En Passant

The duality of racism in Australia means that when Abbott inflames racist tensions by attacking refugees he lays the groundwork for more and more brutal attacks on our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters, including the Tent Embassy.

Rally for Syria Melbourne 11 am 5 February State Library.

John Howard, Mal Brough, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbot and Jenny Macklin should be sent to the Hague to face genocide charges or put on trial here.

This is a link to me on radio station 2UE in Sydney this morning for 15 minutes defending flag burning and the need for a treaty.

We need more and bigger demonstrations for Aboriginal sovereignty and land rights to make the point that they are central to addressing Aboriginal genocide and dispossession. It is time for a treaty.

It is time for a real fight back to shake the systemic racism of Australian capitalism to its core.

‘If you don’t fight you lose.’

Genocide is not only the mass killing of a people. The essence of genocide is acting with the intention to destroy the group, not the extent to which that intention has been achieved. A major intention of forcibly removing Indigenous children was to ‘absorb’, ‘merge’ or ‘assimilate’ them, so Aborigines as a distinct group would disappear. Authorities sincerely believed assimilation would be in the ‘best interests’ of the children, but this is irrelevant to a finding that their actions were genocidal.

There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes – they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good ’cause they ate his food — what he left.

The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn’t get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call ‘em “chitt’lin’” nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That’s what you were — a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.

The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro — remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master.

You are right of course. Protests never achieve anything.

Resistance across the Arab world. The occupy movement in over 800 cities in over 80 countries. Strikes and demonstrations across Europe against austerity. The Equal Love campaign and the Baiada poultry workers’ picket in Australia.

Nothing. Absolutely nothing came of them.

On the first anniversary of the mass mobilizations of January 25th 2011, we have launched an international solidarity campaign with the Egyptian revolution.

For the text of the petition and to sign on, please visit http://www.egyptsolidaritycampaign.org.

It wasn’t a wild protest. It wasn’t a riot. It wasn’t thuggery.

Those false accusations are examples of the constant racist stereotyping by the one percent and their media and part of the wider agenda to deepen even further the oppression of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.