Anarchism is an ideology for fuckwits, bums & lowlifes, And That’s Official!
Thus, two fuckwitted lowlife bums in the US, Hugh Farrell and Gina “Tiga” Wertz, have been arrested and charged with racketeering — under RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) laws originally introduced in 1970 ostensibly in order to target criminal associations such as The Mafia — for allegedly “conspiring” to engage in tree sits, participate in non-violent civil disobedience, and make an inflammatory blog post against the I-69 NAFTA superhighway. Worse yet, Hugh Farrell “has been observed advocating literature and materials which advocate anarchy, property destruction and violence, including Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching [and] Recipes for Disaster: An Anarchist Cookbook.”
Decent, law-abiding, tax- mortgage- and rent-paying citizens everywhere agree that these books should be burned, not read. Sadly, such dangerous texts are also available in Australia. (Recipes, for example, which shouldn’t be but often is confused with the tract The Anarchist Cookbook — and one zillion versions thereof — may be purchased from Barricade infoshop or via Beating Hearts distro.)
Obviously, if you were a punk rock music fanboy, you might react by way of stating “No offence but honestly who gives a shit about some fuckwitted lowlife bums in the US?”; or possibly by suggesting that if one cares about US state repression, the only logical conclusion is to immediately apply for a Green Card.
Be that as it may, as observed by the editors of The Sun in 1990, THE ANARCHISTS are out to disrupt public order by manipulating people with genuine grievances — they are parasitical wreckers who hijack rallies. Anarchism is, “by definition, imported. The immigration authorities should find out whether any of its adherents who are not Australian born are, through their actions, in breach of the permits under which they remain here. If so, let’s send them home. They are not welcome!”
These sentiments were echoed sixteen years later by leading Australian Marxist theoretician Mick Armstrong who, with an eagle-eye for detail, remarked that ‘THE ANARCHISTS’ who attended the protest rally against the G20 were crazy, ultra-violent and silly, “they simply exploited the demo for their own purposes”, and during preparations for protest at the summit were hostile towards and contemptuous of others. On The Big Day itself, “they did all they could to disrupt the demonstration and were hostile, abusive, threatening and ultra-sectarian”.
With similar political acuity, Mick notes that what gave these scum “a certain critical mass… was the presence of considerable numbers of anarchists from overseas”. Worse yet: “one of our members from New Zealand said he recognised at least 40 NZ anarchists” and “at least 20 of them by name”. Worst of all perhaps, there “were also a considerable number of black bloc anarchists from Europe… people from Sweden, Germany and England. These people are like football hooligans who travel the world looking for violence.”
This desperate search for masses of people to manipulate into performing outrageous acts of violence has been the stock-in-trade of anarchist scum since at least the late 1800s, evidence for which is readily available in bourgeois media reportage, police intelligence briefings, and the ideological pronouncements of the leadership of Socialist Alternative.
As for what might be the best response to these foreign scum stirring up trouble, the courts — thankfully — decide to gaol Akin Sari for 28 months. In an earlier era, he may well have been hanged (and judging by the enormous danger the presence of anarchists in any city has to the maintenance of law and order, perhaps should have been). Mick Armstrong, on the other hand — being a theoretician with many years of experience in the student movement — opts for a more liberal approach: “The left should offer no comfort to these crazies. We should do whatever we can to isolate them. They are wreckers.”
- For those of you who are crazy or stupid enough not to take Mick’s advice, please note that on Friday, June 26 from 7.30pm you can enjoy a “Trivia Fun Night With Friends!” @ the Princes’ Park Bowling Club in Carlton. The organisers have promised not to subject those in attendance to ultra-violence, but do point out that those with delicate constitutions are warned that individuals born in places other than Australia may well be present at some point during the evening.
Note that, in an attempt to dissuade their colleagues at the University of Melbourne from attending the Trivia Night, the SAlt Film Unit have produced the following short documentary based on their recollections of the carnage enacted on the streets of Melbourne in November 2006, as foreign anarchists attacked SAlt paper sellers and invaded their parents’ tastefully-decorated apartments:
Final confirmation of the innate wickedness of anarchism and anarchists is revealed through an examination of the origins of May Day, where anarchists once again revealed their violent nature, and the ugly manner in which this violence is deployed against legitimate businessman and the police — with disastrous consequences for the contemporary student left and its ability to chant slogans and sell newspapers to other students in peace and quiet.
Haymarket Martyrs–Origins of International Workers Day Pt 1
Haymarket Martyrs–Origins of International Workers Day Pt 2
The Chicago Times called the workers “ragtag and bob-tailed cuthroats of Beelzebub from the Rhine, the Danube, the Vistula and the Elba”. Labour’s largest paper called them “wild beasts”. The respected Albany Law Review called them “long-haired, wild-eyed, bad-smelling, atheistic, reckless foreign wretches”.
Haymarket Martyrs–Origins of International Workers Day Pt 3
See also : Great Expectations… (May 4, 2009) | Haymarket: A Novel by Martin Duberman (Seven Stories, 2003). A novelisation by a US labour historian of The Haymarket Affair (1886), a torrid period in US history what gave birth to the modern May Day, an occasion the significance of which persists despite over 120 years of denial and historical revisionism. In addition to providing an account of the class war in late nineteenth century Chicago, Martin, moreover, imagines the lives of two of its key players: Albert Parsons and Lucy Gonzalez (Lucy Parsons).
Historical note:
…in December 1879, when thousands of Exodusters were making their way overland from Texas to Kansas, the Socialist Labour Party, of which [Frederick A. Sorge, Marx’s friend and correspondent and National Labour Union activist] was a chief founder, held its national convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Albert Parsons, himself a Texan driven out for his equalitarian views, introduced a resolution “concerning land grants”. The whole country by that time was aware of the Exodus, but the records do not show whether Parsons made any mention of it in his talk and resolution. In any case, the convention as a whole ignored it; the resolution was referred to the Committee on Platforms and is not heard of again.
The South Revisits the Problem of Social Control
I have noted how the Protestant tenants, their exclusive Ulster Custom tenant-right eroded by structural economic changes and drained by reduction of the size of their holdings, indicated for a brief period a readiness to make common cause with the Catholic peasants to secure the legal enactment of a tenant-right law for all Ireland. Radical Reconstruction had likewise shown that there were some Southern whites who were ready to make common cause with the black population to establish a society based on racial equality of constitutional rights.
They dared, and some died as John Brown had done, struggling side-by-side with African-American freedom fighters for their common cause, the end of racial oppression. They are not so well known as they should be; here is a selected list of ten of them:
• A. P. Dostie, described by one historian as “animated by a fanatical ambition to subdue rebels and elevate slaves” (Shugg, Class Struggle in Louisiana, p.217), killed in a mob attack on the New Orleans Black and White Convention in July 1866; his dying words: “Let the good fight go on!” (Proceedings of the Southern Loyalist Convention, September 1866, printed in the Reporter, no.33, Washington, DC, 17 September 1866).
• Calvin Pepper of Virginia, the only white person on the delegation which Fredrick Douglass led to present a petition to the President on behalf of Negro suffrage (Black, Home-made Yankees, p.189. John Richard Dennett, The South As It Is, 1865–1866 [New York, 1866], pp.6–7).
• James W. Hunnicutt of Virginia, who “campaigned vigorously against the vagrancy laws, for racial equality, and against voting and office-holding by ‘rebels'” (Black, p.250, citing Union League Club of New York, Aid for Virginia [New York, 1867]).
• George W. Ashburn of Georgia, murdered “for consorting with Negroes” (Black, p.30).
• J. W. Smith, of Texas, killed for “organizing Negroes” (ibid.).
• Thomas J. Mackey of South Carolina, “one of the few white men to attend the state labor convention in Columbia in 1869” (ibid., p.34).
• William Wallace Chisolm and John P. Gilmer, killed in Mississippi in 1877 in order that “confidence [be] restored between the races” (James D. Lynch, Kemper County Vindicated: A Peep at Radical Rule in Mississippi [New York, 1879], p.319).
• Alexander Boyd, murdered in Eutaw, Alabama, “for too earnest enquiries into outrages committed against freedmen” (Black, pp.47–8, citing the Greensboro, North Carolina Republican, 28 April 1870).
• John Walter Stephens of North Carolina, poor farmer, uncompromising activist in the struggle against white supremacy, whose lynching and the manner of it are described in Chapter 30 of Albion W. Tourgée’s novel A Fool’s Errand (1879; New York, 1961).
The ruling class strangled Reconstruction by sheer terror, but they could not forget the time when the impossible happened and a part of the European-American population arrayed itself against white supremacy. The consensus is that the proportion of this defection from this white-race function was insignificant. If it was so insignificant why the reign of terror against it? Was the terror not simply a new edition of the gag rules, the tar and feathers, and the interdiction of abolitionist mail that had been produced by the fears of abolitionism in the South in the pre-war decades? And, in the end, had not those forebodings proved valid? Given the decision to continue the system of racial oppression, given the self-limiting advantages of rule by mere terrorism, given the dilemma-dictated reliance on African-American labor, given the constitutional leverage, actual or potential, now in the hands of the African-Americans — the matter of the intermediate stratum remained in urgent need of attention.
~ Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race: Volume One, ‘Racial Oppression and Social Control’, Verso, 1994, pp.150–151.
