“AN ARTWORK [“Economy of Movement – A Piece of Palestine”] by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s nephew attacking Connex for suppressing Palestinians was installed beneath Flinders Street Station, then covered up following complaints. It has now been declared fit to be seen, on the grounds of freedom of speech…”
Previously:
“The City of Melbourne last year banned from an exhibition Van Thanh Rudd‘s painting of Ronald McDonald carrying an Olympic torch past a burning monk…”
Van Thanh’s painting “special forces – after banksy”, was inspired by millionaire street artist Banksy. Neo-con scribbler Chris Berg bemoans the absence of creativity in the work; Melbourne City Council regarded it as being too incendiary:
“MELBOURNE City Council has rejected a controversial painting by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s nephew that depicts the clown Ronald McDonald carrying the Olympic torch past a burning monk…”
Which is not the first time the MCC has gotten more than it’s bargained for from an artistic Trotskyist. In May 2004, Azlan McLennan’s Fifty Six was given the arse, and the MCC also told him to piss off from an exhibition in September 2005 (See : Art=Ego, January 22, 2006).
Speaking of McLennan, he has a new exhibition titled ‘Coke vs Pepsi’ @ the George Patton Gallery (May 5–15): “A Marxist analysis of the various forms protest art has taken over the past 100-odd years in the advanced capitalist countries, this examination show is the culmination of research by Masters in Fine Art candidate Azlan McLennan.”
“Insurrection is an art, and like all arts has its own laws” (Leon Trotsky) quoth the McLennan. Speaking of laws and insurrection, People’s Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs and Chairman of the Supreme Military Council Leon Trotsky was quite adept at proclaiming laws to suppress rebellious proles — developing it, perhaps, into an art-form.
See also : Down in the subway, Daniel Bowen, Diary of an Average Australian, March 8, 2009
‘The Workers’ and Peasants’ Government has decreed that Kronstadt and the rebelling ships must immediately submit to the authority of the Soviet Republic. I therefore order all who have raised their hands against the socialist fatherland to lay down their arms at once. Recalcitrants are to be disarmed and turned over to the Soviet authorities. The commissars and other members of the government who have been arrested are to be liberated at once. Only those who surrender unconditionally can expect mercy from the Soviet Republic.
“I am simultaneously giving orders to prepare for the suppression of the rebellion and the subjugation of the sailors by armed force. All responsibility for the harm that may be suffered by the peaceful population will rest entirely on the heads of the White Guard mutineers. This warning is final.”
L.Trotsky, L.Kamenev, ‘Ultimatum to Kronstadt’
“We have one answer to all that: All power to the Soviets! Take your hands off them – the hands that are red with the blood of the martyrs of freedom who fought the White Guards, the landowners and the bourgeoisie!”
Kronstadt Izvestiya, No.6
Bonus!
The conclusion for anarchists like Goldman is identical to that of conservatives – opposition to mass, democratic control from below: the working class can’t and shouldn’t rule. This extreme elitism is not an aberration of Goldman’s, but addresses a contradiction at the heart of anarchism: if a mass movement or organisation aimed at concerted action does not operate on the democratic method of open debate, followed by majority rule and centralised implementation, how does a movement go forward?
There are two possible outcomes: either there is no concerted action because the participants are each “doing their own thing,” and the movement therefore dissolves or collapses in defeat; or decisions are made by individuals who are not elected and not accountable to anyone.
But anarchist principles don’t allow open, accountable leadership. So instead anarchists fall back on secret, elite bands – the “invisible” leaders that Bakunin praised…
Added Bonus!
The Soviet Union Versus Socialism
Noam Chomsky Our Generation
Spring/Summer 1986
When the world’s two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.
Neo-Nazi murderer, warbler, tub-thumper and string-plucker Varg Vikernes — The Artist Formerly Known As Count Grishnackh — is due for release from his prison in Norway.
Varg has learned a lot during his time inside, including how to escape, which he did in October 2003, failing to return to his low-security prison in Tønsberg, after having been granted a short leave. Vikernes was found riding in a stolen Volvo car, which contained an unloaded AG3 automatic rifle, a handgun, numerous large knives, a gas mask, camouflage clothing, a laptop, a compass, a Global Positioning System, various maps and a fake passport (it is thought that Vikernes came to be in possession of this equipment by means of a military barracks). For this thirteen months were added to his sentence, and he was then moved to a maximum-security prison in Trondheim. He has since been moved again, this time to Tromsø Prison.
Vikernes has spent the last 16 years in one prison or another (including, from July of last year, periods spent with his family on the outside) for murdering fellow metalhead Øystein Aarseth — The Former Artist Formerly Known As Euronymous — on August 10, 1993 (and for a number of other crimes). When Vikernes was arrested, it was discovered that he had in his possession about 330 pounds of dynamite, some of which he claimed he was planning to use to destroy the Antifa (Anti-fascist) center Blitz House in Oslo.
Despite this, Varg denies being a neo-Nazi… sort of. Conceding that he has sometimes referred to himself as a Nazi, Vikernes is at pains to clarify his views. Thus:
Some of the terms I have used have been rather inaccurate, and I realize that people react to the different terms differently, depending on where they come from or who they are. A Scandinavian, for instance, has no good reasons to emotionally react negatively to “nazism”, but I understand that a Slav has a perfectly good reason to do so. While the German “nazis” behaved exemplary in Denmark and Norway during WWII, they certainly didn’t behave exemplary in Poland or the former Soviet Union. In Norway only about 0,03% of the population was killed in WWII (and the vast majority was actually killed by the Allies), while for example in Byelorussia as much as 25% of the population was killed – and had a lot to do with the Germans’ incredibly lowbrow and surprisingly ignorant view on the Slavs and their culture…
A Scandinavian, like Varg Vikernes for instance, has no good reason to react negatively to “Nazism”;
The “Nazis” behaved impeccably during their occupation of Denmark, murdering only a tiny proportion of the .03% of the population killed during WWII;
The slaughter of one quarter of the population of Byelorussia had much to do with the Nazis “surprisingly” low opinion of Slavs and Slavic culture.
Got that?
In reality:
Denmark
The Nazis began their occupation of Denmark in April 1940. At this time, the Jewish population was approximately 7,500, accounting for 0.2% of the country’s total population. Until 1943, the Nazis adopted a relatively relatively hands-off approach. Unlike Norway, the ‘Final Solution’ was not implemented in Denmark until 1943, and even then met considerable resistance, from both Government authorities and the general population. At this time, strikes and sabotage escalated, as it became clear that the Nazis might well be defeated by the Allies.
The Danish government resigned on August 28, 1943, rather than yield to new German demands that German military courts try future saboteurs. The following night, the German military commander, General Hermann von Hannecken, declared martial law. German authorities arrested Danish civilians, Jews and non-Jews alike, and Danish military personnel. Under the state of emergency German authorities took direct control over the Danish military and police forces…
In the intervening [months], the Danish authorities and Jewish community leaders facilitated a massive operation to get Jews into hiding or into sanctuaries. When German police began the roundup on the night of October 1, 1943, they found few Jews. In general, the Danish police authorities refused to cooperate, denying German police the right to enter Jewish homes by force, or simply overlooking Jews they found in hiding. Popular protests quickly came from various quarters such as churches, the Danish royal family, and various social and economic organizations. The Danish resistance, assisted by many ordinary Danish citizens, organized a partly coordinated, partly spontaneous rescue operation…
Thousands of Jews were hidden in the countryside while others were conveyed to the relative safety of Sweden.
The Germans seized about 470 Jews in Denmark and deported them to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Most of them were German or eastern European refugees. Despite the fact that many of those deported were not Danish citizens, the Danish authorities and the Danish Red Cross vocally and insistently demanded information on their whereabouts and living conditions. The vigor of Danish protests undoubtedly deterred the Germans from transporting the Danish Jews to killing centers in German-occupied Poland…
The Danish Jews remained in Theresienstadt, where dozens of them died, until 1945. In late April of that year, German authorities handed the Danish prisoners over to the custody of the Swedish Red Cross. Virtually all of the refugees returned to Denmark in 1945. Although a housing shortage required some of them to live in shelters for a few months, most found their homes as they had left them, since the Danish authorities had refused to permit the Germans or their collaborators in Denmark to seize Jewish homes.
In total, some 120 Danish Jews died during the Holocaust, either in Theresienstadt or during the flight from Denmark. This relatively small number represents one of the highest Jewish survival rates for any German-occupied European country.
Norway
When the Nazis tripped and fell into Denmark in April 1940, they also accidentally landed in Norway. Following the Norwegian government’s surrender in June, the Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling was appointed Prime Minister. He was an incompetent figurehead, and was subsequently removed and reinstalled as the Nazis saw fit.
There were approximately 1,700 Jews in Norway at the time of the German invasion, including about 200 German and Austrian Jewish refugees who had found safe haven there in the 1930s. Restrictions on Jews initially were sporadic, but with the German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, numerous Jews in the northern part of the country were incarcerated. Arrests of Norwegian Jews began in the fall of 1942 with Norwegian police and paramilitary formations supporting SS and German police units. In early October, the authorities arrested all male Jews in Trondheim, a northern Norwegian port city. On October 26 and 27, 260 male Jews were arrested in Oslo, Norway’s capital. During the night of November 25-26, 1942, all remaining Jews in Oslo, including women, children, the sick, and the handicapped, were arrested and interned. They were deported on the “Donau,” a ship requisitioned by the Quisling government, which took them to Germany. From Germany, they were deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
In the weeks that followed, despite protests by Norwegian church leaders and some segments of the population, the internment and deportation of Jews from Norway continued intermittently. Fortunately, many Jews received advance warnings of the roundups from Norwegian policemen and members of the underground. More than half of Norway’s Jews, about 900, escaped to neutral Sweden with the aid of the underground. Many others went into hiding.
Between 1940 and 1945, more than 760 Jews were deported from Norway. Only about 25 returned after the war; most of the others were murdered in Auschwitz. On May 8, 1945, German forces in Norway surrendered to the Allies. Quisling was arrested and found guilty of treason. He was executed on October 24, 1945.
The reasons Scandinavians might have reason to reject Nazism escape Varg — but perhaps this is not all that surprising. Certainly, other Scandinavians don’t appear to have too many difficulties in this arena. By the same token, while the place allocated ‘Slavs’ in Nazi racial theory may surprise Vikernes, I imagine it was unlikely to surprise too many Nazis.
MOSCOW — As soon as Dzhomi Kukanshoyev stepped into the Moscow subway car, three young Russian toughs in tracksuits stopped talking and swung their gazes toward him. “You’re not a Russian—why are you here?” one of the men shouted at Kukanshoyev, one of legions of migrants who have left impoverished Tajikistan to make a living at Moscow construction sites. “There’s no place for you here.” In seconds, the three pounced on Kukanshoyev with a barrage of punches and kicks. The 25-year-old Tajik was lucky, escaping the October attack with a broken nose and finger. His first encounter with angry Russians in 2004 also could have turned out much worse; a group of men threw him off a Moscow bridge into a stream. “They thought I was dead,” Kukanshoyev said, “so they left me.”
…
Just as worrisome, experts say, is the degree to which Russia’s nationalist movement is getting larger and wealthier. Once relegated to the fringes of society, ultranationalist and skinhead groups today have among their ranks members with day jobs as bankers and stockbrokers. “They have huge resources at their disposal,” Kozhevnikova said. “They have their own lawyers and maintain good connections in the business and banking worlds.” The attacks have grown more brazen. In December a group of skinheads stabbed to death Salokhiddin Azizov, a 20-year-old Tajik produce-warehouse worker, decapitated him and left his head in a plastic bag outside a Moscow government building… (See : [For Dion] OMG!Nationalists Claim Decapitation!LOL!, December 13, 2008)
Germany’s main neo-Nazi party pretends to be democratic. But its members hoard weapons, plan to rebuild Hitler’s Reich and are using the economic crisis to try to make sweeping gains in this year’s elections, a new and disturbing study of the extreme right has revealed. To write their expose on the increasingly influential neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), the authors spent two years infiltrating Germany’s far right. They interviewed party leaders and defectors who have since quit the organisation in disgust…
Luthardt described how the party was funded by donations from expatriate Nazis and their families who fled to South America after World War II. Cash also came from concerts staged by far-right skinhead rock bands. “The objective is to bring back the Third Reich,” he said. “A new organisation of stormtroopers would take revenge on anyone who disagrees with them. The concept is simply: let’s kick out all the foreigners, then Germans will have jobs again.” (See : Neo-Nazism in Germany: Music & Politics, March 3, 2009)
…The Civic Platform, then in opposition, went on to win the elections in 2007 and in 2008 put together legislation aimed at dismantling TVP and replacing it with a cluster of new companies. The party cited red tape as the main reason for TVP’s lack of efficiency and called for massive sackings. Lay-offs are now happening. TVP’s supervisory board in late December 2008 temporarily suspended the station’s chief executive officer, Andrzej Urbański, and his management board, nominally for three months but probably indefinitely. The broadcaster’s acting head, Piotr Farfał, had by the end of last month fired 54 people, including directors of regional TVP studios. Rather than reducing the headcount, though, he replaced them with 56 people, most of them his cronies. A 31-year-old lawyer, Farfał is a former member of an extreme right-wing association and is notorious for articles he wrote in Polish skinhead magazines. He was propelled to TVP’s board by the right-wing League of Polish Families in May 2006. Farfał is expected to leave the station once the new media law promoted by the Civic Platform is adopted, which will probably happen by June… (See : Race hate and the state, December 6, 2006 / Granddaughter Of Upside-Down Corpse Heils The Dawn Of A New Europe, January 10, 2007)
After a closed-door trial, a Moscow court found seven teenaged racist skinheads guilty of murdering 20 immigrants during a yearlong killing spree. The sadistic details that emerged from the five-month trial captivated a city where skinhead violence is rampant. Russian prosecutors said the teenagers, who believed in “the inferiority of non-Slavs,” randomly selected and stabbed to death victims based on their Eurasian or dark-skinned features. Most of the victims were from China or Tajikistan, a former Soviet republic that borders China and Afghanistan. A splinter faction of the gang also murdered Sergei Nikolayev, an internationally known chess master from Russia’s Far East, by beating him with baseball bats on Oct. 20, 2007… (See : Anti-Fascist Attitude, February 17, 2009)
Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist. ~ G. Carlin
If publishing is defined as the practice of putting ink onto paper and then getting that into the hands of people, then publishing — and anarchist publishing in particular — is on the ropes. While there are arguably more anarchist books being published than at any time in history, readership is shrinking. Anarchist publications, magazines, newspapers, and journals, are nearly universally diminished. Infrequent publishing schedules and decreased print runs indicate that the time for print may be drawing to a close for anarchist periodicals.
The counter to this claim is that there has been a corresponding, if not larger, rise in anarchist publishing on the Internet. But is this actually the case? It depends on what you mean by publishing. On Infoshop.org, the largest and longest-running anarchist publisher on the web, finding enough original anarchist content on the news portion of the site (the most active portion) to fill a magazine in a year would be hard. This is not a criticism but a statement about how qualitatively different Internet publishing is than publishing a newspaper or magazine — where reprints are the exception rather than the rule.
So perhaps a broader definition of anarchist publishing is needed. If we free publishing from paper and ink, then perhaps it can be seen as healthier than it has ever been. These are halcyon days of discussions about events halfway across the world, essays written just last weekend, and salacious details that formerly would have taken years to uncover about the heroes and villains of anarchodom. But what is lost in this new world of constant information limited to screens, broadband network connections, and specialists of the digital arts of HTML, CMS, and image manipulation?
Pacing, tactility, seduction, context, simplicity, clarity (copyediting and proofreading are beleaguered skills), beautiful writing, depth, informed debate, and personal relationships to authors[1] are what has been lost. And it is likely that these things aren’t coming back, not in the anarchist or any other press. Moreover, there is a critical mass of readers[2] who declare good riddance to retail pricing; long form essays; specialization of authorship; editorship; slow publishing schedules, and the amount of time it takes for periodicals to get to print. People are no longer waiting on print and, by and large, print publishers are fading away one by one.
Any publisher who wants to be relevant[3] today has to maintain a presence on the Internet, but the opposite also holds true. The move towards digital publishing (as evidenced by the increasing number of “pdf only” anarchist publications) and the inability of more and more projects to even get their voice out into the world, demonstrates the bleak times ahead. Sure, there will be more words, more stuff thrown against digital walls hoping to stick, but mostly it will not be noticed. At best a new kind of virtual elite (which already exists and is in a kind of ownership of many of the anti-authoritarian spaces[4]) will nod in the direction of a text — and links will proliferate. For about a week. Then it is on to the next thing, the next faux-controversy, the next pleasure, the next distraction.
This is distinct from even the lowliest zine or the most fantastic, critical anarchist magazine stuffed into the bottom of a traveler’s pack. Ink on paper continues to contain the greatest possibility of being rediscovered years from now, of finding a new audience. Anarchist publishing in this century will have to come up with a solution to a new problem that at this time seems more pernicious than the suppression of publications in the last century. While it would seem that the idea of living free of coercion would have to benefit from being free from the burden of printing and distribution, this hasn’t shown itself to be true. In an infinite marketplace of ideas even the idea of freedom, of anarchy, becomes just another choice and not a particularly inviting at that. The path is too lonely and fraught with danger. It may seem unevident but the process of desiring anarchist freedom, of articulating your desire for a different world while you are under duress[5], is as much a part of the process of becoming an informed, educated, life-long anarchist as is reading the words of the grandfathers of anarchism, or the Anarchist FAQ.
The process of putting ink on paper and getting it to people who are interested contains a full spectrum of experiences about how to actually do something. How to turn good ideas (and half-assed notions) into successes and failures on paper has a value of its own, different than the accolades, dismissals, and misconceptions that result from getting those ideas out into the world. The process of moving words on paper from here to there, from me to you, is also the primary connection a publisher has to the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people who will be the writers of the future, the magicians of anarchy today, the comrades who may make things happen, and the best friends we will ever have.
1. The “author as hero” is rightfully criticized (and a puzzling phenomenon for ’most anyone who has met an author or two). That said, very few Internet writers bridge the gap that a Hunter S. Thompson or Feral Faun does – few go from being someone who is read, to someone who makes everything around them brighter.
2. While these readers are overwhelmingly younger than 25, they are speaking volumes about what the future of text, print, and reading will look like.
3. Whatever in the hell that means.
4. Although there are a different set of them at libcom, for instance, than at Infoshop.
5. It is a sad state of affairs that sitting in an office chair staring at a screen is considered easier than reading a magazine on the toilet, bus, or couch, but such is the state of affairs we are confronted with.
======
Oh yeah… apparently, AK Press is no longer stocking AJODA, as a result (I think?) of some hostile criticisms by Bob Black in his review of the 2007 AK Press Publishing & Distribution Catalog — ‘Class Struggle Social Democrats: Or, The Press of Business’ — and/or a letter that was published in one issue which allegedly created (or could potentially have created) some kinda legal difficulties for AK publisher Ramsey Kanaan. Anyway, AJODA have published a response to this decision. In any case, Ramsey, formerly of AK, is now involved in a new venture called PM Press; Bob Black’s writings are available online here.
Dear Leader and Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army Kim Jong-Il has won a landslide victory in military constituency 333, securing a seat in the Supreme People’s Assembly.
May the Ever-Victorious Banner of Our Revolution led by KPA Supreme Commander KIM JONG IL and the Pyongyang Mission of the AINDF (Anti-Imperialist National Democratic Front) fly forever in our hearts!
NKorea’s Kim wins parliamentary seat: official media
SEOUL (AFP) — Leader Kim Jong-Il has been unanimously elected to a seat in North Korea’s parliament, following a 100 percent turnout in his constituency, state media said Monday.
Sunday’s elections for the rubber-stamp Supreme People’s Assembly featured only one pre-approved candidate in each constituency. But analysts say they could pave the way for an eventual transition of power in the impoverished communist nation.
Kim, 67, was standing in military constituency 333, a lucky number in Korean. The new assembly will vote later to confirm him as chairman of the National Defence Commission, the country’s most powerful body.
The central election committee said “all the voters of Constituency No. 333 participated in the election and voted for Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army Kim Jong-Il,” the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported.
“This is the expression of all service persons’ and people’s absolute support and profound trust in Kim Jong-Il,” it added.
Voting for the parliament did not take place in 2008 when its five-year term expired, amid speculation over Kim’s health. He is widely believed to have suffered a stroke last August.
Seoul officials say he has recovered well and is in control, but his health and age have inevitably led to talk abroad about who will succeed him.
The election committee announced later that 99.98 percent of all registered voters took part in the nationwide balloting and 100 percent voted for the candidate in their district.
It has announced the list of the 686 deputies elected, KCNA said without giving details.
Kim Yong-Hyun, a North Korea expert at Seoul’s Dongguk University, said Sunday the election could see “a generation change” in the top ranks.
“The North will likely bring in the young to replace the elderly with a future possible power transition in mind,” he said, adding Pyongyang’s elite was overhauled after the 1998 and 2003 polls.
Dear Leader is obviously kept very busy with affairs of state, but just as Leon Trotsky was able to combine his role as People’s Commissar of Army and Navy Affairs and Chairman of the Supreme Military Council with a deep and abiding appreciation of Art, so Kim Jong-Il also savours Culture. On March 8:
Kim Jong Il Enjoys Art Performance
Pyongyang, March 8 (KCNA) — General Secretary Kim Jong Il enjoyed an art performance given by the State Merited Chorus together with servicepersons in connection with the opening of the Pulgunbyol Theatre…
Through the performance the artistes sang high praises of the proud course of the Songun revolution shining with victory and glory and truthfully represented the unshakable faith and will of the army and people of the DPRK to accomplish the revolutionary cause of Juche and the cause of building a great prosperous and powerful nation without fail under the uplifted banner of the great Songun.
The revolutionary and militant performance deeply impressed the audience as it powerfully demonstrated the great vitality of the WPK’s policy on Songun music.
Kim Jong Il expressed great satisfaction over the fact that the artistes of the State Merited Chorus gave a splendid performance fully reflecting the faith and will of the DPRK and the revolutionary soldier spirit.
He expressed great expectation and conviction that all the artistes of the chorus would conduct dynamic revolutionary performing activities in the future, too, and thus greatly encourage the army and people to wage fresh struggles and perform feats and give full play to the might of the buglers for the Songun revolution and a militant art unit…
The need of the hour is for a man who will incarnate the call to struggle, a man who, subordinating himself completely to the requirements of the struggle, becomes the ringing summons to arms, the will which exacts from all unconditional submission to a great, sacrificial necessity. Only a man with Kim Jong-Il’s capacity for work, only a man so unsparing of himself as Kim Jong-Il, only a man who knows how to speak to the soldiers as Kim Jong-Il does — only such a man could have become the standard bearer of the armed toilers. He is all things rolled into one.
Long live KIM JONG IL! Long live the immortal JUCHE IDEA and SONGUN POLITICS!
For the past few weeks the world media has been buzzing about preparations by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) for a test of what could be either a long range missile or a space launch vehicle, perhaps as early as mid-March. As with their previous long range missile tests in August 1998 and July 2006, there is an extensive ongoing debate over what is in fact being fired from the launch pad and whether or not the test is a threat to other nations, including Japan and the United States…
[In 1998] North Korean State media claimed that they had placed a small satellite into orbit which was broadcasting the Song of General Kim Jong-il and his departed father, along with various status of health signals. No satellite tracking facilities ever tracked any object in orbit from this launch and ham radio operators failed to find any radio signals…
Last month, the Catholic Church sacked Father Peter Kennedy, the parish priest of St Mary’s Church in South Brisbane.
His crimes?
Brisbane Archbishop John Bathersby accuses Father Kennedy of “presenting unapproved services including giving Holy Communion to gay and divorced people, baptising babies using unorthodox wording and not wearing traditional vestments”. As such, “Peter Kennedy is the first Catholic priest in Australia to lose his job for failing to conform to orthodox liturgy” according to Andrew Fraser (What would Jesus do?, The Australian, February 21, 2009).
Shame Peter, shame.
Apparently, some “CATHOLICS are questioning why the church hierarchy is determined to sack rebel parish leader Peter Kennedy, but is slow to act against pedophile priests” (Priest must resign or face axe, Kate Dennehy, Brisbane Times, February 27, 2009). And in his defence, Kennedy argues that Jesus too, was a rebel.
REBEL Catholic priest Father Peter Kennedy has defended his church’s social activism, telling a packed St Mary’s church in South Brisbane that Jesus also was harshly criticised for unorthodox behaviour.
Catholic Archbishop of Brisbane John Bathersby has terminated Fr Kennedy’s appointment from next Saturday, February 21. Fr Kennedy is trying to appeal the sacking under the church’s canon law.
The Vatican is unhappy because the church conducts unorthodox masses, allows women to preach and blesses homosexual couples.
St Mary’s on Sunday once again was packed and the congregation of around 600 loudly applauded the turbulent priest after his sermon.
“People who are not part of our community will make judgments about us because of our so-called unorthodox behaviour,” Fr Kennedy said.
“But we can take heart from the words of Jesus himself, who was judged harshly for his unorthodox behaviour – ‘By their fruits you will know them’.”
Kennedy suffered a collapse following his ‘final’ sermon, has refused to resign, and has labelled his replacement, Dean Ken Howell, a ‘religious scab’.
It would be wrong, however, to suggest that the Catholic Church is an unforgiving institution. Thus, last year “convicted pedophile Ron McKiernan was still celebrating Mass in Brisbane despite having served time in jail” (Catholic Church continues support of sex-abuse priest, Michael Crutcher, The Courier-Mail, February 20, 2009). Which is as it should be: sexually-abusing children is one thing, but giving Holy Communion to gay and divorced people, baptising babies using unorthodox wording and not wearing traditional vestments is a crime of a much more serious nature.
It would also be incorrect to believe that there are those who don’t support Archbishop John Bathersby.
Miranda Devine
Posing as a privileged conservative airhead, Devine is in fact the nation’s foremost postmodern activist. She’s the Bruce Wayne of radical intellectuals in this country, a seeming lightweight who’s really a courageous champion of suppressed ideas and politically unfashionable causes. …Devine’s satire burns with contempt for the profoundly anti-intellectual character of Australian public life today. Dark and Swiftian, her satirical boldness is unprecedented in the history of Australian letters.
~ Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler, The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press (UWA Press, 2006)
While you can feel pity for [Brisbane Archbishop John] Bathersby, the mess is his own making. Having tolerated Kennedy’s antics for years, and having presided over the transformation of Brisbane into the most progressive and least disciplined archdiocese in the country, he can hardly be surprised by the result.
There are plenty of religions which have protested more effectively about Catholic authority than Kennedy – he should try them. Or he could establish his own religion. He has said if he is forced out he will take his flock with him: “The reality is that, if we are excluded from this church, the Trades and Labor Council have already offered us their place just down the road.”
Good luck to him. No one is forced to be a Catholic, and the church – as it has been for 2000 years [sic] – is thriving the world over, wherever it has remained true to its teachings. The thousands of young people who spontaneously went to Rome for the funeral of the very orthodox Pope John Paul II were not activists trying to dismantle the church. They are the future, not Kennedy’s outdated mumbo jumbo socialism.
Note that the Catholic church has a long history of forced conversions — of Jews throughout Europe, in Portuguese-controlled India, the Americas under Spanish rule and so on; the saintly Pope Pius IX (1846–1878), who confined Rome’s Jews to a ghetto and forcibly baptised their children as Christians, referred to Jews as ‘dogs’. See also : The Role of the Catholic Church in Yugoslavia’s Holocaust, Seán Mac Mathúna, Flame, No.6, Winter 2000 & Christian Persecution of Jews over the Centuries, Gerard S. Sloyan, ushmm.org, January 19, 2007 [PDF].
Christopher Pearson
Christopher Pearson is … different. How many middle-aged, gay Catholic journalists, after all, especially ones who devote a weekly press column to espousing the virtues of conservative values and hard-line Vatican morality, can there possibly be? …Pearson shows that he is nothing more than Howard’s political gimp. His job is to make it seem that ‘popular conservatism’ is real, and not simply a strategic assertion designed to make it look as though the Howard government is democratically representative.
In some ways Pearson is no different from the other members of the less than magnificent seven in wanting to return to a time before there were baby boomers. But at least the others could go back as they are today… without having to change themselves in the process. But Christopher Pearson is different. In public, in the 1950s, he could not be who he is today. That’s something he owes not to ‘popular conservatism’, but to those who answered [Isaiah] Berlin’s call for difference, a call made in the name of others whose ‘tastes and beliefs find (whether rightly or wrongly must not matter) little response among the majority.’ In his refusal to acknowledge this, Christopher Pearson is a hypocrite.
~ Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler, The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press (UWA Press, 2006)
Christopher Pearson, another neo-conservative hack, agrees with Devine, declaring that it’s time that the Church got rid of the apostates who endanger its future, undermining its foundations through their flagrant disregard for doctrinal and sacral requirements. Absent these integral and distinctive aspects of Catholic dogma, “[a]ll that remains is a commitment to social justice, feminism and deep green ideology. No wonder the Raelian movement, a UFO cult with a similar radical Left agenda, and the Socialist Alliance should have sent members to demonstrate their support for St Mary’s.”
Pearson elaborates:
To see why St Mary’s represents a pervasive threat to the survival of Australian Catholicism, it’s necessary to say something about the sacramental system. The sacraments are rites that relate to different stages in people’s lives, held to confer particular graces through the mediation of the church, and believed to have cumulative effect. If someone’s baptism is deemed invalid it is a grave matter, foundational rather than a mere technicality, and has to be rectified by going through the rite a second time. This is because baptism is axiomatically “the gateway to the other sacraments” and no subsequent sacrament — such as confirmation, marriage or ordination — can be validly conferred on the unbaptised.
Until recently all the mainstream churches took a very conservative attitude towards their formulas for administering the sacraments. Safety lay in strictly following Christ’s example in the New Testament as interpreted by apostolic custom. To authorise anything else was held to be ultra vires, simply beyond the scope of their authority. What’s more, in the universal church it is a given that the laity are entitled to certainty about the validity of the sacraments offered them. A decade’s worth of controversy over invalid baptisms at St Mary’s is profoundly subversive and leaves uncertainty or worse over hundreds of subsequent church marriages. To anyone with a delicate conscience, or on the other hand anyone who may be looking for convenient grounds for an annulment, uncertainty over baptismal efficacy is a big deal.
As it stands, Father Kennedy continues to take part in a Communist plot to destroy organised religion / threaten the survival of Australian Catholicism / hold religious services, and he and the Brisbane diocese have this week begun to take part in a mediation process (Rebel Catholic priest hopes for positive mediation, Cassie White, ABC, March 4, 2009): ‘Father Kennedy says he is hopeful of a positive outcome, but until it is finished, he is not going anywhere. “The realistic outcome would be for me to be reinstated by the Archbishop as the administrator, the vigilantes who reported me to Rome be disciplined and I particularly and the community should be found not to be guilty of denying Catholic doctrine,” he said.’
Bishop Richard Williamson
Can haz blog: Dinoscopus. In one of his first missives sent from London, he also expresses agreement with Chistopher Pearson: it’s time to get serious about securing the moral and doctrinal foundations of the Church, and to strike back at those undermining its vital role (although it should be noted that where Devine emphasises the treachery of dirty steenky Communists, Dick is angrier at the lies of the Judeo-Masonry conspiracy which produced the dirty steenky Communists in the first place).
March 7, 2009:
…As for the disaster in the Church and our situation in history, I replied that it means we must pray quietly, steadily and seriously, as though the Lord God is important. With the 313 AD victory of the Roman Emperor Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, Catholics switched from fighting lions to fighting heresies, but with Vatican II rotting out both Faith and minds, the official Church gave up fighting heresy, so for Catholics it is back to fighting mindless beasts in the arena. Another Age of Martyrs is upon us. “Today’s Catholic Church”, I concluded, “desperately needs friends of God as serious as are his enemies”, because such seriousness is alone capable of conquering them for Our Lord. Moreover such seriousness “can no longer be proved with mere words, which are shot, but only with” – we come back to – “blood”.
Dear friend, pray the family Rosary, plant potatoes in the garden and teach your children about the martyrs of the Early Church, whose testimony reaches way beyond any reservations. Kyrie eleison.
“If anti-Semitism is bad, it’s against truth. If something is true, it’s not bad.”
The Vatican’s decision to welcome a Holocaust-denying bishop back into the Catholic church was not an isolated instance of Pope Benedict XVI adopting a far-right reactionary position. Gerry Gable examines Benedict’s record in the nearly four years of his papacy.
Pope Benedict’s decree at the end of January lifted the ex-communication of Bishop Richard Williamson and three other breakaway bishops excommunicated by John Paul II in 1988. The bishops had been ordained without Vatican permission by the renegade French archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, who rejected the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.
Bishop Williamson, who has said that the Vatican is controlled by Satan and that the Jews are bent on world domination, reiterated in a broadcast on Swedish television in January that the historical evidence was “hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler. I believe there were no gas chambers.” He added that no more than 300,000 Jews died in Nazi concentration camps.
Williamson and the three other bishops were leading lights in the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X (SSPX), founded by Lefebvre. SSPX’s conservative traditionalist followers include several fascists and antisemites.
Williamson is not the only member of the SSPX to question the Holocaust. Father Floriano Abrahamowicz told the Tribuna di Treviso in Italy last month: “I know the gas chambers existed – at least for disinfecting – but not whether they caused deaths or not.”
A week after readmitting the four bishops, the 81-year-old Pope sparked turmoil among Austrian Catholics when he appointed an auxiliary bishop in Linz who had said Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was retribution for the activities of abortionists, prostitutes and homosexuals in New Orleans. Gerhard Maria Wagner was forced to withdraw from the position after senior deans in Linz passed a declaration of no confidence in him.
A recent report in the Italian weekly Panorama, headed “The Vatican, the Shoah, and the neo-crusaders to the right of the Pope”, listed about 20 different rightwing and far-right groups around the Vatican. They include Catholic traditionalists, followers of Lefebvre, creationists, negationists, believers in the “Judaic-Masonic Plot” and anti-Islam crusaders. One is Militia Christi, which put its name to huge antisemitic graffiti that have appeared in Rome the past few months in Rome.
These groups include individuals who stand out for their strong ties to the traditionalist and Lefebvrian world. Among them is Roberto Fiore, MEP, leader of Forza Nuova, who every Sunday attends a church that celebrates Mass according to the Tridentine rite.
Roberto Fiore (born April 15, 1959 in Rome) has been a leading neo-fascist in the post-war era, both in Italy and across Europe. He has long been a disciple of Julius Evola and helped to develop the Third Position stance on the far right.
As a leader of Terza Posizione, Fiore (along with other various neo-fascist activists, notably Gabriele Adinolfi and Massimo Morsello) became a wanted man in Italy after the 1980 bombing of Bologna train station which left 85 people dead and over 200 wounded. This status was increased in 1985 when a Rome court declared that TP was simply a cover movement for the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari, the terror group blamed on the attack and linked with the Propaganda Due organisation. He was condemned for association to an armed subversive gang (associazione sovversiva e banda armata).
As a result Fiore spent much of the 1980s in hiding in the United Kingdom, where it was alleged by the magazine Searchlight that he avoided extradition by working for the Secret Intelligence Service. This has also been alleged by the Sunday Express, in 2000, citing a source within MI5. Fiore disclaimed he had connections to British intelligence. Valerio Fioravanti, leader of the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari later accused Fiore of having expatriated with the money of the movement.
In England Fiore became a close friend of Nick Griffin and following Griffin’s departure from the British National Front he helped to organise the International Third Position, becoming a founder member.
In 1986, thanks to their friendship with Nick Griffin and other far right activists, Roberto Fiore and Massimo Morsello managed to found “Meeting Point”, which was later renamed “Easy London”. Easy London is a society that helps young students and workers live and work in London by providing jobs, beds, and contracts. This rapidly made Morsello and Fiore wealthy (the profits being around 15 million euros), but the society was more of a fundraising tool to help various far-right organizations in Italy. “Easy London” is still active. Fiore’s association with London has remained as, in August 2007, he became sole director of CL English Language, a college for overseas students in the west of the city.
Fiore has since returned to Italy and is active in politics as the leader of the extreme-right organization Forza Nuova (a group he founded with Morsello), one of the constituent parts of Alternativa Sociale, allied in the House of Freedoms for the 2006 political elections in Italy.
In 2008 he joined as a speaker on the right wing festival Nordiska Festivalen (Nordic Festival) in Sweden to speak about European identity. He also took up the seat in the European Parliament vacated by Alessandra Mussolini.
The Latin language rite was replaced by the Second Vatican Council, which sat from 1962 to 1965, but Pope Benedict relaxed the restrictions in 2007. The papal decree damaged the Vatican’s relations with the Jewish community as the mass includes a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews that asks God to end “the blindness of that people”.
Later in 2007 Benedict caused further controversy with the beatification of 498 people, mostly priests, who died fighting for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, describing them as martyrs of religious persecution. Priests who sided with the elected Republican government and murdered by Franco’s fascists were ignored.
Fiore is a one-time business partner and political mentor of Nick Griffin, now the leader of the British National Party. One of Griffin’s right-hand men in his days as leader of the Political Soldier wing of the National Front was Derek Holland, a fanatical supporter of the SSPX. Holland and the SSPX were part of a sinister network that sheltered James Kopp while he was on the run after murdering Barnett Slepian, a Jewish doctor who worked at an abortion clinic in New York, in 1998.
It brought to mind how the Vatican helped ship hundreds of Nazi war criminals out of Italy in the two or three years after 1945. In November 2008 Pope Benedict announced he wanted to beatify the wartime Pope Pius XII, who failed to speak out against the Holocaust.
When Benedict became Pope it was revealed he had joined the Hitler Youth in Bavaria 1941. However this had been compulsory for all 14-year-olds in Germany at the time and he had not been an enthusiastic member. But since his election as Pope in 2005 he has surrounded himself with extreme rightwing, racist and antisemitic advisers and opposed much of the progress in the church since the Second World War.
Campaigning for Cologne’s Maligned Resistance, Deutsche Welle, November 11, 2004: “They wore their hair long, sang songs by banned Jewish composers and fought the Nazi regime. But history has so far remembered Cologne’s Edelweiss Pirates as criminals rather than resistance fighters…until now…”
Although he has tried to improve the Church’s relationships with other religions, he upset the Muslim world in 2006 when in a controversial papal speech, he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor who said the Prophet Muhammad had brought the world only “evil and inhuman” things.
Pope Benedict said he had not been aware of Bishop Williamson’s denial of the Holocaust. While it is true that he had already signed the decree lifting the excommunication before Williamson’s interview on Swedish television was broadcast, Williamson’s views on Jews, the Holocaust and the veracity of the fraudulent book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fairly common knowledge among rightwing Catholics and elsewhere.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion are available for your reading pleasure on Australian Protectionist Party member Martin Fletcher’s website ‘Australian Nationalist Resource’ (nee‘Downunder Newslinks’).
The antisemitic views of the SSPX are well known, and last year Williamson attended a garden party at the home near Windsor of the convicted criminal and Hitler fan David Irving, one of the world’s leading Holocaust deniers. While the Pope himself might not have been aware of these things, his advisers are at fault for not informing him.
The Vatican has now ordered Williamson to recant but his response has been to prevaricate. He said he would review the evidence and if he finds evidence of the Holocaust he will change his views, but it would take time. It appears that he does not intended to visit Auschwitz to see the site first hand but will read a book by Jean-Claude Pressac, another Holocaust denier, who altered his views after visiting the camp. No doubt he will also get plenty of advice from people such as Irving and Robert Faurisson, the prominent French Holocaust denier.
Dragging things out is a common ploy among fascists, in the hope that the dust will settle and they can get on with their agenda.
Meanwhile the SSPX has sacked the British bishop from his position as head of an Argentinean seminary, a post he had held for five years, in a move to quell some of the anger at the Vatican, and the Argentinian government has given him notice to leave the country.
If Williamson returns to Britain he will be able to maintain his SSPX activity by attending the Church of Saints Joseph and Padam in Holloway, north London. He would be following a long line of extremists who have visited the church, including Holland and, two years ago, a bunch of Polish fascist supporters of the National Rebirth of Poland party, trying to organise in the Polish migrant community.
Pope Benedict has publicly proclaimed his warmth towards Jews and will visit Israel in May. He will need to do a lot to repair relations with Jewish organisations. As Malcolm Hoenlein, a US Jewish community leader, said last month: “It’s in our interest to have good relations with the Vatican, but not at any price”.
* Protester given secret payout after arrest
* Police then stop investigating themselves
* Protester uses money to fund more protests
POLICE made a substantial payment for a secret amount to an activist wrongly arrested during the 2007 Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) summit and then used this payout as an excuse to stop an internal investigation into the arrest, documents released under Freedom of Information laws reveal.
NSW Police made the payment to activist Padriac “Paddy” Gibson after he launched a civil case over his illegal arrest and detention after the major anti-APEC rally in September, 2007.
Documents released to news.com.au through Freedom of Information laws show that police then wrongly cited the civil action as a reason to stop investigating the officers behind the arrest, a move called a coverup by Mr Gibson and his supporters.
This new revelation comes after news.com.au yesterday revealed that NSW Police paid $2 million for the APEC fence, a pricey wall that was unable to even stop The Chaser comedy team.
The documents were released after a 16-month battle with the police.
Mr Gibson is a long-time activist who police put on a list of 61 “excludable persons” considered so dangerous they were not allowed into the APEC security areas. This was despite him having no criminal record.
Mr Gibson says he was sitting with other activists in Hyde Park just after the September 2007 anti-APEC rally when they were approached by a group of heavily armed police. In front of hundreds of onlookers and international media, the officers aggressively arrested Mr Gibson and dragged him to a holding bus.
Despite Mr Gibson repeatedly telling the officers he was not in a restricted area he says he was detained for about 20 minutes because an officer released him, sheepishly admitting it was all a “mistake”.
Afterwards Mr Gibson’s father, Dr Peter Gibson, wrote to police demanding the officers involved in the “gratuitous and illegal violence towards” his son be disciplined.
The documents released to news.com.au show that the internal investigation was brief, with the investigators never bothering to identify the arresting officers. The investigators then decided to close the case because they argued the civil action could be considered a “satisfactory means of redress”.
But Stephen Blanks from the NSW Council for Civil Liberties said the investigator’s action seem like a coverup. “It’s inappropriate for officers to decline to investigate a complaint simple because they have had the opportunity to (try to) buy confidentiality,” he said.
“The public has a legitimate interest in knowing the outcome of complaints and that appropriate action has been taken.”
Greens Member Sylvia Hale said the revelations were particularly troubling given the new powers NSW Police were given this week to secretly search homes and computers of suspects.
Paying for protests
Mr Gibon said he was unable to say how much he was paid but said he was “surprised and very happy” with the amount.
“I’ve used part of the payment to fund my campaigning against the Federal Government’s racist intervention in the Northern Territory and to support those who are still facing charges over G20 in Melbourne.”
With a smile, he added: “So I can thank the NSW Police for helping me help these causes.”
Mr Gibson’s lawyer, Lisa Powell, said she was now arranging for a number of other activists who were also arrested to make civil claims against NSW Police. NSW Police did not respond to written questions.
It’s “International Ladies’ Day” today (March 8th) — or somesuch nonsense; the day Complainey Janeys around the world have Official License to do what they do best: complain. March 8th was declared to be “The Day To Complain” in 1910, when the Second International held an International Women’s Ladies’ conference in Copenhagen.
Ironically, it was twenty-first century social democrats who oversaw the physical destruction of the House in which the conference was held. Congratulations for this principled act of social cleansing must go to innovative Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard — who, when she’s not evicting squatters, on holidays, praising police terror squads, or ‘campaigning’ for ‘environmentalism’, ‘feminism’ and ’socialism’, is a gardener in her organically-managed manor; mostly growing apples — and the Christian fundamentalists who now own the empty block where the People’s House/Youth House once stood.
“By investigating public records, journals, and books published between 1895 and 1917, Terence Kissack expands the scope of the history of LGBT politics in the United States. The anarchists Kissack examines—such as Emma Goldman, Benjamin Tucker, and Alexander Berkman—defended the right of individuals to pursue same-sex relations, often challenging the conservative beliefs of their fellow anarchists as well as those outside the movement—police, clergy, and medical authorities—who condemned LGBT people.
In his book, Kissack examines the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, the life and work of Walt Whitman, periodicals including Tucker’s Liberty and Leonard Abbott’s The Free Comrade, and the frank treatment of homosexual relations in Berkman’s Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist. By defending the right to enter into same-sex partnerships free from social and governmental restraints, the anarchists posed a challenge to society still not met today.
Terence Kissack is a former Executive Director of San Francisco’s Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Historical Society, and he currently serves on the board. His writings have appeared in Radical History Review and Journal of the History of Sexuality.”
Terence Kissack @ GLBT Historical Society, July 30, 2008: “The Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Transgender Historical Society (GLBTHS) collects, preserves, and interprets the history of GLBT people and the communities that support them. We sponsor exhibits and programs on an on-going basis” (San Francisco, United States).
At one point, Terence is asked about Oscar Wilde’s relationship to anarchism; Terence responds that at various points, the Fenian bugger described himself as one. What Wilde meant by this is somewhat uncertain, apparently, and may be read as motivated by his desire to separate himself — the cultured artist — from ‘the herd’. In this context, Wilde was using the term ‘anarchist’ in an ‘elitist’ sense. Leaving aside the fact that Marxist critics of anarchism in particular frequently characterise anarchism as being an ‘elitist’ doctrine (seeEMMA GOLDMAN: A life of controversy, Lance Selfa, International Socialist Review, No.34, March–April 2004), Wilde did formulate his political opinions more extensively in his 1891 essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’, rightly-recognised as a classic of libertarian socialist thought.
Another interesting point raised in the discussion following Terence’s talk relates to the position fin de siècle anarchists in the United States adopted towards religion. On my reading, this relationship was a highly-antagonistic one. This was certainly the case of anarchist movements in Europe and South America. This antagonism derived from both the core tents of anarchist philosophy — summarised in Bakunin’s pithy epithet “if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him” (‘God and the State’, written February–March, 1871; first published 1882) — and the Church’s role in the political and social repression of the masses.
In this context, reference is also made to the legacy of Dorothy Day (1897–1980) and the ‘Catholic Worker Movement’ (1932–), a quasi-anarchist movement/network established after the eclipse of the anarchist movement proper, the members of which, despite a certain radicality in their political and social views, nonetheless retain(ed) loyalty to the Catholic Church.
See also :
MILK Skimmed – What was left out of MILK? “A provocative GLBT Historical Society roundtable about what was left out of Gus Van Sant’s movie. February 19, 2009 in San Francisco.”
Sexual Orientation.info [Jamie Heckert]: “This site is developing as a resource to help people think about sexuality and relationships differently. Is it okay to tell people who they really are, who they should be or what they should want? This is what is happening when we try to fit people into sexual orientation boxes.” Also: ‘Towards Consenting Relations: Anarchism and Sexuality’, Jamie Heckert (University of Edinburgh) [DOC].
anarcha.org: “online resource for anarcha-feminist news, articles, images and discussion”.
Tiara Naputi, ‘Mujeres Libres: Identity Formation in Anarchist Spain’, Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 94th Annual Convention, Nov 20, 2008: “Founded in 1936, Mujeres Libres was the first autonomous feminist organization in Spain. It responded to the lack of attention to women’s issues in the anarchist movement, thus simultaneously supporting and refuting the movement. This dual role was achieved through identity formation. This essay analyzes the decision to tie gender identity to the qualifications for participation and membership and examines the rhetorical tactics and their effects on the broader goals of the organization.”
The Alexander Berkman Social Club: “a group of anarchists who want to talk about what anarchism is, how anarchists see things and what anarchy could look like” (San Francisco, United States).
Social Anarchism, No.19, 1994; No.37, 2004-05, ‘All about Emma’: “This issue features a special section on Emma Goldman, including commentary and reviews of new publications of her work.”
James Osborne and Clive Hamilton have duly taken note of what are, to them, two of the more disturbing aspects of the Internet: the availability of graphically violent videos (Osborne) and the supposed fact that an “ugly culture of dogmatic and belligerent interventions now dominates social and political debate on the Internet” (Hamilton).
James carefully avoids mentioning which sites qualify for inclusion in his list of shock sites, but one popular site is NothingToxic: NothingToxic includes the video titled ‘Rebels Brutally Execute Soldiers in Eastern Europe’; less an example of “Russian soldiers tortured” than “Russian soldiers murdered”. James also makes references to 3Guys1Hammer (aka The Dnepropetrovsk Maniacs) and Budd Dwyer, An hero.
Another execution video — and there are many — is titled ‘Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani’, available on various Russian neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites, and the White supremacist site podblanc.
‘Execution of a Tajik and a Dagestani’ began circulating in August 2007, and in October, 2007, a student named Viktor Milkov, 24, “admitted to posting the video but maintained that he received it as an e-mail attachment from a stranger”. In November, a Russian court found naughty Viktor guilty “of inciting racial, religious, and national hatred”. Consequently, he received a fine.
In June 2008, one of the victims was identified as being Shamil Odamanov, 24, a labourer.
Set against a soundtrack of heavy metal music, the video opens with the title “Operation of the National-Socialist Party of Russia to Arrest and Execute Two Colonists From Dagestan and Tajikistan.” There are shots of the countryside that investigators believe is somewhere in the Kaluzhskaya region, about 75 kilometers, or 120 miles, southwest of Moscow.
“We were arrested by National-Socialists,” the two bound men mumble through their gags.
In the next scene, one of the captors, wearing camouflage and heavy black gloves, yells, “Glory to Russia!” then plunges what looks like a large knife into the neck of the man thought to be Odamanov. He is decapitated in seconds [sic].
Then the second man, whom the police have not identified, is shot in the head and crumples face-first into a shallow grave. In the final scene, two men in camouflage, wearing black masks, give Nazi salutes.
In December 2008, “The severed head of a Tajik man murdered last week in an apparent hate crime was discovered in a dumpster in western Moscow… In a disturbing twist, an obscure ultranationalist group claimed responsibility for the slaying by e-mailing a photograph of the victim’s detached head to two human rights organizations.” As I wrote at the time, and in response to an angry yuppie named Dion, who was very upset at my role in promoting a pretty unsuccessful boycott of a local fascist venue, and also angry at my claim that there were neo-Nazis in Russia:
“As I stated on the Bombshell forum Andy, you are a liar, a hypocrite and no better than the trash that you fight against.” ~ Dion, December, 2007
Yeah well, at least I haven’t decapitated someone, emailed a Russian human rights organisation with a photograph of the severed head, and given directions as to its location: a dumpster.
Still, you’ve got to laugh, don’t you? I mean, this shit’s pretty funny, yeah? And the people who fight this shit — well, they’re little better than the people who commit such acts, aren’t they?
Yeah?
podblanc, one of the sites which hosts the video, was founded in April 2007 in order to “help make the world a Whiter place”. “American neo-Nazi Craig Cobb runs Podblanc from Estonia, where Cobb moved in 2007 after decades of neo-Nazi activism in America with groups such as World Church of the Creator, White Revolution and the National Alliance. Podblanc features videos detailing combat handgun tactics, offers instructions in how to make Molotov cocktails and other improvised explosive devices, and explicitly celebrates and encourages “lone wolf” terrorism, up to and including hate crime murders of non-whites and Jews.”
podblanc is linked to by Australian Protectionist Party member Martin Fletcher’s Down Under Newslinks (aka ‘Australian Nationalist Resource’: “Tracking Non-White Crime and Events Affected by Immigration”); Martin has a very comprehensive library of neo-Nazi material, none of which is objectionable from the point of view of the APP. In fact, Martin is one of the APP’s forum moderators.
Closer to home, in 2006 several schoolboys — nicknamed the Teenage Kings of Werribee — produced a video of their exploits.
The Teenage Kings of Werribee are a gang of highschool IRL trolls from Australia who raped a mentally-disabled 16 year old girl, set her hair on fire, urinated on her, video recorded it and cleverly uploaded it to their MySpace as Cunt: the movie. Less notably they also egged a taxi, bullied drunks, made chlorine bombs and dropped flares on a sleeping homeless person.
In the past 12 months, 10 per cent of the women surveyed reported experiencing at least one incident of physical and/or sexual violence. They were more likely to report physical violence (8%) than sexual violence (4%).
Fifty-seven per cent of the women surveyed reported experiencing at least one incident of physical violence or sexual violence over their lifetime. They were more likely to experience physical violence (48%) rather than sexual violence (34%).
The most common form of physical violence during the lifetime was threats of physical harm (33%). However these were often accompanied by actual physical violence.
Sexual touching was the most common form of sexual violence (about a quarter over their lifetime, and three per cent during the last 12 months).
The risk of violence was found to vary based on a number of socio-demographic characteristics. These included:
* younger women reported higher levels of physical and sexual violence than older women;
* Indigenous women reported higher levels of physical violence during [their] lifetime compared to non-Indigenous women; and
* women who were not in a current relationship reported higher levels of physical and sexual violence during the last 12 months compared to women who were in a current relationship.
Anyway, as Clive was complaining:
A few examples.
First, the results of upsetting one of Doug Smith’s mates (vox, Bulldog Spirit), Mark Bastard; another big fan of slackbastard. From the punk rawk forum Bombshell:
Sun Dec 09, 2007 11:23 am
@ndy you’re a fucking idiot mate and you better watch your back because when me and my mates are out and about, if we see you, ur dead
Mon Dec 10, 2007 11:56 am
@ndy im still going to bash you, fukn gooknigger scum
Naturally, I was kicked off the forum, and the thread was deleted.
you fucking niggers and fucking jews and you fucking commies fuck you all to fucking hell.
racism will always be there, so why try to fucking prevent it. you are just as bad, making a fucking hate website…
im a 15 year old fucking girl, and you peices [sic] of filth disgust me!
ian stuart would kick your fucking asses to fucking hell and back, but noooooooooooo, hes fucking dead, so what the fuck! you are a bunch of pussies hating a fucking dead man!!!
FUCK YOU
ian fucking stuart fucking donaldson is fucking amazing. ♥
dont talk shit, you fucking niggers, go fucking worship your fucking 50cent fucking nigger rapper and that bullshit!
well @ndy, i hope you die?
its stupid. if you make a blog about a dead man wheres the fun in that? you sit at home, all alone jerking off to your nigger shit, and writing hate blogs, kinda pathetic. geeze. if anyone deserves a bullet down there [sic] throat, it is indeed you.♥
i would rather be a precocious teenager than a [sic] old man (or how ever the fuck old you are)
you deserve too [sic] be fillayed [sic] and have thinners thrown on you. i AM a member of the master race, and you obviously are not.
@ndy, mate, you are a disgrace to the White race if you really accept the Muslims, niggers, gooks and so forth coming into our country and living in ‘harmony’ at other people’s expense by bludging and fucking popping out disgusting kids (only furthermore increasing non-White population) many times whilst White people work their arses off and don’t get as much recognition as non-White immigrants! Fuck that!
[snip]
According to Clive:
The brutality of public debate on the internet is due to one fact above all — the option of anonymity. The belligerence would not be tolerated if the perpetrators’ identities were known because they would be rebuffed and criticised by those who know them. Free speech without accountability breeds dogmatism and confrontation.
Moderate opinion tends to be based on a more nuanced and thoughtful view of the world and is more inclined to consider alternative views. Yet these are precisely the contributions excluded from discussion by the bullying culture of online forums. There is little scope for the back-and-forward of debate when the normal social rules of respect and reciprocity do not apply.
Perhaps so. But anonymity is relative.
Last month, two teenage boys were tracked down after rather stupidly uploading to YouTube a video of one of them — glennspam1, aka“Kenny Glenn” of Lawton, OK (USA) — abusing a cat named “Dusty”. Unlike the mountains of nutzi BS which saturates the site, the video has been withdrawn from YouTube; like everything else on the Intertubes, it’s still available online if you search for it. It’s pretty awful — not just the abuse, but the attitude embodied in Kenny’s actions. Thus it’s not that uncommon for young boys to take delight in such things, and animals — being basically defenceless — are obviously regular targets for their sadism. Like other forms of abuse, it flourishes in secrecy. Going public, on the other hand, is stoopid — especially with cats like 4chan around…
The International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist) is a proletarian, revolutionary and internationalist tendency committed to the task of building Leninist parties as national sections of a democratic-centralist international. Their aim is the achievement of new October Revolutions—nothing else, nothing other, nothing less. The ICL bases itself on Marxist historical, dialectical materialism and seeks in particular to carry forward the international working-class perspectives of Marxism developed in the theory and practice of the Bolshevik leaders V. I. Lenin and L. D. Trotsky as embodied in the decisions of the first four Congresses of the Communist International as well as key documents of the Fourth International such as the Transitional Program (1938) and “War and the Fourth International” (1934), and as expressed in musical form by the King of Pop Michael Jackson in “Off The Wall” (1979), “Thriller” (1982) and “Bad” (1987).
Above : Karl Marx. “Michael Jackson fans of all lands, unite!”
The announcement on March 5 at the O2 Grand Concourse in London of a final tour by Michael Jackson has been met with the usual howls from bourgeois media and political spokesmen in Europe. We will not be intimidated by these kinds of tactics and we call on workers of the world to join us in obtaining tickets to his final “curtain call”. Spearheading this effort will be the Spartacus Youth Clubs.
Witchhunts like the one against Michael Jackson are manipulated for reactionary political ends and serve to reinforce the bourgeoisie’s warped and indecent values through fear and intimidation.
The Spartacus Youth Clubs, the youth/student auxiliaries of the Marxist Spartacist League, seek to develop young radicals into communist militants, through listening to Michael Jackson albums, socialist education and struggle, and to organize and link them, through the vanguard party, to the working class. Our goal is nothing less than the destruction of this rotten capitalist society through the seizure of state power by the working class. While many partial battles loom, it is only the revolutionary transformation of society that will put an end to the racist, witchhunting, warmongering offensive. Join us in the struggle against world filth and for a socialist future!
So tonight gotta leave that nine to five upon the shelf! And just enjoy yourself! Groove, let the madness in the music get to you! Life ain’t so bad at all! If you live it off the wall! Life ain’t so bad at all (live life off the wall)! Live your life off the wall (live it off the wall)! Go forward in the historical task of leading the working class to the victory of world socialism! Reforge the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution!
I wanted to join the Spartacist League. True, we used to laugh at them; in fact everyone laughed at them, but in their isolation lay their appeal. The Spartacist League was this bad-tempered Trotskyist group that had probably no more than twenty — no, make that thirty — members throughout the country mainly based on campuses like LaTrobe and Sydney. We occasionally had run-ins with them, although they tended to keep their distance because they imagined that we were out to kidnap them individually and dump the bodies in shallow graves off Rye backbeach. We wouldn’t have done; there were plenty of leftist groups clamouring for that opportunity.
Since the early 1970s, the Australian left had been more gauche than sinister, despite what groups like People Against Communism said. That was the appeal of the far-right, I guess: groups like the League and the Nazis were either nutty or offensive, both of which amused me no end; or it spoke such unambiguous commonsense (like the British NF or the Alliance) that you couldn’t help but identify with it. Well, at least I couldn’t. Most of the left, on the other hand, was dull and earnest and out of touch. You just had to read the left’s papers or, even better, look at the miserable faces of the people selling them. How they ever recruited was beyond me. I certainly didn’t fancy spending my Saturday afternoons in draughty meeting rooms discussing Marx’s Theory of Surplus Value. If I’d wanted to learn that sort of thing I’d have paid attention in fourth form economics classes.
That was the beauty of the Spartacist League. They had this paper, Australasian Spartacist, and virtually every issue had at least one page devoted to sectarianism. Yes, they were Marxists, and yes, they also ran pages of boring leftist tripe that they no doubt thought had some appeal to the working masses — the very same working masses who would never buy their paper, week after week after week — but they specialised in airing the dirty laundry of all the other rival left groups around: the Maoists, the Eurocommunists of the CPA, the Send In the Tanks Stalinists of the Socialist Party, and all the other cheek-by-jowl rivals to the title of Trotsky’s heirs — the Socialist Workers’ Party, the Socialist Labour League, the Communist League (were they still going?), the InternationalSocialists, etc. etc. No wonder they were generally considered to be police agents.
And they had a great writing style — snotty and sneering and puffed-up. It was pretty much like ours, actually. If you could hear what you read, they’d be saying it from the corners of their mouths, then laughing at you. They insulted other leftitsts worse than we insulted other leftists. They insulted other leftists worse than they insulted us. That was no doubt why they kept getting bashed by other Trotskyists. Technically, though, we were the Great Satan, because we were Fascists with a capital F, and the other left groups were part of the workers’ movement.
The politics would have taken a bit of getting used to, but that certainly wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. I envied them. They knew what they believed. They knew who they hated, and why, and it was all footnoted and there was never any room for error and they could pick up deviationism from the most innocuous slip of the tongue and they were as hard on their own people as they were on everyone else and by Christ they were hard on everyone else. No one was good enough for them.
The line was laid down, probably in the US, and you’d know pretty much from the start what you could like and dislike and it would all be explained and there’d be references and cross-references in all the back issues of Australasian Spartacist so no one could just make it up as they went along…
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?"
