slackbastard

Anti-fascist Activist Killed in Moscow

2008-10-15T08:40:00.001+11:00

Anti-fascist Activist Killed in Moscow
October 15th, 2008

A young activist involved with a Russian anti-fascist movement has been killed in the country’s capital, the Interfax news agency reports (RUS). 26-year-old Fedor Filatov died in an area hospital on October 10th from multiple knife wounds sustained early that morning.

A representative of the Antifa movement said Filatov, known in the movement as “Nok,” was jumped by a group of assailants near him home as he went to work. “According to our information, four to eight people armed with knives were waiting for him in his courtyard,” he said.

The source said that a Russian neo-nazi group had already claimed responsibility for the murder on an internet forum as recently as October 12th. While a murder investigation has been launched, law enforcement officials had yet to verify that information.

The Antifa source said the movement considers Filatov’s murder a “planned action” by extremists. “There is not a shadow of a doubt that he died for his beliefs,” the group’s members wrote in a statement.

Russia has seen a growing presense of neo-nazi and extreme nationalist organizations in recent years, and attacks on immigrants and non-ethnically Russian people have become more common. Immigrant community leaders have meanwhile accused authorities and law enforcement of being too lenient in pursuing ethnically motivated crimes.

Groups like Antifa have stepped in to try to counter the growing influence of neo-nazis and denounce their racist and violent activities. Filatov himself helped to found the Moscow Trojan Skinheads, a group described as “a community of anti-political, anti-racist skinheads from Moscow and the Moscow Oblast.”

Filatov was not the first anti-fascist activist to be attacked and killed in recent years.

In November 2005, vocal activist and musician Timur Kacharava, 20, died from knife wounds in St. Petersburg. In April 2006, 19-year-old Alexander Ryukhin was killed by six neo-nazis outside a punk-rock concert. In January 2007, Ivan Yelin was stabbed 20 times by unidentified attackers on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. In March of this year, 16-year-old Alexei Krylov died in Moscow after a group of 15 neo-nazis armed with knives attacked 7 young people near the Kitai Gorod metro station.

Each young man had taken part in the Russian anti-fascist movement.

Back to the Future

2008-04-30T18:40:00.002+10:00

Three weeks later, I'm back at home base: anarchobase.

Cheers and e-special thanks to Ana, Andrew, Anonymous, (the wonderful) Asher, Danny, Denise, Dreck, Hoyden, Insultadarity, Juan Castro, THR and Weezil for their props. (And anyone else I've forgotten to thank -- my apologies.)

War & terror: Hurrah! for the state

2008-04-29T16:42:00.007+10:00

1) Feeding the Death Machine: Joe Montgomery

"The Things That Carried Him," by Chris Jones, is the true story of Sgt. Joe Montgomery's death in Iraq and his nine-day journey home to Scottsburg, Ind., to be buried. It's a very strange article -- essentially the story of the transportation of a corpse -- and Jones makes it even stranger by telling it in reverse chronology, beginning with the funeral and moving slowly backward to the moment when Montgomery was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.

But somehow it works, and in its painstaking accumulation of detail, it becomes a deeply moving story about how ordinary Americans live and die and attempt to help one another salvage a measure of meaning and dignity in terrible circumstances.

Growing up, Joe Montgomery was a skateboarder and a Nine Inch Nails fan with a goofy haircut and an anarchist symbol tattooed on his arm. He married his high school sweetheart and got a job in a steel forge. But no matter how hard he worked, he couldn't support his wife and three kids, so in 2005, he joined the Army.

On May 22, 2007, Montgomery and his platoon were marching down a dirt road, heading toward a farm where insurgents were rumored to hide weapons, when a buried bomb exploded. Montgomery became the 3,431st American serviceman killed in Iraq.

His body was placed in an aluminum "transfer case," packed in ice, and flown to Kuwait, then to Germany, then to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the U.S. military maintains the world's largest mortuary. Montgomery arrived in a shipment of 14 corpses -- 10 soldiers, two Marines and a body too mangled to be identified...

The Australian armed forces in Afghanistan have also just lost a soldier. Jason Marks, 27, was killed and four others wounded during a firefight with the Taliban in Afghanistan (Matthew Burgess, Aussie soldier killed in Afghanistan, The Age, April 28, 2008). According to KRudd, there's more on the way: "Mr Rudd today paid tribute to the dead soldier, but warned further casualties were likely. “I think the nation needs to steel itself for higher casualties than we have had so far,” he said" (Samantha Maiden, More Afghanistan deaths likely: Rudd, The Australian, April 28, 2008).

Iraq : Documented civilian deaths from violence : 83,221 – 90,782

2) la Città Eterna goes Fascist (again)

Berlusconi candidate wins Rome election
The Associated Press
April 28, 2008

ROME: Residents of Rome have elected the Italian capital's first right-wing mayor since World War II and given Silvio Berlusconi's conservatives another major victory, final returns from local elections showed Monday.

Gianni Alemanno took 53.6 percent of the vote versus 46.3 percent for Francesco Rutelli, a former two-time center-left Rome mayor, according to the municipality...

Alemanno is a leader of the National Alliance, an Italian 'post-fascist' party (the NA formed in 1993). Formerly, he was a member of the fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), which included elements of Mussolini's Fascist Party, and was established in 1946 by the remnants of the Salò Republic, immortalised by Pier Paolo Pasolini in Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma ('Salò or the 120 Days of Sodom'). The film, incidentally, is banned (that is, refused classification) in Australia, and has been since 1998.

Alemanno is also married to Isabella Rauti, the daughter of far-right activist Pino Rauti (a former member of the MSI and also the Ordine Nuovo/New Order), and wears a Celtic cross, which in Australia, Italy and elsewhere is recognised as a symbol of the far right, though he of course insists it is a 'religious symbol'.

3) "Who did you say the good guys were again?"

During the 1960s and 1970s, members of the New Order routinely attacked anarchist and left-wing activists. On May 28, 1974, members of the Order were suspected of involvement in the bombing of an anti-fascist demonstration in the Piazza della Loggia, killing eight. Other outrages committed by Italian fascists and the Italian and US states during this period included the Piazza Fontana bombing in December 1969 (which killed 16 and injured 90), the bombing of Italicus train on August 4, 1974 (killing 12 and wounding 105 others), and the Bologna railway bombing of August 2, 1980, which killed 85 and injured 200.

At the time, the Italian authorities blamed the Piazza Fontana bombing on anarchists (much like the Melbourne May Day Committee blamed the 9/11 attacks on "anarchists"). Giuseppe "Pino" Pinelli, a railway worker, was one of those accused. Arrested by police, he was thrown by them from the fourth floor window of a police station on December 15, 1969, and died. His story was later immortalised by Italian playwright Dario Fo in The Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Naturally, no police were ever punished for his murder, although one interrogator, Commissioner Luigi Calabresi, was later shot dead outside his home in 1972. In 1988, Leonardo Marino, an ex-Fiat worker, former armed robber and member of Lotta Continua, gave himself up to the police, claiming responsibility for the murder of Calabresi. He later implicated others, including some of the leaders of the group, Adriano Sofri, Ovidio Bompressi and Giorgio Piotresetafani: see Carlo Ginzburg, The Judge and the Historian, Verso, 1999.

YouTube (among other sites) also has a passable 1992 BBC documentary on the subject of Operation Gladio, a NATO-sponsored project (officially) begun in 1948 and (officially) ended in 1990. The project, managed largely by US and UK authorities, involved the creation of parallel state structures, and utilised members of the European far right (Nazis, Fascists and their epigones) to conduct terrorist campaigns against the left. The monkey business was justified by reference to the threat of 'Soviet' invasion. Speaking of monkeys, Three Monkeys contains a brief history of the Operation: N.A.T.O. Gladio, and the strategy of tension, October 2005. (See also The Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (PHP), which "provides new scholarly perspectives on contemporary international history by collecting, publishing, and interpreting formerly secret governmental documents".)

The term 'strategy of tension' refers to the ability of such networks as those derived from Operation Gladio to create or to sustain political crises. In this context the (far) right and the forces of 'law and order' are to offer themselves to a frightened population as constituting a viable alternative to violent social disorder (thus shoring up entrenched power and privilege). Gianfranco Sanguinetti's chapter 'On Terrorism and the State' (1975) provides an invaluable analysis of the strategy in the context of recent Italian politics (the English translation is by notbored).

"It wasn't just about killing Americans, and killing pigs, at least not at first. It was about attacking the illegitimate state that these pawns served. It was about scraping the bucolic soil and exposing the fascist, Nazi-tainted bedrock that the modern West German state was propped upon. It was about war on the forces of reaction. It was about Revolution."

From the introductory chapter to The Gun Speaks: The Baader-Meinhof Gang at the Dawn of Terror, Richard Huffman

The Gilded Age

2008-04-28T18:29:00.005+10:00

Steve Fraser's essay on The Gilded Ages of the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries ('The Two Gilded Ages', TomDispatch.com, April 22, 2008) is everywhere, just like power and um... er... what was that other thing? Oh yeah: resistance. In fact, the apparent absence of 'resistance' in the US to the depredations of contemporary capitalism is one of the marked contrasts between the two Gilded Ages that Fraser describes, the most recent of which he dates from Ronald Reagan's ascendancy to the US throne:

Reagan's America was gilded by design. In 1981, when the New Rich and the New Right paraded in their sumptuous threads in Washington to celebrate at the new president's inaugural ball, it was called a "bacchanalia of the haves." Diana Vreeland [1903--1989], style guru (as well as Nancy Reagan confidante), was stylishly blunt: "Everything is power and money and how to use them both… We mustn't be afraid of snobbism and luxury."

Er, right.

On the one hand, fear of "snobbism and luxury" is not something that 'style gurus' are exactly famous for possessing, especially those, such as Vreeland, born into wealth. As for the have-nots, Bless'ed are the meek, and a Tatum Frill Dress is available for only $159.95 (RRP).

On the other hand, in 1981, while Ronald, Nancy, Diana and other members of US elites were busy being rich, powerful and stylish, US-sponsored death squads in El Salvador were busy committing rape, torture and murder. For example, the Atlacatl Battalion:

...an elite unit created, trained and equipped by the United States. It was formed in March 1981, when fifteen specialists in counterinsurgency were sent to El Salvador from the US Army School of Special Forces. From the start, the Battalion was engaged in mass murder. A US trainer described its soldiers as "particularly ferocious... We've always had a hard time getting [them] to take prisoners instead of ears."

In December 1981, the Battalion took part in an operation in which over a thousand civilians were killed in an orgy of murder, rape and burning. Later it was involved in the bombing of villages and murder of hundreds of civilians by shooting, drowning and other methods. The vast majority of victims were women, children and the elderly.

The Atlacatl Battalion was being trained by US Special Forces shortly before murdering the Jesuits [in November 1989]. This has been a pattern throughout the Battalion's existence -- some of its worst massacres have occurred when it was fresh from US training.

In the "fledgling democracy" that was El Salvador, teenagers as young as 13 were scooped up in sweeps of slums and refugee camps and forced to become soldiers. They were indoctrinated with rituals adopted from the Nazi SS, including brutalization and rape, to prepare them for killings that often have sexual and satanic overtones.

The nature of Salvadoran army training was described by a deserter who received political asylum in Texas in 1990, despite the State Department's request that he be sent back to El Salvador. (His name was withheld by the court to protect him from Salvadoran death squads.)

According to this deserter, draftees were made to kill dogs and vultures by biting their throats and twisting off their heads, and had to watch as soldiers tortured and killed suspected dissidents -- tearing out their fingernails, cutting off their heads, chopping their bodies to pieces and playing with the dismembered arms for fun.

In another case, an admitted member of a Salvadoran death squad associated with the Atlacatl Battalion, César Vielman Joya Martínez, detailed the involvement of US advisers and the Salvadoran government in death-squad activity. The Bush [Snr.] administration has made every effort to silence him and ship him back to probable death in El Salvador, despite the pleas of human rights organizations and requests from Congress that his testimony be heard. (The treatment of the main witness to the assassination of the Jesuits was similar.)

[On the Salvadoran government's attempts to extradite Martínez, see 'News From Americas Watch', August 14, 1991, available for download as a PDF.]

The results of Salvadoran military training are graphically described in the Jesuit journal America by Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador. He tells of a peasant woman who returned home one day to find her three children, her mother and her sister sitting around a table, each with its own decapitated head placed carefully on the table in front of the body, the hands arranged on top "as if each body was stroking its own head."

The assassins, from the Salvadoran National Guard, had found it hard to keep the head of an 18-month-old baby in place, so they nailed the hands onto it. A large plastic bowl filled with blood was tastefully displayed in the center of the table.

According to Rev. Santiago, macabre scenes of this kind aren't uncommon.

"People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador -- they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch."

Rev. Santiago goes on to point out that violence of this sort greatly increased when the Church began forming peasant associations and self-help groups in an attempt to organize the poor.

By and large, our approach in El Salvador has been successful. The popular organizations have been decimated, just as Archbishop Romero [1917--1980] predicted. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered and more than a million have become refugees. This is one of the most sordid episodes in US history -- and it's got a lot of competition.

When Reagan finally died a long overdue death in June 2004, John HoWARd described him as the greatest post-WWII US President; Malcolm Fraser commented that "He gave America back her pride after the end of the Vietnam War"; Bob Hawke, on a visit to Reagan in 1988, prattled on at length about the achievements of this (other) Great Man of History:

The fact that today, as I said to the Congress, we have more than at any other stage in the postwar period reason to look with optimism to a future where the world can live more constructively at peace is in very large measure, as I told the President, due to his ideas, to his persistence, to his strength, to his determination to shape the agenda and the context of the discussions between the two superpowers. He has ensured properly that when he has come to speak, he has spoken both from a position of strength and from a position where he knows that he has consulted and has the support of his allies and friends. He has insisted that in those discussions that the vital question of human rights shall be a central part of the agenda. And the results have shown not merely in the negotiation for the first of an agreement which has eliminated a particular class of nuclear weapons but also in the area of human rights, the significant advances that have been made in the attitudes and practices of the Soviet Union, that his determination in the shaping of the agenda has been right and that it has borne fruit. And I repeat that we are this day able to look with a greater degree of confidence to a world in which the resources of mankind may be able, with a greater degree of confidence, to be channeled in the constructive uses is significantly a result, as I told you, of the time of your presidency. And we are indebted to you for that...

(On Hawke's legacy, see Peter Fairbrother, Stuart Svensen and Julian Teicher, 'The ascendancy of neo-liberalism in Australia', Capital & Class, Autumn 1997.) The neoliberal policies ushered in by the Hawke-Keating regime (1983--1996) did much to lay the groundwork for HoWARd's (1996--2007), which in some ways was merely the icing on the corporate cake. As for the United States and its initial Gilded Age, Fraser writes:

Legions of small businessmen, trade unionists, urban consumers, and local politicians raged against monopoly and "the trusts." Armed workers' militias paraded in the streets of many American cities. Business and political elites built massive urban fortresses, public armories equipped with Gatling guns (the machine guns of their day), preparing to crush the insurrections they saw headed their way.

Even today the names of Haymarket (the square in Chicago where, in 1886, a bombing at a rally of rebellious workers led to the legal lynching of anarchist leaders at the most infamous trial of the nineteenth century), Homestead (where, in 1892, the Monongahela River ran red with the blood of Pinkerton thugs sent by Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick to crush the strike of their steelmaking employees), and Pullman (the company town in Illinois where, in 1894, President Grover Cleveland ordered Federal troops to put down the strike of the American Railway Union against the Pullman Palace Car Company) evoke memories of a whole society living on the edge...

Everyone was seeking a way out, something wholly new to replace the rancor and incipient violence of Gilded Age capitalism. The Knights of Labor, the Populist Party, the anti-trust movement, the cooperative movements of town and country, the nation-wide Eight-Hour Day uprisings of 1886 which culminated in the infamy of the Haymarket hangings, all expressed a deep yearning to abolish the prevailing industrial order.

Such groups weren't just angry; they weren't merely resentful -- although they were that, too. They were disturbed enough, naïve enough, desperate enough, inventive enough, desiring enough, deluded enough -- some still drawing cultural nourishment from the fading homesteads and workshops of pre-industrial America -- to believe that out of all this could come a new way of life, a cooperative commonwealth. No one really knew what exactly that might be. Still, the great expectation of a future no longer subservient to the calculus of the marketplace and the capitalist workshop lent the first Gilded Age its special fission, its high (tragic) drama.

Fast-forward to our second Gilded Age and the stage seems bare indeed. No great fears, no great expectations, no looming social apocalypses, no utopias or dystopias -- just a kind of flat-line sense of the end of history. Where are all the roiling insurgencies, the break-away political parties, the waves of strikes and boycotts, the infectious communal upheavals, the chronic sense of enough is enough? Where are the earnest efforts to invoke a new order which, no matter how sketchy and full of unanswered questions, now seem as minutely detailed as the blueprints for a Boeing 747 compared to "yes we can"?

What's left of mainstream populism exists on life-support in some attic of the Democratic Party. Even the language of our second Gilded Age is hollowed out. In a society saturated in Christian sanctimony, would anyone today describe "mankind crucified on a cross of gold" as William Jennings Bryan once did, or let loose against "Mammon worship," condemn aristocratic "parasites," or excommunicate "vampire speculators" and the "devilfish" of Wall Street? If nineteenth century evangelical preachers once pronounced anathema on capitalist greed, twenty-first century televangelists deify it. Tempers have cooled, leaving God, like many Americans, with only part-time employment.

The reference to the Haymarket martyrs -- the anarchist labour 'agitators' George Engel, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg, Albert Parsons and August Spies -- is apt given that May Day (May 1) is only a few days away. In Australia, as in the United States, May Day was once celebrated by workers; today, May Day is largely ignored -- especially by the labour movement -- while in the United States it's been re-christened as 'Loyalty Day', in an explicit attempt to quash the memories of the Gilded Age's dead rebels. In 2007, George II declared "All citizens can express their loyalty to the United States by flying the flag, participating in our democracy, and learning more about our country's grand story of courage and simple dream of dignity."

Well, with rather obvious exceptions.

In Los Angeles, following last year's debacle/police riot, the 'LAPD prepares for May Day protest': "As some in the mock crowd threw bottles and acted the part of agitators, officers assigned to undercover "extraction units" quickly and quietly isolated the rabble-rousers and hauled them away" (Joel Rubin and Anna Gorman, Los Angeles Times, April 27, 2008).

In boring old Melbourne, this year as in previous years, the 'May Day Committee' have organised a funeral procession for the labour movement, to take place on Sunday, May 4 (noon, Lygon Street, outside Trades Hall). On a positive note, the Committee is no longer comparing anarchists to al-Qaeda, and has even begun to acknowledge the fact that the Haymarket Martyrs were anarchists. (The November 2001 meeting of the Committee passed a resolution, reproduced in its December newsletter, condemning the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as "anarchist or individualist"!) Next thing you know, they'll be acknowledging the formation of the Melbourne Anarchist Club on May 1, 1886: the first formal anarchist organisation to be formed in Australia.

See also : The Incomplete, True, Authentic and Wonderful History of MAY DAY (Midnight Notes, May Day, 1986), from which the following rather jaunty little poem is taken, penned by a former Buick auto-maker from Detroit, one "Mr. Toad":

The eight hour day is not enough;
We are thinking of more and better stuff.
So here is our prayer and here is our plan,
We want what we want and we'll take what we can.

Down with wars both small and large,
Except for the ones where we're in charge:
Those are the wars of class against class,
Where we get a chance to kick some ass.

For air to breathe and water to drink,
And no more poison from the kitchen sink.
For land that's green and life that's saved
And less and less of the earth that's paved.

No more women who are less than free,
Or men who cannot learn to see
Their power steals their humanity
And makes us all less than we can be.

For teachers who learn and students who teach
And schools that are kept beyond the reach
Of provosts and deans and chancellors and such
And Xerox and Kodak and Shell, Royal Dutch.

An end to shops that are dark and dingy,
An end to Bosses whether good or stingy,
An end to work that produces junk,
An end to junk that produces work,
And an end to all in charge - the jerks.

For all who dance and sing, loud cheers,
To the prophets of doom we send some jeers,
To our friends and lovers we give free beers,
And to all who are here, a day without fears.

So, on this first of May we all should say
That we will either make it or break it.
Or, to put this thought another way,
Let's take it easy, but let's take it.

Carrying the torch

2008-04-28T04:00:00.005+10:00

Above : "Members of the 'New Right' pose as a ‘black bloc’ and stand in the same spot for an hour or two so that they can relate the story of this adventure at parties they will never be invited to." Source : CrowdedWorld

============

The beating heart of the nation, Canberra, came alive recently, with spirited Chinese and Tibetan protest. Alongside of the Tibetans were their comrades, a group of perhaps a dozen or so members of the 'New Right', once again bravely facing down the Communist hordes. In Italy, the far right has also been protesting:

The demonstrators who’ve been disrupting the progress of the Olympic torch around the world have found an unwelcome ally in the Italian far right. Last month, Forza Nuova cashed in on the popularity of the ‘flame of shame’ protests to organise a rally of their own outside the Chinese embassy in Rome. Their leader, Roberto Fiore, expressing outrage at the treatment of the Tibetans, called for the immediate severing of diplomatic relations between China and Italy and a boycott of the games by Italian athletes. The ulterior motive for his unlikely concern for Tibet isn’t hard to make out: one of his campaign slogans calls for ‘un’Italia senza extracomunitari’ (an Italy without non-Europeans, which would mean getting rid of the 200,000 or so Chinese immigrants who live here).

~ Thomas Jones, Short Cuts, London Review of Books, April 24, 2008

In terms of the recent Italian election, the 'extreme' right (the Italian Social Action Party), with Alessandra Mussolini, the Fascist dictator's granddaughter and Sophia Loren's niece, as its mascot, did even worse than the 'far' left, collecting two per cent of the votes and winning no seats. (See The collapse of Rifondazione Comunista in Italy: The price of opportunism, Peter Schwarz, wsws.org, April 25, 2008.) Of course, that doesn't stop fascism from expressing itself more directly: for example, following the Corrupt Knight's return, fascists staged an attack on the Mario Mieli Centre in Rome.

---- Solidarity with the "Circolo Mario Mieli" ----

Fascism is not only an authoritarian superstructure, used from time to time by capitalism: it is also the spearhead of an ideology that is sneaking its way through our society. An ideology that can be seen in the rising arrogance of men, in the rising arrogance of the bosses, in the rising authoritarianism of the State and in the slimy paternalism of the Church.

Several days ago, the Circolo di cultura omosessuale Mario Mieli ["Mario Mieli" homosexual culture club] in the San Paolo neighbourhood of Rome was attacked by a fascist squad shouting "fucking poofs!" and praising Mussolini, who damaged the club's entrance while some activists were meeting in an upstairs room.

We would like to express our solidarity with the club and we denounce this latest attack in a long series which has seen the fascist squads engaging in an escalation of violence, including the death some time ago [August 26, 2006] of Renato Biagetti in Focene, near Rome.

[Renato was actively involved in the social center movement in Rome and visited the “Acrobax" often, where his brother was also active. His hobby was music. On August 26, 2006, he went to a reggae party in Fiumicino, near Rome. After the party, while heading home, he was stopped by two young men and attacked. They stabbed him several times in the heart and lungs. He died at age 26.]

These attacks by squadristi, a practice consolidated over the years, never abandoned by the fascists, are usually directed against social centres, occupied houses, associations, against "leftists" and other individuals who do not conform to their hateful ideology.

So in this climate of intolerance and rising racism, the 25th April, when Italy remembers the Liberation from Fascism, takes on a new and special importance.

The struggle against fascism, whose greatest moment was the war of liberation fought by the partigiani, was not then, and is not now simply a struggle against the purest form of capitalist authoritarianism. It is also the struggle of aspiration towards a society of social justice and equality. Today, more so than ever, class-struggle anti-fascism must remember that.

Today more than ever because now it is clear that both the centre-left and the centre-right are attempting to rid the 25th April of its class significance and its militant anti-fascism, turning it into a mere ceremony of "democracy".

Against this, we say:

Fascism is not only an authoritarian superstructure, used from time to time by capitalism: it is also the spearhead of an ideology that is sneaking its way through our society. An ideology that can be seen the the rising arrogance of men, in the rising arrogance of the bosses, in the rising authoritarianism of the State and in the slimy paternalism of the Church.

Fascism is the strong arm of the State that kills you when you get home late or kills you in prison because you were growing a couple of marijuana plants.

Fascism is the arrogance of landlords, the arrogance of entrepreneurs who gamble with your life, and the homophobic obsession of the Church.

If we want to honour the struggle of the many comrades who fought in the Resistenza, who paid with their lives for their desire to see a world free from fascism, a world of justice and equality, then we must make sure that the 25th April is a day when we actively remember the struggle against all forms of authoritarianism...

Federazione dei Comunisti Anarchici
"Luigi Fabbri" Branch, Roma
21 April 2008

Speaking of which, check 'Alive and Kicking: Review of Anarchy Alive! Anti-Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory', by Uri Gordon (Pluto Press, 2008), reviewed by Alex Prichard, Anarchist Studies 16:1; also the Anarchist Studies archive.

Lazarus Averbuch... and the Irish Left Review (and ah, other stuff)

2008-04-27T21:16:00.006+10:00

Huh. Never heard of Lazarus Averbuch; never knew of the existence of the Irish Left Review either.

...until now.

Anyways, the ILR contains an interesting interview (April 16, 2008) with Chekov Feeney about the introduction of a Press Council to review complaints by the Irish general public regarding 'bad' press.

Obviously, they'll be swamped.

But how will they actually deal with such complaints, and how effective will the Press Council be in maintaining a watchdog role over the use and abuse of the Irish press? (Damn. I feel like a Trotskyist writing a blurb for a public meeting.) More importantly, can a campaign be initiated to send David Flint to Ireland? With signed copies of Her Majesty at 80: Impeccable Service in an Indispensable Office?

Or something?

Probably not. In any case, read on.

A more recent article in the ILR reviews David Graeber's upcoming book Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion, and Desire (AK Press, 2007). Graeber is an anarchist and an anthropologist, whose previous titles include Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004; available for download as a PDF) which I thought was -- rather like the Housemartins -- quite good. (And "If Liking Them Is Wrong I Don't Want To Be Right...".) The review is, in turn, taken from the blog, Counago & Spaves: Unpopular Culture for Heretics and Infidels, which is also, ah, really quite good. (I remember them from such financial adventures as Blogshares.com.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah...

On Possibilities:

In this collection, David Graeber revisits questions raised in his popular book, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. Employing an unpretentious style to convey complex ideas, these twelve essays cover a lot of ground: the origins of capitalism, the history of European table manners, love potions and gender in rural Madagascar, the phenomenology of giant puppets at street protests, and much more. But they're linked by a clear purpose: to explore the nature of social power and the forms that resistance to it have taken—or might take in the future.

In the best anthropological tradition, Graeber uses rich ethnographic and historical detail to support and illuminate broad insights into human nature and society. In the process, he shows how scholarly concerns can be of use to radical social movements, and how the perspectives of such movements shed new light on debates within the academy.

On the interview with Chekov, in it he makes mention of a new book, Flat Earth News, by Nick Davies, a casually horrifying look at the news media in the UK, which "describes, in meticulous detail, exactly how the press comes to publish the propaganda of the powerful". Curiously, the interview with Chekov also links to the blog Leftwrites, and refers to the arrest of two very patriotic (sadly) gentlemen in the UK, Robert Cottage and David Bolus Jackson aka 'The Friendly Dentist' (below):

In October of 2006, two men were arrested in Lancashire, with the biggest cache of chemical explosives ever discovered in Britain, along with a rocket launcher, crossbow and bomb-making instructions. Both were linked to the BNP, with one of the men [Cottage] having been a candidate just a few months before. This event attracted not one single word of coverage in the national British press-with just a few brief stories in the local press-compared to the saturation coverage of several false-alarms involving Islamic people.

The situation in Australia is, of course, quite similar, as reflected in the experience of Brisbane doctor Mohamed Haneef. In fact:

Earlier this month, it was revealed that 14 Australian Federal Police (AFP) personnel are still working on the terrorism case against Indian Muslim doctor Mohamed Haneef, even though the only charge against the former Gold Coast Hospital registrar was dropped more than eight months ago. Nine officers remain assigned to the case full-time, with another five providing assistance “periodically”, the AFP said in answer to a question in a Senate estimates committee on April 3.

~ Mike Head, Australian Federal Police still pursuing Mohamed Haneef, wsws.org, April 15, 2008

Such facts tend to lead to the conclusion that, in the words of my 'National Anarchist' comrades (sic), "If you're white, you're alright", a sentiment which is, indeed, the title of the blog post on Leftwrites which Feeney refers to. The 'Talbot Street bomb-making haul' features in 'A terror raid that doesn't make the headlines - despite chemical explosives and a rocket launcher' (Charlie Kimber, Socialist Worker, October 6, 2006) -- one of the very few instances of media reportage on the original arrest; others include The Sunday Times (News in Brief: BNP link to explosives charges, October 8, 2006) and The Burnley Citizen (Andrew Hewitt, Ex-BNP man faces explosives charge, October 4, 2006) -- and the final verdict in (among other places) The Guardian (Duncan Campbell, Ex-BNP candidate jailed for stockpiling explosives, July 31, 2007):

A second man, David Jackson, 62, a dentist, was also charged with conspiracy to cause explosions but was cleared after the jury twice failed to reach verdicts.

A BNP spokesman said after sentencing that the prosecution had been brought for political reasons. "We're not condoning it, but it's a quid pro quo to appease the Muslims," said Dr Phil Edwards, of the BNP.

"To keep them quiet, we'll snatch someone from white society. We certainly don't support the bloke. We condemn all forms of violence ... but I wouldn't have thought you could do any harm with what he had."

Dr Edwards said Cottage would not be standing as a candidate for the BNP again. "We never have anyone in the party with criminal convictions," he said, because "lefties and people on your newspaper" would publicise the fact.

Quite. For example, The BNP's terrorist links cites not only Cottage, but David Copeland, Tony Lecomber, Allen Boyce, Terry Collins, Mark Bulman and Joe Owens.

As for Lazarus, he's been resurrected by Aleksandar Hemon in his new novel The Lazarus Project, reviewed by David Leavitt in The Washington Post (April 27, 2008):

At the heart of The Lazarus Project is a true story: On March 2, 1908, Lazarus Averbuch, a 19-year-old Eastern European Jewish immigrant and the survivor of an Easter 1903 pogrom in the village of Kishinev, knocked on the door of George Shippy, the Chicago chief of police. Their encounter culminated with Shippy shooting and killing Lazarus, whom he claimed was an anarchist.

Hemon imagines that a hundred years later, a non-Jewish Bosnian immigrant named Brik, who works in Chicago as a teacher and journalist, wins a grant to do research for a book on Lazarus. His plan, he says, is to "follow Lazarus all the way back to the pogrom in Kishinev, to the time before America. I needed to reimagine what I could not retrieve; I needed to see what I could not imagine."

...

The structure of The Lazarus Project is ingenious. Alternating chapters give us the story of Lazarus's killing (the story Brik is writing) and the story of Brik's own journey in search of Lazarus. Then, as the novel progresses, these narratives begin, eerily, to merge. Characters from Brik's life -- or versions of them -- show up in Lazarus's story. Even Brik himself makes a brief appearance. It's a conceit that Hemon justifies through a series of meditations on the idea of resurrection that Lazarus, by his very name, evokes. Art is resurrection, but so is history, a point that Hemon drives home when he notes (ruefully) the 1908 newspaper editorials bemoaning "the weak laws that allowed the foreign anarchist pestilence to breed parasitically on the American body politic. The war against anarchism was much like the current war on terror -- funny how old habits never die."

Well, not until the state is destroyed anyways. And of course, in the meantime, the war on anarchism -- and the anarchist war on the triple yoke of capital, state, and patriarchy -- continues.

Antifa (Ha ha ha?)

2008-04-27T04:29:00.004+10:00

According to IndyMedia and other sources, that segment of the Master Race belonging to the 'British People's Party' (a cheaper, sillier, and much smaller version of the 'British National Party') received some unwelcome news last weekend, as they prepared to attend a meeting in London. (Incidentally, the latest issue (Spring 2008) of the BPP's zine Imperium contains a feature article on Adolf Hitler's 'art'. Get it while stocks last!) According to the BPP: "The St.George's Day meeting of the British People's Party went ahead despite red street violence which exploded in Central London. Four members and supporters of the BPP were attacked by about twenty-five Red rabble armed with a variety of weapons"; one individual requiring hospitalisation as a result of the 'explosion'. A statement from Antifa.org.uk states that "The redirection point to the BPP meeting was completely turned over, with a number of Nazis, including BPP 'National Organiser' Sid Williamson, a drunken idiot who was supposed to be in charge of BPP security, receiving a well-deserved beating. Others fled leaving their squealing comrades to get their just desserts - with a menu which included hospital treatment! Happy Birthday Nazis! We look forward to giving you the same next year, and every chance we get."

Finally, the following post apparently originated on Stormfront:

This post is to make people aware of the events of Saturday 19th April and the attack by Antifa on the BPP Victoria meeting and to prevent the same thing happening again to any Nationalist group. There is no denying this Antifa group had at their disposal up to 35 people and they were organised, disciplined, informed and very bold. There were several football matches being played in London on that day, a heavy police presence who were doing a lot of stop and searches.

These scum cannot be dismissed as a bunch of kids or a bunch of middle class UAF students, they were very tough, split into small groups, had spotters and were carrying Stanley knives and screwdrivers. The attack took place on the way from the [rendezvous] point to the meeting place (they did not attack the meeting itself which was their aim), a couple of people got a good kicking, but the most serious injuries were a broken ankle and a comrade who was taken to hospital after being kicked unconscious. We were very lucky because previous experience shows the weapons they carry were not for show, they have and will use them. There is a strong possibility that they were present at two previous BPP/[British Movement] events, the aborted Holborn fundraiser concert for the BNP and the aborted Brick Lane paper sale. Please note both events were aborted because of a strong reaction by Antifa's allies in the Police force.

This is not the time for blame and [there] were no cowards at the BPP meeting on that day, but Nationalists must be aware of the red scum[']s potential and any meetings must have a good security regime in order. Discussing with comrades today, I would recommend that Richard Barnbrook... and Troy Southgate (a National Anarchist) [and] New Right... must be on their guard.

Be aware, don't take chances and check out newcomers who ring up and want to come to meetings, even if it means having [two] re-direction points.

Oh yeah, at the same time, the 'National Front', or what remains of it, held their annual rally. About 17 people showed up and, accompanied by about 100 police, marched (on the footpath) from one train station to another. The BNP, on the other hand, are predicted to possibly obtain a seat on the London Assembly at the upcoming election on May 1. Its candidate for Mayor is Richard Barnbrook. Barnbrook is notable for his impending marriage to the BNP ballerina Simone Clarke and his production of a film (as an Arts student in 1989) titled HMS Discovery: A Love Story, "an art film... not a bloody porn film", despite apparently including "long scenes of men undressing and fondling each other, full-frontal nudity and a naked man apparently performing a sex act on another... also repeated scenes of flagellation in which a group of semi-naked men apparently whip a fourth semi-naked man senseless to the ground".

Antifa.org.uk : Militant anti-fascist network based in the UK

The meaning of ANZAC Day

2008-04-26T19:03:00.003+10:00

Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. ~ Samuel Johnson, 1775

According to the Australian War Memorial site:

ANZAC Day – 25 April – is probably Australia's most important national occasion. It marks the anniversary of the first major military action fought by Australian and New Zealand forces during the First World War. ANZAC stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. The soldiers in those forces quickly became known as ANZACs, and the pride they soon took in that name endures to this day...

The date, 25 April, was officially named ANZAC Day in 1916 and was marked by a wide variety of ceremonies and services in Australia, a march through London, and a sports day in the Australian camp in Egypt...

Australians recognise 25 April as an occasion of national commemoration. Commemorative services are held at dawn – the time of the original landing – across the nation. Later in the day, ex-servicemen and women meet and join in marches through the major cities and many smaller centres. Commemorative ceremonies are held at war memorials around the country. It is a day when Australians reflect on the many different meanings of war.

The "original landing" referred to is of course that of the British, French and Australian troops at Gallipoli in Turkey, part of a campaign to capture the Dardanelles from Turkish control. By the time the failed campaign ended on January 9, 1916, British Empire and French forces withdrew, having suffered approximately 44,000 deaths (there were 26,111 Australian casualties, including 8,141 deaths) and at least 85,000 Turkish soldiers died in the campaign.

For what purpose?

The view of the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group (2007):

END THE PATRIOTIC MYTH
END MILITARIST PROPAGANDA

Gallipoli

In April 1915, Australian and other troops of the British Empire attacked Turkey, in a doomed attempt to knock a minor ally of Germany out of World War I. Many soldiers on both sides died, but a myth was born. According to this myth, Australians are tough, honest, irreverent towards authority, fiercely loyal and possess courage of legendary proportions. Further, these virtues are embodied in the ordinary Australian "digger". And, according to this myth, these qualities are uniquely Australian.

Imperialism Today, Australian Style

Today, Australian soldiers are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, minor players supporting the failing U.S. "Global War on Terror". These actions are insurance premiums on the Australian alliance with its great and powerful U.S. friend, and are unrelated to the pretexts advanced for these imperialist wars. Australian troops also occupy East Timor and the Solomon Islands and have recently returned from occupying Tonga. These actions are about maintaining Australian control of its smaller neighbours and the Pacific islands.

Patriotism and Militarism

It's hard to miss the patriotic and militarist propaganda these days. Both the Howard Government and the ALP are determined boosters of the military and the worst criticism they can make is to call someone "un-Australian". By supporting militarist myths and patriotic propaganda, they are trying to make it impossible to criticise the military in any way and to compel support for imperialist wars.

Workers can end war

War is endemic in capitalism. Each national capitalist class employs its military to promote its interests at the expense of its own working class and that of other capitalist classes. Workers in Australia, however, have more in common with workers in other countries than with "our own" capitalist rulers. We have nothing to gain from supporting the Australian Government's imperialist wars. As in every country, we do the fighting and the dying, while the bosses stay safe and reap the benefits. But we can end war by refusing to support governments that go to war. By refusing to supply military forces. By refusing to fight in their wars. And we can make a revolution to put an end to capitalism, to all governments and all armies worldwide. We can have a world of freedom, peace and equality.

FOR WORKERS' ACTION TO END WAR

Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group
25 April 2007

Hmmmm... unlikely. In Australia, the only action taken in opposition to the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by workers qua workers (with very few exceptions) has been to rally in protest. The largest such rally was held in Melbourne in February, 2003, at which police estimated 150,000 people took part, while others up to 250,000. On the other hand, the number of Australian casualties has been miniscule: a product, in part, of the token nature of Australia's military commitment; it, in turn, largely the result of the state's alliance with the US and its role as lieutenant in the Asia-Pacific region, and the US desire to provide some kind of impression that such adventures have broader, 'international' support.

Over the water and electronic seas, the following essay, 'ANZAC Day: Occupation Afghanistan and the propaganda system', describes both the significance of the ANZAC myth to war-making and its role in counter-acting public distaste for militarism:

As ANZAC Day 2008 approaches, it is worth considering the role the corporate media plays in maintaining public support for New Zealand's contribution to the NATO-led occupation of Afghanistan, which is over six years old. As the New Zealand Herald calls for the public to send Anzac messages to overseas troops, it's worth noting, as the following article does, how closely New Zealand's corporate media conforms to a propaganda model.

A Peace Action Wellington member has a High Court appeal on Tuesday, 29 April, for burning the NZ flag on ANZAC Day last year. She was convicted of 'offensive behavior' and was fined $500 plus court costs of $130. This is in addition to the 6 hours in the cells on the day of the arrest for a charge that does not carry any term of imprisonment. A second activist was also convicted of obstruction and resisting arrest.

There is also a new web site 'Lest we forget: remembering peacemakers on ANZAC Day' which provides information and resources marking the honourable actions of those individuals who believe war is wrong, and who have risked physical harm, their freedom and their reputations, to bring their message to others that war is never right...

Mark McKenna also had some interesting remarks to make on the subject of Anzac Day:

Patriot act
The Australian
June 6, 2007

The uncritical and self-serving embrace of the Anzac legend by both sides of politics has serious implications for Australia's future, writes Mark McKenna

ON Australia Day last year, I saw English violinist Nigel Kennedy perform at the Sydney Opera House. Kennedy, who cultivates the appearance of a slightly punkish busker-fiddler and is always keen to please his audience, came out on stage and immediately proceeded to play 'Advance Australia Fair'.

As he began, everyone rose to their feet and sang the national anthem. This could not have happened 10 years ago. Then, the traditional understated Australian patriotism would have held sway. The audience would have sung along, almost half-heartedly, but now they stood in unison and sang with gusto. What had changed?

One of the defining features of John Howard's decade in power has been his ability to encourage a greater feeling of national pride in the Australian community. During the past 10 years, a new form of Australian nationalism has emerged: unreflective, earnest and often sentimental. Patriotic display has become a civic virtue. Journalists and academics have commented on the new national mood -- the flaunting of the flag, the commercialisation of feel-good patriotism -- most dating its emergence from the mid-1990s, about the same time that Anzac Day began its resurgence...

And the same time (1995) the now 'traditional' ANZAC Day football match between Collingwood and Essendon was inaugurated.

The moral of this story?

"Our home is girt by sea."

"A bayonet has a worker at both ends."

See also : Fredy Perlman, The Continuing Appeal of Nationalism

At the going down of the sun / and in the morning / we will remember / we thumped Essendon

2008-04-26T01:11:00.004+10:00

COLLINGWOOD 5.3 11.7 15.12 23.16 (154)
ESSENDON 5.2 6.6 7.7 12.9 (81)

Before a crowd of 88,999 people.

Ooh la la!

Anzac clash a cakewalk for Pies, Andrew Wu, Sportal
Collingwood produce Anzac Day best, The Australian
Rampant Pies take Anzac honours, Chris Paine, ABC Sport
Imagine if Pies were fully fit, Len Johnson, realfooty

Neo-Nazis: in and out of jail

2008-04-25T05:18:00.004+10:00

Racist bomb-plotter paroled
Nicolas Perpitch
The Australian
April 24, 2008

A RIGHT-wing nationalist who conspired to firebomb Chinese restaurants has been released on parole after 14 months in jail.

John Anthony Van Blitterswyk, 56, was convicted in May last year of plotting with neo-Nazi Australian Nationalist Movement head Jack Van Tongeren and two other conspirators to blow up the restaurants in Perth.

In the plan, hatched in 2004, Van Blitterswyk recruited others to help him identify which restaurants to attack and how they were to be carried out.

But the plot was deferred while a street poster campaign was launched to advertise Van Tongeren's new book.

Police uncovered the conspiracy while interviewing people involved in the poster campaign, including some co-conspirators who rolled over and gave evidence in court against the masterminds.

In sentencing Van Blitterswyk to two years and four months' jail, Judge Michael O'Sullivan said the racist crime was "un-Australian" and that no one should be at risk of attack because of their ethnic background.

Van Blitterswyk has maintained his innocence.

The WA Prisoners Review Board released Van Blitterswyk on parole yesterday for a 14 month-period on condition he does not associate with any ANM members.

Van Tongeren, 58, pleaded guilty to his role in the plot and was given a two-year suspended sentence. He was ordered to leave WA and is now believed to be living in Victoria.

Van Tongeren and Van Blitterswyk had been convicted of hate crimes before.

In 1990, they were found guilty of conspiring to drive Asians from the state and trying to incite a race hate war.

Van Tongeren served his full 12-year jail sentence, while Van Blitterswyk received an early release from his 14-year sentence.

Meanwhile, back in the USSA, former National Vanguard (a split from National Alliance; NV disbanded in March 2007) fuehrer Kevin Alfred Strom is going to jail:

'I am not a pedophile': Strom gets 23 months
Lisa Torrance
The Hook
April 24, 2008

Kevin Strom hoped his guilty plea would have him out of prison with his nearly 16 months time served.

The white separatist who pleaded guilty to one count of child pornography possession January 17 was sentenced to 23 months in prison April 21 in U.S. District Court. Although Kevin Alfred Strom, 51, has been jailed since early January 2007, Judge Norman Moon rejected his request that he be sentenced to time served– and his claim that he "unwillingly" possessed the kiddie porn found on his computer...

Trot Guide: New Zealand

2008-04-25T02:38:00.010+10:00

Damn.

Despite having a population only a fifth the size of Australia's, Kiwis have an abundance of parties, both Trotskyist and Maoist. Well, when I write 'abundance', I mean um, at least seven:

1) Communist Party of Aotearoa : Maoist. Est. 1993. Possibly dead? No news is bad news, and there's been no news since December 2006.

2) Communist Workers' Group of New Zealand/Aotearoa (Member of the Leninist/Trotskyist Fraction) : CWG originated as the New Zealand Spartacist League; it split in 1972... well, actually, the Communist Workers' do it best:

CWG originated as the New Zealand Spartacist League (NZSL) in 1970 under the influence of the Spartacist League-US (SL-US) "Declaration of Principles". The NZSL split in 1972 in a dispute between Owen Gager and Bill Logan and Adaire Hannah essentially over joining the SL-US. Gager argued that the SL-US had not broken completely with the SWP-US, nor did he think that the SL-US represented any programmatic continuity with Trotsky. The theoretical basis for this position is argued in "James P Cannonism" which can be found at this site in the CWG Archive. Gager went on to form the Communist Left of Australia (CLA) in 1974 while Logan and Hannah set up a Spartacist group also in Australia. In 1981 Dave Bedggood then a member of the British RCP formed the Communist Left in NZ in solidarity with CLA. The CLA split over a tactical difference with Gager in the mid-1980s. Gager left and moved towards anarcho-communism. CLNZ had fusion talks with the Bolshevik Tendency (now IBT) in the late 1980s and with Workers' Power (LRCI) in the early 1990s. CLNZ fused with the LRCI in 1992 as its NZ section, Workers Power (NZ) and ceased fraternal relations with CLA. Some members of WPNZ had differences within the LRCI’s over its movement away from Trotskyism in forming a united front with Yeltsin in August 1991, and its characterisation of the first period of the overthrow of the bureaucracy as a ‘political revolution’. The catalyst for the split was the LRCI’s refusal to defend Serbia from the NATO bombs of 1995. Half of WPNZ left to form the CWGNZ, along with the Bolivian and Peruvian sections of the LRCI who were either suspended or expelled. These comrades formed the Liaison Committee of Militants for a Revolutionary Communist International (LCMRCI) in late 1995. The main documents of this split can be located under LCMRCI Archive. See 'Declaration of the Proletarian Faction'. Essentially, these fusions and splits were attempts to apply the original position of the NZSL and CLNZ on the defense of dialectics against post-war degenerate Trotskyism. Today the CWG fights inside the LCMRCI and in discussions with other tendencies for a 5th International understood to mean the return to the pre-war method and programme of the 4th International.

Got that? My nomination for the fugliest communist website to ever boil out of New Zealand/Aotearoa.

Long Live the Leninist Trotskyist Fraction and the fight for a new World Party of Socialist Revolution!

3) International Bolshevik Tendency : The remnants of the once powerful and mighty Spartacist League of New Zealand, the IBT (est. 1987) is engaged in constant polemics with its older brother, the still mighty (in my opinion) International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), aka the Spartacists (est. 1966). The Bolshevik Tendency is 'International' in the sense that, in addition to New Zealand, it has a presence in Canada, Germany, the UK and the USA.

4) International Socialist Organization of Aotearoa/New Zealand : Trotskyist, and a derivation from the iSt.

5) Socialist Worker (Aotearoa) : Trotskyist. The comrades have no website, but instead publish a blog, UNITY. A member of the UK-based SWP's iSt... and apparently (like the Australian DSP) on a one-way ticket to Splitsville.

6) World Socialist Party (New Zealand) : Neither Maoist nor Trotskyist, the WSP (NZ) have a totally kick-arse HQ. In other news, the World Party holds an Annual Conference at which most members meet up. At the 2004 Conference "momentous decisions on the future struggle for socialism were made, and a pleasant time was had by all".

7) Workers Party of New Zealand : The Workers Partys' monthly magazine The Spark has been in publication since 1991; Revolution is a quarterly journal published from 1994 to 2008.

Missing, presumed dead:

Communist League of New Zealand | Permanent Revolution Group (1986--1990; fused with International Bolshevik Tendency) | Socialist Party of Aotearoa | Workers' Charter ("Movement") | Workers' Power (New Zealand)

NB. The Socialist Party of Aotearoa emerged as a split from the 'pro-Soviet' Socialist Unity Party (SUP) in 1990. It was led by Bill Anderson, who died in 2005. The SPA's only sign of life is a website, described as being that of the Gordon Watson Branch. It contains contact details for the branch, located in Wellington, and a link to a defunct news service.

"Anna" Goes to Elle

2008-04-24T20:24:00.006+10:00

More awesomeness, this time from the pages of Elle: 'The Believers', by Andrea Todd (May 2008). Todd's article profiles "Anna", an FBI informant whose testimony -- along with two other accused turned co-operating witnesses, Zachary Jenson and Lauren Weiner -- has proven crucial to convicting Eric McDavid on September 27 last year of "conspiracy to destroy property by means of fire or explosives". Eric -- who's scheduled to be sentenced on May 8, 2008, and faces up to 20 years in jail -- is one of a number of victims of the US Government's Green Scare campaign against the radical environmental movement in the United States, and in particular the 'Earth Liberation Front', which the FBI has deemed to be a terrorist grouping, and Public Domestic Terrorist Enemy #1 (see John Vidal, 'The green scare', The Guardian, April 3, 2008) on account of the fact that individuals and small groups acting in its name have caused millions of dollars damage to a number of environmentally-damaging projects over the last decade or so.

Naturally, there's been 3/4 of 2/3 of fuck-all in the Australian media about the Green Scare, but a scan of Todd's article is available at veganxjen's livejournal and as a PDF at Worcester Indymedia. You can also read an analysis of Anna's case on Portland IndyMedia: What the Elle? When corporate media tackles anarchism, the FBI, informants, and the ELF (April 23, 2008): "Perhaps Andrea Todd deserves a little credit. She was, after all, attempting to write an article about someone who lies for a living. Getting true, accurate information from such a source can be difficult at best, impossible at worst."

See also : Nicky Hager, 'Private investigators still digging on West Coast', Sunday Star Times, April 20, 2008, regarding attempts by a Kiwi energy corporation to spy on local activists opposed to their destruction of Happy Valley.

Alexander Downer blogs!

2008-04-24T04:34:00.005+10:00

Awesome!

Did you know that:

Alexander has met Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell and Condi Rice?

He once sat across the Parliament from Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating? All at the same time?

In 1953, his father was part of the delegation the Australian Parliament sent to London to attend the coronation of Queen Elizabeth?

Upon arrival at the Elysee Palace -- in Paris -- he was greeted -- on the front steps -- by President Chirac?

In 2006, he called on the CEO of Guggenheim museums in New York to discuss why Adelaide can't build the most innovative, unique, attractive art museum in the southern hemisphere?

Having worked for Malcolm Fraser, Alexander found him to be one of the most dedicated and patriotic people he had ever met?

Alexander has a vice? And that vice is... golf? Or that his putter is Korean, and was given to him by Ban Ki Moon, the Secretary General of the United Nations after Alexander cleaned him up on a splendid course in Seoul?

Chris Patten, the last British Governor of Hong Kong, is an old friend?

If only we learned to drive better we could do a lot for the environment: it’s just common sense?

Environmentally-sensitive Korean putter signed by Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, Queen Elizabeth, President Chirac, the CEO of Guggenheim museums in New York, Malcolm Fraser (again), Ban Ki Moon and Chris Patten to GrodsCorp.

The New Right, "national anarchism", and A White Australia

2008-04-21T16:45:00.011+10:00

Recently, a minor debate concerning the political perspectives of the New Right has taken place within the local fascist milieu, especially in relation to the hot-button topics of the nation, the state, the nation-state of Australia, and the preservation of the White race (of which, globally, there are only something like 1 billion members; within Australia, approximately 85% of the population is of European/White [predominantly 'Anglo-Celtic' or 'Anglo-Saxon'] descent). The preservation of the racial (White) and ethnic (Western and Northern European) composition of the Australian population is the key concern of the 'White (Australian) nationalist' milieu, although how to maintain this dominance is the subject of heated discussion. As such, the debate helps to clarify some of the issues surrounding the relationship between the New Right in Australia (and er, New Zealand) and 'national anarchism'; or at least, the manner in which that relationship is understood by members of the New Right and other members of the local fascist milieu, as well as the different approaches the New Right, 'national anarchists', and other fascist groups take towards questions of social change and political strategy.

Defend Australian Nationalism!

To begin with, the debate was sparked by the leader of the Australia First Party (NSW), Dr James Saleam, a veteran fascist and ideologue. In essence, Saleam questioned the political implications of the New Right's apparent embrace of Troy Southgate's peculiar notion of 'anarchism' for the future of White Australia. Saleam's concern is justified, as the implications of Southgate's vision of villages full of Whites living -- perhaps slightly uncomfortably -- among other villages composed of Blacks, Browns, Yellows and (presumably) all the other colours of the Homo Rainbow -- whatever they might be now or in the future -- does indeed spell the potential end of a White Australia.

Saleam's essay is titled, with his usual sense of pomp and circumstance, 'An Error In New Right Australia / New Zealand: Is There An Effective Acceptance Of Multiculturalism And Multiracialism In Australia?'. He writes:

A senior person in New Right Australia / New Zealand [Welf Herfurth] addressed a meeting in Sydney on February 15. Around the same time, he also did an interview for a certain magazine ['Doing the New Right thing by people: An interview with a key organiser for the New Right and National Anarchist movements in Australia', Destiny, No.3, February 2008]. A few important statements of position were made (and some strongly implied in the dialogue) that may not only imperil the acceptance of general New Right ideology within the broad Australian nationalist movement, but which could compromise the position of that group itself inside any front for Australian renewal. This situation arises because New Right ideology in Australia has been combined by the speaker and the group with the political philosophy of 'national anarchism'. And there are some ideological-political concepts in current national anarchism which place it in juxtaposition to long-standing Australian nationalist principle.

Destiny is a local, Melbourne publication, launched late last year, and closely allied with the 'Australian Protectionist Party' (APP). The APP emerged as a result of a split in Saleam's AF; this split, in turn, the apparent result of qualms over Saleam's history as a neo-Nazi and convicted criminal (a stick with which the media continues to beat Saleam about the head with, much to his chagrin), continued, close association with other neo-Nazis such as Ross 'The Skull' May, and his autocratic leadership style. In addition to Destiny, the interview with Herfurth was also published on mathaba.net, a UK-based site which has sought to close down my writings, and for which Herfurth, along with other members of the far right, is a regular contributor. (Among its previous contributors is Bill White of the US-based 'American National Socialist Workers’ Party', aka the 'American Nazi Party'. Bill is currently facing "fines and possible jail time for interfering in a local racial discrimination suit involving black tenants of a Virginia Beach apartment complex" (Roanoke white supremacist faces fines, possible jail time, Tim McGlone, The Virginian-Pilot, April 3, 2008).

In his Destiny/mathaba.net interview, Herfurth notes his interest in politics, opposition to liberal democracy and globalisation -- especially in terms of their role in the creation of a global 'mono-culture' -- and claims that 'national anarchism' is 'the radical answer to globalisation and the tyranny of liberal democracy'. The New Right and 'national anarchism' are not political parties, he notes, but social movement organisations which serve to facilitate the growth of a broader movement based on their ideas and practices. The failure of One Nation to facilitate this development is instructive, he argues, of the pitfalls of an approach to social change based upon a reliance on parliamentary politics.

(Herfurth was once an official in ONP before being expelled[?]. He was also a member of the Australian Friends of Europe (AFE), formerly Australian Friends of the BNP (British National Party). It sought to foster cooperation between "nationalist" groups against "globalist" socialism. The main AFE activists were Mark Wilson, former BNP organizer in Epping, UK, and Herfurth. The group made contact with, and was invited to address, Saleam's former political party National Action, the Australian League of Rights and branches of the ONP.)

In terms of the distinction between the New Right groupuscule and 'national anarchism', Herfurth believes that the former can act to cohere 'nationalist' ideology, while 'national anarchism' adopts an activist approach: "In my view, the National-Anarchists are the activists of the New Right". An example of this activism is the presence of a group of 'national anarchists' at the APEC summit last year; to date, the first and only public manifestation of 'national anarchism' in Australia of this sort. This kind of activity is intended to "confuse the so-called traditional Left, including the mainstream anarchists... so that they will start to think beyond their dogmas. Ultimately, National-Anarchism aims at an Australia of autonomous communities which are self-sufficient." Herfurth then notes his experiences as a political activist in Germany (Herfurth was a member of the neo-Nazi NPD), and the German far right's willingness to engage in broad, 'cultural' forms of political activism; an approach which he fulsomely endorses.

As for the crux of Herfurth's vision for the land Down Under:

7. What is your vision for the Australian Nation?

What is the Australian Nation and what is the Australian way of life? By law everybody is an Australian if they have an Australian passport [sic]. I disagree with that ‘civic nationalist’ view, of course.

Ideally, what I would like to see is an Australia which is a country with many autonomous communities that control their own local affairs. That means no state government, but one needs a federal body that controls foreign affairs. I want a country of free people who can determine their own destiny and future.

Realistically – that is, for the time being – I want to see a society that rejects liberal democracy. We should form our own groups of friends and associates, and interact with them, and exchange labour and goods within those groups. By doing that, we will form a parallel society. That is, we have a National-Anarchist system within a system.

In response to this proposal -- and Herfurth's reported remarks at the February 15 meeting -- Saleam concludes that Herfurth advocates a possible Australia of the future consisting of "a patchwork of quasi independent communities, living in loose association"; "What does this all mean ideologically and politically?" asks Herr Doktor.

The Australian nationalist position has always been that the country is one country, neither for division nor for colonisation into spheres of influence, nor to be the subject of Euro-genocide by resettlement. It has been argued that a single Australian European identity animates the "whole white people of this continent" (William Lane). The Australian nationalists have demanded a new White Australia Policy, organised humanely and logically to secure this continent for a 'race' and for a 'nationality'...

National anarchism runs the risk of creating goals which would disintegrate the nationalist vision into a compromise with the undesirable. There is little sense saying that we aim to salvage something from the disasters of non European immigration and multiculturalism and will take refuge in "our communities". The sad fact is that "their communities" will become the springboard of imperialism and recolonisation...

Saleam then proceeds to trace the evolution of 'national anarchism' within the English far right, and argues that it has lead, perhaps inevitably, to a form of political compromise, and a loss of a properly national perspective; that is, a concession to the existence of "an apartheid patchwork of communities (sic) on the soil of the British Isles". Any such concessions should be viewed, in his opinion, as a strictly temporary measure, one which does not imply "that we should surrender our right to our homeland to any group whatsoever, or compromise our 'integrity' as a people". Rather, relationships with non-White communities form "part of any counter-power strategy... a strategic operation that permits us to husband resources for the long struggle for state power... any other policy that operates to undermine our purpose would ultimately be anathema to the maintenance of the Australian identity, a denial of the vision splendid of Australian independence and the potential of Australian freedom."

Nevertheless, Saleam recognises the value of the New Right as a whole, if not its apparent embrace of 'national anarchism', a doctrine which might be interpreted by their 'White nationalist' comrades as implying "that it stands for a multicultural / multiracial Australia". As such, the New Right should "commit formally without hesitation or equivocation - to the White Australia Policy and to the Australian Identity over all". Finally, Saleam reiterates his own belief that, contrary to the wishes of the "traitor class" that currently rules Australia, "there must be a vanguard organization of nationalism to create a new protective Australian state": for race, and for nation.

In response to Saleam's criticisms, the 'New Right Australia New Zealand Committee' issued a statement on national anarchism and Australian nationalism (March 25, 2008). The author -- one suspects Herfurth of being responsible -- points out that: the New Right "is comprised of many people of many different views"; it does not have or claim to possess a political line shared by all of its members; "Australian identity is gradually being eroded" (because of immigration, and because of American and globalist pop culture); and finally that the New Right is a relatively new grouping, still groping its way forward.

Which does little to answer Saleam's questions.

Examining the doctrines of the New Right in Europe, however, and the ideas of Troy Southgate in particular, provides more substance to their views. In defining the New Right, Herfurth endorses the definition provided by the German Federal Ministry of the Interior in its 2005 Annual Report on the Protection of the Constitution, viz:

The New Right first emerged as a movement among French intellectuals in the 1970s which sought to raise the intellectual standards within the right-wing extremist camp. Among other things it invokes anti-democratic thought propagated by representatives of the “conservative revolution”, a political current in the Weimar Republic. The activists of the New Right want to abolish or at least impair the democratic constitutional state. To this effect, they try to gain influence within the area of cultural politics in order to finally delegitimise the democratic constitutional state and radically change the political system...

The second, crucial element necessary to understand the ideological perspective of the New Right Australia (and er, New Zealand), according to Herfurth ('the Committee') is French thinker Alain De Benoist. In essence, de Benoist argues -- like previous fascist thinkers -- in favour of an 'organic' conception of the nation.

Nationalists are proponents of holism. Nationalists see the individual as a kinsman, sustained by the people and community, which nurtures and protects him, and with which he is proud to identify. The individual's actions represent an act of participation in the life of his people, and freedom of action is very real because, sharing in the values of his associates, the individual will seldom seek to threaten the basic values of the community with which he identifies. Societies which lack this basic sense of national unity are inherently prone to suffer from repeated situations wherein the opposing values of its egotistical members conflict with each other.

Furthermore, proponents of nationhood contend that a society or a people can survive only when: a) they remain aware of their cultural and historical origins; b) when they can assemble around a mediator, be it individual, or symbolic, who is capable of reassembling their energies and catalyzing their will to have a destiny; c) when they can retain the courage to designate their enemy. None of these conditions have been realized in societies that put economic gain above all other values, and which consequently: a) dissolve historical memories; b) extinguish the sublime and eliminate subliminal ideals; c) assume that it is possible not to have enemies.

~ 'Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: A sociological view of the decay of modern society', based on an original essay by Alain de Benoist, translated and interpreted by Tomislav Sunic, Mankind Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 3 (Spring 1994)

(Note that Mankind Quarterly is published by Washington-based 'The Council for Social and Economic Studies'; it was first published in 1961 by Edinburgh-based 'International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics'. See: Race Science and the Pioneer Fund, originally published as "The Funding of the Science" in Searchlight, No.277 (July 1998).)

"Where does the New Right Australia/NZ stand in relation to de Benoist? In broad agreement" says Welf.

New Right and 'national anarchism'

According to Herr Herfurth, "National-Anarchism, as conceived by Troy Southgate, believes in what Marx called ‘The withering away of the State’"; he then proceeds to mangle Marx's phantasy concerning this withering (one following upon a successful proletarian revolution, the abolition of capitalism, and the institution of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat') as the outcome of economic or ecological crises (Southgate). According to Troy, "Western nation-states will break up into separate, ethnically homogenous communities, concentrated in the rural and semi-rural areas"; a rural idyll the virtues of which are extolled by fellow Englishman, the eco-fascist Richard Hunt. (Hunt was once editor of Green Anarchist, but was told to piss off in 1991, shortly after publishing an editorial in Green Anarchist in support of the Gulf War. Hunt then launched Alternative Green, which became the mouthpiece for the views of 'national anarchists' gathered around Southgate. Green Anarchist subsequently underwent a split, with "the original unapologetic anarcho-primitivist publication" last publishing an issue online in 2003; the other, under the editorial control of Steve Booth, doesn't appear to be available online. See Primitivism.com and Green Anarchy for more on, ah, primitvism. And er, green anarchy.)

In practice, according to Herfurth, this means, among other things, rejecting parliamentary politics. "The best thing a nationalist ['anarchist'] can do is isolate himself and his family from multiculturalism and multiracialism", by also rejecting mass culture and instead embracing homeschooling. Southgate -- and by implication 'national anarchists' -- disavow a 'white revolution' as a lost cause; "The only solution is to create a ‘parallel society’, here and now, that is, work to build an ethnically-homogenous community – or rather, improve relations between the disparate and separate individuals who make up that community, and encourage them to think of themselves as a community, and not individuals – which will exist in total isolation from the State, and from political parties".

"Where does the New Right Australia/New Zealand stand in relation to National-Anarchism?" asks Herfurth.

Firstly, it is not a National-Anarchist group, but some members are National-Anarchists. As for the relation between National-Anarchist theory and New Right ideology, it was stated (erroneously) in the article, “The New Right Manifesto” (published on the Internet in 2007) that the National-Anarchists represent the application of de Benoist’s ideas, that ‘New Right is the theory, National-Anarchism the practice’. This was debatable [as well as being contradicted by Herfurth himself, in his interview with Destiny/mathaba.net: "In my view, the National-Anarchists are the activists of the New Right"], as the reader can see for himself when comparing the two doctrines (Nouvelle Droit and National-Anarchism) as expounded here. Many of the street activists for the New Right are not National-Anarchists (many of them are not Christians, either, or animal liberationists) [which would explain why Darrin 'Damn Muslims!' Hodges -- currently a member of the APP, and formerly a member of both AF and Stormfront.org -- was a conspicuous presence at the 'national anarchist' demonstration at APEC].

Herfurth then refers to the fact that Southgate, like Herfurth, is an organiser with the New Right (in the UK), which to the impressionable "may seem to give the impression that National-Anarchism and the New Right (in Britain, or Australia) are the one and the same thing, or at least closely tied together".

Quite.

"So may the fact that members of the New Right Australia/New Zealand have given lectures on National-Anarchist ideas at nationalist events, or given sympathetic expositions of National-Anarchism to other nationalists in private conversations or in correspondences."

Indeed.

More revealing, perhaps, is to examine exactly what shenanigans the New Right in the UK has been up to in the form of its periodic London meetings. As previously discussed, the featured speakers, with very few exceptions, are all drawn from the far right: the BNP, NF, League of St George, Church of the Creator, Holocaust denialists/revisionists, 'Racial Bolsheviks', racists and fascists of one description or another. Probably the choicest figure to grace the New Right podium in the UK, however, is Lady Susan (Michèle) Mainwairing / Griaznoff / Peacock / Sangster / Renouf, Aussie "bimbo" and champion of free speech (especially for gentlemen such as Robert Faurisson, David Irving, Germar Rudolf, Ernst Zundel and others).

After further equivocation, Herfurth ('the Committee') conclude that "Probably, in organisational terms, it is necessary to split the New Right into two separate departments – a think-tank and a street activist wing"; a formal recognition, I would suggest, of a de facto reality.

In concluding his/their response to Saleam's critique, Herfurth ('the Committee') examine one final question: "the New Right and repatriation".

'Repatriation'

Get outta our country...

Let into this country, to play with drugs and crime
Hold the hands of them all, they’re never satisfied
People who oppose them, are promptly locked away
And those who thought they had a voice, no longer have a say

Get out! We don’t want you around
Get out! Want the people to shout
Get out! Get outta my sight
Get out! Parasites... Parasites... Parasites...

Legends of Eureka, turn over in their graves
They can see what has happened to the Southern Cross today
Laws made to put us down, laws are made to keep us quiet
Jail all the racists who wanna keep this country white

Reject an alien government, don’t recognise their laws
It’s time to close the floodgates, it’s time to shut the door
Repatriate, ship ’em out, send the bastards back
If they don’t fucking like it, it’ll be in body bags

Get out!

~ 'Parasites', a song by fair dinkum Aussie patriots Fortress. These and other patriotic hymns were last heard live on October 13, 2007 at the Melbourne Croatia Social Club; the gig was held, as it is every year, to commemorate the death of English bonehead Ian Stuart Donaldson in 1993, and organised by local neo-Nazi groups Blood & Honour Australia and the Southern Cross Hammerskins. (Donaldson helped form Blood & Honour in 1987; he also sang in the band Skrewdriver, one of whose members, Murray Holmes, may occasionally be found performing with Perth band The Homicides. The Homicides are also releasing a split EP with Sydney-based T.H.U.G., a partial reincarnation of the earlier, neo-Nazi band White Lightning. T.H.U.G. are scheduled to play the East Brunswick Club Hotel in Melbourne on July 19 with Toe to Toe and a Jimmy Pursey-free Sham 69.) Herfurth attended the 2006 gig held at The Birmingham Hotel in Fitzroy, and is otherwise supportive of the efforts of these upstanding young citizens to uphold traditional values.

"So what is the New Right position on repatriation, and does it believe that repatriation can be achieved through the State, e.g., through a State controlled by a nationalist party?"

In a word: yes.

However, Herfurth notes that there's more than one way to skin a cat, and aliens may be removed from Australia by the use of extra-parliamentary violence. "However, probably the best, most efficient (and most humane) way of achieving the two objectives [that is, halting non-European immigration and sending non-Europeans already residing in Australia 'home'] is politically, through the State. The Australian State can put forward legislation halting non-European immigration immediately, and then use its financial resources to provide the inducement for non-European immigrants to resettle in their homelands."

And who in their Right mind could argue with that?

Nevertheless, actually achieving the best, most efficient, and most humane means of purifying Australia first requires the establishment of a 'Nationalist Gub'mint'. This means either: a) getting a 'Nationalist' Party elected or; b) staging a coup d’état ("or a protracted period of insurgency"). "In Western liberal democracies", notes our anarchist comrade, "such options are not usually considered, and in some Western countries (such as Australia) it is illegal even to contemplate, on paper, such possibilities."

So much for Plan B.

As for Plan A: Q. "Where does New Right stand?" A. "A party with mass-based, popular support, winning power through an election is the best way – and the only legal way"; whatever difficulties such a party may face obtaining its wholesome goal. But of course, that's not the only thing Herfurth ('the Committee') has to say on the subject, and it's at this point that the distinctive contribution of the New Right becomes apparent. Thus:

New Right differs from Australian nationalists insofar as that it makes a thoroughgoing intellectual and sociological analys[i]s of what it is that makes some nationalist parties win and others fail. It has held the NPD up as an example because it believes that the NPD, with its ‘three pillars’ strategy, is going about electioneering the right way. New Right has stated, many times, that the essential thing for a nationalist party to do is to a) build trust and support among the community and b) win over the intellectuals and the students. New Right looks forward to the day when nationalists can use the same tactics, with similar success, as the NPD here in Australia.

New Right believes that power can be won – if it can be won – by a series of sustained ‘shocks’ to the liberal democratic system. In other words, a ‘state of exception’ (to use Carl Schmitt’s phrase) needs to be created in Australia, a disruption of the day to day constitutional functions of the Australian State, when the constitution itself becomes in temporary abeyance... It is only during that disruption – which will break up the normal order of things – that Australian nationalists can go ahead and ‘seize power’.

So how will those ‘shocks’ be brought about? Those shocks need to be induced practically (at the street level); intellectually; and emotionally. At the street level, there needs to be a political confrontation, carried out publicly (and with maximum media publicity) against the Left, who, more than any other group, seek to oppose nationalists’ presence on the street. Intellectually, nationalist intellectuals need to make the case to the public that the liberal democratic system is not working, has not worked, and never will, to make them stop believing in the worthwhileness of the liberal parliamentarian system. Emotionally, nationalist propagandists need to induce a state of permanent emotional agitation in the general public, through media and propaganda organs... Such propaganda aims at keeping the public’s nerves permanently on edge, and directing public animosity against the enemies of nationalism.

These are the same techniques as those used by the German National Socialists and the Italian Fascists in the 1920s and the 1930s, and by the British National Front in the 1970s. It is the New Right’s belief that they can be used, successfully, in Australia. They are means, not ends in themselves, and the end is, in the long-term, the successful ‘seizure of power’.

Not that Herfurth's a neo-Nazi or nothing.

He's an anarchist.

A national anarchist.

Or something.

========================

Welf Herfurth writes a letter to Crikey!, April 22, 2008: Re. "Torch protest: who'll be there, from Amway up" (yesterday, item 10). As a Member of the National Anarchists, and a subscriber to Crikey for many years, I am disappointed that Crikey has not spent more time evaluating their articles by reactionaries like Cam Smith, who was quick to slander the Nationalist Anarchists, whilst at the same time over-looking the Nationalist implications of the Tibetan struggle. One is left with no other conclusion that a double standard exists for those fighting for freedom and self-determination is a struggle that those of European heritage have no right to exercise. The only thing Smith managed to correctly assess in his article about the 'National Anarchists’ is that we are indeed planning on making an appearance at the Torch Relay in Canberra, in support of the Tibetan struggle for independence.

"[The] charter of human rights (guaranteed by international law), says that indigenous populations have the right to resist colonisation and immigration. So the Tibetans are justified – legally – in doing what they do. So are we in the West: after all, we are being colonised: the massive flood of immigration in Europe, North America, Australia, is neo-colonialism." From the New Right Website – Tibet and the Lessons for the West

Every other comment is slanderous deceitful rubbish, used for intellectual repression of ideas that do not support Smith's cultural Marxism. The New Right / National Anarchists are about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, and the right of national, ethnic self-determination for all peoples. I find it paradoxical that someone who preaches tolerance, diversity and racial harmony would use a racial epithet to criticise those he considers Nazis. The Australian people are intelligent enough to recognise Mr Smith's hypocrisy. The National Anarchists are not Nazis, nor do we support Nazism, or supremacy of any race towards another, including Zionism. I cannot stress highly enough; violent racist action is as far from National Anarchist ideology as you could possibly be. For further information regarding the National Anarchists and the New Right, please have a look at our website. I would recommend Smith do so before writing any other articles about the New Right/National Anarchists.

See also : Eric Krebbers (De Fabel van de illegaal/No-one is illegal), Millionaire Goldsmith supports the left and the extreme right, September 1999 | RESISTING THE NPD: Sleepy German Town Awakens to Fight Far Right, David Crossland, Spiegel Online, October 31, 2007:

Colorful Stunts to 'Sweep Out' NPD

"People are sick and tired of them. No one's saying 'Oh just let them get on with it.' All this has had a positive side effect. People are discussing human rights and democracy in the pubs; there's a process of politicization," said the high school teacher.

The forum has come up with a variety of stunts to counter the NPD. During one far-right rally in the carnival season last February, it got 400 people to turn up with brooms and brushes to "sweep" the far right out of town. "Of course it was just a symbolic act, but the way they were standing there, it looked like a peasants' revolt," said Helmbrecht.

Other tactics have included a local firm counting NPD demonstrators and donating €5 per head to an organization that helps people quit the far-right scene. Sausages were sold under the motto "In Franconia, only the sausages are brown," in reference to the so-called "Brownshirts" of Hitler's Nazi party.

"We've also been projecting messages on facades behind NPD speakers as well as photos from Auschwitz," said Helmbrecht. "When they come here and go on about the memory of their grandfathers, we project a photo of granddad shooting a Jewish prisoner in the head."

Another stunt has been to declare a "Traditional Day of Woodcutting" to coincide with one NPD demonstration. A screaming buzz saw was switched on in a shed next to the memorial site to interrupt proceedings.

NB. See also this brilliant documentary (produced and directed by the London Video History Group), on the 43 Group, a band of British ex-Army, ex-Navy and merchant seamen who after WWII, and in response to a re-emergent fascist movement, formed to defend London by physically beating them off the streets.

¡No Pasarán!

[For Dion] Immigrant fears as number of neo-Nazi murders soars [Russia]

2008-04-20T20:51:00.004+10:00

Note that in 2005, local fascists and a sprinkling of boneheads attempted to hold their annual gathering -- the Sydney Forum, co-hosted by Dr James Saleam of the Australia First Party (NSW) and Welf Herfurth of the Sydney-based fascist groupuscule 'New Right' -- at the Russian Club. Upon being publicly revealed as hosts for the racists, the Russian Club pulled the plug, and the event was held at Saleam's bunker in Tempe instead. In 2006, the Estonian Club bravely stepped into the breach, with minimal or no apparent opposition from members of the local Estonian community, who are apparently happy to have their Club associated with the promotion of racism and fascism. Last year (2007), it was the RSL's turn, the venue for the Sydney Forum, in addition to the bunker, being Eastwood; the Bexley RSL hosted the Forum in 2004. As for 2008, who knows?

Locally, bonehead venue The Birmingham Hotel (Fitzroy/Collingwood, Melbourne), despite quite vocal support from local fashion punks, has recently undergone a change of management to a new, less fascist-friendly team.

Immigrant fears as number of neo-Nazi murders soars
"Concern over authorities’ lack of action as boneheads ‘hunt down’ non-Russians"
Sunday Herald
John Follett in Moscow

RUSSIA'S BONEHEADS [not 'skinheads'] have begun to hunt and kill immigrants "like game" in the most serious surge in neo-Nazi violence since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Human rights groups say nationalist extremists murdered 41 people in the first three months of this year, more than four times as many as the same period last year. Some groups put the death toll even higher, at 53.

The number and severity of attacks seems to indicate that radical nationalists have become more organised and more willing to kill and maim, usually with a knife.

Victims are stabbed not once but sometimes 20 or 30 times in frenzied attacks accompanied by racial abuse. Those that survive are often scarred for life; in one recent case an immigrant had his nose and lips sliced off. Some of the victims have been women and children.

The attackers are driven by a hatred of non-Russians, who they believe are diluting the gene pool and irrevocably changing the fabric of their country.

"Russia for Russians" is their main slogan. Far-right websites warn that their followers are poised to crank up the severity of the attacks still further, turning to bombs and guns. The victims are mostly people from former Soviet republics in Central Asia, who come to Moscow and St Petersburg to work in construction or do other manual work that Russians don't want to do.

Though the migrant workers fill a gap in the job market, opinion polls show that many ordinary Russians are uncomfortable with their presence and would like to see immigration controls severely tightened. City officials in Moscow, where most of the killings take place, say there are around 850,000 migrants from Central Asia living in a city that has a total population of 10 million.

Their Asian features make them easy targets for boneheads scanning the streets for people of non-Slavic appearance. The killings have sparked a wave of diplomatic protests from the victims' home countries and stirred talk of a street war between boneheads and revenge-minded migrant workers.

Raimkul Attakurov, ambassador for Kyrgyzstan in Russia, complained in a letter sent to Russia's human rights ombudsman earlier this year about what he called "the savage attacks of fascist monsters".

Police have responded by clamping down [sic] on bonehead activity, especially in Moscow. But rights groups accuse them of a cover-up when it comes to discussing the problem publicly or providing meaningful crime statistics. Police prefer to classify many of the attacks as mere "hooliganism".

[In reality, Russian police are far more likely to repress anti-fascists than they are the murderous gangs of boneheads who regularly assault and kill, not only 'foreigners', but anti-fascists. A recent, unauthorised protest (March 19) by anti-fascists in Moscow was conducted in memory of murdered Russian punk, 20-year-old Aleksey Krylov (March 16, 2008); Aleksey was on his way to a gig by the band Nichego Horoshego. Unusually, none of the several hundred-strong crowd were arrested.]

Moscow prosecutor Yuri Semin said last week that he thought the media had "exaggerated" the upsurge in killings and questioned the reliability of statistics released by human rights groups. The police itself keeps no detailed records but insists the number of race hate crimes is falling.

"If someone kills a Kyrgyz, it's inevitably assumed it's on ethnic grounds," said prosecutor Semin. "For some reason, it's assumed that people can't kill Kyrgyz people for other reasons."

Semyon Charny, an expert at the Moscow Bureau for Human Rights, believes the authorities find the problem inconvenient. "The authorities in Moscow are interested in creating a good image for the city," he said. "(But) in recent times the number of extremist crimes is on the increase. It is, as one magazine put it, like a safari."

Police also cite the large number of crimes committed by immigrants whenever the problem is raised, hinting that they are facing a backlash of their own making. Embassies are advising migrant workers to avoid going out on their own, to always be smartly dressed, and to drink alcohol in private rather than in the street.

Galina Kozhevnikova of rights group Sova believes official rhetoric, which has become increasingly strident and nationalistic in tone, is partly to blame. Politicians from outgoing president Vladimir Putin to Communist Party leader Gennady Zyuganov have made comments that appear to favour ethnic Russians over immigrants, while laws have been introduced to limit the number of non-Russians working in the retail sector.

Police made a string of high-profile arrests in the last year that appeared to have decapitated the underground neo-Nazi movement. But Kozhevnikova said the arrests have, paradoxically, only encouraged others who seek the same notoriety and infamy in far-right circles.

It has, she said, become "fashionable" to be a bonehead and "cool" to kill an immigrant.

Sociologists say Russia is home to about 70,000 skinheads and that they tend to congregate in large urban centres such as Moscow and St Petersburg, which has also seen a large number of murders of non-Russians. About 30,000-35,000 of them have neo-Nazi beliefs.

Yevgeny Proshechkin, chairman of Moscow's anti-fascist centre, urges the authorities to wake up to what he calls "acts of terrorism".

"Things need to be called by their name," he told the liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta. "We are standing on a dangerous threshold."

See also : Aryan Guard rocks complacency, Jamie Komarnicki, with a file from Tony Seskus, Calgary Herald, April 20, 2008: "Disaffected youth seeking shock value, or something far more sinister?" | Neo-Nazis Clash With Protesters, Pamela Constable, Washington Post, April 20, 2008: "3 Arrested as White Supremacist Group Marches on Capitol" and as 30 losers from the NSM traipsed about Washington. "Members of the public were kept far from the marchers, who wound up on the West Lawn of the Capitol, where they waved flags and made speeches to an empty, sloping expanse of green, surrounded by hundreds of riot police." Oddly, despite being exposed as an FBI informant, Hal Turner was there too.

PS. Happy Birthday Adolf!

Goodbye to all that

2008-04-20T02:06:00.007+10:00

With friends like these...

When David Mamet declared last month that he was no longer a 'brain-dead liberal', he joined the ranks of leftwing writers, from Arthur Koestler to Kingsley Amis to Christopher Hitchens, who have moved to the right and attacked former allies. Playwright David Edgar challenges the new generation of renegades

The Guardian
April 19, 2008

A few thoughts.

Edgar's article is an attempt to explain why a number of prominent members of the left-wing intelligentsia -- principally scribblers of one kind or another -- defect, especially to the neo-conservative right; the presumed polar opposite of their previous 'progressive' political perspective. (David Mamet's article is titled Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal': An election-season essay, Village Voice, March 11, 2008.) He argues:

Like previous generations, these defectors have been there, done that, and can now bear witness to their former misbeliefs. In so doing, they are joining a club with an extensive membership. Most of the radical and progressive achievements of the 20th century - including the Russian revolution - were brought about by an alliance between the oppressed and the intelligentsia, and a good proportion of them - particularly the Russian revolution - were followed by disappointment and desertion. For some, disillusion set in as early as 1921, when the Bolsheviks suppressed a sailors' uprising at Kronstadt, the port of St Petersburg and cradle of the October revolution. Subsequent "Kronstadt moments" included the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact, the neo-Stalinist show trials in eastern Europe in the early 50s, Khrushchev's exposure of Stalin's crimes in February 1956 and the Soviet invasion of Hungary in November of that year.

Insofar as Edgar addresses defectors from various strains of Marxism -- Bolshevism and its descendants, including Orthodox Marxism, Trotskyism and even Maoism -- he has a point, although another principal weakness of his thesis, I think, is the class position of the intelligentsia, and even -- or perhaps especially -- its crude material (and political) interests. In this context, I think Chomsky's observations are germane ('Anarchism, Marxism and Hope for the Future', Red & Black Revolution, No.2, 1996):

RBR: The importance of grassroots democracy to any meaningful change in society would seem to be self evident. Yet the left has been ambiguous about this in the past. I'm speaking generally, of social democracy, but also of Bolshevism - traditions on the left that would seem to have more in common with elitist thinking than with strict democratic practice. Lenin, to use a well-known example, was sceptical that workers could develop anything more than trade union consciousness -- by which, I assume, he meant that workers could not see far beyond their immediate predicament. Similarly, the Fabian socialist, Beatrice Webb, who was very influential in the Labour Party in England, had the view that workers were only interested in horse racing odds! Where does this elitism originate and what is it doing on the left?

CHOMSKY: I'm afraid it's hard for me to answer this. If the left is understood to include 'Bolshevism,' then I would flatly dissociate myself from the left. Lenin was one of the greatest enemies of socialism, in my opinion, for reasons I've discussed. The idea that workers are only interested in horse-racing is an absurdity that cannot withstand even a superficial look at labour history or the lively and independent working class press that flourished in many places, including the manufacturing towns of New England not many miles from where I'm writing -- not to speak of the inspiring record of the courageous struggles of persecuted and oppressed people throughout history, until this very moment. Take the most miserable corner of this hemisphere, Haiti, regarded by the European conquerors as a paradise and the source of no small part of Europe's wealth, now devastated, perhaps beyond recovery. In the past few years, under conditions so miserable that few people in the rich countries can imagine them, peasants and slum-dwellers constructed a popular democratic movement based on grassroots organisations that surpasses just about anything I know of elsewhere; only deeply committed commissars could fail to collapse with ridicule when they hear the solemn pronouncements of American intellectuals and political leaders about how the US has to teach Haitians the lessons of democracy. Their achievements were so substantial and frightening to the powerful that they had to be subjected to yet another dose of vicious terror, with considerably more US support than is publicly acknowledged, and they still have not surrendered. Are they interested only in horse-racing?

I'd suggest some lines I've occasionally quoted from Rousseau [Confessions]: when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel that it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom.

RBR: Speaking generally again, your own work -- Deterring Democracy [1992], Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies [1989], etc. -- has dealt consistently with the role and prevalence of elitist ideas in societies such as our own. You have argued that within 'Western' (or parliamentary) democracy there is a deep antagonism to any real role or input from the mass of people, lest it threaten the uneven distribution in wealth which favours the rich. Your work is quite convincing here, but, this aside, some have been shocked by your assertions. For instance, you compare the politics of President John F. Kennedy with Lenin, more or less equating the two. This, I might add, has shocked supporters of both camps! Can you elaborate a little on the validity of the comparison?

CHOMSKY: I haven't actually equated the doctrines of the liberal intellectuals of the Kennedy administration with Leninists, but I have noted striking points of similarity -- rather as predicted by Bakunin a century earlier in his perceptive commentary on the new class. For example, I quoted passages from McNamara on the need to enhance managerial control if we are to be truly free, and about how the undermanagement that is the real threat to democracy is an assault against reason itself. Change a few words in these passages, and we have standard Leninist doctrine. I've argued that the roots are rather deep, in both cases. Without further clarification about what people find shocking, I can't comment further. The comparisons are specific, and I think both proper and properly qualified. If not, that's an error, and I'd be interested to be enlightened about it.

Chomsky elaborated upon this thesis in 'The Soviet Union Versus Socialism', Our Generation, Spring/Summer, 1986. The counter-revolutionary nature of the Bolshevik regime is expanded upon in Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers' Control, 1917-21: The State and Counter-Revolution, Solidarity, 1970 (among other places).

In the context of Edgar's article, it might be possible to speak of at least three generations of brainworkers who have defected from 'the Left': the generation of the 1930s, '40s and '50s; that of the post-1960s; and finally the most recent generation, whose renunciation of 'leftist idealism' is a result of the impact of contemporary affairs, especially the so-called 'clash of civilisations' (Islam versus the West). Assuming this to be the case, I think it's possible to locate the disillusionment of successive generations of leftist intellectuals in the failure of Communism and the New Left to generate the kinds of social changes they imagined might be either real (Communism) or possible (the New Left), and in trepidation of the kinds of changes the victory of barbarous Islam might bring in its wake.

Of course, when Edgar writes of defection, he's referring, almost invariably, to disappointed Marxists. This is reasonably self-evident in the case of the pre- and post-WWII generation. In relation to the post-'60s generation, Edgar notes that "Commentators Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and Andrew Anthony all had left-wing parents, and were involved in political campaigning around race, gender and class in the 1970s (Aaronovitch was one of Manchester University's notorious University Challenge team, who answered "Marx", "Lenin" or "Trotsky" to every question)." The point being, of course, that despite the reference to Kronstadt -- which might suggest the possibility of going off on another tangent -- there is another historical tradition, of anti-authoritarian or libertarian socialism, which never endorsed the Bolshevik tradition, and for which the 1960s witnessed a brief re-flowering, the influence of which was (and is, to some extent still) evident in the various 'new' social movements which the period gave birth to...

More later.

In the meantime, and just because I can...

Where was I?

Oh yeah.

W a s t e d.

I mean:

The last few years has also seen the emergence of an attempt to link the development of neoconservative thought in the US with Trotsky's ideological legacy. The thesis finds its most pronounced exegesis in Jacob Heilbrunn's They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons (Random House, 2008), but is also explored in Jeet Heer's essay 'Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House' (National Post, Saturday, June 7, 2003). On his blog, Heer also comments on the recent publication of a chart in The Washington Post (February 3, 2008) which traces this history. The linkage is somewhat specious, but expresses, perhaps, an underlying attitude which Chomsky also hints at in the passages above. In his commentary, Heer writes:

What has to be understood is that neo-conservatism is not a coherent set of ideas or a doctrine, but rather a gestalt or an attitude. And part of this attitude, to be found especially in the writers who are most interested in foreign policy who spent time following either Trotsky in the late 1930s or Shachtman in the 1950s and 1960s, is a certain romantic militarism, a fascination with bravado “forward-thinking” strategy (shading over into a support for pre-emptive war and unconventional tactics of guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency), and a focus on the revolutionary potential of countries outside of North America and Western Europe. This set of attitudes doesn’t derive so much from the historical Trotsky and his political philosophy as much as the myth of Trotsky, the revolutionary intellectual who was also a military genius. I think this mythical Trotsky holds a deep fascination for conservative and neo-conservative intellectuals who might have only spent a few short years anywhere near the real Trotskyist parties (as an example I would cite James Burnham, who constantly kept quoting Trotsky’s words as if they had talismanic power in his National Review columns from 1955 until well into the mid 1970s.) I think it’s this mythical Trotsky that has to be seen as forerunner to neo-conservatism.

The myth of Trotsky -- one revolving around romantic militarism, bravado, guerilla warfare and military genius -- is just that: a myth. In reality, in his capacity as the leader of the Red Army, Trotsky oversaw the destruction of popular forces, the re-institution of Tsarist officers as military leaders, the re-introduction of the death penalty for disobedience and the crushing of all dissent, both within the Army but also in 'Soviet' society as a whole. One of the more dramatic examples of this is Trotsky's role in the betrayal and eventual annihilation of the Makhnovshchina in the Ukraine.

Andrew Flood (Workers' Solidarity, No.59, July 2000):

...in April of 1917 "big rural landowners began everywhere to evacuate the countryside, fleeing from the insurgent peasantry and seeking protection for their possessions". Through direct action "the agrarian question was virtually solved by the poor peasants as early as June - September 1917". As the landlords fled the peasants took over the land and "all of revolutionary Russia was covered with a vast network of workers' and peasant soviets, which began to function as organs of self-management".

The decrees passed by the Bolshevik government in the months after October 'legalised' these takeovers. This was part of the process by which the Bolsheviks got rid of the power of independent organs of workers' self-management like the Soviets (elected workers' councils) and the Factory Committees. 'Legalising' what the workers had already achieved was one way of promoting the right of the central state to have the final say over the working class.

The Bolshevik attitude towards the working class is perhaps best demonstrated by Trotsky's speech to the 1920 9th Party Congress when he declared "The working class cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers". "Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism". "Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps".

These quotes demonstrate the thinking when the Bolsheviks dissolved Soviets, broke up factory committees or jailed and even executed strikers. But if this is how they saw the worker in the factory, how about the 'worker in uniform' in the Red Army?

In 1917 the Czarist Army had fallen apart. Far from the army opposing the revolution, military units were often at the heart of its defence. Not of course the officers, they were for the most part opposed to the revolution. But in 1917 traditional military discipline had disintegrated as soldiers deserted the front, refused to obey orders and elected soldiers' committees. If the soldiers had obeyed their officers in October or February then the revolution would probably have been defeated. So the ending of top down (or 'bourgeois') military discipline was essential to the revolution.

This break down of the old discipline may have been essential to the revolution but once the Bolsheviks were in power it worked against them. They didn't want an army where units might refuse to carry out an order like the crushing of a peasant rebellion or the breaking up of a strike. So, in July 1918 Trotsky (the Bolshevik commander of the Red Army) re-introduced all the old methods of the bourgeois army. He even re-appointed old Czarist officers.

Alongside this the death penalty for disobedience under fire was reintroduced; as were saluting, special forms of address, separate living quarters and privileges for officers. Officers were appointed rather than elected. Trotsky argued that "the elective basis is politically pointless and technically inexpedient and has already been set aside by decree".

These changes were deeply unpopular to the rank and file of the army. This, along with the Bolshevik suppression of the revolution, meant the Red Army had one of the highest rates of desertion of any army in history.

Large scale executions and 'Punishment Battalions' were used to compel soldiers to obey orders. In addition the Red Army's relationship with the local peasants and workers was that of an army of occupation. It seized the supplies it needed and was often used to put down local strikes and insurrections.

Genius.

As for bravado, "...Trotsky was commanding during the Civil War from his armored train. He traveled 100,000 kilometers in it over three years. It had mounted machine-guns, light artillery, a printing press, a radio for broadcast and a flatbed for his Rolls Royce command car. He carried a large amount of tobacco and a brass band on the train to heighten morale of the troops." On a lighter note, Trotsky also expressed his distaste for the use of 'foul language' by the railwaymen who transported him hither and thither: "I consider that a Red warrior, as a fighter for lofty aims, should behave on an armoured train as befits a place of lofty service, and not as though he is in a low tavern" (Order to the Red Army, August 7, 1919, No.140, Konotop).

Fucking wanker.

(Ooops: Pardon my French!)

But to return to Edgar's article, he writes that "All of the great progressive movements of the 20th century in the west - solidarity with republican Spain, the building of welfare states, the civil rights movement in the southern United States, the war against apartheid in South Africa - were led by an alliance between progressive intellectuals and the victims of oppression".

This is correct, in a sense. But it's also noteworthy for the manner in which it describes the relationship between 'progressive intellectuals' and 'victims of oppression'. The case of "solidarity with Republican Spain" is revealing, I think, of the underlying political assumptions regarding the nature of this relationship, one in which (non-victimised) intellectuals use their brains to help (hapless) 'victims'. When Orwell, for example, came to write about the Spanish Civil War, he actually excoriated precisely this class of individual, beginning with his essay 'Spilling the Spanish Beans' (New English Weekly, July 29 and September 2, 1937) but more famously (and more fully) in his Homage to Catalonia (1938). Some 'Beans':

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of Daily Mail reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm. It is the left-wing papers, the News Chronicle and the Daily Worker, with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

The fact which these papers have so carefully obscured is that the Spanish Government (including the semi-autonomous Catalan Government) is far more afraid of the revolution than of the Fascists. It is now almost certain that the war will end with some kind of compromise, and there is even reason to doubt whether the Government, which let Bilbao fail without raising a finger, wishes to be too victorious; but there is no doubt whatever about the thoroughness with which it is crushing its own revolutionaries. For some time past a reign of terror – forcible suppression of political parties, a stifling censorship of the press, ceaseless espionage and mass imprisonment without trial – has been in progress. When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes – the Communists.

In other words, far from being the passive victims of leftist imagination, workers and peasants in Spain -- organised principally via the CNT-FAI -- were actually engaged in one of the most thorough-going revolutions in history. In this struggle, they were forced to fight not only the Spanish military and fascists, but also their alleged allies in the Communist-dominated Republic. It was the special duty of left-wing intellectuals to obscure these facts, just as many (but certainly not all) did in relation to Kronstadt, the Stalinist purges of the 1930s, and all the other moments in history that Edgar identifies as supposedly triggering their anguished reflections, and 'defection' to some form of political conservatism.

See also : 'Goodbye to All That', Robin Morgan (1970), in which a radical feminist says goodbye to the male-dominated Left. (And its recent sequel, February 2, 2008, on the US election: "Me, I’m voting for Hillary not because she’s a woman—but because I am.")

Countess Michèle Susan Mainwaring Griaznoff Peacock Sangster Renouf ... a LADY of the New Right

2008-04-18T19:41:00.010+10:00

One of the more bizarre associations between Troy Southgate's fascist 'New Right' and Holocaust denialism is provided by way of Michèle Mainwairing, more commonly known as Lady Susan (Michèle) Renouf, a title Susan gained through marriage to Sir Francis Henry (Frank) Renouf (1918--1998), a Knightly New Zealand businessman and financier. Susan was also previously known as Susan Peacock and Susan Sangster, through marriage to Australian Tory politician Andrew Peacock (1939--) and Robert Edmund Sangster (1936--2004), a racehorse owner and breeder. According to an article in The Age, the union between Frank and Susan 'collapsed in 1991 after only a few months, when Sir Frank reportedly discovered the then Countess Griaznoff was a truckie's daughter from The Entrance, on the NSW central coast and not a Russian noblewoman. He later described the marriage as a "nasty accident"'(Peter Fray, "Bimbo" who rattled the old buffers club, December 3, 2002). Lady Susan (Michèle) Mainwairing / Peacock / Sangster / Renouf's use of the term 'Countess' was a result of her marriage to Daniel Griaznoff, whose "mother hailed from a line of White Russian aristocrats" according to Renouf.

Andrew Peacock has most recently been in the news for crashing his Mercedes while drink driving (2005) and quitting his post as Chairman of MFS (March, 2008): "The Gold Coast property group went into meltdown in January, revealing a short-term debt of $550 million. About $750 million of mum-and-dad investors' money is locked up in the group's Premium Income Fund, which has been frozen since January 18 because of the company's precarious financial state". Peaccock's other claim to fame -- aside from having been Federal Tory party leader -- was being recorded in March 1987 talking to Jeff Kennett about former PM John HoWARd, whom Kennett described as a "cunt".

Over the course of the last decade, Lady Renouf has made a rather unusual name for herself by championing the rights of numerous Holocaust denialists and/or 'revisionists'. Including, of course, David Irving (1938--) in Austria:

And among the swastikas, a little Aussie flag was flying...
The Chaser
February 21, 2006

... "I am here," she announced grandly, with all the dignity and gravitas that goes with being an ageing, racist, slightly ditzy gold-digger, "to free David Irving and to free Austria from these totalitarian laws". Flanked by the standard-issue "unnamed men" wearing matching flag-pins, she knew her place, her moment and her mission: she was there to stand up for Queen and Country (and David and Adolf).

Irving, she argued, was "standing up to the Zionists". Most fetchingly of all, she demanded – nay, decreed! – that the "so-called Holocaust victims to be exhumed to see whether they died from typhoid or gas". The press corps took this in their stride. (By this point, most of them had managed to download the coverage of her previous outings, including her deriding them as a "Jewish cabal" in 2001). One young and slightly over-earnest Austrian journalist remonstrated with her, but without much enthusiasm. The rest looked at their feet. A moment of awkward silence passed.

Now, standing on the cold paved steps of a building in which Nazis famously beheaded resistence fighters, begging the assembled media pack for a chance to rifle through the remains of the victims of death camps to check whether you can still smell the Zyklon B, is an odd place for a former Miss Newcastle to have ended up. But Fate makes fools of us all – and Fate has pretty self-evidently made a fool of Our Michele.

Perhaps, in her head, this was a rousing call to arms. (You heard it here first: Gentlemen, grab your shovels - we ride for Auschwitz!). To the rest of us, I gotta say, this just sounded like one of the last stops on a downward spiral. Join the dots. She's in the news, she's "controversial", she says stupid, hateful, provocative things. With, I must point out, a faint hint of an Australian accent.

Can an appearance on a reality TV show be far off?

In her capacity as a champion of free speech, Lady Renouf has since gone on to address meetings of the fascist groupuscule 'New Right', in April 2006, January 2007 and most recently in April 2008. Of course, she is merely one among a number of intriguiging characters to address the London forums organised by 'national anarchist' Troy Southgate. (On the 'New Right' in Australia, see: Fascism in Europe... and Australia (April 11, 2008). On Troy Southgate, see Graham D. Macklin, ‘Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2005 [PDF].) As a result of her endeavours, she was also expelled from a Club; more recently 'Labour donor David Abrahams banned from taking beauty queen to club - because of her views on Holocaust' according to The Daily Mail (December 15, 2007).

She's welcome in at least one club, however.

========================

2005

New Right Inaugural Meeting, January 16, 2005

Jonathan Bowden (JB) (British National Party (BNP) cultural officer; former editor, Revolutionary Conservative) : 'The History of the British New Right'
Davide Moiso (DM) : 'Transversal Psychology'

Bowden has an interesting biography and, like all of the other speakers at the New Right forums, not one normally associated with 'anarchism'. Thus he was one of the founders, in 1993, of the Revolutionary Conservative Caucus. According to an article by Nick Lowles in Searchlight ('Right Now! A forum for eugenecists', July 1998): "Politically the RCC was an attempt to promote Revolutionary Conservatism in Britain, drawing inspiration from the French intellectual Old Right, principally the Action Français led by Charles Maurras, and the German Conservative Revolution, which was driven by Oswald Spengler and Ernst Junger. However it saw the need to place this within a very Anglo-American environment. While the RCC did not survive long, being too provocative for its own good, it managed to redraw a right-wing nationalist agenda." Bowden later went on to play a role in the Bloomsbury Forum, a small philosophical circle whose only publication appears to have been a book Standardbearers - British Roots of the New Right, edited by Bowden, Eddy Butler, and Adrian Davies (Bloomsbury Forum, 1999). He later joined the BNP and became its 'Cultural Officer'.

2) March 12, 2005

Alexander Dugin : 'The Eurasian Doctrine of Multipolarism: The Continental Alternative to Globalisation'
JB : 'Nietzsche and Post-Modernism'
Andrew Phillips (Orthodox priest; editor Orthodox England) : 'Holy Europe and Anti-Europe'
Keith Thompson (KT) : 'The Life of Oswald Mosley'

Dugin (1962--) is a Russian neo-fascist. Some tepid criticism of his views may be found in 'Russian Nationalism Today: The Views Of Alexander Dugin', Dmitry Shlapentokh, Contemporary Review, July, 2001. A more critical analysis is available in Vadim Rossman, Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era, University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Thompson is a veteran neo-Nazi, and helped to establish the League of St George in 1974. This formed as a split from the Action Party, which was formerly known as the Union Movement, the political party founded by Oswald Mosley.

3) May 28, 2005

Alexander Baron (AB) : 'Is There Really An Islamic Threat?'
Alisdair Clarke : 'Aryan Futurism'
Norman Lowell (NL) : 'Imperium Europa: A Unifying Idea'
JB : 'Ernst Junger: Revolutionary Conservative'

Baron is a Holocaust denialist, and attended the conference on the subject in Iran last year, for which he wrote an account later published on mathaba.net. He is also allegedly a former member of the BM, although it's also noted that he has moved some distance from these positions (Michael Whine, 'Holocaust Denial in the United Kingdom', in Nationalist Myths and Modern Media: Contested Identities in the Age of Globalisation, Jan Herman Brinks, Edward Timms, & Stella Rock, Editors, I.B. Tauris, 2006).

Clarke in an optimistic mood: "The New Right weltanschauung is unassailable; it is the adamantine synthesis of the most brilliant minds in European history, from Heraclitus to Martin Heidegger and beyond, and the race-mind which created foundational Aryan mythology. It is the intellectual equivalent of Fortress Europe. The Spirit of Europe will never be crushed; neither by force of arms, nor by decades of toxic propaganda, nor by a treacherous plutocratic elite groveling to yet another Abrahamic religion." Of course that was then and this is now, Clarke is dead, and 'Aryan Furturism' may not be as "unassailable" as the 'New Right'; who knows? Time will tell for Aryan Man.

Lowell (1946--) is from Malta, and an aspiring politician. He's also the founder, in 2000, of Imperium Europa. What is Imperium Europa?

Our aim is that Malta, this Sacred Island of Melita, this land of honey, will be the first liberated nation in the whole, White World - liberated from the enemy within and the enemy without. Malta, at the southernmost tip of Europe, could ignite a flame that would set Europe ablaze.

An IDEA, like a seed could spring to life anywhere.
An IDEA whose time has come, is unstoppable!

This is our dream, our goal: that this IDEA of IMPERIUM EUROPA, born in Malta, would capture the imagination of all Europids and bring that unity, which is imperative for the survival of this minority of biological aristocrats.

The only solution for the old continent is the triumph of the Imperium IDEA.

A Europid bond forged through Spirituality closely followed by Race, nurtured through High Culture, protected by High Politics, enforced by the The Elite.

Quite.

4) September 17, 2005

Eowyn (Odinic Rite) : 'Odinism & Women'
Olivier Devalez (Church of the Creator) : 'Creativity: An Introduction'
AB : 'Satpal Ram: A Case Study in Anti-Racist Brainwashing'
Arlette Baldacchino (Imperium Europa) : 'Viva Malta'
JB : 'Leni Riefenstahl'

Baldacchino is one of only two ladies to have addressed the New Right. An article in the Maltese publication The Independent Online describes her as "the spokesman for Lowell’s crackpot organisation, Viva Malta, which he describes as “the political wing” of his deluded racist fantasy empire, Imperium Europa". Her speech, apparently, "reads like a fourth-form essay written by a kid with a chip on her shoulder and a grudge against humanity". Or so says Daphne Caruana Galizia ('What’s a nice girl like you doing there?').

Devalez is a key figure in the French branch of the Church of the Creator, a 'church' for white supremacists. It was founded in 1973 by Ben Klassen (1918--1993). Following a trademark dispute, however, it's now known as the Creativity Movement. Its former leader, Matt Hale (1971--), is currently serving a 40-year prison term for soliciting an undercover FBI informant to kill federal judge Joan Lefkow, the person responsible for ruling against the Church in its trademark dispute. The Church has come to the attention of the Australian public largely as a result of the Reverend Patrick O'Sullivan's (Melbourne) legal troubles and that of a now-defunct website hosted by another Church member, Colin Campbell III (Adelaide).

============

2006

5) January 14, 2006

KT : 'Mosley & Europe (Part Two)'
Wulf : 'Wodenism: Sons of the Wolf'
AB : 'Drop Dead Doreen Lawrence'
JB : 'Politically-Incorrect Art & Culture'

Wulf (var. Wulff) is a German family name. And the name of some bloke what likes Wodenism.

6) February 18, 2006

DM : 'The Politically Correct'
AC : 'Hans Bluher & the Wandervogel'
Bryan Clough : 'The Kent-Wolkoff Affair'
JB : 'Martin Heidegger & Death's Ontology'

7) April 8, 2006

Richard Edmonds : 'David Irving: The Imprisonment of Historical Discourse'
Lady Renouf : 'Free Speech: Irving in Prison'
JB : 'Bill Hopkins & Anti-Humanist Life'

Edmonds is a former member of the National Front (NF) and current member of the BNP. According to the BBC: "In May 1994 Southwark Crown Court was told that a black man was hit in the face with a glass in a racial attack involving the BNP's national organiser Richard Edmonds three days after Beackon's election victory in September 1993. Edmonds was given a six-month prison sentence but he walked free from Southwark Crown Court because he had already spent three months in custody awaiting trial. Edmonds' co-defendant, Stephen O'Shea, another BNP member, received 12 months."

8) May 28, 2006

Michael Woodbridge : 'Henry Williamson: Regeneration of Man Through Nature'
Lady Renouf : On 'Israel In Flagrante: Caught in the Acts of Turnspeak'
James Thring (Founder, Legal Action Against War) : 'The Relevance of Middle East Affairs to UK National Interests'
Tord Morsund (Nation & Kultur, Norway) : 'Beauty Is Hierarchy'
JB : 'Elitism, British Modernism & Wyndham Lewis'

Morsund is a Norwegian fascist, and helped to arrange for a visit by ex-Ku Klux Klown David Duke to Norway in 2005. Morsund is also responsible for writing the introductory text to a collection of Southgate's political dribblings titled Tradition and Revolution (2007). According to Morsund, Southgate is "an artist, a poet and a musician, a father and a relentless idealist … Troy Southgate’s work as presented speaks for itself here, but what is extraordinary about it is that it is as complex as it is clear and transparent … As a driving force within the English New Right, Troy Southgate has clearly shown that he is indeed interested in broader alliances between leading men, … not within a purely conservative and outdated Right of yesteryear …, but of the Right understood as the real and contemporary opposition with alternatives to the egalitarian ideas that pervade the current dominating political systems of the world."

According to one source (Dave Rich, Community Security Trust), Thring was a confidant of dead Lady Jane Birdwood; according to Searchlight (Nick Lowles, 'A very English extremist', August 2000): "One of Britain’s most prolific racist and antisemitic propagandists... Dowager Lady Jane Birdwood, editor of Choice magazine and close political ally of wartime nazi collaborators, died on 29 June. Often dismissed as an eccentric crank, Birdwood represented the far right of the establishment. Backed by MPs, lords, vicars, retired officers and the wealthy, she was a very English extremist."

Woodbridge is an unknown quantity. Well, almost. In reference and as an introduction to a previous address (January 14, 2006) by Alexander Baron ('Drop Dead Doreen Lawrence') he stated that:

In the wake of the murder of Stephen Lawrence [1974--1993], the victim’s parents Neville and Doreen were portrayed by the mass media as icons of racial tolerance in pursuit of justice conducting a responsible campaign to bring their son’s killers to book, while at the same time exposing police corruption, incompetence and institutional racism. The Lawrences have received accolades galore from the media, politicians, even from the police.

On closer inspection though both Neville and especially Doreen Lawrence have been less icons of tolerance than enemies of individual liberty. They have condoned the use of such totalitarian practices as intrusive surveillance, the suppression of free speech, and the abolition of double jeopardy. Their much vaunted struggle against police corruption, apathy and racism is based on ignorance if not wilful blindness of police investigative methodology, while their attempts to convict the Acourt brothers’ gang of their son’s murder has ignored the fact that all the available evidence suggests that the five men branded murderers by a national newspaper are actually innocent.

This speech analyses and deconstructs the methods and the true motives of Doreen Lawrence and her gang, and methodically rubbishes the specious argument that they are champions of the downtrodden and the oppressed in pursuit of justice.

Take that!

In December, 2004, Woodbridge was also credited (see below) as being the New Right's 'Liaison Officer'.

============

2007

9) January 13, 2007

Sahib Bleher (Islamic Party of Britain) : 'Islam: Outdated Oriental Religion or Visionary Ideology of the Future?'
Wulf (Woden's Folk) : 'The Power of the Runes'
Lady Renouf : 'Jailing Opinions'
JB (New Right) : 'Robinson Jeffers: Misanthrope Extraordinaire'

Bleher -- known as the 'Flying Imam' -- is a German-born Muslim convert, former member of the NPD, Holocaust denialist and regular contributor to mathaba.net. Another member of the IPB, Dr Mohammed Naseem, was "a member of Respect's national council and [was] the party's major funder. He was also the Respect parliamentary candidate for Birmingham Perry Barr in the 2005 general election"; noteworthy at the time for the clash between Respect's respect for LGBT rights, on the one hand, and the IPB's homophobia. Incidentally, Respect made like a banana and split into two last November; on the one hand, an SWP-dominated Respect and, on the other, George Galloway's mob (Respect Renewal). A ding-dong battle for electoral supremacy between the two will take place on May 1 in City and East (containing boroughs: Barking & Dagenham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, City of London).

10) May 5, 2007

Rupert Bell : 'Church of Satan: A Non-Prophet Organisation?'
Actuaris : 'Futurism: Is There A Place For It In The Present?'
Kai Murros (KM) : 'National Revolution'
JB : Performance of Beowulf (Part One)

Actuaris is an actuarial model of the Dutch pension sector, with a strong interest in its future development... or possibly not.

Note that between this meeting and the next, JB got the arse from the BNP. Note that his performance of 'Beowulf' had nothing to do with this development... or did it?

Murros is a Finn who describes himself as a 'Racial Bolshevik'.

11) September 8, 2007

Christopher Chibnall : 'Austin Osman Spare: First Postmodern Occultist'
NL : 'The Idea of Imperium'
JB : 'The Art & Philosophy of JB'
Tomislav Sunic : 'Americanism & Anti-Americanism: A View from Western & Post-Communist Eastern Europe'

Sunic was present at the meeting which formally launched the New Right in London in December 2004 (see below). In fact, the meeting was partly organised to provide Herr Doktor with an opportunity to launch his then-recent book, Against Democracy and Equality. This text was published by Noontide Press. Noontide specialises in publishing and distributing Holocaust denial literature, and has since its establishment in 1978 by Willis Carto (1926--). It's also the publisher of The Journal of Historical Review, a key journal of Holocaust denial. Other titles published by Noontide include the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as other classic titles such as Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries and ex-Ku Klux Klown David Duke's My Awakening. More recently, "The Institute for Historical Review, the most active Holocaust-denial organization in the United States, held a public meeting in Irvine, California, on March 24 [2007]. IHR director Mark Weber and two other veteran Holocaust-denial activists, Bradley Smith and Tomislav Sunic, were the featured speakers."

12) November 3, 2007

KM : 'Psychological Aspects of the European Revolution'
Yaqub Zaki : 'Comparison of Islamic and Western Civilisation'
JB : 'Revisionism: Left & Right, Hard & Soft'

Zaki is a Scot, a Muslim convert, and an "ally" of Lady Renouf, the pair recently attending legal proceedings in Paris initiated by Holocaust denialist Robert Faurisson against former French Minister of Justice Robert Badinter (he lost).

2008

============

13) January 12, 2008

Kenyon Gibson : 'Meet the Press'
Wulf (Woden's Folk) : 'Religion in the New Age'
Adrian Davies (The Freedom Party) : 'Ways and Means'
JB (New Right) : 'New-Left Marxism & the Frankfurt School'

Davies is a barrister and was David Irving's attorney when Mr. Irving tried to appeal the decision in his earlier case against Deborah Lipstadt. He's a former Tory and now Chairman of the 'Freedom Party', on whose behalf he contested the 2005 general election, employing the slogan 'Enoch Powell was right!'. In Bad News For Freedom, only 1.7% of the electorate in South Staffordshire agreed.

14) April 5, 2008

John R. Bell : 'British Blood & British Soil'
Wulf Ingessunu : 'The Solar Race'
Lady Renouf : 'Jailing Their Lawyers'
JB : 'The Films of Hans-Jurgen Syberberg: Leni Riefenstahl's Successor?'

========================

Finally, below is the advertising blurb for the first first meeting of the New Right:

Official Foundation of the New Right / Book Launch

Agenda: This meeting will introduce for the very first time a fresh and exciting project known as 'New Right'. [Ahem. See 'An American National Bolshevik', Loren Goldner's review of Kevin Coogan. Dreamer of the Day. Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, 1999.] Concerned at the increasing plight of the British Isles and Europe in general, this dynamic and strictly metapolitical group seeks to unite the disparate strands of the British Right and get everybody pulling in the same direction.

Points of reference: Friedrich Nietzsche, Armin Mohler, Edgar Jung, Carl Schmitt, Ernst Junger, Julius Evola, Rene Guenon, Jean Thiriart, Alain de Benoist, Robert Steuckers, Pierre Vial, Guillaume Faye, Alexander Dugin, Michael Walker.

Date: Sunday 12th December 2004

Time: From 2.00pm until 6.00pm

Venue: Sun Tavern, 66 Long Acre, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9JH (fully licensed bar, food served until 4pm)

Nearest tube: Covent Garden, Holborn or Tottenham Court Road

NEW RIGHT COMMITTEE:

Chairman: Jonothon Boulter
Secretary: Troy Southgate
Treasurer: Lee Consterdine
Press Officer: Dino Caligari
Liaison Officer: Micheal Woodbridge

GUEST SPEAKERS:

*Dr. Tomislav Sunic (Professor of Political Science): AGAINST DEMOCRACY & EQUALITY
*Robert Steuckers (Synergies Européennes, Orientations): HISTORY OF THE NEW RIGHT*

BOOK LAUNCH:

The acclaimed Croatian author, Dr. Tomislav Sunic, will be promoting his new book, 'Against Democracy and Equality' (Noontide Press, 2004), and taking a detailed look at the European "New Right", a significant intellectual movement of men and women concerned about the survival of the West.

The book provides a survey of the New Right's origins, impact and outstanding figures, and an overview of the theory of "revolutionary conservatism". A healthy, enduring society, say New Right thinkers, must be based on the natural principles of hierarchy and aristocracy. Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Alain de Benoist, and the other leading figures of this intellectual current contend that egalitarianism - whether manifest in Marxism or in liberal democracy - inevitably leads to social decay and entropy.

Rejecting both traditional liberalism and conservatism, the New Right calls for a European rebirth rooted in a stern awareness of history and human nature, and based on a recognition of Europe as an organic entity.

This book, explains a review in American Renaissance newsletter, "not only traces the history of 'revolutionary conservatism' but introduces a contemporary school of European writers who are struggling to find answers to the questions that are not yet being asked ... Dr. Sunic has given us an important book. This review can only begin to summarize the richness of thought that he has found in scores of books and journals that are not even available in English. Dr. Sunic has opened the door to a great but little-known body of learning that directly addresses our current crisis."

Copies of Dr. Sunic's magnum opus - as well as various other literature - will be available to purchase at the meeting itself. Please feel free to bring your own material and don't forget to invite your friends!

Meanwhile, if you require further information, please e-mail: synarc2000@yahoo.com or arktos2002@yahoo.com

*"The radical wing of the New Right is now represented by the Synergies Européennes network, led by Robert Steuckers (Belgium), which publishes Nouvelles de Synergies européennes. At the summer university of the Synergies network, in August 2000, held in northern Italy, key speakers included former Terza Posizione activist Gabriele Adinolfi and Maurizio Murelli, of the Holocaust denial publication Orion. In 2000, a controversy arose in Lyon about the facilities granted by the University of Lyon III to New Right activists, among them Prof. Jean-Paul Allard, a German studies professor. The network he built around the Institute of Indo-European Studies within this university is very clearly connected to Synergies Européennes. (Economist and Holocaust denier Bernard Notin writes under the alias Fréderic Valentin in Synergies.)" ~ The Stephen Roth Institute for The Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism Report on France 2000-1

Hitler fetishists prepare for celebrations, run into trouble

2008-04-18T04:06:00.006+10:00

TROUBLE!

Alto Adige: 16 Neo-Nazis Arrested by Police

"(AGI) - Bolzano, 17 April - Bolzano state police are in the processing of arresting 16 individuals in Merano, Scena, Tirolo, Lagundo and the surrounding areas as part of the "Odessa" operation. The latter is an operation conducted by the DIGOS section of police (special investigations) and is the conclusion to a complex and articulated investigation which identified and disbanded a consolidated and sizeable South Tyrol group between the ages of 17 and 27, accused of incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence for racial, ethnic and national reasons. The 8 violent acts by the youths (assault and battery as well as intimidation) were committed against young Italians and foreigners held to be different for racial, ethnic or social reasons. The group had been in contact with extreme right movements in Austria, Switzerland and Germany."

Neo-Nazi gang arrested in South Tyrol with links to Austrian far-right

"A gang of violent neo-Nazis arrested in South Tyrol on Thursday have links to right-wing extremist groups in Austria, police believe. It was announced on Thursday that 16 men were arrested in Bolzano, Italy, all between 17 and 27-years-old, on charges of violence and instigation of racist, ethnic, and nationalist discrimination. Propaganda materials, Nazi symbols, and German Navy war flags were confiscated from members of the group who held regular meetings at a cabin in the woods - with "One Tyrol" carved into the door - where ritual induction ceremonies would take place for new members. Police could give no further clarification as to the links with Austrian extreme far-right groups but it is believed the Austrian and Italian neo-Nazis met regularly."

PARTY!

Neo-Nazis plan Hitler birthday events
Elana Kirsh
Jerusalem Post
April 17, 2008

"...An "Adolf Hitler Memorial and BBQ" planned in association with the neo-Nazi Hammerskin Nation in Houston will involve live entertainment and a swastika lighting."

Locally, the Hammerskins are also organsing a party. Well, by 'locally', I actually mean Wellington, where local (and by that I mean 'Melbourne') boneheads Bail Up! are scheduled to play a gig, presumably at the same location as last year's event: the Satan's Slaves MC HQ in Berhampore, where Blood Red Eagle played.

ALSO!

Court overrules town's decision, permits neo-Nazi march
ČTK
April 18, 2008

"Litvinov, North Bohemia, April 17 (CTK) - The court has permitted Czech neo-Nazis to stage a march through Litvinov which the town hall previously banned, Tyden.cz said Thursday, adding that the extremists organise the march annually to commemorate one of them who was stabbed to death in Litvinov nine years ago. The court said there was no evidence proving that law might be violated during the march, the server Tyden.cz writes. "Unfortunately, this is true. The court has abolished our ban saying we did not meet the legal conditions for the march to be banned. Nothing can be done about it. We respect the court decision," Litvinov town hall's secretary Alexandra Sixtova is quoted as saying. She said the town hall would not be opposed to a commemorative meeting, but it minds the march that is to follow. "Last year, cases of violation of law occurred during the march," she added. The participants in the Litvinov neo-Nazi march annually move from Litvinov to the nearby town of Most, where left-wing extremists protested against their march last year. A 26-year-old right-winger then ran with his car into a group of anarchists, injuring two girls. The court sentenced him to three years in prison."

I believe I noted this at the time on my previous blog. The dead bonehead, Reho Miloš, was stabbed to death at a railway station in May, 1999. The person responsible was supposedly a Romany, and sentenced to 10 years in jail for the crime. Every year since then, on May 20[?], fascists have organised a protest march, often confronting counter-protesters. The year before last (2006) the fascists were attacked by antifa, who threw bottles, rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Windschuttle on Chomsky (2)

2008-04-17T18:46:00.006+10:00

A previous blog entry concerned the subject of Windschuttle on Chomsky. 'SB' commented on that post, and rather than include my response as a comment, given its length, I thought I may as well make a secondary post.

@ndy, that's not a bad post in that it sets out both sides' position quite fairly.

The points to note about Chomsky are:

1. How utterly wrong he got China, given that he was writing [that is, speaking, in December, 1967] at a time of famine and cultural revolution. True, this was not widely recognised at the time, but this is hardly surprising given the credulous gullibility of the left at the time. When it [comes] to assessing leftwing dictatorships the left have a long and sorry record of getting it wrong.

I think that a distinction should be drawn between Chomsky, on the one hand, and 'the left', on the other. In other words, in assessing Chomsky's position, it's best to examine Chomsky's own words, rather than that of an amorphous left. That said, I don't think Chomsky got it wrong on China in the sense that he was able to point to admirable qualities in what happened during this period of history. In which context, it's also worth noting that Chomsky referred to China only in passing, and in the course of a debate the purpose of which was not a discussion regarding the nature of the Chinese revolution and Mao's regime, but the utility of violence as a political act. (Which, incidentally, he summarises as follows: "...if violence could be shown to lead to the overthrow of lasting suppression of human life that now obtains in vast parts of the world, that would be a justification for violence. But this has not been shown at all, in my view.")

In any case, here's what Chomsky had to say, in full, and in context (and irrespective of what 'the left' as a whole may or may not have maintained regarding China as a revolutionary model):

CHOMSKY: Let me make just a couple of quick comments. Dr. Arendt takes rather an absolutist view, that I don't share, about certain historical phenomena such as the character of the new societies that have emerged. I don't feel that they deserve a blanket condemnation at all. There are many things to object to in any society. But take China, modern China; one also finds many things that are really quite admirable. Many things, in fact, do meet the sort of Luxembourgian conditions that apparently Dr. Arendt and I agree about. There are even better examples than China. But I do think that China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

Indeed, a recent article in the China Quarterly -- which is hardly a pro-Red Chinese journal -- compares Chinese and Russian communization to the very great credit of the Chinese communization, precisely for these reasons, pointing out that its greater success in achieving a relatively livable and to some extent just society was correlated with the fact that these methods involved much less terror. This relates to a point Dr. O'Brien raised. I'm not at all convinced that the alternatives are hard and fast, either/or, violent revolution or peaceful stagnation. What one has to ask about a revolution is whether its success is based on its violence; and if we look at revolutions that have taken place I think it's not at all clear that the success has been based on the violence. In fact to a significant extent it seems to me that the successes have been based on the nonviolence.

Now again a blanket statement on this is not possible, but I suggest there are elements of truth in this characterization. I'm quite convinced, as I indicated, that, to a very considerable extent the revolution that took place in China, after the Nationalists [Kuomintang] were defeated [c.1949], was successful because of its nonviolence, because the ground had been prepared, because people were moving to the next stage out of a sort of necessity that was widely felt. And the anarchist revolution in Spain, I think, is a nearly classic example of this sort of thing, where the great success of the revolution was largely due to the very long period of preparation -- extending over a generation, in fact -- during which the groundwork was laid for what turned out to be a very sudden, spontaneous, and I think highly successful revolutionary action. And, in a way, one of the most striking examples of all is precisely the National Liberation Front. If you examine the careful studies that have been made of NLF success, it turns out that this success was not due to its use of violence.

A few more points before proceeding. First, Chomsky is hardly specific. That is, while he maintains that "China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step", he does not detail when, where or how these things took place. Given this, it's hardly tenable to maintain that what he was, in fact, praising, was what Windschuttle imputes: 'Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society"'. And of course, what he praises as being "very positive" is hardly the program of forced collectivisation the Maoist regime instituted; on the contrary, and as I've already pointed out, what Chomsky praises is the largely peaceful redistribution of land and resources which the peasantry themselves actually participated in, and only after a long process of politicisation.

Secondly, and to return to your brief remark that "when it [comes] to assessing leftwing dictatorships the left have a long and sorry record of getting it wrong", this may or may not be the case, but Chomsky himself is actually extremely well-known for his condemnation of leftwing dictatorships, especially his criticisms of Bolshevism.

Finally, I don't think Chomsky's viewpoint may be fairly reduced to the assertion that he "was a big fan of China, particularly during the Cultural Revolution", which was, in fact, my original query. Rather, Chomsky, to the best of my knowledge, has had little to say about the Cultural Revolution as such -- which took place, in any case, from 1965--1976, and was aimed primarily at re-establishing Mao's hold on the Chinese Communist Party. (As an aside, an interesting analysis of the Cultural Revolution was made by the Situationist International -- 'The Explosion Point of Ideology in China' -- also in 1967.)

2. The very things Chomsky praised were in fact the cause of much [suffering]. Collectivisation rarely produces anything other than poverty and misery.

Leaving aside the question of collectivisation and its consequences (I profoundly disagree with your view), it's simply not the case that what Chomsky praised -- that is, voluntary, mass participatory collectivisation of land and resources conducted largely peacefully by Chinese peasants following a long period of politicisation -- was the cause of the suffering Windschuttle, for example, alleges (the famines of 1958--1962).

3. The whole idea of voluntary collectivisation is nonsense. Most collectivisation has been as a result of coercion. I don't know of any [surviving] examples of societies based on voluntary collectivisation, let alone [flourishing] as a result of it.

As far as I'm aware, there are no currently-existing societies based on voluntary collectivisation; on the contrary, global capitalism is dominant. But that's not to say that, therefore, ipso facto, "the whole idea of voluntary collectivisation is nonsense". As Chomsky suggests, the best example of voluntary collectivisation may be found in the anarchist revolution in Spain (what Windschuttle erroneously decsribes as "the short-lived anarchist enclave formed in Barcelona in 1936–1937 during the Spanish Civil War"). This social experiment, which extended throughout significant parts of Spain, was crushed, through violence, by the forces of fascism. Other examples may be found in other societies and at other times. Beyond this, anarchists point to existing, voluntary co-operative processes and associations -- that, they argue, function in order to sustain society as a whole -- as constituting evidence of the potential for such a society to be more fully realised in the here-and-now. The relationship between the recognition of such social relationships and the concept of 'social capital' is another question...

4. Chomsky often includes controversial and speculative analysis without any real consideration of the issues, eg:

"they will contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome."

This is of course meaningless cant, not proven cause and effect. His writings are full of this style of jargoneering, proving nothing other than his own intellectual flatulence.

I don't agree. In the interview from which that quote is drawn, I think the meaning of his statement is fairly clear. In point of fact, it proceeds precisely from a real consideration of the issue and the facts. In this case, the impact of the events of 9-11 on US foreign policy.

B 92: After the first shock, came fear of what US answer is going to be. Are you afraid, too?

CHOMSKY: Every sane person should be afraid of the likely reaction - the one that has already been announced, the one that probably answers Bin Laden's prayers. It is highly likely to escalate the cycle of violence, in the familiar way, but in this case on a far greater scale.

The US has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the US has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand. I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled. It would be instructive to seek historical precedents.

If Pakistan does not agree to this and other US demands, it may come under direct attack as well - with unknown consequences. If Pakistan does submit to US demands, it is not impossible that the government will be overthrown by forces much like the Taliban - who in this case will have nuclear weapons. That could have an effect throughout the region, including the oil producing states. At this point we are considering the possibility of a war that may destroy much of human society.

Even without pursuing such possibilities, the likelihood is that an attack on Afghans will have pretty much the effect that most analysts expect: it will enlist great numbers of others to support of Bin Laden, as he hopes. Even if he is killed, it will make little difference. His voice will be heard on cassettes that are distributed throughout the Islamic world, and he is likely to be revered as a martyr, inspiring others. It is worth bearing in mind that one suicide bombing - a truck driven into a US military base - drove the world's major military force out of Lebanon 20 years ago. The opportunities for such attacks are endless. And suicide attacks are very hard to prevent.

As things stand, I think Chomsky -- along with millions of others -- was right to be concerned. As for "cause and effect", generally speaking, most make a distinction between the natural and social sciences, and it's rare for such claims as "cause and effect" to be made in the sphere of the social sciences, a fact which Chomsky often remarks upon. That said, I think his meaning here is, again, fairly clear, and that is that the US response -- what's termed the 'War on Terror' -- will indeed -- in fact, has -- "contribute[d] to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome". Chomsky has spoken and written about this subject at some length. For example: 'The New War Against Terror' (October 24, 2001); Noam Chomsky: Distorted Morality: America's War on Terror?, February 6, 2002 [video, below]; and in many other places.

5. I have noticed, since the time I investigated Chomsky's assertions about the Hue massacre and found them to be lies, that his usual tactic is to grasp some shard of evidence (rather than assessing all available information and forming a balanced view) and then later when he is shown as having got matters dramatically wrong, claim to have had a sound basis for his assertions.

Again, I disagree. In his voluminous writings, Chomsky occurs to me as one of the better-researched scholars. By way of contrast, one might consider Windschuttle's essay on 'The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky', which employs one single citation.

On the Hue massacre of 1968: Chomsky and Herman discuss this subject in The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I, pp.345--354:

The essential claim of the myth of the Hue massacre is that during their month-long occupation of Hue at the time of the Tet offensive of 1968, NLF and North Vietnamese forces deliberately, according to an advance plan and "blacklist", rounded up and murdered thousands of civilians, either because they worked for the government or represented "class enemies". The basic documentation supporting the myth consists of a report issued by the Saigon government in April 1968, a captured document made public by the U.S. Mission in November 1969, and a long analysis published in 1970 by USIS employee Douglas Pike... (p.345).

After reviewing the evidence -- and counter-evidence -- they conclude:

...given the very confused state of events and evidence plus the unreliability of U.S.-Saigon "proofs", at a minimum it can be said that the NLF-DRV "bloodbath" at Hue was constructed on flimsy evidence indeed. It seems quite likely that U.S. firepower "saving" the Vietnamese killed many more civilians than did the NLF and DRV. It is also not unlikely that political killings by the Saigon authorities exceeded any massacres by the NLF and DRV at Hue. Porter's analysis of the NLF documents used by U.S.-Saigon propagandists suggests that mass political killings were neither contemplated nor consistent with revolutionary strategy at Hue. The evidence indicates that "the vast majority of policemen, civil servants, and soldiers were initially on 'reeducation' rather than on liquidation lists, but the number of killings mounted as the military pressure on the NLF and North Vietnamese mounted". It is also of interest here, as in the land reform case, that the retreating Front forces "were severely criticized by their superiors for excesses which 'hurt the revolution'." We have not yet heard of any such self-criticism coming from U.S. and Saigon superiors for their more extensive killings at Hue... (pp.352--353).

In arriving at their conclusion, Chomsky and Herman primarily rely on the analysis of D. Gareth Porter (in addition to a paper co-authored by Herman and Porter). Porter's essay is available online: The 1968 'Hue Massacre', Indochina Chronicle, No.33, June 24, 1974. He writes:

Six years after the stunning communist Tet Offensive of 1968, one of the enduring myths of the Second Indochina War remains essentially unchallenged: the communist "massacre" at Hue. The official version of what happened in Hue has been that the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North Vietnamese deliberately and systematically murdered not only responsible officials but religious figures, the educated elite and ordinary people, and that burial sites later found yielded some 3,000 bodies, the largest portion of the total of more than 4,700 victims of communist execution.

Although there is still much that is not known about what happened in Hue, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the story conveyed to the American public by the South Vietnamese and American propaganda agencies bore little resemblance to the truth, but was, on the contrary, the result of a political warfare campaign by the Saigon government, embellished by the U.S. government and accepted uncritically by the U.S. press. A careful study of the official story of the Hue "massacre" on the one hand, and of the evidence from independent or anti-communist sources on the other, provides a revealing glimpse into efforts by the U.S. press to keep alive fears of a massive "bloodbath." It is a myth which has served the U.S. administration interests well in the past, and continues to influence public attitudes deeply today...

34 years later, it appears that the massacre still exercises influence.

6. As you should be well aware, I quoted the Windschuttle article as evidence that Chomsky had supported socialism, which THR had asserted was not the case, saying that Chomsky was not a socialist and had not agitated for socialism. In the [passage] I quoted, Chomsky is speaking approvingly of collectivisation, which seems to support my argument.

I'm happy to concede that Chomsky is a 'socialist'; that is, a libertarian socialist, or anarchist. Regarding THR's claim -- that Chomsky "has not agitated for socialism and does not consider himself a socialist" -- you may be right. However -- and I could be wrong on this point, I'll ask -- I think THR's point was that Chomsky is an 'anarchist', not a 'socialist'; 'socialism' in this context referring to the 'state socialism' of figures such as Mao. In any case, it's certainly not necessary to refer to Windschuttle, of all places, to confirm this. See, for example, Alison Edgley's 199 paper titled 'Chomsky's Libertarian Socialism' [PDF].

7. While I admire anyone with the courage to stand up to the intellectual establishment, I should not be taken as blindly supporting Windschuttle. In particular there is little warrant for taking Chomsky's comments about China as supporting violence. I chose to quote from Windschuttle as I suspected it would provoke further discussion from those who are happy to hammer him while at the same time slurping up the lies plopping from those Windschuttle has exposed.

My only concern with Windschuttle, in this context, is his essay on Chomsky, in which he declares him to be a hypocrite of the highest order, who "stands as the most revealing measure of the sorry depths to which the left-wing political activism he has done so much to propagate has now sunk". Windschuttle is wrong, and his arguments absurd.

Given that you have a moderation system I won't be commenting further on your blog or even reading it. Goodbye.

Fair enough -- that's your prerogative. In the meantime, I think my point has been made.

In terms of Chomsky's opinions on China, Communism, and the NLF, the following two articles are of particular relevance: 'In North Vietnam', The New York Review of Books, August 13, 1970; 'Counting the Bodies', Spectre, No.9, [?].

Run Spot Run!

2008-04-17T03:36:00.003+10:00

China calls for a people's army to march on Canberra to defend torch
John Garnaut and Maya Li in Beijing
Sydney Morning Herald
April 16, 2008

"THOUSANDS of Chinese Australians are being asked to rally and defend the Olympic torch from Tibetan "splittists", "scum" and "running dogs" when it arrives in Canberra next week..."

Chinese in Australia vow to defend Olympic torch from pro-Tibet 'scum'
Nick Squires
Daily Telegraph
April 16, 2008

"Thousands of Chinese expatriates are mobilising to defend the Olympic torch from pro-Tibet "scum" when it passes through the Australian capital..."

Uh-oh.

Note that the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne were the first to be boycotted: The People's Republic of China boycotted the Melbourne Games to retaliate against Taiwan's participation under the name "Formosa."

See also : China - Underground Trade Unions
Broadcast: 7/4/1998
Reporter: Jane Hutcheon
Arif Dirlik, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution, University of California Press, 1991 | Dimensions of Chinese Anarchism: An Interview with Arif Dirlik (Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, Fall, 1997) (from Chuck's excellent blog negations)

Heads bowed, eyes down, here comes the enemy
To hail the people's victory! Which people? What victory?
It's the People's Army that murdered the people
They've come to glue the shattered, battered statues in the square

Heads bowed, eyes down, here comes the enemy
With a haircut and a trigger-finger, that could be me!
Tanks tearing a hole in the silence
I've got armor-piercing rockets in my pocket--watch out!

You must've seen it, the boy in the white shirt
You want a fight? Yeah, you and whose army?
The people is bigger than the People's Army
My dad is bigger than your dad, and one day, one day

Raw and angry in front of the enemy
So it's turn back or kill. Boy versus tank
You want a fight? Yeah, you and whose army?
Here soldier, have a watermelon--this'll cool you down!

'Tiananmen Square', Chumbawamba, Slap!, 1990

OK, lay some drums on me
Gimme some bass

Working in a forge, black lungs, burnt skin
Callouses, arched back, hammering, hammering
Stalin watching over us, pigeon shit head
We'd spit on the floor, at this red bastard god

That's how grateful we are
(Repeat)

Bronze statue, pink marble, built to last
We brought him to his knees, in a single night
And the boots that remained, I attacked, I attacked
Hammering, hammering, the past is past

That's how grateful we are
(Repeat)

And the noise rang out, metal on metal
Pigeons flit, dust settled
Out from the shadows, we took to the streets
David chopping, at the giant's feet

That's how grateful we are
(Repeat)

Take it right down

You still want to come? Too late, too late
We're cut and we're fallen, like harvested wheat
But we lived on our feet, at least, at last
And we will live on our feet, at least, at last

That's how grateful we are
(Repeat)

'That's How Grateful We Are', Chumbawamba, Slap!, 1990 [MP3]

Windschuttle on Chomsky

2008-04-16T20:04:00.011+10:00

A few years ago, local historian and controversialist Keith Windschuttle penned an article on linguist and critic Noam Chomsky, titled 'The hypocrisy of Noam Chomsky' (The New Criterion, Vol. 21, No. 9, May 2003; see also 'A disgraceful career', Windschuttle's review (The New Criterion, Vol. 23, No. 1, September 2004) of The Anti-Chomsky Reader, Peter Collier and David Horowitz, editors, Encounter Books, 2004; the Reader is briefly dispatched by Michael Leon in 'The Anti-Chomsky Reader Continues a Soviet-Style Assault', CoreWeekly, January 13, 2005).

So what? Well, a commenter on Jeremy's blog, 'SB', has referred to it approvingly, and I thought I'd re-read it (having originally done so some time ago). My conclusion now, as it was then, is that it's a rather poor piece of writing -- not unexpectedly, given the quality of Windschuttle's other writings on history and politics.

Of course, Windschuttle's essay is hardly the first to accuse Chomsky of being a criminal, 'hypocrisy' tending to be one of the lesser crimes of which he's accused: others include Holocaust revisionism and support for the Pol Pot regime. Both criticisms were previously addressed by Christopher Hitchens over 20 years ago in 'The Chorus and Cassandra', Grand Street, Autumn, 1985.

More recently, Chomsky has been taken to task for his commentary on 9/11. Thus Windschuttle, in his hypocritical essay, writes:

Noam Chomsky was the most conspicuous American intellectual to rationalize the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The death toll, he argued, was minor compared to the list of Third World victims of the “far more extreme terrorism” of United States foreign policy. Despite its calculated affront to mainstream opinion, this sentiment went down very well with Chomsky’s own constituency. He has never been more popular among the academic and intellectual left than he is today.

Leaving aside the question of his popularity, what Chomsky said and wrote may be found in an interview with Chomsky conducted by Radio B92 on September 18, 2001 and, more extensively, in the book 9-11 (Greg Ruggiero, editor, Seven Stories Press, 2002). Point being, I've searched for the phrase "far more extreme terrorism" occurring in Chomsky's remarks, and I don't seem to be able to find it. However, the phrase does occur in an earlier text by Chomsky ('Force and Opinion', Z Magazine July-August, 1991):

Appreciation of the "salutary efficacy" of terror, to borrow John Quincy Adams's phrase, has been a standard feature of enlightened Western thought. It provides the basic framework for the propaganda campaign concerning international terrorism in the 1980s. Naturally, terrorism directed against us and our friends is bitterly denounced as a reversion to barbarism. But far more extreme terrorism that we and our agents conduct is considered constructive, or at worst insignificant, if it meets the pragmatic criterion. Even the vast campaign of international terrorism launched against Cuba by the Kennedy administration, far exceeding anything attributed to official enemies, does not exist in respected academic discourse or the mainstream media. In his standard and much respected scholarly study of international terrorism, Walter Laqueur depicts Cuba as a sponsor of the crime with innuendos but scarcely a pretense of evidence, while the campaign of international terrorism against Cuba merits literally not a word; in fact, Cuba is classed among those societies "free from terror."

The guiding principle is clear and straightforward: their terror is terror, and the flimsiest evidence suffices to denounce it and to exact retribution upon civilian bystanders who happen to be in the way; our terror, even if far more extreme, is merely statecraft, and therefore does not enter into the discussion of the plague of the modern age. The practice is understandable on the principles already discussed.

Huge massacres are treated by much the same criteria: theirs are crimes, ours statecraft or understandable error. In a study of U.S. power and ideology a decade ago [The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I and After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II, South End Press, 1979], Edward Herman and I reviewed numerous examples of two kinds of atrocities, "benign and constructive bloodbaths" that are acceptable or even advantageous to dominant interests, and "nefarious blood-baths" perpetrated by official enemies. The reaction follows the same pattern as the treatment of terrorism. The former are ignored, denied, or sometimes even welcomed; the latter elicit great outrage and often large-scale deceit and fabrication, if the available evidence is felt to be inadequate for doctrinal requirements...

What Chomsky actually remarked and wrote at the time about the attacks on New York and Washington was the following. In the interview with Radio B92 he said:

The horrendous terrorist attacks on Tuesday are something quite new in world affairs, not in their scale and character, but in the target. For the US, this is the first time since the War of 1812 that its national territory has been under attack, even threat... It is correct to say that this is a novel event in world history, not because of the scale of the atrocity -- regrettably -- but because of the target. How the West chooses to react is a matter of supreme importance. If the rich and powerful choose to keep to their traditions of hundreds of years and resort to extreme violence, they will contribute to the escalation of a cycle of violence, in a familiar dynamic, with long-term consequences that could be awesome. Of course, that is by no means inevitable. An aroused public within the more free and democratic societies can direct policies towards a much more humane and honorable course.

In the 9-11 title itself, Chomsky writes (as quoted by Paula Zahn) that "nothing can justify crimes such as those of September 11, but we can think of the United States as an innocent victim only if we adopt the convenient path of ignoring the record of its actions and those of its allies, which are, after all, hardly a secret" ('On 9-11: Noam Chomsky debates with Bill Bennett', CNN, May 30, 2002). Attacks upon Chomsky's political integrity at this time are also canvassed in 'Noam Chomsky and His Critics', Louis Proyect, MarxMail, August 15, 2002.

To return to Windschuttle's critique, 'SB' claims that Chomsky ("that mad hypocritical anti-semitic liar who can never admit his mistakes") was "a big fan of China, particularly during the cultural revolution, and of Vietnamese socialism". As evidence, 'SB' cites Windschuttle, who writes:

For all his in-principle disdain of communism, however, when it came to the real world of international politics Chomsky turned out to endorse a fairly orthodox band of socialist revolutionaries. They included the architects of communism in Cuba, Fidel Castro and Che Guevera, as well as Mao Tse-tung and the founders of the Chinese communist state.

As proof, Windschuttle refers to a panel Chomsky took part in in New York in 1967, along with Hannah Arendt (another "mad hypocritical anti-semitic liar"?), Susan Sontag (ditto?) and others. The subject of their discussion was not their common love of Mao Tse-tung (Mao Zedong) and Hồ Chí Minh, surprisingly, but 'The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act?'. In any case, Windschuttle continues:

Chomsky told a forum in New York in December, 1967 that in China “one finds many things that are really quite admirable.” He believed the Chinese had gone some way to empowering the masses along lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles:

China is an important example of a new society in which very interesting and positive things happened at the local level, in which a good deal of the collectivization and communization was really based on mass participation and took place after a level of understanding had been reached in the peasantry that led to this next step.

When he provided this endorsement of what he called Mao Tse-tung’s “relatively livable” and “just society,” Chomsky was probably unaware he was speaking only five years after the end of the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history. He did not know, because the full story did not come out for another two decades, that the very collectivization he endorsed was the principal cause of this famine, one of the greatest human catastrophes ever, with a total death toll of thirty million people...

In fact, Chomsky was well aware of the degree of violence that communist regimes had routinely directed at the people of their own countries. At the 1967 New York forum he acknowledged both “the mass slaughter of landlords in China” and “the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam” that had taken place once the communists came to power. His main objective, however, was to provide a rationalization for this violence, especially that of the National Liberation Front then trying to take control of South Vietnam. Chomsky revealed he was no pacifist.

I don’t accept the view that we can just condemn the NLF terror, period, because it was so horrible. I think we really have to ask questions of comparative costs, ugly as that may sound. And if we are going to take a moral position on this—and I think we should—we have to ask both what the consequences were of using terror and not using terror. If it were true that the consequences of not using terror would be that the peasantry in Vietnam would continue to live in the state of the peasantry of the Philippines, then I think the use of terror would be justified.

First, regarding Chomsky's acknowledgement of the slaughter of landlords in China and North Vietnam, it's important to note the context for these remarks. Chomsky says: "...I think one has to be rather cautious about accepting as absolute the alternatives peaceful stagnation and violent revolution. There's also a possibility of spontaneous revolution that uses both violence and nonviolent tactics, that minimizes the use of terror except as necessary in defense. I certainly don't think that things like the mass slaughter of landlords in China contributed in any significant way to the revolutionary successes, just as I don't think the slaughter of landlords in North Vietnam contributed in any respect to the successes of the revolution there, such as they were; and in fact the North Vietnamese agree with this judgment."

In other words, rather than "rationalize violence", Chomsky's concern here and throughout the course of his speaking is the utility of nonviolence. Thus: "What one has to ask about a revolution is whether its success is based on its violence; and if we look at revolutions that have taken place I think it's not at all clear that the success has been based on the violence. In fact to a significant extent it seems to me that the successes have been based on the nonviolence." The extent to which a social revolution relies on violence to succeed, in other words, is a significant indicator of its potentially degenerative -- which is to say, distinctly reactionary -- nature. Or as Chomsky says:

With all these arguments in favor of this type of [revolutionary] violence, I still think there are good grounds to reject it. It seems to me, from the little we know about such matters, that a new society rises out of the actions that are taken to form it, and the institutions and the ideology it develops are not independent of those actions; in fact, they're heavily colored by them, they're shaped by them in many ways. And one can expect that actions that are cynical and vicious, whatever their intent, will inevitably condition and deface the quality of the ends that are achieved. Now, again, in part this is just a matter of faith. But I think there's at least some evidence that better results follow from better means.

In essence, Windschuttle has taken Chomsky's observations on violence and stood them on their head.

Secondly, regarding Chomsky's observations on the economic and social changes brought about in twentieth-century China, Windschuttle claims that the kind of collectivisation Chomsky endorses -- that which proceeds along "lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles" -- produced terrible famine in China; "the great Chinese famine of 1958–1962, the worst in human history".

Unfortunately, here Windschuttle confuses forced collectivisation -- which Chomsky, along "lines endorsed by his own libertarian socialist principles" -- opposes, and the voluntary collectivisation Chomsky supports. Further, in the same panel discussion, Chomsky makes his support for such principles and practices quite clear. Thus according to Chomsky, "the anarchist revolution in Spain, I think, is a nearly classic example of this sort of thing, where the great success of the revolution was largely due to the very long period of preparation -- extending over a generation, in fact -- during which the groundwork was laid for what turned out to be a very sudden, spontaneous, and I think highly successful revolutionary action"; the forced collectivisation, adoption of Lysenkoist farming methods and so on that produced the famines in China are in fact the product of the exact opposite of Chomsky's political vision.

The remainder of Windschuttle's critique proceeds in a similar vein.

For Chomsky's views on anarchism ('libertarian socialism'), see:

Chomsky On Anarchism, Barry Pateman, editor, and Noam Chomsky, AK Press, 2005;
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, (with Tom Lane), December 23, 1996;
Noam Chomsky on Anarchism, Marxism & Hope for the Future, interview with Kevin Doyle, May 1995;
'Notes on Anarchism', Noam Chomsky, in Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, 1970.

======

An ABC of Windschuttle:

A) The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land, 1803-1847, Macleay Press, 2002*
B) Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle's fabrication of Aboriginal history, Robert Manne, editor, Black Inc, 2003
C) Washout: On the academic response to the fabrication of Aboriginal history, John Dawson, Macleay Press, 2004
[D The History Wars (Second Edition), Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark, Melbourne University Press, 2004]

*"At the time of the publication of Volume One it was announced that a second volume, to be published in 2003, would cover claims of frontier violence in New South Wales and Queensland, and a third, in 2004, would cover Western Australia. On 20 January 2006, Windschuttle was reported as saying that the second volume would be published within twelve months. On 9 February 2008, however, it was announced that the second volume, to be published later in 2008, would be entitled The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume Two: The "Stolen Generations" and would address the issue of the removal of Aboriginal children -- the "stolen generation" -- from their families in the 20th century. No recent reference has been made to the previously projected second and third volumes."

See also : 'Silenced Voices', Eve Vincent and Clare Land, Arena magazine, No.67, October - November 2003: "The 'history wars' have been conducted in the substantial absence of Indigenous voices and with the exclusion of non-Western forms of knowledge. It is time to resituate, rethink and listen anew."

Oh yeah...

Bob Gould penned an open letter to Keith and Liz Windschuttle titled 'Deconstructing the 1960s and 1970s', June 30, 2000; I think it may have gotten lost in the mail. Robert Manne -- in writing with regards 'PM's contempt for ABC' (The Age, June 17, 2006) -- also briefly reviews Windschuttle's political trajectory from Marxist to neo-con. On Chomsky, see also 'The Wild Man in the Wings', Clinton Fernandes, overland, No.180, Spring 2005 and subsequent correspondence with Philip Mendes in No.181, concentrating on the subject of Chomsky, Faurisson, and the Holocaust.

Boeing workers on strike

2008-04-16T19:10:00.005+10:00

Boeing Workers Continue Strike
Community Assembly
6am Thursday 17 April
Wharf Road
Fishermens Bend
(Off Todd Rd - Melways E12)
Public Transport 235, 237 or 606 Bus

Wednesday 16 April:
Management's plan thwarted
A mass meeting this morning of 500 Boeing workers and supporters at 6am prevented efforts to break the picket line. It was rumored that strike breakers in buses with assistance of police would bust through the picket at 6am and 2pm, however nothing eventuated.

Mass meeting tomorrow
Boeing workers will be attending a mass meeting at 6am and it is requested that supporters are present to assist with picketing.

Serious support coming
Given the gravity of the situation with 700 strikers potentially facing fines and no end in sight it is anticipated that the dispute could continue for a while. Efforts are currently underway to organise funds to help the workers and provide material assistance to the picket. If you can assist with funds, food or picket support please let us know: contact@unionsolidarity.org

Background:
The dispute started on Monday April 7 when Boeing sacked a worker and suspended another without going through the agreed dispute settlement procedure. Workers believe that another 8 workers face a similar fate. Efforts to resolve the dispute failed on Wednesday April 9 and workers walked off the job. Boeing then started legal moves which now see the workers potentially faces fines.

How can I support the strike?

* Attend the 24hour community assembly
* Organise fund raising for the strikers
* Download and print support leaflet
* Send messages of support to contact@unionsolidarity.org
* Join the SMS alert list to be informed of mobilisations

Source : Union Solidarity

"No kitty this is my Debord game!"

2008-04-15T20:09:00.009+10:00

Defending the Property of an Anti-Property Marxist Scholar
Andrea L. Foster
The Chronicle of Higher Education
April 15, 2008

Guy Debord, the Marxist and French philosopher who died in 1994, may be rolling over in his grave.

A lawyer representing his widow [Alice Becker-Ho / Alice Debord] has threatened Alexander R. Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at New York University, with legal action. Mr. Galloway said the lawyer sent him a letter demanding that he cease and desist from distributing his online war game, claiming it infringes on the copyright of the Debord estate. The philosopher had created a similar war game.

But copyrights and intellectual property were anathema to Debord, said Mr. Galloway. The Situationist International movement [sic] that Debord founded in 1957 is a mix of anarchism and Marxism [sic]. Its followers scrawled, "Abolish copyright" [?!?] on building walls during the May 1968 student uprisings in Paris.

The irony of defending the property rights of Debord, a Marxist, has not been lost on scholars, who have publicized the case on their blogs [ah, er, um, yeah, okay, sure].

Mr. Galloway does not deny that the two-person computer game he developed is based on Debord's board game, the Game of War. Debord, who was an avid student of war strategy, released a few handcrafted copies of the board game in 1978. The goal of the game, which resembles chess, is to corner and destroy the opponents' pieces. Debord wrote a book about the game, with his wife, that was translated into English last year.

One of Debord's games, cast in silver and copper, is on display at Columbia University's Buell Center for the Study of Architecture, alongside Mr. Galloway's online version, called Kriegspiel. The goal of Kriegspiel, German for a generic 18th-century war game, is the same as Debord's game.

A computer programmer, Mr. Galloway said he spent about a year designing the digital game, which can be downloaded from the Web for free. "It's part of my scholarly research into how antagonism is simulated in war games and computer games," he said. "It's also part of my research into the work of Debord."

Despite the similarities between his creation and Debord's, Mr. Galloway disputed that he was breaking the law. "I don't think I'm infringing on anyone's copyright in the creation of this game," he said. He declined to discuss his legal quagmire further.

John Beckman, a spokesman for New York University, said the university received a similar cease-and-desist letter. The university responded to it, he said, but he declined to elaborate.

Wendy M. Seltzer, a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society who is familiar with Mr. Galloway's case, believes the Debord estate is overreaching in accusing Mr. Galloway of copyright infringement.

The idea for a game is not copyrightable, she said, only the expression of a game. Mr. Galloway's game used the idea of Debord's game, she added, but it did not duplicate the artistry and detail of Debord's board game.

Ms. Seltzer, who is also a visiting assistant professor at Northeastern University School of Law, sees similarities between Mr. Galloway's case and one involving the Facebook word game, Scrabulous. In the latter case, the owners of the board game, Scrabble, have accused the developers of Scrabulous of infringing on their copyright. Ms. Seltzer believes that infringement claim is without merit as well.

See also : Anarchist War Gaming

The Paris Commune succumbed less to the force of arms than to the force of habit. The most scandalous practical example was the refusal to use the cannons to seize the French National Bank when money was so desperately needed. During the entire existence of the Commune the bank remained a Versaillese enclave in Paris, defended by nothing more than a few rifles and the mystique of property and theft. The other ideological habits proved in every respect equally disastrous (the resurrection of Jacobinism, the defeatist strategy of barricades in memory of 1848, etc.). ~ Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi, Raoul Vaneigem, Theses on the Paris Commune, March 18, 1962

Corrupt Knight Returned

2008-04-15T14:34:00.012+10:00

As expected, billionaire Silvio Berlusconi (1936--) has been re-elected Prime Minister, and his Popolo della Libertà or PdL ('People of Freedom'/'Freedom Folk') Party is likely to obtain an absolute majority in the Italian Senate. Later in the week The Knight will again face trial on corruption charges; a trial suspended for the election campaign.

Politically, Berlusconi collaborates with the most right-wing elements in the country. The “People of Freedom” is an alliance of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which is organizationally based on his business empire, and... Gianfranco Fini’s National Alliance, which emerged from the fascist MSI. While Fini has officially dissociated himself and his supporters from the fascist tradition, avowed fascists such as the granddaughter of the Duce, Alessandra Mussolini, and the convicted businessman Giuseppe Ciarrapico are also standing as candidates for the PdL.

The most important ally of the PdL is the separatist Northern League (Lega Nord), whose racist and in particular anti-Muslim campaigns are on a par with those conducted by ultra-rightist organisations such as the German National Democratic Party (NPD), the French National Front or the Belgian Vlaams Belang.

For the parliamentary left, the election has been a disaster. Sinistra Arcobaleno ('Rainbow Left'/'Rainbow Alliance') -- consisting of Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation), Partito dei Comunisti Italiani (Italian Communist Party), the Greens and Sinistra Democratica (Left Democrats) -- "scoring around 3.5 percent of the Senate vote compared with 11.5 percent in 2006". If so, the Rainbow Left would be left without any representation; it would also be the first time that Communist deputies would be absent from Italy's postwar parliament. As a consequence, party leader Fausto Bertinotti has resigned. The far right, on the other hand -- with whom Berlusconi has formed a coalition -- did very well. According to Reuters, the Lega Nord "could win 8-9 percent of the national vote, doubling the 4.5 percent it won at the last election in 2006"; the National Alliance also, apparently, did relatively well.

In the Lower House of Parliament, Berlusconi's party received 46.8% of the vote, compared to 37.6% for the principal opposition party, Walter Veltroni's Partito Democratico (The Democratic Party, PD). This translates into 340 seats for the PdL, and 239 seats for the Democrats (of a total of 630 seats). In the Senate, the proportion of votes going to the PdL and the PD was 47.3% and 38% respectively, or 168 and 130 seats (of a total of 315 seats). The other party to achieve representation in Parliament is the Unione dei Democratici Cristiani e di Centro, or UDC (Union of Christian and Centre Democrats), which gained 36 MPs and 3 Senators.

See also : Berlusconi's Victory: A Revolution for Italy's Parliament, Michael Braun, Spiegel Online, April 15, 2008:

...A new beginning -- that's also the key phrase on the radical left, which was punished in the election like no other political force in the country. Two years ago, the two communist parties and the Greens managed to get a good 10 percent of the vote between them. This time, they ran as part of the left-wing federation The Left -- the Rainbow.

But the new unity project failed to convince the electorate. Some preferred to vote for Veltroni's center-left party in a bid to stop Berlusconi. Others simply stayed at home, because they had not forgiven the radical left for taking part in Prodi's coalition. In the end, the federation not only failed to reach the 8-percent hurdle for the Senate, but -- against all predictions -- also missed the 4-percent hurdle in the Chamber of Deputies. For the first time since 1945, the communists will no longer be represented in Italy's parliament.

And also for the first time -- and in Italy this counts as a real revolution -- there are only four parliamentary groups in the lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, meaning that the time of having 23 to 30 parties fighting it out between themselves is past. On the left, there is Veltroni's Democratic Party, in the middle the UDC, and on the right Berlusconi's People of Freedom and the Northern League. The new constellation will bring an unusual clarity and simplicity to Italian politics.

Nonetheless, the new parliament will still have its old leading man Berlusconi, who has dominated Rome's political scene for 14 years, and who wants to continue until 2020: first for five years as prime minister -- and then maybe another seven as president.

Italy’s fragmented left, Rudi Ghedini, Le Monde diplomatique, April 8, 2008 | Bertinotti Resigns As Rainbow Left Reaches End of Line, Gian Antonio Stella (English translation by Giles Watson), Corriere Della Sera, April 15, 2008 | Collapse of “left” parties enables Berlusconi to win Italian election, Peter Schwarz, wsws, April 16, 2008

Results : Lower House : Senate

G20 : 'escape', 'avoidance', 'dodging': sentencing

2008-04-15T00:30:00.005+10:00

Three G20 protesters admit riot charges
Sydney Morning Herald [AAP]
April 7, 2008

Lawyers defending three protesters involved in the violent G20 riots in Melbourne in 2006 have asked a magistrate not to convict them.

The trio were among a group of demonstrators involved in confrontations with police outside the Group of 20 nations summit on November 17 and 18, 2006.

Danya Bryx, 23, is accused of ramming an industrial bin into barricades behind which police stood, ramming a water-filled barrier into police lines and throwing it at police.

Bryx pleaded guilty in Melbourne Magistrates Court Monday to two counts of riot and one each of intentionally destroying property and recklessly causing injury to a female police officer.

Her lawyer Marita Altman said jailing the law student would be a "highly disproportionate" punishment and requested she be dealt with through a community-based order without conviction.

In a letter read to the court, Bryx described being caught up in a situation that quickly got out of control and expressed remorse for causing fear and injury to police.

Ms Altman said Bryx wanted to travel to the Middle East to work in human rights or environmental law, using her skills to do community work and make a difference.

"Their lesson that comes from all of this is you don't make change in this way," she said.

However, prosecutor Chris Beale said Bryx was involved in two riots where police were injured and her actions were serious.

Beth Nathan, 22, pleaded guilty to one count of riot after being filmed tipping a water-filled barrier onto riot police.

Ms Altman, also for Nathan, said her client was remorseful and should be given a community based order without conviction.

David Nguyen, 23, of Coburg, pleaded guilty to one charge each of riot and criminal damage.

His lawyer Rob O'Neill told the court he went along to photograph the event but got caught up in a "moment of stupidity" and hurled a glass bottle at police.

He said a community based order without conviction was appropriate given his client's good character, youth and clean record.

A further seven protesters are due to face Melbourne Magistrates Court this week.

Another, Paul Hood, 38, of Queensland, was committed to stand trial and will face the County Court for a case conference on May 29. He has reserved his plea on charges including riot and affray.

Magistrate Sarah Dawes will sentence Bryx, Nathan and Nguyen on Monday.

And she did.

G20 protesters avoid jail
Sarah-Jane Collins
The Age
April 14, 2008

Ten protesters who pleaded guilty to charges arising from the G20 riots in Melbourne have escaped jail after a magistrate today rejected prosecution arguments asking for custodial sentences.

Sofia Todorova, Danya Bryx, David Caldwell, Julia Dehm, Rosalie Delaney, David Jorm, Beth Nathan, David Nguyen, Eric Palsis and Robert Karaca faced the Melbourne Magistrates Court on charges including riot, criminal damage and recklessly causing injury.

They were involved in two separate riots during protests at the G20 summit on November 18, 2006, that included throwing bottles and rocks at police and throwing barricades, metal poles and wheelie bins at a police brawler van.

One police officer suffered a fractured wrist as a result of the actions of some of the protesters.

Magistrate Sarah Dawes said the 10 protesters had all demonstrated remorse at their actions and their offending did not warrant immediate jail terms.

Nathan, 22, of Brunswick, Karaca, 21, of Richmond and Todorova, 26, of Moonee Ponds each received a 12 month community-based order (CBO) with a requirement that they complete 180 hours of community service.

Delaney, 20, of Parkville, cried as Ms Dawes read out her sentence for one count of riot and one count of criminal damage.

"(Your actions) demonstrated the utmost contempt for police," she told Delaney before sentencing her to a 12-month CBO with 200 hours of community service.

Nguyen, 23, of Coburg, was also given a 12-month CBO with 250 hours of community service.

Palsis, 36, received a five-month suspended sentence for his part in the violent protests that took place at the edges of the G20 summit. He described the protest to police as "ugly, frightening and chaotic". Ms Dawes said his assessment "demonstrates a realistic appraisal of exactly what occurred on that day".

Four other protesters, Br[y]x, 24, Dehm, 25, Jorm, 26 and Caldwell, 30, were given suspended sentences for their participation. They were all charged with two counts of riot, one count of recklessly causing injury and one count of criminal damage.

Ms Dawes said she had found sentencing them particularly difficult because they had the most serious charges against them.

"Sentencing you ... has proven to be an extremely difficult task."

Br[y]x, who is currently completing her final year of an Arts/Law degree at Monash University received a nine-month sentence suspended for 18 months and a $3000 fine.

Caldwell received a six-month suspended sentence and $2000 fine.

Dehm, who graduated with a law degree from Melbourne University and is completing her article clerkship with Victorian Legal Aid, was sentenced to a seven-month suspended sentence and a fine of $3000. Her position with Victorian Legal Aid will now be reviewed.

Jorm, a member of the Hare Krishna group, said he was a pacifist who had been drawn into the events around him and got carried away.

He pleaded guilty at the first opportunity and was the first protester to do so.

"That plea had shown great courage in light of the attitudes of some of the defendants," Ms Dawes said.

Nevertheless Jorm, who was heavily involved in the two separate riot incidents, received the harshest sentence: nine months suspended for 18 months with a $4000 fine.

All 10 had convictions recorded against them and Ms Dawes said their conduct "showed a callous disregard for (police) welfare. Violence was directed solely at the police".

Nathan, Bryx, Palsis, Jorm, Dehm, Delaney and Todorova were also ordered to pay $8310.57 and $5323.72 for damage caused to police equipment.

See also : 'Callous' G20 rioters escape time behind bars, Sarah-Jane Collins, The Age, April 15, 2008 | G20 protesters avoid jail, Emily Power, Herald Sun, April 14, 2008 | G20 protesters dodge jail, Emily Power, Herald Sun, April 14, 2008 | Ten G20 rioters escape jail terms, Emily Power, Herald Sun, April 15, 2008

Among all the dodging and weaving, the carnage and bloodshed at G20 (November, 2006) has prompted deep reflection on the part of local media. For example, picking his way among the bodies, Keith Moor of the Herald Sun quotes anonymous police sources, who similarly deride the 'softly, softly' approach police at G20 were presumed to have conducted under the direction of Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon. Yes, a woman.

Hard-bitten police scorn soft touch
Keith Moor
Herald Sun
April 9, 2008

...Many responding to the Herald Sun police survey accused force command of letting them down by ordering a restrained approach to such protests.

"The 'softly softly' approach to policing must be scrapped," one officer said.

"We have become a joke, and the G20 riots, where command just sat back and let the thugs run riot, was an embarrassment. Victoria deserves a better response than 'Don't hurt them or we'll be sued'.

"Police command needs to stop worrying about civil litigation and get more police on the streets, retake the vast amount of territory that has been lost to thuggery, and get some pride back into the ranks."

Another said people no longer respected police and were being allowed to get away with far too much.

"The G20 summit is a perfect example where property was left to be damaged by anarchists. Yet command let them continue with the disgraceful behaviour."

...

In reality, the only police subject to any kind of quasi-legal investigation as a result of G20 -- including the assault and kidnapping of Drasko Boljevic and an assault upon protesters outside Melbourne Museum on the Sunday afternoon -- were cleared before the investigation had even begun. Further, police injuries during the so-called riot were minimal, the most serious being a case of tennis elbow (Riot policewoman cops tennis elbow, Matthew Burgess, The Age, February 19, 2008) and a broken wrist. The exact cirmcumstances surrounding both injuries are yet to be made clear.

On the other hand, the policing of the event as a whole was a near-total success: the rich and powerful men who attended the Summit were able to luxuriate in the Hilton Hotel, completely undisturbed by the rabble outside, who were kept from getting anywhere near it. In addition, the police have been able to draw upon the support of the media, large segments of the general public, revolutionary Marxists, and even NSW anti-terrorist police (Anti-terror police swoop on activists' homes, Mark Buttler and Paul Anderson, Herald Sun, March 15, 2007) in their largely-successful efforts to track down, arrest, and prosecute individuals deemed responsible for the bloody toll of November, 2006.

As it stands, one protester, Akin Sari, has been jailed thus far for offences committed during G20, and a number of others, who have plead not guilty, are yet to begin their trial proper. The G20 court cases are likely to extend well into 2009, with one more significant stage in the legal process before arrestees are tried. To make a donation to the support fund or to find out more, contact afterg20[at]gmail[dot]com.

Note that, in the 504 days between November 16 and April 15, UNICEF estimates that 15,120,000 children have died as a result of poverty-related causes.

Pfft, who's counting?

See also : afterg20.org

Toxteth, 1981:

Brixton, 1981 (The Battle for Brixton):

The Future?

Stylish Greek anarchists register doubts on legitimacy of Greek justice system, Saudi monarchy

2008-04-15T00:07:00.004+10:00

(Presumed) Greek anarchists are up to their usual monkey business:

Greece: Saudi diplomatic car destroyed in arson attack
International Herald Tribune [AP]
April 14, 2008

ATHENS, Greece: A car belonging to the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Greece was destroyed in an arson attack early Monday, police said.

Small cooking gas canisters exploded underneath the parked vehicle in a northern suburb of the capital. No one was injured.

An anarchist group calling itself Cells of Subversion claimed responsibility for the attack in a telephone call to a private television station.

Arson gangs frequently carry out attacks in Athens, targeting cars and property of banks, government department, embassies and international companies.

Anarchists burn foreign diplomat's car in Athens
Reuters
April 14, 2008

ATHENS (Reuters) - A Greek anarchist group claimed responsibility for firebombing a car belonging to the Saudi Arabian embassy in Athens on Monday, causing minor damage, police said.

The car, which had diplomatic licence plates and no country markings, was set ablaze by home-made gas canister devices around 2 a.m. British time, a police official said. It was parked on an Athens street.

"The group, which called themselves the "Subversive Cell", claimed the attack was in response to the arrest of a suspected criminal involved in a bank robbery last year who is set to go to trial this week," said the official, who declined to be named.

The group made the call to a private television station, the official added.

Cars belonging to diplomats, businessmen and politicians have often been attacked by self-styled anarchists in Greece, and more than a dozen have been set on fire in the past year.

(Reporting by Tatiana Fragou, writing by George Hatzidakis)

The "suspected criminal involved in a bank robbery last year who is set to go to trial this week" is presumably a reference to the plight of Giorgos Voutsis-Vogiatzis, currently being held in Korydallos prison. You can read a letter (March 19, 2008) by Giorgos here.

Previously:

Athens: anarchist bank robber gets 25 years
AFP
July 17, 2007

Athens - A self-proclaimed anarchist bank robber arrested after a shoot-out in Athens city centre in 2006 was jailed for 25 years on Tuesday.

To jeers from dozens of young anarchists and amid a heavy police presence, an Athens criminal court found 28-year-old Iannis Dimitrakis guilty of armed robbery, attempted homicide and membership of a criminal organisation.

But he was cleared of six bank robberies carried out by a gang known as the "robbers in black", which police suspected he had taken part in.

Dimitrakis was part of a gang of four who had just robbed a shopping centre in central Athens when police intervened.

He was wounded in a shoot-out with police and captured, while his accomplices got away.

During the trial, he admitted his involvement in the robbery but cited his anarchist convictions by way of justification.

In recent months, groups of young people have staged a series of demonstrations in solidarity with Dimitrakis in both Athens and Salonica. There have also been molotov cocktail attacks on public buildings.

Inmates at the top security Malandrino prison also mutinied last April in protest at what they said was a beating handed out to Dimitrakis by prison guards.

Bonehead found guilty of threatening juror

2008-04-15T00:01:00.003+10:00

Bonehead found guilty of threatening juror
TV3 [NZPA]
April 9, 2008

A Lower Hutt bonehead was today found guilty by a High Court jury of trying to corrupt a juror during a white supremacist trial last year.

Lloyd James Bowling, 40, unemployed, sighed and shook his head after a jury took 2-1/2 hours to find him guilty of being party to an attempt to corruptly influence a juror during the High Court trial in Wellington last July.

He was remanded for sentence on May 30, but will appear in Wellington District Court on Friday to be sentenced on another, unrelated, charge of injuring with intent.

During the trial, which began on Monday, the court heard a juror had received a note with "not guilty" in capital letters and a swastika written on it during the trial of four men charged with the kidnap, robbery and assault of a Canadian Indian tourist in April last year.

Three of the defendants in the trial, Jaydon Borland, Jason Gregory and Benjamin McPadden, were found guilty of various charges, while the fourth, Mark Gage, was discharged due to lack of evidence.

On the last day of the trial, the juror -- whose identity is suppressed -- found the note on his doorstep, was discharged from the jury and later left New Zealand, in part due to concerns over his family's safety.

Crown prosecutor Mark Anderson said the juror was targeted by white supremacist associates of the men as he was not Caucasian.

A search of Bowling's home located pro-nazi paraphernalia and writings and articles about the trial of the men.

Bowling's fingerprint was on the note, and it came from an exercise book he owned. When arrested, he posed a hypothetical question to a police officer, asking what would happen if it emerged he had written the note but not delivered it.

The Crown said this constituted an admission.

Bowling's defence lawyer Keith Jefferies said the Crown had the wrong man, and implicated two other people who also had the motive and means to have sent the note.

Today, Justice Robert Dobson told the jury to put aside feelings of prejudice or sympathy while considering the evidence in the case.

"You may find that anti-Black or anti-Jewish slogans are offensive. You must put any such feelings to one side," he said.

Radio New Zealand : 'Anarchy in Action'

2008-04-14T20:04:00.001+10:00

April 13, 2008 – Anarchy in Action

A Radio New Zealand programme about anarchists and the influence of anarchism on the protest and labour movements.

[Audio]

Anarchy for many is synonymous with chaos, disorder and violence but for a growing number of idealistic New Zealanders it’s a serious political philosophy capable of ushering in an era of freedom and equality.

The word, anarchy, comes from the Greek, anarchos meaning to have no ruler – which is one of the few things anarchism’s supporters and detractors can agree on.

Think of an anarchist and the image that comes to mind is likely to be either a black-flag waving punk or a bomb-throwing 19th century revolutionary.

Yet the list of those who consider themselves anarchists ranges from the radical in thought, but conservative in appearance, such as linguist and political dissident Noam Chomsky, through to the multi-pierced protesters manning the anti-globalisation barricades.

But do people seriously believe that society could function without a government or police force?

Part one:

Long time Wellington activist and anarchist Sam Buchanan talks about his beliefs and influences.

Part two:

Historian and author of Rabble Rousers and Merry Pranksters – A History of Anarchism in Aotearoa, Toby Boraman, provides a snap-shot of a century of anarchism in New Zealand.

Part three:

Christian anarchist Manu Caddie and Green MP and former member of an anarcho-feminist theatre troupe, Metiria Turei, discuss the influence anarchism has had on their daily lives.

Produced by Jeremy Rose

mathaba, defamation and the law

2008-04-13T04:04:00.003+10:00

The following articles provide some background to the case of Adam Musa King v Sunday Telegraph (2004); in the UK, the first defamation case to use a CFA (Conditional Fee Agreement). As previously noted, my having referred to the case, as well as having republished one of the defamatory articles (in the context of a discussion of the general perspective and functioning of mathaba.net; the article itself is available via Lord Justice Brook's decision of May 18, 2004, paragraph 11), resulted in a complaint by mathaba.net, which has resulted -- to cut a long story short -- in my reversion to this location as a site from which to blog.

1) Freedom of speech is being held to ransom, David Hooper, The Times, September 23, 2003
2) Newspapers falling prey to legal eagles, Jessica Hodgson, The Observer, September 28 2003
3) Press wins legal victory on libel, Joshua Rozenberg, The Telegraph, May 19, 2004
4) End urged to 'no win, no fee' libel cases, Frances Gibb, The Times, May 19, 2004
5) Man Wins Libel Damages Over al Qaeda Charge, Editor & Publisher (AP), June 8, 2004
6) Sunday Telegraph pays out over al-Qaida claims, Claire Cozens and agencies, MediaGuardian, June 8, 2004
7) No win, no fee - no free press, Conal Walsh, The Observer, July 3, 2005

At the time, King's victory in court was hailed on mathaba.net (Victory for Right over Might, mathaba.net, June 7, 2004):

A lengthy legal battle came to a close today, with the Telegraph Group making a public apology and out of court settlement with the independent Mathaba.Net news service editor, Adam King.

The Telegraph Group, owned by the Hollinger Corporation along with the Jerusalem Post and numerous other news media and which includes Henry Kissinger, Richard Perle and Conrad Black on its Board of Directors, had published a false story alleging that King supported terrorism.

[See also : Richard Perle v Noam Chomsky @ The Ohio State University, 1988 (audio)]

At the Royal Courts of Justice in London, England, Mr King said: "This is a victory for the small man against the power of the press, for... The Green Book and for right over might. There was absolutely no investigative journalism in the Telegraph article to speak of, therefore the claim (in the British corporate media) is bogus that CFA's (Conditional Fee Arrangements) could have any 'chilling effect' on such activities. I am very grateful to my QC Richard Rampton, to my barrister Harvey Starte and solicitors Carter-Ruck and Partners as well as Mr Justice Eady for making it possible to represent me under Conditional Fee Arrangements and for enabling me to obtain some measure of justice in the Royal Courts."

The victory for King is also being hailed by the ADAM Alliance in Defense of Alternative Media [?] as a victory for alternative and independent media which expose the corruption behind the ‘New World Order’ advocated by the Hollinger directors such as Kissinger and Perle who have a long and bloody history.

“The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, which includes Hollinger directors on its think tank, advocated the current Iraq War, which architect is widely seen as being Richard Perle, who also serves on the Defense Policy Board of the Pentagon”, ADAM Spokeswoman Birgitte Sandell [?] said...

Oddly, a single post on an Internet forum (titled 'The no-win, no-fee system that allows people who have been libeled a chance to have their day in court is under threat by newspapers', attributed to King, and dated July 2, 2005) quotes from the above article in The Observer:

Newspapers and broadcasters have joined forces to lobby the government for legal changes, arguing that free speech is under threat.

Media organisations claim they are being held to ransom by opportunistic litigants who launch bogus claims at little or no risk to themselves.

Alastair Brett, legal manager of the Times and Sunday Times, says some of the lawyers who take on CFA cases in the hope of using the 'success fee' rule to make an easy buck are even worse. 'Nobody objects to people getting help from lawyers,' says Brett. 'What we do object to is lawyers on a gravy train charging double their fees - particularly when they were already charging £400 an hour.'

Brett complains that the amount paid out in damages to a libel claimant nowadays is often dwarfed by his or her legal costs. This, he says, puts 'incredible pressure' on newspapers to avoid a full-blown court case and settle claims early and on unfair terms.

Libel specialist Carter Ruck has piloted a number of 'no win, no fee' libel claims against newspapers. But the firm insists those claims are sound and denies it is making unwarranted profits at the media's expense. Nigel Tait, a partner, says the firm takes a risk in bringing CFA cases to trial. 'When we win, it's usually at the very beginning. Newspapers settle quickly to keep costs down. So from our point of view, it takes an awful lot of wins to pay for one loss.'

To Tait, the social value of 'no win no fee' system is not in doubt. 'I acted for a lady on income support who was wrongly accused of attempted murder. She got £100,000 from her local newspaper and more importantly a large apology. She would never have been able to do that without the help of specialist lawyers. When I first started out, people would lose their homes if they took on newspapers and lost.'

...

It then proceeds to quote a lengthy text on the subject of the case, ostensibly written by King. "However, there is much truth and falsehood in what is claimed by the above parties, and I can speak from my own experience...", writes King, which is precisely what he then proceeds to do. According to King, Carter Ruck forced him, under threat of removing their legal representation, to accept a token amount in damages -- £50,000 -- while they themselves aimed to receive something like one million in fees.

And so on.

Even more oddly, however, another, regular contributor to Mathaba.net, Dr. Sahib Mustaqim Bleher ('The Flying Imam') writes ('Censorship: Law Firm Carter-Ruck Attack Internet Freedom', The Flying Imam blog, May 18, 2006) that Carter Ruck, in turn, threatened legal action against King for these sort of unkind remarks. Thus:

Freedom of speech on the internet? Forget it – if a recent vendetta involving libel lawyers Carter-Ruck goes their way. The firm was upset by negative comments made by a former client who held a grudge due to having allegedly been pressur[ed] by his own lawyers to accept min[u]scule damages in a case against the Telegraph so that they could walk away with hundreds of thousands of pounds in cost awards. Instead of writing to their former client, however, the libel lawyers went for the jugular and threatened his internet service provider with legal action should they not remove the offending material immediately.

If anyone gets a demand from a law firm threatening legal action, what will their first reaction be? Will they ask themselves whether they have done anything wrong or whether the demands are justified? Unlikely. The first thing going through the mind of the recipient of a legal threat is whether they can afford being drawn into litigation. Law firms know this and use this weariness to their advantage...

What's good for the goose is good for the gander I guess.

Barry Pateman on Anti-Franco Activism After the Spanish Civil War

2008-04-13T02:20:00.000+10:00

An extract from the latest # (No.65) of Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed, Spring/Summer 2008:

As you get older you find yourself doing more and more of these events and it’s quite sad as well as quite heartening in many ways. I remember speaking 20 years ago in Conway Hall, in London, about 50 years after the Spanish Revolution, and it is somewhat haunting to think that that generation of militants are now dead and gone.

So tonight I want to talk about the anarchist resistance to Franco, from 1939 onwards. Before I do that I want to say two or three things, because some of the things I say may sound rather harsh and critical of the CNT (and I’m not really going to talk about anything else apart from anarchism). So if it sounds harsh, it’s simply to try and be realistic. I am not particularly cruel or thoughtless or heartless or smug. It’s very easy for all of us, 70 years onward, to say clever statements about it or think smugly about it or try and use it as a debating point. The truth of the matter is that probably if you look at the 20th century, the anarchists, both in the CNT-FAI and the FIJL (the libertarian youth), and the anarchists who were not involved in those organizations, came nearer to creating a revolutionary change in everyday life than anyone else ever did.

Those years in Aragon, Barcelona, and the Levant were probably the high watermark of possibility. The anarchists involved called it “a living utopia.” They touched something that you and I can only dream about and talk about. They actually did it for awhile. No matter how awkward, how ungainly, they achieved something in their life that you and I are trying to do every day and not achieving. And because they did that, because they changed everything that made up their lives, because they took individual-collective responsibility, and they changed patterns that had been locked into their brains for centuries, and they were aware of the potential in each person that could flourish and grow, we must keep looking at it and we must keep thinking about it. Spain isn’t going to go away, and we’ll always return to it as anarchists, thinking about what we can learn and what we can do to make what they did real. And I for one, would very much like it to be real, rather than some intellectual ideal, or something to talk about over three pints of bitter.

When the Civil War/Revolution ended, there were two main areas where the anarchists moved to: France and from France to Mexico. And it’s those militants who stayed in France that I want to talk about today. They settled there and were repatriated into concentration camps, both in France and in North Africa. Conditions were horrendous. Many of them broke out, but within the camps themselves they also began to reorganize the CNT, to try and bring it back to life, to keep it going not only for those in the camps but for the militants who hadn’t left Spain; they tried to revive it in Spain. You must remember the CNT had always been persecuted; the CNT had had periods of being underground, so it wasn’t a totally new experience— though this was a far more brutal underground than they’d ever had before. And what they did was to carry the problems that the CNT had not been able to deal with into those camps and into exile.

By the way, we would be foolish to underestimate the psychological effects of exile. There is an enormously potent story by Ethel Mannin, the British novelist, called Refugees. Ethel Mannin had spoken on the same platform as Emma Goldman in London and had supported the CNT-FAI, and one of the sentences that you read in that story, it’s haunting. Rodriguez, one of the militants, says, “Our days which had been so full, so full and busy, were now just empty,” as they sat in the cold English suburb with nothing to do and nowhere to go but just to sit and talk and talk. And that effect in itself was brutal...

slackbastard v mathaba : update and cheers!

2008-04-12T18:07:00.008+10:00

So anyways, I be wearing my publicity hat, seeking to draw attention to mathaba.net's attempt @ silencing my blog. Thus far, you can find info on, links to (and from) and discussion of the subject here and here, as well as @:

Anarchia
Antony Loewenstein (comment)
Aotearoa Indymedia
Australian Anarchy Bulletin Board
Austrolabe (comment)
Fightdemback
Hoyden About Town
Infoshop
Insultadarity
Larvatus Prodeo
Leftwrites (comment)
Libcom.org
Machinegunkeyboard*
(The Legendary) One People's Project Forum
Pathologically Polymathic (Danny Yee)
run amok
Sydney Indymedia
The Partisan*
Voice of Reason (comment)

*Have re-published the controversial post in question.

and elsewhere, including racist and fascist forums Australian Identity and Stormfront -- the latter of which claims credit for the legalese on behalf of the New Right / 'national anarchist' mob (PanEuropeanAnglo, 'New Right Strikes Back', April 8, 2008). AustralianGrenadier (April 12) is also terribly excited:

FDB idiots Cam Smith and @ndy Slackbastard of Melbourne

ATTENTION TO ALL PRO-WHITE ACTIVISTS IN VICTORIA AND INDEED AUSTRALIA...

As many of us here and in the movement may know, there are two ardent communist/anarchist dorks that have been and are currently operating out of the metropolitan area of Melbourne, these two misfits go by the names of Campbell Smith or 'Cam Sexenheimer' and Andrew Moran or '@ndy Slackbastard'.

[Note that while I am happy to wear a hat marked 'anarchist', Doctor Sexenheimer modestly describes himself thusly: "Advertising Dude, Anti-Racist Activist and THE BEST JOURNALIST IN THE WORLD!"]

Smith and @ndy have been the main knob jockeys from the Fight Dem Back! group that has whinged and lied about pro-white activists to scumbags like Greg Roberts and Jew, I mean Joe Hildebrand of the Zionist run media in Australia [that is, The Australian and The Daily Telegraph, respectively].

That[']s right people, these are the two main people that have been hyping the media up with mostly bullsh*t stories about White Australians who disagree with multiculturalism/multiracialism.

If you think you might know something about these two social rejects then by all means, POST IT HERE!

These idiots really value their anonymity even to the point where @ndy[']s blog recently was totally removed from the internet by the host after rightful legal pressure as a result of his extensive vilification and defamation of others and from using a fake name to register his blog along with a PO box address - you can not use PO Box addresses to register websites. See here for more [blah blah blah].

Once again, post what you know about these cretins and let[']s play a bit of a game of join-the-dots!

EDIT- [in case] this is against Stormfront policy, please PM me here with all relevant information. I am posting this here as only true Australians can post on Stormfront and not our enemy. I will not post an email contact as this will only attract our enemies to attempt to cause trouble.

Hmmm, yes, teh enimy. If any of teh enimy would like to draw further attention to fascist attempts at censorship and intimidation, please feel free to do so, and/or to get in touch with me via my blog. E-special thanks to Ana, Andrew, Anonymous, (the wonderful) Asher, Denise, Dreck, Hoyden, Insultadarity, Juan Castro, THR and Weezil for their props.

NB. The list above will be up-dated as the slackbastard publicity juggernaut gathers steam.

Cheers!

Fascism in Europe... and Australia

2008-04-11T19:57:00.003+10:00

April 11 marks the liberation of Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp, opened on July 15, 1937, and closed in 1945 by the entry of the Sixth Armored Division of the Third U.S. Army. The first inmates to arrive -- 149 in total -- were members of the resistance (see Frank McDonough, Opposition and resistance in Nazi Germany, Cambridge University Press, 2001 [PDF]), Jehovah's Witnesses, previously convicted criminals, and "a few" homosexuals. Its first victim was the 23 year-old labourer, Hermann Kempeck of Altona, who was found hanged on August 14. In the intervening years, approximately 56,000 more people died at the camp. (See A Chronology of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.)

The liberation of the camp produced a rather remarkable phenomenon: The Buchenwald Ball, an annual celebration organised by some of the Jewish boys who managed to survive the horrors of the camp. Thus "Every year on April 11, the anniversary of their liberation, the Buchenwald Boys hold a ball filled with music, dancing, and an energy that defies their advancing ages. The ball is a defiant celebration of life, friendship, family, and love". The Ball is also the subject of a film. The celebration is also remarkable for the fact that it takes place in my hometown: Melbourne, Australia.

In Melbourne, neo-Nazis are rather thin on the ground. In fact, two local neo-Nazi groups, Blood & Honour Australia and the Southern Cross Hammerskins, have experienced some difficulties in organising their activities, activities which -- outside of babbling on the Internet -- principally revolve around the organisation of an annual gig to commemorate the death in 1993 of the founder of B&H, the English bonehead Ian Stuart Donaldson.

In September 2006, this event took place, as it had in previous years -- in addition to gigs to celebrate Hitler's birthday and bonehead organising meetings -- at The Birmingham Hotel in Fitzroy. As a result of protest, complaint, and a boycott initiated in October 2006, the pub's management has just recently changed, and the new management is allegedly less sympathetic to the presence of neo-Nazis than the former mob. (See Boycott the Birmingham blog.) Support for the successful boycott came from a variety of groups -- anarchist, socialist, anti-fascist, anti-racist, queer, women's, punks and skinheads -- while opposition was largely confined to a small number of fashion punks, for whom The Birmy had also served as a venue, and for whom anti-fascist solidarity was less important than the opportunity to drink and to listen to music.

The venue for the 2007 ISD memorial gig was the Melbourne Croatia Social Club, the management of which -- like that of The Birmy -- denied and then defended the use of their premises by neo-Nazis. Fortunately, the President of the Melbourne Knights football club, Matt Tomas, took a very different line, describing the boneheads as "scum", and later apologising for the Social Club's irresponsibility (Greg Roberts, Neo-Nazis split Croat community, The Australian, October 27, 2007: "Contacted by The Weekend Australian, social club manager Catarina Malacic denied the event was held. "There was nothing on at the venue that night," she said"!).

Of course, much more information regarding fascist organising in Melbourne, Australia, Europe and elsewhere was, until earlier this week, available on my previous blog: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com. Unfortunately, as well as having to weather demented death threats, as a result of a complaint lodged by Mathaba New Network, I've had to temporarily revert to this location, and all of this information is subsequently -- albeit temporarily -- unavailable. What's interesting about this attempt at censorship, in the context of remembering the Nazi regime in Europe, is its origins. Thus among its dozen or so regular contributors, Mathaba.net boasts the presence of Welf Herfurth, a Sydney-based, German-born neo-Nazi, formerly a member of the NPD in Germany and One Nation in Australia, but currently functioning as the leader of a recently-established fascist groupuscule known as the New Right, a loose association of white supremacists who promote an ideology they term 'national anarchism'.

And now something I prepared earlier:

THE NEW REICH

All Heil The New Reich!

On September 8, 2007, approximately 15—30 individuals, all white, mostly young, and overwhelmingly male, dressed in black clothing and wearing caps, dark glasses and scarves, gathered in a group outside of Sydney Town Hall as part of a public protest against the APEC summit, scheduled to take place elsewhere in Sydney that weekend. The group carried with them three long banners — with slogans reading ‘Australia: Free Nation – Or Sheep Station?’, ‘Globalisation is Genocide’ and ‘Power to the People, Not Political Parties’ – which were joined together to form a three-sided bloc, within which those gathered assembled to form a ‘black bloc’. The group also distributed a leaflet, and claimed to belong to a group known as the ‘New Right’, one which — as other statements on the banners and on the leaflet stated — consists of ‘National Anarchists’ espousing a ‘Traditional-European Revolutionary’ philosophy. This brief essay examines ‘New Right’ philosophy and its origins in Europe, the emergence of this groupsucule in Australia, and argues that it can best be understood as the latest incarnation in a European-based trend in neo-fascist ideology and practice.

Who or what is the New Right? In Australia, the group was established in late 2005, largely via the efforts of one man, a German-born, Sydney-based businessman named Welf Herfurth. Herfurth has a long history of involvement in the far right, having been a member of the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) prior to his arrival as an immigrant in 1987, and following that a member first of the Democrats, and then of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party (ONP), serving as the vice-president of the New South Wales state branch (under David Oldfield) and as President of ONP’s Riverstone branch. More recently, from its inception in 2001, Herfurth has served as MC, and as one of the principal organisers — along with Dr. James Saleam of the Australia First Party (AF) — of the annual Sydney Forum. In this capacity, in 2007, Herfurth helped to arrange the visit to Australia of Croatian fascist Dr. Tomislav Sunic, a key New Right thinker, and in previous years has attempted, unsuccessfully, to arrange for a number of key members of the NPD (Gerd Finkenwirth and Udo Voight) to tour Australia and to address the Forum.

[Note that Sunic was present at the meeting which formally launched the New Right in London in December 2004. In fact, the meeting was partly organised to provide Herr Doktor with an opportunity to launch his then-recent book, Against Democracy and Equality. This text was published by Noontide Press. Noontide specialises in publishing and distributing Holocaust denial literature, and has since its establishment in 1978 by Willis Carto (1926--). It's also the publisher of The Journal of Historical Review, a key journal of Holocaust denial. Other titles published by Noontide include the notorious Tsarist forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as other classic titles such as Mein Kampf, The Turner Diaries and ex-Ku Klux Klown David Duke's My Awakening. More recently, "The Institute for Historical Review, the most active Holocaust-denial organization in the United States, held a public meeting in Irvine, California, on March 24 [2007]. IHR director Mark Weber and two other veteran Holocaust-denial activists, Bradley Smith and Tomislav Sunic, were the featured speakers." Sunic's Kamerad in Sydney, Herr Herfurth, is also a Holocaust denialist, and a very close Kamerad of the Adelaide Institute's Frederick Toben. See Holocaust Denial: A Global Survey - 2007, Wyman Institute (PDF).]

Subjected to a liberal, middle-class upbringing in post-war Germany, as a young man in the 1980s Herfurth rejected his parent’s liberal values to embrace those of the neo-Nazi movement, establishing a role for himself as a fascist militant. Since then, his politics have developed into a more sophisticated version of the crude neo-Nazism of his youth, one which retains an overriding commitment to race and nation, but shorn of the naked bigotry and crude political analysis which remains one of neo-Nazism’s hallmarks. In particular, Herfurth is part of a generation of far right activists heavily influenced by the philosophies of figures such as Alain de Benoist (1943–), a French intellectual who, beginning in the mid- to late-1970s especially, and together with a small group of others centred around the ‘ethno-nationalist’ think-tank GRECE (1968–), reinvigorated post-war fascist thinking. Part of this project consisted of popularising and critically re-examining the ideas of earlier thinkers such as Carl Schmitt (1888—1985) and Julius Evola (1898—1974), and thereby attempting to craft a philosophy that would somehow transcend the divide between the political left and right; all in the name of establishing a new political order in Europe – a ‘communitarian’ one consisting of nation-states, but under the domination of neither the then-Soviet Union or the United States. It was this posture which also fed into the (re-)development of ‘Third Position’ politics within the far right, one which even attracted the intellectual support of nominally Marxist thinkers such as Paul Piccone (1940—2004), editor of the US journal Telos.

Such is, necessarily, a much-simplified version of the political etymology of the New Right. Of most importance in relation to Herfurth and the New Right in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand), however, is their embrace of the idea of the transcendence of the left-right divide, and their commitment to elaborating a contemporary form of fascist politics; one attuned to the history of ideas, and one which recognises the necessity of building an extra-parliamentary social movement which is capable of responding to contemporary political realities, especially in the realm of popular culture. And it’s in the realm of popular culture that the idea of ‘national anarchism’ has greatest relevance.

Briefly then, ‘national anarchism’, at least as it’s understood by the New Right, is the means by which those grouped around Herfurth in particular, and New Right philosophies generally, seek to intervene in political struggle: “National-Anarchism represents the political embodiment of the European New Right — it is the political wing”. Before examining what this means in practice, however, it’s worth also briefly examining the short history of this rather unlikely doctrine.

In the English-speaking world, the figure most commonly associated with ‘national anarchism’ is the English activist, writer and musician Troy Southgate (1965–). A member of the National Front in the mid-80s, Southgate left it in the late ‘80s to join the ‘International Third Position’; left the ITP to form the ‘English Nationalist Movement’ in the early ‘90s; abandoned this not especially successful group in 1998 to form the ‘National Revolutionary Faction’; and following that declared himself to be a ‘national anarchist’. What this actually means in terms of ideology is a difficult question to answer. However, Graham D. Macklin (‘Co-opting the counter culture: Troy Southgate and the National Revolutionary Faction’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 39, No. 3, 2005 [PDF]), for one at least, has tried to do so. He argues that:

When put into its wider context… ‘national-anarchism’ appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed… Central to ‘national-anarchism’, however, is a far older paradigm drawn from conservative revolutionary thought, namely, the Anarch, a sovereign individual whose independence allows him to ‘turn in any direction’…

In practice, what this means, at least in part, is demonstrated by the emergence of the so-called ‘black bloc’ at APEC in September (from which the ‘Anarch’ Herfurth was conspicuously absent). Specifically — in addition in adopting the name of anarchism to advance a far right agenda — fascists seek to appropriate anarchist imagery and rhetoric. Like Herfurth himself, this tactic appears to have been born in Germany, where in the last 5—10 years, the neo-Nazi movement has increasingly sought to use the radical chic associated with ‘anarchism’ and ‘autonomism’ to recruit youth. (For example, in addition to appropriating fashions associated with anarchists and leftist youth, “autonomous nationalists” have for some years now formed ‘black blocs’ at public protests).

In Sydney, the APEC ‘black bloc’ was the first public protest attended by the ‘national anarchists’ of the New Right, but given its success – in his online account of the protest, one pseudonymous member writes that “We were tremendously pleased, afterwards, that no arrests had occurred and that none of us had been physically assaulted. We had avoided identification, too” – it is unlikely to be the group’s last. Further, while the majority of its members appear to have been drawn from Sydney and Newcastle, a few travelled from Melbourne to attend, and it’s possible that others came from other parts of the country as well. It’s therefore possible that there will be other demonstrations in other cities; certainly, the New Right, on the basis of this success (however meagre), has the potential to draw towards it the many competing factions of the extra-parliamentary far right (including remnants of AF and the Patriotic Youth League (PYL), the more straightforwardly neo-Nazi Blood & Honour and the Hammerskins, as well as others) and in turn help stimulate the growth of a reinvigorated, if still tiny, fascist movement in Australia.

Finally, while the New Right’s adoption of ‘national anarchism’ may be considered bizarre, even comical, it nevertheless retains the potential not only to confuse the broader public with regards the nature of contemporary anarchism, its aims and methods, but also to confuse some who may be approaching anarchism as a serious political philosophy for the first time. As to the question of how to respond to the emergence in Australia of a small group of fascists in anarchist drag, it is beyond the scope of this very short introduction to the New Right to address. At a minimum, it would appear necessary to ensure that this confusion is addressed publicly, in both theory and practice, and the sooner, the better.

Further reading: Kevin Coogan’s Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International, Autonomedia, New York, 1999, provides an exhaustive account of the far right in Europe and North America following the end of the Second World War, and much of the background to the emergence of the New Right and associated ideologies and movements in the last few decades, and is highly recommended.

But to return to Europe, and first to Portugal, where members of the local "Hammerskin Nation" are currently undergoing trial.

Biggest-ever far-right trial begins
The Portugal News Online
April 12, 2008

The trial of 36 Neo-Nazi members of the Hammerskin Nation organisation commenced on Tuesday, with the activitists facing charges including racial hatred, illegal firearms possession, kidnapping, assaults, and spreading far-right propaganda.

The three dozen members of the [bonehead] gang, arrested a year ago in a major police swoop netting guns, ammunition and explosives, made their first appearance amid tight security before judges at the Monsanto court, just outside Lisbon.

Among those in the dock is Mário Machado, a leader of the far-right gang who has already served a four-year jail term for participating in a 1995 attack that killed a Portuguese citizen of Cape Verdean descent.

The [bonehead] leader has been in preventive detention since his arrest last year.

Most of Machado’s co-defendants were placed under strict bail conditions, including electronic tagging, ahead of Portugal’s biggest-ever far-right trial.

Best of luck boys!

In the Czech Republic, meanwhile, Aisha Gawad has penned some thoughts on the local neo-Nazi and fascist movements (Neo-Nazis emerge from the shadows, The Prague Wanderer). As is the case with Portugal -- the organiser of a gathering of the far right in April of last year, the National Renovation Party (PNR), called on immigrants to "leave Portugal to the Portuguese" -- Czech fascists rally around the slogan of a 'Czech Republic for the Czechs'. In November of last year, several hundred local boneheads and assorted other racist wankers -- reinforced by some of their German Kameraden -- attempted to assemble in Prague, ostensibly in order to protest against the Czech Republic's involvement in the US occupation of Iraq, but not coincidentally on the 69th anniversary of Kristallnacht (aka Pogromnacht), and -- again, not coincidentally -- in an attempt to goose-step about the Jewish quarter of the city. According to Aisha:

Propagating outright Nazi ideology would be breaking Czech law, so [neo-Nazis] skirt around it. Prague, for example, struck down their request to march through the Jewish quarter on November 10, 2007, the 69-year-anniversary of Kristallnacht, yet they tried to gather there anyway, claiming to be protesting the Czech Republic's involvement in the Iraq War. The Czech police managed to keep hundreds of [boneheads] from coming into the city, a move praised by anti-racism groups.

Which is only half the story -- and perhaps not even that. In reality, in addition to the Czech police, the neo-Nazis were confronted by a large number of antifa, including many anarchists. In preparation for the neo-Nazi assault, Czech antifa produced a video:

And again, after the events -- which ended up being something less than a total victory for the Master Race -- other videos were produced. Like this one:

To be fair, Aisha does not entirely ignore such manifestations of militant opposition to fascism. Thus: "At the March 1 rally in Plzen, neo-Nazi opponents outnumbered the demonstrators by the hundreds, although many of these counter-protestors, anarchists and anti-fascists, were extremists in their own right". In other words, Aisha is drawing an explicit equivalence between the 'extremist' neo-Nazis and the 'extremist' anarchists. Note that the march of March 1 took place on the 66th anniversary of the beginnings of mass deportations of Jews to death camps. ("From March to October 1942, 57,752 Jews were deported from the Slovak puppet wartime state. Only some 800 of them survived World War Two"; Train exhibition on WW2 Jewish transports opens in Plzeň, ČTK, April 8, 2008.) Plzen is also home to what is allegedly the third largest existing synagogue in the world, and the march was -- surprise surprise -- scheduled to pass the building.

In terms of opposition to neo-Nazi shenanigans, Aisha notes approvingly the institution of an advertising campaign directed at young Czechs. "For instance, "Neo-Nazi. Do You Want Him?," is a new ad campaign designed by People in Need to show young people what is really behind the behavior of hate groups masked as defenders of Czech honor". Which is well and good, but it would also be worthwhile to note that such behaviour intermittently results in the deaths of those whom Aisha describes as similarly 'extreme' in their views. One recent victim was the teenage Czech anarchist skinhead, Jan Kučera, who was stabbed to death by a neo-Nazi in January. Still, accounts of anarchist resistance rarely receive positive press, and that includes some of the earliest instances of resistance to the Nazi regime itself.

...In Berlin the anarcho-syndicalists were part of a much wider anarchist movement and operated within a distinct socialistic culture, bitterly divided between orthodox Socialists and Communists which minimalised the effect of anarchism. The success of Hitler's party had a shattering and paralysing effect on the working class movement. For years it had been thought, even by those who opposed the Communist Party, that its Red Front/Army would put up a fight. It was expected that the struggle would come with its success, not with its failure. This attitude was ingrained even with those who advocated Socialist-Communist unity against Nazism. Though working class formations had long since battled in the streets against Hitlerism, nobody anticipated the struggle would be given up without a shot or a blow.

In a town like Cologne, only months before Hitler took power anarcho-syndicalists had organised a demonstration, receiving huge popular support, against the visit by Dr Goebbels, who bitterly complained he was 'chased out of his native town like a criminal'. It was a challenge to the larger tendencies, who felt obliged to organise similar demonstrations, making Nazi propaganda tours, at the height of the Depression (and therefore when 'historians' later claimed they were building support) risky in the extreme. Hitler took to travelling by plane (then considered hazardous) as the lesser danger.

In Berlin, marches by Nazis were surrounded and heavily protected by police (like fascist marches in Britain). Isherwood, as a young observer a few months before the Nazis took power, noted how the hostile crowds in the Moabit working class district laughed when an elderly and portly SS captain could not sustain the pace, and finding himself on his own, frantically tried to catch up with the protective cordon. (A few months later and that captain would probably be invested with the power of life and death over the scoffers.)

The Nazi murder gangs attacked individual opponents out on their own (something in the nature of contemporary gay-bashers) but shied in the main from open confrontation. One gang, to which Horst Wessel belonged, tried it on and he became a Nazi martyr. The Nazi (prepower) Jew-baiting activities were against professional people or writers, often when sitting around in cafes, and petty shopkeepers, on their own.

It never occurred to people, least of all organised workers living in proletarian districts, there they too would become isolated. After Hitler took power - was handed power by Hindenburg, with the tacit approval of most parties - the power of the SS dramatically increased.

Almost overnight the top-heavy organisation of the workers collapsed with the wholesale arrests, quite illegal, of their leadership. Nothing disappeared more ignominiously than the Red Front army, one day parading through the streets with its Moscow - trained generals, the next day languishing in holes and cellars in the hastily formed concentration camps (at first, converted derelict warehouses) without striking a blow (the despised Austrian reformist Social-Democrats at least fought it out to the last against Dolfuss).

The Communist party became illegalised, the Socialists and trade union movement tried to make their peace and niche and were slowly illegalised - after which social democracy had nothing to offer. Trade union leaders sought to transfer their funds to war veterans' organisations (where for ideological reasons the Nazis could not sequestrate them, but controlled them anyway). The working class as a whole was stunned at the fact that the entire defence they had built around themselves had gone with the wind.

This overcame the German anarchists too, with the exception of the Rhineland, it became a marginalised dissent movement, unable to speak and therefore to grow. The Rhenish workers were slower to accept the situation, they were not initially provoked to industrial action by the Nazis, but as propaganda contacts vanished, they too succumbed (though never completely). During the twelve years of Nazi dictatorship, a few isolated, especially industrially based, groups, remained constant. But any concerted action was never possible, though in Madrid during the civil war people queued to see a dud German shell displayed in the window of a large store, bearing a sage, 'Comrades! The shells I make do not explode'. (It may have been indicative of sabotage, which certainly went on, or it may have been propaganda set up in Spain - who can tell?)

~ Albert Meltzer, '1918--1937: Anarchist activity in Nazi Germany', Black Flag [nd]

See also : Resistance to Nazism: Shattered Armies: How The Working Class Fought Nazism and Fascism 1933-45, Anarchist Federation (UK), 2006 (PDF). Includes short biographies on Edelweiss Pirates (Germany) | The Zazous (France) | Arditi del Popolo (Italy) | FAUD (Germany) | 43 Group (UK).

Hitler’s power may lay us low,
And keep us locked in chains,
But we will smash the chains one day,
We’ll be free again!

We’ve got fists and we can fight,
We’ve got knives and we’ll get them out,
We want freedom, don’t we boys?
We’re the fighting Navajos!

Czech Romanies stage exhibition to mark Roma Day

2008-04-10T23:56:00.001+10:00

Czech Romanies stage exhibition to mark Roma Day
Prague, 8.4.2008, 20:08, (ROMEA/CTK)

Czech Romany activists opened an exhibition paying homage to the victims of racially-motivated crime in Prague on the occasion of the International Roma Day today.

They lit candles near the exhibit panels with the names of 27 Romanies who have been killed by violent perpetrators in the Czech Republic since 1990 over the colour of their skin or their different views.

The panels feature, among others, the names and information about the cases of Tibor Daniel, Tibor Berki [and] Filip Venclik.

Romany Tibor Berki died from injuries he received when he was attacked by four [boneheads].

Eighteen members of the [bonehead] movement were charged with the murder of Romany Tibor Daniel but only two of them have been convicted and they only received suspended sentences.

Anarchist Filip Venclik was killed [September 5, 1993] by an attacker at a metro station. [Also Zdenìk Èepela, August 31, 1994.]

"The question is who will be the next. We want to believe in a better future," activist Gabina Hrabanova said.

According to representatives of the Romany Dzeno group, anti-Gypsy tendencies have strengthened in the Czech Republic in the past period.

The Association of Romany Regional Representatives shares this view.

The exhibition was organised by Dzeno. According to its head Ivan Vesely, the organisers did not want to mark this year's Roma Day by dance or song events as usual. On the contrary, they wanted to pay tribute to the victims of racially-motivated violence and point to the situation of Romanies in the Czech Republic and the European Union.

Romanies are the largest minority in the EU. According to estimates, up to 12 million Romanies live in Europe.

Some 11,700 people declared themselves Romanies in the latest national census in the Czech Republic. However, according to estimates, some 250,000 Romanies live in the country.

An analysis has shown that one-third of them live in ghettos in which almost all adults are jobless and families are dependent on welfare benefits. Romany children are placed in schools for children with learning difficulties which closes a path for them to a higher education.

Romanies resent when Czech and European officials describe them as a "social problem," Vesely said.

He told CTK that Romanies would like to participate in the improvement of their situation and want to make decisions concerning them by themselves.

Last year Dzeno addressed an open letter to President Vaclav Klaus calling on him to contribute to the observance of human rights and the improvement of Romany situation in the Czech Republic.

The International Roma Day has been celebrated since 1990 to mark the first meeting of Romany representatives held near London on April 8, 1971.

In the following days, the first world Roma congress took place in Britain at which the International Roma Union was established.

Participants from 14 countries, including the former Czechoslovakia, approved the Roma anthem and the Roma flag at the congress.

See also : ANTIFA.CZ [Czech | English]

In January of this year, another Czech antifa, an anarchist skinhead named Jan Kucera, was murdered by a bonehead. More details on Jan's life and premature death were once available on my previous blog. For the time being -- that is, until such time as my blog is republished -- below is footage of Jan's funeral:

slackbastard v mathaba // free speech vs hate speech

2008-04-10T16:27:00.001+10:00

On the one hand:

On April 8, the 'alternative news service' Mathaba News Network sent a nasty letter to distribute it, "one of the largest and fastest growing auDA, NZ and ICANN-accredited registrars in Australia". That is, a company which provides, among other services, access to domain names. In this case, anarchobase.com. The subject of their complaint was a post on my blog, slackbastard, formerly hosted by anarchobase. The blog post in question concerned the nature of the news service, and in particular the recent history of its owner, Adam Musa King. As the post in question details, Mr King was formerly known as Louis Istvan Szondy, a name which he formally abandoned in 1990 -- according to one source -- and June 1999 -- according to another (the UK legal firm Carter Ruck).

While the exact nature of the complaint, which alleges that the post is in some way 'defamatory', is a little murky, the main complaint seems to rely upon my having republished an extract from a newspaper report, viz, an article from the October 21, 2001 edition of The Sunday Telegraph, which is reproduced in the legal judgement of Lord Justice Brook of May 18, 2004, paragraph 11.

The case presided over by Lord Justice Brook was an appeal by The Sunday Telegraph against an earlier, adverse ruling against them, brought by the firm of Carter Ruck on behalf of Mr. King: "This is an appeal by the defendants, the Telegraph Group Ltd, from certain parts of an order made by Mr Justice Eady in this libel action on 9th June 2003" (paragraph 1). To cut a long story short, Mr King/Szondy objected to the contents of the October 21, 2001 article as being defamatory.

Question: What is defamation?

Answer: Generally, defamation is a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone's reputation, and published "with fault," meaning as a result of negligence or malice. State laws often define defamation in specific ways. Libel is a written defamation; slander is a spoken defamation.

Carter-Ruck summarises the case as follows:

The action concerns two articles published in the Sunday Telegraph in the aftermath of the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001.

The first article was published on the front page of the issue for 21 October 2001. Although it did not identify the Claimant by name, the article suggested he was to be suspected of being an accomplice of Osama bin Laden's network of terrorists who had assisted that organisation with website activities.

The second article, which named the Claimant and was illustrated with a large photograph of him, appeared in the Sunday Telegraph of 9 December 2001. It too suggested there were good grounds to suspect him of being an accomplice and supporter of Al Qaeda. The photograph, which originally depicted his abuse at the hands of the Islamist regime in Sudan, was thus used out of context, and added to the impact of that suggestion. The article also suggested the Claimant advocated violent Islamic extremism and that he represented a threat to the Jewish community in this country.

As the Defendant now accepts, there was in fact no truth in any of those suggestions. Terrorism of any kind has always been abhorrent to the Claimant. Nor has he ever advocated or supported violence of any description or political change by anything other than peaceful, democratic means. Contrary to what was stated in the second article, the Claimant's website, Mathaba.net, is not "an internet site for Islamic extremists". Nor is his political organisation, Green Charter International, "fanatically pro-Libyan". In consequence, as may well be imagined, the Claimant found the articles extremely offensive and distressing.

What's slightly odd about Mathaba News Service's complaint is that I make it quite clear in the post to which they object that "in 2003 King (Szondy) won a libel case against The Sunday Telegraph, which accused him of being a terrorist and accomplice of al-Qaeda"; in other words, I actually acknowledged that these allegations were false, and prefaced my republication of an extract from the court document in which the article is also republished, by remarking that these were "libellous allegations". Further, as well as providing links to the court judgements in favour of Mr King, I also provided a link to an article (Newspapers falling prey to legal eagles, "No-win, no-fee cases, meant to offer access to justice, are threatening a free press", Jessica Hodgson, The Observer, September 28 2003) which provided some analysis of the case and, moreover, attendant legal issues regarding precisely these kinds of cases (no-win, no-fee deals, or conditional fee agreements (CFAs)).

Precisely how this amounts to defamation I've no idea. That said, the threat of legal action, and the possibility of being b(l)ogged down in legal muck on the part of anarchobase, was enough (among other reasons) to close down my blog... temporarily, anyway. (It will re-appear, in full, in the very near future at another address.)

This is what's known as the 'chilling effect'.

In the meantime, in a rare -- in fact, [almost!] unique -- gesture of solidarity which I deeply appreciate, Weezil @ machinegunkeyboard has republished my original blog post in full at his own blog. If anyone else would like to do the same, please feel free!

On the other hand:

Law chiefs plan ban on race-hate sites
Imre Salusinszky
The Australian
April 01, 2008

RACE-HATE websites could be banned under an internet censorship proposal being considered by state and federal attorneys-general.

The plan, which is in its early stages, has aroused concern among civil libertarians who fear it could be used to stifle political debate.

The attorneys-general, meeting in Adelaide last week, commissioned a report on the viability of authorising the Australian Communications and Media Authority to combat race-hate sites by ordering internet service providers to take them down.

At present, ACMA polices websites that breach copyright, promote terrorism or publish extreme pornography.

“There are racial vilification laws, but the problem with the internet is you can’t trace down the people,” NSW Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said yesterday.

“Any material that incites vilification and hatred is of concern. Material on the internet is a particular concern because it provides a cheap and easy means of dissemination to a very wide audience.”

The proposal, which would be open for public consultation before any decision was made, followed a referral to the attorneys by state and federal police ministers, Mr Hatzistergos said. Concerns had also been expressed by non-English-speaking groups about comments on white-supremacist websites.

For the ACMA to be able to take down sites, it would require a new definition of the “refused classification” category used by the federal Government’s Classification Board to deal with violent pornography and similar material. The proposed system could affect websites such as the one operated by the Australia First party, which was involved in the civil unrest at Cronulla in December 2005.

An article on the group’s website, signed by “Joni”, compares Muslims to mould. “You have the innocent, healthy, cheese block sitting in your fridge minding its own business til one day you peel back the wrapper to see a tiny section of mould on the surface,” she writes.

“Just when you think it’s safe to appreciate your cheese in your own environment again you see it’s back. Now darker, deeper, growing, invading, insidious.”

But Dale Clapperton, from the online civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said a problem with banning such sites was that “it inevitably turns them into martyrs and gives more attention to the type of material you are trying to suppress”.

“The best cure for ‘bad’ speech is more speech,” Mr Clapperton said.

A long time between drinks

2008-04-09T18:02:00.000+10:00

As a result of technical issues, slackbastard @ anarchobase is moving... In brief, my previous blog was subjected to legal threats by the 'anonymous' owners of mathaba.net, who viewed the contents of the post below as being in some way 'defamatory'. More details later. By the way, my email isn't working, my computer is a piece of shit, and I'm a Luddite. In the meantime:

Having read a recent missive from "Media Alert Transmission Hub Advanced Broadcast Application" (MATHABA)* on the subject of its having documented a revisionist conference in Sydney on the subject of 9/11;
having bugger-all response to a previous post [temporarily unavailable] on this issue;
having a few hours to kill, maim and torture;
I thought I might as well scribble a little more on local neo-Nazi Welf Herfurth's media outlet of choice: mathaba.net.

"My name is Louis Istvan Szondy, I am a British and Australian citizen. I was born on 8th March 1963 in London from a Hungarian father and British/Australian mother."

To begin with, mathaba.net founder Adam (Musa) King apparently used to be known as Louis Istvan Szondy, having changed his name in 1990. In terms of the political perspective which he brings to mathaba.net -- and which might explain why fascists such as Welf Herfurth and other anti-Semites are included among its few dozen correspondents -- in 2003 King (Szondy) won a libel case against The Sunday Telegraph, which accused him of being a terrorist and accomplice of al-Qaeda. An extract from the text of a subsequent failed appeal (May 18, 2004) by the Telegraph (against some parts of the decision in favour of Szondy) provides the context for these libellous allegations:

It appears that the defendants' [that is, the Telegraph's] interest in the claimant [that is, King/Szondy] was aroused when the police visited their offices on Friday 19th October 2001 (shortly after the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Centre in New York) and accidentally left there a list of the names of 24 people into whom the Anti-Terrorist Branch was conducting an official investigation. Most of the names on the list were obviously Islamic, but the list contained the name of "Adam Moussa" and at least one other person with an English sounding name.

On the following Sunday, 21st October, the defendants published in the Sunday Telegraph the first of the two articles of which complaint is made in this action. It was headed "Two white suspects in Bin Laden probe" and it read as follows:

"Detectives are investigating two white people in Britain who they suspect of aiding Osama bin Laden's terror network.
Secret Scotland Yard documents, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, name two men – one of whom is understood to be a computer expert – as assisting al-Qaeda's network in this country. It is the first time since September 11 that white non-Muslims have been accused of involvement in Islamic extremism.
The documents reveal that a special unit has been established at the Yard to carry out 'Operation Full Circle', to monitor the two white men and 22 other suspects. All are being investigated to establish whether they have committed terrorist offences.
The Sunday Telegraph cannot name the two for legal and operational reasons.
One of the two white men on the list, the computer expert, is believed to have assisted bin Laden operatives with website activities. He is named in the document as also being linked to Francis Etim, who has been charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Etim, who lived in Greenwich, south-east London, was born in Britain and converted to Islam at marriage and changed his name to Sulayman Zain-Ul-Abidin.
Also on the list is a white man with a French name. Little is known of him, except that he has adopted several aliases. He is believed to be wanted in connection with Algerian plots to attack France."

(For further discussion of the legal and political ramifications of the King case, see Jessica Hodgson, 'Newpapers falling prey to legal eagles', The Observer, September 28, 2003.)

Prior to mathaba.net, Szondy was also responsible for establishing the International Green Charter. In other words, Szondy was once an advocate on behalf of the ideas contained in "Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution" / "Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Jamahirya" Muammar al-Gaddafi's 1975 magnum opus the three-volume Green Book. In fact, Szondy remains a fan; as recently as June 2007, he describes the contents of the Book as constituting "the scientific and natural historical principles of the Third Universal Theory, the truth" ('Founder of Green Charter International Calls For Serious Study of The Green Book', mathaba.net, June 2007).

[http://www . mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=556435]

But what exactly is the International Green Charter?

Inspired by the Proclamation of the Great Green Charter for Human Rights on 12th June, 1988, the first Human Rights Charter to be issued by the people gathered in popular congresses, signalling the end of the era of the republics and the dawn of the era of the masses, as well as a new advancement in the definition of human rights;

Motivated by the Green Book, a guide for the total deliverance from the power of individuals, classes, clans, tribes or parties, and the path towards the establishment of a civil society where all human beings are free and equal in the exercise of power and in the possession of wealth and arms;

Convinced that the rights of Man, vicegerent of God on earth, cannot be the gift of a person nor exist in societies where exploitation and tyranny are practised, and can only be achieved by the victory of the people over their oppressors and the disappearance of regimes which annihilate freedom;

Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

al-Gaddafi, incidentally, is awesome. In addition to being Libya's head of state and an inspiration to Szondy, Muammar has a bodyguard composed entirely of chicks. They wear blue uniforms, have black belts in karate, and were most recently seen in France when al-G popped in to visit fellow Brotherly Leader Monsieur Sarkozy (Ian Sparks, 'Five planes, a camel, a tent and 30 female virgin bodyguards... Libyan leader Gaddafi arrives in Paris with his entourage', The Daily Mail, December 11, 2007).

On a spotterly note, during the 1980s the Libyan Gub'mint sponsored visits to Libya by members of the Trotskyist SWP (now known as the DSP) under the auspices of a local neo-Nazi turned Islamic convert named Robert Pash (see Raiders of the Left Ark, January 13, 2006). According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, NYU Press, 2002, p.292) in the late 1970s Pash was the Australian contact for the US-based Aryan Nations, and also distroed KKK propaganda. In the '80s, Pash distroed al-Gaddafi's Green Book, and later helped establish the Australian People's Congress, an organisation which I first encountered via newspaper advertisements around the time of the first Gulf War.

At one point in 1987, according to The Australia/Israel Review (April 10--May 1, 1998):

...then Hawke Minister Clyde Holding revealed to Parliament that Pash’s outfit advocated the "biological integrity of the white race through a complete geographic and political separation of the races and thus the maintenance of international white unity". Holding told Parliament that Pash was an "anti-Semitic right wing racist political loony in the tradition of Goebbels and Hitler," and then tabled Queensland Police reports which showed that Mr Pash had been under investigation following death threats to Queensland’s Jewish community by the organisation, The Sword of Islam, for which of course Mr Pash was the spokesman.

Curiously, in April 1987, Libya hosted the second conference of its World Center Against Imperialism, Zionism and Racism (MATABA), in Tripoli. Pash led an Australian delegation which included, notoriously, Aboriginal activists Michael Mansell ('Desperate Times', ABC Message Stick, May 14, 2004) and Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs.

In the '90s, Pash popped up as the "Australian Association for the Study of the Juche Idea"; this being another term for the state ideology of North Korea / Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). It was in this capacity that in 1998 'Rashid Robert Pash' was given the opportunity to tour the country of the illustrious Korean President Kim Il Sung and the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il.

As for mathaba.net, as a result of his recent reconciliation with the Jewish-dominated Western powers -- the UK and the US in particular, but including, of course, France's Sarkozy -- al-Gaddafi has broken poor little Szondy's heart. This is why al-Gaddafi is regularly criticised by mathaba.net, while the contents of his little Green Book -- and its strange amalgam of pan-Arabism, Islam and state socialism -- remains an attractive property for the likes of Louis. And, of course, Herfurth & Co..

For further discussion on 'Third Positionism', see Chip Berlet, Racial Nationalism, the Third Position and Ethnoviolence (Including a Discussion of Possible Connections Between Militant Islamic Fundamentalists and the U.S. Extreme Right); on the Green Book and its diminishing funding and influence, see teh Interwebs, especially Craig S. Smith, 'In Libya, pages fade in once-touted Green Book', International Herald Tribune, January 5, 2005, which documents the manner in which the Gaddafi regime no longer plows dinars into promoting The Leader's vision, and why folks like Pash turned to Juche thought for (financial) sustenance ("Tucked away in a whitewashed, Italian-colonial building set in a quiet compound on the edge of Tripoli, the largely forgotten World Center for Green Book Studies is looking for a little respect..."); The Washington Post has just published (March 29, 2008) an editorial, 'Not Quite Free', on Gaddafi, Libya and its relations with Western powers which is worth reading ("The turning point came in 2003, when Mr. Gaddafi renounced terrorism and agreed to dismantle his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. At the time, many attributed Mr. Gaddafi's shift to his fear of meeting the same fate as Iraq's Saddam Hussein. It also reflected his desire to lure U.S. and other Western companies to redevelop Libya's vast oil reserves.").

And on a final spotterly note, sometime anarchist and boy lover Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) recounts his experience addressing a conference in Libya on the subject of the Green Book in 'Jihad Revisited', June 5, 2004: "The conference in Tripoli turned out to be a curious circus of "lost causes," including two anarchists from New York (we were cheered as heroes for defying the "travel ban"), countless African liberation fronts, the interesting French "New Right" philosopher Alain de Benoist and some Australian Red/Brown types, two charming Turkish Greens, a Slovenian anarchist, a clique of Parisian Maoists, etc., and a phalanx of hospitable Libyans, all fuelled by excessive coffee intake. A German doctor gave a paper on depleted uranium in Iraq, the first time most of us had heard of such a thing. A New Zealand delegate told horror stories about privatization of water; ditto..."

*Al Mathaba Al-Alamia

Al Mathaba (meaning center) is the Libyan center for anti-imperialist propaganda which has funded third world guerilla groups. The Anti-Imperialism Center (AIC) - also known as Mathaba - is used by Gaddafi to support terrorist networks and thus plays an important role in Gaddafi’s terrorism strategy.

Al-Mathaba was established in 1982 to support "liberation and revolutionary groups”, Al-Mathaba has sponsored a number of stridently anti-Western conferences in Tripoli. At the same time, its mission is to identify and recruit revolutionaries for ideological and military training in Libya. During their training in Libyans camps, individuals are selected for advanced training, including in weapons and explosives, and indoctrination. With representatives in many Libyan embassies worldwide, Al-Mathaba runs its own independent clandestine operations and disburses payments to terrorist, insurgent, and subversive groups.

As of 1992 Al-Mathaba was headed by Musa Kusa, a Gaddafi confidant who was also Libya's Deputy Foreign Minister. As of late 1995 Musa Kusa was the head of the Libyan External Security Agency, and was also the head of Al Mathaba International.

Al Mathaba is more a concept than an organization. Its origins are Libyan and its objective anti-imperialist. Libya’s international activity is considerable. Some see it everywhere, behind every armed, or even radical, group. It was in 1982 that Libya took the initiative of organizing an international organization essentially based on the third world: Al Mathaba.

By calling the 3rd Al Mathaba Congress in August 2000, to mark the 30th anniversary of its revolution, with the participation of many representatives, particularly from Africa and Latin America, Libya no doubt hoped to affirm for itself an active international role, far beyond its small size. Judging by the level of participation, its plan was particularly well received, reflecting the high degree of sympathy Libya enjoys in the anti-imperialist world — the result of the continuity of its efforts over a period of time.

Once an organization that backed morally, financially and physically the liberation movements seeking to overthrow oppressive regimes — often times through armed struggle — Col. Gaddafi said that "after restructuring, (Mathaba) must confront the concept of globalization."

Many heads of state were present: Sam Nujoma (Namibia), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Yoweri Kaguta Musaveni (Uganda), Blaise Campraore (Burkina Faso), Alpha Oumar Konare (Mali), Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), Idris Deby (Chad), Abdou Diouf (Senegal), and the President of Guinea Bissao. Progressive political forces, communists and revolutionaries were there as well: the Cuban CP, Shaffik Handal (FMLN, San Salvador), the Guatemalan URNG, Tomas Borge and Daniel Ortega of the FSLN (Nicaragua), Raul Reyes (FARC, Columbia), a personal representative of Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Lula, of the Brazilian Labour Party, Gladys Marin, General Secretary of the Chilean CP, Marina Arismendi, General Secretary of the Uruguayan CP. From Europe there was a very varied Italian delegation, with the Refoundation Communist Party in particular, and a Spanish delegation from the United Left (José Cabo) and from OSPAAAL.

~ Al Mathaba / Anti-Imperialism Center (AIC), globalsecurity.org

My pants are on fire!

2006-05-18T21:17:00.000+10:00

I tell a lie.

The post below is (was) my 195th.

Making this one my 196th.

Meaning I didn't quite make it to 200... but still came pretty damn close.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll see all y'all 'round... at my new blog!

http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com

2006-05-16T11:48:00.000+10:00

slackbastard 2.0

My new blog address.

Please update your links... you slack bastards.

(This is my 200th post!)

Happy Mayday!

2006-05-01T16:36:00.000+10:00

And happy 120th birthday to the Melbourne Anarchist Club!

Also, please note that I am in the process of moving to a new address:

http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com

[It should really be 'anarchobase', but like, whatever... Now (6/6) it is! Aaarrrggghhh!]

Collingwood puts the pretenders to the Magpie throne firmly in their place

2006-04-30T19:26:00.000+10:00

And by so doing make it four in a row.

Go Pies!

Collingwood MAGPIES 18.12 (120) defeated Port Adelaide "Power" (sic) 11.13 (79).

Next on the chopping block: Carlton Blues.

Pies surge past Power [sic]; Magpies down Port Adelaide 120-79 in AFL; Pies defuse the Power [sic]; Magpies goal rush shuts down Power [sic]; Third quarter sets up Pies' win; Magpies continue winning ways.

enough with the black uhlans already // uncommercials

2006-04-29T22:55:00.000+10:00

For the benefit of all those folks who google the 'Black Uhlans' and find this reference, here's some links:

Chopper quizzed over missing crim [The Age, 2002]
Bikies enter fray with their Knuckles backing them up [SMH, 2002]
Bikies sue to recover clubhouse [SMH, 2002]

And here's something else Black Uhlans-related:

[Believe it or not, Powderfinger had a] month-long residency at Club ACs, a biker den in the centre of the band's hometown, Brisbane, where members of the Black Uhlans would congregate and listen to the sound of Powderfinger covering pub rock classics by the Stones, the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Steppenwolf ("Magic Carpet Ride," not "Born To Be Wild") and a few less likely numbers from Rodriguez and Neil Young. The band played Thursday through Sunday, four sets between midnight and 4am, surviving thanks to the protection and patronage of a limping gentle giant/local legend who went by the name of Klepto (a Black Uhlans leader who was known around town for having the guts to monster Maoris at the bar of New Zealand's Expo '88 stand).

"We we just these little nerdy white boys playing in this biker club where the Black Uhlans used to hang out," Fanning explains. "It was pretty rough. There were lots of fights and shit like that, and the manager got stabbed - that usual biker madness."

On the other hand, the club was happy to lend its support to the struggle to free unionist (and Trinity Grammar graduate) Craig Johnston in 2004, as well to do what it could to help put an end to racial violence in Cronulla last year, so they're obviously not completely Ken Bruce. And while Johnston was hardly the first militant to go to jail as a result of an industrial dispute, given HoWARd's ramping up of the class war with his new IR regime, he certainly won't be the last. Meaning that sooner rather than later, the Black Uhlans can be expected to again incur the wrath of the Tory press.

On a completely unrelated note, here's some uncommercials:

one of the cool things about working at an anarchist infoshop is the stuff you get sent in the mail. one example is megawordsmagazine. and while the ms.films DIY Guide to Film & Video sounds neat, when i went to the po box all i got was a lousy postcard. anyway, it's published by Parcell Press -- "100% independent and devoted to increasing access to zines and emphasizing the legitimacy of independent publishing as a creative, productive and progressive alternative arts culture". (a quick look at the dependent press is all i need to be convinced it's more than "legitimate": having independent media is vital.) i should also mention 'Practicing In The Space of the Everyday' by jason workman, an "essay which considers a type of politics that operates within the complexity of a pre existing context" by way of the Situationists, in particular [workman_js(at)hotmail(dot)com]. finally, tamara wyndham sent a copy (no.88) of her poem ('artist book'?) 'I Don't Want NONE', which I really, really... like. thanks tamara!

bye bye blogger?

2006-04-28T03:01:00.000+10:00

i'm thinking of splitting and finding some new digs. one where racists aren't welcome. and bill gates isn't either.

Welcome comrade Alice Louise!

2006-04-27T17:35:00.000+10:00

Clare & Leigh are proud parents to a baby girl named Alice Louise who arrived this morning at 2:43am.

Congratulations!

bombers nosedive; magpies triumph!

2006-04-25T23:14:00.000+10:00

COLLINGWOOD Magpies 15.16 (106) defeated Essendon BOMBERS 12.17 (89)

Pies outstanding in Anzac win; Magpies prevail over Dons; Didak's last term sets up Magpie triumph; Didak triple sinks Bombers at MCG; Collingwood prevail in ANZAC clash; Magpies' AFL win 'breaks mental barrier'.

And on ANZAC Day, props to my Irish-Australian forebears for refusing to fight in The Great War:

An Imperative, Desperate Need For Men

"In this hour of your country's peril I urge you to do your duty. There is an imperative, a desperate need for men. The men in the trenches call to you for your help ... The Empire and its allies expect you to prove yourselves worthy of their sacrifices. Every vote is needed. Do your duty and fear not - vote 'yes'."

-- Prime Minister W. M. Hughes, 20 December 1917

The differences in attitude between the opposing sides were largely class based. They represented a struggle between the Labor Party and the Conservatives, between Catholic and Protestant.

" … (it) lead to the divisions between Irish Catholics and other Australians and indeed ultimately to all Catholics and other Australians. It never really died away until the mid or late 1950s and left a scar on Australian society for decades."

Malcolm Fraser, Prime Minister 1975-1983, interviewed by Paul Kelly for TV series '100 Years: The Australian Story'

the second casualty of war

2006-04-24T21:07:00.000+10:00

Everybody knows about the illegal occupation of Iraq by the United States armed forces; fewer know that Australia's armed forces play a supplementary role. Militarily speaking, the Australian state's contribution is negligible; politically-speaking, it offers the US Administration a further pretext to speak of a 'multinational' occupying force rather than, say... oh, I don't know... 'US imperialism'?

In any case, despite massive public opposition to this, the current phase of the 15-year-old war between the U.S. and Iraq, the war has -- to this point -- proved to be relatively clear sailing for the HoWARd Government. But just a few days ago, Jacob Kovco had the unfortunate privilege of becoming the first Australian soldier to die in Iraq. To be precise, "The 25-year-old father of two was today [April 22] named as Australia's first fatal casualty in the Iraq conflict"; his death appears to have been accidental (he shot himself while cleaning a pistol).

And while HoWARd refuses to say 'sorry' for committing Australian soldiers -- on a fraudulent basis -- to the illegal occupation, The Age reports that he did manage to 'offer... his condolences to Private Kovko's family. "We have people at the present time in many parts of the world and we especially feel for the family of that young soldier who died so tragically and accidentally in Baghdad over the weekend," Mr HoWARd said during a public address in Nowra, on the NSW south coast. "We feel especially for his grieving widow and his two young children and his parents."'

A staunch advocate of death and destruction, HoWARd today [April 24] refuses to concede that the war has been a disaster. And, technically speaking, he's correct. For the corporate sector -- notably Halliburton -- the war has been a massive windfall. For the men, women and children of Iraq, on the other hand...

into my arms, oh bored, into my arms // what is to be undone?

2006-04-23T17:37:00.000+10:00

I stumbled across the following passage, taken from an otherwise unremarkable resignation letter written by a small group of Trotskyists, and thought it deserved some sort of a reply. That -- and reading a post by a soon-to-be-unemployed blogger -- gives me all the excuse I need (I hope) to take another jaundiced (yet also strangely joyous) look at the student movement. Anyway, here's the passage:

The bunkered, sectarian approach of the 1980s IS and of Socialist Alternative today makes it impossible for a [socialist] group to take seriously these [political/social] openings [for building the party]. Nowhere is this so clear as in the student movement. The graduation or withdrawal from activity of a whole layer of old leaders of the independent left has left a hole[?]. That gap poses problems but also opportunities for socialists. [But] instead of a patient and comradely approach seeking to win sections of the independent left [to the party and its political program], the SA leadership has sought to antagonise and terrorise them [!] into accepting SA's positions. This has only served to drive some [students] into the arms of a handful of anarcho-sectarians among the independent left. We cannot continue to allow this to go on without actively resisting it.

Pffft. Bring it on 'Marc N', 'Shannon P', 'Tony B', 'Belgin K', 'Trudy McQ' and 'Sophie B'! I love a good argument. (Although careening from pretended ignorance to panic at the presence of anarchists on campus [eeek!] doesn't exactly inspire confidence in your critical faculties...)

In any case, how, precisely, is this disastrous eventuality to be avoided? (Whatever we make of the (alleged) fact that a number of regiments of today's greatly diminished Red (Student) Army have 'gone over' to the enemy / are cuddling into the arms of 'anarcho-sectarians', 'socialists' in Australia have never really been in a position to go Kronstadt ...) For the authors of the letter, the answer to this, and no doubt many other questions, lies in continued allegiance to 'revolutionary Marxism' and building the revolutionary party.

Same old shit.

Still, a belated recognition "that despite the forms, there is no democracy in SA"; that in reality, it's an "authoritarian sect" in which the leadership -- by means of an ill-conceived "hyperorganisation" ("a detailed control of many areas of members' political activity and lives") -- seeks to dominate its followers, is, at least, a step in the right direction. And further consideration of the fact that, for some reason, the (current) SA leadership "have not felt the need to learn any new tricks [as] the old ones have worked perfectly" could even function as a stepping stone to a broader critique of authoritarian socialism. And even if this isn't a radical critique of everything a la Mr. Marx, it could, at least, display some awareness of the anti-authoritarian implications of communist praxis. But I won't hold my breath, any more than I expect Australian workers -- if not students -- to not realise, concretely, the lessons of recent French struggles against the CPE.

Speaking of students, there was another National Day of Prayer Against VSU a few weeks ago (April 12). Obviously impressed by the success of previous such prayer gatherings, 800 students in Sydney, 300 students in Melbourne and 150 students in Perth marched and chanted. In another alarming display of religious intolerance, police in Sydney arrested 26 and charged four.

Next: No compromise in defence of compromise

damn i'm a slack bastard

2006-04-22T13:56:00.000+10:00

yeah yeah.

i've been meaning to piss and moan about a few things this week... just haven't had the energy. so here's a truncated version of my recent concerns; one which also constitutes an excuse to be done with all those other entries i've saved drafts of for later publication. fuck 'em.

1) hoWARd on the wheat scandal: "what's a wheat board?"

2) here's a list of pop groups beginning with the letter 'a', all of whom sit on my shelves (that is, when they're not on tour or in the studio): A.C. African Head Charge Anti-Flag Archers of Loaf Area-7 Asian Dub Foundation Assück Atari Teenage Riot At the Drive-In Attila the Stockbroker

3) Go and see a band and it's another fucking bore
Another bunch of jerks are shitting on the poor...

Earlier this year millionaire property developer John Lydon signed over the rights to the Sex Pistols back catalogue to Universal Music Publishing Group, which is now hawking it to companies for use in advertising. This surprised the naive:

Sex Pistols sell out
The Age
March 10, 2006

Surely not. Surely, if there was one band that would never, ever, sell out it would be the Sex Pistols.

Not the gods of punk! Not those spitting, sneering rebels who called for anarchy, mocked the Queen, raised a middle digit to everything establishment, and ridiculed the greed of record companies.

But it appears so.

[AAP]

Pistols put high price on anarchy
The Australian
March 06, 2006
Adam Sherwin

THE threat of anarchy in Britain appears to have been replaced by the certainty of capitalism. The Sex Pistols have been rebranded for business after signing a deal to use their hits to promote luxury brands.

Thirty years afer the British punk pioneers screamed defiance at the establishment, the surviving members will cash in with a multi-million-pound deal partnering blue-chip corporations as advertisers seek an association with rebellion.

Great rock 'n' roll swindle as ageing Pistols go corporate
March 04, 2006
Adam Sherwin

'We believe the band will want to maximise the income we can generate'

THE threat of anarchy in the UK appears to have been replaced by the certainty of capitalism. The Sex Pistols have been rebranded for business after signing a deal to use their hits as a vehicle to promote luxury brands.

Thirty years after the punk pioneers screamed defiance at the Establishment, the surviving members will cash in with a multimillion-pound deal partnering blue-chip corporations as advertisers seek an association with “rebellion”.

[The Times]

"When, in 1976, punk first spewed itself across the nation's headlines with the message 'do it yourself', we, who in various ways and for many years had been doing just that, naively believed that Messrs. Rotten, Strummer etc. etc. meant it. At last we weren't alone...

By [1977] we had realised that our fellow punks, The Pistols, The Clash and all the other muso-puppets weren't doing it at all. They may like to think that they ripped off the majors, but it was Joe Public who'd been ripped. They helped no-one but themselves, started another facile fashion, brought a new lease of life to London's trendy Kings Road and claimed they'd started a revolution.

Same old story.

We were on our own again..."

4) Just when I thought that corporate dominance of sport couldn't get any greater (= worse)...

Pies on McDonalds' menu
Paul Gough
01 March, 2006

Collingwood has added another $1 million plus to its ever-growing coffers thanks to a three year sponsorship deal with McDonalds.

The deal - which will see the Magpies run extra football clinics in conjunction with the family restaurant chain as well as support the Ronald McDonald House charities - will also involve McDonalds sponsoring Collingwood coach Mick Malthouse - who will wear the golden arches emblem on his apparel this season...

McGuire said the new deal was about more than just money.

"This partnership will enable Collingwood to make a real difference to the lives of young people," he said.

"It provides the resources we need to drive a range of new junior football activities and events for thousands of children around Victoria..."

Stephen Mayne points out that not everybody -- not least the British courts, in addition to millions of parents around the world -- agrees that McDonalds is 'great' for kids (or animals, workers and the environment for that matter):

Eddie Everywhere's McDonalds conflict
Stephen Mayne
08 March, 2006

As keen students of Eddie McGuire's vast conflicts of interest over the years, we couldn't help but notice the amazing Media Watch story... about Ronald McDonald gate-crashing a Hi-5 spot on Channel Nine's Mornings with Kerry-Anne...

Ronald McDonald gate-crashed the Hi-5 segment, prompting their executive producer Helena Harris to tell Media Watch:

"We were deeply distressed that Ronald McDonald was put anywhere near Hi-5. Hi-5 has no association with junk food. We do not want to be seen in print or on TV together. We did all we could to prevent the situation... Our creative director was waving at them (Hi 5 cast members) to get away from him."

Now this is a pretty serious allegation that deserves an answer. As CEO of Channel Nine, did Eddie direct that Ronald McDonald get favourable publicity on Channel Nine after agreeing to kick millions into his football club? Given the horrors of multinationals targeting children outlined on Four Corners... Hi-5 has every right to be angry, as it damaged their fit and healthy image.

And as for me... as an anarchist vegetarian Collingwood supporter... I'm ANGRY too!

See also:
:: Mclibel - Two Worlds Collide (2 DVD Special Edition)
The story of "The postman and the gardener who took on McDonald's. And won."
:: McDonald's Workers' Resistance
:: Remember remember the 16th of October: Worldwide Day of Action Against McDonalds

kangaroos to the slaughterhouse

2006-04-18T01:02:00.000+10:00

COLLINGWOOD 23.15 (155) def. KANGAROOS 11.10 (76).

Magpies hand Kangaroos an AFL hiding; Roos' spirit goes missing as Magpies fly; 'Dangerous' Collingwood on the rise; Pies turn it on against Kangaroos; Pies distinguish themselves at the Dome; Pies massacre Shinboners; Magpies cue for goals, Roos cue blooper tape.

discipline & punish

2006-04-16T02:59:00.000+10:00

I've been neglecting the student right. Here it is. (Or parts of it.) Counter-protesting. (Or planning to.) A 'national day of action' on April 11 in protest at the impending introduction of VSU. Peter Campbell, eat ya heart out.

Young Libs are blocking streets with block letters
The Sydney Morning Herald
April 13, 2006

..."Dear Liberal Student," came the instructions from Timothy Andrews, federal secretary of the Australian Liberal Students' Federation. "This will be a great opportunity for us to annoy the left, show the media that many students DO support VSU, and, most importantly, have a great time."

..."THE RULES. Due to the large media presence, and the nature of what we shall be doing, please keep in mind the following things:

1) DO NOT attempt to provoke any violence or aggression from the left. We are going to annoy them enough by being there.

2) DO NOT make any comments which may be construed as personally offensive. We attack policy, not the person.

3) FOLLOW ALL INSTRUCTIONS given by ANY member of the Liberal student executive without question. This is vital, particularly if there is the possibility for a confrontation to occur.

4) MOST IMPORTANTLY, NO ONE is to speak to any members of the media whatsoever … If any member of a Liberal club is found speaking to the media, they shall be IMMEDIATELY expelled … Furthermore, if they are a member of the Young Liberals, they may face disciplinary action up to, and possibly including, expulsion from the Liberal Party."

There followed, of course, in the finest of university traditions, free drinks on the club.

The missive was signed: "Yours in liberalism."

The police signed their repressive with 24 arrests.

gramsci is dead...

2006-04-15T17:28:00.000+10:00

...and i didn't even realise he was unwell!

(boom boom)

Richard J.F. Day has written a very interesting book, called, funnily enough, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (Between the Lines / Pluto Press, Toronto / London, 2005).

From the blurb:

GRAMSCI'S CONCEPT OF hegemony casts a long shadow over radical political theory. Yet how far has this theory got us? Is it still central to feminism, anti-capitalism, anti-racism, anarchism, and other radical social movements today?

Richard Day shows how most contemporary movements attempt to develop new forms of self-organization that can run parallel-or as alternatives-to existing forms. They follow a logic of affinity rather than hegemony.

From Hegel's concept of recognition, through theories of hegemony and affinity, to Hardt and Negri's reflections on Empire, Day translates academia's theoretical and philosophical concerns to the politics of the street.

A review by Roger Farr of Gramsci the Norwegian Blue is available here, while A Canadian Lefty in Occupied Land writes their thoughts on the matter of the ideological legacy of dead parrots here and Chris Carlsson adds further ornithological insight here; and, finally, some Sketchy Thoughts on the subject of affinity versus hegemony may also be found here. As for my own sketchy thoughts... well, I'm only up to page 106, but I think that an alternative sub-title could be 'Anarchism for Marxist Dummies'... but maybe that's just me? Anyway, I'm gonna write a (more) serious review when I finish the damn thing... next year or next week, who knows?

so what?

2006-04-14T20:43:00.000+10:00

Approximately 2000 years after a Jewish carpenter was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if people were nice to each other for a change (RIP Douglas Adams), I thought it was time to do an update...

december 2005

the timur/fdb gig is yet to happen (but definitely will!);
luke connors of the fascist psychotic youth league has left the group;
dr. james saleam remains at the helm of the fascist australia first party;
my review of the tyranny of structurelessness remains unwritten;

january 2006

some peeps got arrested for the racist shootings on australia day;
david innes remains a leading scumfronter (whose radio broadcasts may be found in the oed under 'stupid bigot');
andrew sanders is still a very naughty boy whose mummy has to keep him on a short leash;
an anonymous reader reckons i got it all wrong over neo-nazi axe murderer dane sweetman, but unfortunately lacks the courage to explain how or why;
irate communiqués from australia's political dinosaurs of the left remain unsent;
peter campbell now employs the pseudonym 'victor whitelaw'... thus allowing him to WRITE even MORE BIZARRELY in the THIRD PERSON;
alleged muslim terrorists remain languishing in gaol (although having been joined recently by two more persons from melbourne);
the socialist alliance continues to teeter on the brink of disintegration;

february 2006

nobody else cares much for writing about pissarro (although i still plan on visiting the exhibition with a mate some time before it closes);
paul reynolds remains too much of a snob to reply;
orthodox communists remain too chickenshit to defend their putrid ideology;
a poster on scumfront reckons neo-nazi colin campbell is in trouble with the law;

march 2006

no-one wants to talk about vsu or the student movement and;
the stolenwealth games is now over and was judged by organisers to be a success (and the energy with which the black gst pursued the campaign will hopefully continue, as continue it must if there's to be land rights, justice and something approximating 'reconciliation')...

So fucking what!
Well I've been to Asia
And I've been to South America
I've been to Europe too
So what, so what
Well I've been here
And I've been there
And I've been every fucking where
So what, so what
So what, so what you boring little cunt
Well who cares, who cares what you do
Who cares, who cares about you
You, you, you...

the (international) sweatshop conspiracy

2006-04-13T17:03:00.000+10:00

ok, so i went + saw the (international) noise conspiracy play at the the corner hotel on sunday.

they kicked arse... so i really wasn't all that disappointed that they'd not responded to my email requesting that barricade have a stall at their gig.

anyway, as well as numerous pots of beer, i also bought a t-shirt.

the t-shirt was manufactured by honduran workers employed by a company called gildan activewear.

gildan activewear employs sweatshop labour.

other companies manufacture no-sweat products:

nosweatstuff
stayhuman
unbranded

but it appears that dennis, inge, lars + ludwig prefer the former.

oh well.