The government of North Korea recently hosted a concert by the NY Philharmonic Orchestra. Eric Clapton has been invited to perform. This seemingly trivial bit of news, released as a PR act by North Korea, and accepted because of its curiosity value, is actually symptomatic of a very different kind of phenomenon.

To begin to understand it, we must look at the countries that surround them.

Few people throughout history have embodied the phenomenon of the conquered imitating their conquerors with the passion of the Japanese (the Ashkenazi Jews being at the top of the list).

I know a Black man, a keyboardist, who was on tour in Japan. He told me he saw a P-Funk tribute band. They played, as you can imagine, the music of George Clinton and his band with mechanical precision. But; they also wore afro wigs and blackface. My friend was disgusted. A few days later, he met them and told them that he was offended. They were shocked; they honestly didn't understand what they'd done to offend him and his people. It was their honest intention to honor Black music. My friend took great pains to explain the reality to them. The following performance, the music was the same; but the wigs and blackface were gone.

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They don't know themselves. And by implication and default, they don't know others. It is a spiritual crisis that is part of the whole spiritual spiritual crisis the whole world suffers from - everyone is everyone else and nobody is himself.

Once they relearn who they are, then they will know who others are. Only then will they bring a valuable contribution to the table.

Which brings me to the question of the Koreans.

I used to have a job teaching guitar at the private music school in the Bronx, I saw Korean culture up close. The school was run by a Korean husband and wife, who also ran a small opera company. Now, I said I saw Korean culture, but that is really a poor choice of words. I say this because, apart from the language, work ethic, and reverence for elders, I saw no evidence of a Korean culture.

When I was hired, they wanted me to teach classical guitar exclusively. I wiggled my way out of that. I have my own ideas about music and I won't be dictated to. But while I was there, I never once heard a single note of Korean music, never saw any Korean art, encountered no Korean poetry, and found no evidence of Korean cinema. All I ever saw were Koreans imitating "western art" with mechanical precision.

North Korea is still pretending to be communist. This is a delusion because 1. communism does not work economically, and is an antithesis to capitalism only in the question of distribution of resources, and 2. their pitiful economy can only be temporarily saved by imitating capitalism, like the Chinese did (and consider: when capitalism started to damage China, they reacted by instituting a communist tyranny. Their back was against the wall, forced there by the British; who were also responsible for helping the Saudis overthrow Arabia, the banking institutions to leech wealth from the Ottomans, and the Zionists invade and occupy Palestine. Yet in the end, they succeeded only in ruining 4000 years of culture). Apart from this, they are no different from South Korea.

But the fact remains that their culture no longer exists. They have proven themselves to be incapable of withstanding exposure to the art and music of "the West" (which itself has no culture, and Western civilization came to an end in 1947). Their own national and cultural identity has been annihilated. They are a defeated people, and no longer exist in any meaningful sense. Their culture is almost completely extinct. The fact that the North Korean government is hosting these purveyors of the now extinct culture of European classical music, who their own political ideology holds as an enemy, is no greater evidence of this

I gave a khutba not long ago where I said, and demonstrated, that there are only two religions in the world today: Islam and capitalism. Leaving aside your obvious disagreements with the former, I ask you to consider the later. A religion is nothing more than a way of life based upon a belief system; and produces its own society its own culture, its own morality, and its own set of laws. In this sense, capitalism answers to that very definition. It has manifested all these traits. Yet it is the antithesis of all these because it can only absorb and imitate, consume and eliminate, reproduce and compete. It cannot produce a complete holistic system. And even now we see evidence of it being in an advanced state of decay; at the moment of its greatest triumph.

The tragedy of Korea was an early casualty of the replacement of Western Civilization with a capitalist / corporate world order. But it isn't the last. This is happening everywhere; and is all due to the assimilation of autonomous and sovereign cultures into the single identity of capitalist / corporate world order, and its economic pogrom. The art and music produced by this anti-culture is determined by one set of values; its ability to sell to a mass market. Content, depth of meaning, and an authentic voice of the spirit is seen as an obstacle that has no place in the dialectic and demographic (and the "new age" tripe cannot be seen as an exception to this; because almost all of it can only tranquilize, not enlighten).

And the only thing with the power to withstand this anti-culture and return the fine arts to its rightful manifestation of the nobility of humanity and its relation with the Supreme Being is the proper application of the principles of Islam. All else is doomed to failure.