Casa Pound
With Beppe Grillo‘s MS5 riding high, it is time to review their allies in Casa Pound, covered here before. The most comprehensive account is from Struggles in Italy. Here are some extracts.
Who they are
CasaPound Italia (CPI) is an Italian far-right political movement, officially established as a “Social Promotion Association” in 2008. Founder and leading figure of CPI is rock singer Gianluca Iannone, who defines himself as a “fascist of the third millennium” and ran for elections with neofascist party Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore before he was expelled from it in 2008.
The name of CPI derives from that which was given to the house squatted by far-right activists led by Iannone in 2003 in Rome, and is a homage to poet Ezra Pound. Pound’s daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, complained about this and «has accelerated her effort» (1) after far-right extremist Gianluca Casseri, linked to CPI, shot five Senegalese stallholders, killing two of them, in Firenze on December, the 13th 2011 (2). Continue reading ‘Casa Pound’
Filed under: The right | Leave a Comment
Tags: Beppe Grillo, Casa Pound, CasaPound, Ezra Pound, Gianluca Casseri, Gianluca Iannone, Mary de Rachewiltz, Movimento Sociale Fiamma Tricolore
Anti-Japaneseism
I just found this article on Wikipedia.
Anti-Japaneseism (反日亡国論 hanNichi-bōkoku-ron?) is a theory promoted by a faction of the Japanese New Left which radicalizes the Old Left’s Anti-Japanism. Continue reading ‘Anti-Japaneseism’
Filed under: anti-nationalism | 1 Comment
Tags: Anti-Japaneseism, Anti-Japanism, Japan
The Soupy One has a post on the links between True Brits, the newest entrant to the crowded space of rebranded fascist groupuscules in the UK, and broadcaster Press TV (mouthpiece of the theocratic regime in Iran, and sometime home of George Galloway) and Russia Today (mouthpiece of the authoritarian regime in the Kremlin, and sometime home of Julian Assange).
There is an almost interchangeable group of white nationalists, Holocaust deniers and neofascists that inhabit the wastelands of the Far and Extreme Right, as Searchlight has established.
What is particularly galling is how these extremists have wormed their way into parts of the media, notably Press TV and RT. Long term associate of David Irving, Lady Renouf, was a regular on Press TV. Nick Kollerstrom‘s revolting The Walls of Auschwitz was published by Press TV without a murmur.
The constant drip-drip of antisemitism at Press TV is acknowledged by most objective observers, however, Russia Today tends to evade such scrutiny even though it is reasonably neofascist friendly.
Peter Rushton, a regular on Press TV, long term neofascist and member of “True Brits”, is a contributor, although Russia Today promotes him as a supposed ‘political analyst and historian’.
As HOPE, not hate stated:
“Rushton is one of Britain’s leading Holocaust deniers and has links to nazi groups across Europe and antisemites in the Middle East. He was previously involved in the BNP but was expelled by Nick Griffin in 2002. He is currently deputy editor of Mark Cotterill’s magazine Heritage and Destiny and regularly speaks at National Front, British Movement and RVF events.”
In a related story, INN reports on the trial of a German former neo-Nazi who converted to Islam and joined the Taliban on the Af-Pak border.
Filed under: The right | Leave a Comment
Tags: Heritage and Destiny, holocaust denial, Julian Assange, Mark Cotterill, Michele Renouf, Nicholas Kollerstrom, Peter Rushton, Press TV, Russia Today, True Brits
Post-Nazi Partisans?
From Souciant:
Post-Nazi Partisans?
by Randomizer on Oct 16, 2012
Radicals the world over continue to make use — some would say overuse — of the terms “Fascist” and “Nazi”, which have demonstrated remarkable staying power in the lexicon of demonization. But there’s no denying that they resonate with special force in Germany. As Europe’s economy threatens to spiral out of control and right-wing populist movements like Greece’s Golden Dawn grow stronger, often by invoking hostility towards German bankers and politicians, the Left is faced with a terminological predicament.
If the heirs of twentieth-century Fascism build support at Germany’s expense, implying that the European Union is the Third Reich by another name, is it still prudent for leftists to summon their followers to combat the specter of Nazism in defense of democratic values? The following flyer, photographed this summer in Berlin’s Neukölln neighborhood, while continuing in a longstanding tradition of mustering left-wing “troops” to counter Germany’s Far Right, subtly addresses this quandary by suggesting that its readers are “Partisans” — not a term typically applied to the German Resistance — and showing the iconic image of Benito Mussolini and members of his inner circle hung up like carcasses at a slaughterhouse.
In other words, although the ostensible target for this action was a march by German Nazis, the broader implication is that Fascism is a transnational phenomenon. Incidentally, the march barely got started before the combination of a heavy police presence along the designated route, and anti-fascist forces blockading alternate paths, forced participants to disperse. [READ THE REST]
This is in my current second favourite magazine’s Street Art section.
Here are some other recent items in Souciant:
Palestine in Africa
by Emanuel Stoakes on Nov 7, 2012Military occupations bring certain themes to mind: human rights abuses; poverty; crowded refugee camps, and so on. Geographic references are equally synonymous: Palestine, Kashmir or West Papua, to cite the most recent example. Rarely, if ever, is the miserable situation in the sparsely-populated province of Western Sahara cited. More»
Age and Occupation
by Randomizer on Nov 6, 2012
At first glance, the flyer might have struck the jadedflâneur as parody. Instead of the crusty punks and hippies that usually festoon images of protest in Berlin, a bunch of white-hairs hold a large banner with the classic squatter’s slogan “This house is occupied.” More»
Leftover Politics
by Randomizer on Oct 30, 2012 •
One of the first things I did when I arrived in Germany as an exchange student in 1986 was to walk into a bookstore and buy a collection of Bertolt Brecht’s plays. I spoke almost no German. And the only Brecht I had been aware of back in the states was his libretto for the Kurt Weill “song-play” The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny More»
Filed under: germany, Street art | Leave a Comment
From Eurozine, by Charles Postel:
The Occupy movement resembles nineteenth-century American populism in its anger at the avarice of bankers and financiers and in its notions of majoritarian democracy. Where it differs from the old Populists is in its attitude to the state, writes Charles Postel.In the late nineteenth century, the telecommunications revolution and steam power “annihilated time and space” and made possible large-scale organization and centralization. In the Unites States, the new technologies unfolded in the midst of what Mark Twain described as the “Gilded Age”. Corporate power grew exponentially, a handful of business executives amassed immense fortunes, financial panics took a devastating toll, and the society was split by an unprecedented chasm of economic inequality. The farmers, labourers and other citizens at the short end of these wrenching changes responded with the Populist movement of the 1890s, the most powerful challenge to corporate power in American history.
Over the last thirty years, we have witnessed a new telecommunications revolution, a resurgence of corporate power, and a growing crisis of inequality. For good reason, many commentators have noted that the United States is experiencing a “Second Gilded Age”. Yet, the challenges to corporate power have been tentative and sporadic. “The Battle in Seattle”, the mass protest at the 1999 World Trade Organization conference, promised to be the start of a movement against global corporate malfeasance. But the 2000 election, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and “the war on terror” pushed other issues to the fore. Then, in February of 2011, tens of the thousands of workers, students, and activists converged on the Wisconsin state capitol in Madison to protest a new law restricting the collective bargaining rights of public employees. For the first time since the onset of the Great Recession of 2008, citizens had boldly taken to the streets to defend their rights and livelihoods from the encroachments of corporate power.
Taking inspiration from Tahir Square and the Arab Spring, as well as the Wisconsin protests, the Occupy Wall Street Movement was born in September 2011 with the encampment in Zuccotti Park in New York’s financial district. The movement quickly spread to hundreds of American cities and dozens of countries. Many of those involved in the encampments have been young people – students, as well as employed, semi-unemployed, and unemployed graduates with too much student debt. And they have been joined by teachers, nurses, transit workers, and other sections of the labour movement, along with a broad array of activists involved in housing, education, women’s rights, immigration and other causes. Although the Occupy Movement has no specific set of demands, and is ideologically and organizationally amorphous, it represents the most strikingly populist response to the present crisis. The Occupy Movement corresponds to the Populism of the last Gilded Age in three interrelated ways.
First, Occupy Wall Street, as its name implies, lays the blame for the financial crisis and the economic wreckage produced in its wake at the feet of the bankers and financiers and their speculative avarice. Here it needs to be kept in mind that one of the most critical decisions made by the Obama administration on taking office was that it would not investigate the Wall Street executives who had pushed the global economy to the edge of the abyss. Moreover, the Tea Party-backed Republicans have been fighting strenuously against any regulations or other measures to check the power of corporate finance. If nothing else, the Occupy Movement has accomplished something important by putting the focus on the corporate interests most responsible for the present financial and economic suffering. The old Populists would be proud.
Second, the Occupy Movement slogan, “We are the 99 per cent” corresponds to populist notions of majoritarian democracy. In their day, the Populists used variations of the 99 per cent slogan, convinced that the bankers, railroad corporation executives, and other “robber barons” only represented a small fraction of the population. If democracy meant anything, it meant majority rule, that is rule of “the people.” The Occupy Movement has effectively wielded the 99 per cent slogan to similar effect. Indeed, the slogan itself has proven both more accurate and more effective than its critics have allowed. A major study of the Congressional Budget Office has confirmed that during the thirty-year period from 1977 to 2007, Americans who receive the top one percent of incomes have seen their earnings rise by over 270 per cent. For most everyone else, incomes have stagnated and their portion of the national income has declined. This reality is especially striking given that these decades have also witnessed rapid increases in productivity and wealth creation. It might be argued that the “We are the 99 per cent” slogan does not add up because, of course, there are tens of millions of Americans who identify with the wealthy or who otherwise embrace the taxation, regulation, and other policies that have so benefited the top 1 per cent. But this is a problem of political arithmetic that plagued the old Populists as well.
Third, the Occupy Movement has let light into the deep crevasse of economic inequality. The late nineteenth century produced levels of inequality unparalleled in American history. Fantastic fortunes provoked fears of a new aristocracy or plutocracy that would sit astride a society fixed by class and station. In the Populist critique, the crisis of inequality was a result of corporate bribery of the courts and legislatures; a monetary and tax policy that favoured banks and corporations at the expense of the people; and the destruction of the rights of labour. “From the same prolific womb of governmental injustice,” exclaimed the Populist Platform of 1892, “we breed the two great classes – tramps and millionaires.” Similarly, the Occupy Movement has put into the public debate the idea that today’s vast chasm of inequality is not the product of a natural law, but the result of the influence of corporate cash on the political process and resulting pro-corporate tax and regulatory policies. Again, the old Populists would be proud.
Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Tags: Charles Postel, Occupy, Occupy Wall Street, OWS, Populism, Wall Street
Greek anti-antifa
A third Greek/fascism post in a row. This story has been chronically underreported:
A Holocaust memorial in Rhodes was spray-painted with swastikas. The Holocaust Memorial to the Jews of Rhodes in the Jewish Martyrs Square — the old Jewish Quarter — was defaced Saturday on its six sides. The initials AME also were spray-painted on the monument, possibly referring to an unknown organization, according to the Greek Helsinki Monitor. The Security Police of Rhodes has launched an investigation.
It is not the first time that the monument, which was dedicated in 2002, has been vandalized. On each side of the monument the words “Do not ever forget the eternal memory of the 1,604 Jews of Rhodes and Kos who perished in Nazi death camps” are etched, each side in a different language. Some 1,600 Jews were rounded up by the Nazis in July 1944. Today only a handful of Jews remain in Rhodes.
According to Panayote Dimitras, Greek Helsinki Monitor, the perpetrators were Ανένταχτοι Μαιάνδριοι Εθνικιστές (A.M.E.), who define themselves as non-aligned nationalists. A.M.E. play with anti-capitalist imagery, support the Syntagma square movement, and frame themselves as “autonomous ethnicists”. But they also call themselves national socialists and celebrate figures like Eugene Terreblanche. Like the “national anarchist” movement globally, they borrow from autonomist and antifa aesthetic, presumably competing for something of the same market, while purveying a far right ideology.
I won’t link to their site, but here is some of their iconography. Continue reading ‘Greek anti-antifa’
Filed under: Fascism and antisemitism, Fascists in the anti-globalization movement, Greece, Left-right convergence, national anarchism and autonomous nationalism | Leave a Comment
Tags: Greece, Greek Helsinki Monitor, Ανένταχτοι Μαιάνδριοι Εθνικιστές, Rhodes
Greek Neo-Nazi punks
Continuing the Greece/fascism theme, here’s Max Fischer on “Pogrom Punk: The Greek neo-Nazi rock bands boosting Golden Dawn’s rise“.
Golden Dawn members sing the national anthem in Thessaloniki (SAKIS MITROLIDIS/AFP/Getty)
The Guardian’s Marla Margaronis begins her deep, and deeply disturbing, article on the rise of Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn with an interesting detail. The movement’s favorite band is a group called Pogrom.
Just so we’re clear, pogrom is a Russian word that originated in the 19th century to describe state-sanctioned mob violence against Jews. Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as “a mob attack, either approved or condoned by authorities, against the persons and property of a religious, racial, or national minority. The term is usually applied to attacks on Jews in the Russian Empire in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.”
Greek neo-Nazi music has its own charming history. Finding English-language articles from within this particular sub-culture can be difficult; most neo-Nazi groups, with the obviously significant exception of Greece, have learned to lay low in the Western world. But Greek neo-Nazi music fans seem to define the genre as “the Hellenic NS/WP skinhead music scene.” NS/WP is the broader movement’s self-styled acronym for national socialism (Nazi)/white power. Common shorthands seem to be Hellenic nationalist music or Hellenic skinhead. The music movement, which began 20 years ago in rock clubs and bars, now seems to moving into mainstream Greek politics.
Related articles Continue reading ‘Greek Neo-Nazi punks’
Filed under: Fascism and antisemitism, Greece, music, national anarchism and autonomous nationalism | 2 Comments
Tags: Golden Dawn, Greece, Hellenic nationalist music, Hellenic skinhead, Pogrom, punk, skinhead, white power punk
From History is Made at Night:
Looking forward to Friday’s Praxis records party in London, all aboard the MS Stubnitz boat (facebook events details here) . Praxis released its first records in November 1992, and twenty years later is still going strong. Started by Christoph Fringeli in South London, and associated in the mid-1990s with the famous Brixton Dead by Dawnparties, it is now based in Berlin. It has stayed true to its mission of putting out sounds from the noisier, faster, more experimental, but still very much partyable end of electronic music. There’s a great line up next week, with various people associated with Praxis and related projects at various times: -
Bambule - http://soundcloud.com/touchedraw- Base Force One - http://soundcloud.com/praxisrecords/- Controlled Weirdness - http://soundcloud.com/dj-controlled-weirdness- Dan Hekate - http://hekate.co.uk/- DJ Stacey - http://soundcloud.com/noyeahno- DJ Scud (Ambush/Sub/Version)- Eiterherd - http://widerstand.org/- FZV - http://soundcloud.com/fzv- Kovert - http://soundcloud.com/kovert- Somatic Responses - http://soundcloud.com/somatics- Warlock - http://soundcloud.com/warlock VJ: Sansculotte Continue reading ‘Praxis Records 20th Anniversary Party’
Filed under: atutonomous culture, music | Leave a Comment
Tags: Datacide, praxis
The following is a commentary on Paul Mason’s important but flawed article on the situation in Greece:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-20105881
Paul Mason’s recent reports on the rise of the Golden Dawn have been very interesting. The latest ends by proposing that a hopeless and resigned Greece now faces a choice between ‘love or nothing’ – and he takes this piece of graffiti, daubed on a wall in Athens, as summing up both the retreat into the self currently taking place in a Weimar-like Greece, and the possibility for a return to resistance against rising reactionary forces.
But for all its power, there seems to be something wrong with this article. Mason maintains the illusion that a centrist response to the crisis – some deferral and/or role back of austerity – would arrest the process of social contraction and fragmentation he describes. This seems to precisely miss the lesson of Weimar and – like the protagonist of ‘Death in Samarkand’ whose attempts to evade mortality lead him straight to his fate – Mason’s analysis, if influential, would hasten the repetition of a Weimar-like denouement in Greece.
The reason the Nazis came to power wasn’t simply the conscious complicity of factions of the ruling class (eg trying to keep down the left or hold on to power, trying to use the Nazis but keep them in check etc) but rather lies in the larger economic contradiction that made ordinary political and market forms of exchange impossible for capital at that point in time – and again today. READ THE REST
Related articles Continue reading ‘Love, nothingness, Weimar and Greece’
Filed under: Antifa, critique and theory, Greece, The right | 2 Comments
Tags: Alfred-Sohn-Rethel, fascism, Golden Dawn, Greece, Paul Mason, Weimar
London Anarchist Bookfair 2013
It’s that time of year again. It will be on Saturday 27th October From 10am to 7pm at Queen Mary’s, University of London on the Mile End Road. Here some ANT suggestions.
Equality – a bad idea 12 noon – 1pm Room 3.22
Equality, fairness and justice are widely appreciated not only in the democratic mainstream but also among Anarchists and Marxists. In this meeting we want to present and discuss what it means when the state grants its citizens equality and why this is not a sham. This is, we claim that one cannot adequately demand “real equality” when opposing domination and exploitation. More generally, we propose that equality, fairness and justice are no weapons of critique and would like to open the discussion on this. Organised by: Wine and Cheese Appreciation Society of Greater London
Alternative: 1839: The Chartist Insurrection 12 noon – 1pm Room 3.18
The Chartists were the original political movement of the working class, and 1839 was the year a National Convention assembled in London, and revolution seemed a real possibility. The year ended with an armed uprising in London, followed by the trial of its leaders for treason. Our speaker, David Black, is co-author (with Chris Ford) of a new book on the events of 1839. Organised by: Hobgoblin
Lifestyle anarchism or revolution and views of the past years events 1pm – 2pm Big lecture theatre
The veteran London Anarchist Martin Wright delivers a pugnacious attack on “lifestyle anarchism”, snobbery and rampant sexism in what passes as the “movement” in London. Academics, intellectual groupies, “polyamory” political correctness will be subjected to merciless sarcasm. Included is a summary of the year’s events culminating in a rousing call for a return to the fundamental basics of anarchism, freedom, class struggle, an anti-authoritian attitude and revolution. Speaker: Martin Wright
Can Dialectics still break bricks in 2012? 5pm – 6pm Room 3.17
The critique of value can certainly help, that is why the left ignore it…. Debate. Organised by: Principia Dialectica
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