NOT all that long ago, ”Aussie, Aussie, Aussie” was just an innocuous, if inane, chant at sporting events. Commemoration of Anzac Day was greeted with indifference. And the idea of tattooing sunburnt flesh with the Southern Cross was, well, strange. Not today…
TIM Soutphommasane has spent more time than most people thinking about what it means to be Australian.
Growing up in Sydney’s western suburbs as the son of Chinese and Lao migrants, he built his own sense of national identity among friends from more than a dozen ethnic backgrounds.
As a political philosopher at Oxford University, he has spent much of the past five years examining the concepts of patriotism and nationalism in 21st century Australia.
When he travelled back to Sydney this year he was shaken to see ethnic clashes in that city’s seaside suburbs even while the city was celebrating Australia Day with a relaxed, friendly and newly confident pride.
The result is that Soutphommasane, an ALP member since the age of 15, is urging Kevin Rudd and others on the Left of politics to mount what he sees as a long-overdue campaign to reclaim the notion of nationalism from John HoWARd and the political Right…
Affronted by the xenophobic nationalists who stalked the land during the HoWARd years, many progressive Australians have rejected a love of country, forgetting that there is a patriotism of the liberal left that at different times has advanced liberty, egalitarianism, and democratic citizenship.
Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and political theorist who has journeyed from Sydney’s southwest suburbs to Oxford University, re-imagines patriotism as a generous sentiment of democratic renewal and national belonging. In accessible prose he explains why our political leaders will need to draw upon the better angels of patriotism if they hope to inspire citizens for nation-building, and indeed persuade them to make sacrifices in the hard times ahead. As we debate the twenty-first century challenges of reconciliation and a republic, citizenship and climate change, Reclaiming Patriotism proposes a narrative we have to have.
Reclaiming Patriotism is published by Cambridge University Press in September 2009. It is the lead title of the new Australian Encounters series published by Cambridge in partnership with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University.
“It is fitting that Tim Soutphommasane makes the case for progressive politics in defining Australian patriotism. When right-wingers claim the national story as their own – white picket fences, Don Bradman, Gallipoli – we need books like this to remind us that Australian citizenship belongs to us all.” ~ Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales
Whose cuisine will reign supreme?See also : George Orwell on democracy, nationalism, patriotism and socialism.
Gustavo Esteva: We are still using the word “democracy” because it has still a beautiful tradition. For some time, I used the expression “radical democracy” to re-claim the original meaning of the word: that is “people’s power”. Among the Greeks, that was the meaning.
Radical democracy implies two things. One, is a very radical critique of representative democracy and here I would like to mention the enlightenment of Douglas Lummis who published a book “Radical Democracy” and who gave to me a lot of elements of historical and theoretical critique of representative democracy and offered a clue for some alternatives within the framework of democratic thinking.
Douglas is a very interesting guy from California who has been teaching for twenty years in Japan. He is a brilliant thinker and his book, this book, I find particularly interesting as a very enlightened critique of representative democracy and an opening to other forms of thinking.
The second source for my radicality is in the sense of “radical” in Spanish which means to come back to the roots, the root of the things. Our roots here is what we describe as democracy in the villages. Meaning that they don’t have vertical authority and a structure of government. They are governing themselves.
…Anarchy alive! Anti-authoritarian politics from practice to theory, Uri Gordon, Pluto Press, 2008 (review by Tom Jennings, Freedom, Vol.70, No.3, February 2009; review by Lawrence Jarach, Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed; and elsewhere… except the arse-end of the world, Australia, where the book isn’t even on the bloodyfuckingshelves unless yous wanna pay an arm and a leg and order it in from o/s goddamnit).
I’ve been linked to by a fascist blog in the UK called ‘The Green Arrow’ (State Supported Terror groups, Mister Fox, August 20, 2009):
After the BNP’s Euro election victory, UAF thugs attacked a BNP press conference outside Parliament, pelting the media and party officials with eggs, placards and bottles. Several of the UAF thugs punched and kicked members of the BNP, including deputy leader Simon Darby who was repeatedly kicked in the back. http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=1284
I’m not sure why the post in question has been linked to, as there are numerous other accounts of the argy-bargy outside the British Parliament. The incident took place at a BNP press conference in London in June of this year; the conference called immediately after BNP Fuehrer Nick Gri££in was elected to the European Parliament.
It reminded one of a similar incident in Brunswick in the ’90s, when ‘National Action’ Fuehrer Michael (De) Brander expertly caught an egg in his mouth, and later featured on that week’s edition of The Footy Show…
To resume.
I can remember coming across the name of The Green Arrow (apparently some bloke called Paul Morris) before, I think ’cause Darrin ‘Sleeping Dragon’ Hodges was wont to reference it as being a suitable alternative to sites devoted to ‘adult shopping’.
Anyway, it so happens that Denise has just recently written a little more about Snakes and Arrows (Norfolk Unity, August 29, 2009), prompted, in part, by the closure of a forum at the BNP website:
And so the dispossessed, muttering darkly about “egos” and “dictatorships”, move on to posting pastures new, but carry with them their unfailing loyalty to the very man who caused their discomfiture.
The closure of the BNP forum has led to a migration to the hitherto moribund Green Arrow forum – but if anybody thinks voicing an opinion there is a good idea, the spousally-challenged drink-loving Paul Morris has news for them, making it clear that nothing less than wholehearted support for Griffin and the Griffinite BNP is expected.
Now the pompous Morris is as much of a standing joke to his own fascist brethren as he is to the anti-fascist community. The online Colonel Blimpish persona and the over-frequent use of military metaphors are rather belied by his real-world persona as a vicious hater prone to subject his neighbours to drunken rants, and who urinated against his caravan while screaming and shouting at the now estranged wife who had locked him out of his own house.
Speaking of Darrin, his ♥ has recently been broken by ‘Terrible’ Terrie-Anne Verney, but he’s nothing if not determined — see : Oh, Darrin!, September 30, 2008.
EdgeLeft : The Long Strange Posthumous Life of Leon Trotsky
…an occasional column by David McReynolds, it can be circulated without further permission…
Historically the Socialist Party USA had two major splits. The first was after the Russian Revolution, when there was an international split in all socialist parties between those who accepted the leadership of Lenin’s Third International and those who didn’t. In the US, [Eugene] Debs [1855–1926], who had proclaimed himself “a Bolshevik from the tip of my head to the tips of my toes” — reflecting the overwhelming international support for the Russian Revolution — then led the Socialist Party in rejecting Lenin’s “21 demands” [V. I. Lenin, ‘Theses on Fundamental Tasks of The Second Congress Of The Communist International’, 1920].
There followed the split which led to the formation of the Communist Party. The second major split — (actually two in almost one year) — was the right wing split in 1936 by the Social Democratic Federation which wanted to support Roosevelt, breaking with Norman Thomas [1884–1968], and the split by the Socialist Workers Party which, under James Cannon [1890–1974], had entered the Socialist Party and then in 1937 split, taking much of the youth of the Socialist Party with it.
By the 1960s (in fact even by 1951, when I joined the Socialist Party) both the Socialist and Communist Parties were shadows of the past, battered by various currents. The Communist Party was never able to build a mass base here after the Cold War began — Communism was seen not simply as “radical” but as “treasonous”. The Socialist Party, in no small part because, fearful it might be accused of being communist, spent too little time on what it favored, and too much time making sure its skirts were clean. (There is nothing simple about this — the Communist Party always had internal dissent, and there was a serious left wing in the Socialist Party, which I joined when I came into the SP.)
Thus when we leap forward to the “final split” in the SP in 1972 we are talking about midgets. Max Shachtman [1904–1971] took out his people to form the Social Democrats USA (actually, he had the majority at the 1972 convention, so for a brief moment he was the SP — it is ironic that it is Shachtman’s group which has since totally [?] vanished). Michael Harrington [1928–1989] finally broke with Shachtman and split to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee which morphed into today’s Democratic Socialists of America. The remnants of the old Socialist Party, some on the left, some on the right, regrouped under Frank Zeidler [1912–2006] in 1973 to form what is today the Socialist Party USA, and which is, pretty much, the legitimate heir to the party of Debs and Thomas. (It is under the banner of this group that I ran for President in 1980 and 2000).
In the real world nothing is static. The Socialist Party, which has about 1,000 members, has attracted newer members who are not aware of the history, and whose radicalism includes an admiration [for] Lenin and Trotsky. The SP is not anywhere near another split — only genuine Trotskyist groups can split when they have less than … 1,000 members. But I’ve been fascinated by this odd posthumous life of Trotsky, and want to reflect on it here.
There really aren’t any Leninists running around — there are lots of people who belong to “Marxist/Leninist” groups, such as the Communist Party, but there are simply not a dozen different Marxist/Leninist groups in this country. There are large numbers of socialists who are not even aware that there was a Marxist tradition before Lenin, and independent of Lenin. There must be a few Stalinist groups, I am sure I could find them on Google, but not even the Communist Party today counts as Stalinist. Stalin has almost no heirs. [Almost. See : Protestant Stalinist Party. Also : arch-rivals Catholic Trotskyist Party of America. Discussion here and below.] In fact, the interesting thing about Stalin is that almost no one wanted to duplicate his politics. The Japanese and Italian Communist Parties broke with Moscow very early, not long after Tito had taken Yugoslavia out of the “Communist Bloc”. Mao (a man Stalin once thought might best be “eliminated”) defied Stalin almost from the beginning. The Vietnamese were careful, in taking aid from both China and the Soviet Union, not to duplicate the Soviets in their own political patterns (there were never any purge trials in Vietnam to equal those in the Soviet Union). And Cuba stands almost in its own tradition, bending to Russia when it depended of Moscow’s aid, but building on Cuba’s own traditions.
It was as if everyone looked at Stalin and thought “there is a lot there we don’t want to repeat”. Even the Soviets, to the astonishment of the West, broke with their own “tradition” when Stalin died, and, after the murder of Beria, allowed a peaceful transfer of power to Khrushchev.
But Trotsky while dead, is still very much alive. Sometimes as a ghost on the far right — Max Shachtman became the first true neo-conservative, embracing the system. His followers took key positions in the Reagan Administration and in the right wing of the Democratic Party. Younger readers may find it hard to believe (I admit that even I do) that Shachtman, who went into the Communist Party in its early years, traveled to the Soviet Union, was a significant leader of the American Communist Party, ended his life supporting the US invasion of Cuba (the Bay of Pigs), the US invasion of Indochina, shifted from a position critical of Israel to one of fervent support of Israel. I knew Shachtman well, and while I didn’t like the man, or trust him, I would never have thought he would have ended in the camp of the enemy.
The original Trotskyist movement in this country formed in the late 1920s, headed by James Cannon and Max Shachtman. It was authentically revolutionary, had an honorable tradition of work in the trade union movement. It reflected the international split, following Lenin’s death, between Stalin, the General Secretary of the Soviet Party, and Trotsky, the brilliant, courageous military leader of the Red Armies. Stalin insisted that a world revolution was not in the cards history had dealt, that the only hope was to build “socialism in one country”. Trotsky, by far the more revolutionary, and internationalist, argued that “socialism in one country” would become bureaucratic, militarized, and fatally “deformed”. Both men were right. There was to be no world revolution. Germany, which had a powerful socialist movement, did not have a revolution and could not rescue the young Soviet Union. Trotsky was right, the Soviet Union became a police state. There was one crucial shift, however, which caused Trotsky to the end of his life to argue that the Soviet Union had to be defended in any conflict with the West — private property had been collectivized, and the old class had been destroyed. Shachtman split over the matter of the Soviet invasion of Finland, setting up what would beome the Independent Socialist League, which lasted until it merged into the Socialist Party in 1958.
Some contemporary Trotskyist groups, such as the ISO (International Socialist Organization) represent what might be called Shachtman’s radical positions of the 1950s. The official Trotskyist group, the Socialist Workers Party, long since became a cult, focused on support of Cuba largely ignoring its own Trotskyist past. There are other groups which owe a debt to Trotsky — Solidarity, while hardly an orthodox Trotskyist group, comes out of that background. New Politics, founded by Julius [1922–2003] and Phyllis Jacobson (and a journal on which I was once a member of the editorial board) had its origins in a kind of “left Shachtmanite” position. I felt I served as the “shabbas goy” on the editorial board, since I was primarily a pacifist, and had never been a Trotskyist. At one point — and perhaps the last intellectually significant split in the Trotskyist movement — Bert Cochran [1913–1984] formed a new publication, the American Socialist, which had a brief useful life but could not be sustained. These groups have made real contributions to the American Left.
They made, for the most part, a very serious effort to uphold the best of the Russian Revolution, while being frank about the disaster of Stalin. Some of the Trotskyists did finally face the problems inherent in Leninism, the vanguard theory of change, the concept of democratic centralism, and the fact Trotsky himself was not really any nicer than Lenin. There are always apologies made for the violent suppression of the workers uprising at Kronstadt — and I wish the Trotskyists, and Leninists, some of whom are now in the Socialist Party, would realize that if one can justify mass murder because the situation demanded it, they should be much more hesitant in writing off the Socialist Parties in the West because they, too, made compromises. I guess my question to the Leninists is why are crimes and mistakes acceptable if committed by the followers of Lenin, but not if committed by the non-Communist left. (Thus far the best answer I’ve heard is that in the name of the revolution, murder, while regrettable, is defensible).
The Workers World Party, formed in 1956, when the Socialist Workers Party had a split over the Hungarian Revolution, (WWP supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary) became a thorn in the side of many of us, with its range of front groups — the International Action Center, ANSWER, etc. In due time WWP had a split of its own, the Party [for] Socialism and Liberation, which took ANSWER with it. WWP still exists.
If one had time and the inclination, the list of those who were in the Trotskyist movement, or touched by it, is truly remarkable. Dwight Macdonald‘s [1906–1982] Politics, Dissent Magazine, and literally dozens of small Trotskyist groups. My own primary mentor, A. J. Muste, was briefly — very briefly — in the Trotskyist movement. The Trotskyist movement has had one great advantage over the Communists — with very few exceptions they never actually had power. And thus they could be pure. All those who hold state power will find that it forces compromises.
So much for this very too brief run down. I have read Trotsky, and Lenin, and Stalin, and a number of others from that period. I liked Lenin and still do — I just don’t agree with him. My own path led me to Gandhi. I liked Trotsky a bit less, though I concede he was brilliant. IsaacDeutscher [1907–1967], in one of his three volumes on Trotsky, cites the case where, in one of the inner-party fights, Trotsky felt he had to make a temporary peace with Stalin. The price which Stalin exacted was that Trotsky withdraw his support from two of his own key allies. Which Trotsky did. Not surprisingly, his allies, once abandoned, sided with Stalin in the next round of in-fighting and helped seal Trotsky’s fate.
All of which brings me to a deeply flawed film I rented from Netflix — Exile in Buyukada. Deeply flawed because while showing Trotsky’s arrival in Turkey, where he spent the first period of his exile, the sound track, featuring a narration by the wonderful actor, Vanessa Redgrave, is “buried” under the music. There are occasional sub-titles, but essentially the film is only worth watching for the sense of that period. And it is to that sense that I now want to turn my attention, (while, by pure chance, listening to a new recording of a Shostakovitch work, featuring the Internationale).
Let’s leave aside the manipulations of Shachtman, the betrayals of the Neocons, the chaos created by Workers World… and turn back to the events in the Soviet Union. That Trotsky would be expelled from the Communist Party and sent into exile was unthinkable. He had been essential to the revolution. He did not leave the young Soviet Union as a dissident — he left it as a believer in the revolution. He and his wife knew they faced death wherever they went, from Stalin’s agents (who did finally murder him when he was in Mexico).
Trotsky had no allies within the socialist movement. He despised the socialist parties of the West. The problem was that he had no allies at all except for the opposition to Stalin which, in the Soviet Union, could not be expressed without risking certain death. In the West the Trotskyist movement was a small splinter in the side of the Communist movement, under steady ideological attack as “agents of the State”. To support Trotsky was genuinely heroic — no one was going to pay you! You had no chance at career advancement. You had no allies in power anywhere in the world. The Communists would check out books by Trotsky from public libraries in order to destroy them (and I knew one Shachtmanite who checked out those same books from public libraries in order to save them from destruction – theft in the name of love).
The Communists held power in the Soviet Union. Their parties in Western Europe were strong. And strong even as far away as Indochina, and China, and Japan.
So those of us who have basic disagreements with Trotsky — essentially the same disagreements we have with Lenin — should pay the history of Trotsky some respect. He was not a democrat. It has been said, by one of those in post-Soviet Russia, that if Trotsky had won the fight against Stalin the outcome would have been just as many executions — but with a far more literary flavor. The sadness of Trotsky’s life is that once the internal fight in the Soviet Union had been decided, Trotsky was an heroic but lost figure. His followers in the US ended on the subversive list, were hounded from their jobs by the FBI.
But always and always, those who took Trotsky’s side cannot help but look back and think what the Soviet Union might have been if only Stalin had lost that fight. I’m very much among those who feel that American socialists need to look to American history — not Russian or Chinese or Cuban history — to chart our course. But no one who has looked back at the early part of the 20th century can fail to be thrilled by that moment when it seemed as if the workers were actually in control of history. It was this painful memory Trotsky carried with him as he began the first of his exiles in Turkey.
May I suggest — though my Trotskyist and Leninist friends will not hear me — that the greatest honor one could pay to Leon Trotsky would be to let him rest with the honor he earned. And, as he broke with Stalin, so let us break with all undemocratic efforts at revolution, which would make human beings merely “means to the end”. Humanity — each life — is an end in itself. As A.J. Muste said, “there is no way to peace — peace is the way”. So too, revolution begins now, as we empower ourselves to think for our own time.
David McReynolds worked for the War Resisters League for 39 years, retired in 1999, and lives with his two cats on the Lower East Side. He is a former Chair of the War Resisters International. He can be contacted at: dmcreynolds[at]nyc[dot]rr[dot]com.
On Sunday I watched with amusement the utterly ridiculous but hugely entertaining film InglouriousBasterds.
In Nazi-occupied France during World War II, a group of Jewish-American soldiers known as “The Basterds” are chosen specifically to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis. The Basterds soon cross paths with a French-Jewish teenage girl who runs a movie theater in Paris which is targeted by the soldiers.
Margaret: ****-and-a-half *s David: ****
The film is ridiculous in the sense that it turns history upside down; entertaining for its slick production values, preposterous script, a number of terrific performances and, of course, the spectacle of Nazis having their brains bashed in, their throats cut, their bodies kicked, punched, shot and blown up — and their heads scalped.
ROFLMAO.
Much of the drama and the climax of the film is set in Paris. Funnily enough, the liberation of the city from Nazi control in August 1944 was spearheaded by Spanish anarchists: “Their tanks were named after civil war battles – Ebro, Teruel, Belchite, Madrid – and also called Don Quijote, and Durruti, after the anarchist leader.”
In summary, Quentin Tarantino’s (1963–) film is a critical, commercial and perhaps even a political success — at least in the sense that contemporary Nazis have been falling over themselves to denounce the film and to proclaim him an honorary Jew.
Lt. Aldo Raine: My name is Lt. Aldo Raine and I need me eight soldiers. Eight Jewish-American soldiers.
Now, y’all might of heard rumors about the armada happening soon. Well, we’ll be leaving a little earlier. We’re gonna be dropped into France, dressed as civilians. And once we’re in enemy territory, as a bushwackin’ guerrilla army, we’re gonna be doing one thing and one thing only… killing Nazis.
Members of nationalist socialist party conquered Europe through murder, torture, intimidation, and terror. And that’s exactly what we’re gonna do to them.
Now, I don’t know about y’all, but I sure as hell didn’t come down from the goddamn Smoky Mountains, cross five thousand miles of water, fight my way through half Sicily and then jump out of a fuckin’ air-o-plane to teach the Nazis lessons in humanity. Nazi ain’t got no humanity. They’re the foot soldiers of a Jew-hatin’, mass murderin’ maniac and they need to be dee-stroyed. That’s why every son of a bitch we find wearin’ a Nazi uniform, they’re gonna die.
We will be cruel to the Germans and through our cruelty they will know who we are. They will find the evidence of our cruelty in the disemboweled, dismembered, disfigured bodies their brothers we leave behind us and the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, at our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us, the Germans will talk about us and the Germans will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with.
Sound good?
The Basterds: YES, SIR!
On Film, see also : celluloid tongue. blog (Gerard Elson) | ADL Statement on Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ (August 18, 2009).
Of course, while the Third Reich was brought to a halt after only 12 years, remnants of the Nazi movement are to be found all over the world, including Australia. The Global Financial Crisis™, in conjunction with the War on Terror™, has also provided a fertile economic and political context for a minor resurgence in the far right, especially in parts of Western and Eastern Europe.
One of the bloodier struggles occurring at the moment is in Putin’s Russia, where neo-Nazis and other fascists, mostly men in their late teens or early twenties, are happily butchering ‘foreigners’ and anti-fascist activists — mostly journalists (Anastasiya Baburova) and law-talking guys (Stanislav Markelov), punks and skinheads. (In this sense, Russian antifa are composed of elements that have assumed exactly the opposite approach of many local ‘punks’ and ‘skinheads’; a product, in turn, of the disembraining/yuppification of formally oppositional yoof subcultures in the West.) The sponsorship of ultra-nationalist sentiment by the Russian state, and the generally indifferent attitude of authorities to the many crimes committed in its name, may be understood if such phenomena are recognised for their broader political function: imposing discipline upon Russian society and labour.
In Germany, in state elections this past weekend, the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) again gained seats in the Saxony state assembly, winning 5.5 percent of the vote, but that was a sharp fall from the 12 percent it won five years ago (Setback for Merkel’s party in German state polls, DPA, August 31, 2009). The fall in the NPD vote is presumably a reflection of voter disenchantment with the party’s corruption and incompetence. However, given the existence of a reasonably successful, and entrenched, extra-parliamentary far right, it’s not necessarily an indicator of a weakening of support for the far right as a whole. Further: “The vote in Saxony was noteworthy for another reason: despite significant losses, the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party was re-elected to the Dresden parliament, a first for the extremists” (Setbacks for Merkel’s CDU in state elections, Derek Scally, The Irish Times, August 31, 2009).
Federal elections are scheduled to take place on September 27, and it would appear that the main interest will be in gauging how much of a decline in support the major parties experience — increasingly viewed, as in Australia, of being largely and fundamentally indistinguishable.
In Australia, there are two ‘major’ (sic) events on the neo-Nazi calendar next month. The first is on Saturday September 12, in Melbourne; the second on the weekend of September 26/27 in Sydney: the location of both is suppressed by organisers for fear of disruption by political opponents.
‘Did they have to shoot my boy’
Chris Griffith The Weekend Australian Magazine
August 8–9, 2009
Tyler Cassidy was only 15 years old, a boy who wanted to play the tough guy but hadn’t started shaving yet. A gangly teenager who was still young enough to tell his mum he loved her every night before bed. A kid who posted dumb things on his MySpace page and had begun to flirt online with some bone-headed racists. Around 9pm on December 11 last year this same boy, brimming with an inexplicable, implacable rage, went careering through a northern Melbourne shopping centre just on closing time.
Brandishing two kitchen knives he’d stolen from Kmart, he terrified the last straggling shoppers and staff. Tyler was freaking out and although he didn’t know it, he only had 40 minutes to live.
For those who haven’t heard of him, Tyler Cassidy holds the awful distinction of being the youngest Australian to be shot dead by police.
His funeral, held a week later, was devastatingly bleak. Angry, bereft kids clung to each other and to their parents, weeping as they filed past their friend’s open white coffin. Shani Cassidy then did something no mother should ever have to do: she helped screw the lid shut on her son.
Any child’s funeral leaves mourners searching for answers; eight months after Tyler’s, the questions are mounting up.
One thing I haven’t really done is paid much attention to the online presence of Australian ‘conservatives’ — or at least not outside of the Tories and their many misadventures (and the neo-conservative warmongers in the Whitehouse). Which is kind of a pity, as some online conservatives are completely awesome and totally kick arse.
“Australian Conservative is a blog to express, debate and promote conservative news, commentary and opinion… The only way we can take the fight to the Left is with well-resourced outlets.”
In addition to its numerous other qualities, ‘Australian Conservative’ provides links to the following:
“Established in Australia in 1993, our organization has steadily developed into a potent force upholding the educational and cultural aspects of our Constitutional Monarchy adopting a prominent role in opposing what had become under the Keating Government, “Republicanism by stealth” where, without reference to the People, Federal and State Governments removed the symbols and traditions of our Constitutional Monarchy all of which are powerful forces ensuring responsible government.”
Possibly the best site listed here: a manifestation, it seems, of what happens when you cross ‘conservatism’ with Spartacism. Agitate! unashamedly supports the rights of individuals and business! And!
We believe that!
Less taxation is the best taxation!
Excessive regulation cripples enterprise, initiative and efficiency! And!
Individual choice is paramount!
‘We’ in this case appears to devolve to Owen Baker of MEDIA AND POLITICAL COUNSEL PTY LTD (ABN 21100364001). Apparently, the company is scheduled to be de-registered by ASIC on September 17. Owen is Managing Director of itregister.com.au.
The Salt Shakers claim to be Christians, and to follow the teachings of a Jewish carpenter who, 2000 years ago, was nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if people were nice to each other for a change. In Australia in The Year of Our Lord 2009, this faith is expressed in a Statement. Their first article of faith, and the basis of the work of the Shakers, is:
The Bible is God’s word to us and it is the ultimate authority by which we live. (2 Timothy 3:10-17; 2 Peter 1:21).
Oddly enough, despite this constituting their core belief, to the best of my knowledge, the Shakers have yet to embark upon a murderous campaign against female sorcerers, people who curse their Mum and/or Dad or people who work on the Sabbath. In fact, in practice, this Statement translates into campaigning against the introduction of a Bill of Rights, euthanasia, pornography, religious vilification, and rights for queers (to adoption, to marriage and to various other civil rights).
10 But thou hast fully known my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, longsuffering, love, patience, 11 Persecutions, afflictions: such as came upon me at Antioch, at Iconium and at Lystra: what persecutions I endured, and out of them all the Lord delivered me. 12 And all that will live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution. 13 But evil men and seducers shall grow worse and worse: erring, and driving into error, 14 But continue thou in those things which thou hast learned and which have been committed to thee. Knowing of whom thou hast learned them: 15 And because from thy infancy thou hast known the holy scriptures which can instruct thee to salvation by the faith which is in Christ Jesus. 16 All scripture, inspired of God, is profitable to teach, to reprove, to correct, to instruct in justice: 17 That the man of God may be perfect, furnished to every good work.
21 For prophecy came not by the will of man at any time: but the holy men of God spoke, inspired by the Holy Ghost.
MOAR AMAZING BIBLE FACTS!
Cain killed Abel because God liked Abel more than Cain. Why? Cain was a farmer and all he could sacrifice to bloodthirsty God was plants. Abel was a herdsmen and he could slaughter animals. ~ Genesis 4:2–5
God tells Noah that He intends to kill nearly every living creature on earth because the world has become too violent. ~ Genesis 6:13
God proclaims that none of the people of Israel can as much as touch Mount Sinai while He’s on it. “Any who touch the mountain shall be put to death”, God decrees. “They shall be stoned or shot with arrows; whether animal or human being, they shall not live”. ~ Exodus 19:12–14
“You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live.” ~ Exodus 22:18 (also Leviticus 20:27)
“Whoever curses father or mother shall be put to death.” ~ Exodus 21:17 (also Leviticus 20:9)
“Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.” ~ Exodus 22:19 (also Leviticus 20:15–16)
“Whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall be put to death.” ~ Exodus 31:15 (also 35:2)
“One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death.” ~ Leviticus 24:16
God learns about the golden calf and is angry. Moses has to talk Him out of killing all the people of Israel. Instead, Moses suggests that those who didn’t worship the golden calf prove their loyalty by killing those closest to them — neighbours, friends, relatives, children — who did. Roughly three thousand are butchered. God still isn’t appeased; He unleashes a plague on the survivors. ~ Exodus 32:7–14, 25–35
“If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God…” ~ II Corinthians 5:13
Dead now, but once the host to thoughts by someone called Aurora. IIRC, she left ’cause ah, the PC state was about to swoop on her. Or something. (Also recently departed: Abandon Skip and The Currency Lad.)
Bonus!
A. R. J. (Rob) Stove : Editor • writer • composer • organist • narcissist
[IMG OF KEMP CENSORED FEBRUARY 8 2012 PENDING LEGAL ADVICE. AVAILABLE HERE.]
Arthur Kemp (1962/3–) is a white supremacist, and a former member of the South African secret police. In 1993 (or 1996, according to the sauce), Kemp re-located to (Really) Great Britain, from which vantage point he praises the virtues of the British National Party (BNP).
Currently, Kemp is a British National Party activist, maintaining its website, addressing meetings, and scribbling further nonsense on its behalf. Thus:
Excalibur Books is proud to announce the launch of a new book The Lie of Apartheid and Other True Stories from Southern Africa by Arthur Kemp. This newest – and possibly most controversial book to date – from the author of March of the Titans, is a series of nine essays detailing political life in the “old” and “new” South Africa, all with direct political application to Britain and any other European nation…
March of the Titans is completely batshit and thoroughly entertaining:
From the time of the emergence of the White racial type, their wanderings to the four corners of the globe, and finally into space itself: This remarkable story of human endeavor is without parallel or comparison, and is a story of awe, inspiration and heroism.
Most importantly of all, revealed in this work is the one true cause of the rise and fall of the world’s greatest empires – that all civilizations rise and fall according to their racial homogeneity and nothing else – a nation can survive wars, defeats, natural catastrophes, but not racial dissolution.
http://www.white-history.com/
Point being: Uncle Arthur’s ex-wife Karen (or somebody claiming to be her) has a blog (June 13, 2009), and on it she recounts life with Kemp. Note that, while he was working for police in SA, Kemp was alleged to have been involved in some manner with the assassination of African National Congress/South African Communist Party activist Chris Hani in April 1993. (In 1994, the cheese-eating surrender monkey Jacques Derrida dedicated Specters of Marx to Hani.) At the time, Kemp was one of a number of people arrested in connection with the murder, but was released without charge. He has a special section of his blog titled ‘Communist Liars’, in which he rebuts various allegations made against him by (lying Communist) Karen, (lying Communist) Unite Against Fascism, (lying Communist) BBC, (lying Communist) Searchlight, and the (lying Communist) Southern Poverty Law Center.
http://www.arthurkemp.com/?cat=31
As for Karen, she writes:
…Arthur is a racist, a white supremacist and also believes in his intellectual superiority and the inferiority not only of other races and religions but also the vast majority of supporters of right wing parties – the rank and file of the likes of the AWB, BNP and the National Alliance have been slated and criticized by Arthur as idiots to be used to further his cause and who should, in his words, “be exterminated once they have been used to get the right wing into power”. Nice Nazi sentiments these! (I have his e-mails to prove this include [sic] being regaled with conversations between him and Nick Griffin on their view of the morons that poor Nick has to work with in the BNP.)
Arthur did work for the police in South Africa – he was in the uniform branch but he also worked for one of the security arms – I think it is irrelevant what the specific branch was called and to now split hairs about that seems academic.
Ojore was released from New Jersey State Prison at 4pm on August 26th and is currently in Philadelphia getting reoriented to being on the streets. He will eventually be moving to New Jersey once he finds a space.
Mundine : The rapporteur also said there was entrenched racism in Australia, but the former Labor Party president says Australia is one of the most modern, civil societies in the world. “I think Australia is a great place. I think Australians are great people and decent people… There are issues in this nation and there is racism in this nation, anyone would be a fool to say there’s not. But there is racism and there’s problems in all nations. We are actually in Australia working towards resolving those issues.”
High profile Aboriginal leader and former Labor Party president, Warren Mundine has joined a barrage of criticism over the UN backed claims that the Northern Territory intervention is overtly racist.
Mundine has thereby joined Jenny Macklin — Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs — and Shadow Minister The Mad Monk in condemning the (dirty rotten stinking Communist) Professor with the very foreign-sounding name of ‘James Anaya’ (see : Uppity blacks find support in traitorous United Nations, August 28, 2009).
Indeed, Mundine has stated that Anaya’s reportage should be regarded in the same manner as all reports produced by United Nations Special Rapporteurs: “I think this Rapporteur’s report should be dealt with the same as every other Rapporteur’s report; just drop it in the bin and actually get on with the job.”
Which is, on the whole, a rather bizarre comment to make.
Such a dismissal would include, of course, reports by Doudou Diene (the Special Rapporteur for Racism), Raquel Rolnik (Brazil), Maya Sahli (Algeria), Monorama Biswas (Bangladesh), Ralston Milton Nettleford (Jamaica), Linos-Alexandros Sicilianos (Greece), Mirjana Najcevska (The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) and several dozen more producers of complete and utter rubbish on such ridiculous topics as: the right to an adequate standard of living, and on the right to non-discrimination in this context; the sale of children, child prostitution and child pornography; the right to education; the question of human rights and extreme poverty; the right to food; and so on and so forth.
That said, while it may be the case that, given Mundine’s commitments to the ALP, his reaction is entirely predictable, it is also worth noting that unlike, say, Richard Downs, he is of the Bundjalung people of northern NSW, not the Northern Territory. Further — and perhaps this point is simply redundant — Mundine simply does not address, whether in general, or in detail, any of Anaya’s claims.
On Mundine’s political vision, see : ‘Indigenous Freedom’, an address to the Bennelong Society Conference, 2005. Mundine was the recipient of that year’s ‘Bennelong Medal’. Also : ‘Indigenous affairs – a new conversation’, Warren Mundine & Marcia Langton.
Like Peter Garrett, Mundine ♥s uranium, and as CEO of NTSCorp Ltd. and a co-convenor of the Australian Uranium Association’s Indigenous Dialogue Group, slaves away at convincing others of same.
Finally, and in fairness to Mundine and his numerous other critics, Anaya has form. Thus, following clashes between Amazon Indians and police in Peru in June, Anaya called upon the Peruvian Government to drop criminal charges against protest leaders to foment dialogue. (On the complaints of ungrateful wretches in Peru, see : Peru’s ‘Cold War’ Against Indigenous Peoples, Kristina Aiello, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), July 15, 2009.) For further information on Anaya, CAAMA (the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association) has an interview available for listening here.
“The Intervention” — its nature and functioning, if not its ostensible purposes — has obviously been the subject of heated debate. One of the more interesting dimensions of this debate has been its impact upon Mundine’s comrades in the Northern Territory. On this subject, see : EDITORIAL: Before you condemn…, National Indigenous Times, No.184, August 20, 2009. A new blog, Intervention walkoff, documents the decision by the Ampilatwatja community in Central Australia to remove themselves from ‘Prescribed Areas’.
Finally, a foreign corporation owned by US citizen (Sir) Rupert Murdoch publishes a zine called ‘The Australian’, and on Anaya its editor(s) opine ‘He came, he saw and missed the point’ (August 29, 2009).
At the head of everything is God, the Lord of Heaven.
Everyone knows that.
Then comes Prince Torlonia, lord of the earth.
Then come Prince Torlonia’s guards.
Then come Prince Torlonia’s guards’ dogs.
Then, nothing at all.
Then, nothing at all.
Then, nothing at all.
Then come the peasants. And that’s all.
~ Ignazio Silone, Fontamara (1931).
Bonus!
Below : Jesse XXXXXX from Deaths Head with the boys from Belgian neo-Nazi band ‘Kill Baby, Kill’ at the recording studio, Australia, September, 2008. (KBK played the Beaconsfield Hotel in 2008.) Jesse & Ravenous are proudly sponsored by YouTube, and will be appearing LIVE ON STAGE! in Melbourne on September 12. Joining Ravenous will be Old Skool boneheads Open Season, a cover band, and more than likely a bunch of foreign troublemakers. Note that former Ravenous drummer Joel now thumps the tub for the proud strong and honourable‘Skin Heads Neither For Nor Against Racial Prejudice’ Melbourne band Bulldog Spirit.
Go Australia!
“We encourage free speech and defend everyone’s right to express unpopular points of view. But we don’t permit hate speech (speech which attacks or demeans a group based on race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, gender, age, sexual orientation/gender identity, or their status as a returned soldier).”
For Dion, Jay, Doug, Phil, Ben, Joel and a cast of thousandshundredsscoresdozens…
Added Bonus!
‘Who is Bennelong?’
Eve Vincent Arena magazine
June–July 2007
‘Who was Bennelong?’ asks the Society named after him. ‘Bennelong the Man’, according to the Bennelong Society’s website, was ‘easily the most intelligent and helpful of the Aborigines that had come into Sydney Cove’. Governor Arthur Phillip’s kidnapping of Bennelong in late 1789 ‘may seem a strange way to begin a relationship’, but the two men grew close, and in the period between his capture and his 1792 trip to England — despite escaping once and subsequently engineering the spearing of the Governor — Bennelong delighted in affecting the habits and customs of the colonisers. He learnt English and was a valuable diplomat. In short: Bennelong walked in two worlds, and was decisive in convincing the Eora people to ‘come in’ to the settlement in 1790.
The view of the Society regarding the contemporary position of Aboriginal people is that ‘the most wretched Aborigines are those who are least integrated’. Hope lies in a process analogous to this ‘coming in’.
OTTAWA — The unknown author of the zeromeanszero blog at zeromeanszero.blogspot.com may soon face litigation if privacy and online reputation management lawyer Brian Bowman has his way.
Bowman, with the Winnipeg firm Pitblado LLP, announced his plan on CFRA radio Thursday afternoon.
He said he is acting on behalf of a anonymous client from Ottawa.
Bowman stressed that his client is definitely not Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien, who is often the target of the blog…
Bowman said he has been in discussion with Google Inc., which operates blogspot.com. There is a chance, said Bowman, that Google will shut down the site — with or without a court order — and it might not release the name of the blogger…
Bowman said that if the zeromeanszero blogger’s identity is revealed, it could open the door for a class-action lawsuit on behalf of everyone who thinks they’ve been defamed by the blog.
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?"
