Cat Stevens, Kurt Waldheim; what's in a name...?

September 21^st – Two seemingly unconnected events today but both joined with a single, secretive thread.

Teaser and the Firecat? Anybody? OK, how about, Tea for the Tillerman?

Yup thought you’d get it from that. When he first made a name with I Love My Dog and Matthew & Son back in 1966, I thought Cat Stevens’ songs well-crafted and quirky but not of sufficient levity to attract me. It was only when I heard his two albums (above) that I latched on to what he was offering, and I still play those two albums to this day on a regular basis. The central tenet of his writings, his poetry, his interviews and his songsmithing encircle the human condition, the need for peace and tolerance and a search for spiritual contact to explain and help him fathom the mysteries of life; a very now thing back in the 70’s.

OK, I don’t want to get scratchy about this, it’s just my take on things and I’m not knocking the outcome either; I’ve written before, whatever you need hold on to to get you through it, as long as it doesn’t hurt others, then that’s what you hold on to. What I do note about so many religious conversions however is they tend to happen to folk in a time of personal crisis, when the heart is heavy and the soul weighed down by trauma or event, when the defences are down. Now that, in so many cases, might be the only way in for God, the way into a heart and mind that’s usually taken up with stuff and so has no room for contemplation and regard for things spiritual. It’s often a turnaround that mostly happens as people get older and they begin to understand the meaning of mortality…bugger me, this is cheerful stuff, innit? Won’t labour the point but you get my drift. Well it would seem that in 1976, Mr. Stevens had a brush with death in the sea off’f Marrakech and pledged himself to God, should he be spared. He was, and this near-miss linked into his search for spiritual meaning. It only took the purchase of the Qur’an (given as a present, it seems) to complete this search (which had brushed with Buddhism, Zen, I Ching and astrology amongst other enquiries) and to convince him, in 1977, to convert to Islam. Taking the name Yusuf Islam, Cat Stevens that was virtually retired overnight from the world of pop.

Now we know that he’s done recordings since and all that, but that’s not what interested me about the story so far. No, what it was, was the idiocy and ignorance that permeates our so-called secret services; those people who are supposed to be safeguarding us and who are supposed to have all the information on anyone of a suspect nature; why, they got everything SO right when Bliar and Bushit took us to war against an enemy who could launch chemical weapons at us in 45 minutes…so, what’s to worry about? Well, lots actually. We know that, as a population, we’ve sleep-walked our way through massive changes to our rights for privacy and fair treatment (the Snowden/Greenwald/Miranda events being the most recent reminder of what can be done to us with no redress to the victim and no fear of reprisal to the perpetrator) in the wake of the appalling 9/11 and 7/7 tragedies. All these changes have been at the behest of our political and security masters who’ve told us it’s all necessary so as to allow them the ability to protect and safeguard our lives and liberty. Their enactment of such far-reaching controls has allowed them access into our private lives unprecedented in modern times, certainly outside of World War conditions. So when, in 2004, Yusuf Islam aka Cat Stevens (a pop singer) with a public record such as his, was stopped from entering the US because he was on a terrorism watch list…well, you have to wonder, don’t you; you have to wonder whether their paranoia was brought to head because of a name, Yusuf Islam?

The Nazi era in Germany was an iniquitous time and, if you were of Jewish origin, even more so. The effect of having to live with yourself after either committing or allowing to be committed in your name such diabolic acts can only be imagined with difficulty, but many did and, as we all know, many of those at the upper-echelon of the inhumanities committed escaped capture and conviction; to evade capture and happily live out their lives in comfort and blessings in some warm, foreign country. Now, you’d have thought the records of the power-brokers, post WW2 would have held all the detail on those who were known to have assisted or collaborated in the atrocities, certainly one ruled by such a paranoid leadership as the Third Reich. So it follows, doesn’t it that those who came after must also have had access to these records? I mean, you don’t destroy documents that could bail you out of a crisis, do you? But, OK, so they did, they destroyed everything, not a scrap of paper left to identify anyone of anything. Well surely those who continued in power post 1945 knew the guilty individuals personally, I mean, you can’t wipe that away, so there should be no excuse for anyone to dodge the justice they are due…is there?

Humanitarian crisis require swift and strong action by statesmen in order to avoid further suffering; such a one was the plight of the Vietnamese Boat People in the late 1970’s. Fleeing a war of proportions just as brutal as the ethnic cleansing of Nazi Germany, their flight and plight was likened to the boat, The St. Louis, which left Germany in 1939 just before the outbreak of war with 900 Jews on board and sailed from country to country only to be refused permission to dock at each harbour. Film and photos of these Vietnamese refugees show boats crammed (and I mean crammed) with people; boats ill-designed and ill-equipped to deal with such passenger numbers and such voyages; 200 to 400,000 didn’t make it at all. Several countries took on large numbers of these refugees, amongst them Germany who took in 40,000 souls. On this day in 1979 a request by the then UN Secretary General, Kurt Waldheim, for The Beatles to reunite and perform a benefit concert to help fund the humanitarian work was made. It did nothing but make headlines; shame as it showed the former Austrian President as a man of compassion with an empathy towards those in peril by persecution with his finger on the pulse of modern solutions to modern problems.

Where his magnanimity fell down, however, was that he was a member of the SS stationed in Yugoslavia in ‘43 ‘to ‘45’ signing papers to allow the brutalities and atrocities perpetrated against that country’s population to continue and, as he later admitted, knew they were being done. Now, do you think the secret services (and we’re talking about the crème de la crème of secret services here, the STASI, the CIA, MI5/6, the KGB) and the ruling classes of all nations who continued to work with him, who had access to and controlled the information those secret services held, the power-brokers, money-men and work colleagues who supported, voted for and worked alongside Kurt Waldheim, do you think that all of them had absolutely no idea about this? That he was so under the radar he could rise into the ranks of the rulers without anyone having even the remotest idea of his past involvement.

Mr. Stevens. Mr Waldheim. Funny how it works, innit? But then, you only have to read the transcripts of the Yalta Conference to know the meaning of the politics of pragmatism.

I leave the last words to Mr. Waldheim which should serve as salient reminder of how the minds of many of our rulers work.

I really don't understand why they make such a fuss about my signing for the correctness of the documents. And if I signed for the correctness, it does not mean I committed a crime.

Yeah, right, Kurt…