In WA, John Van Blitterswyk, a member of the Australian Nationalists Movement (ANM), was recently (May 24) sentenced to two years and four months jail for conspiring to bomb four Chinese restaurants as part of the ANM’s bid to drive Asians out of town — and to thereby create what David Innes, and a mob of other fascists in Perth clustered around Stormfront, are also trying to create, albeit in a slightly less spectacular fashion: exclusively white residential areas (or ‘Pioneer Little Europes’ in their batshit terminology). And while der Führer of the ANM, ‘Java’ Jack van Tongeren, is these days seemingly content with daubing paint onto canvas in the seaside town of Inverloch in Victoria (rather than, say, attempting to spread the bodies of (fellow) Asians onto walls), and has given up on his quest to take over Australia — and to move the capital from Canberra to Alice Springs — in August, Innes is headed to Sydney, where he will embark upon a quest to seize control (from the hands of Dr. James Saleam) of what is seemingly the Holy Grail of the Australian far right: a racist political party not dominated by The Wicked Witch From Ipswich.
In Russia meanwhile, poor old ex-pat Peter Tatchell has been bashed; first by local boneheads, then by the bizarros @ Sp!ked, all for the crime of being publically gay (See Doug Ireland, POLICE BREAK UP MOSCOW GAY PRIDE, EUROPEAN POLS AND GAY LEADERS ARRESTED, May 27, 2007). Tatchell and others were assaulted by the usual muck, and then arrested by Moscow’s finest, in a repeat display of the reactionary authoritarianism for which the Russian state is justly famous.
A handful of lesbians and gays on Tverskaya Street won’t stop that. But they did speak out, and others heard. Sunday night I saw young Russians standing outside police stations for long hours, trying to get food in to those detained and to find them lawyers. Most of those defenders weren’t gay. Andrey Kozlov, a Green with an anarchist’s wisp of beard, worked heroically to help because he believes in democracy and dissent. “Obviously, this is about all of us,” he said.
