Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JOHN ADAMS – THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER – LONDON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA – CONDUCTED BY JOHN ADAMS – DIRECTED BY PENNY WOOLCOCK – 2003 – DVD

As for the original opera and the music I would advise you to check my review of the original production as performed in Lyon, the Death of Klinghoffer’s set of two CDs with libretto, posted on most Amazon sites. The ASIN of the product there is B000005J1B. I am going to insist here on what makes this film different, original.

This is not a filmed opera production but a film shot and constructed on the basis of the opera by John Adams. You will be disappointed because the music is not kept entirely the way it should be. Some passages are cut off, like the Ocean and the Desert Choruses, and the Hagar Chorus has been replaced by some TV presentation that is not in the line of the original opera since it introduces Isaac in a chorus – which is not a chorus anymore – that was exclusively centered on Hagar and Ishmael. This does not balance the tale. This betrays the tale as we are going to see. The worst adaptation/distortion is the use of plain spoken words and sentences instead of the sung equivalent. These sections that are no longer sung are just not in the line of the opera which was sung from beginning to end, even if with some sections sounding more like a dirge with a recitative feel, but it was entirely sung.

The second remark is that to add pictures to the music, pictures that are not the direct stage work of the singers, makes the film very difficult to understand. A film of that type is visual first of all and since we are visual dominant we see these added images first and they dominate the rest, the music, the words and the real setting. The film is thus overloaded with news reels about the Shoah, the deportation and extermination of Jews by the Nazis; with visions of the Jews arriving in Palestine and hunting the Palestinians out and banishing them brutally out of their villages and houses that are taken over buy the thousands of arriving Jews in their mass exodus to the Israel of the old times, and in such scene of appropriation of what is not theirs, of homes that belonged to other families the sex sequence in the bed of those expelled Palestinians of a survivor of a Nazi death camp identified by his number on his arm and the whipping scars on his back is a real mental crime against the Palestinians and against the Jews, a desecration of this bed and house. The Jews were captured by the Nazis, extracted from their homes that were looted by any one who wanted to and by the SS and Gestapo for the enrichment of the Reich, and then they were deported to camps where they were supposed to die and it is clearly shown to us in the film. And here we have the vision of exactly the same thing done to the Palestinians by people who had suffered the Nazi persecutions. It looks like a compensation for the evil they had suffered. This is strongly accusatory towards these Zionist Jews. I was stolen my purse yesterday by a punk. So today I steal the purse of the first person I meet in the street. An eye for an eye, but on a third party collateral victim.

The text contains clear mentions of such facts, particularly in the prologue, but the images multiply the impact of ,these words, and what’s more these images do not intervene only then but do intervene in other places in the opera, hence repetitively. The director of the film knows perfectly well that repetition is subliminal.

In the same way the very graphic images of the expulsion of the Palestinians, of the colonial control and exploitation of the Palestinians, of the horrific life and also death of the Palestinians in the various refugee camps that we can imagine are Sabra and Shatila give the other side of this arrival of the Jews in Palestine based on the Balfour declaration that suggested the parting of Palestine to give a section of this region to the Jews to create a state of their own,. The worst part of this image accompaniment of the text is that the images are often in contradiction with the text. When the Jewish lot is evoked by the text it is illustrated with graphic images of the Palestinian fate, and vice versa. This gives to the Jewish suffering before, in Europe, in the hands of the Europeans, a weight and value that is a lot more important than what it was in the original opera. At the same time the similar providing of graphic images of the suffering of the Palestinians at the hands of the Jews in Palestine emphasizes this suffering that had been kept under control in the libretto. It then becomes completely wild and, particularly at the end the imagined meeting of the “terrorists” in Gaza in 2003, one in a chauffeured car and two reduced to practically disjointed and ineffective retarded people, does not show much except that their future can be good or bad but always locked up in a surrounding misery that makes this fate totally surreal. In other words we are far from the original opera.

But I want to insist on the cutting of the two choruses: the Ocean Chorus and the Desert Chorus. The first one was going back to the very genesis of humanity in the primeval water expanse in total darkness before creation, the creation  of Adam and Eve, of one source for humanity that is then constantly shown in the opera as divided in two as a decision of God himself who seems to have wanted a dual or bipolar world that is easier to control. Originally the whole humanity was one and that was the vision of the opera modulated later by the Hagar Chorus into two and yet centered only on one: Hagar and the Arabs. Yet thanks to the Hagar Chorus and its being replaced by a news report or news commentary on some TV set on the ship in front of the passengers and the hijackers explaining the two sons and the fate of Hagar and her son banished as soon as Abraham’s wife was able to bear a child in her old age, the whole shebang is purely flown into smoke. They even go as far as recalling the fact that the slave Hagar was given to Abraham by his wife because she could not bear children. And the two sons are only presented as the founders of two religions. The original opera only insists on Hagar, on God’s project concerning her son, to create another religion, and the cruel decision of Abraham banishing her and her child, just like the arriving Jews banished the Palestinians from Palestine. In the film the Hagar distorted tale is there to call for love between the two communities in the name of the fact they are cousins. The meaning of the Hagar Chorus has thus been changed completely and that is a shame.

The absence of the Desert Chorus is also regrettable. It explained how the Palestinians lived in the desert, from the desert, entirely formatted and constructed by, for and from the desert with an enormous contrast then with the Day Chorus when the country is showed as cultivated from the top of the mountain to the bank of the river and how a veiled woman has been pushed underground and is going to be drowned into cement and other debris. The veiled woman is the Palestinians and the presently cultivated wasteland of old is Israel. The original opera is showing how Israel has buried the Palestinians under their rich agriculture. We have lost that, that vision of a rich country built and constructed on the banished and hidden previous occupying people that haunts the land. The film preferred graphic images of the 2003 present which has nothing to do with the original opera and is totally anachronistic and – that is the worst part – it changes the ideological and political meaning of the opera.

We could multiply examples like the opening scene with Mrs. Klinghoffer confronted to the four arrested hijackers and spitting in the face of one of them is vain, narrow-minded and it shows the extreme hatred that Jewish woman can nourish in her heart, if she has a heart. This opening scene is going to be amplified by the closing scene when she is officially announced the death of her husband by the captain and her first reaction is a destructive rage nearly including the captain in itself. Her pain is thus translated into hatred and violence against objects and people who have nothing to do with her own fate in spite of her accusation that the Captain had been on the side of the hijackers, which was not the case as we have seen all along. They were hostages just as much as anyone else. Then she cools down a little bit and she comes to that strange concluding image that she is pregnant with her dead husband who will not be redeemed by God as long as she is alive. In other words she takes her husband hostage for the rest of her life. Instead of having the Jewish understanding that the dead husband cannot be redeemed by God as long as he is not reunited with his wife to whom he is eternally committed, we have a mean woman getting even with fate by taking her husband hostage against God’s redemption. How much does she hate him at this moment!

To remain on these two, before dying Mr. Klinghoffer is able to meet his wife, or his wife is authorized to rejoin her husband for the second part of his soliloquy during which she has nothing to say since originally she did not join him then. What is for him in the original opera a soothing recollection of the past becomes then by being addressed to the wife present in the film a sort of solace for the wife and no longer for the husband. He is trying to make it easier for her to survive instead of making it easier for himself to die.

Such transformation makes the film very messy and even fuzzy on the ideological meaning. It is in 2003 literally embedded in the War on Terror raging at the time and John Adams is conducting, which means he accepted such a drift from the original and a lot more cautious and discreet opera, which made it a lot more humane.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

JOHN ADAMS – THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER – ORCHESTRA OF THE OPÉRA DE LYON – 1991 – ELEKTRA NONESUCH – 1992

This opera by John Adams has become mythic because it is one piece of genial invention and creation based on a real global political event but also because some Jewish organizations accused it to be anti-Semitic, as John Adams told David Beverly, October 25, 1995:

“Well, it for sure didn’t strike some people as neutral. You know The Death of Klinghoffer was picketed by the Jewish Information League when it was done in San Francisco and I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the reviews that came out like the one in the Wall Street Journal.”

I won’t go further and I won’t even discuss John Adams’s assertion then that it was neutral on the antagonism between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Twenty years later it does not seem to be that neutral but it does not seem to be anti-Semitic either, nor very pro-Palestinian. The question is very hot today and we cannot be neutral on the subject and I would say that the presentation of the conflict is rather balanced though leaning rather towards the Palestinian side without really being anti-Semitic not pro-Palestinian. The remarks I am going to make are explaining that seemingly ambiguous position, though I could accept the fact that other people might see things differently.

Let’s look at the Prologue and at the various Choruses. The Prologue is composed of two choruses: “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” and “Chorus of Exiled Jews.” Then the “Ocean Chorus” at the end of Act I Scene 1; the “Night Chorus” at the end of Act I Scene 2; the “Hagar Chorus” at the beginning of Act II; the “Desert Chorus” at the end of Act II Scene 1; the “Day Chorus” at the end of  Act II Scene 2. Note the absence of a chorus at the end of the opera (Act II Scene 3).

Many people say these choruses go by pairs: the first two, then the crossed pairs of ocean-desert and night-day. With the “Hagar Chorus” at the center of these latter four choruses. We can also notice that they are antagonistic pairs, except the “Hagar Chorus” that does not have his doppelganger. But this is only on the surface.

The first chorus is about the forced exile of Palestinians who are expelled from Palestine, or part of Palestine by Israelis, in fact only Jews at that moment, arriving to what was to become Israel. Palestinians had a home and a motherland and they were expelled, made refugees by the new arrivals. On the other hand Jews arriving from Europe had just been deprived of a lot during the previous ten or fifteen years and they took possession of what was not theirs in the name of Zion and the fact that they would be the descendants of this Zion. In other words the land they had been forced to leave at the beginning of the Christian Era by the Romans after various riots after the death of James, the brother of Jesus, in 62 BCE and then later on at the beginning of the second century, riots which led to the destruction of the temple first and then later on the destruction of the walls of the city of Jerusalem and the banishment of all Jews, this land is considered by them as theirs. For nineteen centuries the land which was theirs up to their banishment would have been kept and taken care of by the non-Jews who were not banished but who had been the servants and the serfs and even the slaves of the Jews before. So the Jews after the Second World War arrived with little, grabbed the land and prospered. The antagonism is historical, global and very old. It is just reenacted by the Zionist decision to call the Jews back “home.”

But they are brothers, these Israelis and these Palestinians who speak various Semitic languages. True enough, but they are brothers like with Abraham’s two sons, one from his Jewish wife and the other from his Arab slave, or servant if you prefer. But she is banished with her new born and she nearly dies of thirst, and her son too, in the desert. This version of Hagar’s banishment by Abraham makes the whole opera lean towards the Palestinians, as if being banished by the Jews happened after WWII a second time in history, and what’s more the first time happened in Biblical scriptures. And this duality was God’s decision:

“Of this child too I will make a nation.”

And this banishment was a manumission. Hagar was liberated with her son with the only fate of dying in the desert, probably to prevent God’s decision to become a reality. But there is always an angel when it is needed by all mythologies, and there was one here too with Ishmael, like there was one with Isaac. That’s where I say John Adams is not neutral at all since he states the conflict and competition and hostility between the two peoples God himself decided to establish is of divine nature and very old, and the two peoples are not equal, or as equal as Abel and Cain in God’s eyes. Then we are justified in wondering if the composer leans to one side.

And he does.

Ishmael does not have his doppelganger Isaac in the opera. Palestinians were banished twice by Jews, in the prologue and at the beginning of the second act. Obviously Jews were not banished from the Levant by Palestinians but by Romans and Roman Legions. We could wonder if we could consider the Final Solution, or Shoah, as a second banishment concluding a twenty century long segregation and even cyclical partial extermination. But Palestinians are in no way responsible for that. The opera clearly states in these choruses that the Palestinian lot is not at all symmetrical to the Jewish lot. The scales tip to one side quite obviously.

The next question to ask is now concerned by the present time situation. And that is another story.

The “Ocean Chorus” brings the tale back to the primeval expanse of water under eternal night from which Adam and Eve are going to be brought up by God himself. The origin is unique and the same for everyone. Told like that the rivalry between the descendants of Ishmael and the descendants of Isaac is not explained, is unexplainable.

The “Night Chorus that follows is a movement back to that distant past but this time after the two peoples had parted because we are in the days of 1 Kings, a long time after Abraham and on the Jewish side, and the opera brings there more or less under the belief of Jews (which sounds strange) a trinity that is very suspiscious.

“Elijah will return, the Jews believe, the Antichrist condemn, the Messiah judge; . . .”

We can note the chronology of the three characters: Elijah, Antichrist, Messiah. How can the Antichrist come before Christ himself who is the Messiah, though we could consider the Messiah is the Jewish Messiah and not Jesus Christ, but then who is the Antichrist? The trinity is suspicious too because it is Christian and not Jewish. Then comes the Last Judgment, Judgment Day, Doomsday which is in our mind more connected with John’s Book of Revelation, than with the Old Testament (in spite of Ezekiel and Isaiah). At this moment in the opera we are in the night for sure because all references to Judaism and to Christianity get mixed and bringing that debate into the picture is leading to the conclusion of this chorus: salvation for any one after the end of this world is going to be arbitrary and God’s decision only. And that leads to another trinity that is frightening in itself:

“I am afraid for myself, for myself, for myself”

The trinity of fear has little to do with Judaism since a Jew accepts God’s decisions no matter what they may be, a Muslim accepts in the same way God’s decision though one can hasten this decision by fighting for God’s glory and dying for God, but a Christian does not have any trinity of fear because they believe they will be judged on what they have done in life, and only on that. What’s more it does not fit the Christian vision to individualize that much the future after death and after Doomsday: the congregation, the ekklesia of the fauthful. At this moment I consider the opera has lost its references to the ethnic, religious and historical situation we are dealing with. All the more because after this chorus and after the intermission the second act is going to start with the “Hagar Chorus” that brings us to the initial banishment of the Palestinians, or Arabs as they were called at the time, by the Jews. I must say the final declaration of Hagar is particularly powerful:

“My son will die as a free man on his own land.”

She is manumitted but the land is her own and she wants to die on that land of hers.

The next chorus, the “Desert Chorus,” amplifies the desert in which Hagar and her son were bound to die if the angel had not intervened. In this chorus the desert itself structures and formats life, thinking and behavior.

“Is not their desert the garden of the Lord?

. . . The hunters shall go hungry tonight . . .

As if it [the earth, or even stars-moon-sky-earth] had turned itself away from the world

To leap like a fountain in the mind of God.”

The desert is everything and the fountain in the mind of God becomes the dream, the expectation, the promise to find one day in that desert the Persian rose, yellow and red, the rose from Iran, a Shia Muslim country for sure (though Shia is the minority reference in Islam as opposed to Sunni) but from another culture since they speak an Indo-European language and not a Semitic language. Once again here the vision is that of Islam but with mixed references and we must keep in mind the Palestinians have three religions, Shia and Sunni Islam and Christianity (as a generic reference to various affiliations). The Jewish religion has only been brought back there over the last century.

And we come to the “Day Chorus” that brings the ship and her passengers back to Egypt. It is the most confused and maelstrom-like vision of a country that is well taken care of and cultivated but yet a woman was there and she was wearing a dark veil and then she was pushed underground and there with a voice coming from deep in the ground “broken cement and sand slide into the hole” and it is going to drown this underground voice coming from that woman they like and have banned underground. Once again we see here the fate of those who are pushed away or under by the Israelis who are cultivating the land.

When you see these choruses in a sequential approach, you then can consider the real story of what the real event is. The real event is the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. The events and even the words of the Captain or his mate are directly taken from the Memoir the Captain of the ship actually wrote after the event and John Adams said in 1995 in the above-quoted interview that they had a photocopy of that Memoir available all the time in some kind of English translation:

This hijacking is a political action with military force that we call today a terrorist act. The political motivations of such acts do not change the qualification of the act. The Palestinians appear to be “cool” at the beginning but very fast things change when they start sorting out the passengers and extracting Americans, British citizens and Jews. They want some kind of political benefit from this action that has to be negotiated with Syria and the second in Command of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Mahmoud Abbas (the present Chairman of the PLO), but this fails and they understand very fast that killing the passengers one by one every fifteen minutes will not make anyone move. So they come back to Egypt, disembark and disappear leaving the passengers and the crew behind. They had killed one Jewish man, a crippled person who was in a wheel chair and the opera closes on a long lamentation of his wife. And those concluding words are sinister in meaning particularly applied to humanity:

“Suffering is certain.

The remembered man

Rising from my heart

Into the world to come,

It is he whom

The Lord will redeem

When I am dead.

I should have died.

If a hundred

People were murdered

And their blood

Flowed in the wake

Of this ship like

Oil, only then

Would the world intervene.

They should have killed me.

I wanted to die.

I wanted to die.”

We note the husband will not be redeemed as long as his wife is not dead. That’s a Jewish superstition I guess. And out of love for him his wife wants to be dead but she cannot kill herself and she regrets she has not been killed like him. And the world can only be moved if the blood poured in the ocean becomes oil. Oil is the only incentive resource that will make the world react to anything. This is of course not gratuitous and it is political.

So I think all elements show the opera is balanced but not neutral. It is in fact extremely pessimistic about Palestine in particular but also about humanity in general. But the Biblical roots of the problem make this problem unsolvable. Thus the opera is pessimistic about the future of humanity, if humanity has a future, and that’s probably why it was so successful, so influential even. Over the last thirty years or so, maybe some more, definitely since the first oil crisis of 1973 the Middle East has become the geopolitical center of practically all serious problems, especially after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. In the West there is a morbid fascination for unsolvable problems provided they remain limited in space. As for time it does not matter. The civil war in Sri Lanka lasted 30 years or so and very few people cared till Sri Lanka was discovered as being the perfect hub for maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean by China.

The West is always speaking of human rights of course, but in the rest of the world of course, because the fact that young black males are shot dead, armed or unarmed, week after week, by white cops, or at times black cops in the US is not a human right problem. The song has changed a little bit after the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, but has the music changed at all? It still has the sound of bullets being shot.

Speaking of music this opera is fascinating. John Adams is becoming a very rich composer who can shift from extremely hard hammering short sequences of notes repeated for minutes and minutes, to very melodious at time sweet and nearly romantic music, or to some fluid aerial light nearly psychedelic sequences. The singing can vary from “Sprechgesang and Sprechstimme” to melodious singing and to extremely rapid and rhythmic utterances that become even difficult to follow. The use of repetitions is extremely important to emphasize some words, phrases and passages. Personally I do not like the German words I just used since that kind of musical diction between speaking and singing was vastly used by Bach and many others as recitative. We seem to forget it is Mozart and Haendel who made these recitatives musically equal to the arias and duets, getting the opera out of the quasi-operas of Purcell in which the operatic parts were only operatic episodes between the acts and scenes of a play. On the French soil Molière used that structure with Charpentier for His “Le Malade Imaginaire” whereas Thomas Corneille used his brother Puerre Corneille’s tragedy Médée to produce an opera in which there are long sections of recitative in the style of Bach’s Passions.

Nevertheless John Adams uses this recitative tone or technique (note it has always been present in jazz and it is the root of rap and hip hop oratorical styles) a lot and can change the dramatic color vastly from one piece to the next, even to the point of having a quasi-crazy tarantella with the British Dancing Girl. She is on the fast and even very fast trance rhythm of the polyrhythmic music of the African Americans who have kept their African traditions. Have you ever danced on that fast rhythm you find in all African American soul music? You should try one day and you will see that you can reach a trace without any rum. The British dancing girl should be Jamaican.

One major opera of this century, or the end of the previous one, by one composer who is ahead of his time because he can plunge his roots into the oldest traditions and associate them to subjects that are immediately in the news of this modern world of ours. He probably reaches some kind of perennial inspiration that transcends borders and decades.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

MARC-ANTOINE CJHARPENTIER – UN AUTOMNE A VERSAILLES – 2004

Ce « documentaire » de ARTE et Mezzo pour le tricentenaire de la mort de Charpentier est à la fois un bijou et avec cependant quelque peu moins de carats que l’on aurait pu attendre. Heureusement que le commentaire fade et pauvre en mots de Catherine Cessac est largement compensé par les commentaires inspirés et très sensibles de Hervé Niquet, Jordi Savall et Christophe Rousset qui ont trouvé souvent les mots justes pour évoquer une musique que nous redécouvrons après trois siècles d’absence.

Les images de Versailles sont trop souvent fugaces et extrêmement partielles. Elles ne donnent pas la magie du château et des jardins, ni même de la cour d’entrée qui apparaît petite et maigrichonne. L’Opéra Royal n’était pas encore en 2003 dans sa gloire restaurée mais la plupart des lieux sont donnés par petits bouts et par miettes. Dommage.

L’évocation de la dictature musicale et artistique de Lully est juste même si pas suffisamment appuyée. Ce fut un homme étroit de goût et borné de style, un esprit chagrin à l’ouverture tellement étroite qu’il en était une impasse, un cul de sac qui a laissé derrière lui beaucoup plus de créativité bloquée que de réelle innovation durable. Il faudra le dépasser dès sa mort et la musique française a pris plutôt du retard qu’une longueur d’avance avec lui. Heureusement que Charpentier le banni a laissé derrière lui des milliers de pages inoubliables et qui pourtant ont été oubliées car elles étaient une avant-garde et la génération suivante sera toute à sa propre créativité plutôt qu’à l’évocation et la célébration de l’avant-gardiste qui n’eut jamais le soutien du roi ni la reconnaissance de Versailles.

Marc-Antoine Charpentier était un honnête homme au sens de son temps, humble et droit comme une âme ne manquant jamais son devoir de faire le bien. Il était un homme de compassion qui savait honorer et chanter la souffrance et la douleur, et en premier lieu celles de l’homme de foi et de l’homme de principes. Et en même temps il est capable d’évoquer la joie et l’intensité du feu moral et vital de l’homme fidèle à son idéal de beauté et de bonté. C’est que sa foi est sincère et profonde et que pour lui la mort qu’il célèbre sans cesse reste la cible et la destination de toute vie bien remplie. Et son épitaphe résonne dans nos oreilles comme une grande vérité : « Comme en naissant je n’ai rien apporté, en mourant je n’ai rien emporté. »

S’il n’a rien apporté par sa naissance, par sa musique il nous a submergé de monceaux de richesses.

Médée, qui s’ouvre avec un long prologue à la gloire du roi non mentionné aucune part, est dans les mains d’Hervé Niquet un beau conte d’une magicienne de la passion qui devient tragique et probablement surhumaine pour ne pas dire divine quand elle est amenée à transformer son amour vital en un jugement final, mortel, dernier et sans la moindre pitié pour ce Jason qui la trahit. Il s’agit alors de châtier le parjure et surtout pas de venger l’injure. Châtier l’homme sans parole par la souffrance du vivant qu’il est par la mort de ses propres enfants et de l’objet de son désir abject et de son ambition d’arriviste qui a oublié que seule l’honnêteté au sens de Racine est le garant du succès.

Mais plus encore Jordi Savall fait de la Missa Assumpta est Maria une œuvre majeure capable de se comparer sans pâlir aux plus grandes œuvres de Bach et de Haendel. Je retiendrai surtout le Kyrie qui est poignant de foi et de souffrance. Le corps torturé du Christ est ici évoqué et invoqué par la musique et de plus enchanté et inspiré de la résurrection et du salut que seule la mort dans la douleur peut ambitionner de conquérir.

Charpentier est dans l’avant-garde d’une synthèse entre le jansénisme plus ou moins interdit et la religion de gloire et de lumière des Bossuet et autres grands de l’église gallicane, tout en étant à l’avant-garde de la musique qui va triompher en Europe et dans le monde. Il y a en lui les flammes et les émotions qui surgissent dans la musique des Bach de son époque et de juste après-lui, qui jaillissent avec Haendel et l’école de Mannheim, y compris bien sûr Mozart, et qui mène tout droit à la puissance musicale d’un John Adams trois siècles plus tard.

C’est alors que l’on peut entendre le Gloria de cette messe, un Gloria qui s’élève si haut que le vent cosmique lui-même suspend son vol pour laisser cette gloire établir son éternité en communion avec l’espoir d’arrêter le temps par la mort des horloges de la vie, par l’embrassade de l’oméga de la fin qui trouve sa force atemporelle justement dans la temporalité de l’alpha du commencement.

Et il prétend ne rien avoir apporté ? L’humilité là le trahit. Et je ne serai pas comme Catherine Cessac « ébloui par ce génie multiforme » parce que cette expression ne veut rien dire et pourrait s’appliquer à des dizaines de grands créateurs et de scientifiques. Je suis fasciné par tout ce que je viens justement d’expliquer et d’expliciter.

Heureusement que les musiciens sont capables de nous donner toutes ces richesses en nous les faisant ressentir au plus profond sous la seule forme digne de Charpentier, les émotions de l’âme et de l’esprit, du cœur et de la vie.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

HOMELAND – SERIES – SEASONS 1-3

The action of the series is extremely dense and as such the series is interesting, entertaining, suspenseful. But it takes more than simple action to make a good series.

The first problem it envisages is the fact that a US soldier captured in Iraq or Afghanistan, kept prisoner for eight years and liberated as some kind of collateral incident of one particular raid on a Taliban or jihadist post, goes through debriefing and even lie-detecting without a hitch though he has been turned during captivity. Yet one CIA agent is suspicious but she cannot come to anything conclusive.

The whole story turns around the fact that this marine was turned or broken by his captors. The way they did it, and we learn right at the end it was decided by Iranian people directly under control of the security boss in Iran, is original and at the same time standard. First torture knowing that all the man says during the first seven or eight days is worth nothing because a marine is trained to resist torture for seven to eight days. Then he can say everything he knows, after eight days, because he knows that by then everything has had time to change or be changed. In other words torturing well trained elite fighters is useless since they will be speaking freely and the truth only the truth but after eight days during which all they had told was lies and prepared inventions in order to let their side change what has to be changed.

The second element is that after this torture that can only last a short time, you have to get the chap into total absolute isolation with rare moments of contact with the outside world and under perfect guidance. The prisoner will little by little get out of his mind and to keep some sanity he will turn to a god or some kind of spiritual or religious belief. That’s when the Stockholm Syndrome can hit hard on the prisoner. In that total loss of contact, perspective and connections with the world if some kindness is proposed by one of the captors, if possible one that has played a role in the torturing but not the direct torturing part, rather the commanding part in the torture, then the prisoner will become grateful and if this kindness goes on and increases the prisoner will naturally turn. His religious need will lead him to adopting the religion of his captors. In this case the prisoner is entrusted with teaching English to the son of the leading figure among the captors and this brings the prisoner into an emotional situation where he falls in love with the child, the young boy. At this moment the prisoner has become a member of a situation that makes him part of the captors’ world. The torture broke him and the kindness turned him.

It is then a US drone that kills dozens of children in a school, and among these children the boy whose education our prisoner had been entrusted with, that completes the turning of the man. Then the rest is detail. He becomes the willing live suicidal bomber that will kill those who are responsible for the bombing of the school, and that is the US Vice-President and his security outfit or team if you prefer.

The third element here is that this turning cannot be reversed but it can at first be blocked by small elements that come from his previous life, and in his case his wife and his children, particularly his daughter. You can turn a man but you cannot erase his past. You can block that past and train him so that he can go through any debriefing and any lie-detecting, but you cannot delete his past, and you must not because this past is what is going to make him able to go back to his society to fulfill his mission there. But this past contains emotions that are revived for some of them by his coming back to his previous life and that can block the resolve and mission of the turned prisoner. The film gives two cases and the same element, attachment to previous wife and children, is the blocking element, the emotion to which the two people go back to and that can become the stumbling stone. Turning a man is never complete because it is impossible. That’s what the series tells us.

It goes, in the last episodes of the third season, as far as showing the turned prisoner can first be turned all over again and back to what he used to be, a Marine, and then the mission he had been entrusted with when he was turned the first time can become the very incentive for fulfilling at any cost the mission he has been entrusted with when he was turned back to his initial Marine format, and the intermediary turning of the man by his captors will become the force that will motivate his vengeance or vengeful power which will lead him to fulfilling the second mission: he will eradicate those who turned him the first time out vengeance.

The second theme of the series is very debatable. To pretend that the present change in Iran is the result of a CIA opposition that liquidated the historical main security leader in Iran and had him replaced by a CIA undercover agent is simply absurd. This undercover CIA agent was the chief of security under the Shah and then became the second man in command of the security system under the ayatollahs. In other words he is a turn-coat. To pretend that he has embezzled great sums from his own security operations and hence from the regime in Iran is just foolish. It takes an embezzler to recognize another. That’s the type of tactics the CIA uses and they consider everyone does the same. Since the CIA leads the people they want to buy to embezzling money through their double-agent situation, they think it is natural for everyone to dream and desire to be an embezzler. What’s more to think that the evolution of Iran is nothing but secret service corruption and penetration and infiltration from the CIA is mental simplicity. The evolution of a country in any direction can only come from the people themselves if it is to be long lasting and serious. We seem to forget Hitler and Mussolini were elected. At that level the ideology of the Mossad (this series is adapted from an Israeli series) is so obvious that we wonder if the series is not financed by that Mossad.

The final remark I will make is that the CIA is using, at times at top level, people who are psychologically deranged or non-functional. Here the main agent in these “adventures” is a woman and she is bipolar, hence highly sensitive to any withdrawal from her drugs and she should not even be sent in hostile fields since she could be tortured by just being cut off from her drugs. Such “motivations” or “abilities,” I mean the abilities that are developed in such psychologically deficient situations, can be useful for some extreme situations but they are extremely dangerous in the long run because the person cannot be trusted.

And she sure cannot be trusted, so much that she can easily be manipulated including by the CIA in order to fulfill objectives she is not even conscious or aware of. This vision of humanity (man is nothing but a manipulated manipulating manipulator) is a denial of humanity itself. We can see what it may lead to with ISIS or Ukraine. In the first case Iran finds it easy to laugh at the West who actually financed the various movements that now have turned out to be ISIS. In the same case it does not take much from Putin to manipulate Ukraine back to some kind of a compromise after the Ukrainians (including the remnants of the nazi units that had managed to survive in the West as political refugees from the USSR and had come back to be the agents of the West, and particularly the European Community, after the fall of the USSR) had been manipulated into ousting the properly elected President during the Sochi Olympic Games.

If this world has any future it will only come from consensual properly expressed wills and desires of the mass of the people of every single and all countries in the world. Scotland is there to prove the point: in spite of all public opinion polls manipulated by the media to predict such a close result that they could not even tell which side dominated, the winning margin of NO was so wide that there cannot be any kind of doubt.

This series is typical of the new Cold War ideology that is developing in the West confronted to the fact that this West has lost the leading position in the world and the future is in the hands of the BRICS and their allies or partners. Who – apart from me and Ivan Eve, THE INDIAN OCEAN THE MARE NOSTRUM OF HUMANITY [Kindle Edition] – could have said four or five years ago that Sri Lanka was going to be the maritime hub in the Indian Ocean and what’s more the security hub in this Indian Ocean. What this means is not clear as for the security hub, so far, but it is crystal clear as for the maritime hub with the latest announcement about the development of Colombo’s harbor.

This Cold War flavor is regrettable because the series is fascinating at many levels.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

4.        TRIPPING ENDLESSLY ALL ALONG THE DOWNFALL, Jacques COULARDEAU, Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU, Publication Amazon Kindle September 26, 2012, http://www.amazon.com/Tripping-endlessly-all-along-downfall-ebook/dp/B009GIANZE/ref=sr_1_8?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-8&keywords=Coulardeau

5.        THE INDIAN OCEAN THE MARE NOSTRUM OF HUMANITY, Dr Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE, Publication Amazon Kindle October 31, 2012, http://www.amazon.com/INDIAN-OCEAN-MARE-NOSTRUM-HUMANITY-ebook/dp/B009ZVO0F6/ref=sr_1_12?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-12&keywords=Coulardeau

6.        SUPERNATURAL CAR CHASE OR JOY RIDE? Dr Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE, Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU, Publication Amazon Kindle March 28, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Supernatural-Car-Chase-Joy-Ride-ebook/dp/B00C3ODA0S/ref=sr_1_4?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-4&keywords=Coulardeau

7.        L’APOCALYPSE SELON SAINT JEAN, Adapted from the New Testament, Jacques COULARDEAU, Illustrations Annunzio COULARDEAU, Publication Amazon Kindle June 2, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/LApocalypse-selon-Saint-Jean-French-ebook/dp/B00D5YL2W8/ref=sr_1_11?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-11&keywords=Coulardeau

10.     THE U.S. SUPREME COURT, A UNIVERSAL LESSON IN CONSTITUTIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS, Jacques COULARDEAU & Ivan EVE, Publication Amazon Kindle July 19, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/SUPREME-UNIVERSAL-LESSON-CONSTITUTIONAL-RIGHTS-ebook/dp/B00E24JTC0/ref=sr_1_10?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-10&keywords=Coulardeau

11.     SIGIRI GRAFFITI, Jacques COULARDEAU, Illustrations  Annunzio COULARDEAU,  Diyakapilla, October 5, 2005, Olliergues, December 27-31, 2005, Publication Amazon Kindle September 12, 2013, http://www.amazon.com/Sigiri-Graffiti-Jacques-COULARDEAU-ebook/dp/B00EZ412A4/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-1&keywords=Coulardeau

12.     ILYA & VANYA: Love Drama, Full and Uncut, Jacques COULARDEAU, author, Annunzio COULARDEAU, illustrator, Olliergues, February 2014, Publication Amazon Kindle March 8 2014, http://www.amazon.com/ILYA-VANYA-Love-Drama-Uncut-ebook/dp/B00IVIUAOE/ref=sr_1_3?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-3&keywords=Coulardeau

13.     SYNCHROSOME II: ILYA AND VANYA [Explicit], Jacques COULARDEAU, dramatic author, song writer and performer, Kévin THOREZ, composer and performer (music and songs), NadXKa, performer (songs), Amazon, Format MP3, April 4, 2014, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00J09IYFA/ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp?ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-3-catcorr

14.     SYNCHROSOME II [Explicit], Jacques COULARDEAU, song writer, Kévin THOREZ, composer and performer (music and songs), NadXKa, performer (songs), Amazon, Format MP3, April 4, 2014, http://www.amazon.com/Synchrosome-Explicit-NadXka-Kevin-Thorez/dp/B00J09FVBA/ref=sr_1_2?s=dmusic&ie=UTF8&qid=1411303191&sr=1-2&keywords=K%C3%A9vin+Thorez%2C

15.     LA CHAISE DIEU – 3015, Les aventures de Loukardill en musique sucrée (Sweet Music, University of Jupiter on Europa), Jacques COULARDEAU, Docteur en Cosmologie Générative (Generative Cosmology, University of Jupiter on Europa), Illustration Kévin THOREZ, Imageur luciférico-obscur, Publication Amazon Kindle, July 4, 2014, http://www.amazon.com/CHAISE-DIEU-3015-Loukardill-University-ebook/dp/B00LJXWIL6/ref=sr_1_5?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-5&keywords=Coulardeau

16.     QU’AS-TU FAIT, HARRY ? / WHAT’VE YOU DONE, HARRY?, José VALVERDE (auteur / author), Jacques COULARDEAU (traducteur / translator), Edition bilingue / Bilingual edition, Publication Amazon Kindle, July 10, 2014, http://www.amazon.com/QUAS-TU-FAIT-HARRY-Trag%C3%A9die-Moderne-ebook/dp/B00LPP3C2M/ref=sr_1_6?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-6&keywords=Coulardeau

17.     SHADOW IN THE NIGHT, SIGIRIYA SHINY LADIES, Jacques COULARDEAU, Bilingual English and French Edition, Translated from the Sigiri Graffiti of Sigiriya, Historical English and French Introduction, Publication Amazon Kindle, July 13, 2014, http://www.amazon.com/SHADOW-NIGHT-SIGIRIYAS-SHINY-LADIES-ebook/dp/B00LWYCT98/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411301461&sr=1-2&keywords=Coulardeau