En Passant

The right-wingers who have taken over federal property in eastern Oregon claim to be fighting a tyrannical government, but their outrage is selective, writes Eric Ruder in Socialist Worker US.   THE ONGOING occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in eastern Oregon raises a thicket of political questions significantly more important than the squabbling […]

The ruling class won’t crush right wing extremists because it thinks it may need these fascists and racists in the future to control a resurgent working class or to help them impose massive cuts on working class living standards. In the interim the racists and fascists help keep alive and reinforce the top down racism of Labor and Liberal governments and divide workers along race and other lines at the expense of uniting on class lines. We should have no illusions in governments and understand why they don’t smash right wing terrorists but rather turn a blind eye to them. It is up to ordinary workers, unionists, the left and others to build the mass campaign and movement needed to destroy the fascists and their useful idiot fellow travellers before they can become a mass movement themselves.

Amy Thomas in Solidarity discusses where the Greens are heading under Richard Di Natale.

So “family values” appears as simple social conservatism, but it is actually a quite elaborate and historically based right wing project to control and fragment the working class. That’s why the most economically right wing government ministers are so often devout family men.

The relentless campaign in the Murdoch press and other right wing media outlets accusing the ABC of ideological bias and groupthink is so laughably hypocritical that it would be easy to conclude the lot of them were a cutting new satire from the people who brought us The Onion writes Corey Oakley in Red Flag.

The dominant forces in the Greens are driven by electoralism and an attachment to neoliberalism (or fiscal responsibility, as they prefer to call it). Regardless of the odd press release tacking left, the Greens have just legitimised the neoliberal agenda Gillard is implementing. And as they have done so, they have further accommodated to the establishment.

Let me be disrespectful and disparaging. After the revolution Alan Jones will be made to clean toilets. It shouldn’t be too much of a change for him. After all he deals in horseshit every day. The other end of the chaff bag you might say. The right wallows in hate; the currency of the Left is hope.

There is little in the political concerns of right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik that would be out of place in Coalition Party meetings or the mainstream media and especially on the shock jock radio shows.

Breivik saw 3 threats to Western society – Islam, multiculturalism and cultural Marxism.

This is stock standard right wing discourse. Indeed some of his comments could just as easily have been made by Australian Labor Party Parliamentarians and certainly some members.

No part of the political mainstream–neither conservative nor liberal [JP – reformist] parties–is blameless in the crusade against immigrants and Muslims that shaped Anders Behring Breivik.

But this has also produced revulsion among millions of people horrified by the return of the far right and its ideology–whether in the form of openly fascist parties in Europe or the Islamophobic fanatics who gravitate to the Tea Party movement in the U.S. or the “respectable” politicians on both continents who seek to exploit anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim bigotry.

Turning that revulsion into active opposition is the best way to present an alternative to the hatred and violence of the far right.

Labor has changed its leadership – it hasn’t changed its fundamentals. Gillard is a right winger who will rule in the interests of the bosses at our expense.