Category: racism

10 Mar

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Europe: The persistence of racism & the fascist threat

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Golden Dawn’s MPs in the Greek parliament

 

by KEVIN OVENDEN

Below are the points, updated and a little amplified, I made in a contribution to the highly successful Unite Against Fascism conference in London on 2 March. The speech (and I’ve incorporated my summing up) was in a workshop with Petros Constantinou from Greece, Marwan Mohammed from France and Glyn Ford MEP from Britain, who all made extremely clear and thought-provoking contributions.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, democracy, dogwhistling, Europe, fascism, Featured, Greece, immigration, Islamophobia, Left strategy, neoliberalism, racism, refugees, social democracy, state, the Right, War on Terror

03 Aug

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Asylum seekers, the Left and the case for open borders

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Tears in parliament, but no solution in sight

Left Flank has been away on holiday, but we’re back now. Below is a repost of my response to the sickening asylum seeker “debate” that happened in late June. Since then the issue has been shifted off to an elite “expert” committee which, as The Piping Shrike has pointed out, represents the exhaustion of the Gillard government’s agenda in political terms.

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Filed Under: ALP, dogwhistling, Featured, Greens, immigration, Left strategy, racism, refugees

24 Jun

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Paul Howes, foreign workers & the dead-end of union nationalism

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MUA protest against the Enterprise Migration Agreement

I’m reposting a recent piece I wrote for Overland Journal’s blog, in response to the debate over the contentious Enterprise Migration Agreement negotiated between the Gillard government and Gina Rinehart to allow the mining billionaire to import up to 1700 skilled workers from overseas. It was written as an open letter to Paul Howes after an op-ed he wrote. He has indicated he’s interested in responding formally at some point.

For some background on the question of migrant workers in the context of the notorious “British Jobs for British Workers” campaign a few years ago, this excellent essay by UK-based political economist Jane Hardy is highly recommended.

And here is an excerpt from a speech by AMWU Western Australian State Secretary Steve McCartney at a fringe event at the recent ACTU conference.

 

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Filed Under: ALP, Featured, immigration, racism, refugees, state, trade unions

22 Apr

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With our minds & bodies on the line: Democracy v fascism in Breivik’s shadow

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Friends or enemies? Police corral an EDL rally in Tower Hamlets

Later this week Left Flank will be looking at the controversy over the reporting of Breivik’s trial in a post at our regular blog at Overland, asking if the media has handed him an effective platform for his fascist ideological arguments. In the meantime, today we post the second of two parts of an extract from our e-book On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe, looking at the how the Left can develop a strategy to combat the rise of far Right extremism. This version was originally prepared for the Greek magazine Re-Public. If you haven’t yet done so, buy and download the book via the Amazon stores in the United Kingdom or the United States.

In the face of far Right intransigence, should the Left go further and demand some kind of state action against the Right?

In Australia the rise in right-wing rhetoric has come at the same time as the Murdoch press has campaigned hysterically against the left-wing Greens party. Its flagship broadsheet declared it wants the Greens ‘destroyed at the ballot box’ and has run opinion pieces suggesting the party has an agenda akin to fascism or Stalinism. In response, Greens leader Bob Brown has called for tough media regulation, in part to curb such rhetorical excesses and partisan bias.

However, one doesn’t have to be a Spiked-style libertarian to see how such calls can play into a culture of greater state regulation that could easily be turned against the Left and social movements.

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Filed Under: democracy, fascism, Featured, Left strategy, racism, state

20 Apr

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Language, violence & politics: Breivik trial puts liberal democracy to the test

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A ‘normal’ trial for a most abnormal criminal: Breivik shakes hands with a court psychiatrist

With Anders Breivik’s trial underway, Left Flank will be analysing the politics both here and at the Overland website. Below we reprint the first of two parts of an abridged extract from the e-book that Guy Rundle, Elizabeth Humphrys and I edited last year, On Utøya: Anders Breivik, Right Terror, Racism and Europe. The chapter examines how some mainstream voices have responded to the rise in extremist language, and how the Left can formulate a response. If you haven’t yet done so, buy and download the book via the Amazon stores in the United Kingdom or the United States (if you don’t have a smartphone/iPad/Kindle, you can read it on your PC with a free Kindle app).

It seems a fitting place to start because if the first few days of the trial have proven anything it’s that the efforts to provide the terrorist with as ‘normal’ a trial as possible are being used by him to turn it into a platform for his propaganda and to legitimate his defence of ‘necessity’. Even if Breivik ends up getting what the criminal law would suggest is a ‘just’ outcome (found sane, responsible and guilty, and locked up in perpetuity), the liberal democratic response to his fascist political strategy is likely to be found seriously wanting.

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Filed Under: democracy, fascism, Featured, Left strategy, media, racism, state

13 Apr

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You are not who I thought you were: Race and ‘The Hunger Games’

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This post was first published at Overland Journal earlier this week. 

In high school my English teacher gave advanced reading to students who were keen, and the first novel was To Kill A Mockingbird. Harper Lee’s book is a story of racism in the American South, as everyone knows, but it also included a salutary lesson about gender for me.

Lee’s narrator is Scout, the daughter of an Alabama lawyer defending a black man wrongfully accused of raping a white woman. For quite some time, as I eagerly turned the pages, I assumed that Scout was a he. Whether this is because Scout’s gender was deliberately hidden, or because I was skimming (which I’m sadly only known to do with fiction I impatiently adore), I’m not sure. But when I realised ‘he’ was really a Jean Louise and a ‘she’, I found myself fixated on my own sexist supposition as I was, after all, a feminist-in-training at 14.

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Filed Under: Featured, feminism, racism, social inclusion, Uncategorized

08 Apr

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Misdiagnosed anxiety: David Marr and the politics of Panic

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Welcome to the first post of the new Left Flank. We’ve moved from Blogger to WordPress, hosted at the lovely http://brellabee.com/ As you can see we’re still working on porting all the old comments from Disqus to the new platform. Time to change your RSS feed or subscribe by email (see the sidebar on the right of the page).

While we’ve been effecting that change, we’ve also started our new fortnightly blog at the Overland Literary Journal website, which has also had a spiffy redesign! My first post went up on 29 March, a review of David Marr’s latest book on the politics of fear, which is reposted below for your pleasure.

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Filed Under: dogwhistling, Featured, Islamophobia, media, neoliberalism, racism, refugees, state, the Right

26 Jan

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Invasion Day

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A number of myths have shaped Australia’s national identity in profound ways. The possibility of a vast inland sea saw many early settlers search the interior of the country unfruitfully, often meeting an untimely death. The kernel of this myth was a 1798 report to the Colonial Office by First Fleet botanist Joseph Banks:

It is impossible to conceive that such a large body of land, as large as all Europe, does not produce vast rivers, capable of being navigated into the heart of the interior, or, if properly investigated, that such a country, situate in a most fruitful climate, that should not produce some native raw material, of importance to a manufacturing country as England is.

Filed Under: Indigenous politics, racism

14 Aug

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‘Mama said there’ll be days like this’ — The UK riots, the labour movement and the Left

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Special guest post by KEVIN OVENDEN*

What did people expect? Just over a year ago, during the general election campaign in Britain, I remember George Galloway on the stump warning that the last time the Tories came in to replace an already dead Labour government and pursue full-blooded, class war policies, Britain’s cities went up in flames. That was 1981. Three decades later the Sunday supplement features on Brixton, Toxteth and St Paul’s all situated those events in the aggressive policing, racist exclusion and darkening hopes of the young of the time.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, class, racism, UK

13 Aug

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Intended or not, the consequences of riots are not always negative

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Watts Riot of 1965 — how the rioters treated ‘their’ community then 
This is the original text of an article commissioned by ABC’s The Drum, which was published yesterday and can be found here.

The riots in the United Kingdom, mainly involving school age and unemployed youth, have provoked a backlash that seeks to paint them narrowly as “mindless”, “criminals”, “thugs” and an “external” threat to social order. Politicians and journalists sing from the same songbook, to condemn and excoriate first and to (preferably not) ask questions later. Voices that raise the social context in which the riots erupted, that point the very political flashpoint of the police killing of Mark Duggan (and its subsequent handling by the police), that argue that rioters’ own professions of being motivated by grievances relating to economic exclusion and racial discrimination — those voices are rapidly cut down by shrill cries that we must understand the rioters less and denounce them more.

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Filed Under: age of austerity, class, media, racism, state, UK