I’m there!
POST WORLD CUP – PRE SEMI FINAL GIGS WITH THE COSMIC PSYCHOS
* The Rifles will be touring nationally with The Cosmic Psychos in July/August. More details soon but here’s a starter:
Melbourne 28 July,
Moorooduc 29 July,
Sydney 11 Aug,
Brisbane 12 Aug,
Adelaide 18 Aug,
Perth 19 Aug.
Tuneful anarchist liberates music
Nick Miller
Sydney Morning Herald
June 13, 2006
Nick Miller has written a story about A Guy Called Andrew. Nielsen. MC Lars?
Anyway, MC Lars is a bona fide rebel: defiant hairdo, dark complaints about the stifling mainstream and, of course, expensive accessories:
“I’ve got G5 production, concept videos, touring with a notebook, rocking packed shows,” he raps. “The old-school major deal? It makes no sense: indentured servitude, the costs are too immense!”
Lars, aka 23-year-old Stanford University literature graduate Andrew Nielsen, is bypassing the major labels and creating, distributing and marketing his own music.
Unbelievable! Creating, distributing and marketing your own music? Who woulda thunk it?
Piracy will save the music industry, he claims. “It’s going to be a renaissance with music – the 21st century will be fascinating. It will be Darwinian, like the Galapagos with a lot more birds. This is the new information age colliding with big business, and the power is ending up with the consumer.”
Funny, but I coulda sworn I’ve heard that line before…
AP (below, June 5th, 2006) reports that two Polish men have been arrested inre Redwatch Poland; the CIA reported five; gaypoland.pl claims dozens.
Polish police arrest man suspected of co-authoring a far-right Web site
(AP) – WARSAW, Poland – Police have arrested a second man suspected of helping run the Web site of a banned extreme right group espousing Nazi ideology, a police spokeswoman said Monday.
The man, identified under Poland’s privacy law only as 21-year-old Bartosz B., from the northern city of Slupsk, faces charges of disseminating Nazi ideas, xenophobia and participation in an illegal group, spokeswoman Beata Tobiasz said.
Police suspect he translated Polish texts into English for the international “Redwatch” Web site, allied with the far-right Blood and Honor [bonehead gang], and helped the managers keep in touch with its administrators [DreamHost] in the United States.
He was detained on Friday and can be held for two months as the charges are investigated further. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison.
Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz said Monday he hopes that police actions will prevent any kind of dissemination of Nazi ideology in Poland.
Poland lost [sic] 6 million citizens, half of them Jews, under Nazi occupation during World War II.
Last week, police arrested a man suspected of being the Polish administrator of the Web site.
The arrests came after a woman told the police that her name and picture are on a list of “antifascists” posted on the Redwatch Web site[?] Redwatch is an international far-right group based in Britain. [Redwatch is a project of Blood and Honour — an international gang of boneheads.] Its Web site posts names, photos and addresses of human rights activists, gays and left-wing journalists under the slogan: “Remember places, traitors’ faces, they all pay for their crimes.”
Last month, a man on the same list was stabbed in the back and seriously wounded in Warsaw.
In reaction, Poland has asked the U.S. government to help it shut down [DreamHost] the American-based server hosting the Web site.
“Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing” — Edmund Burke
DreamHost contact information:
You can reach us any time – day or night!
DreamHost Offices
DreamHost
PMB #257
417 Associated Rd.
Brea, CA 92821
USA
FAX: 714-990-2600
Business Development : [email protected]
Spam / Abuse : [email protected]
DMCA Issues : [email protected]
As discussed previously, the California-based Internet company DreamHost justifies its support for such seemingly illegal activities as described above on the basis of a supposedly noble adherence to ‘freedom of speech’ (especially as this concept is codified in the First Amendment to the US Constitution). However, DreamHost does acknowledge the existence of concepts and practices — especially legal ones — which conflict with their apparent interpretation of this Amendment; an interpretation which is, in any case, a quite transparent discursive device used to rationalise their basic purpose: commerce. DreamHost therefore has as much (or as little) commitment to the First Amendment and to ‘freedom of speech’ as is thought necessary to the pursuit of its only real function: to be as profitable as possible without landing in court. Thus:
LAWFUL PURPOSE
1. Customer may only use DreamHost Webhosting’s Server for lawful purpose. Transmission of any material in violation of any [US] Country, Federal, State or Local regulation is prohibited. To this effect, child pornography is strictly prohibited as well as housing any copyrighted information (to which the customer does not hold the copyright) on DreamHost Webhosting’s Server.
2. Customer agrees to not have any content on their site that advocates, sells or in any way makes available tools or methods to send unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings (spam), or to use DreamHost Webhosting’s Servers for relaying unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings, or to use unsolicited e-mail or usenet postings to advertise for their site hosted at dreamhost. Any complaint we receive about a violation of this or the preceding two points will be taken very seriously and will result in immediate account cancellation without a refund.
Spam is a deadly serious business, apparently.
Facilitating assaults upon Jews, homosexuals, anarchists, leftists and non-whites, on the other hand, is not.
It therefore appears that only legal action will terminate DreamHost’s role in facilitating international terrorism.
In Auschwitz we asked ourselves questions: Did the outside world know what was happening in Auschwitz? Was it possible that the world did not know that people were being systematically exterminated? Today, in hindsight, we know that the outside world did have knowledge of the widespread organized slaughter of the Jews, and that by the time I arrived in Auschwitz what was taking place there was known in considerable detail.
Auschwitz was really an immense series of camps and I was in the part known as the Zigeunerlager, or Gypsy camp. The name derived from the fact that earlier, before they were gassed, the previous inmates of this section had been Gypsies. One of the crematoria was destroyed with the help of four Jewish girls, who, as prisoners working in the nearby German chemical factory IG Farben, which was part of the Auschwitz complex, stole the explosives used to blow up the crematorium. These unarmed prisoners succeeded in destroying at least one crematorium on their own, but the free world, with its armies of millions of soldiers, was unable to destroy anything. We, the prisoners of Auschwitz, wondered at the time: Is it possible that no one cares about us? Are we really forgotten by God and our fellow men?
On 12 May 1943, an event took place in London which attempted to focus attention on the plight of the Jews. Two Jews, Ignacy Schwarzbart and Arthur Zygelboym, were members of the Polish National Council in London. After desperate but futile efforts to get the British government to act to save the Jews, Zygelboym committed suicide. In a farewell letter, Zygelboym wrote: “I cannot be silent. I cannot live while the remnants of the Jewish population of Poland, of whom I am a representative, are perishing… By my death I wish to make my final protest against the passivity with which the world is looking on and permitting the extermination of the Jewish people.”
This is how Zygelboym died. He died, giving his life voluntarily, hoping to shake the conscience of the free world. But the conscience of the world was not shaken.
A similar reaction of indifference to information about the murder of the Jews had occurred in February 1943. A German embassy official in Switzerland sent reports to the American embassy, reports which the Americans were not interested in receiving. In response to a final telegram the state department ordered, “Do not use our diplomatic telegraph anymore for personal information.” Thus, reports about what was happening to the Jews were seen as being merely “personal information”. The Jews were not important, they were not part of the war effort, they were not recognized as a people. (Only the Germans identified the Jews as a people, a people to be annihilated.)
Well, at least the Nazis didn’t stoop to using spam, right DreamHost?
“Please forward widely”, it said.
So here it is.
Oh, and thanks to everyone who braved the cold and came to the film screening last Friday night!
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 12, 2006
Contact: Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director, 212-679-5100, ext. 11 // Michael Avery, NLG President, 617-335-5023
NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CONDEMNS FBI’S OPERATION BACKFIRE AS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
…Educational Symposium Scheduled for Attorneys and Law Students
New York. The National Lawyers Guild condemns the FBI’s Operation Backfire “green scare” tactics as an unconstitutional abuse of authority. The FBI has engaged in an orchestrated campaign of issuing subpoenas to environmental activists, conducting large scale roundups of activists, levying unprecedented penalties for property crimes, and using threats of severe sanctions to leverage fear of conviction and force individuals to turn state’s evidence.
In 2004, the federal government launched Operation Backfire, a wide-scale investigation of environmental and animal rights activists. It used paid informants and conducted warrantless spying on a range of organizations. Since then, numerous individuals around the country have been arrested and charged with arson, destruction of property and conspiracy in the government’s attempts to target the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) and the Animal Liberation Front (ALF). Others were subpoenaed to testify before grand juries. Some were charged with the use of “destructive devices,” one count of which carries a mandatory 30-year sentence-two counts call for mandatory life in prison. The government is over-charging people with offenses that carry severe sanctions to force them to accept guilty pleas for a lower sentence or to intimidate them into turning state’s evidence. The National Lawyers Guild believes that the government is misusing destructive device charges and engaging in selection prosecution.
For example, in the SHAC7 (Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty) case the government in 2004 prosecuted the administrators of a website, charging them with ‘conspiracy’ to violate the Animal Enterprise Protection Act, an industry-specific statute that provides harsher sentences for those protesting animal-related businesses than say those protesting women’s health clinics. The Animal Enterprise Protection Act is a clear violation of the First Amendment, as it makes certain types of political speech illegal. Three of the SHAC7 defendants were found guilty only of conspiracy, a charge that is rarely prosecuted without a substantive offense connected to it.
“In the past few years, the Guild has witnessed a disturbing trend of targeting protesters engaged in dissent, and in imposing draconian sentences for expressing such dissent. Life sentences for property damage offenses where the actor has no intent to harm an individual are simply unconstitutional-the punishment does not fit the crime,” said Heidi Boghosian, Executive Director of the National Lawyers Guild.
The FBI rates ALF and ELF as the number one domestic terrorist threat, calling eco-sabotage the government’s top domestic terrorism priority. The State Department’s definition of terrorism is: “premeditated politically motivated violence perpetrated against non-combatants.” The expanded definition of domestic terrorism in the Patriot Act punishes a person who commits a dangerous criminal act intended to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population.” The Guild is greatly concerned about the use of the word terrorism because it obfuscates issues about the evidence and the ability to fairly evaluate the merits of the case.
…on June 26, the Guild will hold a symposium, “The Green Scare: What Lawyers Need to Know,” at Cardozo Law School in New York, New York, at 6:30pm. Speakers include Lauren Regan, founder and executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center in Oregon; Andrew Erba, attorney for one of the SHAC7 defendants, Brendan Story of Friends and Family of Daniel McGowan, and New York civil rights attorney Daniel Meyers.
————————————————————-
Family and Friends of Daniel McGowanDaniel McGowan is an environmental and social justice activist, unjustly arrested and charged in federal court. Neither Daniel McGowan, nor his support group “Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan” are affiliated with any other organization or group and any claim to the contrary is speculation and is strongly discouraged.
To donate to Daniel’s legal defense, send a check or postal money order made out to “Lisa McGowan” to Lisa McGowan, PO Box 106, NY, NY 10156-106.
: Support Daniel McGowan :
: Daniel on MySpace :
: Daniel on Friendster :Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan
PO Box 106, NY, NY 10156
friendsofdanielmcg[at]yahoo[dot]comDonations : checks or money orders can be made out to “Lisa McGowan” and sent to the above PO Box or online.
——————————————————————-Security note: All email accounts and lists run by Family and Friends of Daniel McGowan are being monitored by the federal government. Please keep that in mind and be smart with your correspondence. Thanks.
See also : Defense lawyers shut out as war on terror spawns courtroom secrecy, Newsday, June 11, 2006
1! 2! 3!
Oi! Oi! Oi!
(and cheers to the person — or persons — in the nearby street who just let off some rockets.)
From the Department Of Things Some People Will Do For Money:
FBI confidential informant also said to be provocateur
Jennifer Van Bergen
Published: Thursday June 8, 2006According to activists from Des Moines, Philadelphia, Miami, Sacramento, and other locations, a young woman named “Anna” allegedly infiltrated peace and justice rallies and anarchist meetings, and even attempted to join protests against the Democratic National Committee (DNC) ahead of the DNC’s national convention last year as a paid FBI confidential “informant.” Activists say that she has tried to provoke conflict at various advocacy events and violent incidents with police to get people arrested. In other words, Anna is not just an informant, she may be a provocateur.
Hot on the heels* of the public exposure of The Pieman’s plan to “take over” New Zealand comes Gruppe Fluffy Bunny!
We are everywhere, we are your brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. We watch and wait. Our mission is to seek out fascists and to expose them for the scum that they are…
Among other things, the fluffy bunnies in question have exposed the activities and viewpoints of the (remarkably short-lived?) ‘Shore Orion Skins’ — a bonehead gang based in Albany and Mairangi Bay, North Shore, Auckland — as well as some other neo-Nazi wanker with the unfortunate pseudonym of ‘vintersword’. Given that Joe — the immigrant ‘leader’ of the SOS — is apparently still a teenager, and that ‘vintersword’ has supposedly only just left his teenage years behind him, I suppose there remains some hope that these boys may actually grow up and out of their juvenile phantasies of White supremacy. A quick look at the lives of the sad old men who surround them and to whom they look for political guidance may help in this regard.
*…that is, of my previous blog entry: Gruppe Fluffy Bunny has been online since May.
Who ate all the pies?
The burgers and the fries?
You fat bastard,
You fat bastard,
You ate all the pies!
The ah, interesting personalities that populate the local fascist milieu here in the West Island of New Zealand / Aotearoa are rivalled only by those in the North and South: ex-New Zealand National Front Führer Kyle Chapman being one very good example:
Ex-National Front leader starts militia
11 June 2006
By TIM HUME
[Sunday Star-Times, NZ]Kyle ‘The Pieman’ Chapman quit as New Zealand’s National Front chief citing family reasons, but now he is recruiting members for his own far-Right organisation.
Former National Front leader Kyle Chapman has formed a secret [sic] survivalist militia and is recruiting members of the far-Right organisation for the “eventual takeover of New Zealand”.
Details of Chapman’s Phantom Recon Militia are revealed in policy documents, photos and emails he sent to an anti-racist activist posing as a white nationalist.
Ooops. But here comes my favourite bit:
…The militia’s manual includes an urban survival plan recommending shelters are secured with snipers, and advises members to always have a back-up plan, “like if the whole city is under water the plan could be to meet in the hills”.
Sun Tzu, eat ya heart out!
So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.
Above : Chapman hears the sound of an impending tidal wave.
Courtesy : Fightdemback
Ben Weerheym, Perth-based convicted race-hate criminal and neo-Nazi, appears to have decided to abandon his rather ill-considered attempt to construct ‘Leftywatch’: an Australasian equivalent to the UK and Poland’s Redwatch. Whatever the precise reasons for his decision, I suppose that some limited awareness of Simon Sheppard‘s legal difficulties — and the charges currently facing five people in Poland — may have swayed him in the direction of thinking that ‘maybe Leftywatch isn’t such a great idea after all’. So too, the fact that none of the information on the site could be relied on as being accurate, dependent as Ben was on anonymous tip-offs from the Australian (and New Zealand) public… members of which include some devilishly creative anti-fascists!
So much for the good news.
Here’s the bad :
POLAND’S CRACKDOWN ON GAY GROUPS : a criminal probe, and Warsaw Pride threatened with violence
by Doug Ireland
June 09, 2006
DIRELANDPoland’s state prosecutor last week announced a government investigation of all Polish gay groups for illegal financing, criminal connections, and pedophilia. This crackdown on gay groups is only the latest in a series of disturbing developments in Poland during the last month that illustrate the continuing rise of political homophobia under the country’s new gay-hostile government led by the duo nicknamed the Terrible Twins: President Lech Kaczynski and his twin brother Jaroslav, who controls the Polish Parliament.
Three people from the north-eastern town of Reus in Spain — Juan García Martín, Carmen Cayetano Navarro and María Arñanzazu Díaz Villar — have been arrested by Spanish police, accused of membership of a terrorist organisation: GRAPO (Grupo de Resistencia Antifascista Primero de Octubre / “First of October Antifascist Resistance Group”). According to reports:
Xinhua: Alleged radical group leader arrested in Spain
China Post (via Spanish AP, Madrid): Spanish Civil Guard arrests alleged leader of radical leftist group GRAPO
EiTB: Three alleged GRAPO members arrested in Catalonia
And here’s how the BBC put it:
Spain smashes Grapo terror group
An examination of the various newsreports regarding the arrests reveals a somewhat slippery grasp of the facts. For example, this is not the first time that Spanish authorities have claimed to have ‘smashed’ GRAPO — they’ve been doing so periodically since the group’s formation in 1975; one article reports that the three individuals arrested “are wanted by the National Court for alleged membership in an armed group” and;
García Martín has been taken into custody before: he was arrested and sentenced to more than 100 years in prison over 30 years ago, together with his then wife, Manuela Ontanilla Galán, who was arrested again in 2005 in Paris.
Martín was one of the GRAPO prisoners who supported a hunger strike 26 years ago, and was kept alive by a sustenance order from the courts.
The terrorist organisation’s leadership has always managed to reform after police operations to dismantle it, the latest of them in 2002. Nineteen people, including the latest arrests, have been taken into custody since the previous leadership was dismantled in Paris four years ago.
Interestingly, GRAPO was one of the 39 terrorist organisations listed by the US State Department in a statement released in December 2001:
Statement on the Designation of 39 Organizations on the USA PATRIOT Act’s Terrorist Exclusion List:
To further protect the safety of the United States and its citizens, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in consultation with the Attorney General, on December 5 designated 39 groups as Terrorist Exclusion List (TEL) organizations under section 212 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended by the new USA PATRIOT Act. By designating these groups, the Secretary has strengthened the United States’ ability to exclude supporters of terrorism from the country or to deport them if they are found within our borders.
Of further interest is the following paragraph from the Act inre ‘Classes of Aliens Ineligible for Visas or Admission’:
(E) Participants in nazi persecutions or genocide. –
(i) Participation in nazi persecutions. -Any alien who, during the period beginning on March 23, 1933, and ending on May 8, 1945, under the direction of, or in association with –
(I) the Nazi government of Germany,
(II) any government in any area occupied by the military forces of the Nazi government of Germany,
(III) any government established with the assistance or cooperation of the Nazi government of Germany, or
(IV) any government which was an ally of the Nazi government of Germany, ordered, incited, assisted, or otherwise participated in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, national origin, or political opinion is inadmissible.
I think this means that the US State thinks that Nazis are bad.
But not so bad that some of its worst butchers couldn’t be gainfully re-employed by the CIA following the regime’s collapse in 1945. The release of unclassified documents last week by the CIA has caused some small waves in the media, but the real story extends far beyond the agency’s decision to protect Adolf Eichmann. In fact, the existence of numerous ‘ratlines’ — “systems of escape routes for Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe at the end of World War II” — has been known and reported on for years, as has the extensive participation of the CIA and the Vatican in maintaining and/or protecting them. Chomsky, among others, has commented on the CIA’s support for Fascist elements following the collapse of Mussolini’s regime in 1943:
Washington’s intention to resort to violence if free elections come out the wrong way is not very easy to deal with, so it has been generally suppressed, even in the scholarly literature. One of the two major scholarly monographs on this period discusses the NSC memoranda, but with no mention of the actual content of the crucial section; the second passes it by in a phrase. In the general literature, the whole matter is unknown.
In conclusion, then:
The democratic ideal, at home and abroad, is simple and straightforward: You are free to do what you want, as long as it is what we want you to do.
Above : Mussolini and friend hanging out with Italian antifa in Milan, April 29, 1945.
See also : Catalan radicals blamed for bank bomb (BBC, 2001); GRAPO re-emerges (BBC, 1998); La Guardia Civil.
