…both appeared on the AK Press/G7 Welcoming Committee CD Return of the Read Menace, released in 1999. Robb contributed ‘Permanent Free Zone’ while Ron played ‘Small Victories’.
As you can see, we were not joking when we said we were not releasing any more music. We are, in fact, not. Just to reiterate — G7 has entered an indefinite stage of hibernation during which we will release no new music, but simply maintain our existing back-catalogue in high-quality, DRM-free, downloadable form.
CDs which we currently have in stock continue to be available for sale in our online store until that stock runs out. We will not be manufacturing any more CDs in the future.
Now that that clarification is out of the way, I may as well update the curious on the latest with G7-affiliated peoples…
One last note to American readers — Barack Obama is just the figurehead of one of two pro-war, big-business parties in your country. He will not save the world. Unicorns will not frolic in the streets upon his (likely) inauguration.
He will, however, probably write a really great memoir after his time as president is done, in which he will reflect on — and maybe even apologize for — all the mistakes he made in bombing innocent civilians in his new, amped-up war in Afghanistan (and wherever else his administration takes the U.S. war machine in the years ahead.)
The fascist twat is vice-president of the ‘Jobbik’ party in Hungary. In an absolutely extraordinary turn of events which has no previous historical parallel, he himself denies any racist intention. “My party is radical but it is patriotic, not nationalist. Millions in Hungary support us. Those who call us Nazi are just Communists.” Zoltan’s party is also known as Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom, or ‘The Movement for a Better Hungary’. A better Hungary being one without Gypsies (Roma).
Whether or not Hungary is better off without Zoltan is unknown, but the foreign troublemaker has been happily living in England for several years now. In May 2006, he even lodged a complaint with the local council for refusing to allow him to extend the driveway at his home in Windmill Street. By the same token, whether or not patriotic Britishers should support Zoltan’s battle with the local branch of ZOG is a quandary I’ll happily let them decide upon. In the meantime, while the Hungarian remains in England, the Englishman Nick Griffin is coming to Australia in December, and bringing with him all the joys of Christmas.
“a refugee is a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”
By this definition Jesus was a refugee. There is no question of this, despite the fact that some Christians are clearly embarrassed by the fact.
What would happen if Jesus had fled to Australia instead of Egypt?
…
If we judge what Australia would do to Jesus by biblical standards, this is what the bible says:
Deuteronomy 10:17-19 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.
Strangers is one of the biblical word for refugees. Can it be said that we love the stranger in Australia?
To really live the Christian Faith is to have concern for justice for all people, including “the strangers and widows and orphans” the Old Testament called the oppressed and nobodies of the time.
In Matthew 9:13 Jesus told people to go and learn the meaning of the word compassion. Compassion is the modern word for mercy. It means to walk in the shoes of someone, or to feel how a situation feels to them.
Jesus quoted the scripture where God says “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” Keeping the law and making sacrifices in the temple was the “right thing” a good Jew of Jesus’ time did to keep the law. But, says Jesus, God desires mercy or compassion, not rigid keeping of the law. He was alluding to the words of the Old Testament Prophet Hosea who says as God’s word, “For I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.”
The Old Testament prophets were damming of those who kept religious observance and yet did not live out justice. Amos 5:21 has God saying, “I hate, I despise your festivals, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.” Jesus was damning of those who kept religious observance hard heartedly and had no compassion. He called them “whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” Matthew 23:27
The law of Moses was to be interpreted through compassion. Compassion, then the law. Let us be compassionate first and then worry about the law, if you like.
The Residents’ Action Movement has been growing rapidly in the last month (with around 100-300 people joining per week) as a result of the popularity of their key campaign — to remove the 12.5% goods and services tax on food… How did such a party that has the mainstream parties ducking for cover grow so quickly and achieve such success in so short a time?
Et cetera.
In Australia, Aoteraoa/New Zealand and the UK, the last few years has witnessed the emergence of left-wing electoral coalitions. In each case, after some initial success, they have largely collapsed. In each case, the coalition has dwindled to a front group for one of the ‘revolutionary’ socialist (neo-Trotskyist) parties who played a key role in their initiation.
Australia
“An historic moment for the left in Australia” was the most common comment made by participants in the founding conference of the Socialist Alliance in Melbourne over the August 4-5 weekend.
As for the bad news: SAlt (wisely) left the Alliance in its initial stages; SD disbanded in December 2005; WP left in April 2006 (and has also since disbanded); the ISO withdrew in January 2007 (and has since re-emerged as Solidarity); while the FSP left the Alliance just two months later. The status of several other groups affiliated to SA remains somewhat in doubt — thus the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) were there at the beginning, and have yet to formally announce their retirement, although nothing has been heard from them since 2004 — while the Workers League and the Worker Communist Party of Iraq (Australia) have been keeping mum.
SA has contested a number of elections over the intervening period, and a number of SA candidates will be contesting the upcoming Victorian local council elections (November 29). To date, however, none have experienced any degree of real success, and nobody — outside of, perhaps, SA — believes that they will any time soon. Indeed, such has been the controversy surrounding SA, that the question of its utility as a vehicle for the promotion of socialist politics led earlier this year to a split in the DSP (its only remaining power). Thus while the decision by the DSP to submerge itself in SA — celebrated by its re-nomination in December 2003 as the Democratic Socialist Perspective, “a Marxist tendency in the Socialist Alliance” — has had its benefits (the decimation of the ISO) it has also had its costs (currently known as the Revolutionary Socialist Party).
In Aotearoa/New Zealand, as in Australia, there have been a number of attempts at left re-groupment in recent years. One of these was centred around the development of a Workers’ Charter in 2005. Workers’ Charter has since gone the way of all things, and been replaced by the Residents’ Action Movement (RAM). RAM was formed in 2003, and has been described as a “broad left coalition, stretching from social liberals, community activists and former National Party members to social democrats, democratic socialists and left-wing radicals”. Its chairperson is currently Grant Morgan, who is also a leading member of Socialist Worker (Aotearoa).
SW-NZ is one of a bewildering number of Trotskyist parties descended from or (formerly) claiming allegiance to the UK’s Socialist Workers Party and its International: the International Socialist Tendency (iSt): in Aotearoa, SW-NZ remains the iSt affiliate; in Australia, the franchise is owned by Solidarity (and before it, the ISO). Confusingly:
SW-NZ produces a quarterly journal titled UNITY which is Aotearoa’s premier Marxist publication. We have our own website called UNITYblogNZ.com. We publish a monthly Operational E-Zine for SW-NZ members. We hold branch meetings and national conferences to debate Marxist strategies and tactics, and to elect people to positions of local and national responsibility. We are a Marxist group which can act independently for specific political reasons. Such things will continue in the aftermath of the unanimous decision by the February 2008 SW-NZ national conference to support RAM’s plan to go nationwide.
Confusing, as Unity was originally a publication of the Workers’ Charter (under the editorship of the delightfully subversive John Minto); the Workers’ Charter website has since disappeared; Unity appears to have ceased publication; and UNITYblogNZ.com now resolves to Unity Aotearoa, a ‘broad left’ blog (and seemingly a publication of SW-NZ).
Disappointing (for SW-NZ), as, despite a good deal of hype, RAM’s result at the recent election has been farcical. Thus, despite claiming a membership of 3000, RAM received just over 400 votes across the country. By contrast, with 824 votes, the ‘hard’ left in the Workers Party — its “ideology is pro-Mao, Marxism-Leninism [and] based on the teachings and practice of the great revolutionaries from Marx to Mao” — fared a good deal better (as did the social-democratic Alliance, with 1,721 votes).
WPNZ was formed in 2002 as an amalgamation of the (seminal) Workers Party and a Trotskyist groupuscule called Revolution (see Philip Ferguson, ‘Fusion forms new group – Revolutionary Workers League’, The Spark, June 15, 2004). Well, kinda… actually, it emerged out of the ‘Anti-Capitalist Alliance’ as the ‘Revolutionary Workers League’, before settling for the name Workers Party (again).
The first Socialist Alliance was set up in Coventry in 1992 and the first national meeting held in 1996 with eight local alliances represented. Within two years 20 local alliances and twelve left groups had joined. During the next two years the project took off with 58 local SA’s across the country.
In 2001 the SA adopted a new programme and constitution and now involved all the main tendencies and groupings on the left, including the AWL, CPGB, International Socialist Group, Revolutionary Democratic Group, Socialist Party, SWP and Workers Power. The SA stood 98 candidates in the 2001 general election, making the biggest left challenge to the Labour Party for 50 years. [Gaining 57,553 votes.]
After the Bush-Blair war in Iraq, the SWP majority abandoned the SA for Respect and closed the SA down. However a significant minority did not accept this. In November 2005 the SA was relaunched at the London conference. The need for non-sectarian socialist unity remains central to the struggle for socialism. The Socialist Alliance is coming back.
Maybe so — although given that it had just 30 ‘national’ members in 2007, and just 20 in 2008 (supplemented, presumably, by members of a dozen or so affiliates/branches), it certainly has an extremely long road to travel. As for Respect — Respect, Equality, Socialism, Peace, Environmentalism, Community, and Trade Unionism — it was formally founded in January 2004, and split into two in 2007, with one faction dominated by the SWP, and the other comprising most of the remainder.
Respect won its first local council election a few months after its founding, in July, 2004. It contested the general election of 2005, and gained 68,094 votes. Moreover, it gained Parliamentary representation in the form of ‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway (a former Laborite, expelled from the party in October 2003 on account of his opposition to the war in/on Iraq).
The turning point for Respect came in late 2007, when the party split into two: one faction labelled Respect Renewal (Galloway), the other Respect — The Unity Coalition (SWP). Renewal accused the SWP of control freakery; the SWP accused Galloway & Co. of shifting to the right. In any event, the SWP-dominated Respect soon transmogrified into the ‘Left List’, and it was under this title that the SWP contested the London council elections in May, 2008. In the contest for Mayor, the BNP’s Richard Barnbrook received 69,710 votes, while Lindsay German (Left List/SWP) got a mere 16,796 (less than 1%). (As the Respect candidate in 2004, German got 61,731 votes.)
In the ding-dong battle between the SWP (Left List) and Respect in City & East, Respect (George Galloway) got 26,760 votes (14.28%) while the Left candidate got just 2,274 votes (1.21%), less even than the National Front with 2,350 votes (1.25%). In general, of fourteen constituencies, Left List (SWP) candidates managed to avoid coming last in nine, comfortably seeing off Veritas in Barnet & Camden, the English Democrats in seven seats (although being outpolled in seven others), the UK Independence Party in two seats (losing in the remaining twelve), and seeing off challenges from two Independents, Socialist Alternative (Chris Flood), Animals Count and the Socialist Party (David Lambert), and even managed to defeat a Christian in one seat (losing all others) in the race to the bottom.
Following these disastrous results, the ‘Left List’ became the ‘Left Alternative’ (June 2008), and under this name will continue to eke out an existence as the SWP’s electoral front — minus Lindsey German and John Rees.
The fortunes of the SWP in the UK are in many ways mirrored by those of the DSP in Australia and SW-NZ in er, New Zealand. All three parties are (or perhaps were, in the case of SW-NZ) major forces on the Leninist left, and all decided, in their wisdom, to try and hitch their wagons to the ‘anti-capitalist’ movement in the early noughties by way of joining/forming an electoral alliance. In the case of the SWP this meant, first, joining/forming the Socialist Alliance (1999–2003), then Respect (2003–2007), then Respect Coalition (2007–2008), then the Left List (2008), and now the Left Alternative. In the case of the DSP, they comprised one of the founding members of the Socialist Alliance (2001) and — while every single other member of the ‘alliance’ has since departed — have remained there. As indicated, this has come at a cost to the DSP, with the recent departure of a large minority to form the RSP. The SWP, on the other hand, has (also) witnessed a declining membership, one which — and in reaction to the popularity of the BNP — it would appear it is attempting to bolster through rejuvenating its ‘anti-fascist’ organising.
…So the LA is going to be a parked front, much like Globalise Resistance, kept just about ticking over in case there’s a need to dust it off again. This makes sense. Since the election debacle, practically all the SWP’s allies – who weren’t too numerous to begin with – have flaked off. The four Tower Hamlets councillors have gone, three to New Labour and one to the Tories. Kumar Murshid has gone. The very able Sait Akgul seems to have dropped off the face of the earth. And the SWP itself doesn’t have the membership or the money to keep a halfway serious electoral intervention going under its own steam…
See also : Socialist Renewal: “We wish to provide a site for the publication of ideas about how the socialist left with the renewed Respect can begin to offer their socialist perspective, in a non-sectarian way within a more plural and outward-looking Respect.”
Nausea play Discharge. Intro / Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing / Ain’t No Feeble Bastard. Discharged, Allied Recordings, 1994.
Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing
Lied to threatened cheated and deceived
Hear nothing see nothing say nothing
Led up garden paths and into blind alleys
Hear nothing see nothing say nothing
Ain’t No Feeble Bastard
Ain’t no feeble bastard that obeys their every say
They say do this they say do that
No I’m no dogsbody
Ain’t no feeble bastard
No fucking scapegoat
Ain’t no feeble bastard that has no say
I say what I think, not what they want me to think
NZ employs the Mixed Member Proportional representation (MMP) voting system. The NZ Parliament has a total of 122 seats, 7 of which are reserved for Maori candidates. The Nationals won 59 (gaining 11), Labour 43 (losing 7), Greens 8 (gaining 2), ACT New Zealand 5 (gaining 3), Maori 5 (gaining 1), Progressives 1 (no change) and UnitedFuture 1 (losing 2). The election marked a generational sea change, with 47-year-old millionaire former currency trader John Key (National) taking power from Helen Clark (Labour) a long-serving veteran of the Left of New Zealand politics… such as it is, and such as it may be found within the ranks of Labour.
On the whole, and leaving aside the Greens and Progressives, it was a fairly dismal result for the (Socialist) Left. On October 10, RAM boasted that “RAM’s ‘Protect Our People’ campaign has been swinging into action nationwide – and our election campaign has been going from strength to strength!” In reality, it received an extremely meagre total of just 405 votes. What’s especially odd about this result is that in April, RAM claimed a membership of 500. RAM ‘co-organiser’ Oliver Woods stated “I’m from RAM, New Zealand’s fastest growing political party with more than 3000 members in only a few months!” Further, “RAM won 87,000 votes in the 2004 ARC election, and over 100,000 votes in the 2007 council elections which saw a slightly higher average vote for our ARC candidates as compared with 2004.”
Where did they all go? Did RAM forget to remind its (incredibly absent-minded) 3000 members to vote for their party?
For the bizarros of the Workers Party, the results are a little more pleasing. After all, it was only a few years ago that its Leader, Daphna Whitmore, was singing the praises of Marx, Lenin, Mao, and even Presidente Gonzalo.
“If I was running Al-Qaeda in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008, and pray, as many times as possible, for a victory not only for Obama, but also for the Democrats.” ~ John HoWARd, February 11, 2007
We All Earned the Puppy
(“On Faith” panelist) Starhawk Washington Post (Blog)
November 5, 2008
On election night, after Barack Obama made his acceptance speech, I was filled with too much excitement and elation to stay indoors. I headed out to the streets, and eventually found the party in my neighborhood, the Mission district of San Francisco. A crowd filled the streets, drumming and dancing and hooting and high on sheer elation. It was mostly young, but with a sprinkling of us older folks. And it was incredibly diverse, reflecting just about every race and color and ancestry of people on the planet: black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American. Not in separated knots of friends, but grinning and hugging and riding on each others’ shoulders, all mixed together, like the way you mix up flour and sugar and cut in the butter for a pie crust to hold a good old American apple pie.
Very few of us are immune to the exhilaration of this time. My friends on the left write to me that they feel something akin to “redemption” or that “the country has been returned to us” or that “we finally have one of us in the White House.” Of course, like them, I discover myself feeling overwhelmed with disbelief and excitement throughout the day, since the thought of having the regime of George W. Bush over and gone is an enormous relief. And the thought of Obama, a thoughtful and progressive black candidate, shifts the historical ground, and we feel that cataclysm as it produces a new terrain. But let us try to think carefully about the shifted terrain, although we cannot fully know its contours at this time. The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes (“we are all united”) or that we propose (“he is one of us”), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times. There have always been good reasons not to embrace “national unity” as an ideal, and to nurse suspicions toward absolute and seamless identification with any political leader. After all, fascism relied in part on that seamless identification with the leader, and Republicans engage this same effort to organize political affect when, for instance, Elizabeth Dole looks out on her audience and says, “I love each and every one of you.”
WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”
Somewhere on the outskirts, between Stalinville and Mao Valley, there is a special place in hell reserved for Enver Hoxha.
It’s not exactly prime real estate, to be sure. He has a modest house there, perhaps a duplex. Down the block lives Todor Zhivkov. Around the corner are Nick and Elena Ceausescu. Janos Kadar and Ho Chi Minh are frequent dinner guests; sometimes they get a little tipsy and swap wives. Together, they form a special club: inherently evil, they lacked the power, resources and sheer numbers of potential victims to commit murder on a truly genocidal scale. They are abandoned by scholars who flock to the statistical sexiness of Stalin and Mao.
Unable to top Auschwitz or the Gulag Archipelago, all that is left of them now is half-forgotten memories of the more bizarre aspects of their rule. Ceausescu forbade private ownership of typewriters, and held back colour television until the early 1980s for fear the little pictures would be too much distraction to the exhausted Romanian proles. Zhivkov is chiefly remembered for asking Leonid Brezhnev if Bulgaria could join the Soviet Union. Enver Hoxha banned bearded visitors, Americans and God.
This is the little hell made for little men, little dictators of tin-pot kingdoms. While Chairman Mao and Uncle Joe sip blood at the right hand of the beastmaster, Satan sees the residents of dreary Hoxhatown as boorish, uninvited houseguests. There’s little he can learn from them, unless he has a taste for really kick-ass goulash.
Such is the fate of mass murderers with few morals but even fewer bodies. These dictators are like British cops: they snarl and sneer but everyone knows they don’t carry guns. All they can do is go home at the end of the day and take out their frustrations on the wife, kids, and any small animals that get in their way.
Citizens in the state of Victoria are scheduled to vote in their local council elections on Saturday, November 29. (Actually, only about half of those entitled to vote usually bother doing so.) This is democracy in/action, and a small number of socialists, one or possibly two far right candidates, and even an anarchist, have thrown their hats into the ring.
Maribyrnong Margarita Windisch (Wattle Ward: 5 candidates, 1 vacancy) Stuart Martin (Stony Creek Ward: 3 candidates, 1 vacancy)
Stuart is competing with the ALP and the Greens for a seat, while Margarita must defeat a Green and three independents (including Garth “A vote for Garth is a vote for fun!” Bray).
Moreland
Vannessa Hearman, Turan Ertekin and Sue Bolton (South Ward: 12 candidates, 3 vacancies)
Queenscliffe Chris Johnson (5 vacancies, 9 candidates)
As far as I can tell, all bar one (or possibly two) of the SA candidates are members of the DSP/Resistance. The only exception to this neo-Trotskyist rule is Turan Ertekin, who is a member of the Anatolian Cultural Centre and, according to a fellow trainspotter, the local, Australian representative of the ‘Labour Party of Turkey’ (EMEP). The foundation of EMEP was supposedly the result of an initiative by Turkish political cadres affiliated with the Albanian Party of Labour (Partia e Punës e Shqipërisë, PPSh in Albanian). The Albanian Party of Labour is, in turn, one of the awesomest parties ever, being the sole legal political party in Albania during communist rule (1946-1991), and having as its leader one of the awesomest leaders ever: Enver Hoxha.
In the City of Yarra, the Socialist Party is also standing candidates:
Anthony Main (Nicholls Ward: 6 candidates, 3 vacancies)
Denise Dudley (Melba Ward: 9 candidates, 3 vacancies) and sitting candidate (and Australia’s only elected socialist)
Stephen Jolly (Langridge Ward: 7 candidates, 3 vacancies)
I first heard those five dear letters at the dawn of my life
Ever since, your name became as dear to me as my home.
And we shout “ENVER!”
And the sky seems loftier than before,
The lands around us larger,
The sun brighter,
And our visions ever more magnificent.
We shout “ENVER!”
And our days take on colour and meaning
As they fall like cadets
Into the great ranks of the People’s Revolution!
“I know nothing”
Candidates on the far right this year are disappointingly few. Thus far, only one has reared his head: Neil Henry Smith, who is competing for a place on Monash City Council (Mulgrave Ward). Dude was too racist even for One Notion! (Self-proclaimed racist kicked out of party, Kirsten Leiminger, Monash Leader, November 3, 2008). He is unlikely to win, but his candidate statement is still pretty cool.
SMITH, Neil Henry [No photo submitted]
Being a former A.N.Z. Bank Auditor I will vet all items of Council expenditure with a fine – tooth comb. Expenditure not up to scratch will be vigorously opposed. Having recently been involved in a boundary dispute I must express my extreme disappointment with the Monash Building Section. It seemed the approach adopted, mirrored that of Sergeant Schultz of Hogan’s Heroes “I know nothing”. As a councillor I will personally provide a conscientious and sympathetic advisory service to Monash ratepayers harbouring concerns on building matters. The greatest scourge Australia is facing this century is over population. Monash Council is not a benevolent institution, ratepayers are not benefactors, with many battling to fund Council rates. Under no circumstances should ratepayers be forced to pick up the tab for those overseas cot cases transported to Monash by Kevin Rudd and his merry politicians. I will aggressively reject Council funding chanelled thereto.
Following the less-than-total success of Australia First at the recent NSW local council elections, its leader Dr James Saleam declared:
1. Australia First will be contesting Maroondah Council Poll in Greater Melbourne in November.
The party committee in Victoria has resolved to contest the poll for Maroondah Council. The Victorian council elections in November are not conducted in the same way as the New South Wales ones. They feature no polling booth voting days and are all [sic] conducted as postal ballots.
Of course, the party must ‘campaign’ in the normal manner to attract public attention; but ultimately, all voters are provided with a postal ballot.
As far as I can tell, however, this has not occurred. Further, the site for the Melbourne branch appears to be temporarily down. The local organiser, Brendan Gidley, certainly isn’t in the running.
Brendan Gidley, a One Nation branch committee member in the Melbourne suburb of Ringwood. Gidley stood for a Victorian Senate seat in 1993 for the Republican Party of Australia. He is also the founder of the tiny National Republican Movement, an anti-immigrant group that was active in the early 1990s, and which modelled itself on National Action. The NRM issued posters using artwork from the US-based Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. One of its stickers read: “Mass Third World immigration: Enriching our culture by TB, syphilis, AIDS, hepatitis, rabies, leprosy.” The NRM is still active, and is listed on a new far-right website as a supplier of “nationalist literature” written by former National Action and National Socialist (Nazi) Party leader Jim Saleam. The address given is Gidley’s PO Box in the Melbourne suburb of Kew.
The current PO address for AF is in Croydon; so too, the PO address for their rivals, the Australian Protectionist Party. Personally, I think they’re both bald men fighting over a fine-tooth comb.
Update : Please note that the ‘Jim Perren’ referred to in the text below is from Australia, and bears no relation to the Jim Perren who resides in the United Kingdom.
Alan Matheson, a retired Churches of Christ minister and occasional contributor to Online Opinion, has written an interesting article: Scrutinising the religious and political right (November 7, 2008). I know a little bit about the political (far) right — as Alan remarks, being one of, if not the only, bloggers in Australia to takenote of British Nationalist Party fuehrer Nick Griffin’s planned tour of Australia in December — but I know less about its ‘religious’ dimensions, so Alan’s article makes for some interesting reading.
As Alan also notes, Griffin’s tour is being sponsored by the Australian Protectionist Party: a splinter from the Australia First Party, and formed in September, 2007. The APP has a tiny membership, and only a handful of prominent members. One of these is Darrin Hodges; others include Martin Fletcher (of Downunder Newslinks fame) and Mark Wilson. At which point, a few corrections are in order.
According to Alan, “The APP’s Darrin Hodges… attends BNP conferences”. To the best of my knowledge, this is incorrect. In fact, a member of the APP — and former member of the BNP — did attend a recent BNP event, the ‘Red White & Blue Festival’, held in August 2008. His name is Mark Wilson. As noted previously:
Mark is a former comrade of Dr James Saleam who has since jumped ship for arch-rivals the APP. Mark reckons Whitey oughta jump up and down more on Australia Day, ANZAC Day, May Day and Eureka Day (December 3). “Tragically, these Days have been tailored to the agendas of multiculturalist, gender-bending, globalist ideology.” Mark is also sure that he hasn’t done anything to the Aborigines to apologise for, is a recent migrant from Britain, and wishes the Aborigines no harm… but would rather not live next door to them.
Regarding anti-Islamic sentiment, while the APP has certainly distributed leaflets that ask “Do you want your children to grow up in a Muslim Australia?” and claim that “Islam is a religion of Arabic race and culture and its way of life should not be pushed on Australia”, it’s worth noting that the party’s membership has expressed its hatred and contempt for Muslims (and others) in far more vicious terms. Thus Darrin Hodges has previously expressed some rather more straightforward opinions. These appeared on his blog — one which he has since sensibly closed:
“Australia was a beautiful place once, before it was flooded with third-world sewerage from African [sic] and Asia.” February 26
“The hide of foreign students demanding our secular universities re-arrange everything just to suit the[ir] filthy religion…” February 25
(On why Darrin supports Aboriginal land rights) “Kosovo belongs to Serbia, not the Mohammaden hordes who with the help of the United States, have stolen the land.” February 17
(On the Stolen Generations apology) “…Rudd has re-written Australian history today and condemned an entire generation of Australians to a fate worse then [sic] death, he has condemned a people to extinction…” February 13
“How stupid do they think we are? The whole Habib family should be deported, they are a blight on this country.” February 9
“They are traitors just by the very fact they are Muslim…” February 5
(On contradiction) “This is the future the establishment have been longing for since before 1966 when the criminal traitors in the parliament opened the flood gates to the “yellow hordes”. The establishment is not beyond learning from history and are “asianising” Australia from the top and the bottom, with White Australia being squeezed out of the middle. The Establishment view Australia as an economic entity not as a nation of people and it doesn’t matter to them if the labour is white or yellow.” February 3
In addition to being a former member of both the Australia First Party and the viciously anti-Semitic Stormfront, Darrin is a ‘former’ fan of Der Fueher: “I’m more interested in the purer form of fascism… and while I don’t subscribe to the whole ‘worship Hitler’ thing, his comments on multiculturalism and politics in general are still just as relevant today as they were 70-odd years ago” he wrote on Stormfront. On June 20, 2005, he added that “i cant say im into the whole national socialist thing – as far as im concerned, National Socialism died with it’s [sic] creator, not that i do not have any regard for his writings, indeed, they still have much relevance today – he laid a foundation that we should build on”. And just for good measure, a week later (June 26) Darrin further noted that “i have some good colour footage (no sound) of Adolf Hitler at The Berghoff. PM me if you want a copy of the footage”. (’darrinh’ joined the world’s premiere White supremacist website in June 2005.)
As for Martin Fletcher — who co-administers, with Darrin, the APP’s online discussion forum — his racism is absolutely rank. Along with his provision of a copy of the Muslim Massacre videogame, Martin provides hours of Yanqui infotainment on his ‘news’ site, including documentary videos on Barack Hussein Obama, Holocaust denial, David Duke, Stormfront and dead Nutzi Dr William Pierce (author of The Turner Diaries). Indeed, on Downunder Newslinks, The Turner Diaries, along with The Myth of the Six Million, The International Jew, Did Six Million Really Die? and The Protocols of Zion are all available to help White People interpret the Australian news. As visual aids, Martin also thoughtfully provides cartoons produced by Tom Metzger’s White Aryan Resistance. Here’s a sample:
In their online knuckle-dragging, Darrin and Martin are joined by Luke Connors (himself a former member of the ‘Patriotic Youth League’, a short-lived yoof wing of the Australia First Party), who employs the handle ‘casapound’ — so named in tribute to a violent neo-Fascist grouping in Rome, Italy (named, in turn, in tribute to Ezra Pound, the US poet and fascist lickspittle, 1885–1972).
APP versus AFP
To conclude, the APP’s formation was largely inspired by a desire to escape such straightforwardly fascist and neo-Nazi ideological attachments, especially as they inhered in the person of the convicted criminal Dr James Saleam. (Since his departure, Darrin has denounced AFP as the ‘Australian Faggot Party’, and described Dr. Saleam as a “criminal lunatic”, an “oily spiv”, a pathological liar, a “political gold digger”, and so on.) Saleam is currently fuehrer of the Australia First Party (NSW), and most recently distinguished himself by attending a neo-Nazi rally in Wellington… only to then be photographed fondling a childhood book which once belonged to a young Jewish anti-fascist — this photograph being published on a blog belonging to a neo-Nazi named Jim Perren, a member of Australia First from rural Queensland.
Race-hate campaigner unmasked
Greg Roberts The Australian
August 22, 2005
THE man behind a race-hate campaign in southern Queensland has been identified as a professional kangaroo shooter from the Darling Downs town of Crows Nest.
Police are tracking the movements of Jim Perren, 38, after anti-racism campaigners contacted them to register concern about his activities.
Mr Perren has posted hundreds of race-hate messages on the internet under the pseudonym stug111 — a type of German assault gun.
Right-wing extremists attached to a neo-Nazi group called the White Pride Coalition [since transformed into the online forum ‘Australian New Nation’, administered by the Kiwi fascist Alex Fogerty — another former Stormfronter] have targeted Toowoomba because 750 Sudanese refugees have been resettled in the Darling Downs city.
One family was forced to leave its home after being harassed, and refugees have been pelted with eggs and potatoes. Material being distributed includes brochures describing white women as the “world’s most endangered species”.
Inquiries by The Australian have established that Mr Perren is the White Pride Coalition’s chief operative in the region. He lives with his wife and two children on a rural property outside Crows Nest, 45km east of Toowoomba. When contacted by The Australian, Mr Perren did not deny his involvement in the race-hate campaign.
“If only it was that easy,” Mr Perren said. “I’ve got nothing to say.”
Mr Perren’s reluctance to be identified was confirmed by White Pride Coalition national spokesman Terry Davis, who said: “He wants to keep his head down.”
Mr Perren refers to Crows Nest in one of his internet postings: “Luck is on my side. I live in a small town that has two Asians and three coconuts. All the rest are white.”
In another posting, Mr Perren said Toowoomba had become a “staging point for the scum of the world to move into rural Queensland … they must be stopped”.
On the support of local churches for Sudanese refugees, he said: “When the muds they sponsor come and live here and start to rape and murder their grandchildren, maybe then they will wake up.”
“Whatever the justification, society cannot accept that this (riot) was an appropriate response,” Judge Shanahan said.
“So far, almost two dozen Aboriginal people have been jailed over the uprising. Mr Wotton – convicted a fortnight ago of leading the resistance – is the final Palm Islander to be sentenced. To this day, no police have even been disciplined for their part in the derailing of the investigation, despite the coroner’s findings.”
The moral of this story?
Police property is valuable. Aboriginal life is not.
Palm Island riot ringleader Lex Wotton jailed The Australian
November 7, 2008
THE ringleader behind the 2004 Palm Island riot has been jailed for six years.
Lex Wotton was found guilty on October 24 of inciting the riot that resulted in the destruction of the island’s police station, the courthouse and an officer’s residence.
During the trial, the court was told 40-year-old Wotton led an angry mob on a rampage on November 26, 2004, destroying property and threatening police.
The anger erupted after the release of findings of a post-mortem examination on the body of 36-year-old Cameron Doomadgee, who died in police custody a week earlier.
Wotton will be eligible for parole in July 2010.
Judge Michael Shanahan told the court police and authorities had mishandled communication with locals in the days after the death of Cameron Doomadgee.
Many Palm Islanders believed the death in custody would not be properly dealt with, despite a number of investigations being launched, including one by the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC), he said.
“Whatever the justification, society cannot accept that this (riot) was an appropriate response,” Judge Shanahan said.
Outside court, supporters of Wotton cheered at news he would be released in 19 months.
Aboriginal activist Gracelyn Smallwood said the community had been bracing themselves for a sentence of between 10 years and life in jail. She declared the result a victory for Aboriginal people.
“We are very grateful and are hoping that black and white can come together and move on with the healing process,” she said.
Free Lex Wotton NOW: To defend and support Lex Wotton and his family | This group will help to co-ordinate support for Lex and his family.
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?"
