“War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous … there is no profession held in higher esteem than the military. And what is war? What makes for success in warfare? What are the morals of the military world? The aim and end of war is … murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying, which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom—in other words, a rigorous discipline—enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And yet this is the highest caste in society, respected by all.
Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow creatures. Tens of thousands of men meet—as they will tomorrow—to massacre one another: to kill and maim, and then they will offer up thanksgiving services for having slain such vast numbers (they even exaggerate the number) and proclaim a victory, supposing that the more men they have slaughtered the more credit to them. Think of God looking down and listening to them!” cried Prince Andrei in a shrill, piercing voice.
Judging by his Twitter account, the President of One Nation (ON) in Victoria, John Groves, is a rather unpleasant and, perhaps, even mildly psychotic fellow: homophobic, racist, and paranoid.
Who woulda thunk it?
Recently, Melissa Fyfe wrote on how Victoria is “the left-leaning state”; as evidence she cited, inter alia, “the consistently low vote for the right-wing party One Nation (in the 2007 election, 0.01 per cent of Victorians, or 433 people, cast a first preference for the party, compared with 8426 in NSW)”.
Casting our unsettled minds and fevered imaginations back further, it’s possible to recall that, in the 1998 Federal election in Victoria, ON received 105,798 votes in the House of Representatives, or 3.7% of the total. In the Senate, Robyn Spencer (and her running mate Ben Buckley) got 117,048 votes (4.1%). In the 1999 Victorian State election, however, the party received just 8,181 votes, or 0.29%. (See : How One Nation Victoria Fell Apart, Anonymous, Crikey, February 13, 2000: “This is an [attempt] to explain how head office intervention has reduced One Nation Victoria from about 30 branches to about 3 branches all in this year.”)
In 2001, ‘Pauline Hanson’s One Nation’ fared considerably better at the Federal election, the party scoring 71,605 votes in the Senate, or 2.45% of the total, and 37,811 votes (1.2%) in the Lower House. In 2004, however, the party’s share of the vote dropped considerably, to 21,532 votes (0.72%) in the Senate, and a mere 4,119 votes (0.1%) in the House of Reps.
In 2007, Nick Steel (above) and Daniel Shore stood for ON in the Senate, while current President John (Llewellyn) Groves stood for ‘One Nation WA’. Between them, Steel and Shore secured 13,354 votes (0.42%), while John Llewellyn Groves got just 48 (the figure of 433 votes Fyfe cites is for the Lower House, where some bloke called Neil Henry Smith stuck his hand up for ON in Bruce).
In the 2010 Australian federal election, One Nation is standing two candidates in Victoria: Rosalyn Townsend and Dale Townsend.
One Nation’s last crack at winning a seat in Victoria came in December last year, when Steve Raskovy stuck his hand up for God, Queen and Country. Sadly, just 199 voters were willing to support Steve, and in June he announced his shock resignation from the party, taking the opportunity to begin his bid to join scientician Andrew Bolt at The Ponds Institute for Advanced Manipulation and Interpretation of Climatological Data in the Context of Climatic Variability and Change:
Mr Raskovy resigned from One Nation last week but said he would still run in this year’s federal election if he could find “a good party” which stood for limited immigration, better aged and disability care and strong action on climate change.
“I believe global warming is caused by a lack of rainfall,” he said.
“In my opinion, aeroplanes are the biggest culprits because they cut up the rain clouds. That’s why we’re only getting drizzles and not proper rainfall because the aeroplanes are cutting up the rain clouds.”
Leaving aside the bizarro followers of Lyndon LaRouche, aka the Citizens Electoral Council, the other far right candidate at this year’s election is Alex Norwick of the Australia First Party. He’ll be coming last in the competition for a seat in Deakin.
And remember kids…
SHOULD THERE BE ANY MATTERS YOU WISH TO DISCUSS PLEASE PHONE JOHN GROVES, STATE PRESIDENT ON 0439 386 942.
According to a report on Indymedia, a clutch of a dozen or so bizarros belonging to the ‘Australian Protectionist Party’ were confronted by a group of locals in Newtown, Sydney, on Saturday. The APP rally, which was not publicly promoted, was presumably held in order to promote Darrin Hodges and Nick Folkes’ Senate campaign. NSW police soon arrived on the scene to reinforce the fascists, and eventually escorted them away from the Martin Luther King Jnr mural under which the small group had assembled. Members of the APP may or may not have lost some of their propaganda to the crowd, no arrests have been reported, and a fuller account may or may not be published at some point in the future.
A group of fascists and neo nazis were found in Newtown this afternoon. They gathered provocatively at the “I have a dream” mural wall in Newtown. A hundred or so people of the Newtown community spontaneously gathered and overwhelmed them with their powerful presence and voices. The people chanted “nazis out of Newtown, nazis off the planet”. They were physically confronted and forced to flee with their tail between their legs escorted by cops. The cops, the dogs of the bosses, of course attempted to protect them from the rage of the people, trying to arrest only those who have come to kick out racism, nationalism, and fascism. We will not let the fascists exist in our neighbourhoods.
COPS, PIGS, NAZIS, ALL THE BASTARDS WORK TOGETHER.
Victoria, once the jewel in the Liberal crown, may be the saviour of the Labor government, writes Melissa Fyfe.
Uh-huh. Well yeah, maybe: where ‘left-leaning’ = ‘a tendency to preference Labor over Liberal in state and federal elections’, at least — and perhaps moar? In any event, as evidence that the citizens of Victoria lean left, Fyfe cites, inter alia, current polling on voting intentions @ the 2010 Australian federal election, plus:
Victoria’s high republic vote (49.8 per cent, no other state was higher) and the consistently low vote for the right-wing party One Nation (in the 2007 election, 0.01 per cent of Victorians, or 433 people, cast a first preference for the party, compared with 8426 in NSW). In this election Victoria also holds the Greens’ best chance for a lower house seat, the electorate of Melbourne.
Besides these facts and figures, Fyfe notes that there’s a relatively large number of bookshops in Melbourne — and a left-wing clothing label called Polichicks.
*cough*
But seriously. In broader historical terms, Fyfe notes in particular the views of the man who helped drive a stake through the heart of the public transport system: John Cain (see : Melbourne tram dispute and lockout 1990 – anarcho-syndicalism in practice, Jura Media, 2006/1997). He reckons:
The trend left probably had its origins in the gold rush of the 1800s… it brought an ”independent and robust” type of migrant. At Federation, Victoria took a protectionist stance, the realm of the left side of politics, while NSW took a free-trade stance, a stance of the right.
The 1930s Depression hit Victoria particularly hard, which Cain says galvanised the political beliefs of a group of Labor men and women – his father, John Cain snr, among them – who valued education and the dignity of work. The spirit of protectionism later extended to the thriving manufacturing base, which provided jobs for generations of blue-collar workers in the Labor heartlands of the inner-city and western suburbs.
Again, maybe so, but obviously, it’s problematic to assume that support for tariffs (among other devices intended to ‘protect’ the development of local industries from the global market) is evidence of ‘leftist’ inclinations, or cultural, political or social values. Rather, protectionism — also sometimes referred to, in an earlier epoch, as ‘nativism’ — may be termed ‘conservative’ in the sense that it harks back to what the journalist Paul Kelly (The End of Certainty, 1991) describes as the ‘Australian Settlement’, consisting of the five pillars of: 1) White Australia, 2) Trade Protection, 3) Wage Arbitration, 4) State Paternalism and 5) Imperial Benevolence. He dates its final disintegration from the 1980s.
That these ‘principles’ were embraced by various Labor parties and Governments is not especially remarkable. From an anarchist, left-wing or progressive perspective, Laborism has invariably been viewed as being essentially ‘conservative’, at least, if not only, in the sense that it seeks to conserve bourgeois privilege (cf. Vere Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs (1923); V.I. Lenin, ‘In Australia’ (1913), et cetera.)
Of these five pillars, ‘Wage Arbitration’, ‘State Paternalism’ and ‘Imperial Benevolence’ have been (largely) maintained, while ‘White Australia’ and ‘Trade Protection’ have been (progressively) abandoned. In fact, the party’s previously vigorous support for keeping The Chinaman at bay is something about which it is no longer possible to speak in polite circles: in contemporary ALP mythology, Good things like ‘fairness’, rather than Bad things like ‘racism’, define the nation, its history, and that of the Australian Labour Party (see also : Within China’s Orbit? China through the eyes of the Australian Parliament, Chapter One: Federation and the Geographies of Whiteness, Timothy Kendall, 2008 | The Bushman’s Bible, Warren Fahey, The Bulletin magazine, February 1, 2005).
So much for the the saviour of Federal Labor. On the other hand, in 2004, the Victorian ALP gave Steve Fielding a Senate seat. It’s unlikely to make that mistake (?) again (in fact, in 2010, Family First is Nos. 41–45 and The Greens Nos. 6–11 on the ALP ticket), but the party is still shitting bricks over the possibility of losing (or continuing to lose) not only political ground, but actual seats to The Greens.
It’s not without good reason that Labor is nervous. The collapse of ‘social democracy’, and the reasons for it, have been flogged to death elsewhere, and while reports of its death may — or may not — be exaggerated, the existence of a ‘leftist’ version within the Labor Party is now surely only the stuff of myth. Beyond this, a good barometer of the level of concern within Labor ranks about the political appeal of The Greens is the shrillness with which muck-raking, right-wing Labor apparatchik Andrew Landeryou has responded to their wily charms. After noting that Bandt was apparently looking to buy a house in Parkville, Landeryou uncovered an email, published in 1995, in which Bandt describes The Greens as being “in many ways bourgeois”, concluding his online message with the words “Towards an anti-capitalist, anti-social democratic, internationalist movement”.
Landeryou definitely deserves points for spotting, but Bandt is hardly the only former student radical who in adult life has found a political home that is “in many ways bourgeois”. As evidence, one need look no further than, say, Paul Howes (or Michael Costa or Jim Bacon or…). Nevertheless, the idea that The Greens is the new home of The Reds is fast becoming a commonplace of both elite and popular opinion (see also : Eric Abetz? WTF?, marcus westbury, August 26, 2009 | Why the NSW Greens are so hard left, Stephen Mayne, Crikey, February 1, 2006).
Further, of the thousands of former student leftists who have maintained some continuing involvement in political organisation, relatively few have done so by way of the ALP, the principal exception to this being a declining trade union sector (over which the party continues to maintain a political stranglehold). Which is not the same as saying that there are no leftists in the ALP, of course, and while the Greens have long maintained a commitment to ‘social justice’, there are those who remain unconvinced of their political potential (see : Adam’s amazing pitch to Melbourne, Alex White, August 3, 2010).
In April 1972, sixteen sticks of gelignite exploded in the Communist Party’s Brisbane office, lifting the floor of the building almost six centimetres off the ground. Later the same evening, three rifle shots ricocheted through the Maoist East Wind bookshop…
The next month, the terror campaign returned to Melbourne with an attempt to set the Third World bookshop alight. A week later, the East Wind bookshop in Little Londsdale Street received a fire-bomb through the front door, while Molotov cocktails hit the Radical Action Movement’s headquarters in Palmerston Street, Carlton, the China Friendship Society, and the Source bookshop in Collins Street…
Many naturally suspected the NSPA of involvement in the bookshop attacks, since the Nazis had previously clashed with the Left. In January 1971, the NSPA announced a fascist rally to be held on Melbourne’s Yarra Bank. The Left and the Jewish community organised a counter-rally. When the Nazis did not appear, thousands streamed up to their headquarters in North Carlton. The party’s leader Cass Young later complained:
All this time we could hear a noise such as that at a football ground, getting louder. Looking outside, I saw that a huge crowd was coming down the street towards our headquarters.
Within minutes there were several thousand people, mostly reds and those of the chosen race, milling around outside. We closed all the doors and windows and I posted sentries at the back and on the roof. We hoisted the mighty flag of our race — the swastika — and the Eureka flag at the top front window. The crowd outside began throwing anything it could get its hands on: eggs, tomatoes, rocks and tins. Soon all the windows had been smashed by flying missiles.
In June 1972, the NSPA tried to hold its annual conference. The fascists kept the location secret. Protesters instead marched to a triple-fronted brick veneer in St. Albans, which served both as Young’s house and the new [neo-]Nazi HQ. To resounding chants of ‘Death to the Nazis’, they tore the building apart. Surveying the wreckage of his property, Young lost some of his enthusiasm for overt displays of Nazism, and the NSPA collapsed in a bout of internecine warfare, a process nicely captured in the title of David Harcourt’s study of Australian Nazism: Everyone Wants to Be Fuehrer.
This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.
Or: 2010 Australian Federal election notes (August 13, 2010). Well, brief notes, anyway, and relating only to the seat of Melbourne.
So, last time I checked (July 19), in the race between Adam Bandt (Greens) and Cath Bowtell (Labor), Bandt had 895 followers on Twitter, while Cath Bowtell had 162; 2,540 people liked Adam Bandt on Facebook, while 265 people liked Cath Bowtell. A month later, Bandt has 1,475 followers on Twitter, while Bowtell has 370. 3,299 people like Bandt on Facebook, while 493 people like Bowtell.
More worryingly, for Labor, are the odds on Centrebet:
On the other hand, Greens candidate’s old law firm backs Labor’s Bowtell (David Rood, The Age, August 13, 2010). And if the law-talking guys put their money where their mouth is, the odds are sure to shift decisively in the ALP’s favour.
You say you’ll fight
Against me and mine
Against ours and we
Against all we could ever hope to achieve
You say you’ll stand
Against freedoms and rights
Against all this country supposedly stands
You say a lot – but I say
With a little more respect we
Could have a lot more
Then you could ever, ever hope to achieve
You say you’ll stand
You’ll stand alone
You’ll stand alone
Darrin Hodges (above) is Grand Poobah of the NSW branch of the ‘Australian Protectionist Party’, a micro-party on the far right that models itself upon the ‘British National Party’ (BNP). Hodges is standing in NSW for the Australian Senate, along with Nick Folkes (aka Nicholas Hunter-Folkes). The photo above was taken while Hodges participated in a ‘black bloc’ organised by neo-Nazis belonging to a group called the ‘New Right’. The perhaps 20 or so fascists who assembled on September 8, 2007 to form the group were drawn from a range of tiny, far-right political formations (see: All Heil the New Reich*, September 18, 2007).
The ‘New Right’ still ekes out an existence, but the ‘national anarchists’ who gathered alongside of Hodges have almost completely disappeared. Thus on the one hand, their chief ideologue, Welf Herfurth, is still active, organising the local franchise of US-based neo-Nazi group Volksfront: in September, Herfurth will be welcoming Canadian Holocaust denialist Paul Fromm to Australia to speak at the annual fascist gathering known as the Sydney Forum. On the other hand, Herfurth’s most excitable follower — a teenage boy from Geelong called Scott Harrison — has abandoned him and ‘national anarchism’ to become a Creatard and a Reverend in a nutty white supremacist cult called Creativity. Others who gathered together in Sydney on that day have gone in different, if similar, directions, including into APP and their arch-rivals the ‘Australia First Party’ (APP blames Muslims for the world’s problems, AF, the Jews; both despise leftists, homosexuals, and all the usual suspects).
Folkes (pictured above with climate change denialist Lord Monckton — His Lordship thinks global warmening is part of a plot to destroy the world economy and establish a communist world government) is an extremely abrasive fellow, and would make a fine Tory — if he had the bRanes. Sadly for Nicholas, he doesn’t, and is thus stuck with the APP, and must content himself with bemoaning the presence of “muslim rapists” in Australia, greedy Filipinos in the UK, and denouncing me as a “Marxist Nazi turd”, an “anti-Semite” and so on.
Chances are, neither will be addressing the Australian Parliament any time soon.
Update : Clarification of comments by Wendy Francis: “I do not believe that upholding marriage or preventing children being raised in homosexual families is discrimination. We can’t govern Australia by legislation based on pleasing each group who wants things their way. I believe we must stand firm on principles and values that are the best for the good of the nation…”
“Strange that I can be called a bigot for standing up for values that many people believe in yet others can deride my beliefs & that’s ok” (August 7, 2010).
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?"
