Reading, watching, books, films, television…

Ha!

Dazzling Darrin Hodges‘ blog Anglo-Australian National Community Council — er, that is, Hodges and his dog, who together maintain a watching brief on the Muslim menace threatening Orstraya — made a special guest appearance on Media Watch tonight, as evidence of the manner in which, when they take wing, media falsehoods have a tendency to land in some fairly bizarre nests. Dazza’s blog entry is titled ‘How you are made to pay Jizya‘, while the story itself concerns a report in the Herald Sun of May 9 regarding the supposed expenditure of close to $500 million by the Federal Government on ‘Muslim assimilation’. Two weeks later, the same story was mirrored in one of Uncle Rupert’s other quality papers, the Courier Mail:

Muslim millions missing
Michael Madigan
May 24, 2007

NEARLY half a billion dollars may have been spent on a… national plan to help assimilate Muslims into Australian society — but it is not clear exactly where the money has gone…

D’oh!

As reported on Media Watch, the actual amount of filthy lucre put aside for some kinda cultural assimilation program (which apparently forms part of a National Action Plan), was more like $461,000 — and it wasn’t dedicated to ‘assimilating’ Muslims in any case. Nevertheless, on the basis of the Herald Sun‘s reportage, boofhead Neil Mitchell, a local Melbourne shock-jock (today honoured by Queen Betty by being made an ‘Officer of the Order of Australia’ — “The award is a recognition of the things for which I am a funnel”, he said) then picked up the ball and went running; the story has also been the subject of bigoted fuckwittery on Scumfront, unsurprisingly. The White Man’s fury was sparked despite the fact that the Herald Sun buried a retraction regarding their, ah, slight over-estimation of the costs (but not nature) of the program the following day; typically, a correction published at the bottom of another column complaining about how much refugees cost the long-suffering Aussie taxpayer (Refugee problems tackled, May 10, 2007):

The Herald Sun wrongly reported yesterday that $461 million was allocated in the Budget to help Muslim communities integrate into the Australian community. The package, to build social cohesion, harmony and security, is in fact worth $461,000 in funding to the states and territories in 2007-08, and $513,000 in federal programs.

Wankers.

In other news:

Well well, bloody hell. My blog’s been undergoing a transition recently, and like other transitions, unfortunately, it hasn’t been all beer and skittles. Thus, while I’ve been meaning to blog about a number of subjects — the G8 summit in Germany (hello insultadarity), and the conclusion to the recent series of prosecutions of eco-radicals in the US, in particular — for technical reasons, I really haven’t been able to. I’ve also been wanting to work through the pile of unpublished posts I’ve been accumulating, on subjects such as hatred for the rich; an amusing episode of fraud involving a number of Trotskyist groups in Eastern Europe a few years ago; musings on Andrew Bolt’s unique contribution to current affairs journalism; definitions of ‘globalisation’; a review of the Second Latin America and Asia Pacific Gathering(!); the Cronulla pogrom and its political aftermath; an analysis of the role of The Australian newspaper in articulating a ruling class consensus on industrial relations; anarchism and Christianity; and more besides.

Another day, maybe.

In the meantime, I thought I may as well write a few words regarding a few words I’ve been reading… if only because I occasionally need reminding… that as each day bleeds into the next… as the weeks, months and years pass… and as I inch slowly towards the grave… the reasons why my mind is so often full of such happy, life-affirming thoughts also occasionally requires explaining.

Ahem.

In a rare excursion into the world of fiction, I actually went and bought myself a crime novel: Ian Rankin‘s The Naming of the Dead. The front cover blurb declares that Rankin is “unmatched in the field of British crime fiction” (The Times), which really doesn’t say much for the current state of the genre, as the novel is fairly tedious. Of course, the reason I bought it is ‘cos this particular episode in the continuing adventures of Detective Inspector John Rebus is set in July 2005, during the G8 meeting in Gleneagles. (And the reason I read it is ‘cos I bought it.) Despite Rebus being touted as being something of an ‘anarchist’ (that is, he sometimes bends or breaks the rules), however, Rankin relies on the usual tropes to describe the summit and its opposition — which, like the novel as a whole, is simply tiresome. It does have at least one funny line in it but:

In the corridor, she leaned against the wall and let her head drop.
‘Long day?’ Rebus guessed.
‘You ever tried questioning a German anarcho-syndicalist?’

On a more serious note, Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International by Kevin Coogan (Autonomedia, New York, 1999) is an interesting read, and Loren Goldner’s written a worthwhile review of it too, available here. Of that, more later. In the meantime, here’s another review, stolen from antifa.org.uk, of a film I haven’t seen called This Is England, one which prompted a recent, similarly-flawed article about skinhead in The Observer. As Roddy says: “Keep on keeping on against the Bonehead scum that stand for nothing but cowardice… Always stand firm against this threat. FUCK FASCISM.”

Another film about skins, fascism and ‘personal journeys’ that does nobody any favours (except the fash).

As always we have a protagonist who is too young, stupid, and ‘in pain’ to resist the charms of the evil, yet hugely charismatic — and curiously articulate — nazi. There are other players in the story, of course, all of whom are either dull, flimsy or annoying.

After being treated to the usual bonding, having-a-larf, shit-racist-behaviour, written to a formula and similar to Ritchie’s style-over-reality approach to violence (and therefore quite entertaining), we are treated to the de rigeur diatribe by [a National Front] leader that is delivered with clarity and conviction. (For previous examples of this sort of lazy, “they’re so fascinating” shit see Romper Stomper, American History X or The Believer).

This is England falls into the same trap as all of the above films in that the nazi always self-destructs / is eaten by his own hatred or just sees the light ‘cos he’d forgotten about his black mate. There is shamefully little counter-political argument in all these films.

If you didn’t know better you could come away from this film as you could with the others thinking “Yeah he might have been a nutter, but what he said still makes sense”, and if you’re not as squeamish about violence as the makers of these films are you might not even think the ‘baddies’ were that ‘bad’. Another missed opportunity, and a crying fucking shame because Meadows has made some brilliant films (see Small Time).

But there is some hope. According to the formula, the hatred and pain of a thousand injustices done to him will eventually lead Nick Griffin to kill his family and die in a hail of bullets delivered by his jilted sidekick Collett.

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.
This entry was posted in !nataS, Anarchism, Film, Media, State / Politics, Television. Bookmark the permalink.

15 Responses to Reading, watching, books, films, television…

  1. KinkyBoy says:

    Thanks indeed for your welcome back.

    Is this Anarchist a “good” Anarchist, a “bad” one, a feral one, a shaved one, or just an evil “fascist”. Judge him for us please from your position as a turgid and vocal point within the swollen shanks of Australian Anarchasm.

    http://metadave.wordpress.com/about/

  2. @ndy says:

    Reading Dave’s turgid and vocal positioning on the political compass, I’d say he was first and foremost an anti-Semite (to be precise: Judeophobe), for whom English is a second-language, Bakunin functions as an ideological antecedent, and ‘anarchism’ is a remote and not-terribly relevant cover. The ‘Polémique contres les Juifs’ which Dave cites and attributes to “BAKUNYIN, MIKHYL. 19th century Russian revolutionary”, reads like an interesting document, but unfortunately he provides no source for it, and an internet search provides just three references, none of which are any more detailed.

  3. lumpnboy says:

    So any idea if that text is authentic or not?

    There’s long been what I would consider far Right Proudhonians, Bakunin, whatever his problems, is not generally the favoured anarchist of anti-Semitic loons…so far as I know…

  4. @ndy says:

    Given its apparent novelty, I suspect it’s a fake. For example, if you google ‘Polémique contres les Juifs’, its source appears to be ‘JewWatch’ — not what I’d consider to be the most credible of polemical outlets. Further, I can’t imagine such a text being left undiscovered for over 100 years, especially given Bakunin’s prominence, in particular his supposed status as ‘The Father of Anarchism’. And there are certainly ‘right-wing’, anti-Semitic Proudhonians. P-J’s anti-Semitism, along with his misogyny, and other, ‘French provincial’ attitudes, was more marked than Mikhail’s, however — which, as far as I’m aware, tended to manifest itself most vociferously in his polemics with Mister Marx.

  5. lumpnboy says:

    Polémique contre les Juifs may not exist as a Bakunin text by that name, but I think the quote is actually from one of Bakunin’s anti-Marx screeds, from his Rapports personnels avec Marx. Stewart Home quotes the following excerpt from the same text:

    This whole Jewish world, comprising a single exploiting sect, a kind of blood sucking people, a kind of organic destructive collective parasite, going beyond not only the frontiers of states, but of political opinion, this world is now, at least for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other… This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a leading bank? The point is that authoritarian socialism, Marxist communism, demands a strong centralisation of the state. And where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic Jewish nation, speculating with the Labour of the people, will be found.

    Home has a footnote to this which begins:

      English translation from a citation in International Review #87. Brussels Winter 1996, p.7.

    Home’s discussion is here:

    http://www.stewarthomesociety.org/ai.htm

    A more directly relevant discussion can be found here:

    http://void.nothingness.org/archives/ra/display/3432/index.php

  6. @ndy says:

    Sho’ nuff, them’s fair dinkum. According to Clark, they was published, in French, in Lehning’s Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works), Volumes II and III. In other words, the two letters — ‘Rapports Personnels avec Marx’ and “’Lettre à ‘La Liberté’, of which the ’Polémique contres les Juifs’ is composed — have been in public circulation in some form since at least 1908–1910 or thereabouts.

    Thanks for the links!

    PS. Home’s a wanker.

  7. KinkyBoy says:

    Judaism and its adherents seek solace and relevance in the subjugation of others they call “Gentiles”. Without Gentiles the Jew has no relevance and no reference point. This is why I define Judaism as a grounded, earthly religion that possibly and hopefully unconsciously promotes the failure of others. It is interested not in the search for “truth”, “God” or the meaning of life, but the subjugation of others so that the Jew basks resplendent in the warmth of his ascendant destiny. Many of us suspect they are not entirely innocent fools in their quest for dominion over others, and this is why we want nothing to do with them. Jewish behaviour suggests that Jews have an imperative NEED to interfere with the lives and futures of others so that they manifest in accordance with their religious belief.

    When we reject them and the imposition of their religion in our lives then refuse to play the part of “Noahide”, they whine that we are persecuting them simply because we don’t want to come out and play. No subordinate and starry eyed Gentiles equals no Jews, although in that case there’d likely be a schism as lower caste Jews are eschewed by pious elites to become the new Gentile.

    The Anarchist and the Judaist would be very strange bedfellows indeed. The Jewish Anarchists would naturally attempt to “lead” and control the direction of Gentile Anarchists. Would you put up with it? We’re probably all anarchists, even on a collectively racial basis through National Socialism. No race of people wants to be dictated to by another, but some find relevance in the concept. Hence “Anti-Semitism”, which is instinctively reactive in nature on discovery of the proactive flavour inherent in Jewish prejudice.

    Guess who drew first blood in the argument between the Jew and the Gentile?

  8. Darrin Hodges says:

    Thought you weren’t going to mention me again: http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=386

    🙂

  9. @ndy says:

    True. But nine months passed, and I gave birth to this baby. (Isn’t she cute?)

  10. Hello people its your night mare. Yes the stalinist third party. You do relise that you revisionists (like the trots and anarchs) do make a good point abound Darrin and the AANCC.

  11. marijuana and conspiracy theorists says:

    Kinkboy:

    Hence “Anti-Semitism”, which is instinctively reactive in nature on discovery of the proactive flavour inherent in Jewish prejudice.

    “i have always found the jews more interesting than the germans.”–Neitzsche

  12. @ndy says:

    Any relation to Nietzsche?

  13. grammarian goons says:

    woops, spelling error. how presumptious of me. i was focused on the ‘z’ and the ‘s’. nevertheless, cheers for the correction, guvnor. ddi yuo konw taht its’ vrey lkiely that yuo wlil unredstand thsi senentce?

    –guffaw guffaw

    ps or p.s. why isn’t ‘phonetic’ spelt phonetically?

    “the english language is the most illogical language in the world, e.g., fox, foxes, ox, oxen.”–Baron Bragg

  14. meta-dave says:

    @ KinkyBoy

    I’m an individualist, influenced by Proudhon, Plato, a little Voltaire, and our external reality. Individualist were always a minority among anarchist thinker, usually those with higher intelligect and level of education, while most worker usually were in favor of collectivist ideas.

    @ marijuana and conspiracy theorists

    Quite interesting quote, that explains why I always feeled disconnected with Nietzsche and his Weltanschaung.

  15. @ndy says:

    KinkyBoy and meta-dave:

    I think you two would make a lovely couple.

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