- Update : Disruption expected in Codnor as protestors arrive, Ripley & Heanor News, August 14, 2008 “…Police have invoked special public order laws in an effort to keep the number of anti-BNP prtestors who plan to come to the area on Saturday down to 700. A number of shops in Codnor are expected to close over the weekend. Once police estimate that 700 activists have turned up on Saturday, new arrivals will be asked to disperse and could be arrested if they refuse. They will meet at 9am in Codnor Market Place and will be allowed to march from 11.45am. The A6007 Heanor Road will be closed.”
Protest at BNP’s racist policies, The Socialist, August 13, 2008 “…The police have invoked sections 14 and 14a of the Public Order Act for what we understand is the duration of the BNP’s event, which gives them enormous extra powers. It is rumoured they have cancelled all police leave in Derbyshire. They identified an ‘official’ protest area about 1.5 miles from the BNP site. Footpaths are being closed and anyone caught ‘trespassing’ will be subject to arrest. To arrange such an exclusion zone is a denial of our democratic rights. The police aim to try to limit and control the anti-BNP protesters, and agreed with Unite Against Fascism (UAF) – who had announced their own separate protest – a march from the ‘official’ protest area to a place nearer the BNP site, though still almost a mile away from it. In the interests of unity, NSBNP will support this march. The police also agreed with UAF that 30 people will be escorted to near the entrance to the site for a token protest and photograph opportunity, whilst the main body of the protest marches back…
“Well, talk about bad taste…”
England
Sheesh. The SWP remains silent on the fact that Unite Against Fascism (UAF) has determined to split the millions hundreds of thousands thousands (hundreds?) of anti-racist and anti-fascist activists expected to protest the upcoming British National party’s Red White & Blue Festival // Scumfest. Instead, Anindya Bhattacharyya writes ‘Unions throw their weight behind protest to stop Nazi BNP rally’; referring, in part, to the efforts of Notts Stop the BNP to liaise with and gain the support of trade unions. Thus the 11am protest called for by UAF, claims Bhattacharyya, “has been called by East Midlands Unite Against Fascism (UAF) and is supported by a variety of trade unions, including Midlands TUC, Midlands CWU, Midlands GMB, Midlands Unite and East Midlands Unison”. The 9am protest, on the other hand, organised primarily by and through “the Stop the Red, White and Blue campaign, a politically independent network of anti-fascists”, is merely supported by local unions including FBU, UCU, Unison and the NUT… Derby Unite Against Fascism, other local anti-fascist groups and a multitude of trade union organisations. East Midlands Unison, East Midlands TUC and the rail union RMT…”.
Anyway:
The true nature of the event is also revealed by the “guest speakers” that the BNP has invited along. These include Marc Abramsson, leader of the National Democrats, a Swedish Nazi party. Abramsson has campaigned for “racially pure kindergartens” in Sweden that would exclude all non-white children. His party has also organised BONEHEAD gangs to physically attack gay pride marches in Sweden. Also speaking at the BNP’s hate-fest is Petra Edelmannova, chair of the Czech National Party, a fascist organisation that has led a vicious racist campaign against Romany Gypsies in the Czech Republic. Last month Edelmannova co-authored a booklet called “The Final Solution to the Gypsy Issue in the Czech Lands” that advocates “relocating” Czech Romanies to India.
Also joining the British Nationalists in their alcohol-free partying will be a colonial or two. Or as the BNP puts it: “This is your chance to meet in person some of the activists who are making things happen in the Czech Republic along with friends from Sweden (in the form of the National Democrats) and from the Protectionist Party of Australia, who are closely modelling themselves on the BNP”. The Australian speaking at the event is Mark Wilson. Mark is a former comrade of Dr James Saleam who has since jumped ship for arch-rivals the APP. Mark reckons Whitey oughta jump up and down more on Australia Day, ANZAC Day, May Day and Eureka Day (December 3). “Tragically, these Days have been tailored to the agendas of multiculturalist, gender-bending, globalist ideology.” (Mark is also sure that he hasn’t done anything to the Aborigines to apologise for, is a recent migrant from Britain, and wishes the Aborigines no harm… but would rather not live next door to them.) Other speakers include the New Right/national anarchist ideologue Jonathan Bowden, veteran neo-Nazi Martin Wingfield, and Griffin sidekick Simon Darby.
- As for Those Thieving Gypsy Bastards, following the billionaire Berlusconi’s triumph, the Red Cross is lending a hand to Italian authorities in their campaign to sweep Italy clean of the scum / maintain law ‘n’ order.
How nice.
Oh yeah: Unite and fight fascism! At 11am. (But not 9am.)
As for antifa, no doubt they’ll be the joker in the pack…
See also : One man’s war against his demons, “When Matthew Collins became sickened by his far-right BNP comrades, he betrayed them. He tells Rosie Boycott his story”, The Observer, March 10, 2002
Germany
“A youth camp run by a neo-Nazi organization is broken up by police near Rostock in northern Germany. Authorities said the children were being instilled with Nazi propaganda under the guise of a sleep-away camp” (German Police Raids Nazi Youth Camp, Deutsche Welle, August 11, 2008). Which sounds worryingly akin to local Schutzstaffel Untersturmführer Welf Herfurth’s efforts to recruit Australia’s Patriotik Yoof into the nationalist anarchist camp. Whitey is frustrated in Germany too:
Neo-Nazis turning increasingly violent
The head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), Joerg Ziercke, told the German daily Tagesspiegel neo-Nazis were adopting increasingly violent tactics. Ziercke said neo-Nazis were attacking left-wingers and police officers with an aggression that can be seen as a change in strategy. “Before, neo-Nazis largely avoided violence for tactical reasons, but this no longer appears to be the case,” he added. Ziercke said the riots on May 1 in Hamburg were an example of the new strategy. Clashes erupted in Hamburg when 6,000 people took to the streets to protest against a march involving some 1,500 supporters of the far-right NPD party. Twenty police officers were hurt and some 60 people were arrested. Arson attacks by right-wing groups were also on the rise, according to Ziercke. There were some 15 incidents reported in the first five months of 2008 – five times as many as in the same period last year.
See also : Neo-Nazi ‘national anarchists’ in Germany in the headlines (June 4, 2008)
Russia
Oops.
Youths Convicted in Arkhangelsk for Attack on Purported Neo-Nazi
UCSJ
August 11, 2008
Two youths affiliated with the anti-fascist punk movement were convicted in an Arkhangelsk, Russia court for attacking a student they identified as a neo-Nazi, according to an August 5, 2008 report by the Regnum news agency. The youths, who were students at a local college, reportedly heard that another student was a neo-Nazi and burst into his classroom wearing masks and armed with martial arts weapons and a metal pipe. They then beat the student, along with another youth who tried to stop the violence, before fleeing the scene. One of the defendants got off with a suspended sentence because he was underaged at the time of the attack; the second defendant was sentenced to a year and a half in prison.
See also : [For Dion] Shadowboxing (Petersburg Antifa) | chtodelat news (August 5, 2008)
And how does opposing BNP help me? Being White?
Why do you think Europeans should oppose the BNP?
Huh?
The BBC says:
The Original Axis of Evil
Samantha Power
The New York Times
May 2, 2004
THE ANATOMY OF FASCISM By Robert O. Paxton:
Fascism, to hear President Bush tell it, has been revived by Islamic militants. ”The terrorists are the heirs to fascism,” he has said. ”They have the same will to power, the same disdain for the individual, the same mad global ambitions. And they will be dealt with in just the same way. Like all fascists, the terrorists cannot be appeased: they must be defeated.”
In this statement, Bush laid out his checklist for what constitutes fascism. Such checklists are required because fascism — unlike Communism, socialism, capitalism or conservatism — is a smear word more often used to brand one’s foes than it is a descriptor used to shed light on them. Robert O. Paxton, a professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of several books, including ”Vichy France,” is not the first scholar to wade into a definitional and historical quagmire in order to answer the question, What is fascism? Indeed, his book ”The Anatomy of Fascism” — which doubles as a history and a sustained argument — is not the most original study of the subject. But it is so fair, so thorough and, in the end, so convincing that it may well become the most authoritative.
Why should readers care about fascism? Paxton offers one answer at the outset. ”Fascism was the major political innovation of the 20th century, and the source of much of its pain.” But in exploring how such uncouth nobodies as Hitler and Mussolini introduced what the Italian philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce described as an ”onagrocracy” — or ”government by braying asses” — he also hopes to enable us to recognize ”what the 21st century must avoid.”
”The Anatomy of Fascism” is the work of a distinguished scholar who has sifted through the primary sources, the tomes and the trends in an effort to synthesize and even settle prior debates. His main emphasis is on Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, but in order to demonstrate why certain fascist movements were able to seize power while most remained marginal, he contrasts these ”successes” with fascist sputterings in Britain, France, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere.
Paxton proceeds chronologically, tracing how fascist movements are born, take root, assume power, govern and self-destruct. At every stage he explores the interaction among the leader, the state, the party and civil society, examining the symbiosis between socioeconomic conditions and the political agents who seized upon and shaped them.
World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 contributed mightily to the advent of fascism. The war generated acute economic malaise, national humiliation and legions of restive veterans and unemployed youths who could be harnessed politically. The Bolshevik Revolution, but one symptom of the frustration with the old order, made conservative elites in Italy and Germany so fearful of Communism that anything — even fascism — came to seem preferable to a Marxist overthrow.
Still, Paxton retains an important capacity for incredulity. How on earth was it that Benito Mussolini, who won a mere 4,796 votes out of 315,165 in the 1919 election, could find himself appointed prime minister in 1922? The answer, Paxton makes clear, was not Mussolini’s policy platform. ”They ask us what is our program,” Mussolini said. ”Our program is simple. We want to govern Italy.” Rather, it was the societal ills, the conservatives’ fear of a Communist revolution, the paralysis of Italy’s liberal constitutional order and the violence inflicted by fascist militia — violence that made the state eager to co-opt the violent themselves.
How could Hitler, whose Nazi Party placed ninth in 1928 (with only 2.8 percent of the popular vote), soar to first in 1932 (with 37.2 percent)? In Germany, storm troopers intimidated enemies, Hitler himself delivered mesmerizing harangues and the Nazi Party became a catchall movement that appealed to those Germans from all classes who were disillusioned with the bankrupt mainstream parties.
But none of this was enough to bring about fascist rule. One of Paxton’s main contributions is to focus less on the ”Duce myth” and the ”Führer myth” and more on the indispensable ”conservative complicities” behind the fascist takeovers. Paxton debunks the consoling fiction that Mussolini and Hitler seized power. Rather, conservative elites desperate to subdue leftist populist movements ”normalized” the fascists by inviting them to share power. It was the mob that flocked to fascism, but the elites who elevated it. ”At each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution,” Paxton writes. King Victor Emmanuel III responded to Mussolini’s ”gigantic bluff,” the Black Shirt march on Rome, not by imposing martial law but by offering him the prime ministership. And in 1933 it was the ambitious German Catholic aristocrat Franz Von Papen, believing he would be the one who gained power, who arranged the deal that gave Hitler the chancellorship.
Fascists never assumed power in countries where governing structures functioned ”tolerably well,” where conservatives retained confidence or where local fascists remained ”pure” by avoiding political compromise or elections. ”It was not enough to don a colored shirt, march about and beat up some local minority to conjure up the success of a Hitler or a Mussolini,” Paxton writes. ”It took a comparable crisis, a comparable opening of political space, comparable skill at alliance building and comparable cooperation from existing elites.”
Fascist movements and regimes are different from military dictatorships and authoritarian regimes. They seek not to exclude, but rather to enlist, the masses. They often collapse the distinction between the public and private sphere (eliminating the latter). In the words of Robert Ley, the head of the Nazi Labor Office, the only private individual who existed in Nazi Germany was someone asleep. And, crucially, their durability depends on their ability to remain in constant motion. It was this need to keep citizens intoxicated by fascism’s dynamism that made Mussolini and Hitler see war as both desirable and necessary. ”War is to men,” Mussolini insisted, ”as maternity is to women.”
Paxton leaves his readers with a working definition of fascism:
Fine-tuning definitions, however, is less important for the future than identifying and neutralizing fascist threats. This recognition will come, Paxton believes, ”not by checking the color of shirts” but ”by understanding how past fascisms worked.” We should ”not look for exact replicas, in which fascist veterans dust off their swastikas,” he writes; nor should we look for hate crimes and extreme nationalist propaganda. Rather, we should address the conditions and the enablers — political deadlocks in times of crises, and conservatives who want tougher allies and elicit support through nationalist and racist demagogy.
For every official American attempt to link Islamic terrorism to fascism, there is an anti-Bush protest that applies the fascist label to Washington’s nationalist rhetoric, assault on civil liberties and warmaking. Paxton’s study has made it no less likely that the label will be appropriated. But the lasting contribution of this splendid book is to remind us that fascism, if it returns, will do so not simply because of a rousing leader, but because of his timid accomplices.
— Extract —
The word fascism has its root in the Italian fascio, literally a bundle or sheaf. More remotely, the word recalled the Latin fasces, an axe encased in a bundle of rods that was carried before the magistrates in Roman public processions to signify the authority and unity of the state. Before 1914, the symbolism of the Roman fasces was usually appropriated by the Left. Marianne, symbol of the French Republic, was often portrayed in the nineteenth century carrying the fasces to represent the force of Republican solidarity against her aristocratic and clerical enemies. Fasces are prominently displayed on Christopher Wren’s Sheldonian Theater (1664-69) at Oxford University. They appeared on the Lincoln Memorial in Washington (1922) and on the United States quarter minted in 1932.
Italian revolutionaries used the term fascio in the late nineteenth century to evoke the solidarity of committed militants. The peasants who rose against their landlords in Sicily in 1893-94 called themselves the Fasci Siciliani. When in late 1914 a group of left-wing nationalists, soon joined by the socialist outcast Benito Mussolini, sought to bring Italy into World War I on the Allied side, they chose a name designed to communicate both the fervor and the solidarity of their campaign: the Fascio Rivoluzionario d’Azione Interventista (Revolutionary League for Interventionist Action). At the end of World War I, Mussolini coined the term fascismo to describe the mood of the little band of nationalist ex-soldiers and pro-war syndicalist revolutionaries that he was gathering around himself. Even then, he had no monopoly on the word fascio, which remained in general use for activist groups of various political hues.
Officially, Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday, March 23, 1919.
That morning, somewhat more than a hundred persons, including war veterans, syndicalists who had supported the war, and Futurist intellectuals, plus some reporters and the merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolcro, to “declare war against socialism … because it has opposed nationalism.” Now Mussolini called his movement the Fasci di Combattimento, which means, very approximately, “fraternities of combat.”
The Fascist program, issued two months later, was a curious mixture of veterans’ patriotism and radical social experiment, a kind of “national socialism.” On the national side, it called for fulfilling Italian expansionist aims in the Balkans and around the Mediterranean that had just been frustrated a few months before at the Paris Peace Conference. On the radical side, it proposed women’s suffrage and the vote at eighteen, abolition of the upper house, convocation of a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution for Italy (presumably without the monarchy), the eight hour workday, worker participation in “the technical management of industry,” the “partial expropriation of all kinds of wealth” by a heavy and progressive tax on capital, the seizure of certain Church properties, and the confiscation of 85 percent of war profits.
Mussolini’s movement was not limited to nationalism and assaults on property. It boiled with the readiness for violent action, anti-intellectualism, rejection of compromise, and contempt for established society that marked the three groups who made up the bulk of his first followers: demobilized war veterans, pro-war syndicalists, and Futurist intellectuals.
To what anarchy has to provide, what’s in it for white people? Because it doesn’t seem that anarchy provides a lot for us.
“Us”? Hate to break the news: you’re one person. You don’t speak for whites, let alone this white. Go read a book. Think before you write.
I will ask again, what does anarchy provide for white people. Most sites that support anarchy do not hold a positive view towards whites.
For example?
http://illvox.org/category/white-privilege/
Can’t find an article which paints a positive picture of white people (they even bag the white workers).
http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/africa/wsfws/4_1_moz.html
“The Mosagrius agreement signed in May 1997 between President Nelson Mandela and Mozambique’s President Joaquin Chissano has opened the door for the white right to exploit Mozambican peasants…”
Even more negativity directed [at] the white workers.
Google search ‘Anarchist people of colour’.
So I guess white people are the bad guys in this movement.
Anarchism is against the white man.
WR.
OK.
Two examples.
One, a collection of posts on a site called illvox:
“illvox is dedicated to relating people of color-led political struggles, especially from an anti-authoritarian point of view, to a broad audience… llvox emerged in June 2007. It is manifested and maintained by a small collective of people of color.”
The posts themselves are numerous, and by different authors. What they have in common — apart from being categorised under the heading “white privilege” by the illvox admin — is that they concern the nature of ‘whiteness’ understood as being a political and social condition, one closely related to ‘white supremacy’; which, it is argued, is a fundamental aspect of US and (occasionally) global society.
Two, a brief article on the nature of a 1997 political agreement between the Mozambican and South African governments regarding the distribution of large tracts of land in Mozambique to several hundred white South African farmers. The article claims that this agreement is unjust and will further impoverish and disempower local black peasants.
And?
You’re obviously incapable of constructing an argument. When you are and do, I’ll respond to it.
Incidentally, how old are you?
(illvox is dedicated to relating people of color-led political struggles, especially from an anti-authoritarian point of view, to a broad audience… llvox emerged in June 2007. It is manifested and maintained by a small collective of people of color.”)
If they are dedicated to supporting people of colour, then where is their support towards white workers, or white people in living in poverty?
(Two, a brief article on the nature of a 1997 political agreement between the Mozambican and South African governments regarding the distribution of large tracts of land in Mozambique to several hundred white South African farmers. The article claims that this agreement is unjust and will further impoverish and disempower local black peasants. )
But they attack WHITE farmers, rather then attacking the South African government for dispossessing their land.
What I am getting at here is, what’s in it for the white man by supporting these movements?
I do not align myself with any political movement, it’s just that many whites feel they are tossed to the bottom of the barrel when it comes to leftwing politics.
Don’t worry, I have put the question forward to your friends at RevLeft.
http://www . revleft.com/vb/left-wing-politics-t89147/index.html?p=1239353#post1239353
Final words (for now): I’m truly glad you discovered RevLeft WR. Stay there for as long as possible. It’s one place I’m not.
anarchism is just a cypher for state-ideology conformism and unpaid henchmanship of the liberal-capitalist aristos. haha your a liberal doormat!
Oi Master Rice: it’s spelled “you’re”.