The Great Australian Bikini March… Again!

‘The Great Australian Bikini March’ meme has legs, and it knows how to use them.

Even when cancelled.

In the upside-down world of (US) right-wing blogging, even Michelle Malkin has got in on the act. Knowing nothing about Australia (“are not all Australians good American material?”), and caring less, Malkin fails to mention the fact that the March was scheduled to take place on the first anniversary of the Cronulla riots. A small but, like, crucial detail.

Ain’t (pretended) ignorance grand?

In other news:

Bikini march sparks retort
Mark Dunn
Herald Sun
December 7, 2006

MUSLIMS, socialists, unions and other groups will conduct a counter-rally against bikini protesters who plan [?] to march on a Brunswick mosque on Saturday.

Police will monitor the demonstrations, with white supremacists claiming to have infiltrated bikini protest ranks, increasing the potential for confrontation.

Organisers of the “Great Australian Bikini March” had planned to march against the Michael St mosque last [sic] Saturday, anniversary of the Cronulla riots in NSW.

Though the bikini march has been postponed until Australia Day next year, some supporters say they will still hold the rally on Saturday.

The march has been promoted on white supremacist websites.

In response, the Islamic Information and Support Centre and the Socialist Party Australia are organising a barbecue and mosque open day for Saturday at the same time [1pm].

The so-called bikini march, criticised as being insensitive, was designed as a reaction to mufti Sheik Taj el-Din el-Hilaly’s comments on scantily clad women being the cause of some rapes.

Sheik Mohammed Omran, who heads the Brunswick mosque, later defended the mufti.

A mosque spokesman said the theme of their meeting and sausage sizzle was uniting Australia.

BYO vege-sausages!

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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11 Responses to The Great Australian Bikini March… Again!

  1. Mick Reyfield says:

    Vege-Sausages!

    I have veggies in the fridge that are in need of consumption before they expire. So can I please have the recipe to these ‘Snags’.

  2. Mick Reyfield says:

    Andy,

    If a group of White Europeans, who have faced ignored racial discrimination, decide to protest against racism that ‘Whites’ face, today: What would your opinion of this rally be?

  3. @ndy says:

    1) Vege-sausages: avail at all good supermarkets.

    2) By ‘White Europeans’, I take it you mean ‘White Australians of European descent residing in Australia’. But I honestly don’t know what you mean by “ignored racial discrimination”. In other words, yes, it’s possible for White Australians to experience ‘racial discrimination’ — some have — but the fact is: White Australians constitute the vast majority of the population, do not experience institutionalised racism, and live in a country where the construction and maintenance of a White Australia has received both popular cultural and bi-partisan political support; notably, in the form of the ‘Immigration Restriction Act’ of 1901 — a founding document of the Australian state, which remained in force until 1958. So, I would be extremely skeptical, and consider such a ‘protest’ to be of dubious political validity… AT BEST.

  4. Mick Reyfield says:

    Andy,

    I have just found a picture of an Anarchist group protesting at the Cronulla riot – in support of the event.

    Can you explain this: I never knew that Anarchists would rally behind such a demonstration?

  5. @ndy says:

    Mick,

    Yeah, I’m aware of an img of one bloke at Cronulla carrying a sign with a circle A — I think it may also have contained a slogan referring to ‘community’ or something? I’m not aware of the presence of an Anarchist group at the rally but. My ‘explanation’ is a simple one: the bloke’s not an anarchist, he’s a wally.

    Cheers,

    @ndy.

  6. Scott says:

    It’s amazing that you will openly state that White Europeans (British, really) are the majority population of our country…yet you’ll also want us to now not be…and that you’ll openly recognise the immigration restriction act as being a founding document of our society (that you’ve taken full advantage of)…yet now you want to deny that and wish to destroy this society through massive multi-racial immigration!
    Doesn’t a people being the majority population of their own country AND instituting official legislation to ensure such MAKE it their country? End of story?

  7. Paul Justo says:

    Bikinis. Bah. Humbug. Do you hate capitalism? Well if you truly do then you must take a stand with the socialistic Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) against the intense threats it is facing from capitalist states.

    Rally to demand:

    U.S. Military Get out of the Korean Peninsula and the Yellow Sea!
    stop the Capitalists’ Provocations Against Socialistic North Korea!

    2pm Saturday
    12 February 2011
    Sydney Town Hall Square
    For information contact – Trotskyist Platform

    The governments of the U.S.A, Japan, South Korea and Australia have launched a volley of threats against North Korea. It is only support for the DPRK from the Peoples Republic of China that has thus far prevented an all out U.S.-led invasion of North Korea. So why are they targeting North Korea? They invaded Iraq to gain greater control over the world’s oil supplies. Yet North Korea is not oil-rich. The reason that they are targeting the DPRK is because it remains a socialistic state. In such a situation anyone sympathetic to socialism must side with the DPRK regardless of whatever deformities the workers state there may have. The issue here is a class conflict between the socialistic DPRK and capitalist forces. The exact manner in which any battle arises is not of decisive importance just like it does not matter to socialists how a struggle between a capitalist boss and a trade union fighting for workers rights comes about. Nevertheless, it is clear that it is the capitalist side that is provoking the conflict. Tens of thousands of U.S. troops remain stationed in South Korea. North Koreans remember the horrific crimes of the U.S., Britain and Australia during the 1950-53 Korean War, crimes which exceeded even their hideous atrocities later in Vietnam. On several occasions they exterminated the civilian population of North Korea’s capital Pyongyang by simply burning the entire city to the ground with napalm. Now, over the last few years, the U.S. and South Korea have been holding ever more threatening military exercises against North Korea. In these exercises they have taken to firing live ammunition over disputed waters. The imperialists aim to either provoke a war or to bleed North Korea dry. Until the DPRK’s Soviet ally collapsed leaving the DPRK extremely vulnerable, North Korea’s socialised economy had enabled a universally well-fed population with one of the world’s highest literacy levels, free medical care, housing for all and advances in women’s equality. Since the Soviet Union’s destruction the capitalist noose around the DPRK has tightened. It has been hurt by sanctions and the provocative acts of the U.S. military forces in the Korean Peninsula have forced North Korea to spend valuable resources on building up its military defence. Still, contrary to the hysterical Western media propaganda, the North Korean masses manage to get by and continue to hold steadfast against all the threats. They can be compared to workers on a long strike against a powerful boss – their struggle brings many hardships but they stand firm in the hope of a brighter future. Their courageous struggle to maintain socialistic rule must meet with solidarity from opponents of capitalism here. The conflict between the U.S-led capitalist states and the DPRK is a frontline in the conflict between socialism and capitalism, between the working class and the capitalist exploiters. Anyone here who cannot rise to the defence of the socialistic conquests in the DPRK – however warped they are from incessant capitalist pressure – is incapable of winning new conquests against capitalism.

  8. @ndy says:

    Scott writes:

    “It’s amazing that you will openly state that White Europeans (British, really) are the majority population of our country… yet you’ll also want us to now not be…”

    The reasons why the Australian population is majority European (and majority British) is hardly something to be proud of: the Australian colony (1788–) and nation-state (1901–) has been built on the decimation and in many cases outright genocide of indigenous peoples (so defined in relation to imperialist conquest) in this part of the world. This attempted and in many cases successful genocide being the direct consequence of British imperial expansion; a project which, like other imperial conquests, has generated enormous misery and violence for the many and great riches for the few. The convict slaves whom many (but certainly not a majority) of Australians count as their ancestors were treated with absolute contempt by their British rulers.

    The proposal to colonize Botany Bay with convicts was formally drawn up… in an unsigned document titled “Heads of a Plan for effectually disposing of convicts” and was presented to the [British] cabinet in August 1786. Its emphasis was clear: The proposed colony would serve as “a remedy for the evils likely to result from the late alarming and numerous increase of felons in this country, and more particularly in the metropolis.” The secondary benefit of the region’s raw materials was presented at the end of the document: “It may also be proper to attend to the possibility of procuring… masts and ships’ timber for the use of our fleets in India, as the distance between the two countries is not greater than between Great Britain and America…”

    Further:

    By 1837, hanging was mainly restricted to cases of murder, while crime after crime — forgery, cattle-theft, housebreaking — was relegated to the less terrible and magical status of a “transportable” offense. Slowly, the English authorities acknowledged the mistakes and fantasies that had led their predecessors to fetishize the death penalty. But the real rise of transportation began, not with the law itself, but with its new enforcers: the “peelers,” the English police, established by Sir Robert Peel in 1827. A police force meant a huge rise, not in gross crime, but in successful arrests and convictions. Likewise, the abandonment of transportation was not caused by any fall in crime, but by three other factors: the growing moral and political opposition to the System [of transportation] among English reformers in the 1830s, the growth of an alternative English penitentiary system and the Australians’ own opposition to a continuous dumping of fresh criminals on what, after 50 years of settlement, they had come to view as their own soil.

    In their most sanguine moments, the authorities hoped that [Australia] would eventually swallow a whole class — the “criminal class,” whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs of late Georgian and early Victorian England. Australia was settled to defend English property not from the frog-eating invader across the Channel but from the marauder within. English lawmakers wished not only to get rid of the “criminal class” but if possible to forget about it. Australia was a cloaca, invisible, its contents filthy and unnameable. Jeremy Bentham, inveighing against the “thief-colony” in 1812, argued that transportation: “…was indeed a measure of experiment… but the subject-matter of experiment was, in this case, a peculiarly commodious one; a set of animae viles, a sort of excrementitious mass [ie, shit], that could be projected, and accordingly was projected — projected, and as it should seem purposely — as far out of sight as possible.”

    The facts of Australia’s colonisation and the dispossession of its indigenous peoples may be regarded as unfortunate, but it seems to me that there is also an ethical obligation on the part of non-indigenous (majority European–and majority British–) Australians to redress this injustice, as part of a more general commitment to establishing an egalitarian society in harmony with (non-human) nature. In this context, this is what I ‘want’ and would like to see, and is a desire which I think renders a commitment to maintaining Australia as a “majority European (and majority British)” semi-colonial outpost redundant. To put it another way: I’m much more interested in questions of ‘social justice’ than I am (White) racial purity.

    “…and that you’ll openly recognise the immigration restriction act as being a founding document of our society (that you’ve taken full advantage of)…”

    My recognition of the Immigration Restriction Act as being a key document (to be precise: a piece of legislation) in Australian history is nothing personal. It’s also not something I can take full, half, or even a quarter advantage of as it ceased having legal status in 1958 (also notable for being the year in which Collingwood defeated Melbourne in the VFL premiership by 16 points, and thus averted the historical tragedy which would have been the case had Melbourne won, thus equalling Collingwood’s still-unbeaten record of four premierships in a row (1927–1930)).

    “yet now you want to deny that and wish to destroy this society through massive multi-racial immigration!”

    Huh? I don’t deny either the fact that a) the Australian population is of majority European descent or b) the existence of the Immigration Restriction Act. I also haven’t indicated a personal preference for a government program of ‘massive multi-racial immigration’. I have expressed, inter alia, a wish to dismantle those aspects of Australian and global society which perpetuate inequality, hierarchy and no-fun, and am also hoping for a Collingwood premiership victory in 2011.

    Sue me.

    “Doesn’t a people being the majority population of their own country AND instituting official legislation to ensure such MAKE it their country? End of story?”

    In a word? No. Then again, I think you’re confusing some issues while avoiding others.

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