Drive Violent Racists Off The Streets Now!
On January 16 one hundred anti-racists of all colours held a determined anti-fascist rally in Newtown. Starting from the Hub opposite Newtown railway station, demonstrators marched upon a shopfront racist mural on Station Street. The anti-Muslim mural has become a magnet for extreme white supremacists.
The rally was larger and better organised than the first anti-racist rally that marched upon the mural on December 19 last year. As a result, the fascist Australian Protectionist Party (APP) that had mobilised a contingent, complete with hateful placards, to defend the racist mural on December 19 did not dare to do the same this time. Instead, they showed up without any placards or flags to cowardly intersperse themselves amongst the anti-racist crowd and from there they launched individual provocations.
The anti-racist demonstrators spiritedly chanted, “Drive out, Drive out, Drive out the fascist filth!” Anarchists, autonomous Marxists and concerned Newtown residents were joined by Trotskyist Platform supporters in helping to organise and promote the action which in the end drew in a larger cross-section of the Sydney left than had the December rally with representatives of groups such as Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative and Solidarity also turning out. Our own placards included: “Protect the good multiracial people of Newtown. Workers, minorities and leftists unite to sweep the fascist filth off the streets!” and “Drive extreme white supremacists out of stolen Aboriginal land!”
However, ultimately the police, seemingly having coordinated their plans with the APP, launched violent attacks against the anti-racist demonstrators. Moving in to arrest some of the anti-mural protesters, they pushed and flung others around while all the while making sure to protect the APP racist vermin. When one APP idiot kicked a protester right under the nose of two police officers, the cops – true to form – did absolutely nothing.
With the police unrelenting in their attacks, the protesters as a tight-knit group moved away from the mural site and on to Enmore Road. But the cops followed them there and now bolstered by large numbers of reinforcements became even more violent. They kicked protesters and grabbed some in headlocks. Eventually, after much police brutality eight demonstrators were arrested. At least one of those arrested was kneed in the back by several police while being spread-eagled on the ground as the police, lying through their teeth, shouted out “stop resisting” to ‘justify’ jumping in with their knees. Another of the protesters, after being arrested, was picked up by several cops and thrown into the police van like a sack of rice.
Seven of the protesters were subsequently hit up with outrageous charges that included resisting arrest, hindering arrest, assault of a police officer and malicious damage. Although one of the defendants pleaded guilty to a charge of malicious damage (of the racist mural), the other six defendants were found not guilty on all charges. This followed a rather half-baked prosecution case in the court – one in which the prosecutor barely bothered to emphasise any facts at all during his closing summary. It seemed that the police, conscious that their action on January 16 was so heavy-handed and thus the charges they imposed on protesters so over the top, did not seem to want to arouse further public exposure of their behavior on January 16 by pushing the trial proceedings too hard. Especially when they had achieved what they wanted to on January 16 by on the one-hand protecting the hard racists and their filthy mural and on the other, brutally breaking up the rally of the anti-racists through violence and arrests.
RACIST REDNECKS AND THE BURQA
The racist anti-Muslim mural in Newtown which is couched as an anti-burqa mural has become something of a focal point for the struggle between White Australia racists and those who oppose racism in this country. It is important to understand that the racists care little about the burqa itself. It is simply a convenient excuse for them to use to vilify Muslim people and whip up race hatred in general. If they weren’t focussing on the burqa they would find something else. During the 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach, the same extreme racists who are today whipping up a storm against the burqa found other excuses to bash people of Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds. Nevertheless, it is helpful to the racists that the burqa has indeed been both a symbol and an instrument of the oppression of women, often excluding women that wear it from a good deal of social interaction. Ironically, the effect of the racist
anti-Muslim torrent has actually been to push some women to cling on to things like the burqa or hijab because they see wearing them as statements of defiance against the incessant racism.
The origin of the use of the burqa is tied up with traditions linked to pre-industrial, agricultural economies – either based on the nomadic raising of livestock or sedentary agriculture. With few people working for wages in such economic systems, there were instead relatively large amounts of people holding small amounts of private productive property. Fundamental to such social systems was the passing down of livestock or small holdings of land by the patriarchal head of the family to his male heirs and, consequently, there was a great obsession on ensuring that a man’s son was indisputably his. This was enforced by keeping women under strict seclusion.
This practice, rooted in a particular socio-economic system, actually predates the advent of Islam. In fact, it was only in the second century after the time of Mohammed that the veil became common in the Islamic world at all and this was at first only exclusively amongst the rich and powerful. The majority of the population of the Near East, rural and nomadic, had very little property to protect and, since wearing a veil is often a hindrance when doing physical work, for a woman to wear the burqa and be kept within the house was a sign that her family had the means to enable her to do so. The role that the prevalent religion played (and even more significantly those who would interpret it on down the centuries) in regions where burqa-wearing already existed was simply the role religion has always played everywhere: that is, to use the claim of holy endorsement to legitimise and further enforce the existing power relations – and associated “norms” – of a society.
Partial industrialisation in the Middle East, in particular the rise of the oil industry, and with it the displacement of the earlier nomadic and agricultural socio-economic realities by wage labour would long ago have started to partially undermine practices such as the wearing of the burqa. However, the Western capitalist powers, in order to help them loot a good chunk of the wealth of the Middle East and North Africa have for many years now held up the most reactionary forces there. Thus, while talking “democracy,” Washington and Co. actually act as salvage agencies for the most reactionary traditions.
And so it is with the vilest hypocrisy that racists pretend that “Westerners” have the “moral high ground” on this issue. Western imperialist regimes have long propped up governments that enforce the seclusion of women. Chief among these is the Saudi monarchy, the strongest Western ally in the Muslim world. The Saudi monarchy for all practical purposes enforces the wearing of a form of the burqa – the niqab – by all local Saudi women in the country. And this is not even to mention that the U.S.-backed Saudi regime is the only government in the world that bans women from driving!
Then there is the history of the U.S., Australia and the other capitalist powers in Afghanistan. In 1978 a leftist secular party, the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, took power in that country. The Soviet-allied PDPA government began opening up education to women and attempted to free them from the imposition of the chador – the Afghan burqa. In response, reactionary forces declared war on the PDPA and were soon backed by the CIA. Eventually, the U.S. and other Western powers (as well as Iran) would provide the anti-women forces, short of the open presence of their own ground troops, with the most enormous backing imaginable. As a result of this along with, critically, the internal collapse of the PDPA’s Soviet ally, the U.S.-backed Mujahedin forces eventually won the war and re-established the enslavement of women in Afghanistan. Once in power the Mujahedin would, of course, later split into the Taliban and the current crop of U.S. puppet warlords who are now in power there and no less reactionary and misogynist than the Taliban themselves.
But the disgusting hypocrisy of the racist far right doesn’t end here. While “mainstream” rightist shock jocks from the likes of 2GB are backing the APP’s “ban the burqa” posture, they continue to vilify poor single mothers. These hard right forces, themselves, are linked with “jilted fathers” groups like the notorious Blackshirts and Tank who go around threatening and harassing divorced mothers. The tiny proportion of Australia’s Muslim women that wear the burqa are no threat to anyone. However, the extreme right-wing filth that intimidate single mothers outside their own homes definitely are!
This right-wing crusade to “ban the burqa” is, in fact, worse than simply hypocritical. If successful it would further isolate the small number of women who do wear the burqa. Moreover, the “ban the burqa” agitation when combined with the war on refugees helps to produce a climate of intense racism in which violent fascist groups can grow. We have, unfortunately, all seen recently in Norway what indescribable hatred and horror can bloom in such a stiflingly xenophobic atmosphere. It is telling that one of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik’s political heroes turns out to be none other than Australian ex-prime minister John Howard. Praising him in his manifesto for being “one of the most sensible leaders in the Western World,” within its 1500 pages of hate and racism Breivik is all too pleased to point out that “Mr Howard caused outrage in Australia’s Islamic community when he said Muslims needed to speak English and show respect to women.”
JANUARY 16: A STRUGGLE FULL OF LESSONS
It was completely correct for anti-racists to stand up to the fascists that are incubating around the racist mural shopfront in Newtown. It is, however, important to now study the lessons of that struggle. For the January 16 demonstration showed up the current strengths as well as the shortcomings of the movement.
A highlight of the action was the terrific solidarity shown by the core activists of the movement in defending each other after the rally was attacked by police. Once the police did attack the protest, activists instinctively came together and linked arms to defend each other. We acted in a united way. At a later point some activists, after an on-the-spot consultation amongst themselves, called out for everyone to move away with arms linked. Good discipline was again demonstrated here by the core of participants in the rally. Such solidarity would continue during the trial of the protesters charged over the demonstration with a core group of activists turning up at the court to support the defendants.
Such self-sacrificing spirit for the sake of the struggle is priceless to the anti-racist movement. Without it no amount of good political theory means anything. On the other hand, the existence of such determination and courage amongst activists means that if the movement can be infused with a clear political strategy then it will surely blossom.
The most important lesson of the January 16 struggle was that it confirmed, yet again, that organs of the capitalist state such as the police can never be allies in the struggle against extreme racists. The police attacked the anti-racist protesters and protected the fascists. Despite carrying out violent provocations, none of the APP people were arrested. The level of collusion between the police and the white supremacists was evident once again during the trial of the arrested anti-racists. Two APP fascists were the police prosecutor’s sole “independent” witnesses. Furthermore, in the foyer outside the court room a large group of police along with the APP creeps and the racist mural artist, Sergio Redegalli, were lounging around in a circle for hours in chummy conversation.
With the powerful forces of the state arrayed against anti-fascists, this only highlights the need for the anti-racist movement to link itself with the might of the organised workers movement. To carry out this perspective does not simply mean approaching trade unions and asking them for help. It also means framing the demands and calls to action of a struggle to appeal to the class interest of the working class. In planning meetings for the January 16 action, comrades proposed that such appeals be included in the leaflet that was building the January 16 struggle. This proposal was well received and others at the meeting – anarchists and autonomous Marxists among them – seemed to have been thinking along the same lines themselves. The particular formulation that we specifically proposed later was: “Trade unionists must be at the forefront of stopping the fascists. The racist filth that the fascists spew is poison to any attempt to unite workers of different ethnicities together and without unity workers cannot defeat greedy bosses.” In the end, however and for whatever reason, this formulation was not included. It is possible that it was just a question of communications not getting through in the rush to finalise this leaflet. But it is also quite possible that some people may have been a bit queasy about such a formulation (or at least not enthusiastic enough about it to leave something else out of the leaflet in order to fit it in) because they thought it would alienate, for example, the small cafe owners and shopkeepers who were showing some sympathy for the campaign. It had, in fact, been noted at the planning meeting that these small businesspeople had been allowing advertisements for the rally to be posted on their shopfronts. Indeed, the proposed pro-union formulation would likely have alienated many such small businessmen and women, especially those that are small-scale exploiters of labour or who hope to hire labour in the future. However, ultimately a clear-cut choice has to be made: either appeal to the organised workers movement or make the movement acceptable to the small business people and small-scale capitalists. You simply can’t do both. In making this choice, activists should be aware that small-scale bosses, even if subjectively anti-racist and self-described “leftists,” are not the type, at least not in great numbers, to risk standing up to fascists when the fascists are being protected by the police. Furthermore, in terms of being able to make the police pull back from attacking an anti-racist mobilisation, a small trade union contingent is worth much more than the participation of a hundred individual small proprietors. Most importantly, it is the working class that must be energised and mobilised now because it is the only real force that can eventually deal the final blow to fascism by sweeping away the capitalist system that spawns it. And in this class struggle against capitalism, small-scale exploiters of labour find themselves on the other side of the fence.
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It is indeed possible to win the organised workers movement to the struggle against the fascists not only because the extreme racists threaten workers’ unity but because fascists are ultimately a direct threat to the trade unions themselves. From Hitler’s Nazis to Franco’s Falangists, fascists in power have always smashed the organised workers movement. They not only hate the labour movement because it unites workers of different ethnicities together but because fascism actually represents the hatred of the most right-wing sections of the middle class, along with insecure sections of the upper class, against organised labour. In this the APP is no different. Today they already rail against “egalitarians leading us into a new dark age.” Notably, one APP member who was a prosecution witness in the trial of the Newtown anti-fascists was heard by several people outside an earlier court hearing loudly dobbing in to the police the CFMEU (Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union.) He claimed that “CFMEU thugs” had been threatening him in the streets. Well, let’s make these claims a reality by mobilising the CFMEU and other unions to drive the APP and all extreme white supremacists off the streets!
In reviewing the lessons of the January 16 struggle, we should acknowledge that there was a missed opportunity on the day. And that is the following: when the anti-racist rally first arrived at the mural, we actually had the forces to deal the handful of violent racists that were there the blow that they needed to be dealt. However, unfortunately did this not in the main happen although one fascist was punished for his violent provocations when he collided his head a couple of times against a bed post used to hold one of our placards. The reason that, in the main, the fascists were not dealt a defeat is that it is not yet widely agreed to within the left that the fascists need to be stopped through self-defence actions of workers and anti-racists. The need for such mass action was motivated in the Trotskyist Platform leaflet that we used to mobilise our supporters for the January 16 action. We reprint the leaflet below.
We feel that it is particularly necessary to review the lessons of the January 16 struggle because far right forces have been gaining ground in this country. While, in the likes of Greece and Spain, economic implosions have led to the outbreak of militant workers struggles and also a leftist radicalisation among a section of those societies, in this country the insecurity over the global capitalist economic crisis has instead led to a shift to the right. Right now it is Tea Party-style politics and the ever more vicious refugee bashing that is in the ascendant in Australia.
However, things can change very quickly. Mass mobilisations against the most extreme white supremacists who are, after all, still despised by most of the population could be just what the workers movement and the left need to revitalise themselves so that they can start to seriously challenge the anti-worker, anti-poor and racist measures of the Labor/Green federal government and Liberal and ALP state governments alike.
Drive Violent Racists Off The Streets of Newtown!
January 14- Fascist groups are increasingly pushing their way into Newtown. In that inner-city suburb, they have held stalls, spread race hate and threatened those who do not fit into their deranged “ideal” of a white master race.
A piece of garbage that is attracting fascist vermin into the area is a large racist mural. The mural, painted on his glass art shop wall by right-wing artist, Sergio Redegalli, depicts a crossed-out Muslim woman in a burqa. The mural originally called to “Ban the Burqa” but was subsequently changed to “Say No to the Burqa.” Of course, the attention-seeking artist and the racist talkback hosts and white supremacist groups that have supported this mural do not really care at all about the burqa which is, after all, only worn by a tiny proportion of Australia’s Muslim minority. Rather, they want to spread a tale that “Muslims are threatening Australia’s ‘way of life’” in order to incite racist fears against Muslims and non-white ethnic groups.
The effect of a ban on the burqa in Australia would be to cruelly drive most of those women who wear it into deeper seclusion – isolating these women from schools, public transport, work and other public life. Those truly concerned about women’s rights would, instead of picking on a tiny minority, focus on the truly serious threat posed by the likes of Fred Nile supporters harassing women going into abortion clinics. But there is no way the fascists are going to highlight this! Instead, they espouse the anti-woman extreme puritanical and homophobic values spewed by Fred Nile who himself is an ardent campaigner to ban the burqa. For the fascists, focussing on the burqa is really simply just a means to whip up a racist storm.
Among the fascists that have swarmed into Newtown is the Australian Protectionist Party (APP.) Members of the APP are, in fact, acting as the thugs who guard Sergio’s racist mural. On December 19, a march on the mural by anti-racists was met by a group of APP members protecting the mural wall and spewing vile slurs against refugees and Muslims. Although the APP tries to hide its neo-Nazi agenda behind the banner of “Australian patriotism,” its fascist character is apparent. The outfit boasts of its openly whites-only membership policy and disgustingly claims that Africans are everywhere especially prone to crime. The APP specialises in vilifying people from “Third World” countries who their members regularly slur as “turd world” people. Such fanatical racists cannot be debated. For what separates these fascists from garden-variety bigots is that not only do they have stupid views but they actually have an agenda to organise violent actions to drive out or destroy non-white people, Muslims, gays, “egalitarians”, leftists and others caught in their gun sights. Fascist groups were prominent in helping to organise the horrific December 2005 white supremacist riot at Cronulla Beach. They have also carried out a number of violent attacks on Indian and Chinese students. Meanwhile, white supremacist outfits have terrorised and in some cases even murdered Aboriginal people. In one well-known case, 15 year-old boy Errol Wyles was murdered in Townsville by an active white supremacist who deliberately and repeatedly drove his car over the Aboriginal child.
The physical threat posed by the fascists must be physically stopped by mass mobilisations of all those that have good reason to fear these extreme right-wing thugs. So that the fascists do not feel emboldened and are not free to actively recruit to their program of racist violence, mass actions must drive them off the streets, physically humiliate and demoralise them and thus put off those considering joining them.
On this Sunday, 16 January at 1pm, an important anti-fascist rally will commence at The Hub in Newtown just opposite Newtown railway station. It is expected that at the very same time, the sinister APP will be swarming together outside the racist mural.
The January 16 anti-fascist action is being built by a wide range of people from individual students and anti-racists in the local area to leftists – including anarchists and Trotskyist Platform. We urge all our readers to join and help build thisanti-racist protest commencing at the Newton Hub. The aim of rally participants should be to either collectively sweep the fascist trash expected to gather at the mural off the streets or if our forces are as yet not sufficient to do this necessary sanitation work then to at least solidify our forces enough so that this crucial work can be accomplished in the future.
Yet we will face a major obstacle – the police protecting the fascists. You see, the police form part of the core of a capitalist state that serves the same capitalist interests as does the racist rhetoric of the fascists. Thus, police have far greater affinity for fascists than for staunch anti-racists. For the cops, anti-racists are a threat to the fabric of the bourgeois society that they are charged to protect at all costs. Not only does this mean that there is an overlap in the membership of the police force and of far-right groups but it is why every time a major anti-fascist movement has tried to confront fascists in Australia over the last few decades, it has had to contend with police mobilised in big numbers. By contrast when major white supremacist mobilisations have occurred, like in Cronulla in 2005 and Manly Beach on “Australia Day” 2009, then the police have been all too conspicuously lightly mobilised.
That is why it is absolutely crucial to win sections of the trade union movement to join the anti-fascist struggle. It is the social power of the organised working class – deriving both from its greatness in number and its extraordinary potential for industrial action – that can compel the police to stand aside so that anti-fascist mobilisations can deal crushing self-defence blows against the fascists. Furthermore, because the whole experience of workers both in their jobs and in struggles for their rights teaches them the necessity of strictly collective organising, trade unionists will bring to the anti-fascist movement the quality of always being disciplined in adhering to the requirements of the collective struggle (as opposed to acting on personal whim and impulse). It is this quality that we need amongst anti-fascists in order to act with the tightest coordination on the ground without which self-defence actions against the violent racists cannot decisively triumph.
It is very possible to mobilise the organised working class behind the anti-fascist movement because it is in the very interests of the workers movement to combat the fascists. The racist filth that the fascists spew is poison to any attempt to unite workers of different ethnicities and without unity workers cannot defeat the bosses that exploit them. The anti-fascist movement must thus frame its slogans to openly appeal to this class interest that workers have in stopping the fascists in order to mobilise the organised workers movement behind us. That naturally means that our movement must be explicit in taking the side of the working class against business employers in the class struggle.
We should appeal especially to workers in the heavily racially integrated manufacturing industries – as well as in other sectors like public transport, post, cleaning and health services – where the threat posed by the fascists means very directly the threat of violence against a non-white union sister or brother. Meanwhile, for waterfront workers and seamen, the extreme racism of the fascists is poison to solidarity with maritime workers abroad, solidarity that is so crucial for maritime workers everywhere to win struggles against the greedy port and shipping owners.
There are indeed tens of thousands of staunchly anti-racist trade unionists and others out there ripe to be mobilised against the fascists. The thing that can get in the way of this is if we make even the slightest suggestion that any component of the state could become an ally in our struggle. For people will then draw the conclusion that we can then leave it to the particular state institution to stop the fascists which after all can sound a lot easier than having to get out and engage in difficult and dangerous actions on the streets. That is why we must not make any appeals to any institution of the capitalist state – whether it be appeals to local councils or police to act against the fascists or calls on governments to pass anti-fascist legislation.
Such appeals will not only be disorienting but could end up being practically suicidal to the anti-racist struggle. Historically, when capitalist rulers have faced pressure to ban fascists they have cleverly responded with legislation banning all so-called “extremists”, legislation which inevitably they then use not against fascists but … against leftists. It is worth noting then that the first person charged under Western Australia’s race hate laws (supposedly brought in to deal with white supremacists) was not an extreme redneck. No, it was actually a 15 year-old Aboriginal girl, apparently because she responded to racist baiting by a white adult!
Even if a particular institution of the state were to partially act against fascists, this would only be to pre-empt and thus demobilise a burgeoning anti-fascist mass movement. In that case the state’s actions would be a very hollow “victory” for our side indeed. Of course, we wouldn’t get in the way of the capitalist state pulling the leash somewhat on its fascist guard dogs in this way but we certainly should not disorient people by making a point of calling for such hypocritical and cynical machinations by the bourgeois state. Inevitably, any localised and necessarily very limited measures that the mainstream capitalists may take on extremely rare occasions “against” the fascists will only serve to breed illusions among anti-racists throughout the country that the fascists can be stopped without mass mobilisations. That’s why we shouldn’t go looking to any state authority to aid the anti-fascist cause in Newtown on the basis of any “hippy Newtown particularity” or something. The anti-fascist struggle in Newtown is crucial but even more important is the need to stop the white supremacists throughout the whole country from Cronulla to Blacktown to Townsville to Alice Springs. We want the anti-fascist struggle in Newtown to inspire in other anti-fascist struggles throughout the country the strategy that can actually defeat the fascists on a wide arena – the strategy of mass action centred on the power of the working class.
Powerful union-centred mass actions against the fascists in Newtown would also encourage broader anti-racist struggles based on a similar strategy: from actions to stop deportations to the much needed union/multi-ethnic anti-racist convoy to Cronulla to ensure that the still largely whites-only beach in that suburb can be safely accessed by all people of all colours.
Sisters and brothers our struggle is crucial. Violent racist groups everywhere are feeding off the official racism of the Labor government (kept in power by the Greens) and the right-wing Liberal opposition. Abroad from the U.S to Britain to Austria to Russia, fascist forces have grown even more by feeding off the unemployment caused by the current capitalist economic crisis. If this country has avoided an economic collapse to the same degree as other capitalist countries it is only because the Australian economy has been propped up by sales to China’s booming socialistic state-owned enterprises. Yet eventually the capitalist economy here will also run aground and that could provide the opportunity for the noxious fascists to expand rapidly out of the resulting putrid social decay.
This is why we must crush the fascists now while they are still crawling out of their eggs. Successful mass actions against the fascists that involve the trade unions will also give the workers movement some much needed confidence in their own power. This is the confidence the working class needs in order to mobilise in defence of its own workplace rights and wage the badly needed struggle for increased resources for public housing, public hospitals, public transport and public schools. Only by in this way posing a class struggle solution to the burning grievances of the masses can we undercut the fascists’ attempts to direct people’s frustrations on to non-white “ethnic” groups.
Working class people and anti-racists of all colours: it is time to stop the fascists. We cannot allow extreme racism to flourish – we cannot allow the multiracial working class to be divided. Only united can workers never be defeated! So let us join the January 16 rally in Newtown and help steer it on to a course of mass union/“ethnic”/leftist actions to crush the fascists. We must protect the good people of multiracial Newtown!