People's Republic of China membership. The vote was 36 in favor, 48 against, with 20 abstentions. On the same day, the Assembly passed United Nations General Assembly Resolution 1668, declaring Communist Chinese membership an "important question", and requiring 2/3rds approval rather than a simple majority for all future votes on admission, passed 61-34, with seven abstentions.'

        Also on 15 December: 'Soviet KGB officer Anatoliy Golitsyn, who had memorized the details of secret documents and cases, defected to the West at the American CIA station office in Helsinki. Golitsyn has been described by one author as "perhaps the most controversial and divisive defector of the Cold War".'

16 December: 'The African National Congress, frustrated with peaceful attempts to end apartheid in South Africa, began a bombing campaign with a new organization, Umkhonto we Sizwe, setting off explosions at empty government buildings in Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Durban. "Had we intended to attack life," Nelson Mandela would say in a statement at his trial in 1964, "we would have selected targets where people congregated, and not empty buildings and power stations." The Manifesto of Umkhonto, published the same day, began, "The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices— submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom."[49] The only casualty was one of the saboteurs, Petrus Molefe, who died at the Dube township in Johannesburg, when the bomb he was placing exploded prematurely. There would be 190 attacks in all until the group was suppressed in 1963, and only one other death, when a young girl was killed by a bomb.'

UK chart hits, week ending 16 December 1961 (tracks in italics have been played in earlier posts)

Htp: Clint's labour-of love compilation https://www.sixtiescity.net/charts/61chart.htm

1	Tower Of Strength	Frankie Vaughan	Philips
2	Moon River	Danny Williams	HMV
3	Take Good Care Of My Baby	Bobby Vee	London
4	His Latest Flame / Little Sister	Elvis Presley	RCA
5	Midnight In Moscow	Kenny Ball	Pye
6	Walkin' Back To Happiness	Helen Shapiro	Columbia
7	Stranger On The Shore	Acker Bilk	Columbia
8	Big Bad John	Jimmy Dean	Philips
9	The Savage	The Shadows	Columbia
10	So Long Baby	Del Shannon	London
11	Let There Be Drums	Sandy Nelson	London
12	I'll Get By	Shirley Bassey	Columbia
13	My Friend The Sea	Petula Clark	Pye
14	Johnny Will	Pat Boone	London
15	Take Five	Dave Brubeck	Fontana
16	The Time Has Come	Adam Faith	Parlophone
17	Baby's First Christmas	Connie Francis	MGM
18	I'd Never Find Another You	Billy Fury	Decca
19	Son, This Is She	John Leyton	HMV
20	The Charleston	The Temperance Seven	Parlophone
20	Toy Balloons	Russ Conway	Columbia