Aidex tactics — 1
Gerry Harant (Write on, 12.3.92) astonishes me. He left the CPA. He gives the same reason for which I left the CPGB (well before 1968). Yet he still upholds an undemocratic monolithic ideologic minority group. Worse still, he quotes from my article to make me seem akin to them.
Such groups descend on actions like vultures on a feast. The demand that we use tactics that are wrong for the time and place. If we won't play along, they fake the situation. They cause the wrong effect despite us.
Doing so, they make martyrs of our best people — and of bystanders as well — to no avail. They also harm us in other ways. They snipe at us from the rear. They sell us out when we are close to a win.
I proposed strong measures against such spoilers at future actions. I did so from experience as long as Gerry's. He does not seem to have profited. My words did not make a number of things clear to him. Let me list and clarify them, in case he is not alone.
1. I want each person who comes to our side to learn all they must know to stop self styled elites from conning them or anybody else.
2. I was glad to see so many kinds of groups apply their own special knowledge at Aidex. Nearly all helped well towards our goal. At worst, some held to single tactics when changing them at the right time could have gained us more. I do not oppose them.
3. I oppose only two tactics. They are words and deeds of violence against police when few of them are on our side. Only a tiny minority used such tactics. But in using them they imposed the expectable results on a vast majority that had clearly signalled they did not want such tactics used.
4. The Russian soviets got one thing right in 1917. They had wisely worked to get masses from the "organs of the repressive state" — army, navy, police — to join them. Think of the result if, even in their mass support situation, they had done as one small group wants us to do in a much less advanced one. The state would have crunched the 1917 revolt just as it did the 1905 one. Just as it crunches any head-on tactic here and now.
5. Gerry quotes Murphy's law — against guerilla tactics! Let him quote it at Fidel Castro, among many others. We gain most if we oppose only in places where the opponent is a bit weaker at the time. Success depends on how knowing and self-disciplined we guerillas are, and how our numbers grow.
If Gerry has his way, we'll never win. At best, we'll face a Paris 1968 from time to time. At worst, we'll end up with no allies. Then, a "law and order" government can throw us into concentration camps, as company for the long term unemployed.
Ron Guignard
Stepney SA
[Edited for length.]
Aidex tactics — 2
I agree with some of the criticisms of the anti-Aidex campaign made by Ron Guignard in GL #46, but think some of the conclusions he draws are off the mark.There was a lack of organisation, and we suffered for it. Louise MacDonald covers this point quite well in her article in Chain Reaction number 65.
I agree there were those present whose attention seemed more focussed on the police than on Aidex: holders of the "bash on the head theory of radicalisation." They reduce the state to its most basic element (the police) and believe that by fighting the cops they are "confronting" the state, regardless of the situation. From this, they conclude that by getting hit by the cops you naturally radicalise and develop an instant understanding of the state.
These people certainly didn't help, but they weren't the cause of the police violence. It was clear a decision had been made to contain this demo with maximum permissible force, taking into account the political ramifications.
Ron's solution is to issue "credentials" after completion of a course in NVDA. This would reduce the campaign to the action of a small elite. Rather than limiting participation, we should seek to involve as many people as possible in open, democratic decision making. This is the best way to ensure that the movement is not hijacked by small elites or bureaucratic cliques.
Those who focussed all their energies on "closing Aidex down" were misleading themselves and others on the possibilities of our actions and the forces necessary to bring about their aim.
More important than putting up barricades and throwing ourselves, or others, at the police was reaching out to wider layers of people with information and ideas, using the blockade as a focus for that. Instead the blockade became an end in itself, and because of this the anti-Aidex campaign never reached its full potential.
That does not mean the campaign was a defeat, but the blockade has been invested by some with an almost mystical aura — "the greatest demo since the Vietnam war", as some would have it. We cannot be about creating myths, we must discuss openly and honestly both strengths and weaknesses and re-evaluate our strategies so we can be better prepared for the future.
Ray Fulcher
Melbourne
[Edited for length.]
Police racism
As far as we know, Mr Polyukovich, now on trial for killing Jews in the USSR during World War II, did not, after their deaths, dress up as his victims at a party and make a mockery of the way they died.
Rosemary Evans
St Kilda Vic
Ozone depletion
When I read reports on how the ozone depletion affects southern Chile and how the Russian arctic region (and with it much of northern Europe) is facing a catastrophe due to decades of indiscriminate dumpings of nuclear waste I wonder whether this planet is not already ripe for the scrap heap of inter planetary history. The Russian story naturally is only the proverbial tip of the iceberg because the Americans, the Brits, the French and others have long used the world's oceans including Australian waters to dump radioactive waste. These materials are slowly escaping from their decaying containers creating a nightmare scenario.
What a lovely place planet earth is going to be. The ultimate blessing the Western philosophy of exploitation, pollution and destruction presents us with is life in indoor cities protected from the nuclear and chemical wastelands and a sun which literally "burns the living daylight" out of anyone not wearing a Pierre Cardin space suit. Science fiction? I am afraid it is too late for that.
Michael Rose-Schwab
Rapid Creek NT
Population and racism
Paul White's letter (GL #48) about "racism" in an earlier correspondent's argument for limiting migration would be funny if it didn't represent a real political obstacle in the attitude of some leftists.
Yes, I know there are people who oppose immigration for racist reasons. And no, I don't agree with those who believe that restrictions on immigration are an answer to the environmental crisis.
But Paul is out of touch with the real world in not recognising that there are many people who sincerely believe that immigration needs to be limited for environmental reasons. Calling them "racists" without justification is not a very clever way to persuade them they are mistaken.
Richard Ingram
Sydney
'Reconciliation'
The so-called Process of Reconciliation is such a load of rubbish.
"Reconciliation members". The members are paid by the government. The members are chosen by the government. The members have no mandate or authority to represent Aboriginal people's views.
Who do the black members want their people to reconcile with, the British Crown, the Australian government or their prime minister Keating, who has already abandoned the queen and royalty and is on the road to republicanism, without 10 years to think about it.
Only the blacks have 10 years to talk, during which England will change its flag and Australia will be identified as even more of a colony.
Do Aborigines want to surrender their land under reconciliation?
Do Aborigines want to celebrate 100 years of colonial federalism in the year 2001?
Not me!
Clarrie Isaacs
President Aboriginal Government of Australia
Macedonia
Greg Andreas, GL March 11, claimed that I falsified the facts about the Macedonian issue. In fact, the falsification of the right wing Greek establishment over the last half century. Volumes of fiction have been printed to "prove" that the modern Macedonians have never existed historically and were invented by Tito in 1945. Such "academic" fiction appears daily in
Greek-Australian newspapers.
The Greek establishment has a hide to talk about being insulted by the Macedonians using an ancient Greek name while they churn out the ultimate insult, denying a people's history.
I agree that the ancient Macedonians were Greek. This is interesting academically, but as interesting politically as the divorce of a couple of royal twits in England.
Like most parts of the world, Macedonia has been occupied by different cultures, each blending into the previous one. While Greeks always remained in Macedonia, from the seventh century till the 1920s a Slavic people were the majority, as they remain in the Yugoslav and Bulgarian sections.
It's odd that Greg Andreas objects to modern inhabitants of Macedonia calling themselves Macedonian, while he probably calls himself "Greek-Australian". We only have to go back 200 years to see that no-one used to speak Greek or English here.
He says nothing about what I wrote about the oppression of the Macedonian minority in Greece. I've seen this with my own eyes, and until Greek leftists rise to openly condemning this, then talk about multiculturalism in Australia, support for Aboriginal rights etc, appears to me a little shallow.
Mike Karadjis
Sydney