Mark reflects on music and world events.

Author:  Mark Seymour.

Date: 27 April 2025.

Original URL: N/A.

Article Text

‘THE SOUNDS OF SILENCE’

Simon and Garfunkel

It was first song I ever learned to play on acoustic guitar. Thirteen years old in my Doncaster bedroom, pretending to study, listening for my father’s footsteps in the hallway.

It started with a minor chord, a bog simple riff that even I could play but what followed was a nightmarish vision of mass human hypnosis where thousands bowed and prayed in silence to a neon god..

in some huge city I’d never been to..

a long way from Doncaster..

It was the story of a crowd who’d seen something in themselves that had terrified them so deeply, they came to avoid the awful truth of history and turned to obedience, allowing themselves to be brain washed by some cheap image of worship, some false god, some fool on the hill.

Their sense of worth, compassion, good will, their humanity abandoned to

Silence..

‘The Sounds of Silence’ must’ve tweaked some biblical nerve in me. A kind of near future apocalypse, the idea that human civilisation would end someday. Maybe it was just around the corner..

I was an idealistic teenager, schooled by religious parents. There was evil in the world. It was a force to be reckoned with and only by vigilance and good works could it be resisted

Keep in mind, this song actually got played on commercial radio. Can you believe that now?

Back then the Vietnam War consumed everything. I was a year short of the draft while thousands were outraged by the fundamental injustice of the mass bombing of innocents, nightly glimpses of burning children, diggers writhing in the jungle mud.

And it was all coming straight into our lounge rooms courtesy of network TV which for the first time had penetrated the heart of the beast..

It wasn’t the politics at first. It was the shock of the carnage. The blood, the wounding, the sight of bodies in city streets. How could our side, allies of democracy do these things?

What? You think this had never happened before boy? Nah. Not in your Doncaster loungeroom.. in front of Mum and Dad.. over fish and chips on Friday..

At school we struck on the oval on Moratorium Day, painted the flag pole red and raised the U.S. flag spattered in red paint..

For years Australia was deeply divided. On one side those who believed we were fighting a battle we had to win or succumb to the tyranny of communism..

and on the other, those who simply refused to accept the violence itself. Global circumstances were no justification. There was something else going on. Something far more sinister. Far more cynical.

The slaughter of innocents was a moral rubicon that should never have been crossed.

In the last two years, faced with the horror of Gaza I’ve felt something similar. My teenage outrage has returned. But this time I’ve grown silent.

Instead, I’ve listened and watched..

At the end of ’24 I naively posted a call for a ‘ceasefire’, believing I knew enough of the history of conflict in and around the state of Israel,

that it would escalate. I was howled down. Fair enough I thought. That’s FB for you. So I trashed my bits and moved on as many of us have. Still, nothing prepared me for now. The gates are closed. No food is getting in..

Tens of thousands of people have been blown to bits, cities laid to waste, children buried under rubble.. bodies rotting in the streets. Doubtless by simply pointing this out I’ll be told I don’t understand, I don’t know enough. There are always countervailing facts. Forces at work that lie beyond my imagination. But not in my bones. My bones know.

To me it looks like a murder spree.

When a military response escalates to a point where the body count far out strips the original threat, where resistance is impossible.. why go on?

See, the problem with war is that it can always be justified by somebody, especially when it is fought in your name. No matter how shocking the violence, there’s always that old trope of defending democracy.. our so called ‘way of life..’

But what exactly are the facts on the ground? Sure we have the tech to see it but who’s holding the camera? We begin with outrage. The violence offends our middle-class comfort. How dare they? Whoever they are? After all we’ve done, to save them from themselves, how dare they resist? How dare they reject peace and prosperity? But when the carnage gets too close, too graphic, our moral certainty is shaken. We begin to wonder..

We fall silent.

Like it or not, Australia is complicit simply because of the ongoing presence of the Pine gap tracking station. Military intelligence guides the flow of weaponry. So we can’t be too critical. And risk sounding ‘un-Australian’

but the moral schism runs much deeper than that. For me it’s the sheer obscenity of sitting round debating with others, who’s right or wrong..

While the suffering of Palestinians lies far beyond anything any of us are ever likely to live through. Anxiously defending your moral reputation to other so called enlightened punters is nothing more that middle class self-indulgence.

Doubtless someone will read this and accuse me of something. I’m wrong, I’m misguided, I don’t know what I’m talking about but as I’ve said before, Face book, Instagram or on whatever other ‘platform’ you might like to air your grievance, it’s all a vanity project anyway.

So how do wars end? If you can call shooting fish in a barrel an actual war. I thought I knew the answer. But not this time. If you can defend catastrophic cruelty please step forward. Because in the face of Gaza, I am at a loss.

Meanwhile, everyone’s got a phone. Comment by all means but you will hear no more from me on the this particular ‘topic’ of chat.. Life’s too short but a warning: If the stream gets abusive I’ll kill it.

In the meantime I will continue to get my Al Jazeera hit in the mornings over a hot long black..
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