So, since it was thought that government was necessary and that without government there could only be disorder and confusion, it was natural and logical that anarchy, which means absence of government, should sound like absence of order.
Nor is the phenomenon without parallel in the history of words. In times and in countries where the people believed in the need for government by one man (monarchy), the word republic, which is government by many, was in fact used in the sense of disorder and confusion—and this meaning is still to be found in the popular language of almost all countries.
Change opinion, convince the public that government is not only unnecessary, but extremely harmful, and then the word anarchy, just because it means absence of government, will come to mean for everybody: natural order, unity of human needs and the interests of all, complete freedom within complete solidarity.
Those who say therefore that the anarchists have badly chosen their name because it is wrongly interpreted by the masses and lends itself to wrong interpretations, are mistaken. The error does not come from the word but from the thing; and the difficulties anarchists face in their propaganda do not depend on the name they have taken, but on the fact that their concept clashes with all the public’s long established prejudices on the function of government, or the State as it is also called.
Blocking of fascist march in Warsaw 11 November 2010.
As every year on November 11, nationalists and neo-fascists from various organizations are planning a march through the streets of Warsaw. We do not want the supporters of xenophobic and racist ideology, who proudly refer to the pre-war organizations of openly fascist sympathies, to again pass through the capital. Remembering the past, we believe that the growing national movement must be opposed. For two years now, we have been trying to block this march. We will stop it only if there will be many of us.
We are a group of different people and organizations. We share an idea of resistance against fascism. We are planning a demonstration on the route of the fascist march. We want to physically block it. We will use our civil rights. We invite all residents of Warsaw and all who want to come to Warsaw, to take part in active opposition to the fascists. We look forward to your participation in the preparations, to your arrival to Warsaw on time and at the place proposed by us. We hope you to prepare banners and inform friends about our activities. We count on your presence.
For more information about the preparations check out our website.
I’ve given [Beazley] a bagging here, which he deserves. But the good thing about his being so conflict-averse is that he will do anything for anyone. He can’t say no. I call him an opportunist but maybe it’s the people around him suggesting opportunities that he can’t refuse. That settles it then: he’s a weak opportunist. (And I’m a slack bastard.)
~ Mark Latham, The Latham Diaries, Melbourne University Press (2005), pp.73–74
Periodically I check my blogroll to see who’s still kicking and who ain’t. Also, to remind myself who I haven’t included but should. So…
AntiCopyright (lotsa rad films and vids for free d/l) City Is Ours (new-ish group addressing Melbourne’s housing crisis) Червоно-синя революція (‘Class War on the Terraces’ /// Russia Ukraine) Facta Non Verba (new local @ zine) jew on this (local left-wing troublemakers) left flank (local left-wing troublemakers) Melbourne Freedom Club (local @ troublemakers) New Mandala (‘New perspectives on mainland Southeast Asia’) Poumista (@ and left-wing histories and polemics) ZERO ANTHROPOLOGY (‘a project of decolonization’) are all worth having a look at. And if you have a blog and you’d like it to be included here, drop us a line or make a comment.
Update : Monaghan dog picture scandal goes global, Glenn Cullen, The Sydney Morning Herald (AAP), November 5, 2010. Apparently, the photo has been circulating for a coupla weeks, but went viral following a tweet from Fake Wyatt Roy: “Disgusted by his behaviour, that’s why I decided to leak the pic to Twitter. (Wednesday, November 03, 2010 10:42:43 PM via Echofon in reply to dbreban_18)”. Real Wyatt Roy is not happy; fake Wyatt Roy has just announced his retirement from Twitter.
This story reminds me of another story someone once told me…
One of Jenny’s audience guests was Yassir Morsi. He has a blog and a crack at Waleed Aly, Salam Cafe, and liberal (‘moderate’) Muslims here. (Oh, and postmodernism too. But then, that prolly goes without saying amirite?) [See : Granada Blog.]
Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? The First World as [a] whole and its agents in the Third World are enemies of the proletariat and its allies who reside, almost exclusively, in the Third World. The First World working class should be regarded as part of the imperialist bourgeoisie. As part of the imperialist bourgeoisie, they live off of and align against the popular classes of the Third World.
The principal contradiction in the world is exploiter versus exploited countries, the global city versus the global countryside, First versus Third Worlds, etc. Fundamental social revolution in this era occurs as part of the struggle against imperialism. Hope lies in the struggle against imperialism by people of the Third World led by the proletariat of the Third World.
The main form of struggle is people’s war. Communists that do not aim toward advancing people’s war are not communists. The global struggle is best understood as a global people’s war made up of individual struggles across the world, as advanced by Lin Biao.
Revolution is not a dinner party. Many liberals posing as communists have tossed aside the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of liberal bourgeois conceptions of power and the state. The struggle for revolution is the struggle by the new power to destroy the old power. It is not the struggle to reform the old power, to capture the old power, to put oneself at the head of the old power. There is no creation without destruction. Destroy the old, build the new.
Many liberals posing as communists have tossed aside the Cultural Revolution. While claiming to uphold the Cultural Revolution, they peddle liberalism. They peddle liberalism while proclaiming themselves defenders of “the mass line.” They reduce Mao to nothing more than a democrat. Theirs is a “revolution” without revolution. The Leading Light reclaims the real Cultural Revolution.
Our revolution does not seek to simply tweak the current order. We will overthrow everything. Our revolution cuts the deepest. Our goal is communism, total liberation. We fight for continuous revolution until all oppression is ended. We wage war against thousands of years of exploitation and oppression. Our revolution will remake humanity at the deepest level. Overthrow the whole thing. Are you ready for the future?
The article notes, inter alia, that Walters is a barrister, who makes (lots of) money from providing legal representation for his clients, including a coal mining company. It also notes that Walters invests his money in property.
ALP state secretary and campaign director [and law-talking guy] Nick Reece said Greens voters would be surprised to hear that Mr Walters had such a client. “In life, it is not what you say, it is what you do,” he said.
“The Greens party always talks about dirty coal, but it is obviously not dirty enough to stop Mr Walters seeking to profit from it.”
Melbourne MP and Education Minister Bronwyn Pike also branded Mr Walters a hypocrite.
“It’s no wonder the voters of Melbourne can’t pick the difference between the Liberals and Greens,” she said.
“This appears to be typical behaviour of the Greens political party – say one thing, but do another. They grandstand a lot, but don’t put in the hard work to deliver results on education, climate change and social housing.”
There’s a few obvious–like, really obvious–rejoinders to Labor’s criticisms, but the main problem is not the rather weak nature of the attack so much as its ineptitude. Michael Danby, “a Jewish MP, said it was acceptable to look at Mr Walters’ past as a barrister, during which he defended SS Nazi auxiliary Konrads Kalejs”. Which is a factually correct statement: Walters did defend Kalejs. It’s what defence lawyers do. But unless Danby is implying that Walters chose to defend Kalejs because he’s anti-Semitic, or that Walters has systematically defended the interests of accused Nazi war criminals to the exclusion of others, it would seem somewhat unremarkable. Jack Fajgenbaum, QC, another Jewish lawyer, described Labor’s attempt to paint Mr Walters as anti-Semitic as ”offensive” and ”not true”.
Beyond that, both the Greens and the ALP are dominated by middle-class professionals, especially lawyers (the ALP, for example, has 19 lawyers sitting in the Federal parliament), who in their working lives have represented a range of corporate and state interests. And if it’s true that in life, it is not what you say, it is what you do, that’s important, then Walters is hardly the only one to have some explaining to do…
Obviously, there’s some very odd thinking going on at Victorian ALP headquarters. Uncle Rupert has made his preferences clear, and so have his papers. But readers of the Sunday Herald Sun are unlikely to be key players in the Melbourne electorate, so, like…
A protest by the English Defence League was held in Amsterdam today in support of Geert Wilders of the PVV (Party of Freedom). Although only around 20 protesters showed up, a large police presence was evident. Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Other sources claim EDL members joined together to form a crowd with as many as 50 or even 60 members, including their Dutch cousins in the imaginatively titled ‘Dutch Defence League’. The small number at the rally may have something to do with the fact that several weeks ago Wilders denounced the assembly.
As is now typical of police management of their rallies, according to Sky News: “The EDL were given permission to hold the action in the isolated area near Sloterdijk rather than Amsterdam’s centre, where it would have been harder to manage”. Otherwise, a few dozen anti-fascists got arrested on their way to a counter-rally, and police also prevented Ajax ultras from greeting the League’s hools in the customary fashion.
The ideological nature of the EDL–or rather, the unofficial ideology of its supporters–is the subject of much ongoing commentary. However there is no doubt that many of its leading figures have histories of involvement in the far right. The League’s leader is former BNP member Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (Yaxley-Lennon uses the pseudonym ‘Tommy Robinson’). He’s one of many whose politics extend to the unapologetically neo-Nazi.
Whatever. The EDL appeared to reach a peak in its popularity some time ago. The more time passes–and the more its supporters are allowed to stew in their juices–the more likely the members of the fractious mob of young-men-what-don’t-like-Muslims will revert to form: battering one another on the basis of their footballing preferences. As for the fate of the hateful tourists in Amsterdam, according to Nick Lowles, Yaxley’s minibus was damaged, he complained about being harassed, and the EDL/DDL were told that for their own safety they had to leave the scrap of ground the police had allocated them on the outskirts of town for their rally not long after it began.
As for the “Australian” Defence League, they reckon they’re gonna be ‘protecting’ Australia again by assembling at Federation Square on Saturday, February 19 next year.
The moment has come to give fascism a usable short handle, even though we know that it encompasses its subject no better than a snapshot encompasses a person.
Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
To be sure, political behavior requires choices, and choices–as my critics hasten to point out–bring us back to underlying ideas. Hitler and Mussolini, scornful of the “materialism” of socialism and liberalism, insisted on the centrality of ideas to their movements. Not so, retorted many antifascists who refuse to grant them such dignity. “National Socialism’s ideology is constantly shifting”, Franz Neumann observed. “It has certain magical beliefs–leadership adoration, supremacy of the master race–but it is not laid down in a series of categorical and dogmatic pronouncements.” On this point, this book is drawn toward Neumann’s position, and I examined at some length in chapter1 the peculiar relationship of fascism to its ideology–simultaneously proclaimed as central, yet amended or violated as expedient. Nevertheless, fascists knew what they wanted. One cannot banish ideas from the study of fascism, but one can situate them accurately among all the factors that influence this complex phenomenon. One can steer between two extremes: fascism consisted neither of the uncomplicated application of its program, nor of freewheeling opportunism.
I believe that the ideas that underlie fascist actions are best deduced from those actions, for some of them remain unstated and implicit in fascist public language. Many of them belong more to the realm of visceral feeling than to the realm of reasoned propositions. In chapter 2 I called them “mobilizing passions”:
• a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions;
• the primacy of the group toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether individual or universal, and the subordination of the individual to it;
• the belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment that justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against its enemies, both internal and external;
• dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effects of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences;
• the need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary;
• the need for authority by natural chiefs (always male), culminating in a national chieftain who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s historical destiny;
• the superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason;
• the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success;
• the right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess within a Darwinian struggle.
Fascism according to this definition, as well as behavior in keeping with these feelings, is still visible today. Fascism exists at the level of Stage One [‘the creation of movements’] within all democratic countries–not excluding the United States. “Giving up free institutions”, especially the freedoms of unpopular groups, is currently attractive to citizens of Western democracies, including some Americans. We know from tracing its path that fascism does not require a spectacular “march” on some capital to take root; seemingly anodyne decisions to tolerate lawless treatment of national “enemies” is enough. Something very close to classical fascism has reached Stage Two [‘the rooting of fascist movements in the political system’] in a few deeply troubled societies. Its further progress is not inevitable, however. Further fascist advances toward power depend in part upon the severity of a crisis, but also very largely upon human choices, especially the choices of those holding economic, social and political power. Determining the appropriate responses to fascist gains is not easy, since its cycle is not likely to repeat itself blindly. We stand a much better chance of responding wisely, however, if we understand how fascism succeeded in the past.
~ The Anatomy of Fascism, Allen Lane (2004), pp.218–220
Oh yeah. In Russia: Vasily Krivets, 22, was convicted of 15 counts of murder motivated by ethnic hatred and sentenced to life in prison while his nutzi accomplice, Dmitry Ufimtsev, 23, who unlike Krivets pleaded guilty, got 22 years in prison on five counts of murder. The pair were members of the (banned) neo-Nazi groupuscule ‘National Socialist Society’. In the US: Daniel Cowart, one of two nutzis to hatch a bizarre plot to kill President O’Bama back in October 2008, got sentenced to 14 years jail last week. “Cowart’s sentencing was delayed so he could remove tattoos of a swastika and iron cross before reporting to prison.” (The other guy got 10 years.)
The British National Party (BNP) appears to be imploding, as Nick Gri££in continues to alienate senior figures within the Party, and the rats leave the sinking ship. Given that most BNP members are a littlebitstoopid, however, and in the absence of a credible alternative, it seems likely that the author of Who Are the Mindbenders? will continue to milk a living out of gullible British racists for a while longer.
In the US [h/t : j/r], Melissa Hack is next on the white power chopping block according to OPP. In July, Hack was charged with one count of making a false statement in connection to her involvement in the murder of two SHARPs / ARA activists Daniel Shersty and Lin “Spit” Newborn by boneheads in Las Vegas in 1998. Hack’s brother Ross — whose rich daddy sent him on a two-year vacation to Europe following the murders — is a member of the Hammerskins.
A federal judge in Los Angeles last year sentenced Ross Hack to three years in prison for lying on a passport application while under investigation in the double murder case. He came under scrutiny in January 2008, after he was identified as an organizer of a white supremacist rally in Las Vegas where an individual was assaulted and nearly killed.
In Australia, the (Southern Cross) Hammerskins are having another party on the Gold Coast on December 11. (Their last part-ay, held just a few days prior to Adolf Hitler’s birthday, attracted a relatively large amount of media attention.) Performing at the White Christmas (fnarr fnarr) celebration will be local boys Open Season and Full of H8. As ever, the gig is being co-sponsored by the local branch of Blood & Honour (to be confused with Blood & Honour/Combat 18). There’s bad blood brewing between B&H/SCHS and their rivals in Volksfront, as detailed in National Anarchist! blog:
According to an anonymous source, there’s been a recent re-alignment along the fringes of the fascist right in Australia. The re-positioning is both the result of and the Creator of some ongoing friction between ‘Blood & Honour Australia’ (B&H), the ‘Southern Cross Hammerskins’ and the ‘Creativity Alliance’ (CA) on the one hand and the ‘national anarchists’, ‘New Right’ (NR) and ‘Volksfront Australia’ (VF) on the other…
The period of most intense and violent rivalry between and among neo-Nazi gangs in Australia was in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
In 1989 in Gosnells (WA) Wayne Robert Napier and William Patrick Monaghan murdered David Locke, falsely believing him to be a police informant. The trio were members of ‘Java’ Jack van Tongeren’s neo-Nazi groupuscule the ‘Australian Nationalists Movement’ (ANM). At the time of the murder, the ANM were engaged in a terrorist campaign against ethnic minorities and left-wing political opponents. The organisation later formed part of the now disbanded ‘White Pride Coalition Australia’ (along with at least one current member of Dr James Saleam’s ‘Australia First Party’).
In 1991 in Perth (WA), Scots-born Colin Irvine, a ‘dangerous and armed criminal with a history of involvement with skinhead and neo-Nazi groups’ was on the run after the horrific murder of a neo-Nazi associate. He was killed by police. On Hitler’s birthday (April 20) in that same year, ‘National Action’ member Perry John Whitehouse murdered fellow bonehead Wayne “Bovver” Smith at Saleam’s bunker in Tempe. On Hitler’s birthday in 1990, Dane Sweetman murdered David “Pommy Dave” Noble. Whitehouse, Smith and Sweetman all had involvement in neo-Nazi gang activity.
Ukraine : The rise of the radical right in Ukraine, Andreas Umland, Kyiv Post, October 21, 2010 | Czech Republic : Czechs jailed for Roma hate attack, Al Jazeera, October 20, 2010 (“Czech court punishes four men for brutal April 2009 firebomb attack on a Roma family’s home”) | In Milan, Italy, the Italian Hammerskin franchise has reportedly had to cancel a gig to celebrate the legacy of good fascist Leon Degrelle | Two decades of neo-Nazi and racist violence in Central Europe, October 21, 2010 (“A summary of the basic information available regarding neo-Nazi and racist attacks on Roma committed in the Czech Republic and Central Europe”).
Finally, please support Jock Palfreeman, the young Australian serving a 20 year sentence for murder in Bulgaria. After an initial hearing on October 21, Jock’s appeal against his sentence has been re-scheduled for November 11. Jock’s chief crime was to come to the defence of two Roma under attack by a large gang of racist football hooligans, only to then find himself also under assault. Rallies in support of Jock have been held in Vienna, Austria, Sydney, Australia, Paris, France, Moscow, Russia and elsewhere.
Who Makes the Nazis? is a site focused on the fascist presence in various ‘transgressive’ (by their own estimation) musical subcultures. The claim is that at the fringes of these milieus, ideas about the sanctity of art and the irresponsibility and fundamental ‘amorality’ of the artist provide perfect cover behind which fascist and pro-fascist ideologues are allowed to spread their ideas. Currently these cultures include ‘post-industrial’, ‘martial’, ‘neo-folk’, ‘apocalyptic folk’ and ‘darkwave’, among others. It is not a matter of condemning these subcultures, which in fact contain many non-fascist, liberal, socialist, anti-fascist, etc., supporters, but rather of drawing a clear line between the fascists and non-fascists within them by showing the latter the nature and extent of the problem, in the hope that they will themselves marginalise and ultimately reject fascist participation in their ‘scene’…
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
