A ‘Final statement by John August, President Humanist Society of NSW, regarding Humanist House and the PIF’ has been published on Indymedia, dated January 8, 2010. It concerns the relationship between the Society and the ‘PIF’, or ‘Public Information Forum’, a small group which has been associated with the Society for the last decade or so, and which has been the subject of some controversy given its fascist political complexion.
In brief, the Society has announced that it will no longer be making its premises in Chippendale available to the innocuous-sounding PIF. (An aside: according to Martin Walker in his The National Front (1977), citing Rodney Legg, ‘NF Directorate meetings were always held in a public house booked in the name of the Anglo-Asian Friendship Society’ — arf arf.) This decision was made at some unspecified but recent point by an Executive appointed at a Special General Meeting late last year. Otherwise, August’s statement provides his account of events within the Society over the last few months, culminating in the SGM. Of note is the fact that a large number of Sydney-based racists and fascists have joined the Society, and a proportion of these elected to the Society’s Committee. The Executive is currently organising an AGM at which a new Committee will be elected; the composition of this Committee will reflect the relative strength of the racist and fascist contingent.
Finally, on a spotterly note: “While other hirers of [Humanist House] have a public identity and often a webpage (one example is the “Spartacist” group, a previous tenant, which have a regular publication, website and entry on Wikipedia), there is no similar such information available on PIF”.
See also : Fascist infiltration of the ‘Humanist Society of New South Wales’ (Inc.) (November 25, 2009) | Klub Naziya / Klub Nation / Public Information Forum / Jason Rafty… (November 15, 2009) | Neo-Nazis in Sydney // Neo-Nazis in Phoenix (November 10, 2009) | Klub Naziya in Chippendale (November 7, 2009) | Neo-Nazism ~versus~ humanism (November 4, 2009) | Is neo-Nazism humanist? (October 14, 2009).
Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. In the light of these ideas, Negroes will be hunted at the North and held and flogged at the South so long as they submit to those devilish outrages and make no resistance, either moral or physical. Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get. If we ever get free from the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and if needs be, by our lives and the lives of others.
~ Frederick Douglass, “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress”, August, 1857.
