Gramsci and Left Managerialism : Kees van der Pijl

Posted on September 1, 2010 by @ndy

Gramsci and Left Managerialism

Kees van der Pijl
Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy
Vol.8, No.4
December 2005

Abstract

This essay argues that one way of understanding Gramsci today is as an organic intellectual of a class of managerial cadre which develops in advanced capitalism. With the growth of monopolistic structures and a deepening state role in capitalist society, a separate class of mediating functionaries emerges, entrusted with managerial tasks in running the economy and the state. The problems of conquering power from the perspective of this ‘new middle class’ that concerned Gramsci, were also those of the neo-Machiavellian thinkers, Mosca, Michels, Pareto and Sorel around the turn of the twentieth century. From opposed political angles, they and Gramsci shared the concern with occupying the centre ground and mediate the extremes in a complex society. Today’s Gramscianism appeals to the same set of concerns.

Continue reading →

Posted in History, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , | 3 Comments

William Cooper ~versus~ Richard Wolstencroft

Posted on August 31, 2010 by @ndy

From the Department of Destroy All Yuppies!

Over 70 years ago, a small group of local Aborigines, led by William Cooper, protested the beginnings of the genocidal Nazi assault upon European Jewry.

Indigenous anti-Nazi protests recognised
Luke Waters
SBS
August 26, 2010

The final chapter in a 72-year old Australian story of oppression, protest and pride is finally set to be written.

It involves formal recognition of an Aboriginal elder who led a march against Nazi attacks in the 1930s.

William Cooper was one of the few voices to formally rebuke what became known as ‘Kristallnacht’ and his stand is about to be recognised…

“When he arrived at the German consulate in South Melbourne in 1938 he delivered a petition condemning the Nazi’s behaviour.”

It’s widely considered a visionary act. Just a few weeks after Kristallnacht, it is a gesture for which William Cooper is only now being recognised.

But his great-grandson Kevin Russell insists the story still resonates…

In 2007, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht/Pogromnacht in Prague, neo-Nazis attempted to hold a rally in the Jewish quarter. It didn’t quite go according to plan (see also : Dear Mister Ambassador, February 2, 2010).

So much for William Cooper. As for Richard Wolstencroft…

I’ve kind of always distrusted Richard Wolstencroft, filmmaker, Melbourne Underground Film Festival director, and tedious bore, partly because of his avowed fascist tendencies. Now that I’ve paid money for and sat through his fucking film [Pearls Before Swine], I just want to beat the cunt senseless.

Ouch.

The transcendental fascist has been the subject of renewed criticism recently, by way of a blog titled ‘Richard Wolstencroft’s Unconcealedness’. The blog documents a number of the silly things Wolstencroft has been posting on his Facebook account “and elsewhere”. For example:

There needs to be WW2 films were [sic] the German army are portrayed as heros [sic] as indeed they were in many battles. On a larger scale the Nazis only wanted a united Europe like the EU, anyway, in essence. They were a little excesses [sic]. But that can be forgiven now given some historical distance…

Forgiven? Maybe. Maybe not. Many leading Nazis were certainly forgiven their crimes: Hans Eisele, the German doctor and SS officer who worked at Nazi concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Dachau and Buchenwald, was merely one of thousands whose punishments were minimal. In any case, any discussion of films in which Nazis are the “heros” would be incomplete without some acknowledgment of Alois Von Eichberg’s 1944 classic Stolz der Nation:

Putting to one side this admittedly minor quibble, while somewhat unusual (most agree that the Nazis, “in essence”, wanted something other than “a united Europe”, and that the Holocaust and other German war crimes were more than a little ‘excessive’), such sentiment is hardly unique to the Z-grade filmmaker. Generally speaking, however, these sorts of opinions are normally confined to kooky sites such as Stormfront; they tend not to emanate from the director of an ‘underground’ film festival, however awful and stupid. That Wolstencroft is still getting away with it suggests that the problem lies elsewhere.

The yuppies who attend Wolstencroft’s annual film festival typically don’t care much for politics, so further confirmation of the nature of his views, if any were truly needed, signifies little. (Wolstencroft has been publicly advocating fascism for some years now.) Further, Wolstencroft has built a career upon catering to the naughty desires of the middle class, whether sexual, cinematic, or both. As Wolstencroft remarks of Master Satirist or Yuppie Clone? Bret Easton Ellis: “For Ellis the superficial is all that matters. There is nothing beyond the surface, no inner depths, no hidden meanings. If you think about it this idea is paradoxically rather deep.”

LOL.

So much for the market. As for the rest, the major sponsor of the 2010 MUFF was Japanese corporation Canon.

Canon’s corporate philosophy is founded on a responsible approach to working. We believe that each step we take in trying to work for the common good – as individuals and as an organisation – does make a real difference.

We aim to act morally, in accordance with our own code of conduct and our worldwide ethical compliance framework; but more than this, we aim to make a positive difference to all we come into contact with and, through our behaviour, contribute to positive change.

I’m unsure if Canon agree with Wolstencroft that MUFF is “aggressive, transgressive, cutting edge, hip oh and fucking out there, baby” but, presumably, their “worldwide ethical compliance framework” would make it difficult to reconcile apologias for Nazism with ‘positive change’. As for the other, minor, MUFF sponsors, they are the crazy funky zany madcap and in no way annoying bunch at noise merchants gasinc; the “cutting-edge music distributor sourcing international product” aka Inertia; the “daily email News and Jobs service for people working in the Australian film and television industries” (Screen Hub); Grolsch beer (a Dutch brand owned by SABMiller); and some mob called Movie Extra. Helping Wolstencroft deal with The Controlled Media are 3RRR and Spook zine. Curiously, Spook‘s ‘Film Editor’ Luke Buckmaster also writes for Crikey on the subject of film — and MUFF, but Spook‘s promotion of MUFF goes unmentioned.

As for Wolstencroft’s hosts, in agreeing to screen films just around the corner from the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre, the owners of the Elsternwick Cinema have demonstrated that they have a rather odd sense of humour. Well, perhaps: much more likely, the proximity of the two is an unhappy coincidence, and the franchise holders are completely unaware of Wolstencroft’s espousal of fascism. In reality, it’s unlikely that either Reading Cinemas (a US-based cinema exhibition and real estate company) or the managers of the Elsternwick Cinema know much about Wolstencroft’s political views, and even if they did, in these crazy, topsy-turvy times, who’s to say what’s right or wrong?

See also : MUFF 777 (July 6, 2006) | More on MUFF 777 (July 11, 2006) | Southern Cross Soldiers, Tyler Cassidy and the far right (December 16, 2008).

Posted in Anti-fascism, Broken Windows, Death, Film, History, State / Politics | Tagged , | 1 Comment

…

Posted on August 30, 2010 by @ndy

On the evening of 29 August 1952 a crowd of avant-garde aficionados and local music enthusiasts filed into the Maverick Concert Hall near Woodstock to hear a piano recital by the young virtuoso David Tudor. That they should be here, tucked away in the Catskills, was already extraordinary. The Maverick is more hermitage than concert hall: a wooden, barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing playing cards. After subdued applause, Tudor sat back down at the piano. He played pieces by Christian Wolff, an 18-year-old student of Cage’s, and by Morton Feldman, Cage’s friend; and thundered through Pierre Boulez’s fiendishly difficult first sonata. The penultimate piece on the programme was Cage’s latest, 4’33”. Tudor shut the piano and sat still. The wind rustled in the maples. Half a minute later he reopened the lid, then shut it. The summer rain could be heard falling on the Maverick’s wooden roof. Another couple of minutes – Tudor opened and shut the lid again – and muttering broke out in the hall. People began shuffling towards the exit. Four minutes and 33 seconds without a note played and Cage had stamped himself on music history with the most radical contribution of his generation. At the end of the concert, a local artist drew himself up and bellowed: ‘Good people of Woodstock, let’s drive these people out of town.’

Posted in History, Music, Poetry | Leave a comment

Neo-Nazi skinheads murder 14-year-old girl in Russia

Posted on August 30, 2010 by @ndy

*Russian authorities/media deny early reports (Russian state-run news channel Rossiya-24) that a girl was killed in the attack. Mind you, they deny a lot of things… Avtonom has an English translation of an account published in local media here.

    you have to treat them nice & gentle
    do nothing rash, they’re sensitive
    you must be somewhat sentimental
    respectful of the way they live
    don’t let your dogs attack them on the street
    embrace the fascists where you may meet

    if they should call for hate or violence
    just let them talk, it is their right
    & keep your protestations silent
    you wouldn’t want to start a fight
    for fighting is what they do best
    embrace the fascists & you’ll be blessed

    & if they fire their guns upon you
    is life so precious in your eyes?
    you would be sheep with wolves around you
    why not be gladly victimized?
    & if you feel inside your guts
    the Nazi dagger’s blade
    embrace the fascists that you have made

    ~ kurt tucholsky, 1931

Yeah so, during the course of an assault upon concert-goers in Miass (a city 1400km east of Moscow) a group of “bare-chested” boneheads in Russia have apparently injured scores and killed a 14-year-old girl. Some reports suggest that there may be moar victims, but accurate information will be difficult to obtain while the Russian state goes into damage control mode.

Report: 100 Russian skinheads attack concertgoers
David Nowak
AP

MOSCOW — Scores of bare-chested skinheads attacked a crowd of about 3,000 people at a rock concert in central Russia on Sunday, beating them with clubs, media reports said.

Dozens of people were left bloodied and dazed in the attack, television and news agencies reported, and state news channel Rossiya-24 said a 14-year-old girl was killed at the concert in Miass, 900 miles (1,400 kilometers) east of Moscow…

Not surprisingly — or incredibly, if you prefer — other reports suggest that police stood aside as the boneheads went about their bloody business:

According to local media reports, shooting was also heard as a crowd of angry bare-chested boneheads, armed with batons, sticks and iron rods, forced their way through security cordons.

“Police and security guards were either inactive or ran away. Some attackers snatched truncheons from police officers and started beating the visitors,” the Chelnovosti reported citing eyewitnesses.

Photos made by the portal’s correspondent at the event show police standing aside while people are being beaten up.

The non-intervention by police makes sense if the context for such (in)actions — and the long history of elites utilising violent, pea-brained fascists to crush dissent — is understood. So too, the hostility of police and other authorities to grassroots resistance to fascist violence (which violence includes hundreds of extra-judicial executions over the course of the last few decades). Thus the attack upon the Tornado rock festival in Chelyabinsk comes a month or so after another attack upon a protest camp near the Khimski forest in Moscow (The attack on forest defenders Khimki, avtonom, July 23, 2010). The forest is currently slated to be destroyed to make way for a road to Saint Petersburg, although the appearance of Saint Bono in Moscow has given Russian President Medvedev an opportunity to claim otherwise.

Fitzroy yuppies have expressed skepticism at reports coming outta Russia of fascist involvement in the cleansing of the camp. Spokesperson Dion stated that, even if correct, the environmentalists are liars, hypocrites and no better than the neo-Nazi elements that his Russian equivalents frequently employ to destroy their encampments. The Russians have also come to the attention of Freya Powell, who has conducted an interview with ‘Anarchist Street Artists’. The Artists singularly fail to understand the importance of shitting on anti-fascists, and are thus liars and hypocrites.


Above : Novaya Gazeta reporter Anastasiya Baburova and human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov, murdered January 2009. Their alleged murderers are currently on trial.

Last weekend, activists organised a pop concert in support of the struggle to preserve Khimki forest. The attitude of authorities to the event was rather different to that adopted towards the event at which boneheads were given license to maim and kill children.

Battle of the bands
Andy Potts
The Moscow News
August 23, 2010

Up to 3,000 people crowded onto Pushkin Square on Sunday for an environmental protest-cum-concert in defence of Khimki forest.

In a strange quirk of policing policy, the rally was allowed to go ahead but musicians were barred from using amplifying equipment – meaning the acoustic sounds of guitars had to compete with the noise of city-centre traffic.

The police’s door policy was as intimidating – and seemingly arbitrary – as at any Moscow nightclub, with burly uniformed officers ready to pounce at the first whiff of an amp.

They manned airport-style security scanners at every entrance to the square, and were eager to direct would-be protesters to any other way in, ideally the one from which they had just been turned away…

Earlier, Reporters Without Borders were shocked — shocked — to discover that Russia’s Interior Ministry had cracked down on independent media attempts to report on the struggle, and of damage to a Government building in Khimki following a protest on July 28 (see : Journalists interrogated, photos seized after protesters attack official building in Khimki, August 12, 2010).

See also : Unplugged protesters defy Moscow authorities [23/08/2010] | Banned bands will play on in Moscow [20/08/2010] | Protest gig aims to highlight discord over Khimki Forest plans [19/08/2010].

NB. Neo-Nazi skinheads will be assembling in Melbourne on September 25 to attend a pop concert in memory of dead bonehead Ian Stuart Donaldson. It will be the 17th year in a row that they’ve done so, apparently. On the same day, Canadian Holocaust denialist Paul Fromm and Australia First Party leader Dr James Saleam are scheduled to address a meeting.

Bonus Bottles!

Posted in Anti-fascism, Death, Music, State / Politics, War on Terror | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

…a debate on Afghanistan

Posted on August 29, 2010 by @ndy

Let’s debate Afghanistan, but give us the facts first
Tom Hyland
The Age
August 29, 2010

Where there is no information, there is no hope of a meaningful discussion.

IT HAS taken nine years, the deaths of 21 Australian soldiers and a hung parliament, but now our politicians agree: they will have a debate on Afghanistan. The Greens have long called for one; so have former and serving soldiers. Now Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott reluctantly concur…

What about degrees of responsibility and shared burdens of guilt on an individual level? What can we learn about how one views oneself often in positions of power or authority?

You almost never find anyone, whether it’s in a weapons plant, or planning agency, or in corporate management, or almost anywhere, who says, ‘I’m really a bad guy, and I just want to do things that benefit myself and my friends.’ Almost invariably you get noble rhetoric like: ‘We’re working for the benefit of the people.’ The corporate executive who is slaving for the benefit of the workers and community; the friendly banker who just wants to help everybody start their business; the political leader who’s trying to bring freedom and justice to the world—and they probably all believe it. I’m not suggesting that they’re lying. There’s an array of routine justifications for whatever you’re doing. And it’s easy to believe them. It’s very hard to look into the mirror and say, ‘Yeah, that guy looking at me is a vicious criminal.’ It’s much easier to say, ‘That guy looking at me is really very benign, self-sacrificing, and he has to do these things because it’s for the benefit of everyone.’

Or you get respected moralists like Reinhold Niebuhr, who was once called ‘the theologian of the establishment’. And the reason is because he presented a framework which, essentially, justified just about anything they wanted to do. His thesis is dressed up in long words and so on (it’s what you do if you’re an intellectual). But what it came down to is that, ‘Even if you try to do good, evil’s going to come out of it; that’s the paradox of grace’. And that’s wonderful for war criminals. ‘We try to do good but evil necessarily comes out of it.’ And it’s influential. So, I don’t think that people in decision-making positions are lying when they describe themselves as benevolent. Or people working on more advanced nuclear weapons. Ask them what they’re doing, they’ll say: ‘We’re trying to preserve the peace of the world.’ People who are devising military strategies that are massacring people, they’ll say, ‘Well, that’s the cost you have to pay for freedom and justice’, and so on.

But, we don’t take those sentiments seriously when we hear them from enemies, say, from Stalinist commissars. They’ll give you the same answers. But, we don’t take that seriously because they can know what they’re doing if they choose to. If they choose not to, that’s their choice. If they choose to believe self-satisfying propaganda, that’s their choice. But it doesn’t change the moral responsibility. We understand that perfectly well with regard to others. It’s very hard to apply the same reasoning to ourselves.

In fact, one of the—maybe the most—elementary of moral principles is that of universality, that is, if something’s right for me, it’s right for you; if it’s wrong for you, it’s wrong for me. Any moral code that is even worth looking at has that at its core somehow. But that principle is overwhelmingly disregarded all the time. If you want to run through examples we can easily do it. Take, say, George W. Bush, since he happens to be president. If you apply the standards that we applied to Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg, he’d be hanged. Is it an even conceivable possibility? It’s not even discussable. Because we don’t apply to ourselves the principles we apply to others.

There’s a lot of talk about ‘terror’ and how awful it is. Whose terror? Our terror against them? I mean, is that considered reprehensible? No, it’s considered highly moral; it’s considered self-defense, and so on. Now, their terror against us, that’s awful, and terrible, and so on.

But, to try to rise to the level of becoming a minimal moral agent, and just enter in the domain of moral discourse is very difficult. Because that means accepting the principle of universality. And you can experiment for yourself and see how often that’s accepted, either in personal or political life. Very rarely.

…Let’s take the Iraq war. There’s libraries of material arguing about the war, debating it, asking ‘What should we do?’, this and that, and the other thing. Now, try to find a sentence somewhere that says that ‘carrying out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime, which differs from other war crimes in that it encompasses all the evil that follows’ (paraphrasing from Nuremberg). Try to find that somewhere—I mean, you can find it. I’ve written about it, and you can find a couple other dozen people who have written about it in the world. But is it part of the intellectual culture? Can you find it in a newspaper, or in a journal; in Congress; any public discourse; anything that’s part of the general exchange of knowledge and ideas? I mean, do students study it in school? Do they have courses where they teach students that ‘to carry out a war of aggression is the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows’?

So, for example, if sectarian warfare is a horrible atrocity, as it is, who’s responsible? By the principles of Nuremberg, Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rice—they’re responsible for sectarian warfare because they carried out the supreme international crime which encompasses all the evil that follows. Try and find somebody who points that out. You can’t. Because our dominant intellectual culture accepts as legitimate our crushing anybody we like.


Brother Ali – Uncle Sam Goddamn
Uploaded by Hip_Hop_Videos. – See the latest featured music videos.

Posted in Broken Windows, Death, History, State / Politics, That's Capitalism!, War on Terror | Tagged | 5 Comments

S11 + 10

Posted on August 28, 2010 by @ndy

The term ‘September 11’ is now forever associated with the terrorist attacks upon New York and Washington in 2001; in 2000, however, ‘S11’ was the name given to ‘three days of protest + carnival’ against the Asia-Pacific Economic Summit of the World Economic Forum, held at Crown Casino in Melbourne. (For others, ‘September 11’ will be remembered for other reasons.) EngageMedia is gonna throw up video in the weeks and months ahead, but you can also watch S11: This is What Democracy Looks Like (Actively Radical TV) online and the remnants of the S11-AWOL (Autonomous Web of Liberation) site may be found here. s11.org is archived at the NLA here.

S11 done got written about quite a bit at the time (including by myself, in a fairly cringe-worthy manner), and I’ll probably throw up moar links in future, but in the meantime it’s worth noting that it was only seven years later that Slater & Gordon (& Co.) were able to secure a fat payout for themselves — and as long as law-talking guys are happy, who could ask for anything moar? Well, apart from a whitewash, of course.

Posted in Anarchism, Broken Windows, Film, History, Media, Poetry, Student movement, Television, That's Capitalism!, Trot Guide, War on Terror | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Paul Howes

Posted on August 26, 2010 by @ndy

I keep getting hits to my blog from users either searching for the term ‘Paul Howes’ or clicking on a link from his Wikipedia entry. Both lead to a post dated February 1, 2008, and titled Would the real anarchists / Trotskyists… (Et cetera). It explores the wonderful world of radikal yoof: “If a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head”. And so on and so forth, in a number of variations, and with various attributions. Visits spiked considerably when PM KRudd got knifed, and again, sharply, following the 2010 Australian federal election, and Howes’ profile on Australian Story earlier this week (with almost 300 visits to the page in question).

After drawing the short straw and fronting ABC’s Lateline in June in order to effectively assume, on behalf of the Labor Right, credit for Julia Gillard’s coup (“Boo! Hiss!”), Howes was the subject of Australian Story: one called, appropriately enough, ‘Labor of Love’. It aired just one week after the same show done a piece on Van Rudd, the Social Revolutionary Revolutionary Socialist Party member, artiste, and ‘nephew to the stars’. The RSP being, of course, the recent (2008) split from the Leninist party which Howes joined as a teenager, and which helped both introduce him to the wonders of Castro’s Cuba and to thereby deprive him of his illusions:

I attended a 3 hour speech from Fidel whilst there – it played a key part in my decision to become an avowed anti-communist.

Having watched the Lovely story of Howes’ transformation from homeless-teenage-Trotskyite to youngest-boss-of-Australia’s-oldest-and-arguably-worst-Union, I don’t know that it contained any revelations. The question was asked how is it that someone so young so-young-and-so-gone, let’s-chase-the-dragon, oh could assume a position of such authority. But if the trade union movement is understood to be the property of the ALP — and it is — then the answer is not very hard to find.

The disavowal of political ambitions at the end of the piece was an especially nice, comic touch.

Beyond this, the irony in Howes’ recent scribblings on the threat posed to Australia by watermelons is made rather obvious by his own dilly-dallying with the DSP. It also demonstrates a central political weakness. After all, the ALP remains, formally at least, committed to ‘democratic socialism’. “The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.”

LOL.

In eulogising Laurie Short, another former-Trotskyist-turned-Labor-icon, Howes writes: “Though there may be many generations between me and Laurie I feel great affinity with him, not least because we have held the same office but because we both began our political lives on the far-Left and ended as committed democrats – hostile to the authoritarian Stalinist model which dominated the communist ideal.” Billionaire amateur Marxologist Clive Palmer argued in relation to the KRudd Government’s Resource Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious Profit Tax (a tax which Howes, on behalf of the AWU/ALP, was highly vocal in supporting): “I think it comes from Das Kapital in 1868. The super tax comes about by Marx and Engels and their famous work which inspired the Russian Revolution.”

The political potential/threat of Fabianism may only be taken seriously by billionaires, Fabians, and other members of the chattering classes, but conflating it — and the redistributive effects of a tax increase on mining super-profits — with the various ‘Stalinist’ regimes that were the end-products of Bolshevism, is a bit silly. Further, it’s worth recalling that resistance to state tyranny has been a part of Western workers’ movements since their inception, and that the authoritarian models which have dominated the communist ideal have also generated moar radical, libertarian forms of opposition to this domination. In other words, Howes’ argument that the consumer/citizen has only two choices — Coke or Pepsi, Democracy or Communism — is mistaken. As a keen student of history, Howes would know this.

The terminology of political and social discourse is vague and imprecise, and constantly debased by the contributions of ideologists of one or another stripe. Still, these terms have at least some residue of meaning. Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, “this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie,” but can only be “realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

As for stories of radical sons and daughters… they are indeed numerous. By way of explanation, I prefer the crass, the gross and the vulgar, material explanations to be found in any Economics 101 class.

And Hell hath no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle.

See also : Who Are They? Jenny Turner reports from the Battle of Ideas, London Review of Books, Vol.32, No.13, July 8, 2010.

Posted in History, State / Politics, Student movement, That's Capitalism!, Trot Guide | Tagged | 20 Comments

Move over Kenny! Here comes Mary Bale, cat-hating wheelie bin woman!

Posted on August 24, 2010 by @ndy

A cat (sometimes called a pu55y or pussy) is a small, indestructible, furry automaton often used to provide you with love and companionship when things fuck up in your shit life. ~ ED

From the Department of Kenny Glenn Now Probably Regrets His Cruel Action comes:

A woman who was filmed putting a cat in a wheelie bin has been offered police protection after being identified by the RSPCA.

Where is the Dustyce?

Posted in Broken Windows, Cats, Media | Leave a comment

Hammerskin Mário Machado Goes To Jail

Posted on August 24, 2010 by @ndy

Mário Machado is líder máximo of the Portuguese franchise of the international neo-Nazi skinhead network known as the Hammerskins. In Australia, the franchise holders call themselves the Southern Cross Hammerskins, and are coming to Melbourne on September 25.

Mário Machado jailed
The Portugal News Online
August 21, 2010

Neo-Nazi leader Mário Machado has been jailed for seven years and two months this week, for the crimes of coercion, robbery, kidnapping and illegal possession of weapons.

The leader of the nationalist far right party, the ‘Hammerskins’, was finally sentenced to seven years and two months at Loures Courts on Tuesday, after sentencing was postponed twice beforehand. A further two suspects, Rui Dias and Fernando Massas, were jailed for nine years and seven years and ten months, respectively.

Nuno Cerejeiro (two years and two months) and João Dourado (ten months) received suspended sentences, whilst Bruno Ramos, Bruno Monteiro and Nuno Themudo were acquitted.

Mário Machado had previously been convicted to four years and ten months in 2008 for racial discrimination, intimidation, damage and assault with intent to cause serious bodily harm, amongst other related crimes.

Another nutzi to have been found guilty of breaking the law recently is Hal Turner. On August 13, 2010, the Internet Tough Guy was found guilty of making death threats against federal judges. Turner is currently in prison awaiting sentencing, and faces up to 10 years jail and a $250,000 fine.

Apart from being batshit, Turner’s trick was to cultivate an audience of psychotic racists, and on occasion to feed infos concerning their madcap plans to the FBI. A shock confession at a court hearing in July 2009 of his tricksy, double-dealing ways — first uncovered by pissed-off hackers 18 months prior to this — shook off most of his supporters, but not all.

Thank Heavens no loudmouthed nutzi Internet Tough Guy from Australia does the exact same thing eh?

Posted in Anti-fascism, State / Politics, War on Terror | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Bradley Trappitt, Combat 18 & The Weerheym Manoeuvre

Posted on August 24, 2010 by @ndy

I beg Odin to watch over you with his loving eye / If my life must end for you and my race then I will … give it / Your smile melts the most Iron heart, your holy body wrapped in the red, white and black of the Swastika flag…

~ ‘Aryan Princess’, Bradley Trappitt, May 22, 2005

Bradley Neil Trappitt and three friends, allegedly members of the local franchise of neo-Nazi network Combat 18, were apparently drunk on February 4, 2010, and so decided it would be both ace and grouse to fire three shots at the dome roof of the Suleymaniye Mosque in Queens Park in Perth. Trappitt was fined more than $9000 for his involvement in the shooting (co-accused, Jacob Marshall Holt, 24, previously pleaded guilty on similar charges and was given a seven-month jail sentence suspended for 12 months).

Trappitt was charged with wilfully damaging property, possessing an unlicensed firearm and unlawfully discharging a firearm from across the road.

In the Perth Magistrates Court on Monday, the 25-year-old was fined $5000 for criminal damage, $3750 for his part in the reparation costs for the mosque, $1000 for the two firearm offences and $62.60 in court costs.

Magistrate Steven Heath said the fine needed to be a “substantial one to reflect the seriousness” of the crime.

He said Trappitt’s involvement could be distinguished from his co-accused as a “lesser role” and accepted that he co-operated when he was questioned.

But he said it was still a “foolish decision” to participate in the crime.

Trappitt’s lawyer Curt Hofmann said his client drove the car to the mosque but never got out of the vehicle.

He said Trappitt was trying to show “bravado” among his friends and was acting out of “stupidity”.

~ Mosque shooter fined more than $9000, The Age (AAP), August 23, 2010

Bradley is innocent until proven now considered guilty, obviously; curiously, he’s also friends with Welf Herfurth, the (former) ‘leader’ of the dwindling ranks of ‘national anarchists’ in Australia. (Herfurth now appears to prefer to spend his time organising grown-ups in the local franchise of the neo-Nazi Volksfront network in Sydney.) Along with Herfurth and a range of other fascist creeps, Trappitt is BFF with the Sydney-based Creatard Chris Smith.

Despite this, “Trappitt’s lawyer Curt Hofmann had earlier told the court the shooting wasn’t racially motivated but just a stupid stunt by four friends who wanted to show off after they had been drinking.”

LOL.

‘Combat 18’ originated in the UK in the late 1980s as a militant, anti-anti-fascist network dedicated to causing terror among neo-Nazism’s political opponents — “left-wing bookshops, gay pubs and anti-apartheid activists” — and to defending the organising activity of its parent networks ‘Blood & Honour’ and the BNP. Those involved also referred to Combat 18 as ‘Terror Machine’, and took great delight in the fear and loathing its activity was intended to generate. Like many other stories on the fringes of the far right, however, it ended in tears: former leader Paul ‘Charlie’ Sargent one of two Aryan Supermen convicted of murdering kameraden Christopher Castle (by sticking a knife 20cm into his back) in 1997.

Since then, C18 — which, while also gathering a reputation as a state-sponsored honeypot, cultivated links with Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland/The Six Counties — grew and expanded overseas. Currently, C18 appears to eke out a sporadically violent existence nestled among broader fascist networks in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, while also remaining closely tied to one of two splinters in the neo-Nazi network ‘Blood & Honour’. In Australia and New Zealand, B&H is aligned with non-C18 elements, and in particular the local franchises of the US-based Hammerskins network. Their principal bonehead rival is another local franchise of yet another US-based group called Volksfront. In the US (and elsewhere) the rivalry between the two groups can be quite intense, even bloody, but locally it’s all sunshine and lollipops, and the two, otherwise antagonistic groups have learned to play nicely with one another.

Or at least, nobody has stabbed anyone in the back.

Yet.

Like seemingly ever other Jew-hatin’ Australian, Trappitt (‘Aussie_Knight’) posted on the White supremacist website Stormfront (joining in November 2004), contributing some very moving poetry [stormfront.org/forum/t206672/] while also taking the opportunity to riff on some neglected aspects of modern German history: “You want to know who started the War… THE JEWS[!]” [stormfront.org/forum/t162628-6/#post1470826].

The Boys from Brazil Australia maintained a website — terrormachine.net — taken over from the Norwegian C18. It’s closed now, and the archive wiped, but it used to advertise neo-Nazi merch and contain occasional announcements regarding the group’s infrequent activities. If I was a defence lawyer, I might characterise it as not racially motivated but just a stupid site by four friends who wanted to show off after they’d been drinking. In any case, the site was registered to a bloke called Jake. From Perth. Several years ago he, along with Stormfront moderator Paul Innes (‘Steelcap Boot’), helped spread David Lane’s ashes around town: David Lane being, of course, the dead neo-Nazi terrorist from the US who coined the ’14 words’.

As for The Weerheym Manoeuvre…

Six years ago, another small group of neo-Nazis found themselves on trial in Perth for similarly foolish and stupid behaviour / boys will be boys / ‘nigger’ and ‘sand-nigger terrorist’ are simply everyday discourse / Nine sisters twelve cousins and I’m fucking the lot / yadda yadda yadda.

Before he was sentenced to a six-month suspended sentence this week, Weerheym’s lawyer, Michael Tudori, told the Perth Magistrates Court Weerheym was not interested in the ANM and had not wanted to take part in the graffiti…

Weerheym was not jailed because he was deemed to have played a much lesser role as the driver.

~ Paige Taylor, ‘Graffiti driver a secret white supremacist’, The Australian, August 7, 2004

History repeats.

The next two major fascist assemblies are the Sydney Forum over the weekend of September 18/19 (at which the Canadian neo-Nazi and Holocaust denialist Paul Fromm is expected to speak) and the following weekend in Melbourne, when Justin O’Brien of Blood & Honour Australia (and Hold Fast Body Art) will be helping to organise the 17th (?) annual Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial gig.

But moaron that later.

Speaking of tattoos…

See also : Combat 18 / terrormachine clunks into Perth court (June 4, 2010) | C18 “terror machine” breaks down in Perth (May 25, 2010).

Posted in Anti-fascism, Broken Windows, State / Politics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments