Archive for the ‘Anti-Fascism’ Category
General Strike In Nicaragua. Left Condemns Ortega who “Puts Down Protests Violently”.
General Strike in NIcaragua: Demonstrator in Burnt-out Bus in Tipitapa.
Nicaragua protesters stage national strike as clashes persist.
A 24-hour general strike has brought much of Nicaragua to a standstill, as anti-government campaigners demand the resignation of President Daniel Ortega.
Streets have been deserted and businesses closed in the capital, Managua, but violent protests have broken out in other cities.
Reports say at least three people died on Thursday, bringing the total killed in eight weeks of clashes to about 160.
Fresh talks aimed at ending the stand-off are due to take place on Friday.
The protests began on 19 April after the government imposed cuts to pension and social security programmes.
The cuts were later scrapped but the protests evolved into a rejection of the Ortega government and thousands of people have since taken to the streets.
Nicaragua se paraliza mientras Ortega mantiene la represión
El País
A detailed report on the strike, which has already resulted in deaths, has just appeared:
Nicaragua paralysed as Ortega continues the repression.
Despite the report in the Sun today on British apologists for the repression (“Top Corbyn allies ‘help spread propaganda for murderous dictator who’s killed dozens of protesters in Nicaragua”) there have been strong left criticisms of the Ortega regime from the left.
“A massive violation of human rights” Mike Phipps
From the latest Labour Briefing.
In late April, civil unrest swept across Nicaragua. Over 40 people were killed, ostensibly over social security reforms proposed by Daniel Ortega‘s government. Many more were injured at the hands of the police who used live rounds, or in beatings by pro-government groups, western media reported.
One local blogger reported: “Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government proposed a rise in employer contributions, a smaller one in employee contributions and a 5% cut in pensions (offset by stronger health care entitlements). The employers’ federation, which is opposed to paying more and would prefer more drastic cuts, called for protests. University students obliged. The government dispatched anti-riot police who – having never done so before – fired live rounds.”
Pitched battles followed in several cities and the army was deployed amid widespread looting. Independent media were censored and Nicaraguan state news outlets blamed the protesters. The unpopular social security overhaul was suspended and the violence subsided.
For some. President Ortega continues to enjoy huge legitimacy as a key figure in the 1979 popular revolution that overthrew the decades-long Somoza dictatorship. Through the 1980s, Nicaragua pursued policies popular with most ordinary Nicaraguans – in the teeth of armed subversion by the USA. The Sandinistas lost power in 1990, but bounced back in 2007, with Nicaragua receiving economic help from Venezuela, but facing renewed pressure from the US.
Last year, the US House of Representatives unanimously passed the Nicaraguan Investment Conditionality Act, which would cut the loans Nicaragua receives from international financial institutions. This legislation is currently stalled in the Senate. Nicaragua’s uncharacteristic violence comes at a convenient time for US policymakers seeking to tighten the screws on the country.
Additionally, the US National Endowment for Democracy has been channelling money – over a million dollars last year – to student and civil society groups opposed to the Nicaraguan government. For some, the recent violence resembles unrest in Venezuela, both in its choice of weapons – homemade mortars and rockets – and in the prominent role played by students, who are not directly affected by the social security reform.
But for others, the involvement of many young people, often from Sandinista families, underlines their anger at the corruption of revolutionary values by the Ortegas. Ortega’s latest term in office has seen power centralised, with presidential term limits scrapped and the unpopular first lady, Rosario Murillo, made vice president – potentially the successor.
The Ortegas dominate Nicaragua’s Congress and judiciary. Their children run the family’s considerable business empire and the government’s radicalism has been superseded by an alliance with conservative sections of the catholic church, exemplified by harsh anti-abortion legislation. The government’s latest target appears to be social media and the internet.
The Economist accuses Ortega of “establishing a family dynasty reminiscent of the dictatorship he overthrew in 1979,” comparing him to Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, “re-elected last year in a vote widely believed to have been fraudulent.” This is cynical obfuscation: Honduras, remember, saw its elected government overthrown in a US-backed coup in 2009. It quickly became one of the most dangerous countries in the world for political activists and its current president is a US placeman.
But this longstanding hostility in the mainstream media to Nicaragua’s government makes the left wary of criticising it. Activists in Nicaragua allege violence on both sides, saying some protesters had highly hostile political agendas. One reported significant vandalism, for example of mobile health clinics. A Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign statement confirms this analysis with considerable detail.
But other reliable local sources alarmingly report that the Ortegas now hire thugs from the poorest neighbourhoods to put down protests violently. Videos show goon squads in pickup trucks, driving up and beating protesters with pipes and clubs despite the presence of the police. A leading member of the country’s Human Rights Commission was herself injured in such an attack while observing a peaceful protest.
The Nicaraguan Centre for Human Rights, whose director is Vilma Núñez, a woman of great stature who was imprisoned and tortured under Somoza and served on Nicaragua’s Supreme Court following the 1979 Revolution, has produced a scathing report. It lays the blame for the “massive violation of human rights” that it documents squarely on the Ortegas. As for the Truth Commission set up to investigate the bloodshed, the Report concludes, “ Nicaraguans can in no way accept the manoeuvre of setting up a Truth Commission by the President of the National Assembly, who has not the moral authority or credibility to initiate something of this nature.”
This view is widely shared: critics see a whitewash in preparation. Ortega’s time in office may well have been shortened by recent events, but what follows is uncertain – especially as violence flared up again in mid-May.
There is from Paul Canning.
For Sandinistas, who aren’t Danielistas, it’s Time to Serve your Country.
The hour for our nation has come, for a new republic, with new thinking that has been incubating in the new generation of Nicaraguans.
The civic struggle, headed by the university students, stands out for their refusal to use the methods of war to confront the State repression against Nicaraguan society. The densely populated citizen marches and the roadblocks are their principal instruments of struggle. The civic struggle has reached the heart of the people and shown itself to be an effective tool for awakening political conscience. The organized repression of the National Police, the paramilitaries and the so-called “Sandinista mobs,” all respond to political orders from a unified command.
Everything seems to indicate that the capability of the Police to order and repress was outflanked in the first days of the civic insurrection. Ortega’s paramilitary bodies, the mobs who identify themselves as Sandinista Youth, and the incorporation of the so-called nostalgic Sandinista combatants and retired military officers into reserve squadrons, became, and continue to be, the reconstructed forces for repression. It’s this new conglomerate that the masses of people have been facing, and they’ll continue doing so peacefully and civically with a great cost in lives. Meanwhile, the Nicaraguan Army maintains its political commitment to remain in their barracks.
The massacre of young people from all social classes and religious creeds, students and workers from all trades, is a wound that won’t close nor should it ever close in our people’s memory.
More than anyone else, it was Sandino who taught us the importance of national sovereignty in constructing the foundation for a republic. Sandino pointed us to the specific import of this fundamental value.
The confiscations permitted under Law #840 (the canal law), have offered up our national sovereignty to a Chinese magnate in exchange for the promise to construct an inter-oceanic canal across our national territory. Where does that situate Ortega’s government and those who organized this so-called public-private model? We should recall that the leadership of Danielismo, plus the Private Enterprise Council (COSEP) and its spokespeople greeted the handing over of our National Sovereignty as an inevitable trade-off for Nicaragua’s economic and social progress.
How far did that model get us? What should we recognize as good and what should we censure and correct in it? The rural residents who have fought against Law #840 in favor of sovereignty and against the canal are now part of the current struggle against the tyrant and his dictatorship. How do the spokespeople of large capital see them and weigh their actions?
Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo, his wife, fed on that stew of our political history. They abandoned the ideas inherited from the peoples’ revolutionary struggles against colonialism, imperialism, capitalism and those of our own history as exemplified by Sandino. They abandoned the patriotic education of their early political days for the unholy practice of forging pacts with the lowest elements if such alliances brought them closer to the political power they desired.
As architects of evil, they elaborated a mixture of strange and hybrid ideas that allowed them to pact with large capital, preach a socialism with no genuine substance and a Christianity with esoteric practices of dolls and pins. Daniel and Rosario filled the vacuum left by the ideological emptying of Sandino’s thought, and skillfully embraced cynicism, the art of deceit, “banditry” as cunning and practice. Internationalists abandoned him for his empty praises, false discourses and undisclosed agreements.
The activists who hold Sandino in their hearts but are naïve enough to maintain that in Nicaragua Danielism is developing a new stage of the FSLN’s revolutionary project are either fools or acting the fool for convenience. On the other hand, those citizens who are FSLN militants but who consider themselves Sandinistas but not Danielistas, are called upon to reflect profoundly about their political militancy in this dark hour. Because the hour has come to defend our nation, and we should only see light emerging from it. To act the fool or ignore the murderous repression that Ortega and Murillo are leading is to become an accomplice of the entire tragedy we’re living through.
Justice and democratic institutions are the themes of the dialogue that simultaneously opened and closed the people’s expectations. From the guts of the youth who head the civic rebellion, the slogan was born: “Ortega Out!” The couple have equaled Somoza in many things and they’ve outdone him in others, because as they say out there, history repeats itself either as a comedy or a tragedy. Nicaraguans today are going back through the tragedy of yesterday. The popular struggle comes at an opportune moment, and opens a historic window on a new Nicaragua, with clear rules for democratic coexistence, the legal Rule of Law, with transparency and accountability before the eyes of Nicaraguans of all territorial and social sectors.
The condition that the young students and representatives of the farmers’ movement have imposed for continuing the Dialogue is correct and healthy for assuring a response and stopping the tyrant from spilling so much young blood. With the pair of dictators out of the national territory, other architects the public knows and believes in will be able to create the new figure of the Republic that we’ve dreamed about.
Students and farmers are the crucible of our struggle: the different strata of our society are headed towards developing a potent force capable of finishing off the resistance of the tyrant and his woman.
There are many indications that Ortega is militarily shoring up his residence in El Carmen. He’s equipping himself to resist and improve his negotiating position – not before the kids and the anti-canal farmers, but with large capitalists. “If they want to screw just me, well then we’ll all get screwed.” He doesn’t care about the political verdict on his proven murders, just as he cares little about the conclusive preliminary report of the IACHR. Or about the upcoming documenting of the experts from the IACHR, because in his desperate clutching to sick, brute force, he prefers to think that like Hitler, he’ll die in his bunker before he’ll be made accountable for his crimes.
The figureheads of large capital, in particular Pellas, have proposed Ortega’s exit by the institutional route, that is, by moving up the date for elections. Some of his spokespeople have called that initiative “the soft landing.” This isn’t a possible solution. Force is what can and will move Ortega. The Ortega Murillo family and those close to them also understand the interests of large capital. There will come a moment in the people’s fight in which his family members and close circle reflect on the exit from power. It will involve an arrangement, and in such an arrangement the young people and the rural residents can’t be erased. Large capital has a part in this scenario. Pontius Pilate has nowhere to wash his hands in this game; and Judas shouldn’t be at the table either.
If we need to count on strength and the Constitution, the elections should take place in October at the latest, with the necessary structures in place, even if they’re transitory ones to be perfected later. The Episcopal Conference should continue facilitating the solution, but good faith isn’t enough in this commotion. The Catholic temples like the University halls should be ready for the final battle. The National Army must be pressured; there shouldn’t be any room for conjecturing whether the snipers, an active contingent in the savage repression of the protesting masses of citizens, are coming from their ranks. The presence of Dragonov weapons has been uncovered, and this type of rifle is principally the property of the National Army. The communiques from the National Army urge the citizenry to believe hook line and sinker in their declarations, but the proof in these situations can be deceiving.
Ortega Out! Murillo Out! Long live the April Mothers! Eternal memory for the immolated youth!
It is clearly time for the apologists for Ortega’s brutality to be answered firmly from the left.
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Communist Party of Britain-Marxist Leninist (CPGB -ML) and Stop the War Coalition on the Trump/Kim Jong Un Meeting.
On BBC’s One Show. Really…
On Monday 11 June, CPGB-ML chairman Harpal Brar joined guests on the BBC’s primetime One Show to discuss the historic meeting between US President Trump and Marshall Kim Jong Un, chairman of the Workers Party of Korea, in Singapore this week.On this video, you can see both the package that was broadcast by BBC One and the rest of the comments made by Comrade Brar during the course of the hour-long recording session.As the only person in the room supporting the people of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK),
Comrade Brar put a strong and persuasive case in favour of the Korean people, their government and their hopes for peace and reconciliation on the Korean peninsula. Contrary to years of hysterical hyperbole demonising the north, its socialist system and its leaders, journalists in the capitalist press are now having to concede that the DPRK’s decision to arm itself with a nuclear deterrent was a wise one, and that the leadership of Comrade Kim Jong Un and the Workers Party of Korea (WPK) has been anything but ‘crazy’.For our part, we have always fully upheld the Korean people’s right to work for peace and reunification without outside interference. It is US imperialism that stands in the way of this strong desire of the masses of both the north and the south of Korea, not the DPRK government, which has long pursued a policy of striving towards reunification.
That is why one of the most popular slogans of the WPK and the DPRK masses for decades has been and remains:
Korea is One!
This is closest we’ll get in Britain to the DPRK’s response.
It is laughable but Harpel Brar is seen strutting around – unchallenged – on most London left demonstrations.
Some on the left are more concerned with what they claim are “regime change” plans for North Korea than about the reality of this tyranny.
Just before the summit (11th of June) the Morning Star was issuing warnings on this theme:
Nagging doubt hang over Trump’s talks with North Korean leader
But, until reality dictates otherwise, a nagging doubt remains that Washington — especially the plethora of neoconservative cold warriors surrounding the president — has something more sinister in mind.
The likes of John Bolton and Mike Pompeo find it difficult to talk in anything but ultimatums, demanding “the Libya model” as the basis for Pyongyang’s agreement to renounce its nuclear weapons programme.
After the summit this was their response:
Trump and Kim agree to work towards the denuclearisation of Korea
While the global response to the meeting has been largely positive, Iran warned North Korea against trusting the US after Mr Trump recently pulled out of the 2015 international nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran last month.
John Rees of the Stop the War Coalition takes the regime change angle equally seriously while dismissing depth of the concluding agreement,
Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.
What does the Trump-Kim summit mean? Not much, says John Rees.
We may all welcome the retreat from earlier war-mongering rhetoric but this deal will not preclude it’s sudden return because there’s nothing of substance in it.
Kim Jong Un must be laughing all the way to the DMZ. In a single bound he’s escaped from the dunce’s corner of international relations and now bestrides the world as, well, if not quite a colossus, then at least the admired ally of the most powerful head of state in the world.
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What Trump has actually done is to tear up a functioning nuclear deal with Iran and replace it with a meaningless multilateralist statement of intent with North Korea.
We may all welcome the retreat from earlier war-mongering rhetoric but this deal will not preclude it’s sudden return because there’s nothing of substance in it.
Kim Jong Un must be laughing all the way to the DMZ. In a single bound he’s escaped from the dunce’s corner of international relations and now bestrides the world as, well, if not quite a colossus, then at least the admired ally of the most powerful head of state in the world.
China too will be relieved that any likely further pressure to contain their ally has just sharply decreased.
The real lessons of the circus in Singapore are two-fold.
One, this is another episode in the decline of US power. The initiative was taken out of US hands when North and South Korea began another round of détente at the Olympic games and it has never regained it. Trump has merely managed to grandstand on a stage that he neither created nor on which does he control the action.
Two, the age of populist leaders is an age in which foreign policy goals are determined as much by domestic campaigning priorities as by traditional international relations strategy. US Presidents are supposed to at least make a show of pursuing goals agreed on by the entire foreign policy elite, otherwise known as the ‘national interest’. Trump isn’t interested in that, although he sometimes has that approach forced on him by the wider US power structure.
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If there is one thing more dangerous than a US President following the dictates of the foreign policy elite, as Bush did with the Project for the New American Century, it’s a President following his own mercurial interpretation of what viewers of Fox news think is a good idea. But that is where US economic decline wedded to overwhelming military power, plus the aftermath of defeat in Iraq, has brought us.
In other words Trump is still a danger.
There remain three principal points to make:
- North Korea, the DPRK, is a totalitarian tyranny. Yet, “Trump seemed to play down the severity of human rights violations in North Korea. “It’s rough,” Trump allowed after being asked about North Korea’s human rights record. He then said: “It’s rough in a lot of places, by the way. Not just there.” (Kim Tong-Hyung). We did not expect the CPGB (M-L) to mention this either, but Rees, acting as a chess strategist on the world stage, fails to tackle the issues which the New York Times has just summed up as “Atrocities Under Kim Jong-un: Indoctrination, Prison Gulags, Executions”. Perhaps these are more important than the “decline of US power.
- On the DPRK some parts of the left have a serious analysis. Shiraz reposts a piece from the US Socialist Worker by David Whitehouse. It says, “During a period of famine in the 1990s, Kim’s father looked the other way while Northern citizens developed private markets for farm produce and other goods. If Kim Jong-un really shifts resources away from military investment, North Koreans can look forward to making even more money from their private efforts.Meanwhile, soon after coming to power in 2012, Kim embarked on structural economic reforms that provide freedom to managers at the enterprise level — freedom to hire and fire at will, set wages at variance with national guidelines, and cultivate their own suppliers and buyers without going through the national planning process.
These reforms, which mirror the early measures of Chinese economic liberalization in the 1980s, have promoted the development of a new middle class, at least somewhat independent of the ruling party hierarchy. This group definitely has an interest in Kim following through with diplomatic engagement that can open the economy even further.
North Korea’s working class is overwhelmingly poor. Anecdotal reports, including from asylum-seekers who make it into South Korea, suggest that workers harbor intense hatred toward the rich upper layers of the party hierarchy and toward residents of the city of Pyongyang, where wealth is concentrated.
To some extent, Kim seems to be able to use the popular cult of the Kim family to deflect popular anger away from himself — and toward those just a few layers below him. Right now, says North Korea specialist Andrei Lankov, “Kim Jong-un is popular. Everyone supports him.”
Kim wants to keep it that way. The burden of domestic expectations has helped drive him toward the Singapore summit, where he hopes that de-escalation of hostility with the U.S. will bring relief from sanctions — and open up export possibilities, access to international finance, and investment from countries such as China and South Korea.
- If Rees suggests that ‘populism’ is now the engine of US foreign policy, does this mean that Trump tore up the Nuclear deal with Iran to please Fox News watchers? What exactly does the term American imperialism mean if instead of “military industrial” interests we have crowd pleasing as the motor of decision-making? Does it mean that ‘anti-imperialism’ now signifies fighting the mob and its leader’s “sound and fury”?
It may well be that there will be less than a massive response in London to a Stop Trump protest against the US President who’s a”walking shadow, a poor player,that struts and frets his hour upon the stage.”
City of Ghosts: from Syria to Europe and the fight against the far-right.
City of Ghosts was shown on BBC 4 last night.
This moving documentary about a group of Syrian activists, Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. (RBSS)
The hopes of an Arab Spring resounded in their home, the city of Raqqa in the north of Syria. Protests against the Assad regime were countered by violent repression. The arrival of ISIL, in April 2014, the country’s branch of Islamic State, was followed by the rule of their version of Islamic ‘law’. There were public beheadings, firing squad executions, mock crucifixions and Volkish placard shaming.
At great risk to themselves RBSS opposed the take-over in the only way they could. They reported and filmed undercover the regime of what became the de facto capital of Daesh.
The documentary showed images of clandestine protests against Daesh and the slaughters the jihadists committed. Perhaps the most disturbing moments were when the new rulers tried to bring the young into their fold. “Children are Isis’s firewood” they said, and we saw a band of joyful babes and youngsters following a bearded fighter chanting their hate. A near-infant was filmed being trained to stab and behead on a large teddy bear.
This backdrop confirmed the worst scenes in Peter Kosminsky’s The State.
Many RBSS activists left the city, though they kept a core group of courageous witness inside Raqqa.
They used social media and the Net to broadcast their message. ISIL devoted a great deal of time to trying to search their supporters out.
In May 2014, Al-Moutaz Bellah Ibrahim was kidnapped by ISIL and murdered. In July 2015, ISIL released a video showing two men being strung up on trees and shot. Though ISIL claimed the two murdered men had worked with RBSS, one of the founders of RBSS denied they were members. Another friend of the group was similarly executed. Hamoud al-Mousa, the father of one of the group’s founders, was killed in ISIL custody. On October 30, 2015, RBSS activist Ibrahim Abdul Qadir (age 20) and his friend Fares Hamadi were found stabbed and beheaded in Urfa Turkey. It was the first acknowledged assassination outside of ISIL controlled territory. (Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently)
The sight of Hamoud al-Mousa’s execution, followed by that of the same RBSS activist’s brother’s murder, being watched in a safehouse in Germany was harrowing.
City of Ghosts deserved the highest awards.
But above all the activists of RBSS, merit the greatest respect we can possible give to other human beings.
Avoiding fruitless debate about the essential nature of ‘Islam’ one of them says,
“It is not my Islam”.
Europe.
Towards the end of the documentary there were scenes in which the Syrians were confronted by the German far-right Pegida calling for the removal of refugees.
There was also commentary on the actions of Daesh in Europe, including the Bataclan massacre.
This opens up the issue of how we should both support the fight of groups of democrats like RBSS and combat the racist far-right.
With the Tommy Robinson campaign in Britain this has become an issue of burning importance.
People have noted that the groups Stand up to Racism and Unite against Fascism are dominated by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) (“Both these groups are front organisations of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and receive their political direction from its leadership.” Socialist Resistance)
In 2014, as Raqqa fell to the genociders Socialist Worker published this article by Hassan Mahamdallie, co-director of the Muslim Institute.
There is resistance to this frenzy of Islamophobia
The beheading of US journalist James Foley by the Islamic State, formerly known as Isis, was horrific. But is the Nigerian military slitting the throats of 16 young men and boys any less horrific?
Or last week’s Israeli air strike that blew to smithereens the wife and seven month old son of Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif? Surely that was horrific and disturbing too?
..
In the 1930s radicalised young men from the same mining communities illegally made their way into Spain to take up arms against general Franco’s fascist army.
It must have been the fault of their Welsh Methodist upbringing.
But Howells’ drivel was modest fare compared to the truly millennial frenzy that was gathering pace.
In authentic End of Days tones, US secretary of defence Chuck Hagel said Isis represents “an imminent threat to every interest we have, whether it’s in Iraq or anywhere else.
“They’re beyond just a terrorist group. This is beyond anything we’ve seen, so we must prepare for everything.”
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I much preferred the response of the spokesperson from south east London’s Lewisham Mosque.
The press asked him to condemn a tweet from a woman “Jihadi” in Syria who might have once attended the mosque.
He retorted, “The young woman’s desire to travel to Syria has nothing to do with the Centre. Unfortunately, the Muslim community are being subjected to a burden of proof based on a ‘guilty by association’ standard”.
He rightly attacked the press’s demand, as “loaded with an Islamophobic assumption that Muslims by default condone such brutality”.
It was good to see someone refusing to bow to the frenzy, a spark of resistance in a very dark week.
There was much in a similar vein, from the SWP and groups such as Counterfire, understanding the ‘radicalisation’ of those who volunteered to be part of Einsatzgruppen and concentrating their fire on the prospect of Western intervention in the civil war.
Unlike RBSS their criticisms of the Assad regime was fairly muted.
This ambiguity continued.
When Charlie Hebdo (12 deaths) and the Porte de Vincennes Hypercacher (5 deaths) attacks took place in 2015, the same forces took it upon themselves to understand why this “blowback” against France in general and the ‘Islamophobic” satirical weekly took place. Charlie “had it coming to them”. Counterfire railed against ” a crude and absolutist fetish of free speech”.
These people are unable to confront violent Islamism.
With such a tainted history these groups have no moral authority whatsoever.
There are many many people on the lest who do not back groups which fail to take a resolute stand against the jihadist Islamism, and against Assad.
The fight against Robinson’s supporters, many (from the Clarion to Socialist Resistance) suggest, should come from the mass organisations of the labour movement and the Labour Party.
We cannot unite around “defeating fascism” as Lindsey German puts it, until we have a clear view that the violent jihadists and the mouvance around them, with roots in Europe as well as the Middle East and the Maghreb, are also enemies of the far right.
And we need to back the Syrian democrats, whose heroism is so powerfully illustrated in City of Ghosts.
Free Tommy Robinson Rally Ends in Violence.
Fascist Gammon Rally For Robinson.
Far-right activists stage violent protest calling for Tommy Robinson to be freed
The Independent.
Five people have been arrested during a violent protest that saw crowds of Tommy Robinson supporters in a tense stand-off with riot police.
Hundreds of far-right demonstrators descended on the capital on Saturday afternoon, occupying the road around Trafalgar Square.
Supporters chanted “Free Tommy Robinson” and hurled missiles and smoke bombs at police. Right-wing Dutch politician Geert Wilders also delivered a speech.
The protest is the latest in what appears to be a bid to secure the former English Defence League (EDL) leader’s release from jail.
A spokeswoman for megasightseeing.com said: “Our London sightseeing bus was on its normal route when it got caught up in the demonstrations.
“The bus was stormed by demonstrators and the driver and a small number of customers got off.
“The demonstrators have caused a significant amount of damage to the bus which meant it had to be towed away.
“We have reported this to the police and will help them with any investigations.”
The report adds,
Dutch far-right MP Geert Wilders, who campaigned last year to become Dutch Prime Minister, was among those attending, as was UKIP leader Gerard Batten.
The demonstration has been picked up internationally:
Libération: Heurts au cours d’une manifestation de l’extrême droite à Londres
Le Parisien: Londres : une manifestation de l’extrême droite dégénère
Here is some footage (Russia Today carried a live stream).
Anti-fascists are concerned at the size of the rally.
But there were anti-fascists there to protest against the fascist mob.
Hope not Hate states,
BIG NUMBERS AND VIOLENCE AT FREE TOMMY ROBINSON DEMONSTRATION
The demonstration, which started at Trafalgar Square before marching down Whitehall, saw speeches from Dutch Islamophobe Geert Wilders, The For Britain Movement’s Anne Marie Waters, former Breitbart London editor Raheem Kassam, co-founder of the EDL Kevin Carroll and several others.
The event was held to demand the release of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon after he was jailed last month for jeopardizing a just outcome in an ongoing court case.
The crowd, possibly as many as 10,000, was extremely hostile towards the police and violence erupted with a group of roughly 500 demonstrators going on a rampage near Trafalgar Square. Bottles, sticks and cones were hurled at police officers and vehicles were attacked. At one point the police were outnumbered and forced to flee the scene in a hail of flying projectiles, pursued by the angry mob.
Another group of angry demonstrators attempted to force their way into Downing Street but were held at bay by the police.
The rally is the latest in a series of street demonstrations with Lennon as figurehead, marking an ongoing cooperation across the British far right around an anti-Muslim agenda.
Upon Lennon’s incarceration there were ugly protests outside Downing Street, but today was the largest event organised in his support.
Like previous events such as the Day For Freedom, todays event saw groups from across the far right come together around a single issue. In attendance today were activists from the EDL, UKIP, For Britain, the FLA, and a contingent of roughly 10 people from Generation Identity, among others.
Also on the demonstration were a number of notable far-right activists including the Holocaust denier Nicholas Kollerstrom and Luke Nash-Jones from Make Britain Great Again.
ANTI-MUSLIM AGENDA
Wilders, founder and leader of the People’s Party for Freedom (PVV), one of the largest parties in the Netherlands and one of the most prominent anti-Muslim activists in the world, whipped up the crowd and demanded the release of Lennon.
Waters, who is currently campaigning ahead of the 14 May Lewisham East parliamentary by-election, told the crowd “the globalist elites want our borders open” and that the government are “accelerating the islamisation of our country for their political gain”.
Meanwhile Raheem Kassam referenced Enoch Powell and claimed he had received a supportive text from Steve Bannon.
Kevin Carroll said that they will return to London for another demonstration on the 14th of July.
In addition to the London demonstration was a Free Tommy Robinson event in Belfast and a small event in Budapest organised by Generation Identity.
Political Satire and its Critics: From Spitting Image to Tracey Ullman.
Trigger Warning: Satire!
The reaction to Charlie Hebdo in the English-speaking world has always been marked by po-faced people telling the cartoonists what should and what should not be satire.
The usual hostility to French secular leftists by the likes of Giles Fraser, the ex-SWP supporting Priest, now a Patriot with a wanion, is one thing.
Now we see the same kind of reaction to Tracey Ullman.
As somebody who tabled a resolution at Warwick Students’ Union in the late 70s mocking Larry O’Nutter (something like, “we shall smash the trumpeting bourgeoisie; throwing the error-strewn imperialists apologists into smithereens i.e. into the gutter”) and got a counter-resolution in return taking the piss out of Andrew Coates (First line, “Marxism is all-powerful because it is true, it is not true because it is all-powerful – Louis Althusser), perhaps I have a decades old thick skin.
Ullman’s sketch on Corbyn last week raised the hackles of a swarm of his supporters.
It only offended me because her feeble attempt to give him a North London accent – speaking as Geezer born in his constituency.
Now there is this:
Being made of stern stuff I recall this, which I may guess few leftists would object to.
So there we have it.
Defeat of the po-faced.
I fucking hate Tories!
Giles Fraser, Guardian Columnist and radical Priest attacks “Cosmopolitans” and calls for New Patriotic Party – “Home”.
Giles Fraser: Fighting “Rootless Cosmopolitans”.
Clergyman Giles Fraser is a bit of character.
During his time at St Paul’s – as Canon – he backed the Occupy! movement.
More recently he has embarked on a journey which began with his studies of Nietzsche, then passed through his staunch denunciation of the ‘atheist’ French revolution, and, above all, Charlie Hebdo, who misused freedom as “white atheists to sneer at non-white believers”.
Then he attacked the “The oppressive individualism of human rights.”
As you do.
Pride is not normally considered a Christian virtue, but this has not stopped our Padre this week from terminating his voyage with his very own proud call for a new political party.
He begins with this lament for the past.
The Labour party began as a party for the working class, reflecting the patriotic communitarian commitments of working class people. Many who were not themselves working class were attracted to its values of fairness and social solidarity.
But towards the back end of the 20th century, the party was increasingly taken-over by those who espoused a cosmopolitan and liberal philosophy of individualism that was too relaxed about the effect of market forces and indifferent to the importance of communal life.
There was a dangerous hubris about the way liberals accepted no limit to individual self-assertion. Under the banner of progress and spreading liberal values, we invaded Iraq and brought the world to the very edge of another world war.
Enough is enough. It’s time for a new political party. My one would be called Home. It wants a United Kingdom that is generous at home and reluctant to intervene abroad.
Liberals, human rights – all vanity.
In touch with Twilight of the Gods Fraser has thus spake.
Let’s Concentrate on Home
Home is a party that accepts we are no longer a global power. The empire is long behind us, and, therefore, we do not need an expensive global military to go with it. We would immediately cancel Trident and substantially reduce our budget for the armed forces. We will be extremely cautious about foreign military interventions. Withdraw all forces from the Middle East. We need more police and fewer soldiers.
Exit EU, without a deal if necessary: no to the Single Market, no to the Custom’s Union. We must have a home of our own, and others should respect we have our own way of doing things. We need a British Bill of Responsibilities and Rights. The seat of government should move to Manchester during the refurbishment of the Houses of Parliament, and an English Parliament should remain there when the United Kingdom government returns to Westminster.
…
Home is a patriotic party. Not narrowly nationalist, but nonetheless proud of our heritage. It believes in stable communities, full of people who are very definitely citizens of somewhere. Deracinated cosmopolitanism, and its accompanying philosophy of liberalism, has transformed us into a society of atomised individuals, cut off from each other and ill at ease together. Home is a proposal for the fightback.
Liberalism has broken us – we need a new party to call Home. 7th of June.
This looks, probably because as it is, like 1930s neo-socialism, a half-way house to the nationalist far right.
Fraser is only one anti-EU figures to go in this direction.
Sovereigntism, a “home of our own” is the maison commune of many an anti-globaliser.
Communities, the real destination of the once influential communitarian thought of Michael Sandel and others, end up being exclusionary Nation States for all this fretting Man of the Cloth’s warm words.
Fightback Forsooth!
Rootless Cosmopolitans.
There are those, less enchanted, and full of resentiment who have picked up on some of his language.
Here is a recent example of how Fraser is Beyond Good and Evil.
Solidarity with Lush Campaign Against Spy Cops!
Tell Lush They Are Right and Have Support!
We are ex-wives of undercover police officers who had relationships with other women without our knowledge, while we were married with families, and write with regard to the Lush campaign and reaction to it (Report, 5 June). We trusted our husbands (and their managers) and now feel betrayed. Although we have been recognised as core participants in the undercover policing inquiry, our voices have yet to be heard in public or within the public inquiry.
When she was home secretary, Theresa May set up a public inquiry to investigate undercover policing and the related concerns of significant malpractice. It was due to report back within three years. Three years on, the inquiry has yet to hear any evidence, including our own. Although the events in question took place many years ago, they continue to have a profound effect, and we are still waiting for the officers concerned (as well as their chain of command) to give an account in public. These officers, together with the Metropolitan police, have spent a significant part of the last three years seeking both anonymity and continuing secrecy as to their conduct within the inquiry. While this process continues and the evidence stage is further delayed, our view is that the amount of public money spent to date for such little progress is of far greater concern than the Lush campaign.
In bringing this issue to the attention of the general public, Lush has achieved far more in a weekend than the inquiry has in three years. Its campaign has not only drawn attention to the plight of some of the victims, but has also brought into focus legitimate concerns about how the inquiry is proceeding, which we also share. We would like supporters of the police who are criticising Lush to be aware that we, as affected police ex-wives, endorse the points that Lush are now publicising.
Although we are not involved in the Lush campaign, we recognise that it draws attention to legitimate concerns about how the inquiry is proceeding. Lush’s campaign is not an attack on hard-working police officers and we ask critics of the campaign to hold an open mind, look into the facts of this issue (which relate to a specific unit of undercover officers only – see uk.lush.com/article/spycops-statement) and to note that the families of undercover officers are also victims of this scandal. Together with other core participants, we still await answers.
“S” and “HAB”
Core participants in the undercover policing inquiry
This Blog covered the case of Bob Lambert from when it first broke.
Sack Bob Lambert! – Police spy, agent provocateur, exploiter of women. 2014.
Bob Lambert, Police Spy, Sex Infiltrator, State Adviser on Islamism: The Met Pays Out.
Bob Lambert, Police Spy, Resurfaces to Offer to Advise Government on Islamists.
Today his name figures in this excellent article in the ‘I’:
Lush ‘Spycops scandal’ has real PTSD truths for every day life too
Deborah Orr
The cosmetics group, Lush, has been condemned for using what has become known as the “Spycops scandal” in an advertising campaign. Critics say that it was a cynical and exploitative stunt, and all just to flog bath bombs. Victims are considerably more enthusiastic about the attention it has drawn to the horrific psychological crimes they were subjected to, or suspect that they may have been subjected to. No one knows how many people were targeted in a protracted undercover operation run by Scotland Yard, which involved police posing for years as the lovers of women involved in political, environmental and animal rights campaigns that the government didn’t like, even going as far as marriage and children in the service of their false identities. They were called the Special Demonstrations Squad (SDS).
One name now in the public domain is Jim Boyling, who married and had two children with one of the women he spied on. Another is Bob Lambert, who had a son with a woman in her early 20s and left without trace when the child was two years old. He had a “real family” with someone else, and continued to have relationships with other women while secretly investigating their lives in their various protest groups.
The promiscuity of Lambert’s investigations allowed various women to put two and two together. The mother of his son didn’t realise what had happened until Lambert was outed by others. The woman had suffered psychological distress significant enough to call for psychiatric treatment. She took legal action and was awarded a compensation payout by the Metropolitan Police. Still, they refused to confirm or deny that Lambert had been a detective working for the SDS until a high court ruling forced them to. There has not been a great deal of progress since all this happened four years ago. The Lush campaign sought to highlight the need for a full public inquiry into the operation, particularly so that victims can ascertain whether they were deceived in this deeply intimate way. Many people involved in these groups, who met and had relationships with men they later lost touch with, have no idea at all whether they were duped.
Go to Lush and Back their Campaign for our Comrades!
