En Passant

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.

What courage, what humanity the Warsaw Ghetto Jews showed in resisting the monolith of Nazism. There is a universal message here. It was right then to fight back against the Nazi occupiers. It is right now, even in the face of overwhelming force, to resist your oppressors, their invasions and occupation.

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.

The fight against the encroaching extremism of the right and the cloak of respectability the mainstream parties here and across the world give it is the fight specifically against the fascists and their ‘respectable’ legitimisers but more generally to build a genuine socialist alternative.

That means as a first step building an organisation of thousands of workers and others committed to a new society in which the threat of fascism is wiped from the earth for good. Only overthrowing the system that breeds fascism can do that. Only the working class as working class, the millions for example in Australia who produce the wealth of Australian society, have that power.

We socialists want to build an organisation of the most class conscious elements to win a new world. The first step to doing that is to build an organisation that doesn’t sink into the sewer of racism and Islamophobia but which challenges at every step of the way the creeping extremism of the right and becomes strong enough to smash this violent and abhorrent expression of capitalism now and into the future.