“What’s a Stormfront?” Darrin Hodges in The Canberra Times

Posted on August 6, 2008 by @ndy

Darrin Hodges is a Protectionist: he wants to protect (White) Australia from Asians, Muslims, Communism, Multiculturalism, teh Gays, Muslims, and Asians. (And Muslims.) Once an admirer of Hitler, a Jew-hater, a member of Don Black‘s Stormfront website and Dr James Saleam’s Australia First Party, Hodges has since been expelled from/renounced his membership of the Party (denounced as the ‘Australian Faggot Party’), denied his membership of Stormfront, made his peace with ZOG, and, presumably, learnt that public expressions of support for Mr Hitler are unlikely to endear him to the electorate. What kind of expressions?

“I’m more interested in the purer form of fascism… and while I don’t subscribe to the whole ‘worship Hitler’ thing, his comments on multiculturalism and politics in general are still just as relevant today as they were 70-odd years ago” he once wrote. On June 20, 2005, he added that “i cant say im into the whole national socialist thing – as far as im concerned, National Socialism died with it’s [sic] creator, not that i do not have any regard for his writings, indeed, they still have much relevance today – he laid a foundation that we should build on”. And just for good measure, a week later (June 26) Darrin further noted that “i have some good colour footage (no sound) of Adolf Hitler at The Berghoff. PM me if you want a copy of the footage”. (‘darrinh’ joined the world’s premiere White supremacist website in June 2005.)

Currently, Darrin is preparing to contest the upcoming local council elections in NSW on behalf of the recently-formed Australian Protectionist Party, and is hoping to win one of three seats in Ward D of the Sutherland Shire Council, whose current occupiers include the Mayor, David Redmond (a Tory). Last September, however, wearing his ‘revolutionary’ hat, Darrin was a ‘national anarchist’, one of about twenty who formed a ‘black bloc’ at the APEC protest. (The same mob has now declared itself to be composed not of Australian patriots but oppressed Tibetans.)

Darrin is nothing if not persistent. Either that, or a very slow learner. Having initially been exposed to the public following his enthusiastic embrace of the White ‘civil uprising’ in Cronulla in December 2005, as already indicated, Darrin reacted by renouncing his membership of both the Australia First Party and Stormfront. It was only a little while later, however, that he re-joined both. Later still, he left Stormfront and — together with letters to the editor and commentary on other websites — reverted to using one of several blogs to publicise his views. Darrin also established a group he called the ‘Anglo Australian National Community Council’ (the existence of which he announced in November 2006). As the only known member, in this capacity he also organised a number of film screenings and public meetings.

Darrin’s disillusionment with Saleam’s ‘Australian Faggot Party’, and eventual membership of the APP, really began following the less-than-successful NSW state election in March 2007, in which the Party fielded one candidate, John Moffat, in — where else? — the seat of Cronulla. Three months later, in June, Darrin was expelled. (At about this time, Darrin’s blog featured in an episode of Media Watch.) And three months after his expulsion, the APP was formed.

Interestingly, AF — Saleam having successfully wrestled control of the organisation from Diane Teasdale, and registered it in NSW as ‘The Australia First ‘Council Elections’ Party’ — is also standing candidates at the upcoming election (Blacktown, Coffs Harbour, Newcastle and Sutherland Shire), using the stirring slogans “Reclaim New South Wales! Reclaim Australia! Voting For Anything Other Than Australia First Is Largely A Waste Of Time”. And while Darrin and the APP are looking to Nick Griffin and the British Nationalist Party (BNP) for inspiration, AF has recently stitched up an agreement with the kooks in the New Zealand Nationalist Alliance.

    On the BNP, see The BNP Uncovered (PDF), 2005.

Anyway, here’s Philip:

Tough times suit a right lurch
Philip Dorling
The Canberra Times
August 2, 2008

Pauline Hanson is gone. After achieving a 3.8 per cent vote in the Queensland Senate election last November she has finally, probably, disappeared from national political life.

Earlier this year the media highlighted the fact that Hanson received $213,000, $2.10 a vote, in public funds from the Australian Electoral Commission following her unsuccessful campaign.

On her website she protests that she hasn’t pocketed the money, rather that it was deposited into a Pauline’s United Australia Party account, but no one has really been listening. The caravan has moved on.

Hanson’s autobiography, Untamed and Unashamed, has been on sale on Kmart discount book tables for a knock-down 75c.

For the major political parties, all that remains of the phenomenon that was “Hansonism” are amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act to ensure their candidates are only reimbursed for actual campaign expenditure.

Speaking earlier this week following the merger of the Queensland Nationals and Liberals, senior members of the new Liberal National Party said it was unlikely any far-right party would be able to repeat the brief success of the One Nation Party, which secured 22 per cent of the primary vote in the 1998 Queensland state-election and won 11 seats in the state Parliament.

Senator Ron Boswell, who was in the forefront of the National Party’s fight with One Nation, dismissed suggestions by independent federal Member of Parliament Bob Katter, who said that the Liberal-National merger was the perfect opportunity for a new right-wing party to poach conservative support in the bush.

“There is always a danger for [new] parties [to] rise”, Boswell said. “It happened before because people weren’t being heard in the bush. [But] people in the country are pragmatic, they will see a stronger party in a better position to win and we will have to deliver for them.”

Boswell may well be right, but it would be wrong to think that what Tony Abbott once called the “feral right” will remain permanently consigned to the political fringes.

Unnoticed by the national media, a new Australian far-right political party has emerged over the last year. The Australian Protectionist Party has its origins in the fracturing of the Australia First Party that was founded by former federal Labor Member of Parliament Graham Campbell.

Campbell himself split from Australia First to briefly join Hanson’s One Nation Party and Australia First has now split into two, with one faction led by one-time National Action member and right-wing ideologue Dr Jim Saleam, and the other led by the nominal president of the party, Diane Teasdale. The Protectionist Party is the product of a further split and represents an attempt by expelled Australia First members to repackage right-wing nationalism to appeal to a wider audience than far-right activists.

As is often the case with the minor parties of the right, the Australian Protectionist Party is a bit shy about its origins, with its website saying somewhat cryptically that it was “formed by a gathering of people who have been politically active in several other nationalist and patriotic movements, who intend to develop a new social movement in Australia, to tackle the ideological strangle-hold our opponents have upon political discourse in this country, and to take back the moral high ground”.

The party claims to be the “new expression on an Australian Nationalist perspective”.

“Protectionism is deeply rooted in Australian political history,” the party’s website says. “Our first two Prime Ministers were Protectionists and our first federal government was a Protectionist government. Sir Edmund Barton and Sir Alfred Deakin were largely responsible for creating some of our most important institutions.”

Barton and Deakin would probably be spinning in their graves if they thought they had been roped in to provide philosophical cover for a party whose roots are to be found in the various fascist and neo-Nazi factions that have dwelt on the edges of Australian political life over the past 50 years.

Interviewed by The Canberra Times this week, the Protectionist Party’s New South Wales chairman and its first local government candidate, Darrin Hodges declined to identify any members of the party’s national executive apart from himself and the national president, former South Australian Pauline Hanson’s One Nation candidate Andrew Phillips. Both Phillips and Hodges are former Australia First Party members who, having failed to displace that party’s leadership, in particular Saleam, moved to establish their own party.

The Protectionist Party claims membership in New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Victoria, Western Australia and the ACT; however, details of the last-mentioned branch are sketchy, indeed no more than a Woden post office box number previously linked to the Australia First Party.

Hodges, who is running for election to the council of Sutherland Shire – home of the Cronulla riots – certainly has a talent for publicity, campaigning against the development proposal to establish an Islamic school at Camden, including a brief appearance on the ABC’s Q&A.

It has been alleged that Hodges has contributed to the neo-nazi “white survivalist” discussion forum, Stormfront, though he denies this.

Hodges is keen to spruik his credentials as a local resident concerned about the quality of life in the Sutherland Shire.

His website declares: “My campaign will be centered around environmental and development issues, principally in relation to the ‘unit boom’ around the shire.” His main focus is what he sees as the link between local development decisions and broader national issues of race and identity.

“Given the tensions certain development proposals have caused in areas such as Bass Hill and Camden, I would vigorously oppose any similar developments that would threaten the peace and harmony of the Shire,” his website says. “We most certainly do not want a repeat of the scenes we saw in Cronulla a few years ago.”

The issue of mosques and Islamic school has provided a useful focus for Protectionist Party activists, with the party’s main website providing templates for local leafleting efforts, but the so-called “Asianisation of Australia” is their primary focus.

“Islam is a problem but people can change their religion, but if you’re an Asian, you are an Asian,” Hodges told The Canberra Times.

In this the election of the Rudd Labor Government has undoubtedly given the new party and far-right groups more generally a new focus and sense of purpose.

The Protectionist Party’s discussion forum is full of references to creeping Asianisation and the need to defend “White Australia” from a resurgence of multiculturalism. Kevin Rudd is commonly referred to as a “Sinophile” whose ambitions for greater Asia-Pacific economic and political integration are viewed as a conspiracy to betray Australia.

The Government’s apology to the Stolen Generations, a feared arrival of Asian guest workers in regional Australia, the end of mandatory detention and a recommitment to multiculturalism by the Federal Government are cited as evidence of a growing national crisis.

“The great danger of people like Rudd is dragging Australia further in the direction of Asianisation”, says Hodges. “This is the most dangerous government since Whitlam.”

It would be easy to simply dismiss Hodges as just another far-right loon, but this would be a mistake. In the interview this week, he was articulate and keen to differentiate himself from what he called the “rabid behaviour” of other far-right activists, notably Saleam, who he says has led Australia First into “an ideological cul-de-sac”.

Still the Protectionist Party is not without direct connections to the more openly extremist elements of far-right and neo-Nazi activity with members being sought through the Stormfront website.

Hodges’ focus on development and environmental issues, while not hiding his anti-Asian agenda, is relatively sophisticated and is clearly closely modeled on British National Party strategies which have enjoyed some success in British local government elections.

Hodges candidly admits to close and growing links between the two far-right groups.

“The BNP is a successful nationalist party,” he says, adding that he has corresponded with the BNP’s leader.

“[Nick] Griffin rescued the BNP from the murky depths of of right-wing extremism,” Hodges says, and he hopes the Protectionist Party will emulate that success in Australia.

The new party’s membership includes a number of former BNP activists and members are travelling to the United Kingdom to attend the BNP’s annual “Red, White and Blue” conference later this month.

Whether Hodges will succeed, or at least achieve a presentable level of support, in the New South Wales local government elections on September 13 remains to be seen.

Labor and Liberal sources in the Sutherland Shire are adamant the odds are stacked against him, but, as one Labor branch stalwart observed, “He’s got quite a lot of publicity and some of it strikes a chord with the locals here.”

Associate Professor in Political Science at Flinders University Dr Haydon Manning said that time would tell whether the Protectionist Party would prosper.

“That will really depend on how far the present economic downturn goes and whether they have the leadership and organisational ability to expand beyond a small core of activists. Possibly the model of the British National Party is a more viable starting point than the precedents provided by earlier Australian far-right parties.

“Right-wing extremist movements have tended to be energised in periods of economic difficulty, and during the life of Labor governments, both federal and state. It’s also true that the seeds of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party were sown in the latter years of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments.

“It’s in periods of economic stress that significant numbers of voters have tended to become … fearful of external pressures on their living conditions. In these circumstances references to stopping “Asianisation” and calls to wind back multiculturalism have had and may again have some appeal. The combination of anti-Islamic rhetoric post-9/11 with long-standing advocacy of a White Australia should also not be discounted.”

By and large the media ignore the far right on the grounds that they are racist and objectionable and that they shouldn’t be given the oxygen of publicity. But it’s always worth keeping an eye on the fringes of political life, because what lurks there may, given the right circumstances, step unexpectedly on the centre stage.

After all, Pauline Hanson’s spectacular rise caught most seasoned political observers by surprise. Darrin Hodges and the Australian Protectionist Party may yet amount to nothing much, but one never quite knows what is around the corner.

True that.

More later…

Posted in Anti-fascism, State / Politics | 10 Comments

Hakluyt (Spies Like Us)

Posted on August 5, 2008 by @ndy

    The pigeon arrived this morning. By the tone of its cooing, I knew that Dr. Cam had completed the assignment I set him last week upon reading a sweet Sweet article. I used to wonder why ZOG insisted on the use of pigeon post for such communications, but upon securing the message from Cher Ami‘s spindly little leg and reading over its contents, I no longer question their wisdom. For those of you who dare, read on…

Medical journalist Melissa Sweet is obviously being paid far too much by the good folk at Crikey, if her recent rude rejection of a rather rustic recruitment request from the refined risk assessment/global strategic business intelligence firm Hakluyt is any indication.

She wrote:

Are journalists being paid to provide high-level political intelligence to companies and consultancies seeking to benefit from such information?

Judging by a series of emails that I’ve recently seen, it seems the answer might be “yes”.

Several weeks ago, I received an email which read as follows:

    I work for Hakluyt which is a London-based but global strategic business intelligence/risk assessment firm. We have clients all round the world and certainly with interests all round the world. Although we never divulge who are [sic] clients are, they will typically be top-level executives in multinationals or private equity firms.

    When they have a particular project in view — anything from a possible joint venture or market entry plan, and much in between — they will come to Hakluyt for us to provide them with greater visibility on what they have in mind. We work independently of any other advisers they may have.

    We have a proprietary network of well-placed individuals around the world who are able to provide us, very discreetly, with intelligence on specific commercial or political issues that may arise. Typically, these individuals will be very well-connected, knowledgeable in a particular field or market and well placed discreetly to make inquiries.

    I should add that we are only interested in “human source” information — ie information that is freely sought and freely given — and not documentary information at all. Also, just as we do not disclose the identify (sic) of our clients, we ask our network not to disclose the interest of Hakluyt.

    Hence this email! With your healthcare expertise, I wondered if you might be able to help us on a new project on the new Australian government’s healthcare policy — how realistic their reform ambitions really are; the role of the private sector and whether its approach coincides with government; the profitability of various private sector area[s] (hospitals; radiology and pathology service providers); and why government raised the tax penalty threshold for not taking private health insurance as far as it did. Our client is already knowledgeable in the sector.

At first, I thought there had been a mistake. Perhaps the man at Hakluyt did not realise that I am a journalist. I emailed back pointing [out] that I am not a consultant but a journalist, and asked, “wearing my journalistic hat”, who his client was.

The reply was enlightening at a number of levels:

    All I can say on that is that it is a financial institution interested in the sector, which I realise does not quite answer your question!

    However, we have a very strong confidentiality code here operating at various levels: we never divulge the identity of our clients (whether to other clients, to our well-placed network of associates or at all). In the same way, we never reveal the identity of those associates (or, for that matter, of their own sources). Equally, those sources never get to hear about the involvement of Hakluyt. By these means the best interests of all players are best served.

    Which brings me to your first point. The reason for writing to you was not because I was looking for consulting skills. Rather, as a journalist — and particularly one with your speciality and expertise — you will, I assume, know literally dozens of well-placed sources in the field. In other words, if you were willing to help us out on the odd project, we would obviously be interested in your own expert “take”; but it would also be of huge interest to us if you were prepared, with a brief in hand, to speak to several of those sources on our (or our client’s) behalf and let us know what they say.

    It would always be — as I mentioned in my first email — human source information that we are after; nothing in documentary form. For what it is worth, we already have a number of quality, usually specialist journalists that we deal with on this basis. From our point of view, they are expertly placed to source information and invariably we are calling on fairly traditional journalistic skills — so it works well.

If a company that professes to value confidentiality and discretion is prepared to send such an indiscreet email to an unknown journalist, they must have some grounds for feeling confident that journalists are willing to play along with them. The statement that “quality” journalists are already in their employ is just as worrying.

To be honest, I’ve dithered about going public on these emails. It seemed a breach of trust to publish correspondence that was obviously intended to remain private. But it was the assumptions of the second email from Hakluyt — written after I’d expressly declared my journalistic hand — that persuaded me the correspondence should be put on the public record.

The public has a right to know: are journalists selling political intelligence to consultancies such as Hakluyt?

Incidentally, according to the Sourcewatch project Hakluyt & Company Limited is a British private intelligence agency, “…staffed almost entirely by ex-intelligence [services] staff”, according to a 2006 report in The Times. In 2001, The Sunday Times revealed that Hakluyt had been hired to spy on Greenpeace.

Spooky.

Turning journalists into spooks?, Melissa Sweet, Crikey!, 31/07/08

Spooky? Maybe a little. Definitely clumsy though. What’s with all the exclamation marks, dudes? Perhaps Hakluyt should look to the Israeli security services for some hot tips. They seem to have hit upon a much more reliable recruitment technique:

“You have cancer, and it will soon spread to your brain, as long as you don’t help us,” security agents told one man, according to testimony provided on condition of anonymity.

After about eight hours of interrogation the man was given permission to enter but by then had missed his appointment at an Israeli hospital. He had to reschedule and was not allowed to leave until two months later.

But anyway, enough about whinging Palestinians, back to Hakluyt.

Founded by Christopher James, a former MI6 agent, Hakluyt provides many invaluable services to its many esteemed clients. What and who those services and clients are is not entirely clear. Known clients – revealed by various fuck-ups – include Shell, BP and Enron.

The best resource available online is a rather wanky feature from the Financial Times, published in March 2000, in which James waxes lyrical about his business while sipping tea from a china cup. If I were running a secretive private intelligence agency, I probably wouldn’t talk to the press about it, but that’s just me. Most disturbingly, it is reported that while Hakluyt pays “good professional rates” some associates “prefer a case of claret.” In the British vernacular, claret is slang for blood. Just what sort of people work for Hakluyt? Are they even people at all?

The Financial Times is a bit dry though. One prefers the far more lurid article on the somewhat dodge conspiracy site Voltairenet which accuses former career diplomat and Hakluyt board member Frank Wisner Jr., of having orchestrated the downfall of Nicolas Sarkozy’s primary party rival in the 2007 French election, Dominique de Villepin, using documents forged at Hakluyt’s London office, amongst other things. Sarkozy’s father’s second wife’s second husband was Frank Wisner Jr. Have a think about it.

    An aside featuring fascinating local colour: In 2001, as mentioned in Sweet’s article, Hakluyt was busted by the Sunday Times infiltrating Greenpeace. Writ the Times:

    The Sunday Times has seen documents which show that the spy, German-born Manfred Schlickenrieder, was hired by Hakluyt, an agency that operates from offices in London’s West End.

    Schlickenrieder was known by the code name Camus and had worked for the German foreign intelligence service gathering information about terrorist groups, including the Red Army Faction.

    This being the case, it is likely Camus had some dealings with Iago, aka John Friedrich, who claimed (in his posthumous autobiography Codename: Iago) to have performed similar activities for the C.I.A. prior to coming to Australia and joining the National [Safety] Council of Australia (Victorian Division). Under Friedrich’s steady hand, the Victorian division of the NSCA was transformed from an ineffective lobby group into Australia’s premier search-and-rescue (slash paramilitary training) outfit, with much of its equipment and pioneering techniques still in use today. Where were they based? At the S.E.C. power station in Yallourn. And who doesn’t like the Yallourn power station? Greenpeace. Join the dots.

    (Friedrich was found dead on the 21st of July 1991 of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head a few days into his trial over the small matter of his defrauding various banks of around $293 million to fund NSCA initiatives. The Sunday Times expose came out on the 17th of June 2001 – almost ten years to the day. I advise you to also join those dots.)

    (Further! Just after I wrote this, I opened the local paper and the first story I read was about the responsibilities of company directors, using Friedrich as a primary example of bad directoring.)

In conclusion, Melissa Sweet might be too principled to work for Hakluyt, but I’m not. Give me a call, Chris!

But in actual conclusion, Christopher James was an MI6 agent whose primary task while working for that agency was to liaise with business interests. He then left MI6 to form a private business with a number of other spooks – with the permission of his former masters – where he and his colleagues performed essentially the same role. It is not exactly secret knowledge that a career with an agency such as MI6 or similar is a career for life. If one were to apply Occam’s Razor to this scenario, one would come to the logical determination that Hakluyt is most likely an MI6 front. Whether the reasoning behind the creation of such a front group is to allow that agency to take part in activities which might cause embarrassment to MI6, in the event that they were uncovered, is entirely speculative. It wouldn’t be the first time.

See also: Private spooks in New Zealand and Australia and also Australia and in New Zealand again for good measure.

See also also: Timothy Garton Ash, a British journalist who flirted with the idea of accepting an offer to join British intelligence in his youth. Ironically, despite choosing not to, he was investigated at length by the Stasi as a suspected spy, an experience he describes extensively in his book The File.

Hakluyt takes its name from the British explorer Richard Hakluyt who kicked about the place approx. 400 years ago. Strangely enough, he was also a spook. Sayeth Henry Porter in The Guardian:

Settling the land named after the Virgin Queen was not the obvious course of action that it appears today. The English could have chosen the east and left the Americas to the Spanish and, but for a little-known geographer named Richard Hakluyt, they might have. During his lifetime, Hakluyt, a cleric, academic and occasional spy, never travelled further than Paris. But as a new biography by Peter C Mancall explains, he ‘invented the grammar of colonisation’ and kept the idea alive so it would not ‘wax cold and fall to the ground’ during the period when England faced invasion by Spain. Like NASA scientists announcing the mission to the Moon without knowing exactly how it was going to be achieved, Hakluyt declared in 1586, 20 years before the Susan Constant sailed, that Chesapeake Bay was his preferred target.

His great work is The Principal Navigations of 1589, which assembled all that was known about the voyages to America, its people, their customs and the wealth locked up in the continent. Last week, I sat down with the London Library’s copy of the first edition and realised it is as much an achievement of the English renaissance as Shakespeare’s plays.

Hakluyt, Mancall writes, ‘believed in the power of words, written or spoken. He saw troubles and engineered solutions from the premise that it was the task … of the intellectual elite to diagnose problems and find answers’. One of the great problems of Elizabethan England was unemployment among the expanding population, which then stood at about 3.6 million. Colonies would provide labour for every possible trade, for clerics and for failed merchants ‘schooled in the house of adversity’.

Exactly three decades later, according to White Cargo, a new book by Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, the authorities would solve the problem of London’s street children by rounding them up and dispatching them as slaves to the plantations of Virginia. Economic expediency runs through Hakluyt’s work. His brands of Protestantism and unabashed capitalism passed without dilution into the American bloodstream. Hakluyt, I am sure, would have been perfectly at home talking to Dick Cheney or any of his former colleagues in Halliburton.

Now, that’s spooky.

Posted in !nataS, State / Politics | 2 Comments

Hair are your aerials

Posted on August 5, 2008 by @ndy

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

[For Dion] Shadowboxing (Petersburg Antifa) | chtodelat news

Posted on August 5, 2008 by @ndy

While local punk bands (like Perth’s The Homicides) are happy to play with neo-Nazis — and thereby encourage the re-emergence of boneheads in Perth — and other, Melbourne-based bands were happy to support a (formerly) fascist venue, I stumbled upon this article on antifa in Petersburg, young punks who take a somewhat different approach…

Punk Revival-Resistance

Shadowboxing
Anna Rudnitskaya
Russian Reporter 25 (55)
July 3, 2008

It is hard to believe that the war against fascism is once again being fought on the streets of Russia’s cities. This war is waged by young people who for some reason don’t like the sound of the slogan, “Beat the blacks [i.e., people from the Caucasus region and Central Asia]!” No one coordinates them, and they are in no hurry to emerge from the shadows. The antifascists are not asked to appear on TV, the Kremlin doesn’t give them medals, and they don’t go on state-sponsored trips to the famous [Nashi] summer camp on Lake Seliger. Generally, the powers that be and talking heads prefer not to mention them. Why? Is it because their struggle runs against the grain of the public mood, which has become more and more aggressive towards foreigners and non-Russians? Or is it because it is frightening to acknowledge the antifascists as a real force? For that would mean admitting that the evil they are fighting is already within us.

The words “skinhead” and “fascist” took root in the Russian language long ago. But we know almost nothing about the people known as antifa. Are they an incarnation of goodness, which (as we were taught in Soviet times) has to have fists to defend itself? Are they just street hooligans who enjoy fighting? Or are they a well-organized, deeply clandestine combat unit? No one knew much of anything about them before [their enemies] began to murder them.

The first murder to become nationwide news was that of the Petersburg professor Nikolai Girenko. This famous antifascist was shot in his own apartment. A year later, also in Petersburg, twenty-year-old Timur Kacharava perished: seven teenagers armed with knives attacked him after a [Food Not Bombs] action. Less than a year later, Moscow student Alexander Riukhin was killed as he made his way to a punk-rock concert. And this spring, Alexei Krylov was stabbed to death in downtown Moscow…

Anna in conversation with Katya, “an English-language instructor at a university… between thirty and forty… [with] a delicate figure and a dreamy gaze”:

We head to the metro through another park, next to the Forestry Academy. Katya tells me the story of her neighbor lady. This cultured elderly woman was walking down this same path one evening when she saw that two young men who looked like skinheads were stalking an African student. The woman didn’t lose her cool: she attacked them with her bag and shouted, “Get the hell out of here, fascists!” The young men obeyed her. “So it’s hard to say how many antifascists prepared for direct action there are in the city,” Katya laughs. “There [are] around a hundred people who regularly participate in actions.”

The article ends on a rather dramatic — rather than humourous — note, one concerning the possible fate of a twenty-two year old former student named Oleg Smirnov (‘Rash’):

Rash is an interesting guy to spend time with. He’s the genuine article, absolutely unpretentious despite his age and circumstances. What is more surprising is that there is nothing aggressive about him—not his words, not his eyes, not the way he talks with you. He is charming, almost a regular guy. Goddamn it, why didn’t he keep studying for his sociology degree!

“What,” I ask, “are you going to be doing in ten years?”

“In ten years?” he shrugs. “I imagine that by then they’ll have either put me in prison or killed me.”

Also of interest is a podcast by Christof Putzel called (what else?) ‘From Russia With Hate’, published in December last year and commencing with a look at events around Hitler’s birthday that April. At the same time, in Australia, local, Newcastle-based neo-Nazis Blood Red Eagle traveled to Wellington (Aotearoa/New Zealand) to wish Mr. Hitler a happy birthday. BRE also played the Ian Stuart Donaldson memorial gig in 2006 at The Birmingham Hotel, and is scheduled to play the upcoming ISD gig on September 13 (also in Melbourne), along with the band Ravenous (which once featured Joel of local oi! band Bulldog Spirit) and a band from parts unknown (weight unknown). In 2007, the ISD gig was held at the Melbourne Croatia Social Club, and featured Bail Up! (Melbourne), Fortress (Melbourne, in their last ever gig), The Quick & The Dead (mates of The Homicides from Perth, and featured in the latest # of Blood & Honour zine) and the US pop-neo-Nazi-punk band Final War.

See also :

[For Dion] Hooray for Everything!* (July 2, 2008)
[For Dion] OMG!Violence is real!LOL! (June 19, 2008)
[For Dion] Family identifies son in Russian beheading video (June 10, 2008)
[For Dion] “What’s a truck?” (April 9, 2008)
[For Dion] Love versus hate // Another antifa stabbed in Moscow (February 16, 2008)
[For Dion] Nothing to see here… (February 16, 2008)
[For Dion] “I Love Trash” (February 6, 2008)
Jan Kučera – Další oběť neonacistů (Czech antifa murdered by neo-Nazi) (January 23, 2008)
[For Dion] Hate Crimes on Rise in Russia // Big Ups from Down Under (January 1, 2008)

Naughty Russian neo-Nazi fined over execution video (November 23, 2007)
From Putin to Prague and back again (November 6, 2007)
Until someone gets killed… (October 31, 2007)
Student charged over Russian neo-Nazi execution video (October 22, 2007)
Nothing to see here, just murder, apathy, and collaboration (August 15, 2007)
Another neo-Nazi assault on FNB in Russia (July 27, 2007)
Who do they think they’re fooling? Angarsk, Ilya Borodaenko, and the IUEC (July 24, 2007)
Statement from survivors of fascist assault in Siberia (July 22, 2007)
Neo-Nazis attack environmental protest camp in Siberia; murder one, wound others (July 21, 2007)
Blame Canada? Limonov & National Bolshevism (July 6, 2007)
Fascists and the Russian nanny state (June 21, 2007)
Bombs, Knives & Batons, Not Food, in St. Petersburg (February 28, 2007)

Russia : Two more anarchists stabbed by fascists (December 12, 2006)
“White Terror” (July 19, 2006)
FCUK the G8! (July 16, 2006)

Timur Kacharava (21.08.1985 – 13.11.2005) (December 30, 2005)


Alexander Riukhin

Timur Kacharava

Nikolai Girenko

Posted in Anti-fascism | 1 Comment

ELF vs Gunns?

Posted on August 4, 2008 by @ndy

Apparently, an ‘anonymous communique’ has been sent on behalf of the ‘Earth Liberation Front’ to the US-based zine Bite Back, “a 36 page magazine, full of direct action reports, prisoner news, stories and photos. Get your copy today!”:

On the morning of Thursday the 31st of July, the Earth Liberation Front attacked the Victorian office of Gunns Ltd. This was an act of economic sabotage and resistance against the proposed Tamar Valley Pulp Mill, an ecocidal project which would cause disastrous and irreversible damage to the ancient and precious ecosystem of Tasmania.

This mill’s hunger for woodchips would mean a doubling of the already immense current rate of wood-chipping[1], ravaging the native forests of the North-East of the state. It would bring the Tasmanian Wedge-tailed Eagle, the Spotted-tail Quoll and the Giant Freshwater Crayfish to the brink of extinction[2]. It would spew 30 billion litres of dioxin and furan laced effluent into the Bass Strait every year[3], consume up to 40 billion litres of fresh water[4], and contribute greatly to climate change[5].

We will not accept Gunns’ continual assault on Tasmania’s old growth forests, wildlife, water supplies and carbon sinks. More extreme forms of ecocide call for more extreme forms of protest.

We will not cease until Gunns abandons its controversial Tamar Valley Pulp Mill.

In defense of our Earth,

Earth Liberation Front.

[1] Gunns Ltd. Bell Bay Pulp Mill, Draft Integrated Impact Statement.
[2] Gunns’ referral under the EPBC Act, April 2007.
[3] University of Melbourne and Forestry Tasmania 2003; Bekessy transcripts, Wielangta court case 2006.
[4] Gunns Ltd. Bell Bay Pulp Mill, Draft Integrated Impact Statement.
[5] Trees — The forgotten solution to climate change, The Wilderness Society, 2006.

The Hon Peter Garrett MP, a member of the party for working families and Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Yartz, reckons the Mill is ace, and on April 2, 2008 — just a day too late — gave his personal stamp of approval to Module C of the Gunns Pulp Mill Project [PDF].

Now!

An historic live satellite television linkup to students in the United States, Canada and Australia. From the College Satellite Network studios in New York, and from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. CSN brings you the first of our continuing series of special interactive telecasts on science, technology and the future:

See also : Tamar valley pulp mill – key issues | Tasmania’s future threatened – pulp mill impacts, The Wilderness Society, May 30, 2008 | By Invitation: Project finance – Equator Principles case study: ANZ shot in foot by blasting Gunns, Oliver Wagg, Ethical Corporation (“Not an oxymoron”!), July 11, 2008 |





Funny thing is, both my grandfathers were timber workers…

Posted in !nataS, History, Music, State / Politics, War on Terror | 1 Comment

I don’t get it

Posted on August 4, 2008 by @ndy

French President Nicholas Sarkozy’s son Jean — “the smooth-talking 21-year-old law student” — is engaged to be marrried to Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, the “heiress of a Jewish family that controls Darty, one of France’s largest consumer electronics chain”.

Anyway:

‘Anti-Semitic’ satire divides liberal Paris
Jason Burke
The Observer
August 3, 2008

“Controversial columnist’s aside about Sarkozy’s son and a Jewish heiress reignites old embers”

…The young man, Siné wrote without a shred of evidence, was planning to convert to Judaism before marrying Jessica Sebaoun-Darty, the Jewish heiress of a huge electronics chain. ‘He’ll go a long way in life, this lad!’ Siné commented.

Um…

For [Philippe Val, the editor of Charlie Hebdo] there was no doubt. Siné’s statements, he said last week, ‘could be interpreted as making a link between conversion to Judaism and social success’ and that they spread the old stereotype associating Jews and money.

See also : Satire and anti-Semitism: Like Sarko, like son, John Lichfield, The Independent, July 19, 2008 | French cartoonist fired for anti-Semitic remarks towards Sarkozy’s son, EJP, July 29, 2008 | Aux barricades! France and the Jews, Roger Cohen, International Herald Tribune, August 3, 2008

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Anti-Nazi Schmazi

Posted on August 2, 2008 by @ndy

Yeah so the RAF (‘Baader-Meinhof’) met a fairly grisly end in most cases, with a few exceptions (including the bizarro/“utterly incorrigible” Horst Mahler [1936–], who became a paranoid neo-Nazi). But it’s better than bottling it up, I guess…

In any case, a Blacksmith Punk informs me that overnight on August 2/3 1944, the entire Roma camp at Auschwitz was destroyed and the population gassed and cremated in what was called Zigeunernacht (‘The Night of the Gypsies’) — not that the corporate/state media seems to have remembered (nor anyone else for that matter).

My sister Josefine Steinbach had nine children, only one of whom died in camp. Today I still can’t believe that the other eight children survived everything until they were gassed in August 1944. My sister could have survived. But when she was supposed to be taken away with me to Ravensbrück before the destruction of the Gypsy Camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau, she refused to go because of the children. She told the SS that she wouldn’t leave without her children. After the last transport left Auschwitz she and her children were gassed together. . . ~ Maria Peter, in State Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Memorial Book: The Gypsies at Auschwitz-Birkenau (K.G. Saur, New York, 1993) p.1517

On the other hand, the Anti-Racist World Cup has again been celebrated in Bologna, Italy (A soccer tournament with a social conscience, Amanda Wilson, Christian Science Monitor, July 24, 2008):

A hot Mediterranean sun parched the soccer fields of Casalecchio as the 204 soccer teams from 27 countries gathered for the 3 p.m. shaking of hands. African political refugees, Italian Roma, Danish feminists, young Ecuadoran gang members from the streets of Genova, and many more all stood in neat lines for the official start. Moments later, they broke chaotically into the inaugural game of the four-day Anti-Racist World Cup, an extraordinary amateur soccer tournament that takes place each year in this northern Italian town…

Against the political backdrop of a right-wing Government and a revived neo-fascist movement, it’s good to see the Cup survive. Further:

Music was the theme of the film “Nazirock,” screened for a crowd of more than 100 people in the “Anti-Racist Piazza,” the main square of the tournament. The Italian documentary, directed by Claudio Lazzaro, explores neo-fascist and neo-Nazi rock bands in Italy and their role in the politics of intolerance…

Nazirock is also being played in Australia, of course (although fortunately the number of outright fascists taking to the streets is miniscule), with Sydney band T.H.U.G. playing at the East Brunswick last month, Perth band The Quick & the Dead being featured in the latest issue of the Blood & Honor zine as well as playing alongside friendly punk bands such as The Homicides, and the annual Ian Stuart Donaldson gig being held next month in Melbourne. One other thing that distinguishes the much more numerous Italian fascists from their Australian counterparts is their honesty and openness; Australian fascists tend to be both less literate and more secretive.

See also : Remembering Nicola Tommasoli (May 17, 2008) | mad props 2 zamboni (October 31, 2007) | Granddaughter Of Upside-Down Corpse Heils The Dawn Of A New Europe (January 10, 2007)

Posted in Anti-fascism, Film, History, War on Terror | 2 Comments

Chloe Black: The Socialite’s Nazi Publicist

Posted on August 2, 2008 by @ndy

Yeah, old (as in several weeks) but very very good. Below: Emilia Fanjul (left) and Chloe Black (right). Not wanting to simply take take take, Emilia has employed Chloe to spruik the virtues of a school for poor kids she’s sponsoring in Florida. “They can study out there; they can have their sandwiches,” she says, pointing to a patch of weeds and garbage where she’d like to see a patio and lunch tables. “It will be nice!”

Problem is, Chloe’s a fucking Nazi.

Ok guys, deep breaths. Do you know the Fanjuls? Pepe and his lovely wife Emilia? They’re maybe the wealthiest Cuban-American couple in the nation. Emilia, a socialite about Palm Beach, the Dominican Republic, and, yes, New York, is famous for her charitable work. Recently she’s made a couple headlines for her newest project—”helping to finance and build a sparkling new campus for Glades Academy, a charter school in the town of Pahokee, Fla.,” a town full of impoverished migrant workers and their families. So it’s odd, isn’t it, that her “executive assistant” and publicist is a white supremacist.

The Southern Poverty Law Center noticed, in a magazine piece about Emilia and her work with the school, this innocuous-looking line: “For more information about Glades Academy, call Chloe Black.” That name probably doesn’t mean much to you, but it’s very familiar to a group like the SPLC, which battles racist organizations.

Chloe Black used to be married to David Duke. Former national leader of the KKK David Duke. Straight-up neo-Nazi David Duke.

    While less visible in the white supremacist world than either of her husbands, Black has a strong movement history of her own. She met Duke at a college meeting of the White Youth Alliance in the 1970s, and, after marrying him, became vice president of his Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. She long held the copyright to African Atto, a weird 1973 booklet that instructs blacks on how to kill whites — and which was written, as was revealed by enterprising reporters, by Duke, who then claimed he was using it to compile a list of “radical blacks.”

Yes but that was years ago, you say! People change! Sure. Her next husband was Don Black. Another former Klan leader! But far, far more famous these days for founding and operating the most notoriously hateful site on the internet: Stormfront. Look it up yourself if you don’t know the deal—it’s generally considered poor Internet form to mention it, let alone link. It’s basically a neo-Nazi message board. Fucked up shit goes on there.

Don Black claims to be unemployed, though he pays to operate Stormfront all on his own in a house owned entirely by his wife Chloe. And where does Chloe get her cash? From Emilia Fanjul, the Cuban-American sugar magnate socialite! Black is an executive assistant at Florida Crystals, the Fanjuls’ sugar conglomerate. They had no comment.

They maybe didn’t even know! Though a GOOGLE SEARCH would’ve revealed that in recent years Chloe Black has attended the conferences of hate groups and says lovely things about David Duke to the press.

So yes a neo-Nazi is flacking for a school designed to help poor minority children out of poverty, and using the money she makes to run a site dedicated to raising hatred and inciting violence against those little kids. And a wealthy socialite is involved!

WTF.

Source : Gawker. See also : Sugar Baron Aide’s KKK Link, New York Post, July 19, 2008 | The Strange Loves and Stranger Life of Chloe Black, Fred Grimm, The Grimm Truth (Miami Herald), July 25, 2008 | Local organizer, other supremacists say Obama’s run boosts their cause, John Lantigua, Palm Beach Post, July 26, 2008 | Stormfront Founder’s Wife Sets Off Firestorm, SPLC HateWatch, July 28, 2008 | Lomin Saayman, Woman With Ties to White Supremacists Represents School for Blacks and Hispanics, FOXNews, July 30, 2008

Chloe Black’s husband Don is a right bastard.

Besides being the subject of the most cringeworthy forms of deference by local racists, Don Black is a Florida businessman, owner and chief administrator — Hauptverwalter — of the Stormfront website. He’s also an ex-KKK leader (1978–1987), having assumed the leadership of the groupuscule David Duke left to pursue his ongoing campaign to make himself more palatable to the tastes of a less crazed audience. Black himself is probably most notorious for his unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government of the island of Dominica in 1981. According to Matthew Lauder, ‘Operation Red Dog: Canadian neo-nazis were central to the planned invasion of Dominica in 1981′:

On April 27, 1981, two Canadians, Wolfgang Walter Droege and Larry Lloyd Jacklin, along with eight Americans, were arrested in New Orleans by ATF, FBI, and US Customs agents in an early morning raid. Later, four more Canadians would be arrested, including Marion McGuire, James McQuirter, Charles Yanover, and Harold Woods. All of the Canadians and Americans arrested were members of the far right with the exception of Yanover and Woods. Yanover was a well-known Mafia crime figure from Toronto while Woods was a psychiatric patient in love with McQuire. Woods was arrested in Dominica after trying to break McQuire out of prison.

On Dominica, Patrick John, the former Prime Minister, Major Fred Newton, the commander of the army, three additional army officers, and two civilians (including Dennis Joseph, the former manager of the Dominican broadcasting service) were arrested. In total, more than 20 people were tried and convicted of conspiracy charges in Canada, the US, and Dominica.

The invasion, named Operation Red Dog by the mercenaries, was simple. The group of neo-Nazis planned to travel from New Orleans to Dominica on a chartered boat, land at night in rubber boats, meet up with John and his guerrilla force of disgruntled army veterans and Rastafarian rebels, and then lay waste to Dominica’s police force and political leaders. Contrary to Stanley Barrett’s analysis (1987), the primary purpose of the invasion was not to establish a base of operations for white supremacists, but rather to set-up a series of lucrative businesses including cocaine manufacturing plants, casinos, hotels, brothels, and a gun running operation. Considering the size of Dominica, which is only 300 square miles, and its military and police force, the coup was achievable…

If not actually achieved: weird shit, nevertheless, and the beginnings of a great Hollywood film script. Incidentally, while Black survives and even thrives by milking credulous white racists of their money, Droege does not, having been shot dead by a fellow cocaine addict named Keith Deroux on April 13, 2005: on June 16, 2006, Deroux was sentenced to 10 years jail after pleading guilty to manslaughter (Don Black served three years for his part in Operation Red Dog).

The amount of mooing by the milk cows on SF regarding Chloe’s exposure is naturally extensive. Would-be dictator Don is also upset:

“An executive with an organization that tracks hate groups calls the employment of the woman, Chloe Black, an “untenable position” and “unbelievable.”

Who else would tell private individuals how to spend their money and who they are allowed to hire? Jewish supremacists like Mark Potok, Stephen Cohen, [Heidi] Beirich and the rest of the SPLC crowd have pushed too far for their own best interests, but their pathological hatred of White Western Culture has blinded them.

To use their word, chutzpah no longer works against an increasingly awakened American majority, who’ve already had enough of their schemes to destroy America as a Western nation reflecting traditional European values and turn it into a Third World cesspool, and who are now feeling the effects viscerally.

But Jewish supremacists are never satisfied with what they’ve got, even in a country which has given them more than any other host people, even subverting America’s government into complete subservience to their country, the Jewish racial nationalist state of Israel. But they still have a death wish and must destroy their host! They must keep pushing.

One can understand their roller coaster ride through history, having been kicked out of every major European country at least once. They just couldn’t stop pushing a sleeping giant.

Now they think getting Chloe fired would hurt Stormfront and me, and they’ll keep pushing. They’re blinded by hate. A lot of new people would be really mad, some of means. We’ll do fine.

The press, btw, has played this as if contact for that charter school is Chloe’s primary job. Actually, [it’s] one of the lesser of dozens of projects dropped on her, the rest of which are innocuous.

Posted in !nataS, Anti-fascism | 2 Comments

Unite Against Fascism is a weird mob

Posted on August 1, 2008 by @ndy

    Update (August 5, 2008) : RWB toilet supplier targetted:

    Over the weekend the company who supply portable toilets to the BNP Red White and Blue event were targetted by militant antifascists. All companies who support the RWB can expect to be targetted also. If you make money by helping the BNP, we will cost you money!

    STS of Chesterfield, who happily process the BNP’s shit (and we all know they are full of it) by servicing the RWB event with portable bogs, had their depot in Pottery Lane East, Chesterfield, targetted. Their gates were locked and glued and the slogan “bnp = shite” graffitied. STS have their office at 47 Rockingham Close, Chesterfield, S40 1JE, phone 01246 278754 and 07889 832076. Get in contact and tell them what you think of their support for the BNP.

The British National Party is organising a Red White & Blue weekend gathering in a few weeks (August 15–17), and for some months local anti-fascists have been organising to protest and (presumably) to attempt to disrupt proceedings. Unfortunately, for reasons which have not been provided, the campaign group Unite Against Fascism, rather than endorse and/or participate in the action being organised by locals, have decided to arrange for a separate rally to protest the Festival, at a different time. Thus the Socialist Workers Party site — which appears to be the main force behind UAF — reports (July 29, 2008) that:

Trade unions and anti-Nazi activists across the East Midlands last week came together to form a regional Unite Against Fascism group to campaign against the BNP in the area and in the run-up to next year’s European elections. As one of its first actions, East Midlands UAF has called a protest and rally against the BNP’s “Red, White and Blue” hate-fest, due to be held in the village of Codnor, Derbyshire, on Saturday 16 August. The anti-BNP protest will take place at 11am, with coaches to the event leaving from Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Chesterfield and Coventry. For contact details, assembly points and start times go to the UAF website…

As the Socialist Party reports, via ‘Nottinghamshire Stop the BNP’, activists in Derbyshire and surrounding areas have been campaigning since January, generating broad community and trade union support. Another, anonymous (?) writer notes that:

Between 15 and 17 August, the British National Party will be holding its annual Red, White and Blue “festival” at Codnor-Denby in Derbyshire on land owned by former BNP councillor Alan Warner. For months now, local anti-fascist groups and trade unions have been working to organise a protest on 16 August.

This protest was initiated by Nottinghamshire Stop the BNP, a campaign launched in January by a conference of one hundred labour movement, student and anti-fascist activists sponsored by local unions including FBU, UCU, Unison and the NUT. Notts Stop the BNP aims to build an anti-fascist movement on a working-class basis – mobilising mass action to physically confront the fascists and raising social demands around issues like jobs, homes and services to undercut their base.

The protest also involves Derby Unite Against Fascism, other local anti-fascist groups and a multitude of trade union organisations. East Midlands Unison, East Midlands TUC and the rail union RMT are sponsoring it, and RMT general secretary Bob Crow will be speaking.

Unfortunately, the national Unite Against Fascism organisation has been less keen to support the protest. After months of refusing to acknowledge the issue at all – ignoring repeated invitations to come and get involved in the organisation of the protest, and refusing to announce it from the platform at various national events – UAF has now called its own protest, taking place just down the road and at a different time from where and when the main protest is taking place! (The UAF website implies that theirs is the only protest and supported by all the sponsors, but this is simply not true.)

UAF leader Weyman Bennett met representatives of the local campaign – including the chair of Derby UAF and a representative of East Midlands TUC – on Friday 25 July, but refused to agree to the amalgamation of the protests.

This is bizarre and outrageous behaviour.

UAF is dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP); it may be that its leadership are reluctant to support a protest that they do not control, and one organised with the involvement of other socialist groups. If so, they should sober up! This protest is far too important to let sectarianism get in the way. We call on UAF to enter negotiations with the local campaign for the amalgamation of their protest into the main one, so that we can strike at the BNP and their racist “festival” with a single fist.

Meanwhile, we urge the labour movement and anti-fascists to mobilise for the protest.

Bizarre and outrageous behaviour? Hmmm. Maybe… Maybe it’s worth acknowledging the role of the UAF in channeling anti-fascist activity in directions which are considered by its leadership — the SWP — as being of greatest benefit to it, rather than, as the name might suggest, the fight against ‘fascism’. But this can only be understood through examining the history of the UAF and the SWP, and its antecedents in organisations such as the Anti-Nazi League (ANL)…

    See also :

    Antifa UK | Militant anti-fascist.
    Institute of Race Relations | Est.1958, publishers of Race & Class.
    Love Music Hate Racism | Est. by the ANL/UAF (SWP) in 2001/2 to gain money and publicity and as a successor organisation to ‘Rock Against Racism’. Organised a big gig on April 27, 2008 in the hope that it would counter the BNP vote at the GLA Elections of May 1, 2008. The strategy failed, and the BNP gained an historic victory.
    National Assembly Against Racism | Est.1994. Aligned to Labour.
    Searchlight | Monthly investigative journal. Est.1975, widely suspected (in anarchist and other radical circles) of enjoying an overly-familiar relationship with state agencies.
    Stop the BNP | Um.
    Unite Against Fascism | Est.2004 as an amalgamation (of sorts) of the ANL (in the person of Weyman Bennett) and the NAAR (Lee Jasper).

    ‘United we will smash the Nazi BNP’, Socialist Worker, June 17, 2008 (“Joint secretary of Unite Against Fascism Weyman Bennett spoke to Socialist Worker about the rise of the BNP and about how we can defeat the fascists”)

Bonus!

A recent interview with British Holocaust revisionist David Irving (c/o Max Blumenthal by way of One Peoples Project):

Posted in Anti-fascism | 15 Comments

Anarchy!

Posted on July 31, 2008 by @ndy

July 29, 1900

Italy’s King Humbert I assassinated by an anarchist, Gaetano Bresci.

Gaetano Bresci emigrated from Italy to the US, & was working & living in the large Italian-American anarchist community in Paterson, New Jersey, when demonstrations over high bread prices led to demonstrations all over Italy. In Milan, General Bava Beccaris fired cannons on a peaceful demonstration, leaving hundreds dead. “Order restored”, the King of Italy, Umberto I had the gall to decorate the butcher Beccaris, & consequently, Gaetano Bresci determined to kill the king. Bresci went to Italy & in Monza, where the King was visiting, put three bullets into him on July 29, 1900.

Anarchists propose $50 million deal on convention
Associated Press
July 29, 2008

DENVER (AP) – A group of anarchists says it will drop its plans to disrupt the Democratic National Convention if Denver invests a $50 million federal grant in the community rather than spend it on security.

The group Unconventional Denver wants the city to spend the $50 million intended for security for the convention on health care and other needs. If the city agrees, the anarchists say they’ll call off their protests.

Otherwise, Tim Simons says members of the group plan to “physically stand in the way of what’s going to happen.” He says the group is protesting what it sees as the Democratic Party’s support of big business rather than meeting people’s basic needs.

Anarchist Rosa Pazos has been murdered / La anarquista Rosa Pazos ha sido asesinada
July 23, 2008

On the eleventh of July Rosa Pazos, Sevillian anarchist and transsexual activist, died after being stabbed. The Local Federation of Unions of the CNT-AIT in Seville and her comrades want to express what follows:

Rosa always said she would be murdered one day, but nobody took her seriously. Mournfully, facts have finally shown her to be right: we know from mass media that she was found dead at home by firemen, on the eleventh of July, and only afterwards, in the autopsy practised in the Anathomic-Forensic Institute, was revealed that the cause of her death had been a stabbing on her thorax. Due to this, a prosecution has begun and secret summary has been decreed.

Very few people accepted her the way she was throughout her life, not even her family, and very few paid her attention, but far from unravelling she always faced society’s reject due to her triple condition of transsexual, anarchist and diseased.

Rosa has been a fighter all her life, she has fought for her right to be recognized as the woman she was, for her right to a proper medical treatment, for her right to be socially and professionally accepted, for her freedom of speech, for her right to intimacy, etcetera. A constant and unequal fight that she has always faced from a libertarian perspective, which has lead her to denounce systematically institutions and public powers, whose bureaucracy, as usual, has turned into nothing these rights…

Open Letter to the CNT
Alexander Schapiro
June, 1937

In June 1937, following the May Events in Spain, when anarchists battled Communist and Republican forces in the streets of Barcelona, and many prominent anarchists were arrested, murdered (Camillo Berneri) or simply disappeared, the CNT (Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo) adopted a “minimal program” to submit to the Republican government and the forces now in control of it, including the Stalinist Communist Party which was itself embarking on a concerted campaign to suppress the anarchist movement and other opposition groups, such as the dissident Marxist group, the POUM (one of whose leaders, Andres Nin, was notoriously “disappeared” and accused by the Communists of being a Francoist fifth columnist). The “minimal program” was not accepted by the government, and the anarchists continued to be marginalized and persecuted by government and Communist-backed forces. Alexander Schapiro wrote the following Open Letter to the CNT criticizing them for their continuing and disastrous policy of collaboration and accommodation with these counter-revolutionary forces. Translated by Joseph Wagner and published in the One Big Union monthly, August 1937. For a similar critique by a Swedish member of the International Workers Association (IWA), see Albert Jensen, “The CNT-FAI, the State and Government” (1938), in Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1, Selection 127.

Posted in Anarchism | 2 Comments