The Day Iraq's Music Died

Dean Kuipers, LA CityBeat

Iraq was a secular, middle-class, educated society that is now, thanks to decades of American foreign policy and despotism and sanctions, etc., come close to becoming a failed terrorist state (...) A terrible combination of criminal anarchy and de facto theocracy has killed that old secular culture which existed in pre-invasion Iraq, where you had theater and the Baghdad Philharmonic. All my musician friends have left. The orchestra's been getting death threats (...) All the educated people are leaving. There's a campaign, now, of assassination against doctors and professors. It's like the Khmer Rouge.

continua / continued