Former KKK Grand Poobah-turned-fundamentalist Xtian Johnny Lee Clary has declared that there are some bedsheet-wearers in WA. Correction: the KKK has “infiltrated” Perth.
Whether by boat or plane is unknown.
“I know that the Ku Klux Klan is in Western Australia. I know that they’re in the Perth area”, he said in Perth this week.
“The National Front is here, I know that the Nazi Party is here. I’ve talked to people here and they’ve said to me ‘I know so and so, that belongs to the Klan'”.
In reality, there’s been a KKK presence in Australia for many years; it has never attracted widespread support; what little support it has generated has been mostly restricted to a small number of rural towns (Cairns, Toowoomba, Townsville); there is little evidence of any violent activity on the part of the Klan(s); the Klan is split into numerous rival factions; of late, there has been no upsurge in Klan activity either in Perth, in WA, or in Australia as a whole. Further, there is no ‘National Front’ or ‘Nazi Party’ in Perth, in WA, or anywhere else in Australia; rather, there is a loose assortment of neo-Nazi cranks, some of whom are members of formal organisations, most of whom are not.
In terms of the KKK’s appeal, it is extremely limited. Moreover:
Ethnic Communities Council of WA president Ramdas Sankaran said racist elements in Australia had been strengthened “thanks to the demonisation of religious and ethnic minorities” by former [P]rime [M]inister John HoWARd and his senior colleagues.
This ‘demonisation’ has paid political dividends. First, in combination with a Tory dirty tricks campaign against it, by eclipsing the appeal of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party. Secondly, by shoring up support for the Tories by way of capitalising on continuing racist residues in a country with an explicitly and formally-endorsed history of racism and continuing colonial dispossession.
That said, a lone KKK supporter did rock up to the Invasion Day celebrations conducted by the ‘Southern Cross Soldiers’ in Melbourne this year, and a handful of keyboard warriors have done their best to embiggen the Klowns on Stormfront Down Under in the last few years.
A visitor from Patagonia, Argentina, Elio Brat, will speak about workers’ self-management in factories (Zanon) and indigenous struggles (Mapuche) in Argentina.
WHEN : 7pm WHERE : Old Council Chambers, Trades Hall (corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets, Carlton)
For more information, please call : Rodrigo 0414 970 418 or Lucho 0400 914 944.
Write to: lasnet[at]latinlasnet[dot]org.
Visit: Latin American Solidarity Network (LASNET).
Speakers include Gary Foley.
Entry by gold coin donation.
Food available.
For more info call 0404 105 403 or email asfsec[at]gmail[dot]com.
IWA Secretary Arrested
Ratibor Trivunac, a member of the Anarcho-Syndicalist Initiative and General Secretary of the International Workers’ Association, was convicted yesterday evening to ten days prison for burning the US flag in the centre of Belgrade. A group of anarchists organized an illegal protest yesterday as a reaction to the visit of the US Vice President Joseph Biden to Belgrade. During the protest Trivunac burned the US flag and read a statement condemning the role of the USA in reproduction of capitalist relations, wars, exploitation and discrimination in the world.
Belgrade district judge Goran Milutinović sentenced Ratibor and ordered him to be immediately sent to prison without giving him a chance for appeal. Other comrades that have been arrested were released without charges. Our lawyer will try to appeal the sentence today.
Burning of the flag is a symbolic act of protest and we find the actions of judge Milutinović to be scandalous. We refuse to obey orders, we refuse to keep quiet! We will always burn the symbols of exploitation and oppression!
We would like to call for international actions of solidarity if Ratibor is not released by Saturday morning. We will keep informing you of developments.
The IWA Secretariat can be contacted, as usual, by telephone number +381-63-263-XXX or email (we would prefer by telephone as we may not check the email regularly during the following days).
Freedom for Ratibor!
Long live the IWA!
On behalf of the IWA Secretariat,
Nikola Pavlović
—
Secretariat of the International Workers Association // Secretariado de la Asociación International de los Trabajadores
The poster demands “British jobs for British workers” and it shows three smiling men in hard-hats urging people to vote BNP. But the “building workers” in the ad – which is being driven up and down the country on a BNP vehicle called the “Truth Truck” – are not even British. They are American models who posed for a general photo agency shoot in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Another shot in the same set shows a black man working alongside white colleagues – but the racist BNP didn’t use that one… ~ Exclusive: BNP poster campaign for British workers uses American actors, Gary Anderson, Mirror, May 16, 2009 [Tip of the hard-hat to Sina]
‘British Jobs For British Workers’ (Gordon Brown) is soon expected to become ‘European Jobs For British Fascists’ following the June 2009 elections to the European Parliament. Elections will be held in the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) between June 4–7; 736 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) will be elected by proportional representation to represent some 500,000,000 Europeans — “making these the biggest trans-national elections in history”.
Shazam!
If the British National Party can gain at least four seats at the talking shop in Brussels, the European far right would also likely be in a position to initiate a formal voting bloc in the Parliament — a situation briefly realised in early 2007, before it disintegrated (BNP could be at heart of far-right EU group: “Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, is poised to become a key figure in the creation of a new far-right group in the European Parliament”, Bruno Waterfield, Telegraph, May 15, 2009).
Searchlight zine has launched a campaign against the BNP called ‘Hope Not Hate’. As part of this campaign, a video has been released:
The video resurrects Griffin’s polemics from the mid-90s, and prior to efforts to mainstream his and the BNP’s message (Griffin became leader in 1999).
Antifa England has responded to the Hope Not Hate campaign by pointing out the perils of electoralism, and rejecting ‘New Labour’ as an alternative to the BNP. Both the BNP and New Labour are accused of using racism and xenophobia to attract support — the attraction of the BNP among working class whites a product of New Labour’s record of anti-working class policies, corruption, and pandering to xenophobia. In summary:
Antifa are not calling on people to vote Labour or ‘Respect’ to stop the BNP, we are calling on people to boycott the whole election charade, and to get out onto the streets and combat the rise of the BNP in the only way that matters – by Direct Action.
We can understand the contempt people rightly have for the mainstream political parties. We can understand why white working-class communities feel abandoned and alienated. But a vote for the BNP is NOT a so-called ‘protest vote’, it is a vote for FASCISM.
Don’t believe ANY of their lies.
Don’t play the politicians’ games.
Don’t vote – Organize!
Independent Working Class Association
In some respects, this debate recalls that of an earlier era, and one which accompanied the dissolution of ‘Anti-Fascist Action’ (AFA: 1985–2001). In fact, this ‘debate’ had further precedents among anti-fascists in the UK: see‘Filling the Vacuum’, Fighting Talk, No.12, November 1995; ‘The Acid Test’, Fighting Talk, No.10, January 1995; and elsewhere in the pages of FT.
One of the principal contributors to AFA was ‘Red Action’, a small Marxist party segments of which evolved into the International Wing Chun AcademyInternational Window Cleaning AssociationInternational Writing Centers Association‘Independent Working Class Association’ (IWCA), initially formed in October 1995 and registered with the state in September 2001.
Some years ago I started blogging about RA… actually: “Trawling the web for information on the split in Workers Power — yes, I’m a Trainspotter; how many members did they have in Australia? 4? 5? 6? — I somehow or other stumbled onto Red Action. Their site declares that it was suspended in 2004 — but gives little explanation”:
As of Friday 24th 2004 this forum (as part of [a] general site re-vamp) will no longer be updated.
In due course, it is intended that a substantial amount of fresh material will be added to the site and a search-friendly archive will be created containing some of the more informative and memorable threads.
I found the following on a blog: Working class?!, Mike’s Little Red Page, July 25, 2005:
I’m posting rather a lot about the Oxford branch of the Independent Working Class Association at the moment, but they seem to want to force themselves on the public’s attention. Their latest smart idea is to sue Labour Councillor Bill Baker for defamation for suggesting they are associated with extremists…
…Part of an apology to the IWCA said: “In this article Bill Baker wrongly alleged the Independent Working Class Association has links to extremist anarchist groups and violent Irish nationalist groups, and that the organisation has tried to hide those links behind legitimate political activities.
“The Labour Party and Bill Baker accept that these statements are incorrect and without foundation and would like to apologise for the distress and embarrassment which the article has caused.”
After some initial success, at least in electoral terms — successes which no doubt worried Labour — the IWCA’s star has dimmed somewhat. In its place — that is, in part, competing for the same working class political loyalties — arose first the ‘Socialist Alliance’ (1992/2001/2005), then ‘Respect’ (2004).
The short-lived socialist electoral ‘alliance’ underwent various splits, with the role of the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) being key, just as it was in the SA’s replacement Respect. Respect too split, with one branch continuing to campaign under that brand, while the other — dominated by the SWP — became first the ‘Left List’ and now the ‘Left Alternative’. A sense of the fortunes of this last in the series of the SWP’s front groups may be gained by a quick glance at its empty website. LA’s last hurrah — seeVictory for Dick in Londinium, May 4, 2008 — appears to have been failing miserably at council elections last year; a failure which may be usefully contrasted by the BNP’s (relative) success.
With Labour having more or less purged the ‘left’ / the ‘left’ having abandoned Labour (while at the same time Labour has embraced neo-liberal / neo-conservative policies deeply injurious to working class interests), in the absence of a clear working class alternative the BNP looks set to make hay in Europe. See : A ‘perfect storm’ for the BNP to make gains in the European elections?, Nigel Farndale, Telegraph, May 17, 2009:
…There are no protesters today, thanks presumably to the secrecy. Councillor Robert Bailey, an ex-Royal Marine, is the BNP candidate for London. “Most of us are ex-Labour,” he tells me. “The Labour Party used to stand for what we believe in. Now, no way. It’s not just immigration that has changed; it’s our way of life. We’re becoming a Third World country in Europe with no influence, no power and the people not knowing anything about their own history.”
…It is predicted that the BNP may win not only its first seat in the European Parliament but, because of the proportional representation system of voting, as many as seven. To win in the North-West it needs just 8 per cent of the vote, barely 1.5 per cent more than it got in 2004. Griffin is calling it a “perfect storm”. He believes that the combined effects of the credit crunch, the perceived lack of control over immigration and, most significantly, the perception that all of the mainstream parties are corrupt – thanks to the MPs’ expenses scandal – will mean a big turn-out for the BNP. “Journalists are going to say it was a protest vote: well, that is fine with us,” he tells me later in the day. “The British public have a lot to protest about.”
…[The BNP] is also, fundamentally, Old Labour. It would take the railways back into public ownership. It rejects globalisation. It believes in strong trade unions and that as much of industry as possible should be owned by those who work in it. In these respects it reminds you that Oswald Mosley left the Labour Party in 1931 to form the party that ultimately became the British Union of Fascists because Labour had rejected his plan to defeat mass unemployment with a programme of public investment. It is no coincidence that campaign leaflets in white working-class areas describe the BNP as “the Labour Party your grandfathers voted for”.
…I’ve been trying to work out how the BNP is different from the National Front of the Seventies and the British Union of Fascists in the Thirties and the answer is that it is now playing the victim. The white working class it represents felt superior before. Now they feel inferior and victimised…
Neo-Luddism
John Kinsella
ABC Unleashed
May 15, 2009
“Technology isn’t the deliverance of humanity, it is its damnation. ‘Progress’, used as a noun, becomes the linchpin of technological propaganda. Computers aren’t a tool of liberation, but of destruction — look to the power they are chewing, the materials that go into making them, the pollution engendered in their manufacture, especially of batteries for laptops, despite the propaganda of ‘greener’ models, the radiation they emit and the health risks associated with associated wireless technology are being constantly debated.
As an anarchist, I believe firmly that ‘small’ is necessary (or, as Andrew Fleming on his anarchist blog notes, ‘local’, or what I might call ‘regional’), that rights are best protected on a community level and without centralised hierarchies as delivered by the State; that rights come out of consensus (all members of a community having an equal say and all members’ agreement being necessary to making ‘change’ within the community — we might understand this within the usual dynamic as a shift in ‘policy’, but it is fundamentally different)…”
“Cultural change necessarily involves resistance to change. The term Luddite has been resurrected from a previous era to describe one who distrusts or fears the inevitable changes brought about by new technology. The original Luddite revolt occurred in 1811, an action against the English Textile factories that displaced craftsmen in favor of machines. Today’s Luddites continue to raise moral and ethical arguments against the excesses of modern technology to the extent that our inventions and our technical systems have evolved to control us rather than to serve us and to the extent that such leviathans can threaten our essential humanity…”
“Primitivism is the pursuit of ways of life running counter to the development of technology, its alienating antecedents, and the ensemble of changes wrought by both. This site is an exploration into primitivist theory, as well as various works that contribute to an understanding of the tendency.”
“This new type of man… turns his interest away from life, persons, nature, ideas — in short from everything that is alive; he transforms all life into things, including himself and the manifestations of his human faculties of reasoning, seeing, hearing, tasting, loving. Sexuality becomes a technical skill; …feelings are flattened and sometimes substituted for by sentimentality; joy, the expression of intense aliveness, is replaced by “fun” or excitement; and whatever love and tenderness mankind has is directed toward machines and gadgets. The world becomes a sum of lifeless artifacts; from synthetic food to synthetic organs, the whole man becomes part of the total machinery that he controls and is simultaneously controlled by. He has no plan, no goal for life, except doing what the logic of technique determines him to do. He aspires to make robots as one of the greatest achievements of his technical mind, and some specialists assure us that the robot will hardly be distinguished from living men. This achievement will not seem so astonishing when mankind itself is hardly distinguishable from a robot.
The world of life has become a world of “no-life”; persons have becomes “non-persons”, a world of death.”
~ Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, 1974
SBS-TV News, May 11, 2009. Members of the fascist group ‘Golden Dawn’ what arranged with Greek police an assault upon an immigrant squat in Athens are described by fashionista Lee Lin Chin as “right-wing anarchists”.
In another world — often referred to as ‘reality’ — anarchists attempted to attack the fascist scum — with some degree of success — while Athens police did what Athens police do best — protecting the little pea-brained fascists from violent retribution.
A 39-year-old Perth man has been charged under Western Australia’s racial vilification laws in relation to a series of videos posted on the internet website YouTube. It is alleged Maylands resident Brendon O’Connell shot video while making anti-Semitic comments in front of Perth’s Bell Tower and a South Perth supermarket. O’Connell has been charged with conduct intended to incite racial animosity or racist harassment. It is believed he is only the second person to be charged under the laws, which were introduced by the previous state government. The maximum penalty for the offence is 14 years’ jail.
Note that the legislation in question was introduced following a previous wave of racist stupidity conducted by a little gang of fascists called the ‘White Devils’; they acted as a kind of publicity machine for former Australian Nationalists Movement (ANM) leader Jack Van Tongeren. Several went to jail following a police crackdown. The first person charged under the legislation was not a nutzi, however, but an Aboriginal teenager who vilified a white woman — these charges were later dropped, partly at the insistence of her alleged victim. See : Racial vilification in WA, September 15, 2006.
“REVISIONIST historian” Fredrick Toben has been given a three-month jail term for contempt of court – but has also won a 14-day reprieve to file appeal papers…
Fifth teen nabbed for attack in former Austrian concentration camp
dpa
May 12, 2009
Vienna – A fifth teenage suspect has been nabbed for having attacked and hurt participants at a memorial event of a former concentration camp in Austria, an Interior Ministry official confirmed Tuesday. The 14- to 17-year-old suspects have largely confessed the incident at the Ebensee camp in Upper Austria province on Saturday, in which they allegedly fired plastic ammunition on a group of French visitors, likely including one survivor of the camp.
One member of the French group was reportedly hurt, regional Interior Ministry official Alois Lissl told the German Press Agency dpa.
The male teenagers later shocked a group of Italian participants with Nazi salutes.
Interior Minister Maria Fekter on Tuesday announced an investigation into a possible rise of extremism in Austria, and about the contributing factors. Austria’s police intelligence regularly monitors the neo-Nazi scene.
However, the suspects do not belong to such groups, according to police investigators.
“The youths did not say what moved them to do such things at such a young age,” but they indicated they had wanted to provoke, Lissl said.
The five could face charges of committing National Socialist activities, bodily harm, and disturbing the peace of the dead.
Of the 27,000 men from all over Europe who were deported to Ebensee, around 8,500 perished in the camp run by the Nazi SS.
Note that there are positively shitloads of nutzis all over Blogger, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other popular blogging and social networking sites. Speaking of which, the Digital Liberty Coalition brings together a really curious admixture of individuals; its President, ‘Mr. Andrew Kellerman MA’, being one of the most fascinating, and oddly familiar, figures.
“The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naive forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.” ~ Thomas S. Szasz
Released on nettwerk records, 1993. The first solo release by Adam Sherburne, vocalist for Consolidated. The title of the release echoes that of John Stoltenberg’s (1945–) 1989 book Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. Also of interest is Australian scholar R.W. (Raewyn) Connell‘s (1944–) Masculinities (1995/2005): “In its first edition, Masculinities provided one of the most important voices in feminist scholarship by men. Connell argued that there is no such thing as a single concept of masculinity, but, rather, that many different masculinities exist, each associated with different positions of power. In a world in which gender order continues to extend privilege to men over women, but that also raises difficult issues for men and boys, Connell’s account is more pertinent than ever.”
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?"
