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“And so with the facts on the table and these uniting principles as our guide we move forward. We move forward to an effective, sustainable, long-term solution: To stop the boats not at our shoreline but before they even leave those far away ports…” Julia Gillard said.
“My pledge to the Australian people is to end the waste, to pay back the debt, to stop the new taxes and to stop the boats” Tony Abbott said.
“Reject an alien government, don’t recognise their laws. It’s time to close the floodgates, it’s time to shut the door. Repatriate, ship ’em out, send the bastards back. If they don’t fucking like it, it’ll be in body bags” sang Scott McGuinness.
I gots the following msg in my Inbox recently. It’s issued by antifa skinheads who organise themselves as members of RASH: Red & Anarchist Skin Heads, and concerns a skinhead from Ecuador named Álvaro Paredes. On May 17 this year, Alvaro was ambushed outside of his school by a group of four neo-Nazis, and in [...]
The Mad Monk tries and fails to kill the albatross that is/was ‘WorkChoices’, bravely battling the reality that it won’t be until after Labor’s next term in office that the ill-will the scheme generated will dissipate — by which time, it’s also likely he’ll have been demoted for being too unpopular among the ladies. Speaking of which, Cath Bowtell is the lollipop lady taking over from Lindsay Tanner and taking on law-talking guy Adam Bandt in the seat of Melbourne, a marginal undertaking quite possibly falling victim to the disease Paul ‘I Was A Teenage Trotskyist’ Howes has identified as turning Green into Red:
[The Greens are] being infiltrated by many whose commitment to the environment is questionable, and who are more focused on turning the Greens into a left-wing, socialist-style party. Some people call these Greens “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside.
[Lee] Rhiannon is one of those. In fact, if you look back at her 11 years on the comfortable red couches of the NSW Legislative Council, not much has been said by her on Green issues, but she has spent a lot of time talking about issues not dissimilar from those she campaigned for when she was an active member of the Stalinist Socialist Party [now better known as the Communist Party of Australia].
Rhiannon’s “watermelon” faction of the Greens is growing in strength. They are increasingly flexing their muscle through their base in the inner-city Green branches against the traditional “true” Greens such as [Bob] Brown.
‘Making tracks nightly’ (Katherine Murphy, The Age, July 19, 2010) is a nuts ‘n’ bolts account of the Labor machine in action. Among the many gems of electoral wisdom to be gleaned from the article is the observation that “Polling is an evolving art, and online is playing a greater part in the overall enterprise”. In which context: Adam Bandt has 895 followers on Twitter; Cath Bowtell has 162. 2,540 people like Adam Bandt on Facebook, while 265 people like Cath Bowtell.
FLEDGLING talkback station MTR 1377 must change its format to succeed, media observers warned after its poor performance in yesterday’s ratings report.
MTR attracted a market share of just 1.7 per cent and an average audience of 10,000, making it Melbourne’s lowest-rating station.
More than 1.5 million people listened to 3AW or 774 ABC during the 10-week survey period, of which MTR was on air for seven weeks, while 145,000 tuned in to MTR and its precursor, 3MP…
Otto Skorzeny (1908–1975) was a Nazi, a member of both the (Waffen) SS and the Gestapo. He took part in Kristallnacht (Pogromnacht) in 1938 and, after being injured while fighting in the Soviet Union in December 1942, joined the foreign intelligence service of the SS. His most (in)famous wartime exploit, however, was taking part in the rescue of Mussolini in September 1943; this, or his subsequent role in quashing the attempted coup of July 1944 (which underwent a Hollyweird revision *ing Tom Cruise in 2008). Following the end of WWII, like many other Nazis, Skorzeny found employment with US intelligence, and enjoyed a long career as a businessman, spy, and Nazi stalwart. On June 12, neo-Nazis in Ungarn, Budapest, organised a gig in tribute to his memory, *ing ‘Tar Had’, ‘Szebb Napok’, ‘Vérvád’ and ‘Revizorok’. The gig was held at a club called ‘Bluehole’.
In the US, Forrest Fogarty, a leading member of the Florida-based Confederate Hammerskins, has, inter alia, been accused of being… a stoner! Fogarty’s previous claim to fame was being nominated as one of ‘A Few Bad Men’ to have joined the US military. “There are some dirty Arabs enjoying their 70 virgins because of my actions and that of my fire team,” Fogarty boasted in the Winter 2005 issue of Resistance.
Skorzeny, on the other hand, became wealthy selling guns to “dirty Arabs”; so that they could kill “filthy Jews”, presumably.
*sigh*
Plans to produce a Pioneer Little Europe in Perth have been interrupted recently by shenanigans involving shotguns. Be that as it may, Paul Innes’ mates on Stormfront have come under some further scrutiny lately, with John Harold Browne’s Tip of the Spear Consulting Services possibly being less than — shall we say — kosher. According to Larry Keller (‘Charismatic’ Felon is Top Advertiser on Major Racist Website, Intelligence Report, No.138, Summer 2010): In the end, it’s hard to say exactly what motivates John Harold Browne. What is known is what he told a skeptical Stormfront member during the exchange about his credit repair service last fall. “I do not,” Browne said, “run a scam.” LOL. Writing in the Broward Palm Beach News (Advertiser on Local White Supremacist Site May Not Be Legitimate Racist, June 14, 2010), Thomas Francis notes that:
In addition to the financial sleight of hand, Tip of the Spear’s web banner offers “intellectual and physical protection.” In that latter capacity, Browne attended the October 2009 speech by Nazi Holocaust denier John [sic] Irving at the Ritz-Carlton in Manalapan [Florida]. After a fracas led to one neo-Nazi stabbing another, Irving blamed Browne for being slow to react. Browne is the surname of the “John” we referenced in this November 17 Juice post about hackers who leaked Irving’s emails, including those the historian had with Browne.
Note that the person stabbed at Irving’s speech — John Kopko — was reportedly a member of Crew 38, the junior burger version of Fogarty’s Hammerskins.
Speaking of fraud, Dr James Saleam’s party Australia First had a crack at winning a seat on local council (Hawkesbury) on the weekend, as well a seat in State parliament.
“I’m coming back soon … and now I’m really pissed off …” stated neo-Nazi crazy person law-talking guy Edgar (J.) Steele on April 25. As of June 22, he’s now able to sing “Hello Dad… I’m In Jail”. Steele is alleged to have paid a man to murder his wife and mother-in-law. He’s also known for his legal advocacy on the part of neo-Nazi groupuscule the Aryan Nations.
Anxious about rising nationalist sentiment, the West German chancellor decided that, at the very least, a symbolic gesture was necessary to placate his right-wing critics. Kohl’s riposte came when President Reagan ventured to West Germany to participate in a solemn wreath-laying ceremony on May 5, 1985, at a military cemetery in Bitburg, where forty-seven SS men were buried along with two thousand Wehrmacht soldiers. Its ostensible purpose was to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II, but Reagan used the occasion to get in his digs at the Evil Empire — not the Third Reich, of course, but the Soviet Union. German war veterans who insisted that Hitler should not be judged too harshly, because he fought the Red Menace, felt vindicated when Reagan restricted his comments on human rights abuses to only those occurring in Communist countries. The president’s one-eyed view of history transformed Nazi culprits into victims. He depicted the Third Reich not as a system of mass terror but as the work of a single maniacal despot. The fallen SS fighters were Hitler’s victims “just as surely as the victims in the concentration camps”, Reagan asserted. Absolving Germany of its wartime sins was the president’s way of thanking Kohl for backing the unpopular nuclear missile buildup in Europe.
Not surprisingly, Jewish organisations were outraged. So, too, were U.S. veterans groups. The American Legion, usually a staunch supporter of the president, reminded Reagan that the Waffen SS had murdered more than seventy unarmed American prisoners at Malmedy, just thirty miles from Bitburg. “Are these the same SS troops buried beneath the stones of Bitburg?” a Legion spokesperson asked. Other veterans recalled that the city of Bitburg was a staging area for German soldiers — including Otto Skorzeny’s notorious SS units — who fought against the Allies in the Battle of the Bulge. Bitburg also contained the graves of men from the Second SS Panzer Division, which massacred 642 French civilians in Oradour-sur-Glane in June 1942.
~ Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens, Little Brown & Co., 1997, p.220. Note that credit for Reagan’s speech at Bitburg has been given to multi-millionaire neo-conservative hack Pat Buchanan.
ALSO! The BNP, EDL & Violence, Malatesta, Norfolk Unity, June 20, 2010: “As the BNP continue to implode the EDL are siphoning off support for their own brand of racism.”
“Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.” ~ Buddha
Brisbane-based soldiers Darren Smith [...]
Date: Saturday, June 5, 2010 Time: 2:00–4:00pm Location: State Library (Cnr Swanston & Latrobe Sts, Melbourne)
On Saturday, a rally has been organised to protest, inter alia, the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip. The rally is also being organised to further protest the Israeli attack upon an humanitarian aid convoy earlier in the week, in which Israeli soldiers murdered nine members of the convoy, and injured dozens more.
The attack has sparked an inevitable torrent of commentary. The Israeli Foreign Minister, Avigdor Liberman, blamed the murders on the victims of the attack, claiming that Israeli soldiers came “under the brutal attack of a bunch of anarchists, hooligans and terror-supporters… actually terrorists – who simply want to promote terrorism, cooperate with terrorism… to attack our sovereignty and to spill blood”.
The blockade is a form of unlawful collective punishment of the 1.4 million people who reside in Gaza, the 360 square kilometre strip of territory occupied by Israel in 1967 and formally abandoned by it in 2005.
In late 2008 / early 2009, the Israeli state abandoned some bombs on Gaza, in an exercise which brought “great rejoicing at the nation’s capital” — or so said the morning’s paper.
In the name of the Jews, the Israeli state drives Palestinians from their lands, imprisons them and punishes them with blundering brutality. The Revisionist policy dreamed up by early fascist Zionists of “Facts on the Ground” is a total success – Israel’s perceived choice today is between Apartheid and ethnic cleansing. The Israeli elections are seeing the meteoric rise of Avigdor Leiberman whose party, Israel Beitenu, promises to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel and Leftists of their citizenship if they fail tests of loyalty to the state. This isn’t swear-word fascism – this is the real thing. Still on the table is Kadima’s “realignment” plan to withdraw Israeli settlers from the “Palestinian” side of the segregation barrier. This is a de-facto annexation of 6 per-cent of West Bank territory which, crucially, would leave the [West Bank] in two landlocked islands, an internal enemy non-state which can now be disciplined on the same terms as Gaza.
Policing the blockade — or rather, justifying it, and the blockade’s brutal effects upon an enormous captive population — has become slightly moar difficult following the slaughter at sea (producing some truly spectacular mental gymnastics on the part of apologists for the Israeli regime), but as a general rule of thumb, unless the position of US authorities shifts, there will be little or no change in Israeli policy. Thus, while the O’Bama administration has tut-tutted the murderous act of piracy, it has otherwise remained solidly behind the Israeli state, and the UN has been licensed to issue only tepid criticism (see : Washington comes to aid of Israel over Gaza convoy massacre, Jean Shaoul, wsws.org, June 2, 2010).
As a result, the people of Gaza are pretty much f*cked.
The talking head on Channel 9 News tells me that there’s anarchy on the streets of Bangkok. Burning banks, shopping mauls and TV stations…
May 20 - Day of Action in Solidarity with the people of Thailand
Melbourne solidarity rally
Thursday 20 May at 12:30 pm
In front of Thai Airways office
250 Collins Street, Melbourne
Soldiers - Don’t shoot !
Abhisit government - Resign !
This is a time of crisis for workers in Thailand. The Abhisit government must go.
It is the 6th time in the past forty years that the Thai government has used military force to suppress popular discontent against the inequality and corruption of Thai society.
Thursday 20 May is the anniversary of the end of Black May in 1992, when the Thai military attacked hundreds of thousands of pro democracy demonstrators in the centre of Bangkok. The demonstrators resisted the attacks, and on 20 May 1992 the King intervened against the government.
We stand with the working people of Thailand. All workers in the region and globally should support protest actions and international industrial action and solidarity to assist workers in Thailand.
End the dictatorship - No to Abhisit - No to Thaksin - Yes to Workers’ Government !
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