“From behind the velvet rope of the Melbourne night club scene, two MCs, MervdaPerv^ and Benny “Bugzie” Sinclair, ‘tell it how it is’…” with a style of rhyming “unprecedented in its brutal reality”, and a certain sense of humour that “only real Bouncers could portray”. Their debut album ‘King Hits’ features Niko, Pegz, Billy Bunks, Blades and Eloquor. Also featuring on ‘King Hits’ is Ben Hense from Mr Jigga on bass and guitar. Produced by ARIA-award winning CJ Dolan, two-time Australian DMC DJ champion, the album will feature skits by Dave Hedgcock, King of the Clubs and ex-pro boxer (from the days of T.V. Ringside) Dennis “the Flash” Wittnal. “‘King Hits’ will be a must have album.”
BOUNCER : ‘Bouncer’
*TV RINGSIDE screened from July 1966 till June 1975. 319 Programs and 2870 Bouts (1450 on air). The venues included the Channel 7 studios in South Melbourne, Festival Hall Brisbane, South Sydney Leagues Club, the Southern Cross Hotel and of course Festival Hall in Melbourne. Among the hundreds of fighters that appeared were: Barry Michael and Rocky Matioli — who went on from TV RINGSIDE to win World Championships — Hec Thompson and Tony Mundine — each of whom went on to challenge for world titles — Charkey Ramon, Hec Thompson, Bobby Dunn and Toro George — who all won Commonwealth Titles on the program…”
“…The cigar-smoking, joke-cracking [Mervyn Louis] Williams, whose black-rimmed glasses were pinned by ears thickened from boxing, broadcast his ‘Mervisms’ on radio 3DB’s ‘Sports Forum’, and later on HSV7’s ‘TV Ringside’. Tired and beaten boxers ‘couldn’t run out of sight on a dark night’, ‘swayed like a jelly in a wind’, or ‘had less chance than a crippled prawn in a flock of seagulls’.”
“If Russians are so interesting to you, move to Russia.” ~ Fruitsalad, Melbourne Punx Forum | “No offence but honestly who gives a shit about some [lawyer] in Russia.” ~ Nowave, Melbourne Punx Forum
Top rights lawyer shot dead in Moscow
Michael Schwirtz, Moscow The Age (New York Times)
January 21, 2009
A PROMINENT Russian lawyer who spent almost a decade pursuing contentious human rights and social justice cases has been killed in a daylight assassination in central Moscow.
Stanislav Markelov was shot dead on Monday after holding a news conference at which he said he would continue to fight against the early release of Yuri Budanov, a former Russian tank commander jailed for murdering a young Chechen woman.
[Bella Ciao reports Markelov “was about to give a press conference against neo-fascism in Russia.”]
Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old journalist who was with Mr Markelov, was also killed. She worked for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, which is highly critical of the Government.
Officials said they believed Mr Markelov, 34, was the primary target, having brought cases against the Russian military, Chechen warlords and murderous neo-fascists.
His murder had the characteristics of a contract killing, a not uncommon phenomenon in Russia.
Mr Markelov was the director of the Rule of Law Institute, a civil liberties group. He gained prominence representing the family of Elza Kungayeva, an 18-year-old Chechen whom Budanov admitted strangling in his quarters in March 2000, just as the second post-Soviet war in Chechnya was beginning to rage.
Budanov was sentenced to 10 years in prison but was given early parole for good behaviour.
At the news conference Mr Markelov had told reporters he might file an appeal to the European Court of Human Rights against the early release of Budanov, a decorated colonel of the Russian army before he was stripped of his rank.
The decision to free Budanov sparked protests and outraged human rights groups and Chechen officials.
It reignited tensions years after a decade of intermittent war in Chechnya, the southern Russian republic, was replaced by tenuous stability.
But Budanov was also revered by nationalists for helping to wage a bloody but necessary war against separatist rebels in Chechnya. Some now see Mr Markelov’s murder as revenge for his efforts against a Russian hero.
The lawyer of the Kungayev family, the relatives of a Chechen woman, who was murdered by a Russian army colonel, Yury Budanov, has been killed. Stanislav Markelov was shot dead in the centre of Moscow in broad daylight on Monday.
According to witnesses, a man wearing a ski-mask approached Markelov and Anastasia Baburova, a 24-year-old free-lance journalist for ‘Novaya Gazeta’ newspaper, in the street and took out a gun.
The lawyer was shot dead on the spot, while the woman was fatally injured with a gunshot wound to the head, and died shortly after she was taken to the hospital.
”Today at around 14:20 Moscow time, a man’s body with a wound to the head was found in the centre of Moscow. The ID found on the victim identified him as the lawyer Stanislav Markelov. The second victim, Anastasia Baburova, also with wounds to the head has been critically injured. The ID found on her identifies her as a student of a Journalist’s faculty,” Vladimir Markin from the General Prosecutor’s Office Investigative Committee, said…
See also : Russian Rights Attorney, Reporter Murdered, The Other Russia, January 19, 2009. The Washington Post has the best headline so far: Two More Critics of Vladimir Putin Take Bullets in the Head: “The larger story here is of serial murders of Mr. Putin’s opponents, at home and abroad. Ms. Baburova, 25, is at least the 15th journalist to be slain since Mr. Putin took power. No one has been held accountable in any of the cases — including that of Anna Politkovskaya, a former client of Mr. Markelov who also was murdered execution-style in broad daylight, on Mr. Putin’s birthday in 2006. In London, dissident former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned; so was Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, who survived. Karina Moskalenko, another opposition lawyer who has represented Ms. Politkovkaya’s family, fell ill from mercury poisoning in Strasbourg, France, in October, just before a hearing in the case. Last week in Vienna, a Chechen dissident who had received political asylum was murdered on the street — shot twice in the head.”
Dead lawyer Stanislav Markelov, who represented dead Chechen Elza Kungayeva, also once represented dead journalist Anna Politkovskaya. In November 2008, he represented anti-fascist Aleksey Olesinov; curiously, Russian police apparently attempted to link Aleksey to the murder investigation of dead anti-fascist Fedor [Fyodor] Filatov.
On a brighter note, Russian murderer Yury Budanov is alive and well, as is Russian dictator Alexander Putin.
It’s a funny old world, but as Dion stated on the Bombshell forum, Stanislav, Elza and Anna are were liars, hypocrites and no better than the trash that they fight fought against.
Bah humbug. The chattering classes are at it again: David Burchell in the pages of The Australian and James L Gelvin in the pages of the not-quite-as-popular journal Terrorism and Political Violence (tho’ I imagine Burchell expresses similar sentiments in his crackademic scribblings). So I’m gonna waste some more of my precious time on my way to an early grave by… er… let’s see.
One. Taking note of the fact that Paul Norton once penned a piece for Larvatus Prodeo asking the question ‘Is David Burchell brain-dead?’ (October 2, 2007). Burchell on 1968 and all that (May 28, 2008) tends to suggest that the answer remains a conditional ‘yes’. (Similarly craptastic ideas of Burchell’s are to be found in Stumbling in harmony with history, The Australian, December 29, 2008.)
Two. Re-publishing the debate on Gelvin’s thesis that, inre Al-Qaeda, ‘it was the anarchists what done it’… Or something.
Being un anarcholoco fuelled only by mountains of organic hummus and rivers of organic coffee, scarcely more than an adolescent, lacking all experience of real life, my mind confused by ill-digested philosophical, social, political and economic theories, and perplexed by the drab monotony of my everyday life, I make the empty, arrogant, and pathetic claim to pass definitive judgments, sinking to outright abuse, on my fellow-students, their teachers, God, religion, the clergy, the governments, newspapers, academic journals and political systems of the whole world. Rejecting all morality and restraint, I do not hesitate to commend theft, the destruction of scholarship, the abolition of work, total subversion, and a world-wide proletarian revolution with “unlicensed pleasure” as its only goal.
I also already done published three essays from Terrorism and Political Violence, in seemingly random order.
“Brandon Darby of Austin, Texas was an activist in the global struggle against capitalist neoliberalism. Brandon Darby was also working undercover as a snitch for the FBI. Surprisingly, he’s proud to be an informant and has come out in the open about it…”
“An Austin-based activist named Brandon Darby has revealed he worked as an FBI informant in the eighteen months leading up to the Republican National Convention. Darby has admitted to wearing recording devices at planning meetings and wearing a transmitter embedded in his belt during the convention. He is expected to testify on behalf of the government later this month in the trial of two Texas activists who were arrested at the RNC on charges of making and possessing Molotov cocktails.”
A reply to John Surname, principally, but also an opportunity to review some of the recent history of squatting in Australia. S is for SHACking Up, Soul Train & Squatting (January 16, 2009) was a previous post responding to some criticisms of SHAC, but on squatting, property and housing issues more generally. John wrote on the subject of Diddly-Squatters on January 14. The following img, taken from John’s post, graphically portrays the general tone of his writing on the subject of squatting:
And here’s some recent commentary from John (and A.J):
Yeah I read it.Your post is mostly quotes from centuries past, and then you don’t even make any kind of coherent point. Squatting is for bums and lowlifes, and in this day and age is a lifestyle choice. Maybe the students should grow up and actually go and meet some real homeless people.
Why do you support their actions, and squatting in general?
John Surname | Homepage | 01.19.09 – 1:57 pm
“Over a century ago, a Frenchman called Paul (1841-1911) made the following observations on property.”
Fucking lol.
A.J | Homepage | 01.19.09 – 4:15 pm
So to begin…
OK. Yeah: I quoted some peeps: George Orwell’s adaptation of I Corinthians xiii (Keep the Aspidistra Flying: first published by Gollancz in 1936); and Paul Lafargue on ‘Capitalist Property’ (1903).
On the other hand, I also cited Julia Gillard’s speech of March 2008, and half-a-dozen or so media reports from December 2008/January 2009, one from 2004, and two studies (2007 and 2002) both by Richard James, Director of the Centre for the Study of Higher Education and Professor in Higher Education at unimelb.
As for whether or not I made any kind of coherent point, maybe not, but you can’t blame a bloke for trying.
So I’ll try again:
“Squatting is for bums and lowlifes, and in this day and age is a lifestyle choice.”
In reality, squatting is for anyone who chooses to utilise vacant buildings for accommodation or other, social purposes. Leaving aside the emergence of a squattocracy in the nineteenth century, “bums and lowlifes” have been occupying buildings in this manner in Melbourne, Australia, and cities and lands across the world for many, many years.
This paper will consider whether the term patrimonialism can be applied to a particular, keenly contested and racially bifurcated aspect of Australian history: the relations between ‘squatters’ and those with competing civil and property claims. The discussion will draw parallels between Australia and other settler societies.
“Squattocracy” has had a lively currency in Australian political history. It was first used to designate the social, political and economic power of pastoralists who acquired use rights over vast stretches of grazing land in the early years of white settlement. For many 19th century colonial activists, it was the key enemy of ‘closer settlement’, capitalist farming and industry, and democratic reform. Squattocracy was associated with the long domination of upper houses of Australian legislatures by inherited wealth. It has been a periodic target of those determined to achieve the principle of ‘one man, one vote’. Squattocracy also figured prominently in periodic public debates on the class character of early Australia, and on the role of ‘ruling elites’ more generally.
There may be two distinct histories of patrimonialism in Australia. The Australian colonies were among the pioneers of ‘universal’ male and later female franchise in the nineteenth century; Aborigines gained [de jure] full citizenship only in the late 1960s. While the squatter’s patrimonial rule over white settlers was arguably short-lived, that over some groups of Aboriginal people persisted, for good or ill, for more than a century.
I suppose squatting could be described as a ‘lifestyle choice’ for some; then again, some term homosexuality the same thing. In reality, things are a little more complicated. In any case, even if one were to concede (and I’m happy to do so) that squatting is a choice, the fact that a choice has been made does not tell us anything about the legitimacy or validity of that decision. But what I think you’re alluding to is a more general critique of a certain species (stereotype) of student radical, for whom squatting is one of a number of choices (including the adoption of one or more sorts of food faddism) that together add up to the fulfillment of a certain social role (and cliche). Hence, I think, your admonition that “Maybe the students should grow up and actually go and meet some real homeless people”. That is, on the one hand, there are “fuckwits who think they deserve to live in someone’s else property for free because it’s their right to live in the inner city”, and on the other hand, “real homeless people”; and never the twain shall meet.
For what it’s worth, I think that the gulf that separates impoverished students and squatters, on the one hand, and “real homeless people”, on the other, is narrower than you believe. For example, I know many individuals who have squatted, both in Melbourne and other cities, in Australia and overseas, and their relationship to homelessness and to the homeless is a good deal closer than you appear to assume is generally the case. I also know a number of housing and youth workers — some of whom have been homeless and/or squatted properties — who have intimate knowledge of squatting, and are sympathetic to the squatting movement.
There is also a considerable body of scholarship on the subject (mainly concentrating on urban squatting in Europe and urban and rural squatting movements in Africa, Asia and South America), and even some attempts at documenting this history in Australia. For example, Lock Out the Landlords: Anti-eviction Resistance in Australia 1929–1936 (Barricade Library Publishing, 1998; second edition, Homebrew Cultural Association, 2008) examines workers’ attempts to resist eviction during a period of ah, more “robust” political discussion. A good deal more can and has been written about the squatting movements of the 1960s and 1970s — see, for example, Squatters’ Handbook Chapter 11, ‘Squat History’, 2004.
CANBERRA — The Unemployed Workers Union squatted in a house belonging to the ACT Department of Health after discovering that the property, usually reserved for its secretary, had been left vacant for more than six months. [The UWU] organised an open occupation in the hope of providing suitable accommodation for some of the many homeless or needy people in Canberra. Best described as opulent, this residence is set in large, well-kept, leafy gardens on half an acre of land with a northerly aspect next to the Royal Canberra Hospital. The building is two stories and has double brick construction, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, a huge living area, wall to wall carpets and curtains on every window. Power was still connected, as were two telephone lines. The kitchen included a refrigerator and microwave oven…
MELBOURNE — There have been squatters for as long as there has been the concept of owning land. At certain times it has been condoned, but not today. Last century, Australian land was settled by the “squattocracy”, the landed class which grew rich on convict labour. For many people today, squatting is an act of necessity. Students, single parents, unemployed and others not eligible for social security often have little choice. In some cases, squatting is also a political act to deny property owners money for rent, and instead to use this money for clothing, food and other necessities. “Government departments leave buildings empty, yet there is a huge housing list. The logical thing to do is to put your housing [needs] in your own hands”, says Genevieve, a spokesperson for the Squatters Information Service, established earlier this year to provide information on squatting and support for squatters…
SYDNEY — A group of homeless people were abruptly evicted from a disused warehouse here on January 31 by oil giant Shell. The homeless people had been squatting in the warehouse for almost one year. According to the squatters, Shell has no plans to use the heritage-listed building immediately. However, Gavin Sullivan, spokesperson for Sydney Housing Action Collective, said “Shell’s approved development plans indicate the building will eventually be knocked down and replaced by a service station, convenience store and the ubiquitous McDonald’s”.
SYDNEY — On August 23, South Sydney City Council workers armed with sledgehammers and crowbars attempted to evict almost 30 homeless squatters from council-owned buildings at 147-159 Broadway, near Glebe. The squats are less than 100 metres from the office of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games. After failing to gain entry, the council officers refused to negotiate with the squatters and called the police to have the squatters evicted…
SYDNEY – The owners’ plan for the Grand Midnight Star would have been nothing like it. Rather than becoming just another block of flats, the enormous Heritage-listed art deco theatre on Parramatta Road in Homebush has become a “social centre” for community activities and political organising. The new occupants, a collection of activists who make up the Social Centre Autonomous Network (SCAN), have reinvented the space. The downstairs bar has been turned into a place where activist groups can meet and where people can eat and chat, the lobby has been fitted with a dozen computers, an empty side room has become an art gallery, the industrial-sized kitchen has been taken over by Food Not Bombs and the cavernous ballroom, complete with chandeliers, will become a venue for gigs and raves…
…In the 1970s, the lack of affordable housing in Redfern drove many Kooris to squat in empty houses, and in response police arrested and charged squatters with trespassing. The local church hall became a home for increasing numbers of homeless, until it was shut down by the South Sydney Council. It was with the help of the NSW Builders Labourers Federation and the plumbers union that houses were brought up to a liveable standard, resulting in 45 Indigenous people residing in three houses in the Redfern Block. When development threatened to displace the residents, the BLF placed a ban on all development in the area and any other work that the construction company was doing. It is this kind of union and community solidarity that is needed to defend the Redfern Block today, 30 years later. A real answer has to involve Indigenous self-determination…
The practice of squatting buildings for ’social’ as opposed to purely ‘private’ (residential) purposes has a long history. To cite one example, on January 1, 1987 (1987 having been designated International Year of Shelter for the Homeless) squatters occupied a disused cafe opposite Princess Pier in Port Melbourne. Subsequent activities included the usual array of meetings, workshops, benefit gigs, film screenings, performances, a cafe (needless to say!), etcetera.
To cite another, more recent example: the Brown Warehouse in Wellington Street, Collingwood (now a yuppie apartment complex). First squatted in the late ’80s as a cafe and performance space, it was re-squatted in the mid-’90s, and used for much the same purposes (Dropdead even played a gig there), at first providing temporary accommodation in the city for forest blockaders, later becoming a more permanent residential and social space.
In a related case, during the 1980s and into the early-’90s, the Squatters Union of Victoria: maintained an office and meeting space (in an abandoned fire station in North Fitzroy); produced a radio show; distributed a bi-monthly zine (Squat It!), conducted a weekly community cafe; operated a telephone advice service; produced leaflets, stickers and various other forms of propaganda (in addition to the bi-monthly zine); organised benefit gigs; resisted evictions; and engaged in various other activities in solidarity with others engaged in workplace (for example, the BLF) and community struggles.
In Williamstown (Melbourne) in 2002 there began a series of art shows called ‘Empty Show’, held in abandoned properties [VIDEO].
Squats have also been established to house conferences. A few examples: in May 2004 over 500 people attended a conference for four days in a reclaimed warehouse in inner city Melbourne. ‘State of Emergency’ was a series of workshops, forums, parties and film screenings that attempted to come to grips with the new forms of state power, war and neo-liberalism that pervade everyday life [VIDEO]. ‘A Space Outside’ was a gathering of educational and creative workshops and direct action training that took place in the lead up to the G20 summit mobilisation in Melbourne from 17th * 19th November, 2006. Over the course of five days, approximately 400 people came through the space before it was busted by seventy police on Friday 17th November, the eve of the main protest. At the same time that ‘A Space Outside’ was being evicted, so too was ‘The Wake’, a squat which served both a residential and social function (gigs, meetings, workshops, etc.).
Currently, hundreds if not thousands of individuals squat in Melbourne, mostly in order to provide themselves with a roof over their heads. I support the actions of SHAC because I support direct action — in this case squatting — in order to solve social issues — in this case housing for the low-waged. Beyond this, the proposal SHAC made with regards establishing a student housing cooperative at 272–278 Faraday Street seems to me to be eminently reasonable, and has numerous precedents, most obviously STUCCO (197–207 Wilson Street, Newtown, Sydney), a student housing cooperative at the University of Sydney, originally established as a squat in the late ’70s and early ’80s, and which currently houses a total of 38 people in 8 self-contained units at low cost (app. $70 per week).
Fuckwits, bums and lowlifes in Victoria Street, Sydney, 1970s
Those who were part of the long drawn-out campaign that followed Arthur King’s disappearance speak of a constant air of danger and intimidation. Roelof [Smilde] says, ‘The number of residents still in the street just kept on dwindling. When Arthur first disappeared there were plenty but gradually they got more isolated and the more isolated they got the worse they felt about it, and finally they’d leave. In the end there was only a handful. When it got to the point where there was literally only two or three left, that’s when we started the squats. That was our final tactic.’
The decision to squat was made when Mick Fowler was the only tenant left in the threatened buildings. It was a last-ditch attempt to prevent the buildings from being vandalised by Theeman’s men.
Squatting was not unique to Sydney but part of a worldwide-trend whereby squatters, often young, usually poor, stymied developers who wanted to pull down the old inner-city residential areas and build luxury high-rise offices and apartments in their place. Squatting has been used as a tactic in Amsterdam for more than twenty years.
A couple of dozen Push people squatted in Victoria Street, joined by a whole range of people, from dedicated conservationists to followers of fringe political groups to the homeless just looking for a place to sleep. The Libertarians had wanted two things: to protect the architecture of Victoria Street and to keep the area for low-cost housing ‘for knockabout students, sailors and all the sorts of people who used to live there’.
‘To bring back low-cost housing to one of the best streets in Sydney?’ Arthur King says. ‘Shit, it had no chance of success.’
Roelof says, ‘It was a battle for the inner-city, for low-income residents to be able to stay there, and that was lost. It wasn’t lost in Woolloomooloo. A lot of the spin-off from Victoria Street was successful — in places like Woolloomooloo, the Rocks and Darlinghurst and Waterloo. But in Victoria Street we lost.’
The Victoria Street group knew that one way to succeed was to send Theeman broke. And they almost did it. By 1974, the hold-up in the Victoria Point development was costing Theeman $16,000 a week in interest payments.
But the squatters were up against a businessman who was getting desperate and a team of heavies with little regard for ethics. The tactics employed against them became more dangerous, including the firing of houses, with or without squatters in them. In one such fire, an Aboriginal girl who was camping in one of the houses died.
Intimidation came not just from hired men but from the police. One night when Wendy [Bacon] was squatting in the street, the door of the flat was broken down in the middle of the night by members of Squad 21, the vice squad.
In January 1974 the squatters were evicted by police, assisted by gangs of men employed by Victoria Point Pty Ltd. These men were organised by Fred Krahe [1919–1981], a former policeman. Video footage from the event shows wild scenes of squatters on roofs, clinging to chimneys, and people being hauled away to paddy vans.
By this time Wendy was living with Roelof at his flat at Darling Point. On Valentine’s Day, she received an orchid from an unknown admirer. Inside it was a bullet an a note: ‘Have a good day but avoid barbers’ shops.’
‘That was the second time I was really frightened. The first time had been after Arthur disappeared. And the next time was when Juanita [Nielsen] disappeared.’
While Wendy became nervous, Roelof wanted to keep going. He was heavily committed. He was financing a lot of the Victoria Street activities and was neglecting his punting. The expensive flat wouldn’t flat much longer. Before long he’d be broke. ‘Not that it mattered,’ he says. ‘I’d been broke before.’
After the squatters were evicted it looked the Victoria Point project would go ahead. Within months Norm Gallagher succeeded in taking over the NSW branch of the BLF; [Jack] Mundey, [Bob] Pringle and [Joe] Owens were expelled, never to work on a building site as builders’ labourers again. Gallagher’s first act was to lift the ban on Victoria Street. The same day, he was seen driving down Elizabeth Street in a car with Frank Theeman.
But just when Theeman thought he’d rid himself of one thorn in his side, there was another. Juanita Nielsen was an unconventional heiress who owned a house on the eastern side of Victoria Street. She had been overseas during the early days of the battle and when she returned she, like other owner-occupiers, was not initially impressed with the squatting campaign, fearing the effect on property values. She published a local newspaper, NOW, that was primarily an advertising rag. But in 1974, Juanita’s position, and her newspaper, began to change. In the months leading up to her disappearance in July 1975 she carried on a single-handed and highly effective battle with developers.
In an article about Juanita at the time of the inquest into her death, Wendy Bacon wrote, ‘The middle-class heiress who had once worried about the effects that green bans and squatters would have on property values was filling NOW with militant phrases such as, “Laws are based around property, not people. Green bans made people more important.”‘
Juanita Nielsen disappeared after a meeting with Edward Trigg at the Carousel Club. Trigg, who ran a club for Jim Anderson, said they discussed an advertisement that he wanted to run in her newspaper. The club was owned by an Abe Saffron company. After absconding, Trigg was eventually caught, pleaded guilty to conspiring to abduct Juanita Nielsen, and spent two years in jail. No one has ever been charged with her murder. At the inquest — where Arthur King first told his story publicly — it emerged that not long before Juanita’s abduction, Frank Theeman had paid Jim Anderson a sum of money, ostensibly for investing in a business.
Not long ago, Tim Bristow, private investigator to the glitterati, said he had been offered the contract to kill Juanita Nielsen, that he had turned it down, and that the man who did it was Freddy Krahe, Roelof’s ‘killer cop’. Krahe died in 1981.
By the time the developers had rid themselves of the Push, the BLF and Nielsen, public and government standards on urban conservation had shifted, aided by the Federal Minister for Urban Affairs, Tom Uren. The Labor Government would soon be thrown out of office, but it had made a difference to Libertarians after all. Theeman never got his forty-storey towers; the Victoria Point development went ahead but on a reduced scale, not providing Roelof’s dreamed-for low-cost housing, but city homes for the urban middle-class.
Today, Victoria Street is peaceful and tree-shaded; a mixture of elegant restored terrace houses, backpacker hotels and trendy cafes, with a few cheap flats in still-unrestored buildings. When Mick Fowler died in 1979, the street was closed as hundreds of people turned out to farewell him: seamen, conservationists, builders’ labourers, university lecturers, musicians, public servants, middle-class trendies, anarchists and activists, demonstrating the extraordinary range of people mobilised in this extraordinary battle.
At the top of the sandstone steps that lead down to Woolloomooloo is a plaque to Mick Fowler: ‘Seaman, musician, green ban activist … for his gallant stand against demolition of workers’ homes … from his friends.’
~ Anne Coombs, Sex and Anarchy: The Life and Death of the Sydney Push, Viking, 1996, pp.296–299.
See/hear also : Mick Fowler – 115 Victoria St, ABC, 1979 | Wendy Bacon, ABC, 1974. The Juanita Nielsen Mystery (ABC): “In 1977 ABC Radio’s Double J produced this radio documentary looking at the conflict between residents of Victoria St in Kings Cross and developers. Double J 1977.” Video: ABC TV 1976, “ABC TV’s This Day Tonight investigates this mystery one year after Juanita’s disappearance. ABC TV, 1976.” ABC TV 2004, “In 2004, ABC TV’s 730 Report investigates fresh allegations about the unsolved Juanita case. ABC TV, 2004.” Killing Juanita: a true story of murder and corruption, Peter Rees, Allen & Unwin, 2004. Rocking the Foundations, 1986: “An outstanding historical account of the Green Bans first introduced by the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation in the 1970s in response to community demand to preserve inner-city parkland and historic buildings. One of the first women to be accepted as a builders labourer, filmmaker Pat Fiske traces the development of a quite singular union whose social and political activities challenged the notion of what a union should be.” Green Bans, Red Union: Environmental Activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation, Meredith Burgmann & Verity Burgmann, UNSW Press, 1998.
Chomsky: Undermining Gaza
Sameer Dossani Foreign Policy In Focus
January 16, 2009
Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. Sameer Dossani interviewed him about the conflict between Israel and Gaza.
DOSSANI: The Israeli government and many Israeli and U.S. officials claim that the current assault on Gaza is to put an end to the flow of Qassam rockets from Gaza into Israel. But many observers claim that if that were really the case, Israel would have made much more of an effort to renew the ceasefire agreement that expired in December, which had all but stopped the rocket fire. In your opinion, what are the real motivations behind the current Israeli action?
CHOMSKY: There’s a theme that goes way back to the origins of Zionism. And it’s a very rational theme: “Let’s delay negotiations and diplomacy as long as possible, and meanwhile we’ll ‘build facts on the ground.'” So Israel will create the basis for what some eventual agreement will ratify, but the more they create, the more they construct, the better the agreement will be for their purposes. Those purposes are essentially to take over everything of value in the former Palestine and to undermine what’s left of the indigenous population.
I think one of the reasons for popular support for this in the United States is that it resonates very well with American history. How did the United States get established? The themes are similar.
There are many examples of this theme being played out throughout Israel’s history, and the current situation is another case. They have a very clear program. Rational hawks like Ariel Sharon realized that it’s crazy to keep 8,000 settlers using one-third of the land and much of the scarce supplies in Gaza, protected by a large part of the Israeli army while the rest of the society around them is just rotting. So it’s best to take them out and send them to the West Bank. That’s the place that they really care about and want.
What was called a “disengagement” in September 2005 was actually a transfer. They were perfectly frank and open about it. In fact, they extended settlement building programs in the West Bank at the very same time that they were withdrawing a few thousand people from Gaza. So Gaza should be turned into a cage, a prison basically, with Israel attacking it at will, and meanwhile in the West Bank we’ll take what we want. There was nothing secret about it.
Ehud Olmert was in the United States in May 2006 a couple of months after the withdrawal. He simply announced to a joint session of Congress and to rousing applause, that the historic right of Jews to the entire land of Israel is beyond question. He announced what he called his convergence program, which is just a version of the traditional program; it goes back to the Allon plan of 1967. Israel would essentially annex valuable land and resources near the green line (the 1967 border). That land is now behind the wall that Israel built in the West Bank, which is an annexation wall. That means the arable land, the main water resources, the pleasant suburbs around Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and the hills and so on. They’ll take over the Jordan valley, which is about a third of the West Bank, where they’ve been settling since the late 60s. Then they’ll drive a couple of super highways through the whole territory — there’s one to the east of Jerusalem to the town of Ma’aleh Adumim which was built mostly in the 1990s, during the Oslo years. It was built essentially to bisect the West Bank and are two others up north that includes Ariel and Kedumim and other towns which pretty much bisect what’s left. They’ll set up check points and all sorts of means of harassment in the other areas and the population that’s left will be essentially cantonized and unable to live a decent life and if they want to leave, great. Or else they will be picturesque figures for tourists — you know somebody leading a goat up a hill in the distance — and meanwhile Israelis, including settlers, will drive around on “Israeli only” super highways. Palestinians can make do with some little road somewhere where you’re falling into a ditch if it’s raining. That’s the goal. And it’s explicit. You can’t accuse them of deception because it’s explicit. And it’s cheered here.
Comments on James L. Gelvin’s ‘‘Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology’’
George Esenwein Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol.20, No.4, 2008 (597–600)
Because they have long been associated with bombing outrages and spectacular acts of violence, it is tempting to draw parallels between the anarchists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and contemporary terrorists. However, as such recent studies on jihadist terrorism have shown, constructing a comparative model for such an analysis is fraught with difficulties. As Professor Gelvin intimates in his thought-provoking article, the ways in which Al Qaeda appears to overlap with anarchism, a comparative study demands a careful examination of both the beliefs and practices underlying distinct historical phenomena.1 But though he should be commended for bringing greater focus to a discussion that is too often couched in distorting generalities, Professor Gelvin never manages to defend satisfactorily his claim that the political and ideological strands of anarchism and radical jihadism are fundamentally compatible. This is true above all because Dr. Gelvin’s argument is predicated on a number of mistaken notions about both anarchists and the ideological content of their revolutionary doctrine.
Al-Qaeda and Anarchism: A Historian’s Reply to Terrorology: Response to Commentaries
James L. Gelvin Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol.20, No.4, 2008 (606–611)
I would like to thank the editors of Terrorism and Political Violence for opening up the pages of their journal for this exchange, particularly because it enables me to engage with those I would not normally have an opportunity to engage with and to reach an audience I rarely get a chance to reach. I would particularly like to thank David C. Rapoport for his interest in and continued support for this project, despite the many differences that separate our analytical approaches.
I shall direct my remarks primarily to three of the four respondents. While I value the scholarship and observations of the fourth—John Kelsay—he and I agree on just about everything, with one reservation on his part. I have little to add to his comments, and shall speak to his reservation in the course of my remarks below.
George Esenwein and Richard Bach Jensen raise many of the same issues, so I shall address their concerns together. Both, it seems, have made the study of specific aspects of nineteenth-century anarchism their life’s work, so I am not surprised that both treat my outsider’s view of anarchism with skepticism. Fair enough. But sometimes an outsider’s view can be refreshing, particularly since, when it comes to presenting the story of those you study to a wider public, it is a well-known tendency for scholars to switch from being judges to being advocates. In a review of an earlier version of this article, for example, Walter Laqueur differentiates nineteenth-century anarchists from al-Qaedists on the basis of the fact that the former purportedly held to some ‘‘code of honor’’1—this, in spite of the acts of violence recounted by both Esenwein and Jensen in their responses against people most of us would consider ‘‘innocents.’’ So, to set the record straight and allay the fears of those who would uphold the reputation of anarchists past: I agree that al-Qaedists are a nasty, violent bunch; I also agree that only some—not all—nineteenth-century European anarchists were nasty and violent. But just as one cannot understand nineteenth-century anarchism merely by looking at acts of violence perpetrated by (some of) its adherents, one cannot understand al-Qaeda either merely by looking at acts of violence perpetrated by its adherents. The purpose of my article is to make sense of al-Qaeda—to typologize it—by locating it within one or another category familiar to social scientists. The location I found most appropriate is anarchism.
…Pencil-necked geek and anarchist Jeff ‘The Snowman’ Monson…
In the US, quick-thinking authorities have won another skirmish in the War on Terror. This time, by arresting a man for spray-painting the peace sign, the anarchy symbol, and the phrases “No war” and “No poverty” on multiple columns of a Gub’mint building.
Former UFC heavyweight contender and professed anarchist Jeff Monson is now a wanted man in Washington state, but he doesn’t regret the spray-painted message he left on the state Capitol building denouncing the war in Iraq. The Olympia native has been charged with first-degree malicious mischief, a felony carrying a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine, according to The Olympian, which reported the story first on Wednesday. A warrant for Monson’s arrest was issued on Wednesday after the state spent $19,000 to remove the graffiti, said The Olympian. Monson, 37, told Sherdog.com on Thursday that he’d spray-painted the peace sign, the anarchy symbol, and the phrases “No war” and “No poverty” on multiple columns of the building on Nov. 26…
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?"
