Anarchists Against the Wall Speaking Tour (And Moar), March 2012

Beginning Friday, March 16, a member* of the Israeli group ‘Anarchists Against the Wall’ will be speaking at various events around Melbourne. (Barricade hosted another speaker back in April 2009.) NB. Details of some events are TBC.

Friday, March 16
7pm, Melbourne Anarchist Club (62 St Georges Rd, Northcote)
Tuesday, March 20
Monash University
Wednesday, March 21
Victoria University
University of Melbourne (Union Building)
Thursday, March 22
1pm, Latrobe University (Agora Cinema)

…And Moar

From the Department of “Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools” (“Der Antisemitismus ist der Sozialismus der dummen Kerle”) comes news of another tour (of the United States) by Gilad Atzmon. Some folks aren’t all that happy about his tour or his work — especially the support given him by left or progressive organisations — and have issued a statement about it: Not Quite “Ordinary Human Beings”—Anti-imperialism and the anti-humanist rhetoric of Gilad Atzmon (March 13, 2012). You can read it here. Another statement — Granting No Quarter: A Call for the Disavowal of the Racism and Antisemitism of Gilad Atzmon (March 13, 2012) — has been issued by a mob called the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN).

Closer to home, I’m aware of only a handful of Australians to have attached their names to the former statement. Otherwise, in July 2010, Michael Brull complained about ‘Australians for Palestine’ re-publishing some of Atzmon’s work — the latest such activity occurring in May 2011. (AFP published an editorial statement responding to such criticisms in July 2010.) In the UK, Atzmon’s work has been supported by the SWP, tho’ it seems to have distanced itself in recent times, presumably on account of his batshit.

Here’s a song (or three):

See also : Anti-Fascism, Anti-German, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism… (June 29, 2009).

Bonus Butler!

Crazy cat lady and crackademic Judith Butler performs her number one smash hit ‘Anarchy is a fag’ at the Australasian Document Computing Symposium Alzheimer’s Disease Cooperative Study Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2011 conference The Anarchist Turn! Turn! Turn!

[2] [3] [4]

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Freedom for Jock Palfreeman / Jock Palfreeman for Freedom

Paul ‘Jock’ Palfreeman is a 25-year-old Australian (born November 13, 1986) currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in Sofia, Bulgaria. An anarchist and anti-fascist, one night in Sofia in December 2007 Jock intervened to stop a racist assault. As a result, one man died, and despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Jock was convicted of the crime of ‘murder with hooliganism’. Jock’s story is a compelling one, and there is an ongoing international campaign to free him: a day of action is taking place on March 15.

Background

Originally from Sydney, Jock left Australia for Europe in 2006. Having spent most of 2007 in the UK, in December Jock travelled to Bulgaria, where he had previously spent many months working. On the night of December 28, 2007 Jock was celebrating with a small group of friends in the capital Sofia when he witnessed a large group of football hooligans assault two Roma men. When Jock intervened in an attempt to stop the assault, the gang turned on him. In the ensuing melee, one of the gang, Andrey Monov, was stabbed and later died on the way to hospital.

Arrested on the night of the incident, Jock was charged with murder and attempted murder. His trial commenced in May 2008. In December 2009, after numerous delays, Jock was found guilty of the murder of 20-year-old law student Monov and the attempted murder of 19-year-old Antoan Zahariev. In addition to a prison term, Jock was also fined 400,000 leva (approximately $A325,000). Subsequent appeals have failed to either overturn the verdict or reduce the sentence, and Jock’s final avenue of legal redress is the European Court of Human Rights— a very difficult, lengthy and expensive process.

Trial

From the beginning, Jock has always maintained that he acted in self-defence. “When I saw the 15 men attack the two homeless men, I was presented with a choice. Stand back and let the injustice continue or [intervene] in an attempt to save human life” (February 2011). While elsewhere in Europe ‘hooliganism’ is a term used to downplay fascist abuses, in Jock’s case it serves to rob his action of political meaning.

There are numerous other reasons to question the verdict in Jock’s case, a useful summary of which has been provided by Jock’s father Dr Simon Palfreeman who—through a quirk in the Bulgarian judicial system—was able to join Jock’s defence team. Aside from motivation—the prosecution claimed Jock is a violent psychotic—the central flaws in the prosecution case are conflicting eyewitness testimonies, the disappearance of crucial CCTV footage, and numerous procedural irregularities.

Andrey’s father is a well-known and influential figure in Bulgarian society, and Bulgaria’s justice system has a deserved and well-documented reputation for corruption. Many police officers, judges and politicians attended Monov’s funeral, and the overall legal, political and social context for the trial has been overwhelmingly hostile to the defence.

Media

Jock’s case has received considerable coverage in Australia and been the subject of two ABC television documentaries, the most recent (‘Conviction’) broadcast in June 2011 and the earlier account (‘One Night in Sofia’) in June 2009 (both available for viewing online and highly-recommended). When Jock was first charged, a false story was circulated claiming that he had previously stabbed a man in Sydney; later, it was falsely reported that the dead man, Monov, had been stabbed in the back.

Within Bulgaria, the media reportage has been almost universally hostile, and Jock portrayed as being psychologically unbalanced; a psychological report conducted by the court concluded that he is neither violent nor aggressive and on the contrary possesses a highly-developed sense of social justice.

Campaign

There have been sporadic attempts to publicise Jock’s case in Europe and Australia (most recently with a banner drop in Sydney over NYE 2011) and an international day of action was held in October 2010 with events organised in Australia, Austria, France and Russia. Support for Jock within Bulgaria appears to be minimal, and public expressions of same dangerous for those concerned: the far right has held public demonstrations condemning Jock and threatened violent retaliation against any who dare to publicly oppose them. This hostile political climate helps to explain the position of the Federation of Anarchists in Bulgaria, which has denounced Jock and in response to his trial called for the maximum penalty to be imposed upon him.

Context

The fact that the two men on whose behalf Jock attempted to intervene are Roma is significant, both because the police were unable to locate them to act as witnesses but also because harnessing widespread anti-Roma sentiment is a key mobilising strategy for the far right in Bulgaria, especially the Attack party. In September 2011, anti-Roma pogroms took place in Bulgaria, The New York Times reporting that protesters shouted racist slogans like “Gypsies into soap” and “Turks under the knife.”

Jock’s case is an important one for anarchists and other anti-fascists to publicise as part of ongoing efforts to combat the rising tide of racism and fascism within Bulgaria and Europe as a whole. Jock’s actions were informed by a sense of solidarity, one which transcends ethnic boundaries and national borders, and his punishment is a register of the perverted nature of criminal justice in capitalist society. Jock welcomes correspondence and may be reached at Sofia Central Prison, 21 General Stoletov Boulevard, Sofia 1309, BULGARIA. Further information on his case may be found at freejock.com.

[Published in Freedom newspaper, March 12, 2012.]

Posted in Anti-fascism | Tagged | 6 Comments

The Communist Gay Communist N*gg*r Loving Party

Or: Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

The Liberal National Party are going to win the 2012 Queensland state election. (Centrebet is currently paying $8.50 and Sportsbet $7.00 for a Labor win.) The only real questions, then, are By how many seats will the LNP win? and Will Katter’s Australian Party win more than two? Otherwise, there’s a relative absence of fringe participation in the election, with neither the Australia First nor the Australian Protectionist parties fielding any candidates and One Nation standing just six. (The forces of right-wing populism are obviously best represented by The Mad Hatter.) On the other side of the fence, the Socialist Alliance is contesting half that number. And where oh where are The Communists?

In other news, Premier Anna Bligh has condemned a racist and homophobic graffiti attack on the office of one of her ministers [Curtis Pitt] as ‘‘unAustralian’’ and ‘‘absolutely disgusting’’.

Maybe.

But if you look at Australian history, I think you may find some evidence of racism and homophobia. In fact, some argue that racism and homophobia still animate the body politic. As for Communism, I think Labor may have even supported its banning Once Upon A Time, along with a range of other measures intended to keep Moscow from dominating the Antipodes.

Labor really should learn how to use Google.

Posted in !nataS, Anti-fascism, Broken Windows, Media, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , | 2 Comments

“Ah, the fun had gone out of being a fascist…”

John Safran has a new blog column for Vice. Reading it I was reminded of the following, an extract from the teenage fascist David Greason’s autobiography…

“Ah, the fun had gone out of being a fascist.

I arrived in Sydney in November, and stayed with Jim for a few weeks. Things had been patched up, or at least they’d been patched up enough for me to tolerate staying at his place and for him to tolerate me being there. He was living in Chippendale, one of those inner suburbs of Sydney where you get seven factories or warehouses to every house. One of the warehouses in his street was the storage depot for the Socialist Party. Jim had always been lucky like that; the house he’d been living in when we first met was in Ross Street, Glebe, just a few doors up from the Communist Party printery. One of us would always whack a sticker on their front doors just to let them know that someone was thinking of them.

He was sharing with a couple of women, neither of whom knew about his politics, and he fancied both. The story was the usual one: one of his housemates comes across his name in the Sydney Morning Herald one day, brings it up that night, black looks for a couple of weeks, he moves out not long after. These understanding liberal types just weren’t understanding or liberal enough for our type.

About a week or so after I’d arrived, Jim and I went over to Surry Hills, house-hunting. A figure came shambling towards us, and Jim whispered, ‘It’s Cass Young’. The former Nazi fuehrer from Melbourne was blind drunk and looked like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, but despite it all, he could still recognise Jim. Warm greetings and back-slapping followed, and the three of us headed off to the nearest pub for a reminisce about the old times. He didn’t make much sense, although he did reveal the true story behind the notorious NSPA demos against sex shops in Melbourne. In the early seventies they had been organised by the morally correct Ian Skipworth, lamented Young. ‘I should have been inside the shop!’ he kept saying. ‘I should have been inside!’

Sydney was great for colourful nationalist identities. I also met Nick ‘White Australia’ Maina (he changed his name by deed poll for the 1974 senate election), an associate of Robert Clark’s in the anti-Grassby campaign of 1974. Maina, of Greek parentage, objected strongly to Italian and Greek immigrants, considering them a potential security risk if war ever broke out. He wanted them deported, just in case. Like many on our side, he liked to consider all possibilities. ‘But Nick’, I said patiently, ‘you’re a wog. On that logic, you’d have to deport yourself’. His voice cracked with patriotic fervour. ‘If I had to, I would’, he said. ‘I love this bloody country so much’.”

~ David Greason, I was a teenage fascist, McPhee Gribble, 1994, pp.268–269. (Greason died of cancer last year.)

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KKK in Victoria? Uh-huh…

Former KKKlown turned fun-da-mentalist Xtian Johnny Lee Clary — FROM BURNING THE CROSS TO PREACHING THE CROSS! — is touring Australia again (March–May) and once again making spurious claims. In fact, precisely the same claims he made during his last tour in 2009. Thus Clary strikes the same alarmist bell about 1) KKKlowns recruiting school children and 2) a non-existent National Front.

Former top clan [sic] leader claims jobs fall adds to rise of KKK in Victoria
Mitchell Toy
Sunday Herald Sun
March 11, 2012

JOB losses are contributing to a growing white supremacist movement in Victoria, according to a former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Rev Johnny Lee Clary, who rose through the ranks of the Klan in the US before renouncing racism and turning to God, said hate groups were active in Melbourne and across the country seeking to recruit white youths.

Ahead of his speaking tour this week, Rev Clary said the group National Front, active in Melbourne, resembled the KKK.

“I have spoken to kids in schools who have told me they have been approached to join these groups,” he said, adding that economic turmoil was a driver for a growing white supremacist movement worldwide, including in Australia.

“When the economy gets bad and people lose their jobs, they need someone to blame for that.

“Hitler didn’t come to power when everyone had money and a home. He came to power when everyone was poor and feeling badly treated.”

In reality, the KKK is, and remains, an extremely marginal presence in Australia. In January, a few racist morans played dress-up in an attempt to intimidate members of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy (no doubt emboldened by the media hysteria surrounding Joolya’s shoe) and a year or three ago two loons in Melbourne declared themselves to be the ‘Christian National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’ to no great effect. Both were interviewed by Carl D Thompson (aka the National Socialist Movement in Australia) whose Internet broadcasts are promoted on VNN and meet with the enthusiastic applause of former ALP candidate Peter Watson.

As for the National Front, there was once an Australian version of the NF, based in Melbourne. But that was, like, over 30 years ago.

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Okupación : Film screening, Wednesday, March 14, 2012

“¡Oye!”

This Wednesday, March 14 a new documentary film will be screening at the Melbourne Anarchist Club (62 St Georges Rd, Northcote). Called Okupación, the 80-minute film documents contemporary social struggles in Spain for housing and public space. Filmmaker Chris P will be along to discuss this exciting look at activist life in Madrid. Entry is free. Doors open at 7.30pm, film screens at 8pm.

Preview:

Okupación from Christopher Patz on Vimeo.

Posted in Anarchism, Broken Windows, Film, Music, Poetry, Sex & Sexuality, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

antifa notes (march 11, 2012)

SPLC: Patriots Go BOOM!

According to the SPLC, in the United States “[t]he radical right grew explosively in 2011, the third such dramatic expansion in as many years” (Mark Potok, The ‘Patriot’ Movement Explodes, Intelligence Report, No.145, Spring 2012). In preparing their annual report “the SPLC counted 1,018 hate groups operating in the United States last year, up from 1,002 in 2010. That was the latest in a string of annual increases going all the way back to 2000, when there were 602 hate groups.” As well as Patriots, the haters include Ku Klux Klan, Neo Nazi, White Nationalist, Racist Skinhead, Christian Identity, Neo-Confederate and Black Separatist groups, as well those groups which engage in General Hate. According to Potok, it’s the economy, stoopid:

At the most macro level, the growth of right-wing radicalization — a phenomenon that is plainly evident in Europe as well as the United States — is related directly to political and, especially, economic globalization. As the nation-state has diminished in importance since the end of the Cold War, Western economies have opened up, not only to capital from abroad but also to labor. In concrete terms, that has meant major immigration flows, many of which have drastically altered the demographics of formerly fairly homogenous populations. In Europe and the U.S. both, white-dominated countries have become less so. At the same time, globalization has caused major economic dislocations in the West as certain industries and kinds of production move to less developed countries.

Yeah… kinda sorta. Leaving aside debates about the impact of (economic) globalisation upon the body politic and the operations of the neo-liberal state, how much Haterade have boneheads in the US been drinking?

Last March, David Lynch, leader of the Sacramento, Calif.-based American Front and one of the best-known racist skinheads on the international scene, was shot to death in his Citrus Heights home; his girlfriend was shot in the leg. Within days, police were questioning Charles Gilbert Demar III, a Lynch associate also known as “Charlie Boots” who was the lead singer of the Stormtroop 16 band, as a “person of interest.” Demar was arrested when officials found crystal methamphetamine and a meth manufacturing setup in his apartment, but as of press time he had not been charged in connection with Lynch’s death. Another significant event on the skinhead scene took place last June, when the decade-old Vinlanders Social Club, one of the most violent racist skinhead groups, held its first white power concert. More than 50 people came to the event in Columbus, Ohio, including Richie Meyer, president of the Confederate Hammerskins, and Forrest Fogarty, a musician and one of Meyer’s more prominent followers. Their presence and friendly association with Vinlanders at the event reflected the success of a truce between the two groups that was reached in 2007, ending what had been described as a “blood feud” between them.

A few points:

• Another American Front luminary is Boyd Rice, inter alia a kamerad of local fascist filmmaker Richard Wolstencroft, recently unable to appear on behalf of the Melbourne Free University (but not a “villain”, apparently);
• If 50 boneheads in the one place at the one time is noteworthy then the Hammered Festival in Brisbane in April should mos def be coming under greater scrutiny;
• The tensions between the Hammerskins and Volksfront in Australia seem to have subsided somewhat, though VF is still forbidden by the Hammerskins from establishing branches outside of VF leader Chris Smith’s hometown of Sydney.

• According to ‘Nazi Skinheads Exposed’ (April 18, 2011), VF supporter Andrew Wilson (front, second from right; Smith is centre front, with braces) is also a supporter of ‘Klub Nation’ (KN), described as being Jason Raftey’s [sic] organisation. KN was the umbrella under and through which local Sydney fascists attempted to stage a hostile take-over of the NSW Humanist Society. According to the blog, KN have spent nearly $20,000 “producing their own Klub Nation currency out of silver coins”. In addition, VF have organised gigs in Sydney with Perth-based Combat 18. Last month, former WA policeman Robert Critchley was sentenced to a minimum nine months jail for providing infos to C18 in Perth (Former WA cop jailed for tipping off neo-Nazi, Aja Styles, February 27, 2012):

A 44-year-old former policeman has been sentenced to serve at least nine months in jail for perverting the course of justice by tipping off a suspected white supremacist at the centre of a police phone tapping operation.

Robert David Critchley, a former senior constable, was sentenced today by District Court Judge Andrew Stavrianou to 18 months immediate imprisonment with parole.

Critchley, 43, who was employed at WA police’s telephone interception unit, made a call from a public telephone to Murray Holmes, a friend of white supremacist Jacob Marshall Hort…

Ironically, the members of C18 responsible for shooting at a Perth mosque all escaped custodial sentences for their anti-Muslim hi-jinks.
• Among those who count themselves among VF’s supporters in Australia is Welf Herfurth of the Australian franchise of the UK-based New Right. (Herfurth is also MC at the Australia First party’s annual conference The Sydney Forum.) In August last year Herfurth had a collection of his essays, A Life in the Political Wilderness, published by Flavio Gonçalves’ Finis Mundi; Keith Preston is a big fan and interviewed Herfurth recently for an online White nationalist radio network.

Speaking of which, two related items:

Thor Steinar ♥s Anders Breivik


Above: Matt Chivers (l) and Welf Herfurth (r) at a VF fund-raiser for fascist criminals, July 31, 2010; Herfurth models Thor Steinar.

In Germany, neo-Nazi fashion label Thor Steinar got into some hot water after one of its shops in Chemnitz decided to open under the name ‘Brevik’, ostensibly in er, ‘tribute’ to the town of that name in Norway but with obvious resonances to another Breivik, the not-insane mass murderer Anders. Controversial ‘Brevik’ Clothing Store Changes Name, Spiegel, March 8, 2012:

The company removed the sign over the store under public pressure. The company that operates the Thor Steinar label, Mediatex, said the store had been named after the Norwegian town of Brevik and that any association with Anders Breivik was disastrous and unintended. The company, which operates 13 stores, primarily in the states that belonged to the former East Germany, said it was sorry for the naming. “We apologize if this reminds anyone of the massacre of last summer,” the company said in a statement. “That was not intended.”

Still, the naming of the store as “Brevik” was widely seen as a far-right provocation, even if the company had opened a store with the same name in Hamburg in 2008. It also seems to have a history of recycling names. The Chemnitz outlet is now to be called “Tønsberg.” The company used the same name for a store in Berlin that it opened several years ago and which has since been shuttered.

Fashion-as-fascist-politics and fascist-politics-as-fashion is further examined in ‘The new faces of far-right extremism’ by Benjamin Cunningham (Prague Post, March 7, 2012). The article refers to right-wing yoof as Facebook Fighters (lol) but otherwise re-hashes Czech antifa observations on the changing cultural mode of the ‘autonomous’ nationalists. Elsewhere in the Republic: “Just days after a hotel was firebombed in a suspected racist attack, experts and activists have warned of neo-Nazi groups turning to ‘terrorist’ campaigns as they become increasingly influenced by far-right movements in other countries” (Neo-Nazis Taking to Terror, Pavol Stracansky, IPS, March 9, 2012).

Operation Blitzkrieg

Over a month ago the neo-fascist American Third Position website was hacked and information obtained from the site published on pirasec.com. Apart from anything else, the hack gained attention for the links it revealed between A3P and US Presidential candidate Ron Paul. Now, however, a comment on my blog states:

Submitted on 2012/02/22 at 4:46 am

Pirasec.com has been removed for violating the host’s Terms Of Use/Service and posting hacked info from american3rdposition.com.

Posting of hacked data, private emails and phone numbers, credit card info etc. skirt the law.

http://pastebin.com/MCmzw7aR has been removed.

http://www.zone-h.com is in the process of being removed.

And a number of other web locations as well.

Apparently, the legal team at A3P is aggressively pursuing these violations. I read that the FBI and Secret Service were informed of credit card theft from hacked data that was posted online.

Any service provider risks serious legal action for posting hacked data by “Anonymous” or anyone else for that matter. One way to contain “Anonymous” is to restrict any hacked information from being displayed.

Makes sense I guess. But while pirasec.com is down, and the pastebin item removed, there are other places on the Interwebs where the hacked information is available. And I doubt zone-h will die.

The A3P hacking incident followed closely on the heels of the publication of nazi-leaks.net, a site containing similar kinds of data obtained from a range of neo-Nazi websites (some old, some new). That site has been taken down, as have mirror sites http://www.nazi-leaks.info and http://www.p4rtyvan.net. OpBlitzkrieg, however, continues to surgically enhance online fascism. Further, it’s not always necessary to hack to find infos. Recently, One Peoples Project (OPP) has obtained the membership lists of the National Socialist Movement (NSM).

Finally, a few days ago a young man in Chile was attacked and hospitalised for the crime of being gay. The culprits are believed to be local neo-Nazis.

Family of Daniel Zamudio seeks attempted murder charges
Matt Niner
March 8, 2012

SANTIAGO – The lawyer representing the family of Daniel Zamudio expects that an attempted murder charge can be presented before the North Central District Attorney’s Office in the next few days, as well as the whereabouts of the perpetrators of this brutal attack.

This Thursday, the Metropolitan City Officials and the family of Daniel Zamudio, who was attacked last weekend by an apparent neo-Nazi group, will present charges to be attributed to the crime of attempted murder to those responsible for the unprovoked attack sustained by the hospitalized 24-year-old…

Posted in Anti-fascism | Tagged | 2 Comments

Terry Teene : 1942–2012

Terry Teene, aka Terry Knutson, reportedly died today, a day after he was hit by a tow truck while cycling in Texas. The 70-year-old had a long career in show business and wrote one of my favourite songs, Curse of the Hearse.

If life were a thing that money could buy
The rich would live and the poor would die…

RIP Terry.

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Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe

[See also : Reframing the Enemy, Bill Berkowitz, Intelligence Report, No.110, Summer 2003.]

Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe
Martin Jay
Salmagundi
No.168/9, Fall 2010/Winter 2011

On August 18, 2010, Fidel Castro contributed an article to the Cuban Communist Party paper Granma in which he endorsed the bizarre allegations of an obscure Lithuanian-born conspiracy theorist named Daniel Estulin in a 2005 book entitled The Secrets of the Bilderberg Club.[1] In an Associated Press wire story written by Will Weissert, which was quickly picked up by scores of sites online, Castro’s infatuation went viral, and suddenly Estulin was unknown no more. Soon after, he was invited to Havana for a meeting with his new admirer, who was untroubled by Estulin’s ambiguous political affiliations, and before the day was out, the aging Cuban leader and his unexpected friend had declared that Osama Bin Laden was really a secret CIA agent and the United States was planning to destroy Russia’s still potent military forces, if necessary by nuclear means.[2]

Estulin’s claim in the book that captivated Castro goes something like this: beginning with a meeting in 1954 in the Bilderberg Hotel in a Dutch town, a group of powerful men—heads of state, economic tycoons, even the occasional monarch—have gathered annually in order to decide the fate of the world. Among the usual suspects, the Rockefeller family, the Rothschilds, Prince Bernhard and Henry Kissinger are prominent eminences grises. With the ultimate goal of installing a world government—or more precisely, a “one-world corporation”—under their control, they pull the strings of the economy, aiming to create chaos, and plot to narcotize the population by any means possible. Perhaps their most effective gambit has been the concoction and dissemination of mass culture, in particular the rock and roll that turned potential social revolutionaries into countercultural stoners.

Continue reading

Posted in Anti-fascism, History, State / Politics, That's Capitalism! | Tagged , | 11 Comments

CEC LaRouchites save Melbourne from Barack HUSSEIN O’Bama’s Armageddon!

Defeat the British Crown’s Green Fascist Dictatorship!
Charles Darwin was a Fraud!

9 out of 10 experts agree: the LaRouche kvlt is one of the most entertainingly batshit political kvlts around.

Born in 1922, kvlt leader Lyndon LaRouche is an x-Trot who in the mid-1960s began to lay the groundwork for his movement among the student ‘New Left’. By the mid-1970s, the bizarros had formed a fully-fledged kvlt of epic trolling proportions (see : Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism by William Dennis King (1989/2007) for lulz). In Australia, LaRouche’s followers gather under the umbrella of the “Citizens Electoral Council”, which for many years has been run straight outta Coburg/Pascoe Vale under the leadership of the Isherwoods.

Initially established in the late 1980s as a pressure group seeking electoral reform, by the early 1990s the CEC had become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the North American ‘physical economist’. To the extent that they’re aware of its existence, most Australians would likely be familiar with the CEC either by way of their habit of running last in elections or, perhaps, through walking past one of their numerous stalls — generally concentrated on busy city streets or, sometimes, University campuses — where kvlt members decry the malign influence of The Royal Family over Australian and world politics.

Oh, and central role in the illicit drugs industry.

FACT.

Funnily enough, back in 2007 I advocated a vote for the CEC.

Well… kinda.

That is, not really.

But even if I did, I doubt anybody would pay attention. After all, their track record is — quite frankly — appalling, the CEC’s candidates coming last in almost every ballot they’ve ever contested. In fact, the contrast between the CEC’s electoral performance and its financial status is one of the more curious features of the micro-party’s history. In the last decade, the CEC has generated many millions in revenue: in FY2010/11, $1,854,684.00; in 2009/10, $1,784,272.00; in 2008/09, $1,803,691.00; in 2007/08, $1,800,281.21; in 2006/07, $0; in 2005/06, $1,823,311.63… and so on, all the way back to 1998/99, when the party raised a mere $1,077,982.80.

In FY2003/4:

The second largest single donation was from Queensland man Mr H.R. (Ray) Gillham, who gave $500,000 to the right-wing Citizens Electoral Council.

The CEC, a group considered by most political observers to be an anti-Semitic organisation, confirmed that Mr Gillham was a “long-term supporter and regular candidate”.

Taking in other donations over the year, Mr Gillham – who stood, unsuccessfully, as a Senate candidate for the party at the federal election in 2004 – gave the party $864,100.

Not what you’d call value for money really is it?

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah… KRudd’s plan for planetary annihilation.

SOMETIMES Strewth worries about giving more oxygen to the Citizens Electoral Council, but the thought occurs — usually while wading through a tract about Prince Philip’s lust for genocide — that it’s not oxygen they’re inhaling. Still, going by the broken clock principle and assuming there’s a chance the CEC is right now and then, it seems prudent to point out this vital Kevin Rudd-related headline in their latest report: “Kevin007 is pushing World War III.” Just bear that in mind next time you have an attack of Rudd-algia. Also included in the CEC report, “Should Australia grow more food?”

Who doesn’t like food?

As for averting nuclear war, LaRouche’s followers have documented their efforts to do so on the streets of Melbourne last weekend. As if to confirm The Royal Family’s control of the world drug trade and plan for total annihilation the British consul refused to meet with the protesters and to explain why The Queen’s puppet O’Bama behaves as he does.

See also : ‘Dialectic of Counter Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat for the Lunatic Fringe’, Martin Jay, Salmagundi, No.168/169, Fall 2010/Winter 2011, in which Jay gives partial credit to the LaRouche kvlt for propagating the right-wing meme about how The House of Windsor The Frankfurt School lies at the heart of The Problem.

…it wasn’t really until a decade or so ago that the School as a whole entered the netherworld of garbled memedom, and began circulating in a wide variety of narratives, such as that promoted by Estulin and Castro. Most of these, to be sure, came from a very different political direction. Patrick Buchanan’s 2001 best-selling screed against the nefarious impact of immigration, The Death of the West, was one major source, stigmatizing as it did the Frankfurt School for promoting “cultural Marxism” (a recycling of the old Weimar conservative charge of “cultural Bolshevism” aimed at aesthetic modernists). But the opening salvo had, in fact, been fired a decade earlier in a lengthy essay by one Michael Minnicino called “New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and ‘Political Correctness’,” published in 1992 in the obscure journal Fidelio. Its provenance is particularly telling: it was an organ of the Lyndon Larouche movement cum cult, one of the less savory curiosities of nightmare fringe politics.

Larouche and his followers have, to be sure, always remained on the fringe of the fringe, too confused in their ideology to be taken seriously by either radical left or right, with little, if any significant impact on the real world. But the germ sown by Minnicino was ultimately to bear remarkable poisonous fruit. The harvester was the Free Congress Foundation, a paleo-conservative Washington think tank founded by Paul Weyrich, who was also in on the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority movement. Much of the financial support came from his collaborator Joseph Coors, who knew how to turn all that pure Rocky Mountain water into a cash flow for the radical right. The FCF sponsored a satellite television network called National Empowerment Television, which churned out slickly produced shows promulgating its various opinions…

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