Variousness 2

24Dec08

Flesh is Grass: Were the keffiyehs at Urban Outfitters fairly traded? Extract:

A keffiyeh is perhaps more commonly known as a ‘PLOscarf’ although I read (several years ago in a good but out-of-print book called ‘My Enemy My Self‘ by Yoram Binur which I can recommend – in the tradition of John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me and Jack London’s People of The Abyss, an Israeli journalist passes himself off as an Arab Israeli to see how the other half live) that only black ones indicated support for Fatah whereas the red ones were for the communists. Whatever the colour, to me it’s an icon of Palestinian nationalism. A couple of years back though, to most within striking distance of an Urban Outfitters it was an item of ethnic fashion.

In these times of heightened consciousness of the Palestinian economy and the requirement that it be mixed and not so reliant on the olive, I found myself idley wondering if the keffiyehs so denuded of political significance by fashion retail train Urban Outfitters were fairly traded.

Revolutionary Boredom: I kept this photo in my wallet to keep my hatred sharp. Extract:

an antidote to the glamorisation of the violence of the RAF in The Baader-Meinhof Complex. I actually didn’t mind the film at all, and certainly preferred it to the comparable Patty Hearst, an even less nuanced act of recuperation and revision. Although its still no Raspberry Reich.

Public Eye: Rebranding fascism. Extract:

In Sydney, the Black Bloc assembled and hoisted banners proclaiming “Globalization is Genocide.” But when fellow demonstrators looked closely, they realized these Black Bloc marchers were “National- Anarchists”—local fascists dressed as anarchists who were infiltrating the demonstration. The police had to protect the interlopers from being expelled by irate activists.

Slack Bastard: The new right in the sun. Extract:

Despised and ridiculed by anarchists, and regarded skeptically by their racist counterparts in the mainstream of the ‘white nationalist’ movement, they have nevertheless come to the attention of anti-fascist researchers in the US… A few fascist pipsqueaks does not constitute a movement, and the ideology is plainly incoherent. At the same time, like other fascist movements and projects, the ‘national anarchists’ do not aim for the head so much as they do the heart, and the younger and more naive, the better. There is, in fact, a large market for racist opinion — 10% of the Australian population, according to one recent study, holding views which might be described as ‘racially supremacist’ — and the ability of nationalistic and xenophobic sentiment to attract the young is evident in the appeal of the ‘Southern Cross Soldiers’ to perhaps as many as a few thousand white teenagers and twenty-somethings.

Derek Wall at Socialist Unity: Alternative economics, or fascism? Extract:

Alistair McConnachie…  has two faces, one is as an alternative economist, he heads the Bromsgrove group that promotes monetary reform and is highly active as a monetary reformer. These people argue that money is created essentially out of thin air by bankers, instead it could be created by the community…  He has another face as a member of the far right. He is critical of a multi-cultural society, he opposes increased immigration, he believes in reducing the number of asylum seekers in Britain using the subtle term ‘crimmigrants’ to describe ‘illegal immigrants’… He was too right wing for many members of UKIP and after writing a letter on the holocaust, his membership was suspended. [PLUS MORE HERE AND HERE.]

Filed under: 68ers, Baader-Meinhof, Fascists in the anti-globalization movement, germany, Left-right convergence, the poverty of anti-imperialism   |  2 Comments
Tags: Baader-Meinhof, Fair trade, kefiyeh, palituch, Urban Outfitters