The battle against racism is one that needs to be fought with a passion. It is fundamental to the future success of the left that this constant river of ignorance is dried up once and for all.
Only education can do this, and a full blown campaign by all socially responsible groups to educate in the home, the schoolroom, the workplace and the street could remove the racists from the political landscape within a generation. It's not a case of personal views and opinions, it's about telling the clear, factual truths that only flat-Earth fascists could dispute.
Truths like:
lmany refugees are victims or witnesses of torture, massacre, rape and political incarceration. They are often traumatized and are worthy of our respect and understanding, not our racism.
lthe cultural, biological, religious and actual physical genocide perpetrated against indigenous Australians for two centuries has had a profound effect on their psyche, will never be forgotten by them, and must never be dismissed by anyone else. When Howard downplays it, he lies in the same bed as David Irving.
lmigrants increase the population base which increases demand which increases required production which creates jobs. Any aspects of their culture they bring with them are no less valid than our own second hand US/British culture. I certainly don't recall the early white immigrants make much of an attempt to assimilate into Aboriginal cultures!
Economic rationalism is the enemy here, and victim-reversal propaganda is its chief weapon. Unless the truth is successfully conveyed to the masses, ignorance will reign, scapegoats will suffer and as this system finally buckles it could well mutate into an openly fascist one.
Hanson does speak for a lot people I know — it's up to us to change that.
Chris Dawson
Bulimba Qld
Governments that lie
We always believed that the US nuclear tests on Amchitka Island in 1971 would seriously contaminate the environment, and now we have it confirmed (GLW, #254).
Then the US government vigorously denied such a danger. But that did not prevent tens of thousands of high school students and university students flooding into the streets of cities across Canada to try to prevent the blasts. Seeing through the lies, we organised mass walk-outs in Vancouver high schools, which spread throughout Canada, and to the US.
This experience confirms once again that capitalist governments are built on lies. Last year, for instance, the French government claimed that the nuclear tests in Tahiti would not cause any harm. The Howard government states that the massive budget cutbacks will be for the good of the nation.
We should not have to wait 25 years to have it confirmed that more nuclear tests and budget cuts are extremely harmful to the environment and the human race! This is yet one more reason to join the fight for a socialist future.
Stuart Russell, Sydney
Zionism
Phil Shannon's review of The Controversy of Zion (GLW, 16/10/96) reveals a deeply disturbing ignorance of the broader historical and political context of Left attitudes to Jews.
What is most concerning is Mr Shannon's "whitewashing" of obvious examples of Left anti-Semitism. There is absolutely no doubt that Marx was an anti-Semite. His writings contain numerous smatterings of anti-Jewish sentiment. For example, he regularly associated Jews with dirtiness, describing them as the "filthiest of all races", and employed gross anti-Jewish stereotypes in his criticisms of Jewish socialist leaders Ferdinand Lassalle and Leo Frankel.
It is hardly surprising that Marx was an anti-Semite since many of his contemporaries including Engels, Bakunin, Fourier, Proudhon, and Beatrice Webb also held anti-Jewish views. It was only following August Bebel's famous 1893 denunciation of anti-Semitism as the "Socialism of Fools" that philo-Semitism became dominant on the Left.
Even more disturbing is Mr Shannon's implied support for the malevolent allegation of Zionist-Nazi collaboration during the Holocaust. This allegation seeks to shift the blame or responsibility for the Holocaust from the Nazi perpetrators to the Jewish victims.
Of course, some individual Jews and Jewish leaders including most prominently Rudolf Kastner bartered with the Nazis to save their own lives. Just as some Aborigines collaborated with the white invaders of Australia, and some East Timorese collaborate with their Indonesian overlords.
But, generally the Left sympathizes with the victims of genocide rather than accusing them of soliciting their persecution, or attempting to minimize the reality of their suffering. I am not aware, for example, that the Nazi guards in concentration camps made any distinction between the gassing of "Zionist Jews" or "Non-Zionist Jews".
None of this means that the ideology of Zionism or the current-day Israeli treatment of the Palestinians should not be critiqued. But such a critique needs to acknowledge the specific realities of Jewish experience of racism and oppression that drove the creation of the State of Israel, rather than narrowly depicting Israel as the dispassionate creation of outside forces.
Philip Mendes
North Caulfield Vic
[Abridged.]
Green Party
I am disappointed that Libby Connor's letter (Write on, GLW #250) is a personal attack on Gary McLennan rather than what is sorely needed — an honest attempt to deal with the issues McLennan addresses — the moral and ethical implications of the decision by the Green Party leadership in 1995 to support the election of a National Party Premier.
It is unconscionable for Drew Hutton and his friends to continue to pretend that helping Rob Borbidge to get elected was a clever political strategy, because the tragic result of that strategy is now before us for all to see. The Cape York Wilderness Zone is dead and the traditional owners have nothing. The agreement on native forests in Queensland (negotiated by the Wilderness Society and the Rainforest Conservation Society) has come to nothing. Where are the tree clearing controls now? What about alternative energy initiatives that were being discussed with the Goss government?
I am not saying that the Labor administration was the answer to the environmental crises facing us, but the cost to the environment of supporting the Coalition has been too high, and cannot be morally justified. What I am saying is that I will not be intimidated by Libby Connor because in my heart I know that what the Green Party leadership did last year was unethical and so should you.
Debra Beattie
Disappointed Green Party member
Nobel Prize
Beyond the fanfare of his much-deserved Nobel Prize, the tireless activism of our neighbor and compañero Jose Ramos-Horta should stand as a reminder to us all. A reminder that the most difficult challenge we face is that of keeping our exhausted compassion at pace with our growing anger. Because the struggle never ends, but contains its own reprieve.
Robbie Casey
Longueville NSW
An open letter to Pauline Hanson
If you had to cart your daily water supply in a jerry can through mud and mangroves, would you call that disadvantaged? If you had no sewerage, electricity, mail delivery, telephone or garbage collection would that be disadvantaged? If your local government harassed you instead of representing you, labelling you "itinerants" by the colour of your skin although you had lived in the city for over fifteen years, would that be fair?
Now imagine you have no feet, or are blind, yet have never claimed taxi subsidy vouchers, meals on wheels, Medicare or most of the entitlements due to a disabled pensioner. Instead you sleep in dust or mud huddled under a leaking tarpaulin. Nearby an ailing middle aged niece toils as a full-time carer, cooking on an open fire, worried that her unemployment benefit demands she be "looking for work". Please explain to her the meaning of "respite leave". Try negotiating the bureaucratic maze in a language which is foreign to you, because this family speak a tongue which has grown with the continent, and that is a lot longer than 200 years. Wouldn't you agree, Pauline, that this family group, friends of mine in the City of Darwin, are the real Aussie battlers?
William B Day
Darwin
Intrigue in Brisbane
While watching the A.B.C. Four Corners programme on October 28, 1996, that reported about corruption, bribery, intrigue etc., that involve politicians and others in high places in a town in Western Australia, I began thinking about what is going on in our own City of Brisbane. I wonder why?
Could it be, allowing developers to construct high rise buildings on the edges of the Brisbane River, where nature strips should exist? Such buildings also block out the views of nature strips on the opposite side of the river. There was a time when one could see Captain Burke Park and surrounding foliage under the Story Bridge. Because of the recently constructed high rise building on the opposite bank, that view is now lost to both the locals and tourists who politicians are supposed to attract.
Attempts to remove the RNA show grounds, to make way for developers to build down houses on the sites.
Banning the collecting of petition signatures in the Mall in support of establishing a Central Park on property bounded by Edward and Ann Streets, where developers are threatening to build a high rise building, thus obliterating one of Brisbane's best known tourist attractions, the Historical School of Arts next to the aforesaid property.
The ongoing debate over the future of Roma Street Rail Yard, that could possibly fall into the clutches of developers' political stooges, if action is not taken to thwart their dubious intentions.
No doubt there are other schemes afoot that have not yet came to the surface, so, when they do, people should be ready to nip in the bud, any development that is detrimental to our City and its citizens.
Putting high rise buildings in wrong places, could become a heath hazard exacerbating the problems of our already overburdened health services.
Eddie Kann
Chermside Qld
Unemployment and Professor Hilmer
Interested to hear Professor Hilmer, one, I take it, of the new order architects, replying to a question on unemployment that the answer was growth.
An hour or so later heard discussion on radio where it was pointed out that in Chile they had achieved said growth and thousands were out on strike because "they were worse off". The growth of modern technology at its present rate must mean fewer and fewer people are needed to produce the growth.
Still think that a shorter working week with no reduction in wages is the only answer.
The adjustment in the taxation system is, I think, the way this could be achieved. The unemployed could then become taxpayers and we would all be better off.
Jean Hale
Balmain NSW
Which community?
All the major parties of Government are encouraging Australians to think of themselves as a part of the Asian business community. What sort of a community is that?
Is this the community which allows the East Timorese to be slaughtered by Indonesia, a powerful member of that "community"? Is this the community which allows the organisers of a meeting on this human rights issue, and not the demonstrators who caused the trouble, to be arrested, manhandled and deported as happened recently in Malaysia? Is this the "community" which allows the slaughter of its own people in Bougainville, just to appease the mining interests?
All Australians should be outraged by this latest "community" effort by the Malaysian Government. Those arrested were only trying to bring the plight of the East Timorese to light.
Howard's conscience won't trouble him much on this issue, as the East Timorese had all their rich oil rights seized from them by the Australian and Indonesian Governments and haven't got a brass razoo to call their own.
I am part of the Asian community. The oppressed Penan people of Malaysia are my community. The East Timorese are my community. As are the Bougainville Island people, the Aborigines, the South American Indians, the Tibetans and the myriad of oppressed people throughout Asian and Oceania. It is not only those with white skin who oppress the powerless.
I am not part of the filthy business community Howard wants us to be so much a part of. While they have the blood of oppression on their hands; while they allow censorship and no freedom of speech, ideas and movement, they are not worthy to be a part of any community I belong to.
Therese Mackay
Port Macquarie NSW
[Abridged.]