There is “great rejoicing at the nation’s capital”. So says the morning’s paper.
The enemy’s fleet has been annihilated.
Mothers are delighted because other mothers have lost sons just like their own;
Wives and daughters smile at the thought of new-made widows and orphans;
Strong men are full of glee because other strong men are either slain or doomed to rot alive in torments;
Small boys are delirious with pride and joy as they fancy themselves thrusting swords into soft flesh, and burning and laying waste such homes as they themselves inhabit;
Another capital is cast down with mourning and humiliation just in proportion as ours is raised up, and that is the very spice of our triumph…
This is life–this is patriotism–this is rapture!
But we–what are we, men or devils? and our Christian capital–what is it but an outpost of Hell?
~ Ernest Crosby, ‘War and Hell’, 1898 (at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War)
On Tuesday, August 3, 2010, long-time political prisoner and acclaimed poet and translator Marilyn Buck, 62, passed peacefully at her home in Brooklyn, New York.
Australian rock legend Angry Anderson has fronted the final Liberal party election advertisement in NSW before the media blackout begins at midnight on Wednesday.
In the television ad, Gary `Angry’ Anderson takes aim at Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s promise for a Parramatta-to-Epping rail line in western Sydney, saying it will never happen…
Angry’s also angry with The Greens:
Onya mate. Presumably, Angry’s own debt is now going to be somewhat lessened following his appearance in a series of Tory propaganda vids.
Angry last came to my attention when he gave evidence at a Senate inquiry about yoof gangs. See : Angry Anderson : No violence?, March 2, 2010. Then Angry expressed concern for yoof, and decried the use of weapons in their occasional street battles. Before giving testimony, Angry took the opportunity to record a song with Sydney band T.H.U.G.. Called ‘Gunnin’ 4 U’, the song recounts the adventures of a recently-released prisoner, intent on gaining bloody revenge on his tormentors. Angry’s lines bemoan the fact that his mate threw away their friendship “for some filthy whore”. The band itself features two members of ‘White Lightning’, a seminal Australian neo-Nazi rock ‘n’ roll band one of whose songs, ‘We Rule’, the band still performs live.
The 2010 Australian federal election is just a few days away, and while most eyes are on Labor, the Coalition and the Greens, there’s a range of other parties hoping to use the occasion to promote their agenda. Among these parties are a small number on the racist right-wing: the Australia First, Australian Protectionist and One Nation parties.
Below is a brief summary of their candidacy.
Australia First
Founded by former Labor MP Graeme Campbell in 1996, the Australia First Party has undergone a number of ups and downs in its short life, its initial Sturm und Drang stolen from it by a red-haired fish ‘n’ shop owner from Queensland. In 2001 it underwent something of a revival when veteran fascist Dr James Saleam joined the NSW branch, became its Secretary, and began reconstructing the party on a more systematically right-wing basis. The party split in mid-2007, with Saleam becoming its undisputed leader. In 2009, Saleam was the subject of an extensive profile in the Good Weekend (‘The Audacity of Hate’, September 26/27, 2009), one which — notwithstanding Saleam’s numerous objections to its alleged inaccuracies — provides a rather damning portrayal.
While it has participated in numerous elections before — its only success being the election of Bruce Preece to local council in Adelaide — 2010 is only the second that AF has contested since re-registering with the Australian Electoral Commission, and the party is standing just a handful of candidates in NSW, QLD and VIC. In NSW, its candidates are Tony Pettitt in Greenway and Mick Saunders in Lindsay. In QLD Peter Schuback and Nick Maine are running for the Senate, while in Victoria Alex Norwick is standing for the seat of Deakin.
None are expected to gain more than a handful of votes.
Australian Protectionist
Formed as a split from AF in 2007, the APP is currently unregistered, and is standing just two candidates in NSW for the Senate: party leaders Darrin Hodges and Nick Folkes. Hodges unsuccessfully stood for local council in 2008, while this appears to be Folkes first electoral contest. Hodges is a former member of AF, while both men are reputed to be former Liberals. The pair took part in a small rally in Newtown last weekend, but received a hostile response from locals. The APP’s principal concern is getting rid of Muslims, but it otherwise expresses a routine form of white nationalism, albeit one which veers between an assimilationist and rejectionist model.
One Nation
The One Nation party — best known for its earlier association with The Wicked Witch from Ipswich, Pauline Hanson — is a shadow of its former self, having undergone a sudden rise in the late 1990s, and an equally sharp decline in the early 2000s. The party lost its last MP, Rosa Lee Long, in the 2009 Queensland state election. While the party may be down it’s not gone, however, and is fielding candidates in NSW, NT, QLD, SA, VIC and WA.
In NSW, ON is putting up patriots in a total of fourteen (14) Lower House seats: Banks, Bennelong, Blaxland, Chifley, Cook, Hughes, Hunter, Kingsford Smith, Macarthur, New England, Paterson, Riverina, Robertson and Shortland. In NT it’s standing someone for the seat of Solomon. In SA, ON is contesting Makon and Sturt, in QLD Bowman, Fadden and Wide Bay, and has thrown up just the one candidate in Moore, WA. The party is also taking part in Senate contests in each of the mainland states.
Of the few dozen aspiring ON politicians, a handful are noteworthy. One is Kate McCulloch, the ON candidate in Macarthur. Briefly coming into the media spotlight during the course of a campaign against the construction of an Islamic school in Camden, it remains to be seen if she really is the Great White (Red Haired) Hope. More recently, the President of ON in Victoria, John Groves, has informed the world of his love of ‘Phoofter Bashing’ and his passionate hatred of Jews, the former comment prompted by Family First QLD Senate hopeful Wendy Francis comparing gay parenting to child abuse.
Another ON candidate (Riverina) who has gained some small degree of notoriety is Craig Hesketh, the party’s NSW publicity officer. Hesketh has received the official endorsement of AF, as he is a ‘nationalist’ and because he “has rightly spoken out against the refugee invasion of our country”. Quite strongly, too. On Facebook, Hesketh denounced “race traitors” and “immigrant whores”:
While he describes the Greens as “sick f*cks”:
On the other hand, as Hesketh noted in response to homophobic sentiment allegedly expressed by Nationals candidate Michael McCormack, “I think we’ve all said something [we’ve] regretted at some stage”.
The ETU (Victoria) has put its money where its mouth is, and donated a heap ’em big sum of $ to The Greens in order to support their election campaign (Union bankrolls Greens, Ben Schneiders, The Age, August 18, 2010). 125K has gone to law-talking guy Adam Bandt, while another 200K has been thrown at quack Richard Di Natale. On the other side of the equation, the ASU has thrown its weight — and I dunno how much filthy lucre — behind Bandt’s Labor opponent, law-talking grrl Cath Bowtell. Earlier, law-talking guys at Slater & Gordon gave Bowtell their big tick of approval, but until The Firm does what the ETU done and invests some of its “$19.8 million net profit for the year to June 30, up from $17.04 million the previous year” at the races, I reckon it’s so much tricksiness. In any case, the cautionary admonitions of Comrades Gerard Henderson, Paul Howes and Christian ‘The Christian’ Kerr have thus far failed to stop The-Red-Disease-That-Eats-Away-At-The-Heart-Of-Our-Democracy from swaying the moar gullible voters into supporting it — both in the polls and, presumably, cum Saturday. I’m guessing that, regardless of the outcome, the boys will continue to live a million miles away from Beasley Street.
“War is not a polite recreation but the vilest thing in life, and we ought to understand that and not play at war. Our attitude towards the fearful necessity of war ought to be stern and serious. It boils down to this: we should have done with humbug, and let war be war and not a game. Otherwise, war is a favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous … there is no profession held in higher esteem than the military. And what is war? What makes for success in warfare? What are the morals of the military world? The aim and end of war is … murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying, which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom—in other words, a rigorous discipline—enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness. And yet this is the highest caste in society, respected by all.
Every monarch in the world, except the Emperor of China, wears a military uniform, and bestows the greatest rewards on the man who kills the greatest number of his fellow creatures. Tens of thousands of men meet—as they will tomorrow—to massacre one another: to kill and maim, and then they will offer up thanksgiving services for having slain such vast numbers (they even exaggerate the number) and proclaim a victory, supposing that the more men they have slaughtered the more credit to them. Think of God looking down and listening to them!” cried Prince Andrei in a shrill, piercing voice.
Judging by his Twitter account, the President of One Nation (ON) in Victoria, John Groves, is a rather unpleasant and, perhaps, even mildly psychotic fellow: homophobic, racist, and paranoid.
Who woulda thunk it?
Recently, Melissa Fyfe wrote on how Victoria is “the left-leaning state”; as evidence she cited, inter alia, “the consistently low vote for the right-wing party One Nation (in the 2007 election, 0.01 per cent of Victorians, or 433 people, cast a first preference for the party, compared with 8426 in NSW)”.
Casting our unsettled minds and fevered imaginations back further, it’s possible to recall that, in the 1998 Federal election in Victoria, ON received 105,798 votes in the House of Representatives, or 3.7% of the total. In the Senate, Robyn Spencer (and her running mate Ben Buckley) got 117,048 votes (4.1%). In the 1999 Victorian State election, however, the party received just 8,181 votes, or 0.29%. (See : How One Nation Victoria Fell Apart, Anonymous, Crikey, February 13, 2000: “This is an [attempt] to explain how head office intervention has reduced One Nation Victoria from about 30 branches to about 3 branches all in this year.”)
In 2001, ‘Pauline Hanson’s One Nation’ fared considerably better at the Federal election, the party scoring 71,605 votes in the Senate, or 2.45% of the total, and 37,811 votes (1.2%) in the Lower House. In 2004, however, the party’s share of the vote dropped considerably, to 21,532 votes (0.72%) in the Senate, and a mere 4,119 votes (0.1%) in the House of Reps.
In 2007, Nick Steel (above) and Daniel Shore stood for ON in the Senate, while current President John (Llewellyn) Groves stood for ‘One Nation WA’. Between them, Steel and Shore secured 13,354 votes (0.42%), while John Llewellyn Groves got just 48 (the figure of 433 votes Fyfe cites is for the Lower House, where some bloke called Neil Henry Smith stuck his hand up for ON in Bruce).
In the 2010 Australian federal election, One Nation is standing two candidates in Victoria: Rosalyn Townsend and Dale Townsend.
One Nation’s last crack at winning a seat in Victoria came in December last year, when Steve Raskovy stuck his hand up for God, Queen and Country. Sadly, just 199 voters were willing to support Steve, and in June he announced his shock resignation from the party, taking the opportunity to begin his bid to join scientician Andrew Bolt at The Ponds Institute for Advanced Manipulation and Interpretation of Climatological Data in the Context of Climatic Variability and Change:
Mr Raskovy resigned from One Nation last week but said he would still run in this year’s federal election if he could find “a good party” which stood for limited immigration, better aged and disability care and strong action on climate change.
“I believe global warming is caused by a lack of rainfall,” he said.
“In my opinion, aeroplanes are the biggest culprits because they cut up the rain clouds. That’s why we’re only getting drizzles and not proper rainfall because the aeroplanes are cutting up the rain clouds.”
Leaving aside the bizarro followers of Lyndon LaRouche, aka the Citizens Electoral Council, the other far right candidate at this year’s election is Alex Norwick of the Australia First Party. He’ll be coming last in the competition for a seat in Deakin.
And remember kids…
SHOULD THERE BE ANY MATTERS YOU WISH TO DISCUSS PLEASE PHONE JOHN GROVES, STATE PRESIDENT ON 0439 386 942.
According to a report on Indymedia, a clutch of a dozen or so bizarros belonging to the ‘Australian Protectionist Party’ were confronted by a group of locals in Newtown, Sydney, on Saturday. The APP rally, which was not publicly promoted, was presumably held in order to promote Darrin Hodges and Nick Folkes’ Senate campaign. NSW police soon arrived on the scene to reinforce the fascists, and eventually escorted them away from the Martin Luther King Jnr mural under which the small group had assembled. Members of the APP may or may not have lost some of their propaganda to the crowd, no arrests have been reported, and a fuller account may or may not be published at some point in the future.
A group of fascists and neo nazis were found in Newtown this afternoon. They gathered provocatively at the “I have a dream” mural wall in Newtown. A hundred or so people of the Newtown community spontaneously gathered and overwhelmed them with their powerful presence and voices. The people chanted “nazis out of Newtown, nazis off the planet”. They were physically confronted and forced to flee with their tail between their legs escorted by cops. The cops, the dogs of the bosses, of course attempted to protect them from the rage of the people, trying to arrest only those who have come to kick out racism, nationalism, and fascism. We will not let the fascists exist in our neighbourhoods.
COPS, PIGS, NAZIS, ALL THE BASTARDS WORK TOGETHER.
Victoria, once the jewel in the Liberal crown, may be the saviour of the Labor government, writes Melissa Fyfe.
Uh-huh. Well yeah, maybe: where ‘left-leaning’ = ‘a tendency to preference Labor over Liberal in state and federal elections’, at least — and perhaps moar? In any event, as evidence that the citizens of Victoria lean left, Fyfe cites, inter alia, current polling on voting intentions @ the 2010 Australian federal election, plus:
Victoria’s high republic vote (49.8 per cent, no other state was higher) and the consistently low vote for the right-wing party One Nation (in the 2007 election, 0.01 per cent of Victorians, or 433 people, cast a first preference for the party, compared with 8426 in NSW). In this election Victoria also holds the Greens’ best chance for a lower house seat, the electorate of Melbourne.
Besides these facts and figures, Fyfe notes that there’s a relatively large number of bookshops in Melbourne — and a left-wing clothing label called Polichicks.
*cough*
But seriously. In broader historical terms, Fyfe notes in particular the views of the man who helped drive a stake through the heart of the public transport system: John Cain (see : Melbourne tram dispute and lockout 1990 – anarcho-syndicalism in practice, Jura Media, 2006/1997). He reckons:
The trend left probably had its origins in the gold rush of the 1800s… it brought an ”independent and robust” type of migrant. At Federation, Victoria took a protectionist stance, the realm of the left side of politics, while NSW took a free-trade stance, a stance of the right.
The 1930s Depression hit Victoria particularly hard, which Cain says galvanised the political beliefs of a group of Labor men and women – his father, John Cain snr, among them – who valued education and the dignity of work. The spirit of protectionism later extended to the thriving manufacturing base, which provided jobs for generations of blue-collar workers in the Labor heartlands of the inner-city and western suburbs.
Again, maybe so, but obviously, it’s problematic to assume that support for tariffs (among other devices intended to ‘protect’ the development of local industries from the global market) is evidence of ‘leftist’ inclinations, or cultural, political or social values. Rather, protectionism — also sometimes referred to, in an earlier epoch, as ‘nativism’ — may be termed ‘conservative’ in the sense that it harks back to what the journalist Paul Kelly (The End of Certainty, 1991) describes as the ‘Australian Settlement’, consisting of the five pillars of: 1) White Australia, 2) Trade Protection, 3) Wage Arbitration, 4) State Paternalism and 5) Imperial Benevolence. He dates its final disintegration from the 1980s.
That these ‘principles’ were embraced by various Labor parties and Governments is not especially remarkable. From an anarchist, left-wing or progressive perspective, Laborism has invariably been viewed as being essentially ‘conservative’, at least, if not only, in the sense that it seeks to conserve bourgeois privilege (cf. Vere Gordon Childe, How Labour Governs (1923); V.I. Lenin, ‘In Australia’ (1913), et cetera.)
Of these five pillars, ‘Wage Arbitration’, ‘State Paternalism’ and ‘Imperial Benevolence’ have been (largely) maintained, while ‘White Australia’ and ‘Trade Protection’ have been (progressively) abandoned. In fact, the party’s previously vigorous support for keeping The Chinaman at bay is something about which it is no longer possible to speak in polite circles: in contemporary ALP mythology, Good things like ‘fairness’, rather than Bad things like ‘racism’, define the nation, its history, and that of the Australian Labour Party (see also : Within China’s Orbit? China through the eyes of the Australian Parliament, Chapter One: Federation and the Geographies of Whiteness, Timothy Kendall, 2008 | The Bushman’s Bible, Warren Fahey, The Bulletin magazine, February 1, 2005).
So much for the the saviour of Federal Labor. On the other hand, in 2004, the Victorian ALP gave Steve Fielding a Senate seat. It’s unlikely to make that mistake (?) again (in fact, in 2010, Family First is Nos. 41–45 and The Greens Nos. 6–11 on the ALP ticket), but the party is still shitting bricks over the possibility of losing (or continuing to lose) not only political ground, but actual seats to The Greens.
It’s not without good reason that Labor is nervous. The collapse of ‘social democracy’, and the reasons for it, have been flogged to death elsewhere, and while reports of its death may — or may not — be exaggerated, the existence of a ‘leftist’ version within the Labor Party is now surely only the stuff of myth. Beyond this, a good barometer of the level of concern within Labor ranks about the political appeal of The Greens is the shrillness with which muck-raking, right-wing Labor apparatchik Andrew Landeryou has responded to their wily charms. After noting that Bandt was apparently looking to buy a house in Parkville, Landeryou uncovered an email, published in 1995, in which Bandt describes The Greens as being “in many ways bourgeois”, concluding his online message with the words “Towards an anti-capitalist, anti-social democratic, internationalist movement”.
Landeryou definitely deserves points for spotting, but Bandt is hardly the only former student radical who in adult life has found a political home that is “in many ways bourgeois”. As evidence, one need look no further than, say, Paul Howes (or Michael Costa or Jim Bacon or…). Nevertheless, the idea that The Greens is the new home of The Reds is fast becoming a commonplace of both elite and popular opinion (see also : Eric Abetz? WTF?, marcus westbury, August 26, 2009 | Why the NSW Greens are so hard left, Stephen Mayne, Crikey, February 1, 2006).
Further, of the thousands of former student leftists who have maintained some continuing involvement in political organisation, relatively few have done so by way of the ALP, the principal exception to this being a declining trade union sector (over which the party continues to maintain a political stranglehold). Which is not the same as saying that there are no leftists in the ALP, of course, and while the Greens have long maintained a commitment to ‘social justice’, there are those who remain unconvinced of their political potential (see : Adam’s amazing pitch to Melbourne, Alex White, August 3, 2010).
In April 1972, sixteen sticks of gelignite exploded in the Communist Party’s Brisbane office, lifting the floor of the building almost six centimetres off the ground. Later the same evening, three rifle shots ricocheted through the Maoist East Wind bookshop…
The next month, the terror campaign returned to Melbourne with an attempt to set the Third World bookshop alight. A week later, the East Wind bookshop in Little Londsdale Street received a fire-bomb through the front door, while Molotov cocktails hit the Radical Action Movement’s headquarters in Palmerston Street, Carlton, the China Friendship Society, and the Source bookshop in Collins Street…
Many naturally suspected the NSPA of involvement in the bookshop attacks, since the Nazis had previously clashed with the Left. In January 1971, the NSPA announced a fascist rally to be held on Melbourne’s Yarra Bank. The Left and the Jewish community organised a counter-rally. When the Nazis did not appear, thousands streamed up to their headquarters in North Carlton. The party’s leader Cass Young later complained:
All this time we could hear a noise such as that at a football ground, getting louder. Looking outside, I saw that a huge crowd was coming down the street towards our headquarters.
Within minutes there were several thousand people, mostly reds and those of the chosen race, milling around outside. We closed all the doors and windows and I posted sentries at the back and on the roof. We hoisted the mighty flag of our race — the swastika — and the Eureka flag at the top front window. The crowd outside began throwing anything it could get its hands on: eggs, tomatoes, rocks and tins. Soon all the windows had been smashed by flying missiles.
In June 1972, the NSPA tried to hold its annual conference. The fascists kept the location secret. Protesters instead marched to a triple-fronted brick veneer in St. Albans, which served both as Young’s house and the new [neo-]Nazi HQ. To resounding chants of ‘Death to the Nazis’, they tore the building apart. Surveying the wreckage of his property, Young lost some of his enthusiasm for overt displays of Nazism, and the NSPA collapsed in a bout of internecine warfare, a process nicely captured in the title of David Harcourt’s study of Australian Nazism: Everyone Wants to Be Fuehrer.
This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That’s democracy for you.
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
