Ping, Pong, Pang: we went to enjoy the opera but found it perpetuating racism

By Cat-Thao Nguyen

On reading the story below, I do feel sorry for Ms Nguyen. But Puccini's "Turandot" is one of the greatest works of opera so should be sacrosanct in a way. Its first performance took place at the "Teatro alla Scala" in Milan in 1926, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, after which it rapidly became a classic. Who has not wondered at the power of its great aria "Nessun dorma"?

We should not meddle with the transcendent and it seems that the Sydney performance was true to the original, as it should have been.

So I think Ms Nguyen should simply see the opera as the fantasy that it is, without ascribing personal reference to it. That would seem to be the only constructive way forward, difficult though it might be. After all, works by Wagner are now performed in Israel, for their artistic merit, not their historical relevance

Growing up in poverty in Bankstown as a Vietnamese refugee, I was always on the outside looking in at the Sydney Opera House. My mother always warned us the city had a different temperature. Crossing train lines was like crossing countries.

So when my Canadian-Chinese husband suggested we go to a performance at the Opera House earlier this month, I wore the heavy coat imposed by mum. After showing our vaccination documents and checking in we ascended the steps of the Joan Sutherland Theatre to see Opera Australia’s performance of Puccini’s Turandot.

Our previous experience of a Puccini opera was by accident while on holiday in Italy. Inside an ancient church, there were two unassuming singers without any costumes, stage or surtitles. And it was transcendent. But what we saw in Sydney shocked us.

In 2019, a comedian withdrew her show, Aisha the Aussie Geisha, from the Melbourne Festival. It had featured a white person dressing up as a geisha with face paint, drawing complaints about its use of “yellowface”. Yet Opera Australia apparently feels comfortable having white performers dress up in face paint and exaggerated Asian features to play Chinese characters such as Ping, Pong and Pang.

Turandot is set in ancient China, even though Puccini never went to the country. Unsurprisingly, the play, which centres around a barbaric Chinese princess, contains outdated orientalist stereotypes of Chinese people. As an Asian woman, I have had to battle exotic fetishism and binary depictions that oscillate between submissive servant and dragon lady – the exact binary I was now watching on stage.

As I sat in the theatre, the horrible caricatures kept coming like a tidal assault. Ping, Pong and Pang pranced around the stage with their Fu Manchu-style moustaches and fake long ponytails flicking across their costumes. I felt utterly sick. I clutched my husband and clamped my hand over my mouth. As the scenes unfolded, I felt a violent wilting of dignity for myself and my Chinese husband.

We decided to leave after the first act. Most of the audience that night was white but the only thing white for me was my hot rage. I quoted the Jewish teacher Elie Wiesel to my husband. Wiesel said: “It is illegal to shout ‘Fire’ in a crowded theatre. But if there is a fire, it is immoral to remain silent ... One must raise an alarm in such a moment, even though it will be perceived as the act of a madman, even though it makes people uncomfortable.” It seemed no one else was alarmed.

No one else saw the fire of cultural appropriation and the use of Chinese music, traditional dress and perpetuating historical Western depictions as demeaning. Instead, on the Opera House balcony people chuckled, talked about property and holidays. It was achingly normal.

https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/culture/opera/ping-pong-pang-we-went-to-enjoy-the-opera-but-found-it-perpetuating-racism-20220221-p59yai.html

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Jilted South Wales police officer, 24, made fake Crimestoppers calls accusing his innocent ex-girlfriend of 'drug dealing, storing a gun and murdering an Albanian gangster'

More Muslim garbage

A jilted police officer made fake calls to blame an innocent former girlfriend for a string of crimes - including murder and drug dealing, a court heard.

PC Abubakar Masum, 24, rang Crimestoppers to wrongly accuse old flame Mia Pitman, 23, of being linked to the criminal underworld.

A court heard Masum's calls led to armed police raiding her home looking for a Glock handgun - and questioning her over a planned murder.

Innocent Mia was arrested at her student job in a Tesco store in Swansea Marina while another 20 officers rifled through her home in the gun hunt.

Prosecutor William Hughes QC said Masum developed an 'obsession' with university student Mia after they met in a nightclub.

A jury was told Masum and Mia's brief relationship ended when she learned he had a girlfriend.

But he then allegedly began to make a series of 'false, untrue and malicious' claims against her and workmate Leon Croucher.

Mr Hughes said in one call Masum reported: 'Mia Pitman is storing is a handgun on behalf of Leon Croucher. He is a known Class A drug dealer.'

The anonymous call to Crimestoppers went on to say Mia and Mr Croucher 'planned to shoot' a man who allegedly owed them drug money.

Cardiff Crown Court heard Mia and Mr Croucher were arrested mid-shift by armed police while working at the Tesco store in Swansea Marina.

Another 20 armed officers raided her student home to look for a gun after the bogus anonymous tip-off.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10565823/Police-officer-24-fake-Crimestoppers-calls-accusing-ex-girlfriend-crimes-court-hears.html

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OH: Governor DeWine Signs CCV-Backed Bill Protecting Student Religious Expression in Athletics

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine signed into law the Center for Christian Virtue-backed Senate Bill 181 to protect the religious freedom of Ohio students competing in state-sponsored sporting events.

Sponsored by Senator Theresa Gavarone, the law was introduced after an Ohio student was disqualified from a track event because of her religious garment, which gave her no competitive advantage, or endangered her or other students.

“Students shouldn’t be forced to check their First Amendment religious freedom at the starting line” said Nilani Jawahar, CCV’s Legislative Liaison. “That means they shouldn’t be penalized for their hijab, kippah, or cross. Students have a right to free speech, especially where their expression does not result in any issues of safety, unfair advantage, lewdness, or disruption to the academic process and mission.”

“We’re grateful for Sen. Gavarone’s leadership in sponsoring this bill to protect religious freedom for all Ohio students, and for Governor Mike DeWine’s signature on this essential bill,” Jawahar said.

The law goes into effect in 90 days

Center for Christian Virtue: contact@ccv.org

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Australian police use sonic ‘torture weapons’ on vaccine protesters

It's long been admitted that the police do have and use LRADs and that they can be misused. So the time appears to have come when the police are misusing them. The shocking part is that the mainstream media seem to be largely ignoring it

SINISTER stories have emerged from the trucker convoy camp in Canberra. Nasty new devices seem now to be deployed against peaceful citizens. This is Australia in the 2020s.

Canberra is the insiders’ insider paradise. Woke on steroids does not begin to describe the place. A workers’ promised land. With fewer than half a million residents, it is run by a glorified local council. As the Australian Capital Territory’s Chief Minister, Andrew Barr, says in as many words, vaccinated to within an inch of its life. As I have noted elsewhere:

‘Australia’s two separate worlds were vividly on display on Saturday, 12 February. In Canberra, tens of thousands of protesters marched upon the national Parliament in the biggest display of controlled public anger at government since Vietnam. The numbers and the raw emotion involved make the pro-Gough rallies of 1975 look puny in comparison. People from all over the country rose up and marched on the capital. Across town, meanwhile, youngsters as young as five were being dressed up as superheroes as they were led off to be vaccinated against a minor illness that will not even touch most of them.’

Then came horrifying reports of the way the police had managed the crowd, the ‘weaponry’ they had deployed, of unexplained injuries at the convoy camp. Was something literally ‘cooking’ the protesters?

Your News reported: ‘Australian police have been deploying directed energy weapons (DEWs) against the peaceful Freedom Convoy protesters around the capital, according to reports.

‘Disturbing videos and photos circulating social media show Canberra protesters, including women and children, who appear to have been badly burned by directed microwave energy weapons, with blisters on their faces, arms, and torsos.

‘These particular DEWs reportedly used concentrated microwave radiation to inflict painful burns on the skin from far distances. ‘

The mainstream media has accepted that the Canberra cops were using sonic devices called long-range acoustic devices (LRADs) which the Australian Broadcasting Corporation tried to put a benign spin on. It said ‘sonic weapons’ were used by police in Canberra’s protests, but only to broadcast messages rather than do harm.

All ok, then.

Why the use of designer torture devices by the police? One hundred thousand and more protesters from all over Australia have presumably caused some serious political buttock-clenching. John Stapleton at A Sense of Place magazine called it ‘the day Australia changed’. Here we have the resistance to the resistance. Ottawa style. The concerted effort to portray protesters as liars as well as everything else of which they are regularly accused is the Covid State.

The use of harmful devices is utterly consistent with the tactics used by the State across Australia and in other Dominions to quell peaceful protests. And consistent with the overarching strategy of doing harm to citizens, and with the lies, spin, propaganda and misinformation.

The ACT’s Chief Minister doesn’t like protesters much. On Wednesday morning, Andrew Barr told ABC’s Radio National the protesters’ behaviour had been ‘over the top’ and they were ‘effectively stalking Canberrans, harassing business owners and residents, and aggressively flouting the law’.

Mr Barr said the protesters ‘couldn’t have a less receptive audience anywhere in the world’ with Canberra – if not the most vaccinated city on the planet – among the most vaccinated cities.

‘It is an eccentric and eclectic bunch, there’s no denying that,’ he said. ‘And it appears to have been infiltrated, or at least part of the protest movement has, by very extremist views.’

But some of its Canberra’s denizens are stirring. Craig Kelly MP has called for an inquiry into the claims about sonic weapons. Senator Malcolm Roberts of One Nation has asked questions in parliament. As has Liberal Party hero Alex Antic, detained by police at Adelaide Airport and placed forcibly in quarantine last year for entering his own state whileunvaccinated, when it was the norm that home isolation was all that was required.

A far more trustworthy news source than the mainstream media, the Canadian Rebel News reported both the sonic devices whose use in Canberra was admitted by police, but framed to appear innocent, and the deployment of other devices that caused a range of documented injuries and reactions.

The site said: ‘What started out at the beginning of the week as the “stuff of conspiracy theories” was eventually confirmed by police. Australian Capital Territory Policing admitted they did use a Long-Range Acoustic Device (also known as a LRAD) during the Canberra Convoy Freedom rallies outside Parliament House.

‘Reports are still coming in on various injuries at the protest – most relating to what looks like sunburn and heat stroke. There are also clear allergic reactions from what some speculate might be contact with chemicals.’

The LRAD is technically a sonic crowd control weapon. It has two settings and can project extremely loud sounds over long distances to cripple a crowd. This ‘alert setting’ on the device is particularly dangerous and has been known to cause permanent hearing damage, dizziness, disorientation and brain damage.

Ironically, as Rebel News points out, when the weapons arrived down under in 2016, the ABC was ‘concerned’: ‘They can break up protests with loud, piercing sound, but Long-Range Acoustic Devices can also cause permanent hearing damage. Australian law enforcement agencies are now investing in the technology, but sound and law experts say their potential use is extremely concerning.’

At the time Melbourne University expert James Parker told the ABC, ‘The secrecy of the state around the tools, the weapons that it has and is capable of using on its population is something to be really, really concerned about. It expands the nature of police/state/military authority in a certain kind of way. It makes sound itself part of the arsenal that police and military and state institutions use.’

Since then, the ABC has discovered deplorables and anti-vaxxers, those same folks routinely referred to by politicians, police commanders and journalists as ‘domestic terrorists’.

Whatever the murky tactics used by police, the message to we-the-people from the Canberra community was clear. One local rammed a protester’s vehicle with her car, then let loose with expletive-laden vitriol.

The Canberra Times editorial made its position clear, after a mere few days of extremely polite, heartfelt protest by the deplorables. ’You have made your point. Now go home’. The same Canberra Times accused Craig Kelly of ‘bringing a conspiracy [theory] into the House of Representatives’.

Taxpayer-funded Canberra seems not to have noticed that Australia has fallen apart, its citizens’ rights crushed. For two years. Lives have been ruined. The parking of the unvaccinated in the bad corner and the use of language to diminish their ‘grievances’ is a classic tactic of the Covid class. According to the police boss, the crowd had a ‘poor attitude’. Thought crime. Only three arrests, though.

As we know, names will never hurt us. It is the rather sophisticated and sinister sticks and stones of the politicised police that are doing the harm. Like the truckers in Ottawa, we have been used as punching bags. The legacy ‘journalists’ are useful idiots, with the Covid Kool-Aid dribbling down their chins.

https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/australian-police-use-sonic-torture-weapons-on-vaccine-protesters/

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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