Moscow Nights

  • KathJuliane
    May 24, 2018 @ 10:20 pm

    God bless you, dear +BN.

    Glad to hear and see another one of your song parodies, and this one was just toe-tapping spirit-lifting fun along with it.

    Moscow Nights, wow, that takes me way back to about 9 or 10 years of age. My Mom was addicted to, jazz, swing, and rock n roll, and this was one of her favorite dance tunes that she taught me to dance to.

    Your cover has to be the original Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen.

    I’m tickled pink to be hearing it, and your parody is hilarious! “I eat Matzah balls when Norman Braman calls, I gave up on burritos long ago” — classic!

    Dear Lugu,

    Moscow Nights is originally a 1950s Soviet era love song, originally titled Podmoskovnie vechera.

    I’m in the process of writing up something about Moscow Nights and how it actually wound up subverting the Cold War — on both sides — traveling international avenues of “cultural diplomacy,” but more often spontaneously coming to life with folk singers, classical pianists, and Dixieland jazz bands.

    I am old enough to remember when the Cold War was at its most dangerous height, the Kennedy-Kruschev standoff, the Cuban Missile Crisis, atomic weapons testing and nuclear weapons build up.

    I’m old enough to remember President John F. Kennedy’s televised commencement address given at American University titled “A Strategy of Peace” in June 1963.

    In this powerful and now timeless speech, more important than ever, Kennedy not only outlined a plan to curb nuclear arms, but also “laid out a hopeful, yet realistic route for world peace at a time when the U.S. and Soviet Union faced the potential for an escalating nuclear arms race.”

    Kennedy knew war first hand, as did millions of US soldiers who served overseas, but America escaped the enormous ravages of most of the entire Eurasian land mass in WWII.

    The Russians knew war but didn’t escape the ravages that Kruschev was still trying to rebuild from. Putin was born and grew up in Leningrad just 7 years after VE Day in 1945, and the city had hardly started rebuilding.

    A nuclear war between the USSR and the USA would make WWII pale in comparison in terms of devastation and destruction, essentially ending civilized life as we know it.

    President John F. Kennedy’s “Peace Speech”
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fkKnfk4k40

    Transcript:
    http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=9266

    From Wikipedia_American University speech:

    Sorensen had been Kennedy’s aide since the 1953 Massachusetts Senatorial election, and eventually served as his primary campaign speechwriter and as Special Counsel during and after the 1960 Presidential election

    By 1963 he had written drafts for nearly every speech Kennedy delivered in office, including the inaugural address, the Cuban Missile Crisis speech, and the Ich bin ein Berliner speech. Common elements of the Kennedy-Sorensen speeches were alliteration, repetition and chiasmus as well as historical references and quotations

    Although Kennedy often interposed off-the-cuff ad-libs to his speeches, he did not deviate from the final draft of the address. Anca Gata described Ted Sorensen as “the chief architect of the speech in language, style, composition, and rhetoric. One of the most original issues in the speech was the reintroduction of the Russian people to the Americans as a great culture with important achievements in science and space, and as promoting economic and industrial growth on their own.”

    The content of the speech was unapologetically “dovish” in its pursuit of peace. Kennedy noted that almost uniquely among the “major world powers” the United States and Russia had never been at war with each other.

    He also acknowledged the massive human casualties that Russia suffered during World War II and declared that no nation had “ever suffered more than the Soviet Union in the Second World War,” a fact that had gone largely unheralded in the West due to the onset of the Cold War.

    Kennedy sought to draw similarities between the United States and the Soviet Union several times and called for a “reexamination” of American attitudes towards Russia. He warned that adopting a course towards nuclear confrontation would be “evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy—or of a collective death-wish for the world.”


    Aftermath

    Soviet response

    Kennedy’s speech was made available, in its entirety, in the Soviet press so that the people in the Soviet Union could read it without hindrance. Additionally, the speech could be heard in the Soviet Union without censorship because jamming measures against the western broadcast agencies such as Voice of America didn’t take place upon rebroadcast of Kennedy’s speech.

    Khrushchev was deeply moved and impressed by Kennedy’s speech, telling Undersecretary of State Averell Harriman that it was “the greatest speech by any American President since Roosevelt.”

    After 12 days of negotiations and less than two months after the president’s speech the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was completed.

    The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was signed by the governments of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom and the United States (represented by Dean Rusk), named the “Original Parties”, at Moscow on August 5, 1963. US ratification occurred by the U.S. Senate on September 24, 1963 by a vote of 80-19 and the treaty was signed into law by Kennedy on October 7, 1963. The treaty went into effect on October 10, 1963.

    Other reactions

    The speech was met with little response in the United States; after one week, only 896 letters were sent to the White House concerning its content (in contrast to over 28,000 related to a bill affecting the price of freight). The response from [neocon] Republicans in Congress was mostly dismissive in nature. Senator Barry Goldwater accused Kennedy of taking a “soft stance” on the Soviet Union. [unquote]
    —–

    At 11 years old after hearing Kennedy’s “Peace speech” I loved the Russians and I, too wanted world peace. At that time, having “pen pals” was a very common thing, kids would exchange handwritten letters. So, for the sake of world peace and being sick of the old Civil Defense atomic war drills, I figured it could start with striking up a Russian-American penpal friendship with a kid in the USSR.

    I sent postal letters off to Moscow and Leningrad addressed to “any 11 year old or more boy or girl who would like to be a pen pal with an American girl”. I never got a response, I’m sure my letters hit the dead letter file in the local post office.

    By way of a providential set of Cold War turns, Moscow Nights traveled the world, and took on many types of musical arrangements.

    And, in listening to this particular Kennedy speech once again, I realize how much our political elites have fallen.

    Now I know who Putin reminds me of in many ways: President Kennedy, who 55 years ago recognized and publicly acknowledged the great suffering of the Soviet Russian peoples during WWII. He hated the neocon Pax Americana and the military industrial complex.

    Why not? Putin’s my age. He would have been an 11 year old boy in Leningrad. Since the Soviet government let it be published and broadcast without censorship, perhaps he listened very carefully, and a little of Kennedy stuck in his heart.

    “What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.

    “I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.” — President John F. Kennedy

    The Russians heard Kennedy for themselves and believed. A few months later, the first sign of détente appeared when President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty on August 5, 1963.

    Putin has also matter-of-factly pointed this out to recent and current US administrations. He is treated now to the same disdain as Kennedy was treated by the Republican hawks in his day who pushed the Pax Americana — the Judeo-neocon American Century Empire.

    Some of us who remember the Cold War and Kennedy hear Putin, and believe. He doesn’t talk about peace among nations that much differently than Kennedy did.

    The Russians know war, and they fear it, so they are prepared for it. Americans do not know war, they don’t fear it, and we are not prepared for it on our own soil.

    Holy St. Basil, pray to God for us.

  • Source Article from http://www.realjewnews.com/?p=1294

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