Legal threats to comrade @ndy.

Following the lead of Machine.gun.keyboard, we at The Partisan are hosting a post by @ndy of Slackbastard fame. @ndy is an anarchist who has done much excellent work in exposing the nascent fascist/neo-Nazis of Australia and NZ.

@ndy writes:

As a result of technical issues, slackbastard @ anarchobase is moving… In brief, my previous blog was subjected to legal threats by the ‘anonymous’ owners of mathaba.net, who viewed the contents of the post below as being in some way ‘defamatory’. More details later. By the way, my email isn’t working, my computer is a piece of shit, and I’m a Luddite. In the meantime:

Having read a recent missive from “Media Alert Transmission Hub Advanced Broadcast Application” (MATHABA)* on the subject of its having documented a revisionist conference in Sydney on the subject of 9/11;

Having bugger-all response to a previous post [temporarily unavailable] on this issue; having a few hours to kill, maim and torture; I thought I might as well scribble a little more on local neo-Nazi Welf Herfurth’s media outlet of choice: mathaba.net.

“My name is Louis Istvan Szondy, I am a British and Australian citizen. I was born on 8th March 1963 in London from a Hungarian father and British/Australian mother.”

To begin with, mathaba.net founder Adam (Musa) King apparently used to be known as Louis Istvan Szondy, having changed his name in 1990. In terms of the political perspective which he brings to mathaba.net — and which might explain why fascists such as Welf Herfurth and other anti-Semites are included among its few dozen correspondents — in 2003 King (Szondy) won a libel case against The Sunday Telegraph, which accused him of being a terrorist and accomplice of al-Qaeda. An extract from the text of a subsequent failed appeal (May 18, 2004) by the Telegraph (against some parts of the decision in favour of Szondy) provides the context for these libellous allegations:

It appears that the defendants’ [that is, the Telegraph’s] interest in the claimant [that is, King/Szondy] was aroused when the police visited their offices on Friday 19th October 2001 (shortly after the destruction by terrorists of the World Trade Centre in New York) and accidentally left there a list of the names of 24 people into whom the Anti-Terrorist Branch was conducting an official investigation. Most of the names on the list were obviously Islamic, but the list contained the name of “Adam Moussa” and at least one other person with an English sounding name. On the following Sunday, 21st October, the defendants published in the Sunday Telegraph the first of the two articles of which complaint is made in this action. It was headed “Two white suspects in Bin Laden probe” and it read as follows: “Detectives are investigating two white people in Britain who they suspect of aiding Osama bin Laden’s terror network. Secret Scotland Yard documents, obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, name two men – one of whom is understood to be a computer expert – as assisting al-Qaeda’s network in this country. It is the first time since September 11 that white non-Muslims have been accused of involvement in Islamic extremism. The documents reveal that a special unit has been established at the Yard to carry out ‘Operation Full Circle’, to monitor the two white men and 22 other suspects. All are being investigated to establish whether they have committed terrorist offences. The Sunday Telegraph cannot name the two for legal and operational reasons. One of the two white men on the list, the computer expert, is believed to have assisted bin Laden operatives with website activities. He is named in the document as also being linked to Francis Etim, who has been charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. Etim, who lived in Greenwich, south-east London, was born in Britain and converted to Islam at marriage and changed his name to Sulayman Zain-Ul-Abidin. Also on the list is a white man with a French name. Little is known of him, except that he has adopted several aliases. He is believed to be wanted in connection with Algerian plots to attack France.”

(For further discussion of the legal and political ramifications of the King case, see Jessica Hodgson, ‘Newpapers falling prey to legal eagles’, The Observer, September 28, 2003.) Prior to mathaba.net, Szondy was also responsible for establishing the International Green Charter. In other words, Szondy was once an advocate on behalf of the ideas contained in “Brotherly Leader and Guide of the Revolution” / “Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Arab Libyan Popular and Socialist Jamahirya” Muammar al-Gaddafi’s 1975 magnum opus the three-volume Green Book. In fact, Szondy remains a fan; as recently as June 2007, he describes the contents of the Book as constituting “the scientific and natural historical principles of the Third Universal Theory, the truth” (’Founder of Green Charter International CallsCell-Phone-Services-for-Travelers Mar-4-2008 For Serious Study of The Green Book’, mathaba.net, June 2007). But what exactly is the International Green Charter?

Inspired by the Proclamation of the Great Green Charter for Human Rights on 12th June, 1988, the first Human Rights Charter to be issued by the people gathered in popular congresses, signalling the end of the era of the republics and the dawn of the era of themasses, as well as a new advancement in the definition of human rights; Motivated by the Green Book, a guide for the total deliverance from the power of individuals, classes, clans, tribes or parties, and the path towards the establishment of a civil society where all human beings are free and equal in the exercise of power and in the possession of wealth and arms; Convinced that the rights of Man, vicegerent of God on earth, cannot be the gift of a person nor exist in societies where exploitation and tyranny are practised, and can only be achieved by the victory of the people over their oppressors and the disappearance of regimes which annihilate freedom;

Et cetera et cetera et cetera.

al-Gaddafi, incidentally, is awesome. In addition to being Libya’s head of state and an inspiration to Szondy, Muammar has a bodyguardcomposed entirely of chicks. They wear blue uniforms, have black belts in karate, and were most recently seen in France when al-G popped in to visit fellow Brotherly Leader Monsieur Sarkozy (Ian Sparks, ‘Five planes, a camel, a tent and 30 female virgin bodyguards… Libyan leader Gaddafi arrives in Paris with his entourage’, The Daily Mail, December 11, 2007).
On a spotterly note, during the 1980s the Libyan Gub’mint sponsored visits to Libya by members of the Trotskyist SWP (now known as the DSP) under the auspices of a local neo-Nazi turned Islamic convert named Robert Pash (see Raiders of the Left Ark, January 13, 2006). According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke (Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity, NYU Press, 2002, p.292) in the late 1970s Pash was the Australian contact for the US-based Aryan Nations, and also distroed KKK propaganda. In the ’80s, Pash distroed al-Gaddafi’s Green Book, and later helped establish the Australian People’s Congress, an organisation which I first encountered via newspaper advertisements around the time of the first Gulf War. At one point in 1987, according to The Australia/Israel Review (April 10–May 1, 1998):

…then Hawke Minister Clyde Holding revealed to Parliament that Pash’s outfit advocated the “biological integrity of the white race through a complete geographic and political separation of the races and thus the maintenance of international white unity”. Holding told Parliament that Pash was an “anti-Semitic right wing racist political loony in the tradition of Goebbels and Hitler,” and then tabled
Queensland Police reports which showed that Mr Pash had been under investigation following death threats to Queensland’s Jewish community by the organisation, The Sword of Islam, for which of course Mr Pash was the spokesman.

Curiously, in April 1987, Libya hosted the second conference of its World Center Against Imperialism, Zionism and Racism (MATABA), in Tripoli. Pash led an Australian delegation which included, notoriously, Aboriginal activists Michael Mansell (‘Desperate Times’, ABC Message Stick, May 14, 2004) and Yaluritja Clarrie Isaacs. In the ’90s, Pash popped up as the “Australian Association for the Study of the Juche Idea”; this being another term for the state ideology of North Korea / Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). It was in this capacity that in 1998 ‘Rashid Robert Pash’ was given the opportunity to tour the country of the illustrious Korean President Kim Il Sung and the Great Leader Comrade Kim Jong Il. As for mathaba.net, as a result of his recent reconciliation with the Jewish-dominated Western powers — the UK and the US in particular, but including, of course, France’s Sarkozy — al-Gaddafi has broken poor little Szondy’s heart. This is why al-Gaddafi is regularly criticised by mathaba.net, while the contents of his little Green Book — and its strange amalgam of pan-Arabism, Islam and state socialism — remains an attractive property for the likes of Louis. And, of course, Herfurth & Co.. For further discussion on ‘Third Positionism’, see Chip Berlet, Racial Nationalism, the Third Position and Ethnoviolence (Including a Discussion of Possible Connections Between Militant Islamic Fundamentalists and the U.S. Extreme Right); on the Green Book and its diminishing funding and influence, see teh Interwebs, especially Craig S. Smith, ‘In Libya, pages fade in once-touted Green Book’, International Herald Tribune, January 5, 2005, which documents the manner in which the Gaddafi regime no longer plows dinars into promoting The Leader’s vision, and why folks like Pash turned to Juche thought for (financial) sustenance (”Tucked away in a whitewashed, Italian-colonial building set in a quiet compound on the edge of Tripoli, the largely forgotten World Center for Green Book Studies is looking for a little respect…”); The Washington Post has just published (March 29, 2008) an editorial, ‘Not Quite Free’, on Gaddafi, Libya and its relations with Western powers which is worth reading (”The turning point came in 2003, when Mr. Gaddafi renounced terrorism and agreed to dismantle his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs. At the time, many attributed Mr. Gaddafi’s shift to his fear of meeting the same fate as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. It also reflected his desire to lure U.S. and other Western companies to redevelop Libya’s vast oil reserves.”). And on a final spotterly note, sometime anarchist and boy lover Hakim Bey (aka Peter Lamborn Wilson) recounts his experience addressing a conference in Libya on the subject of the Green Book in ‘Jihad Revisited’, June 5, 2004: “The conference in Tripoli turned out to be a curious circus of “lost causes,” including two anarchists from New York (we were cheered as heroes for defying the “travel ban”), countless African liberation fronts, the interesting French “New Right” philospher Alain de Benoist and some Australian Red/Brown types, two charming Turkish Greens, a Slovenian anarchist, a clique of Parisian Maoists, etc., and a phalanx of hospitable Libyans, all fuelled by excessive coffee intake. A German doctor gave a paper on depleted uranium in Iraq, the first time most of us had heard of such a thing. A New Zealand delegate told horror stories about privatization of water; ditto…”

*Al Mathaba Al-AlamiaAl Mathaba (meaning center) is the Libyan center for anti-imperialist propaganda which has funded third world guerilla groups. The Anti-Imperialism Center (AIC) - also known as Mathaba - is used by Gaddafi to support terrorist networks and thus plays an important role in Gaddafi’s terrorism strategy.Al-Mathaba was established in 1982 to support “liberation and revolutionary groups”, Al-Mathaba has sponsored a number of stridently anti-Western conferences in Tripoli. At the same time, its mission is to identify and recruit revolutionaries for ideological and military training in Libya. During their training in Libyans camps, individuals are selected for advanced training, including in weapons and explosives, and indoctrination. With representatives in many Libyan embassies worldwide, Al-Mathaba runs its own independent clandestine operations and disburses payments to terrorist, insurgent, and subversive groups.As of 1992 Al-Mathaba was headed by Musa Kusa, a Gaddafi confidant who was also Libya’s Deputy Foreign Minister. As of late 1995 Musa Kusa was the head of the Libyan External Security Agency, and was also the head of Al Mathaba International. Al Mathaba is more a concept than an organization. Its origins are Libyan and its objective anti-imperialist. Libya’s international activity is considerable. Some see it everywhere, behind every armed, or even radical, group. It was in 1982 that Libya took the initiative of organizing an international organization essentially based on the third world: Al Mathaba. By calling the 3rd Al Mathaba Congress in August 2000, to mark the 30th anniversary of its revolution, with the participation of many representatives, particularly from Africa and Latin America, Libya no doubt hoped to affirm for itself an active international role, far beyond its small size. Judging by the level of participation, its plan was particularly well received, reflecting the high degree of sympathy Libya enjoys in the anti-imperialist world — the result of the continuity of its efforts over a period of time. Once an organization that backed morally, financially and physically the liberation movements seeking to overthrow oppressive regimes — often times through armed struggle — Col. Gaddafi said that “after restructuring, (Mathaba) must confront the concept of globalization.” Many heads of state were present: Sam Nujoma (Namibia), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Yoweri Kaguta Musaveni (Uganda), Blaise Campraore (Burkina Faso), Alpha Oumar Konare (Mali), Yahya Jammeh (Gambia), Idris Deby (Chad), Abdou Diouf (Senegal), and the President of Guinea Bissao. Progressive political forces, communists and revolutionaries were there as well: the Cuban CP, Shaffik Handal (FMLN, San Salvador), the Guatemalan URNG, Tomas Borge and Daniel Ortega of the FSLN (Nicaragua), Raul Reyes (FARC, Columbia), a personal representative of Hugo Chavezfla-bank-meeting-to-focus-on-biofuels Apr-3-2008 (Venezuela), Lula, of the Brazilian Labour Party, Gladys Marin, General Secretary of the Chilean CP, Marina Arismendi, General Secretary of the Uruguayan CP. From Europe there was a very varied Italian delegation, with the Refoundation Communist Party in particular, and a Spanish delegation from the United Left (José Cabo) and from OSPAAAL. ~ Al Mathaba / Anti-Imperialism Center





Legal threats are familiar to many of us bloggers. A certain ;;; comes to mind...

Crikey on Class

Online mag Crikey has had a couple of interesting articles recently, both of which are worth bookmarking for future reference.

The first is by Jeff Sparrow, editor of the Overland journal, who argues that US forces are colluding with Shi'ite elites against the nationalist Iraqi resistance, composed largely of the underclass:

According to George Bush, "Iraqi security forces are waging a tough battle against militia fighters and criminals in Basra, many of whom have received arms and training and funding from Iran." But hang on a minute. In that "tough battle", isn’t the US providing air support for an organization called the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq? Wasn’t the SCIRI (more recently known as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq) founded 25 years ago as an Iranian proxy? Didn’t, until May last year, the SCIRI/ICI explicitly take its spiritual direction from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei?

I've seen this theme elsewhere of some of the left-leaning blogosphere, and I'd be interested to hear from anybody who knows more. Anybody who still believes that the Iraq War was an emancipatory project should be disabused of their illusions upon learning that private security firm Blackwater has had its contract in Iraq renewed, in spite of allegations of civilian massacres, and in spite of the wishes of the Iraqi people.

Closer to home, Crikey has published an article examining the disparities in wealth between Australians, and puts paid to the Howardian myth of unparalleled economic prosperity:

St. Vincent de Paul assisted over 2.1 million Australians in 2006. An estimated 100,000 Australians are currently homeless. The percentage of the population living in poverty increased in 10 years (1994 to 2004) from 7.6% to 9.9%. Australia ranks unfavourably against most OECD nations on poverty.

It's good to see such issues receive a bit of attention, when the rest of the media is focusing on Wayne Carey's foibles, and newsreaders coming out of the closet. Traditional leftist considerations of class, and the analysis of struggles between classes are still essential is a supposedly post-Marxist, postmodern world.

Action and Reaction/ Reality and Perception

I have little interest in engaging in the pseudo-debate over Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilder's Fitna. As far as I can see, it is the cinematic equivalent of street graffito saying 'Go home, Lebs'.

Nonetheless, certain sections of the media and blogosphere were falling over themselves in Australia and the US in their rush to tell us how necessary this film was to disabuse us of our illusions about Islam. Apparently, Islam is not a secret mission (arm-in-arm with the 'politically correct' crowd, you see) to take over the world, beginning with Europe. As Melbourne's resident cherry-picker, Andrew Bolt put it:

If Geert Wilders was very wrong about Islam, his film would not cause such panic...If Wilders is so wrong, people wouldn’t be so terrified as to try to ban his film, which does virtually nothing but quote the Koran and Muslim leaders, and show without comment the work of some Muslim groups. (source)

It is therefore heartening to see an article in the Israeli press that elaborates on this supposed panic, and the nature of the Islamic menace in Holland:

Dutch Jews are more outspoken than local Muslims in their criticism of the newly released anti-Islam film by rightist legislator Geert Wilders, says Dr. Ronny Naftaniel, head of the pro-Zionist Center for Information and Documentation (CIDI).

"They [the Muslim community] are afraid. They have been told by the Dutch government to keep quiet and be wise about this issue, and that's what they want to do," Naftaniel told Haaretz on Monday in CIDI's four-story headquarters near the American embassy.

"I was surprised by the silence of the local Muslim leaders," Naftaniel added. "If I were a Muslim, I would speak out and I would blame Wilders for this film. I wouldn't stop shouting about it. I don't understand their silence, I really don't. I think they are scared."

"We are never afraid to speak out in the harshest of terms against what we think is wrong, be it against Muslim extremism here in the Netherlands, or the Dutch or Israeli governments," he said. "But this movie portrays all Muslims as The Enemy. And this is just not true."

So much for panic on the streets of Amsterdam.

A Salvo Against Cruise-Missile 'Liberals'

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and in light of 9/11 and the ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories, a number of self-identified leftists or liberals underwent a period of colonoscopic self-examination. Many emerged from the process as supporters of US, British, and, more locally, Australian imperialism. Christopher Hitchens, Nick Cohen, Pamela Bone, the Eustonites - collectively these people are known as the 'Decent Left'.

A rather indecent comrade, who happens to be arguably the best solo blogger on the intertubes, has just published a book looking at this very subject:





It's published by the excellent Verso, who also provide a good deal of other indecent stuff, such as anti-imperialist tomes, and exegeses on Lacan. Pre-order the book, comrades, and tell your Decent friends to return to their colonoscopic self-examination!

In the meantime, if you'd like a shorter rebuttal of Decentism, you could do much worse than this hilarious rejoinder.

Whack-A-Mole

Many of the unctuous half-wits on the right-side of the blogosphere appear to be concerned with pursuing a kind of cultural hegemony. You can see this in those few who, having well and truly lost the argument, continue to bleat about the beauty and goodness of US invasions of Vietnam and Iraq, for instance.

Another commonplace is the notion that fascism generally, and Hitler, specifically, are somehow 'socialist' or 'leftist'. Unsurprisingly, whenever this claim is made, little evidence is offered in its defence, other than some guilt-by-association remarks about former Democrats (who are neither leftist nor socialist in any case), and some vague statements that Hitler controlled the German economy in a 'socialist' fashion. A young, intellectually-challenged boy illustrated this with some recent comments on my blog:

Hitler was a Socialist at heart. The Nazis controlled the economy and told the companies what to produce, they just didn't sieze them. Hitler was NOT ALL Right-Wing.


It is curious that rightists attack the Nazis on economic grounds, given that this was the only area in which they were somewhat 'successful', and considering that it is for war and genocide, not economic tinkering, that we revile them today.
Furthermore, if economic intervention by governments is definitional of either fascism or socialism, then virtually every post-war Western government must fall into one of the latter categories. Free markets, after all, do not exist except in textbooks (and certain third-world dictatorships, such as Colombia, or Egypt). The Bush administration 'controlled' the economy by contracting the likes of Haliburton and Blackwell to perform various tasks that formerly would have been the domain of the state. In this, the Bush presidency meets the rightard criteria for Hitlerism/socialism on economic grounds, to say nothing of the curtailing of civil liberties, or histrionic 'patriotism'.

We should also remember that, at the time of Hitler, informed leftists were bitterly opposed to fascism, on economic and other grounds. This is clearly demonstrated on the anti-fascist writings of Trotsky, Benjamin, Adorno and others around the time of Hitler's ascendancy. In both Italy and Germany, fascists came to power by way of alliances with a conservative coalition, the aim of both groups being to keep out the socialist left.

Finally, let us look at what an actual historian (Robert Paxton), rather than partisan pundit, has to say about fascism and the economy:

Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933-socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini's famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen.

Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had "converging but not identical interests." Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. (p. 145)

Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy their common enemies. (p. 147) (source)

I'm sure that the shameless dissembling of the right will continue, on this topic as on others, but in keeping with the carnival spirit that inhabits this blog, I encourage everybody to continue playing whack-a-mole as often as is necessary.

Victoria, the Surveillance State

Some of this information has been provided to me via a couple of sources, and is not widely known.

The State Government of Victoria funds, administers, and oversees a sizeable portion of the state’s ‘services’, from hospitals to housing. These welfare state services are spread across a number of Ministerial portfolios, as well as a number of ‘Departments’. As much as the libertarians may complain about it, when things go wrong in Australia, the locals tend to expect the relevant government to do something about it.

In addition to those services directly overseen by the State Government, we also have the so-called Non Government Agencies (NGAs), who are private firms to whom state services are outsourced and sub-contracted. This takes place by way of a competitive tendering process and much red tape, though I suspect some of the state’s more ardent capitalists might question precisely how ‘competitive’ the whole process is. In welfare-related industries, the NGAs in Victoria are auspiced almost entirely by one Christian church/religious group or another. The services themselves are secular, but the infrastructure and so forth are provided by the agency and funded by the Government. The same agencies will often have a fundraising component or some other means of diverting cash into less secular activities.

In short, this means that there are hundreds of thousands of Victorians who will come into these services, in one capacity or another. Not unreasonably, we might expect each particular industry to maintain a database for a range of purposes – to facilitate better ‘service delivery’, communicate, for legal reasons, etc. After all, in Victoria we have legislation governing the privacy of individual’s personal information, and the limits to which such information can be used.

What is less reasonable is that there should be a centralised point at which all this information converges. Such a point has been constructed in the form of a computer program, known variously as CRIS or CRISP (as well as a couple of other acronymic monikers). This program was commissioned by the Victorian Government some years ago, and built by a private programming firm. My information now tells me that the Government has since bought out the program, owns it outright, and intends to market and sell it to other states and countries.

My understanding is that, functionally speaking, the above computer program was a turd. The Government spent ever-increasing amounts of cash to salvage the project, running up a bill that is somewhere in the order of $53 million.

The software itself applies to a range of Government programs, such as housing, disability services, youth justice, child protection, and the various NGA appendages attached to these services.

Now, a NGA worker cannot read the file of a housing worker, who in turn cannot read the file of a youth justice worker, even though each uses the same program, and may be dealing with the same individual. We can safely conclude that this program has nothing to do with improving communication or information sharing.

Secondly, the program is functionally inferior to its predecessors – slower, more prone to bugs, and tends to significantly increase the administrative burden of workers. The implementation of this program therefore must have nothing to do with ‘efficiency’, unless it was designed by half-wits.

The only reasons that I can see for foisting this software onto thousands of workers, and, by extension, hundreds of thousands of members of the public (as the software does not merely take details for individuals, but also for their associates) are firstly, that this information is siphoned back to the central branch of these Government agencies. In effect, a massive database has been created, including information about hundreds of thousands of Victorians. Given the ‘welfare’ orientation of most of these agencies, one can readily appreciate that much of the information is sensitive in nature. What does the Government intend to do with all this information? – I have no idea.

The second reason is much more entrepreneurial. I’m told that the program will be marketed and sold to other states (and possibly countries) on the basis of its promised ‘efficiencies’.

In the meantime, tens of millions of Victorian dollars have been blown on a useless piece of software, whose only virtue is being able to keep masses of people under a kind of surveillance. As I wrote earlier, few know of this nasty piece of work, possibly because the Vic Government is among the country’s more secretive. Who knows, this may even unite libertarians and Foucauldians or, more likely, it will simply allow the screws of Governmental control to turn a little tighter.

So spread the word, comrades, and do anything you can to fight this little tyranny, though it be of a petty, and bureaucratic form.

Some religions are plain authoritarian...

An Italian judge was sentenced to a year in prison for refusing to sit in a courtroom with a crucifix on the wall, his lawyer said...Crucifixes have been present in Italian courtrooms since a 1926 justice ministry directive under the fascist regime of Benito Mussolini that has never been repealed in mainly Catholic Italy. (source)

Benito who? I suspect there will one day be a generation who, nourished on propaganda, will have never heard the term 'fascism' without the epithet 'Islamo-' thrown in front of it.