General

“If you are still in the Labor Party today, you should be ashamed of yourself”, 71-year-old Aboriginal activist Pat Eatock called out to delegates entering the stage-managed proceedings of the first day of the ALP national conference.

The heroic act of resisting an order to serve in a war that is wrong has shaped the political views of many people. I remember the powerful impression draft resisters made on me as a young student during the tail-end of Australia's military involvement in the war on Vietnam.

In a fortnight when the world's wealthiest countries escalated their war on one of the world's poorest, Afghanistan, and when Peter Sold-His-Soul-To-The-Devil Garrett gave the nod to a new uranium mine to be run by a company controlled by a billionaire US arms merchant and former contra gunrunner, you'd be keen to get some good news.

In his notorious Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler explained the political device of the big lie:

When Rupert Murdoch’s Australian published a racist and malicious attack (see page 8) on Green Left Weekly and particularly its Arabic-language supplement, the Flame, I rang the Flame

Green Left Weekly received dozens of solidarity messages for its 800^th birthday from Australia and from around the world.

Below are extracts from a June 18 email from Tehran, Iran. It was posted on the Socialist Pakistan News e-list by Farooq Sulehria, a comrade from the Labour Party Pakistan. Sulehria is a regular contributor to Green Left Weekly.

A visitor from Mars would have scratched their head raw about what big business is allowed to get away with in this country — especially by so-called Labor governments.

Recent protests by Indian students in Australia have drawn global attention to a resurgence of racist violence in Australian cities. An Indian student lies in a Melbourne hospital recovering from serious stab wounds to his abdomen, while others live in terror.

Green Left Weekly will be taking a one week break. This means the next issue will be dated June 17.