First they came for...then they came for...and now the universities; Timothy Snyder has missed the moment until it is too late

I guess this video from now former Yale History Professor Timothy Snyder is okay. But note how Snyder never connects the dots to how come there were so many Jewish college students who took part in the protests. There were and are a whole lot, Professor Synder. Where were YOU during the encampments? Where was YOUR voice on what Revisionist Zionism in Israel has done over so many decades of power? There is an element of Pastor Niemoller here as the right-wing part of the establishment and elite powers finally came for the universities themselves--and only now he is speaking up on the topic of antisemitism relating to but still not touching the very essence of the problems of Zionism as practiced in Israel against an indigenous people.

 

As far as I saw, Snyder never spoke up about the wrongful conflation of Zionism and antisemitism. And despite his learning and knowledge, he missed how a belief in Zionist causes can go hand-in-hand with antisemitism. It is not the opposite of antisemitsm. See this critique of a book Snyder wrote over a decade ago where the reviewer shows how Snyder missed how Revisionist Zionism in Poland was a vehicle for Polish Christian antisemitism--not a philo-semitism.* Worse, in an October 2022 lecture, Snyder was expressly willing to designate Putin's war crimes in Ukraine as genocide. But somehow, Snyder has been missing in action regarding what is actually a more obvious case of Israeli genocide against Palestinians under the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of genocide.

When I watched Synder's new video and read the transcript, I was struck by how ultimately how hollow it is because of his continued inability to understand how politically-oriented Zionists, not only Jabotinsky and the Revisionists, sold Zionism to European and British leaders as a colonial project--and were adamant against those relatively few cultural Zionists who envisioned a multi-cultural or binational state for Palestine (Rabbi Judah Magnes, philosopher Martin Buber, Jewish Biblical scholar Morris Jastrow, among more than a few others).

Yes, Timothy Snyder. You've been great at sounding the alarm regarding Trump. But, really, man, get your ass out of Hebrew school mythology about Zionism and the State of Israel. It ain't our religion. It's a political ideology attempting to respond to 19th and 20th-Century European Christian-based antisemitism, at best. At worst, even the "good guys" like Ben-Gurion and Weizmann have been exposed as bad guys when Israeli historians began going through their review of the archives.

The only one I will defend is Herzl because, while he may have written The Jewish State in the late 1890s and was the leading founder of the Zionist movement, his novel, published around the time of his early death, New Old Land, posited a binational state where Arabs and Jews from Europe and elsewhere lived in harmony, equality, and peace. Herzl was a true visionary who sensed that building Zionism as a colonial project could lead to precisely what we see today. I wish American pro-Zionist Jews in particular would read the then-hopeful book from the mid-1990s by the now late Israeli Labour Party leader, Shimon Peres, The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodore Herzl in Israel.  Peres went deep into the Herzl novel and why it needed to be resurrected from the dusty shelves of a privileged few who knew it.

* It is stunning to me that such a renowned historian as Snyder missed how Zionist ideology is premised on the immutability of antisemitism, and helps explain why at various points, early Zionists through the end of the 1930s, tried to forge agreements with antisemites, including the German Nazi leadership. Wikipedia is actually very good on the idea of the overlap between Zionist ideology and its acceptance of the assumptions that drive antisemitism. Joseph Massad's polemical essay is, notwithstanding the polemicism, worth reading to take us through today, particularly why it is not odd for Israel to cultivate relationships with far-right and antisemitic politicians throughout what used to be called "Eastern" Europe (at one time "Central" Europe). Most sadly, based upon this series of tweets, I am not sure Snyder is still getting what is wrong with his perspective. He is cogent in recognizing how Trump is following a playbook that overlaps with Hitler and Mussolini. However, he seems oblivious in how Zionist ideology and Israel's leadership are ultimately in league with the thinking and policies that undergird right-wing, nationalist, and antisemitic ideologies. 

The PDA leader's proposal for an outside-inside strategy to transform the Democratic Party leaves me more convinced of my proposal

I read this important proposal, set forth in the LA Progressive online magazine, from PDAer Alan Minsky and hoped to be convinced why I am wrong about progressive leaders simply leading by leaving the Democratic Party altogether as did the brave Whig politicians in the mid-1850s, starting in 1854. After reading Minsky's article, I am more convinced than ever that this is asking progressive activists to do twice the work. He also refuses to acknowledge just how entrenched the money interests are in the Democratic Party, including many state parties. Multiple times, he acknowledges the Democratic Party leadership is hopeless and, worse, refuses to accommodate progressives in the party.

Worse, he doesn't talk about what happened with when his outside-inside strategy in Nevada was already successfully applied. Four years ago, progressives won the chair, vice-chair, and other statewide positions. The establishment Dems, on the way out, took out most of the money from the party and inserted it into a party within a party from those who were previously handpicked before by the by-then Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), who was awful in his lifetime for the most part. Nevada still has two conservative Dems as senators--both women, and one a Latina--who continue to enable Trumpism and the Republican agenda as they claim to oppose it. In short, they bled the money from the party and showed how the money power still controlled the politics in the Democratic Party. This article from the Hill shows the establishment, backed by money power, eventually won back formal power in the Nevada State Democratic Party.

I urge anyone who cares about the future of the Democratic Party to read this if any thinks this proposal is really viable considering the Nevada progressive experience, the way Dem politicians routinely ignore party platforms--I saw this in CA and see this in NM--and how much hatred there really remains behind closed doors of Dem officeholders of Dem progressive activists. I've seen it, I've heard it, and it is beyond ridiculous. The phrasing these people use is classic projection--as if we are the bad guys, when it is clear our point about losing the working classes is now verbally acknowledged.

My proposal remains much more sound, but requires progressive leaders to act. If they did, one sees how much more effective the time progressives are being asked to spend under Minsky's proposal would be. There is nobody to fight under my proposal. It is a straight shot with progressive candidates, hundreds of millions of dollars donated to a party that one may want to actually and fully support, and candidates who would know their candidacy was BECAUSE of the people who donated, and following a platform they are in agreement with. In the past decades, Dem politicians only care about the money they raise from big donors, run as independent fiefdoms, don't care about party platforms, and find activists a pain in the neck. A replacement party doesn't have those barriers to have to work to get around.

Minsky is letting off the hook the progressive leaders already in Congress. The fact that hardly anyone besides AOC joined Bernie tells you pretty much all you need to know why they are failures, no different than the establishment/corporate Dems.

Tariffs, infrastructure, taxes, religion, ideology, and, at long last, smart policy-making. Too bad we won't get to smart policy-making in the current discourse.

Up into the 2010s and perhaps even into the 2016 campaign, I was either pro-tariff or neutral on the topic of tariffs. In the 1990s, I strongly opposed the NAFTA and the WTO. At the dawn of the 2000s, I strongly opposed the gift of favored trade status to China. Why? Because I wanted to protect US industry and US manufacturing jobs, even as I knew automation was starting to rise in ways that made Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano" and Daniel Bell's "Post-industrial society" finally start to look prescient. But alas. It didn't matter who among the two corporate-dominated parties were elected. The US workers and the world were getting corporate-dominated global trade--and damn the US workers and US industrial capacity.

In the 2010s, as I saw how interdependent consumers in the economically advanced US and other nations were on goods shipped from China and elsewhere, I realized the US could only get its middle and lower classes back to New Deal type success levels would be through (a) significant increases in the MARGINAL income and capital gains tax rates on the truly rich and corporations and (b) a massive infrastructure program to rebuild our infrastructure, hopefully with greener technologies (yeah, I supported a New Deal that was Green before AOC).

Also, as I saw the US birth rate was dropping so much, any massive infrastructure program would invariably lead to us putting up "Help Wanted" signs at the physical land borders and sea/air ports. That's a little hint why Trump 1.0 never came through on infrastructure: It would expose that our nation didn't have enough even trainable people to do the infrastructure work. We would also have too many infrastructure jobs chasing too few workers, and that would mean employers would have to pay more to workers. This is STILL TRUE. But the fact remains, fans of Trump and anti-anti-Trump people: Trump never wants to economically help workers or, ahem, bring in more immigrants who would be line workers. And neolibs in both parties don't want massive infrastructure because it would help workers over employers (It is why I was so surprised by neolib Biden's NLRB policies, as it was a break from Clinton and Obama, not just Republicans, including Trump).

The worst part of all this, for me at least, is most Americans receive pro-corporate economics lessons in both high school and college. Most Americans don't realize how corporate media propaganda continually supports a right wing corporate capitalist (known as neoclassical economics) narrative that even Pete Buttigieg, the Clintons, Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barry Obama buy into. This seeps into social media as I see even people on my FB feed keep posting the scene in "Ferris Bueller" where Ben Stein plays the economics high school teacher talking about tariffs. Stein, whose Dad (Herbert Stein) was a respected conservative economist who ALWAYS hated the New Deal, repeats the tired and incorrect nostrum that the Hawley-Smoot tariff of 1930 was what really sent us into the Depression. Sorry, Ben, Herb, and even John Kenneth Galbraith, you are all WRONG.

I wish I could post online the old labor-side economics guy, Gus Tyler, and his great essay in the late 1980s that put that to the lie it is.* It was published in the now defunct (?) "New Leader," an old labor oriented magazine. To summarize its points: The Great Depression was initially caused by people buying stock on loans from banks, and, banks, when collecting the collateral for those loans, as most never had the money to pay back the loans, started to go under more and more as the value of the collateral declined more and more. Second, there was a larger drop in the GNP (now GDP) BEFORE the S-H Tariff went into effect than after. Third, only 10% of our economy relied on imports. Fourth, the S-H Tariff was, for the most part, only a marginal increase in the tariffs that already existed. Therefore, to think this one tariff passed in 1930 was a primary cause of the Depression getting worse is, well, dumb. It is why I consider most econ high school and college econ teachers to be, well, morons.

Thus, in the last decade or more, I've been more against tariffs than for tariffs. And Atrios, a rare smart economist, is absolutely correct to say we shouldn't buy into the current liberal and business-conservative chatter that says tariffs are always and elementarily bad on principle. They are not. They are situational. They definitely played a positive role in building up our nation's industrial capacity throughout the 19th Century. Tariffs also played a hugely positive role in China, Japan, and South Korea in building up their economies in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Today, though, for the US at least, tariffs are not such a great idea. Atrios also states, most insightfully:

(a) Ahem, liberals: Biden kept most of Trump 1.0's tariffs and added more in the late part of his one term; and

(b) It is well past time for regular Americans to reject the pro-free trade assumptions we have bought into since the early 1990s. The only valid question is a practical one: What policies help workers and consumers, and, as a sub-part, what polices will help workers more than consumers or vice versa? The answer to the question and sub-question reveals why we should not be pro- or anti-tariff as if we are standing on some principle. It is why I merely call myself a socialist-oriented person as it is simply an aesthetic or philosophical feeling. You know, the way someone may even think of their religion, though I find the idea that socialism is a religion to be an invitation to confusion and worse. The only thing an ideology shares with religion is that both carry a philosophical default mechanism and generality of a set of principles. However, when it comes to political-economy, and public policy, the policy-making should override, when reasonably necessary, the political-economy principle. Why? Because the best public policy making is empirically-based, situational, and relative. At some point, every public policy should be tweaked or significantly reformed, again depending upon the circumstances. Smart religious and smart ideological thinking requires this recognition--or else we get the excesses that cause religions and ideologies to amass a bunch of dead bodies.

God, I hope this is clear to at least some of us.

*If only Dissent would take another article he wrote for the magazine in the Spring of 1988 from behind the subscription wall. 

Time for the national Dems to go the way of the once-national Whig Party. Only national politicians can make this start to happen.

I have reached the conclusion that national progressive Dems in Congress need to strongly consider, and then do, what then-progressive Whigs did in the early 1850s, which is to form a new national political party. Just as the then-new Republican Party rose quickly out of the morass of the hopelessly divided Whig Party, this new party will find so much support across the nation, starting in places where the Dems are already toxic. The primary platform should revolve around economic policies of a social democratic form to directly challenge corporate power and the Empire. It will also acknowledge cultural issues, but strongly support "live the way you want to live" on LGBTQ and abortion issues, and promote gun safety regulation more than outright confiscation.

I realize the main difference in the 1850s was the Republican Party was able to unite people outside the enslavement institutional South through one issue, the Scourge of Slavery. However, we face an existential threat of corporate domination and a climate crisis that needs to ensure people can be employed in a New Deal of people-helping jobs and green-oriented infrastructure redevelopment, and not continue to be tied to fossil fuel production.

Structurally, the national Democratic Party resembles nothing more than an equivalent to Communist-front organizations where, once the New Deal liberals left in the wake of the Stalin-Hitler deal of 1939, they became hollow shells. Sadly, the national Democratic Party remains controlled by major corporate donors and major consultant companies which have largely destroyed the Democratic Party's ties to working people and New Deal values.

However, all the activists across labor, environmental, and antiwar movements continue to be unable to create a new political party. What it is going to take is leadership from already known politicians, as with William Seward, Salmon Chase, and Charles Sumner, and even a Lincoln, who was very well known in Illinois, contrary to the usual way we think of Lincoln coming out of nowhere for the 1860 presidential nomination.

I am also confident that states with decent Democratic Party leadership, such as New Mexico, will quickly find their way to a new party, and eventually gain more political power in areas now dominated by right-wing Republicans.

 
It is time. Past time. So, Congressional politicians who supported Bernie Sanders' values and/or Bernie, #DitchtheDems.

Echoes of the fall of Paris and France

Chuck Schumer has become the domestic US version of Neville Chamberlain. His argument was that things will get worse if he and other Dems did not capitulate to the Republicans, and that capitulating to Trump now would be more effective later on. This argument collapses on its own intended idea of logic. Trump has now clearly won. This is why Trump humiliated Schumer further in Trump's "tweet" "thanking" Schumer. The other eight Democratic Party senators and independent Angus King of Maine deserve equal blame.

As this has unfolded, I have been reading the Soviet-Russian novelist Ilya Ehrenburg's 1942 novel, "The Fall of Paris." I am just past the halfway point. The parallel of his description of French life from 1935 forward is compelling. Each step Hitler took, from supporting Franco in Spain against the Spanish Republic, to taking the Sudtenland in Czechoslovakia and then the latter itself, was greeted with alarm across the French political spectrum. However, the same political elites (except the Communists, who the political elites from the far right to the Socialists reviled) ultimately decided peace was more important than standing up to Hitler. In this set of decisions from the French elites, it was believed by all the so-called smart people that giving in would sate Hitler and standing up for Spain and Czechoslovakia meant war.

Reading this insightful and literarily well-crafted narrative has provided me with a powerful understanding of how this unfolded day-to-day. It is uncanny to me how I see echoes of this in the discourse I have read and sometimes seen at my folks house on MSNBC and CNN. Except, in our time, our nation's Fascist threat is a call from inside the house.

What is surprising to me in reading this novel is Erhenburg was a dedicated Stalinist during the period of the 1930s through Stalin's death. Yet, this novel is deeply sympathetic with respect to business people, conservative and right wing people, and the politically indifferent people who simply wish people would stop with obsessive political arguments, and leave each other in peace. Ehrenburg has been careful to not show how wrongheaded these people were, as he almost tenderly describes their best motives and arguments. Ehrenburg knew he could write the novel in this fashion, as, of course, he wrote his novel after the fall of France. Readers would therefore themselves be able to judge the thinking of these people.

The reason I am still inclined to be negative in my judgment regarding Ehrenburg the person is based upon my reading Victor Serge's most important work, "Memoirs of a Revolutionary," which Serge wrote in his last years before his early death in Mexico in 1947 for what he called the "dresser drawer," and which was not published until after his death. In Serge's magisterial work, he took great care to be as objective as he could about his enemies and opponents. It is what makes the work so powerful, as Serge, a revolutionary, is, in this way, most liberal in that old 19th-Century sense. But he is not willing to be that way with Ehrenburg. In the memoirs, Serge harshly described Ehrenburg as a "hack agitator-novelist" (Serge, 318).

I get Serge's anger. In 1935, Ehrenberg, originally born in Kyvv (!), was then living in France. At an international left writers' conference held in Paris he attended, there was a proposal on behalf of various oppressed writers around the world. One of the speakers mentioned Serge, who was suffering his second internal exile due to Serge being a Left Oppositionist to Stalin and affiliated with Trotsky. Ehrenburg and other pro-Soviet writers denounced Serge as a counterrevolutionary and justified Stalin's treatment of him.

 
Not long after the conference, Andre Gide and Romain Rolland respectively implored the Soviet ambassador to France and Stalin to let Serge leave, and Stalin relented (Serge, 318-319). This proved to be miraculous as Serge eventually left the Soviet Union not long before the "Great Purges" of mostly Bolsheviks began. As Serge remains my Soviet dissident hero, I hesitated to read Ehrenburg's book as I expected it to be hack work. I was stunned from the start with Ehrenburg's brilliant writing, and, as I have reached the halfway point, have found it remarkably prescient in its insights. The only nod to Stalinism I see is his missing the manner in which the Communists in Spain were behaving and a very brief, indirect, unnamed but positive, nod to the Lysenko agricultural methods. The latter led me to laugh and that nod has thankfully not been repeated. The novel won the Stalin Prize for best novel, which also makes me deeply wince, but damn it, it is really great despite that hackish award.

Again, I find it sadly strange to be reading this novel of France in the late 1930s and seeing how it echoes into today's political environment. Heck, I didn't even need to re-read Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here" (1935). Lewis' novel is not focused so much on the day-to-day that led to the election of Buzz Windrip. Its focus is on the aftereffects. Ehrenburg's novel takes readers step by step into the abyss in a story with a variety of characters from various parts of life, whose lives overlap with, break apart, or carry on romantic affairs with each other. It is a remarkably insightful and compelling work.

Trump's humiliation of Zelenskyy was an American insult to America's injuring Ukraine all these years

I POSTED THIS TO FB ON SATTURDAY MARCH 1, 2025. I THOUGHT I'D SAVE IT HERE. I DID SOME GRAMMAR EDITS, BUT IT IS ESSENTIALLY THE SAME AS THE FB POST. I MAY AS WELL SEE HOW THIS STANDS UP WHEN HISTORIANS IN 2060 LOOK AT BLOGGER POSTS IF THEY CAN. LOL. ANYWAY... 

What Trump and Vance did to Zelenskyy yesterday was petty, cruel, nasty, and dumb. What these two terrible leaders did also revealed to me that, for all the arguments from the anti-anti-Trump left that "Russiagate" was a "hoax," this is one more example of Trump being potentially compromised by Putin's Russia--with now Vance going along.

 

I feel so badly for the Ukrainians. The evidence is clear to me that the US, for decades, led enough Ukrainians near or in power that NATO membership was likely at some point and that promise was somehow worth fighting for. The US' goals have not primarily been about helping Ukrainian people as much as using Ukraine as a proxy to bloody up post-Communist, kleptocracy Russia, which, incidentally, our nation initially and ironically helped create in the 1990s. Our actions in the mid to late 1990s and, in the early 2000s, to expand NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, remember?) shocked the now deceased major Cold War advisers Chalmers Johnson and George Kennan, who had spent their adult lives studying Russia and its nationalist impulses. They knew expanding NATO betrayed what was implied and sometimes said to Russian leaders. The actions exposed the fallacy in their own assumptions about US good faith and revealed to them that Soviet/Russian fears of "capitalist encirclement" were not cynical delusions. These two men at least had the integrity to go public with their mea culpas and warnings, which warnings continue to be prescient.

Worse, Ukrainian diplomats have already gone on record that a reasonable settlement with Putin was at hand in the spring of 2022, within weeks of Putin's February 2022 invasion. They have publicly stated how, during those negotiations, they were shocked that Putin kept saying "No NATO membership," which for these diplomats proved Putin's nationalistic concerns in that regard were real, not feigned. The US's and UK's deliberate--and threatening--scuttling of that potential deal has only led to far more devastation, and what could be a million deaths on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. The big counteroffensive the Biden administration pushed has failed, and, while there is an uneasy stalemate, the Russians may be said to be in better shape militarily than they were a year or so ago. I shudder when I look at Ukraine's current position, the Ukrainian public's loss of confidence in Zelenskyy, and the continued hostilities between Russian-Ukrainians and those Ukrainians whose heritages go back a millennium.

This brings me to this reminder amidst the noise: We must never forget that, before February 2022, 22% of Ukrainians identified as Russian, speak Russian, and are favorably disposed to Russia. Ukraine's history and Russia's history have been intertwined since at least the thirteenth century, with initially for centuries, Ukrainian leaders ruling over a then-fledgling Russia.

I am so appalled at the way Trump has behaved against Zelenskyy and Trump's cruel and disrespectful denigration of Ukraine's sovereignty. This is truly a moment where I now desperately hope China and Germany may enter negotiations as relative neutrals, sorta how Teddy Roosevelt acted to help end the Japan-Russian War of the dawn of the 20th Century.

The US behavior at this point is an insult to the initial injuries against Ukraine from Clinton's, Bush II's, Obama's provocations, and Biden's warmongering. I should note, though, that during Trump's first administration, Trump issued sanctions against Russia, in part because of brewing issues with Ukraine. For the anti-anti-Trump left, that fact proves Russiagate was a hoax. For me, it was simply Trump not having the power or confidence at the time to overcome the military-industrial complex. Remember, nearly every major foreign policy person from his first administration, and his first VP, nearly all Cold Warriors, opposed Trump in 2024's election cycle. That is not a coincidence.

In any event, at this point, the military-industrial complex's guardrails appear to be severely weakened--which would have been largely true even if there was a President Harris as she would have been feckless, and facing a mutiny among her own party, let alone plenty of cruelly cynical Republicans. For those of us opposed to the existence of the US Empire, that development may seem good. However, that weakening of guardrails is occurring in a context that threatens stability within our own society. The weakening of the military-industrial complex is not happening in the way a President Bernie Sanders would have wanted to see, with the US becoming an honest, kindlier peacemaker and only competing with China on "belts and roads" initiatives, while promoting a global response to climate change challenges. I know, it sounds so naive. But, dammit, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, those who are often called idealistic are most often the most effective realists when provided the opportunity.

After yesterday, I remain hoping against facts that someone calms down Trump and Vance, and gets them back to some reasonable recognition that the US and UK put Ukraine into this position and that blaming them is a disgusting insult to the injuries committed against Ukrainians and their present government. It is a humiliation Ukrainians will not soon forget, with consequences that may cause anti-Russian Ukrainians to act in ways that nationalists behave--you know, like Serbian nationalists circa 1910-1914.

Right now, I don't hold much hope for anyone currently in the Trump administration getting hold of Trump's demented mind to create trust to get to a decent peace between Russia and Ukraine. But I admit I am not reading these twists and turns on this issue as deeply as I used to do. I just find the whole thing detestable, and my own views so far outside the discourse on top of having no power. I feel like Isaac Deutscher surveying Cold War America, though without his credentials. :) Anyway, I found yesterday morning I was doing more analysis-reading of the Lakers' victory over the Clippers on Friday night, where Luka appears to have gotten hot in his shooting in the second half after I had gone to bed. LOL.

1975: The last great year of the 1970s progressive rock movement

1975 was the last year in which one may say the majority of progressive rock bands released amazing music, though one may begin to see the cracks in the wall. In 1976, the fall more deeply began. While there continued to be great progressive rock albums released, they were simply not as great overall as what had occurred during the six years before. Here is my decidedly not-chronological list of the progressive rock albums released in 1975, fifty years ago this coming year, 2025:

Gentle Giant, "Free Hand." This was released in the summer of 1975--and I was in heaven when I first heard it. This album became GG's most economically successful and popular album, though it received almost no airplay from nearly any then popular FM radio stations (WNEW-FM in NYC barely played it. The others, not at all).

Renaissance, "Scheherazade." Perhaps my favorite overall album from this band. Renaissance's instrumental sound led with their keyboardist, with the ever-amazing Annie Haslam at lead vocals. The band has had a high mortality rate with the lead bassist, Jon Camp, dying last month. I think of the main members, the only survivors are Annie Haslam and the drummer, Terry Sullivan. Just start with "A Trip to the Fair" on this one, though, and let it roll.

Camel, "The Snow Goose." This is Camel's greatest album as well. It is an instrumental, with some nonword choral vocals. And it is one continuous track. The music on the album was inspired by the late, underrated author, Paul Gallico's book of the same name. Sadly, Gallico's estate successfully sued Camel for copyright infringement to grab a big portion of what would be Camel's best selling album of their entire career as a band. I have read and love several of Gallico's books, including "Snow Goose" which was a novella, not a full-on novel. But, his estate acted badly and morally wrongly in my view. I also wonder about whether the lawsuit was even proper under a Nimmer-based copyright law philosophy. For me, specifically, I thought it was odd because Camel did not do anything more than identify the characters. Most importantly, there were no quotes from the book in the recording. Anyway, this remains a wonderful album and well worth the listen.

Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here." Yeah, we all should know this album. Or at least know OF this album. Just. Listen.

Kansas, "Song for America" and "Masque." Kansas released two amazing albums in one year! Both are well worth the listen, too. Some criticized then and now "Masque" for being too much a likeness in sound to "Song for America." That is correct, but who gives a damn? To me, this is like a double album released with seven months of separation. Just take it, people!  Two great albums!

Jethro Tull, "Minstrel in the Gallery." This remains an under-appreciated album, and one where Tull or more precisely Ian  Anderson was closest to his British folk tradition to date. He would return to that strong British folk in "Song from the Wood" (1977), which I consider Tull's last truly great album. This album, "Minstrel," has some great tracks, including the title track, and "One White Duck on the Wall."

Van der Graaf Generator, "Godbluff." I was more happy that VDGG had gotten back together than in love with this album when it was released. It is amusing to me that this album has grown tremendously on me, and I find myself returning more and more to it over the years. I mean, "Sleepwalkers" alone makes it a keeper in one's collection. It is an album more commercially-oriented, but not enough for FM radio program directors. Somehow Johnny Rotten aka John Lydon found it and loved it. There is a punk element to the sound, I will admit.

Kayak, "Royal Bed Bouncer." This band, from the Netherlands, was the essence of prog-power-pop. This was perhaps their most complete album, starting with the wild, funny title track which opens the album. How this didn't break through, I can never understand. Ton Sherpenzeel remains for me one of the most interesting pop oriented composers of the era. 

Hatfield and the North, "Rotter's Club." This is an awesome album, the second from this famed Canterbury band. The band would later change its name, and restore most of the lineup except for vocalist/bassist Richard Sinclair, as National Health, which produced three amazing albums. One can hear the development of this jazz-tinged, classically-oriented, progressive rock sound in "Rotter's Club," and of course the British-oriented humor throughout, including the names of the mostly instrumental songs on the album. A must hear for those who have studied the language and sound we call "music." It is not for the regular non-musically inclined. 

Soft Machine, "Bundles." Another Canterbury band, with a most underrated and wonderful album to listen to over the years.

Goblin, "Profundo Rosso." An album I did not hear until years and years later, and I went, "Oh, wow! This is really great!" An Italian band. In 1975, the only Italian band I had ever been able to hear in those pre-YouTube and pre-Internet days was PFM. See next listing...

Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), "Chocolate Kings." This is an awesome album, especially lyrically on the title track. It is the band's thanks to the United States, and wondering just what the hell was already starting to go wrong in our nation. The entire album is worth a listen, though I don't know why the band allowed for such a muddy recording. It lacked the crispness of the previous recordings from the band, and I just don't get it. But, the music remains compelling and is still great to listen. 

Chris Squire, "Fish Out of Water." I was not interested in this album from Yes' founding bassist when it was released. I recently started hearing different tracks in rotation on Pandora and kept saying to myself, "My God! This is great!" My son has long said, "Dad, how did you not like this album? This is a great album!" And it is. I apologize to the late Chris Squire.

Rick Wakeman, "....King Arthur." I think I was put off to not really listen to Squire's record because I found Wakeman's album so awful. I had such hope for Wakeman's second solo effort because his "Six Wives of Henry the Eighth" remains simply amazing. It holds up so well from its 1973 release. But, this album could stand in for what too many anti-progressive rock music writers call the "excesses of progressive rock."

Another Yes member, Steve Howe, released his solo effort in 1975, "Beginnings," and I was surprised at how dull I found the album. It has not improved in age, I must admit. 

Steve Hackett, "Voyage of the Acolyte." This is another album I did not appreciate upon its release. It is from Genesis' guitarist during their heyday of progressive rock love, from 1970 through 1977. Hackett released this out of growing anger at not having his songs included in Genesis albums, and in the wake of Peter Gabriel leaving the band. It is well worth the listen in its entirety from progressive rock fans who were not born during this period.

Frank Zappa, "One Size Fits All." This is not a favorite Zappa/Mothers album, particularly after the two great albums from 1974, "Apostrophe" and "Roxy and Elsewehere". Even though it has essentially the same lineup from 1974, I just didn't find the album's melodies all that enticing. Yes, there is "Inca Roads," and "Sofa No. 2," but even those pale in comparison to the songs/compositions on the previous two albums. Again, this is where progressive rock as a genre begins to fall off in terms of the main bands.

Esperanto, with members from the UK, Europe, and Australia, had largely a dud album in 1975, "Last Tango." However, the band's wild version of "Eleanor Rigby" remains a must-hear for the musically-inclined. If not, stay away. Very much away! LOL. But, I love it! Here it is, and note one will not hear the Beatles' melody until nearly the 2:45 minute mark.   

Brian Eno, "Another Green World," "Discreet Music," and with Robert Fripp of then recently ended King Crimson, "Evening Star". None of these albums appealed then or now to me. Too much getting into John Cage territory, which reads well as an idea, but I find, well, dull.  

Led Zeppelin, "Kashmir." Zep was never really a prog band, but this album was certainly, in the parlance, "proggy," particularly the title track. It may be my favorite single song Zep ever recorded, except for "Stairway to Heaven," but I have never been a big Zep fan. Sorry. It is just a matter of taste, not a lack of respect for what is inarguably one of the most iconic bands, post-Beatles. I definitely recognize and respect that singular fact.

There were two albums from Rush in 1975, which band I admit I have never enjoyed (Heavens! LOL). These are Rush's classic albums, "Fly By Night" and "Caress of Steel." I feel the same with the band, Triumvarat, which in 1975 released "Spartacus," arguably their best album--though one I don't find compelling in any event. 

There were also releases from progressive rock bands beyond the UK and US, which I didn't know at the time, but heard through my son, and really like a lot. These are bands such as Germany's Eloy ("Power and the Passion"), Chile's Los Jaivas ("El Indio"), another Italian band, Area ("Crac!"), Brazil's O Terco ("Criaturas de Noite") and Casa das Maquinas ("Lar da Maravihas"), among others. It remains a deep cultural tragedy that in those days, it was nigh impossible for progressive rock fans in the US to hear these amazing bands from other continents. 

The great Italian progressive rock band, Banco del Mutuo Soccoso, also had an English-oriented release in 1975, mostly their previous albums' tracks but in English. I didn't hear it then, and hearing it now, I say stick with the original Italian versions. Banco was outstanding! 

THE SEMI-PROGRESSIVE ROCK ALBUMS OF 1975

1975 saw a flowering of the semi-progressive rock bands. It is weird to think how reviled progressive rock was in the pages of the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, etc. and, when not ignored by most mainstream newspapers, reviled by Robert Hilburn in the LA Times and John Rockwell in the NYT. Yet these semi-prog bands appeared, as if to say maybe there was a larger audience for music with a sense of musical theory and composition.  It is funny that I had thought Foreigner would be included in this list of bands releasing albums in 1975. However, Foreigner formed in 1976, and the band initially included Ian MacDonald of the original King Crimson. This gave the band a more progressive edge than most of the bands which follow on this list, though certainly not enough progressive structures for me, I admit.:) Anyway, here are the semi-prog bands releasing major albums in 1975: 

Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody." Yup, that album. I place this in the progressive-oriented category, as it was. What was always deeply frustrating to me is that this album got into regular airplay, but the other progressive bands, whether that is Camel, Gentle Giant, Renaissance, etc. never could. But, the title track remains one of the most iconic tracks/songs of the 1970s classic rock era.

Journey, "Journey." Yes, Journey began life as a progressive-oriented pop band.  I heard a track from this album recently, and it was decent to good. I remember when they arrived on the scene, and, how, by the next year, they went fully into the ersatz-prog category with Styx and Boston--and eventually Toto. I think, though, Journey became even more associated with pop rock of the period than any of those bands. This means, too, that non-musically interested female Boomers began to love Journey in a way that still alienated me, musically-speaking, from most women my age over the decades. LOL.

Nektar, "Recycled." Their most progressive-oriented album, but still in that Styx and Boston mode. Not sure it is worth the listen in 2025 unless one listens first to the rest of the albums listed here.

Ambrosia, "Ambrosia." Another band, as with Nektar, which tried but failed to effectively combine progressive elements with pop music. I don't think Ambrosia pleases most progressive rock fans, and normie folks still think, "This is too weird for me."  

Billy Joel, "Turnstiles." Yes, this has several progressive-oriented tracks. Just listen to "Prelude/Angry Young Man" and "Summer, Highland Falls." If one knows and says the latter song is not progressive in orientation, then listen to this acoustic version Joel did of the latter song at the National Press Club back in 2008. It is definitely progressive-oriented, akin to a King Crimson soft-ballad type of song (examples of Crimson soft songs include "I Talk to the Wind", "Book of Saturday" and "Matte Kudasai")  Joel had progressive credentials before going pop. In 1970, he, along with the extraordinary drummer Jonathan Small, made an album under the band name, "Attila". It is an album Joel has continually disparaged for what may be personal reasons, as I think Joel ran off with Small's wife, or vice-versa. Hard to recall right now. In any event, "Atilla" remains a great progressive-blues album much neglected in our musical oriented world. As I like to say to people, listen to this final or last track from the album. Very progressive. Various songs on "Turnstiles" and then Joel's later "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" from "The Stranger" in 1977 are definitely progressive-oriented, and more so than most of the bands listed in this section. 

ELO SELLS OUT TO PURE POP AND BECOMES A SUPERSTAR BAND SPANNING DECADES:

Electric Light Orchestra, "Face the Music." Man, I had to face the music that ELO had completely left progressive rock which defined its first three albums. The band's 1974's "Eldorado" was the beginning of the trend that would send ELO into regular folks' orbits, not music for us weird music freaks--or as I liked to write during that decade, music "phreaks." I will always remember a high school friend in our first year at Rutgers who, seeing my face, after I had brought the album I just purchased to another friend's dorm so I could hear what I purchased, kept laughing, pointing at me, and taunting: "Freedman's band sold out! Ha-ha!" That last part is what was to become a Nelson Munz "har-har" if one knows the Simpsons show that would not appear for another 13 years or so. It is very funny to recall that moment! 

FINAL THOUGHTS:

As one may see by my commentaries next to the band names and album releases, 1975 was, for me at least, a mixed year. I may have missed some bands, such as Curved Air or Caravan. However, I admit the 1975 released albums from Curved Air or Caravan have not grown on me, either since their releases or through the present. Still, when one considers the output of progressive rock music from 1969 through 1975, and even through the rest of the decade, one should remain amazed at how brilliant the music was, and how often, lyrically, these bands do not get the credit they deserve. Not always of course, with Yes leading the caveats. But, certainly, Gentle Giant, Genesis, Jethro Tull, and PFM leading the way, along with Renaissance, in writing intelligent and creative lyrics. 

Sigh. Fifty years: 1975-2025. I am not sure I could even imagine 2025 back in 1975.