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International Women's Day is drawing to a close, and I'd better do my duty and reprint (with editing) the comment that I have published for the last two years here at Molly's Blog. What follows is a short history of the day and its significance.
♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀♀
HOLIDAYS (OR IT SHOULD BE)
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY:
Today, March 8, is celebrated as 'International Women's Day'. Way back when, on March 8 1908, 15,000 women marched through the streets of New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights. In 1910 the first international women's conference was held in Copenhagen, Denmark, under the aegis of the Second Socialist International. The German socialist Clara Zetkin was the originator of the proposal. No fixed date was set at this event. The conference called for the establishment of an international women's day. This had been preceded by a declaration of the Socialist Party of America in 1909 calling for such an event on the last Sunday of February.
The date of March 8 gradually became an accepted time because it commemorated an 1857 protest in NYC by garment workers who later went on to establish the first labour union in the USA two years later. (Molly Note-Since I first wrote these words there have been further entries at the Wikipedia site on this day, claiming that this 1857 demonstration never took place. I am unable to say whether this is true or not, but I urge the reader to consult the Wikipedia site for details on the controversy )March 8 was also the day when women in Europe held peace rallies in 1913 as the clouds of WW1 gathered. IWD also gathered force from the Commemoration of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire on March 25, 1911 when 140 garment workers were killed in a factory fire because the owners had locked the doors, barring any escape.
On the persuasion of Alexandra KollontaiIWD was declared a holiday in the USSR shortly after the Revolution. But.....this "holiday" remained a regular working day until May 8, 1965. Wags might remark that this is the usual stuff of communist pronouncements, with the name and the reality usually at significant variance. Nonetheless IWD remains an official holiday in many countries today. Most are members of the ex-Soviet bloc or other communist countries. By 1975, International Women's Year, the United nations began to sponsor the day. Today there is pressure in many countries to declare it an official holiday. In 2005, for instance, the British Trade Union Congress passed a resolution calling on the United Kingdom to issue such a declaration.
Nowadays celebrations are held across the world on this day. The global women's group Aurora hosts a semi-official list of events and resources. For an anarchist take on the day and its significance see THIS and THIS from the Anarkismo.Net news site. Also 'Feminism, Class and Anarchism' by Deidre Hogan (also available as a downloadablepdf).
“The activity of the soviet represented the organization of anarchy. Its existence and its subsequent development marked the consolidation of anarchy.” ~ Leon Trotsky
Awesome! In a stunning rejoinder to the followers of Juan Posadas, the Socialist Equality Party in Australia held its founding congress in Sydney on January 21-25, 2010 — almost fourteen years after it was formed.
What explains this historical anomaly? As Sherlock Holmes remarked in Sign of the Four (1890), “Eliminate all other factors, and the one which remains must be the truth.” Having considered, and then eliminated, all the other factors, the only reasonable conclusion I can arrive at is this: The Marxist scienticians at the SEP have invented a Time Machine!
Not content with having achieved the extremely difficult — some suggest impossible — task of travelling in time, the party makes an even more ambitious boast: of being “indisputably” the only Trotskyist party in Australia. Socialist Equality Party (Australia) holds founding Congress, wsws.org, February 24, 2010:
Most essentially, Beams said, the past 25 years had clarified the role of the Pabloite opportunists who once claimed to represent genuine Trotskyism. In Australia, as in France, they were now seeking to establish “broad anti-capitalist parties” with non-revolutionary tendencies and had entirely repudiated Trotsky and the Fourth International. Unlike the previous period of mass radicalisation from 1968 to 1975, the SEP was now indisputably the sole Trotskyist party.
The Freedom Socialist Party, Revolutionary Socialist Party, Socialist Alternative, Socialist Party, Solidarity and Trotskyist Platform would surely beg to disagree.
Speaking of Trotsky, as already indicated, Robert Service’s new biography has really upset his contemporary followers. Peter Taaffe, general secretary of the Socialist Party (UK), refutes attacks on Leon Trotsky at one of the sessions of the Socialist Party’s ‘Socialism 2009′ conference:
In The great anti-poll tax victory (February 26, 2010), Taafe also has a crack at the anarchists who “occasionally latched onto and viciously attacked the organised anti-poll tax movement”. According to Taafe, “It remains an incontestable historical fact that it was neither the official leadership of the labour movement nor small left groups – without a feel for the real pulse and movement of the working class – that provided the leadership for the decisive poll tax victory. It was, instead, the vilified and persecuted forces of genuine Marxism gathered around the newspaper ‘Militant’ which played the crucial role.” Further, “Ultra-left sectarians and anarchists [following the London anti-Poll Tax rally of March 31, 1990]… accused Militant supporters of “collaborating with the police”. This was totally false. Tommy Sheridan and the other leaders were overwhelmingly re-elected to head the All-Britain Anti-Poll Tax Federation.”
Taafe’s account may be usefully contrasted with Danny Burns’ Poll Tax Rebellion (AK Press/Attack International, 1992). After noting, inter alia, the fact that the gutter press joined police efforts to identify alleged rioters, Burns quotes Socialist Party nee Militant member and Secretary of the All Britain Anti Poll Tax Federation Steve Nally as stating that “We are going to hold our own internal inquiry which will go public and if necessary name names” (p.105). (Note that a similar campaign against protesters was mounted in Australia following the G20 protests in November 2006, the role of the gutter press this time being played by Fairfax and The Age.) The task of defending the accused was eventually taken up by an independent group, the Trafalgar Square Defendants Campaign, formed over and against the wishes of the leadership of the Federation.
Elsewhere, Taafe’s Communist Workers’ International (CWI) has issued a statement on the apparent split in rival international the International Marxist Tendency (IMT): Open letter to the members and former members of the IMT (March 2, 2010). The ideological leader of the IMT (which, sadly, has no section in Australia but, oddly enough, does in Aotearoa/New Zealand) is Alan Woods.
In Defence of Marxism An Attack Upon Bakunin Anarchism, Or: A Case of The Woods Seeing The Tree.
Woods provides a fairly orthodox Marxist / Leninist / Trotskyist critique of Bakunin, who is invested with the same status within the anarchist tradition as Marx is within Marxism. Wrong, but also routine.
Greece Braces for Deeper Spending Cuts The New York Times (AP)
March 3, 2010
ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece will announce painful new spending cuts Wednesday to lift the country out of a major financial crisis, a day after Prime Minister George Papandreou said the country was in a “’state of war” and was fighting for national survival…
Bonus!
Portraying the Poor, BBC4, February 28, 2010. “Paul Mason explores the image of poverty and the working class that has been created by writers. From Friedrich Engels’s reports on the Salford slums in the 1840s through to Raphael Selbourne’s story of a young Bangladeshi woman in present-day Wolverhampton, by way of George Orwell’s expeditions to Wigan and the hop fields of Kent, our picture of the poor has been painted by members of the middle class. Paul Mason asks if this outsider’s view gives us a full and fair account, or if it says more about the attitudes of the literary class than about the poor themselves. Interviewees include Orwell’s biographer DJ Taylor, Polly Toynbee (author of Hard Work: Life In Low-Pay Britain); Michael Collins (author of The Likes Of Us: A Biography Of The White Working Class) and Raphael Selbourne (author of Beauty).”
Update : see/hear also : Angry Anderson’s opinions on youth violence, Shane McLeod, The World Today (ABC), March 1, 2010. The report contains no reference to Angry’s observations about culture and violence.
March 2010
In September last year I began to write a post about Angry Anderson and his jihad crusade campaign against violence gang violence the [...]
The Sydney Institute Annual Dinner 2010 Date: 16th March 2010 Time: 7:00pm (arrive at 6:30pm) Venue: The Grand Harbour Ballroom, Star City, Sydney Dress: Black Tie
It ain’t no Mystery, Herald Sun trollumnist Andrew Bolt’s making History. On February 24, to be exact, when he launched the new book by former Trotskyist Maoist Keith Windschuttle at a glittering forum sponsored by Quadrant (The Magazine Formerly Sponsored By The CIA). Windschuttle’s book is titled The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Three, The Stolen Generations 1881–2008. A renowned humourist, the publication of Windschuttle’s third volume on Aboriginal historical fabrics comes prior to the second (the rumoured title of which is The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume Two, Writing, Researching And Communicating How the Unemployed, Literary Critics and Social Theorists Working in the Arts And The Media in Van Diemen’s Land Are Fixing the News And Killing White Australian Local Employment Initiatives: A New Social and Political Analysis of the Economic Crisis in Australian Press, Television, Radio and Advertising).
Incidentally, Quadrant would also like to welcome you to the History Wars:
Quadrant and the History Wars seem synonymous.
So, we are adding a new page to Quadrant Online called History Wars.
History Wars is both an online archive for writing that has appeared in the magazine and elsewhere and a platform for voices that challenge the established Left stranglehold on our past.
Stolen Generations! Holocausts! Bullies! Pygmies! ANZACs! Terra Nulliuses! Postmodernism! It’s all here, and neither The Aboriginal Industry or The Pink Mafia — nor, indeed, the Leftist Media And Political Establishment — can stop Quadrant from unveiling The Truth.
Speaking of History, The Jew and ‘Holocaust? More like Holohoax amirite?’, Canadian/German UFOlogist and Holocaust denialist Ernst Christof Friedrich Zündel is to be freed from prison in Germany today (March 1, 2010), after having spent the last five years behind bars. Poor old Uncle Ernst was convicted in 2007 of 14 counts of inciting hatred for The Jew, including contributing to a Web site devoted to denying the Holocaust. On a related note, good old Uncle Fred Töben — himself no stranger to either Holocaust denial or prison — has been busy trying to keep up the spirits of Perth-based Brendon O’Connell in his battle with ZOG.
But the less said about that, the better, apparently.
Also on trial for some of the things he’s said is Freedom-loving (and much-beloved) Dutch politician Geert Wilders. His Freedom-loving party party party is not keen on Muslims (see : Short Cuts, Thomas Jones, London Review of Books, Vol.27, No.20, October 20, 2005), and neither is a large segment of the Dutch public it seems, with many expected to vote for Wilder & Co. at local council elections (Intolerant kingmaker defies Dutch clichés, Michael Steen in Amsterdam, Financial Times, February 26, 2010). Also in Amsterdam, as in Europe as a whole (see: Rozbrat), Government authorities are kraak-ing down on squatting.
In Marvellous Melbourne, squatting is an extremely marginal phenomenon, confined to fuckwits, bums, and lowlifes, and without even the often token legal protections afforded by the state in Dead Europe. This is despite the fact that squatting in the nineteenth century embiggened many of the families which now constitute the country’s elite, that the land as a whole was stolen wholesale from indigenous peoples, and that housing affordability in the major cities is at an historic low. For the poor, slums — whether private or public — befit their status, a condition unlikely to change until such time as the political costs increase.
Another Cultural Warrior fighting out of the blue corner is Mervyn F. Bendle. He’s written a series of truly extraordinary essays on teh gheys teh Left, Warmingism and more, of which the following are a sample:
I didn’t realise it until quite recently, but in late 2008 Bendle was at the centre of The Bendle Affair. “Some of Australia’s top thinkers on national security have opened a new front in the culture wars - over whether a postmodernist interpretation of terrorism is brainwashing our next generation of military leaders…” (Culture wars bomb hits the military, Jamie Walker, The Australian, September 20, 2008). In essence, Bendle surprised The Academy by volunteering to act as an intellectual bouncer.
For Bendle, the shift from pondering The Mystery of Gaia, psychoanalysis and postmetaphysics to the fitness of the ADFA’s Tony Burke to be teaching The Kids about terrorism began with the essay Hijacking Terrorism Studies (Quadrant, Vol.52, No.9, September 2008). I dunno if the ‘affair’ gained much publicity: torrid as it was, it seems to have ended fairly quickly. Bendle’s previous essay on ‘America as the New Rome’, published in the May issue of the magazine, despite being “superb, erudite, and sophisticated”, doesn’t appear to have generated any heat at all; a fact possibly not unrelated to the further fact that, unlike his military assault upon Burke, it didn’t come to the attention of The Australian. Anyway, the subject of his essay writing (and, moreover, blogging) is fringe, left-wing politics, so moaron that later.
I recently read Antony Beevor’s The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. It’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in this period of history. It brings together the political, military, and social history of the war and places it in context with the era’s European politics. This is a complex task, and Beevor succeeds. Helpful maps and pictures are included.
The Battle For Spain includes the roles of the Durruti Column and the CNT-FAI, but since they are woven into the rest of narrative, this might not be the best book for a specifically anarchist study. It certainly will provide a solid basis for understanding the war. The only objection to the work I can think of at the moment is that people new to the history might have trouble keeping up with the acronyms and names, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to remember their context.
According to The Melbourne Times (Greens have a Jolly good chance in Richmond, Bianca Hall, February 24, 2010), in Melbourne, the socialist with a pathological hatred of pumpkins, Steve Jolly, is due to announce his candidacy for the seat of Richmond, currently held by the ALP’s ‘Tricky’ Dick Wynne. A Yarra City Councillor, if he does in fact contest the seat, Jolly’s preferences could prove crucial to the eventual outcome of the election.
A Greens victory would be an electoral breakthrough for the watermelons.
In the upcoming Victorian State election (scheduled for Saturday, November 27), Richmond, along with Brunswick, Melbourne and Northcote, is one of four seats in which the Greens hope to be able to seriously challenge the ALP. In Brunswick, like Richmond, the entry of an independent, left-wing candidate — in this case, widely rumoured to be Phil Cleary — could also tip the balance of preferences in the Greens’ favour. The ALP has been doing its level best to ensure that this is the case, by first ignoring, and then crassly attempting to capitalise upon, public disquiet over Sue Maclellan’s fear and loathing of rock and/or roll. Then again — Hallelujah! — the Victorian ALP is The Party That Brought You Mister 0.08% Senator Steve Fielding — Praise Jesus! — so…
Speaking of Christians, in disappointing news for the remaining Midnight Oil fan, the Minister for Uranium Mining, Woodchipping & The Yartz — who appeared on 3CR’s SUWA show earlier on Friday in what might be reasonably termed a feisty mood — has now realised he failed to read the fine print when he sold his soul to the ALP and was parachuted into the safe seat of Kingsford Smith in 2004. In brief, bringing the Government into disrepute means being demoted by KRudd. The main beneficiary of Garrett’s demotion appears to be former ACTU Secretary Greg Combet, who was bumped into Parliament in 2007. A current union official, far less less happy with the role of the ALP in the trade union movement — even going so far as to suggest that the couple undergo a trial separation — is Dean Mighell.
The Socialist Alliance will also contest the election, as will various other micro-parties (perhaps even the Communist Alliance, who knows?). But the only serious challenge to the ALP from a vaguely leftist direction will almost certainly be coloured Green not Red.
In summary, in April 2009, “John Brumby’s Labor government … opened a red-hot $1.14 favourite with leading election bookmaker Centrebet to retain power when Victoria goes to the polls late next year, with the embattled Coalition a $5.10 outsider”; odds have since shifted slightly in the Coalition’s favour, a Labor win bringing $1.23, a Coalition victory $4.00.
Otherwise, After the Greek Riots and taxikipali’s posts on libcom.org are the best sauces of news in English that I’m aware of.
As far as the antifascist counterdemo planned for today afternoon in Amerikis Square, both the fascist gathering and the antifascist counterdemo were declared banned by the district attorney. As a result, antifascist marches were prevented to reach the square by strong riot police forces and marched instead in the streets of Kypseli chanting antiracist and proletarian solidarity slogans. The fascist scum never even appeared for their advertised bigotry stunt at the square.
Bloggy… Left
Αντιφασισμός is a Greek blog and one which, I assume, is like an online brick in the face of Greek fascism. (Great links page too.) Red Thread Brisbane e-journal is “a collective thinking space for revolutionaries in Brisbane.” (NB. Dave promised me if I plugged this and his new interpretive dance troupe Vegan Steel he’d recruit a dozen Brisbane reds to become fans of slackbastard.) The gaping silence : More Work, Less Pay? You Bastard!
Bonus!
“In light of the station’s maturity into a stable economic and social entity, the theme running through its existence remains prescient. As first station manager Sue Matthews wrote in 1981, “When the mainstream catches up with the alternatives, it’s time for people like us to be assessing just where the edges we’re supposed to be pushing against now lie.”
Norman G. Finkelstein received his doctorate in 1988 from the Department of Politics at Princeton University. For many years he taught political theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict. He is currently an independent scholar. Finkelstein is the author of five books which have been translated into more than 40 foreign editions: Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press, 2005; expanded paperback edition, 2008) The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the exploitation of Jewish suffering (Verso, 2000; expanded paperback edition, 2003) Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995; expanded paperback edition, 2003) A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen thesis and historical truth (with Ruth Bettina Birn) (Henry Holt, 1998) The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A personal account of the intifada years (University of Minnesota, 1996) He has just completed a new book entitled A Farewell to Israel: The coming break-up of American Zionism, to be published in 2009.
I bring to your attention two reports from the UK on ‘Blood & Honour’, the neo-Nazi network of ‘patriotic musicians of a right-wing persuasion what organises musical performances for younger persons’ (Dr James Saleam, Australia First Party). Born in 1987, “rather like football hooliganism, Blood & Honour originated in England, but has gone on to bigger and better things elsewhere” (Antifa UK), spreading like some kinda… I dunno… virus or something, first to Australia, and then the world.
Which is News… of the World.
*boom-tish*
Crush them Reich now
Anti-terror chiefs have warned against the growing threat from Nazi fanatics hell-bent on unleashing a new wave of bloody mayhem on Britain’s streets. The hardcore racists have vowed to WIPE OUT non-whites and set up a FOURTH REICH, echoing Hitler’s evil empire.
This ARTICLE in NEWS OF THE WORLD is CONTINUED at NORFOLK UNITY. Its publication was occasioned by a new report on B&H released by a mob called the Centre for Social Cohesion:
New report released today by the Centre for Social Cohesion (CSC) and Nothing British exposes violent ideology of white supremacism. Featured in yesterday’s News of the World, ‘Blood & Honour: Britain’s Far-Right Militants’ analyses the threat posed by white supremacist militant network, Blood & Honour (B&H).
I haven’t read the report yet, but when I do I’ll add some commentary (if I think it necessary). Otherwise, White Noise: inside the international nazi skinhead scene, edited by Nick Lowles and Steve Silver (Searchlight, 1998) provides some good background material, while the ‘Turn It Down’ site in the US has recently published a nice White Power Band Map, “To assist anyone and everyone who cares enough about music and wants to keep hate groups from hijacking our scenes”.
Adolf Adolf Adolf! Oi oi oi!
In Australia, B&H has been around for over 20 years, and works in close collaboration with another neo-Nazi skinhead group called the Hammerskins. (The Hammerskins originated in Texas; the Australian franchise is known as the Southern Cross Hammerskins.) B&H Australia is tiny, but does manage to organise an annual gig in Melbourne to commemorate the death in 1993 of B&H co-founder Ian Stuart Donaldson, as well as other, occasional events in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and elsewhere. Otherwise, the group produces an occasional (Internet) radio show (episodes appearing in January, April, July, September and December 2009), and distributes neo-Nazi muzak and propaganda through its merchandising arm, 9% Percent Productions.
Beyond this, the network receives some small degree of support from others involved in the local music industry, a fact which, given its longevity, is unsurprising. Thus individuals involved with or on the periphery of the minuscule white power muzak industry have established generally cordial relations with others uncommitted and generally uninterested in furthering White racial supremacy. Of course, given broader public contempt for neo-Nazism and related doctrines, this support is generally covert rather than open, and tolerating the presence or even actively cooperating with racist, right-wing elements is usually justified on other grounds. For example, when, in 2006, an inner-city Melbourne pub was exposed as hosting the annual B&H memorial gig, a relatively large number of punk bands rallied around the pub’s manager. (The worst of the scabs still gigging are Marching Orders, Slick 46 and (ironically) The Worst.) While for the most part arising from a sense of loyalty to the pub manager, the ‘apolitical’ approach of many in the milieu may also be attributable to the more general yuppification of the subculture (although it should be noted that even yuppies are generally capable of recognising Nazism as being, like, Bad!).
In any case, despite this support, after a community boycott was initiated — one which gained the support of a range of local groups and individuals, including many other, more politically-aware punks — the racist, neo-Nazi sympathising management was removed, and a new, non-fascist friendly crew took over. Ironically, the main threat to its continued existence is now not the stench of neo-Nazism but draconian legislation ostensibly aimed at stemming violence at live music venues!
White Noise Productions
Outside of local, neo-conservative and reactionary 100% Two Fingers In the Air Punk Rawk™ circles, there’s a small audience for racist and fascist ideas within the heavy metal milieu — although again, most assume a fairly apathetic approach to politics, and/or extol the virtues of racism simply for its transgressive appeal.
A recent entrant into the field of heavy metal promotion is White Noise Productions, which maintains — at best — what might be termed an ambivalent approach to groups such as Blood & Honour. Thus WNP arranged for a brief tour Down Under by the fascist-sympathising Deströyer 666 in January 2010, is friends with the openly neo-Nazi band Ravenous, as well as B&H’s merchandising arm 9% Productions, and until recently (early 2010) proclaimed the promotion’s allegiance to ‘Blood & Honour’ and the network’s FREE! “Interactive Media Promotion’: like Panzerfaust’s 2004 ‘Operation Schoolyard’ (albeit on a much tinier scale), an attempt to provide FREE! neo-Nazi propaganda to White yoof.
ACAB!
Like that adopted towards other groups and projects deemed to be potential sources of ‘politically-motivated violence’, the attitude of police and state authorities towards B&H and allied groups is generally one of watchful tolerance. (The obvious exception to that rule currently being the Muslim population; see : Kevin Rudd says Australia faces major terror threat, BBC, February 23, 2010.) Thus, providing the boys break no laws, they may carry on their activities more or less unmolested.
The only possible, slightly complicating factor is the existence of laws prohibiting ‘racial vilification’, which theoretically provide citizens the opportunity to file complaints for such things as the publication of enjoinders to racial violence. However, the use of such laws is extremely rare, their employment generally expensive to those concerned, and, moreover, of questionable legal bearing when brought to bear on private performances and the ah, Internets. (See also : More powers to nab net racists, Josh Gordon, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 21, 2010.) And while there have been a handful of murders, assaults, shootings and stabbings in recent decades (largely the result of internal bickering), given also the relative absence of violence on the far right — and its chronic inability to establish stable and even semi-popular structures — B&H and other neo-Nazi associations have only very occasionally been able to generate sensational headlines of the sort to be found in the News of The World.
Note that since the CSH report was published, police in Croatia have closed down a nutzi gig and arrested a number of organisers (for what crime(s) remains unknown); in a few weeks time, on March 6, Hungarian neo-Nazis will be holding a rally in the capital Budapest, while in the evening B&H are organising a pop concert. On February 22, the Hungarian Parliament voted “in favour of making Holocaust denial a criminal offence, punishable by up to three years imprisonment. The law was passed in a final vote with 197 in favour, 1 against, and 142 abstentions. It had been proposed by Attila Mesterhazy, prime ministerial candidate of the governing Hungarian Socialist Party. A motion by the centre-right opposition party Fidesz to extend the law to cover the denial of other crimes committed under the Communist regime was rejected by 178 votes to 146, with seven abstentions.”
Anonymous sources in Edinburgh are claiming that the English Scottish Defence League has United Scotland behind The Ghost of Charles the Hammer and — shouting “No Surrender to Al Qaeda!” — successfully driven The Moorish Hordes And Their Communist Archarchist Allies off The Streets of Edinburgh.
The Scottish Defence League today achieved A Most Resounding Success in their continuing Campaign Against The Islamification of This Sceptred Isle.
Rallying to The Call of Ages to protect The Scottish Nation from The Threat of Foreign Invaders — truly these are The Inheritors of Arthur’s Legacy — the League assembled at A Pub in Edinburgh.
By this Brave & Resolute Action — which follows an earlier & equally glorious victory over The Communist Archarchists & The Radical Left Wing Scottish Nationalist Party in Glasgow in November — The Brave Boys & Fair Maiden of the League struck fear into the hearts of Islamo-Fascists all over the City… & indeed Scotland & The Worlde.
Numbering in their dozens, The Boys defied The Red Left by occupying a pub on The Royal Mile — a deft strategic maneuver that shook The Communist Archarchists outside to their very core. The Boys then surrounded the pub with Lothian & Borders Police. This Cunning Ploy easily defeated the hundreds of unScottish Rabble intent on thwarting The Boys’ Plan to rid Our Green & Pleasant Land of The Moorish Invaders what are intent on destroying Our Way of Life.
After this Dazzling Display of Valour, the League, in no way coerced by the Police, proceeded to board buses, and to exit the City.
“These communist archarchists who claim to make a stand against fascism are really the haters of this nation who support all forms of terrorism and marxist fascism…” [http://www.scottishdefenceleague.moonfruit.com/#/sdl-statement/4537800468].
It is always good to know your history, it smashes so many myths.
Britain’s Imperial history is always portrayed as a force for good, a paternal approach. Taking care of the colonies for their own good, a civilising process until they were able to look after themselves. Of course those who know their history are fully aware that the reality is a far different scenario.
Mike Davis’s book, Late Victorian Holocausts, published in 2001, details famines that killed between 12 million and 29 million inhabitants of the Indian continent. He clearly shows that these people were murdered by the British state. When the drought of 1876 impoverished the farmers of the Deccan plateau India had a net surplus of rice and wheat. The then viceroy, Lord Lytton, insisted that nothing should stand in its way as it was exported to England. In 1877 and 1878, at the height of the famine, grain merchants exported a record 6.4m hundredweight of wheat. As the peasants began to starve, officials were ordered "to discourage relief works in every possible way". The Anti-Charitable Contributions Act of 1877 prohibited "at the pain of imprisonment private relief donations that potentially interfered with the market fixing of grain prices". The only relief permitted in most districts was hard labour, from which anyone in an advanced state of starvation was turned away. In the labour camps, the workers were given less food than inmates of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1877, monthly mortality in the camps equated to an annual death rate of 94%.
As millions died, the imperial government launched "a militarised campaign to collect the tax arrears accumulated during the drought". This collected tax, which ruined those who might otherwise have survived the famine, was used by Lytton to fund his war in Afghanistan. Even in places that had produced a crop surplus, the government's export policies manufactured hunger. In the north-western provinces, Oud and the Punjab, in spite of the fact that they had brought in record harvests in the preceding three years, at least 1.25m people died.
The same type of imperialist policies are still employed today by the western corporate world. The continents of Africa and South America can bear witness to the poverty inflicted on millions of people to feed the corporate greed machine. Only when we as ordinary people come together and organise at community level and co-operate with each other on a global scale creating societies based on mutual aid and sustainability, undermining the festering marriage of state and corporate greed and so consigning it and its wars, exploitation and greed, that is part and parcel of that system, to the dust bin of history and perhaps remembering it as man’s darkest hour will we see a world fit for all our children and grandchildren.
Anarchoblogs is a collection of blogs from
self-identified anarchists, anarcho-syndicalists, anarcha-feminists,
anarchists without adjectives, libertarian-socialists, autonomists and
other assorted anti-statists.
