BY KATELYN MOUNTFORD
BRISBANE — Resistance's mailbox here held a nasty surprise recently: a letter from Edmund McMahon, Pauline Hanson's One Nation candidate in the seat of Mt Gravatt in the February 17 state election.
McMahon acknowledged that "our respective organisations have not had a great deal of dialogue", which, he said, "is hardly surprising, as [Resistance] stands for decadent Marxist Internationalism, while One Nation represents wholesome Australian values".
McMahon continued: "In my opinion, your organisation represents all that is base and corrupt about the global community. Your particular variety of internationalism refutes Australian sovereignty, degrades National unity and seeks only to sow division and discord."
"Is it your primary purpose", he muses, "to suck the life blood and energy out of Australian youth, teach them to hate their ethnicity and then leave them spent and disillusioned?"
Unfortunately for likes of racists like McMahon, the answer to his question is the opposite (apart from the bit about ethnicity: Resistance rejects ethnic chauvinism and promotes human solidarity).
Our stand was well-demonstrated by the inspiring 1998 high school walkouts against One Nation and racism, which mobilised more than 10,000 high school students across Australia. Perhaps McMahon is still bitter about them.
McMahon comes to the point of his letter when, in an outrageously clever play on words, he challenges Resistance to "resist me, One Nation and all we stand for ... The Queensland state election will be held on the 17th of February. I will contest with the objective of winning, stop me if you can."
Unfortunately, McMahon's defeat alone would not stop the intrinsic racism and shortsightedness of the political and economic system that his party, and the major parties, champion.
As a consequence, on February 17, Resistance members were not protesting against McMahon at the Mt Gravatt polling booth as he challenged. We had better things to do.
Far from "demonstrating [Resistance's] own childish insignificance within the greater Australian Political Demography", Resistance members were out campaigning for the Democratic Socialist candidates in the seats of South Brisbane and Brisbane Central and exposing the racist policies of Labor, the Coalition and One Nation.
The previous day, we had organised a very successful walkout by school students to protest the resurrection of the One Nation zombie.
We've been publicising the May 1 anti-capitalist blockades of stock exchanges around the country. And of course, Resistance has been organising against One Nation's racism in the schools and in the streets. That is where McMahon and his ilk will be defeated.
So while it may disappoint McMahon that his literary machismo didn't work us into a frenzy, or awaken our members to the fact that their "life blood" is being "sucked out" by "a Machiavellian arm of the Government", he can at least take heart in the fact that he produced a pants-wetting level of laughter at the Resistance branch meeting.