En Passant

Just as the Reclaim White Australia racists and fascists plan to rally this Saturday and Sunday across the country, so we are building counter-protests to welcome and defend Muslims. I urge all anti-racists and anti-fascists to attend and spread a message of love against the purveyors of hate, and in doing that help to drive the fascists and their useful idiots back into their cesspits.

The possibility of a populist Hanson and a neo-Nazi right within Reclaim Australia finding common ground, as they appear to be doing, is frightening. It could herald the development of a proto-fascist organisation, based on the disaffected middle and lower classes and racist fear-mongering. We need to gather our forces and begin the fight against the racist Reclaim (White) Australia movement. It is better to remove the weeds before they destroy the garden than after they have. Apply the weedicide now, not when the weeds have overrun the garden and it is too late.

Operation Sovereign Borders stops innocent people who are fleeing war, murder and rape but Australian Immigration Minister Scott Morrison won’t stop fascists coming here. Says it all really.

At the end of May, the Front National results in the European elections sent a shock wave across France, John Mullen writes from Paris. Here we look at the causes of this disaster, and at what can be done

If the economy does decline where will this middle class anger then go? Without a left wing or socialist working class alternative it could go further and further to the right…The need right now is to build a socialist alternative.

Socialist Worker UK looks at how the growing threat of fascism across Europe can be challenged as Unite Against Fascism holds its annual conference in London

Last week the mining companies sent a shot across the bows of the Labor Party government with advertisements purporting to show how they really do pay a lot of tax. According to the ATO statistics for 2009/10 73% of mining companies were non-taxable. The mining industry has the highest percentage of non-taxpayers of any industry – about 12% higher than the average.

Tell me again Labor why we can’t tax these corporate bludgers as they plunder our resources?

The seemingly good Australian economy means that the fascism, the politics that dare not speak its name, has found no large following here, yet. However the enthusiastic response to Wilders’ lies about ‘Islamification’ and the rest of the vile filth this man spews forth show that the seeds are there for a re-birth of fascism in Australia built around anti-Muslim vitriol and a fear and hate campaign against Islam.

Hitler’s rise to power was the greatest defeat in the history of the working class, and we are told all kinds of myths about how it happened. Donny Gluckstein in Socialist Worker UK uncovers the real story—and looks at how we can stop it happening again

This verdict is a blow to the Islamophobes who hoped to rehabilitate themselves after the Norway massacre shone a spotlight on their sickening propaganda. But it is not enough by itself. The capitalist crisis is already creating social conditions that can help the far right grow in Europe. We can see this most chillingly in Greece with the rapid electoral rise of Golden Dawn’s neo-Nazi thugs. All of this underlines that building resistance to austerity has to be combined with exposing and confronting those who share Breivik’s hateful beliefs.