When Captain James Cook first surveyed what later became known as Australia, he declared his “discovery” to be “in the pure state of Nature, the Industry of Man [having] had nothing to do with any part of it”. In reality, the “industry of man” had everything to do with the places that Cook most valued. Indigenous people did not live in a “state of nature”—at least, not in any simple way. Rather, they shaped, through their labour, the environment on which they depended. 
Indigenous people developed a complicated method of land custodianship resting on what historian Bill Gammage calls “templates”: particular associations of disparate plant species, maintained over decades or even centuries. They selected a notable topographic feature—such as a lake, a mountain, or a rock—and then reshaped the surrounds to complement it, alternating varieties of vegetation to create effects that suited them and the animals they wanted to attract. 
Taboos and other cultural prohibitions discouraged the taking of plants and animals in circumstances that might diminish the long-term viability of species; similar obligations ensured that burns were performed only when and where they were required. These methods did more than sustain the population. They generated abundance and did so efficiently: Indigenous people seem to have spent no more than three or four hours each day seeking food. 
In pre-capitalist Australia, humans did not despoil nature; they consciously improved it. Within a few years, white settlement changed all of that. Land the colonists had assumed was inexhaustibly fertile became barren clay, exposed to the sun and rapidly eroding. The unmaking of the continent resulted not from human activity so much as the wrong kind of human activity. A relatively tiny number of Europeans prevented a larger number of Indigenous people from maintaining the environment in the way that they’d done for tens of thousands of years. 
They did so by introducing capitalism. Today, we take the wage system that underpins capitalism for granted. It appears normal, almost eternal, because we can barely conceive of an alternative. It did not seem normal to pre-colonial people. Historian Henry Reynolds provides a long list of complaints from Europeans about the indifference to wages of local people, who simply saw no reason to labour with the intensity demanded by capitalists. 
The problem was neither one of stamina nor of aptitude, but rather pertained directly to their relationship with nature. Accustomed to taking with little difficulty food and other resources from the wild storehouse they’d constructed all around them, they could not recognise any justification for the patterns of work that the Europeans required. 
When Indigenous people gathered food, or burned the bush or fulfilled customary obligations, they provided food, clothing and shelter for themselves and those around them, not for a boss or for a distant customer. They were not impelled by an abstraction like money; they were meeting the immediate obligations of necessity, in ways hallowed by tradition and exulted by theology. Their labour—hunting, burning the bush, sowing and collecting plants—combined what the Europeans would describe as work, recreation, worship, art and much else besides. 
In Western Australia, the “protector” of Aborigines noted that Indigenous people did not see the necessity of labouring for colonists because they preferred the “precarious subsistence” of the bush and saw their “roving life” as superior to the “habits and customs of civilisation”. He was correct, except insofar as he regarded their subsistence as “precarious”: prior to 1788, the standard of living for Indigenous people seems to have been considerably higher than for most of the English working class. 
Indigenous people thought the work demanded by capitalists stripped life of its humanity. They could not comprehend why anyone would accept such monotony, such empty, soulless drudgery, given the bush itself provided the basis for a life of material satisfaction and spiritual enrichment.
European observers tended to explain the Indigenous hostility to wage labour as a product of race or culture. Yet the Australian colony itself provides striking evidence to the contrary, simply because it came into being—at least in part—in response to a very similar transformation within England. Until the early modern period, many people in rural Europe also depended on collective, non-capitalist practices for their day-to day survival—practices that they, too, saw as giving life meaning and value. 
Feudalism was, of course, a very different system from that which prevailed in Australia, not least because it mandated a tremendous disparity between the privileged aristocracy and people who possessed neither wealth nor power. But, unlike the capitalism that replaced it, the feudal order recognised reciprocal rights and obligations, including those customs through which peasants collectively tended various natural resources to sustain a community. 
Many of England’s poorest relied on the so-called commons: shared lands in which they grazed cattle, collected fruits and berries, and perhaps raised some crops. The management of such areas depended on a social world of rituals, feasts and festivals—structures through which the folk made sense of their often difficult lives. That culture mandated a way of living far more attuned to the natural cycles than what was to come. 
From the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, feudal landowners realised they could make fortunes growing wool for the textile industry, so they forcibly enclosed vast tracts of land previously held in common. The customary systems of land management gave way to an agricultural capitalism that treated the soil merely as a source of profit. Unable to survive in the old ways, displaced people straggled into the cities, whose markets and industry grew on the back of destructive rural “improvement”. 
Like the Indigenous men and women uprooted by white settlement in Australia, many of those who could no longer live on the land resorted to begging—and, in some cases, to criminality. The British state responded with viciously punitive legislation. Between 1688 and 1820, the number of offences attracting the death penalty increased from 50 to more than 220. Looking back from 1857, an appalled Charles Phillips wrote, “Every page of our statute book smelt of blood”. 
Yet bloodshed was only part of the transformation imposed by the English elite on the mass of the population. The authorities also dealt with the swelling criminal class through transportation—including to the new colony. In a grotesque irony, the dispossession of Indigenous people in Australia can be traced to a similar dispossession in England, with the settlement of the new country driven, at least in part, by the need to build a different order in the old one. 
By forcing the rural poor out of their traditional villages, the enclosures created a social layer with no choice but work for a wage. People who previously would have fed and clothed themselves by their own labour suddenly no longer could. That experience was, again, utterly wrenching. The new regime meant that people worked far harder than would have been imaginable previously. In 1200, an adult male in England laboured for an estimated 1,620 hours per year on average; by 1840, the figure stood as high as 3,588. Even more significantly, artisans or peasants displaced from their ancestral communities and into the cities were inducted into an entirely new culture. 
Before the industrial system could function properly, the owners of capital needed to normalise conduct markedly at odds with the values most people cherished. The new workers had to arrive punctually; to perform precisely the task needed (and never do anything else); to keep quiet during work hours (rather than chatting, singing, swearing or arguing); to maintain a regular output instead of working in bursts; and to think of nothing but the repetitive duties assigned to them. They had to accept that this new method of labour would occupy most of their time and they had to discard, as obstacles to progress, the traditional habits and customs by which they’d made sense of their lives and tended their country.
The rhetoric of the early English manufacturers about their employees thus replicates, almost exactly, the attitude of colonialist employers to Indigenous people. The factory owner Samuel Greg Junior vented about the “restless and migratory spirit” of factory hands; the entrepreneur Thomas Arkwright bemoaned the difficulty in training staff “to renounce their desultory habits of work”.
In a revealing metaphor, mill managers described the experience of subjecting the locals to the long confinement of the factory as “like putting a deer in the plough”, almost as if, in harnessing the populace to the wage system, they were domesticating nature itself. 
As in Australia, religion facilitated the required socialisation, with employers funding churches, chapels and Sunday Schools in every village and town centre, on the basis that ministers preached a gospel of obedience. As in Australia, children were believed more susceptible than their parents, with the philosopher John Locke opining they could begin work from the age of three. 
In both Australia and England, the acceptance of wage labour came from the destruction of other options. In both countries, the old order was shattered, in part by physical violence, since the new regime ultimately relied on soldiers with guns. Expelled from their lands and thus unable to feed and shelter themselves in their customary manner, people either accepted capitalist discipline or else became entirely destitute. 
We’re accustomed to acknowledging the relationship between Indigenous society and the land, a relationship that enabled humans to sustainably manage an immense continent over a vast time frame. But, even in feudal England, ordinary people valued their direct engagement with nature too, and mourned deeply its destruction. John Clare, the poet of the enclosures, explained: “Each little tyrant with his little sign / Shows where man claims, earth glows no more divine”. 
For Clare, closer than we are to the transition between social orders, capitalism disenchanted the land, profaning the previously sacred ritual by which people had once related to their environment. New priorities were forced, painfully and brutally, on the bulk of the population, in ways that made environmental stewardship impossible and facilitated the crisis we now face. 
Today, as the temperatures vault year upon year, we can easily think of humanity as fundamentally hostile to nature. Yet, in historical terms, we’ve lived as we do now for the merest blink of an eye. It is the devastation wrought since 1788 that is anomalous, not the tens of thousands of years of stewardship that preceded it.
From the technological world of the 21st century, we cannot, of course, return to the conditions that prevailed in a pre-1788 Australia. But that’s not the point. The remarkably rapid destruction of the landscape created by Indigenous people was not brought about by modern machines. On the contrary, the settlers ruined the land with distinctly low-tech methods. The problem was not technology, but a social system that deployed technology in certain ways, replacing the conscious choices of humans with the blind agency of capital.
For 50,000 years, Indigenous Australians enhanced the land on which they lived. Their example, and that of other native peoples, shows an ecological society to be possible, not some kind of dream or utopia.

Jeff Sparrow

The unmaking of our relationship with the natural world

The world’s no fun anymore, 
Only machinegunfire and arson 
Starvation lice bedbugs cholera typhus.
That’s John Dos Passos in the novel 1919, part of his USA trilogy. A hundred years later, typhus might have given way to coronavirus, but the sentiment remains instantly recognisable. As the uprising against police brutality spreads across the United States, many have recalled events from a hundred and one years ago – in particular, the “Red Summer” of racial clashes and killings in an America reeling from mass unemployment and a deadly pandemic.
The Red Summer began in spring, when two policemen died arresting an African American man during an April celebration at a Black church in Jenkins County, Georgia. In retaliation, a white lynch mob formed, murdering six African American men and burning the community’s property. The following month, white sailors rioted against the Black community in Charleston, South Carolina, killing three. In July, white mobs rampaged in Indianapolis, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Norfolk, Virginia. The pogroms continued with a riot taking seven lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, in August; a lynching in Omaha, Nebraska; the massacre of more than a hundred African American sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, in late September; and mob violence in Wilmington, Delaware, in November.
Then, as now, brutality inflicted on people of colour was not new. Historian David F. Krugler estimates that, in the first months of 1919 (that is, before the Red Summer began), two dozen died at the hands of lynch mobs. What happened next was notable not because African Americans suffered, but because they fought back with a determination that shocked the racists.
That resistance grew as the riots spread. During the Charleston attacks, Blacks hurled bricks at the rampaging sailors. When conflict flared in Chicago, young African Americans responded by amassing a huge arsenal of weapons for self-defence. In places, community organisation successfully quelled white violence. In Omaha, for instance, one racist warned fellow bigots not to press ahead with attacks – he’d heard that the Blacks had guns and were willing to use them. Such was the inspiration for Claude McKay’s iconic Red Summer poem “If we must die”, with its conclusion:
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, 
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
The similar sentiment in today’s rallies led Robert Green II to argue, in a piece for Jacobin, that 2020 might be understood as a Red Spring, a movement arising to reject a hitherto normalised oppression. The parallel between the two uprisings also deserves examination from a different angle, given the relentless red baiting by authorities today and in the past.
Donald Trump responded to the insurgency by threatening to declare “Antifa” – a name given to a loose association of anti-fascists – a terrorist organisation. He blames violence on those he calls “Antifa-led anarchists” or “Antifa and the radical left”. US attorney<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/attorney-general-barr-blames-far-left-extremist-groups-violent-protests-n1219696"> </a>general William Barr insists that “outside agitators and radicals are exploiting the situation”, with violence “planned, organised and driven by anarchic and left extremist groups ... using Antifa-like tactics”. The New York Times, the organ of establishment liberalism, allows Republican senator Tom Cotton to fulminate against “cadres of left-wing radicals like Antifa infiltrating protest marches” and to call for military force to crush them.
All of this, up to and including the role of the New York Times, would have been familiar to African Americans in 1919. Throughout that year, attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer attributed African American resistance to the nefarious influence of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the newly formed Communist Party, a theory he shared with his newly recruited Bureau of Investigation section chief, J. Edgar Hoover. The press followed suit. As historian Mark Ellis documents, the New York Tribune condemned “the insidious IWW and Left Wing Socialist propaganda being disseminated among the negroes”, while the Boston Herald linked “the unprecedented boldness and aggression” of Blacks in Washington and Chicago to the “sinister influence” of the IWW and Bolshevism.
Then, as now, the New York Times played a key role, channelling the thoughts of an unnamed public official (probably Hoover). A Times headline in July announced: “REDS TRY TO STIR NEGROES TO REVOLT ... [through] publications circulated among uneducated classes in Southern states”. The paper’s editorial declared that “Bolshevist agitation” was “bearing its natural and inevitable fruit”. An article the following month reported that “facts thus far developed lead officials to believe that IWW and Soviet influence were at the bottom of the recent race riots”.
After the massacre of sharecroppers in Elaine (one of the deadliest lynchings in American history), the Times declared that “natural conclusions” lent “a high degree of plausibility” to charges that the IWW was behind the incident, and argued that its agitators were persuading northern papers “to exaggerate real grievances and to create unreal ones”. Hoover spent the rest of his life denouncing the supposed puppet masters behind African American activism and ran a concerted campaign to expose Dr Martin Luther King as a Communist.
The passage of a century makes the bigotry of red baiting more glaring. When, for instance, attorney general Palmer delivered a lengthy report to the Senate Judiciary Committee about subversion, most of his document consisted of extracts from Black newspapers in which writers called for self-defence against racism. He and his audience assumed African Americans to be unwilling and incapable of standing up for themselves.
Representative James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, a political ally of Palmer, spelled this out explicitly. The Southern Black man was, he said, “happy and contented and will remain so if the propagandist of the IWW, the Bolsheviki of Russia, and the misguided theorist of other sections of this country will let him alone”. Trump’s patronising references to himself as a “friend of peaceful protesters” relies on the same paternalistic trope: rioters as the dupes of outsiders invariably depicted as white, middle class and well educated.
Yet an understandable revulsion at such rhetoric can lead progressives to embrace paternalism of a different kind, one that simply reverses the red baiter’s logic. Where Trump and Co. attribute the current rebellion exclusively to the machinations of those they call “Antifa”, some would-be supporters embrace an “allyship” that treats the movement as entirely self-contained and distinct from developments elsewhere. That’s why it’s worth considering how, in 1919, when African American communities organised themselves to fight back, they did so in the context of a world in turmoil.
During the First World War, African American soldiers experienced extraordinary racism throughout their service. In France, the US high command even released a pamphlet warning civilians about the supposed predilection for rape of its own Black soldiers. Nevertheless, military service gave African American men renewed confidence to insist on their rights back home. “The five hundred thousand Negroes who were sent overseas to serve their country”, explained the veteran Stanley B. Norvell in a letter to a white newspaper in 1919, “were brought into contacts that widened both their perceptions and their perspectives, broadened them, gave them new angles, on life, on governments, and on what both mean”.
When the 369th Infantry Regiment – better known as the Harlem Hellfighters – returned to New York, the unit’s band marched the men through white streets in disciplined military formation – and, then, when they crossed into Harlem, struck up the jaunty jazz number, “How ya gonna keep ‘em down on the farm (after they’ve seen Paree)?” It was a sentiment that W.E.B. du Bois expressed in a famous essay. “We return”, he wrote. “We return from fighting. We return fighting.” In many cases, the fight was literal. When, in 1919, racists tried to put African Americans “back in their place”, they now confronted men with weapons training and combat experience – men not inclined to back down.
But the Great War provided veterans with more than mere military skills. The widening of perspectives described by Norvell occurred in a period of massive social struggles all over the world: the Easter Uprising in Ireland, two revolutions in Russia, the Spartacist uprising in Germany and mass strikes throughout Europe. Global instability manifested back home as industrialisation forced African Americans into the modern cities of the north and a post-war slump brought mass unemployment.
If 1919 was the year of race riots, it was also the year of anarchist terrorism, May Day riots and the Seattle general strike. The red baiting directed at African American communities foreshadowed the “Palmer Raids”, the Bureau of Investigation being unleashed on anyone deemed disloyal. On 2 January 1920, the attorney general’s men coordinated the arrests of more than 4,000 people in raids conducted across 33 cities.
During the Red Summer, the New York Times deduced the influence of Bolshevists behind the clashes on the basis that “the situation presupposes intelligent direction and management” – with the implication that “direction” could come only from outside the African American community. That was quite wrong. But precisely because the African American militants were intelligent, they took stock of the ideas influencing rebels all over the world. In his memoir, Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood wrote about organising with fellow African American veterans – one of whom had somehow obtained a submachine gun – to repel white pogromists in Chicago:
“The Chicago rebellion of 1919 was a pivotal point in my life ... My experiences abroad in the Army and at home with the police left me totally disillusioned about being able to find any solution to the racial problem through the help of the government; for I had seen that official agencies of the country were among the most racist and most dangerous to me and my people. I began to see that I had to fight; I had to commit myself to struggle against whatever it was that made racism possible.”
For Haywood, that meant joining the Communist Party. That was a choice made by only a minority, but many others who lived through that period were forced to consider radical ideas, as they tried to make sense of their experience.
The situation today possesses a similar dynamic. Scholar and activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor attributes the current rebellion to the extreme state violence directed against African Americans. But she also argues that the uprising needs to be understood in the broader context of a failing society and a steady accretion of injustice. “If you’ve graduated from college, your life has been bracketed by war at the turn of the 21st century, by recession and now by a deadly pandemic”, she said in a 1 June Democracy Now interview. “And so I think we’re seeing the convergence of a class rebellion with racism and racial terrorism at the centre of it.”
The convergence explains the global resonance of a struggle initiated in the United States. The solidarity rallies on every continent represent the universality of both racism and police violence. The protests in Australia, for instance, drew attention to the horrendous rates of Indigenous deaths in custody and the persistent refusal of authorities to prevent them.
Yet the extraordinary attendance at the global rallies surely confirms Taylor’s argument about the context in which the response to George Floyd’s death has emerged. Lives across the world have been blighted by the War on Terror, the Global Financial Crisis and the new recession spurred by the coronavirus. Should we really be surprised that so many people identify with the resistance in America?
Hence the importance of a relationship based on that commonality. Where “allyship” emphasises external support for a struggle waged by others, solidarity means recognising mutual interest, acknowledging that the issues raised in one setting have a relevance elsewhere for others. What function do the police play in society? What strategies deliver genuine social change? What attitudes should activists take to the media and to elections? These are questions with which progressives everywhere need to grapple.
Trump’s rhetoric about “outside agitators” is, of course, despicable – an old-fashioned racist smear. But, from a different perspective, history shows that there’s no real “outside” to struggles that inevitably spread. If indeed we are facing a Red Spring, the implications will be global – and we need to act accordingly.

'Outside agitators', then and now

With every Australian government in recent years obsessing about repelling Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, one could be forgiven for thinking the interests of ordinary people in the two countries are diametrically opposed. That’s why it’s worth remembering the role played by an Australian activist in the struggle for independence and social justice on the island.
On 4 April 1936, Mark Anthony Bracegirdle arrived in Colombo to work on a tea plantation at a place called Madulkelle in the central highlands. In Ceylon, as the British called the colony, the plantations operated almost as a closed kingdom. Bracegirdle had been offered a post as a “creeper” – a name given to assistant planters because of the obsequious demeanour they were supposed to adopt to the periya dorai (“big master”).
Creepers could, if they behaved themselves, work their way up the white hierarchy, eventually obtaining privileges and status they’d never have enjoyed in their own countries. But their success depended on their management of the estate labourers, who were themselves stratified in a rigid order. The plantation system rested on a workforce of so-called coolies, impoverished Tamils brought from India by recruiting agents who controlled the distribution of their wages. The system guaranteed grotesque abuses, with coolies housed in segregated barracks, denied education and often sinking deeper and deeper into debt.
In later life, Bracegirdle claimed he’d come to Ceylon because of an interest in agricultural improvement – specifically, a new method of controlling weeds. But he was no ordinary agriculturalist. Mark Bracegirdle was a committed communist. In England, his mother Irma had supported the suffragists, stood for the Independent Labour Party and campaigned for the unions during the 1926 general strike. When she and her children moved to Australia, Mark studied painting and gravitated to the fringes of Melbourne’s bohemian and radical circles. He became friendly with John and Sunday Reed and the artists associated with Heide – the property in Bulleen on which the Reeds cultivated modernist painting. He also joined the Young Communist League.
When Bracegirdle applied for a passport to travel to Colombo, the Australian authorities knew of his politics. But they let him go, the Commonwealth Investigation Bureau deciding that a stint in the colonies might prevent the young man joining “the ranks of aggressive communism”. It was a serious misjudgement. Once on the plantation, Bracegirdle noted immediately that his superintendent forced the coolies to work even when they were sick, while preventing them from educating their children because literacy would “give them ideas in life above their station”. Within six months, he had contacted the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), a newly formed group agitating for independence and socialism.
A policeman who encountered Bracegirdle at the home of an LSSP member around that time described him as “a well-made, good looking young man of about 24 years of age [with] very regular features and a charming smile ... His hair is dark brown and in large waves, and his eyes are greenish blue”. Even while admiring the Australian’s profile (“rather like the poet Rupert Brooke”, he decided), the officer found Bracegirdle’s views alarming, judging him “strongly Communist and decidedly anti-British” and noting that he spoke with great bitterness about the “atrocities of British imperialist methods” in suppressing riots in 1915.
Worse still, he was wearing a sarong. Though Bracegirdle’s association with the LSSP worried the authorities, “it was the likelihood that he would ‘probably go as far as to adopt the national dress’ that put him beyond the pale”, Alan Fewster explains in The Bracegirdle Incident. “This social crime was worse than it sounded, inasmuch as it was final proof that a white man had ‘gone native’ ... [Here] was a case of a European going native in the most public way imaginable and, what was worse, he seemed proud to be doing so.”
By December, Bracegirdle was a member of the LSSP; the next year, he was co-opted to its central committee. LSSP leader Dr N.M. Perera concluded a meeting of 2,000 coolies at Nawalapitiya, a central plantation town, by declaring: “Comrades, I have an announcement to make. You know we have a white comrade. [applause] I call upon comrade Bracegirdle to address you”. In his speech, Bracegirdle declared his compatriots to be bloodsuckers and urged his listeners to “rise and win your freedom and gain your rights!”
A government official in the crowd later expressed his horror at Bracegirdle’s presence and his attack on the planters, particularly because he “claimed unrivalled knowledge of [their] misdeeds ... and promised scandalous exposures”. In his notes, the official recorded that Bracegirdle’s “delivery, facial appearance [and] his posture were all very threatening” and that, worse still, workers “were heard to remark that Mr Bracegirdle has correctly said that they should not allow planters to break labour laws and they must in future not take things lying down”. Another observer recorded that the emotions of the labourers “were roused to a very high pitch”.
This could not be allowed to stand. “It is clearly dangerous to allow a European youth of this type to remain in Ceylon stirring up feelings against employers of labour and against the British government”, the deputy governor declared. Sir Edward Stubbs, the governor, duly signed, under obscure wartime legislation, an order-in-council giving Bracegirdle 48 hours to “quit the island” by the next available ship.
The LSSP had other ideas, launching a campaign to repeal the order, claiming, with some legitimacy, that the method could exile anyone “without trial, charge or cause and without the possibility of any appeal to authority”. Meanwhile, Bracegirdle went into hiding, including briefly living in a cave behind his old estate. In an increasingly polarised atmosphere, the Times of Ceylon, the newspaper of the planters, ran the headline: “BRACEGIRDLE MUST BE BUNDLED OUT NOW: ARREST THE REDS WHO FLOUT THE LAW”.
Rather than being bundled out, Bracegirdle surfaced at an open-air meeting, where he delivered solidarity greetings from “the workers of Australia” and warned that “the capitalists and imperialists were preparing for war, and in the event of war it will be the workers who would have to face the war and suffer”.
On May Day, 10,000 LSSP supporters marched behind banners reading, “We want Bracegirdle” and “Deport Stubbs”. A few days later, they organised a rally of 50,000 people. Unexpectedly, those present noted “a commotion among the crowd and, as from nowhere came running Mark Anthony [Bracegirdle] wearing a white suit and a blood red shirt and tie to match”. The Times dubbed the rally a “sedition-mongers field day”, explaining disgustedly that Bracegirdle told the crowd that he had “sat with planters who have in the evening quiet decided where they should kill and shoot certain Sinhalese on this island”. (A voice in the crowd responded, “Down with the blackguards!”)
He also assured those in attendance they were the “only instrument of Ceylon’s freedom” and promised, as their comrade in arms, to publicise their cause to workers around the world. His speech concluded with a reference to “those drunken countrymen of mine”, whom he dubbed “more dangerous than a scorpion” and said “should be trodden on”.
Bracegirdle was arrested by police with drawn truncheons at an LSSP property soon after. Yet the political crisis facing the authorities continued to intensify. Already, the governor had been forced to endure the ignominy of a vote of censure successfully moved by the LSSP in the state council. Now, the LSSP’s lawyers contested the legality of Bracegirdle’s arrest in sensational hearings before the Supreme Court. On 18 May, the judges handed down a decision that Fewster calls “a triumph for Bracegirdle and his team”: the order-in-council was illegitimate and the prisoner was to be released. When Bracegirdle eventually left Ceylon in October, he did so as a free man whose civil rights had been upheld.
The ramifications of the so-called Bracegirdle affair continued to be felt long after, the incident destabilising the colonial authorities and helping to transform the LSSP into a mass force. The LSSP’s formal embrace of Trotskyism in 1940 raises fascinating questions about Bracegirdle’s own loyalties and motivations. Originally committed to independence and a loosely defined socialism, by 1937 the party was increasingly led by young intellectuals who had learned their politics in Britain, where some had encountered Trotsky’s ideas. Philip Gunawardena, Leslie Goonewardene, Vernon Gunasekera, Colvin R. de Silva, Edmund Samarakkody and others were initially known as the “G Group” before becoming, on the basis of their Trotskyism, the “T Group”.
Bracegirdle, on the other hand, was known in Australia as a fervent Stalinist, who had once divested himself of a treasured collection of Diego de Riviera’s art when the muralist attacked Stalin. Members of the T Group apparently came to believe that he’d been sent to Ceylon as a Comintern agent, Samarakkody writing in 1960 that Bracegirdle “was the first person to sow the seeds of Stalinism in the party”.
But that might have been a retrospective projection. Certainly, when Bracegirdle first arrived, the intellectually precocious LSSP leaders judged him theoretically weak rather than thinking him any sort of ideologue. Gunasekera and the others even helped write many of his speeches. It seems likely that, whatever his reasons for coming to Ceylon, Bracegirdle was genuinely moved by the plight of the coolies he sought to organise.
Intriguingly, after leaving Ceylon, he made his way to Berlin, where he appears to have been involved in smuggling Jewish refugees out of Nazi Germany. Details of this, and other aspects of his later life, remain disappointingly sketchy. The obituaries published on his death in 1999 noted only that he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War, helped organise a flying doctor service in Zambia and then settled in Gloucestershire, England, where he remained a committed Labour Party member.
Historians of the independence movement in Sri Lanka regard the Bracegirdle incident as an important moment in the freedom struggle and a major boost to the forces of the left. But even though the press in Australia (and, indeed, around the world) devoted considerable coverage to the episode, Mark Bracegirdle remains largely unknown in this country. That’s a shame. In an era in which Australian chauvinism justifies the most appalling brutality against oppressed workers fleeing Sri Lanka, the kind of anti-colonial solidarity that he voiced back in 1937 matters more than ever.

The Australian communist in the thick of Sri Lanka's independence movement

Capitalism is a virus

“We stab out our eyes rather than regard Aboriginal achievement in this country.” Bruce Pascoe’s <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/11312/">claim in in a recent Meanjin essay</a> has, ironically, been confirmed by the agitation against his own work, the subject of a prolonged conservative smear campaign culminating in his referral to the Australian Federal Police.
In 2014, Pascoe published a book originally titled Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident with the small Indigenous press Magabala Books. In it, he re-examined letters and journal entries from colonists to present a different account of Indigenous society, focussing on evidence of sophisticated pre-settlement agricultural systems. He showed that the attainments of Indigenous people were ignored in the early years of colonisation and have been derided and downplayed ever since.
In a typical passage, he quoted James Kirby, one of the first Europeans to visit the Murray region. Kirby observed an Indigenous man catching fish using a complicated mechanism built into a weir. After describing the ease of the operation, he commented: “I have often heard of the indolence of the blacks and soon came to the conclusion after watching a blackfellow catch fish in such a lazy way that what I had heard was perfectly true”. As Pascoe noted, Kirby’s racism turned even the most obvious Indigenous achievement into further proof of Indigenous inferiority. 
Dark Emu became a sleeper hit, its influence growing year by year. The most recent figures show it selling some 100,000 copies, an astonishing quantity for a book of history. A new edition, with the more assertive subtitle Aboriginal Australia and the birth of agriculture, appeared in 2018, followed by Young Dark Emu last year. But the announcement of an ABC documentary based on the book really kicked an anti-Pascoe campaign into gear.
The attacks on Dark Emu come from the usual suspects: Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt in particular, but also the Australian and the reactionary literary journal Quadrant. They drew much of their material from an anonymous blog, Dark Emu Exposed, which describes itself as “compiled by a collective of Quiet Australians from many walks of life who question, and want to hold to account, authors who appear to be rewriting our Australian history to progress their own particular, political narrative”.
That description gives the game away at once.
For, naturally, none of these masked truth seekers (“most of our researchers need to operate under pseudonyms to protect their careers”) show the slightest interest in, say, the century-long campaign to update the Anzac myth in the service of Australian nationalism. Nor, in their obsessive pursuit of Pascoe, do they address the many other historians whose work draws similar conclusions to his. Dark Emu Exposed could, for instance, equally have been called Biggest Estate on Earth Exposed, since Bill Gammage, the author of that (also acclaimed) title, makes arguments about Indigenous agriculture very similar (if not, indeed, more provocative) to those articulated by Pascoe.
Why, then, aren’t our bold researchers quibbling at Gammage’s references, speculating about his earnings, rummaging through his family tree and subjecting him to all the treatment they’re directing at Pascoe? The answer, fairly obviously, comes back to race. Pascoe identifies as Indigenous – and Gammage does not.
It would be wrong to say that the people running the anti-Pascoe campaign don’t care about his arguments. They do. The invasion of Australia remains an ideological weak point for the right in this country. Dispossession of Indigenous people was a precondition of white settlement and thus Australian capitalism, something with which nationalists of all stripes must continually grapple. 
Capital, wrote Karl Marx, comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”. Nowhere was that truer than in Australia, as a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/ng-interactive/2019/mar/04/massacre-map-australia-the-killing-times-frontier-wars">map of Indigenous massacres illustrates</a>. The British justified their occupation using the principle of terra nullius, a Latin term meaning “empty land”. They of course knew about the Indigenous inhabitants but, drawing on the philosopher John Locke, argued that a people who didn’t “improve” the land (i.e. farm it for commercial gain) couldn’t “own” a country. 
The evidence adduced by Pascoe about Indigenous agriculture, architecture and land management thus discredits the supposed legality of settlement. But that’s only part of the story. The cranks at Quadrant might want to revive terra nullius – they’d revive the divine right of kings, if they could – but normal people know that’s not going to happen. What matters more is the interest Dark Emu has generated among many white Australians about a narrative of which they’d previously known nothing. “Many readers speak of it”, <a href="https://insidestory.org.au/reading-bruce-pascoe/">says the historian Tom Griffiths</a>, “with a sense of astonishment and revelation; they often tell me that Pascoe’s book completely changed their understanding of Australian history”. 
Reactionaries want to smother that excitement. The people attacking Pascoe have what the police call “form”, having intervened to quell earlier manifestations of white support for, or interest in, Indigenous affairs. Andrew Bolt, for instance, crusaded relentlessly against an apology to the Stolen Generations. Keith Windschuttle – a former student radical who <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=AGiu7Typ4iQC&amp;pg=PA80&amp;lpg=PA80&amp;dq=keith+windschuttle+lsd&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=y8ffl1ebiD&amp;sig=ACfU3U2hawYrblLQrKkPtwHA_N7V4J9cKg&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwj2xIC944TnAhUBVH0KHWKOBw4Q6AEwBHoECAoQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=keith%20windschuttle%20lsd&amp;f=false">once enthused about LSD</a> but now writes hallucinatory screeds for the far right – penned a preposterous book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, downplaying or flatly denying the existence of frontier massacres. Under Windschuttle’s editorship, Quadrant obsessively belittles Indigenous activism and causes: its new book on Bruce Pascoe follows its incessant promotion of an earlier title urging people to climb Uluru. 
As a work by an Indigenous author, Dark Emu, with its remarkable success, itself exemplifies the kind of Indigenous accomplishment it encourages readers to celebrate. That alone makes the grubby efforts to disprove Pascoe’s ancestry so important to a certain sort of culture warrior. Yet, even by such standards, the referral of Pascoe to the Australian Federal Police constitutes a particularly vicious political stunt.
As Nat Cromb <a href="https://indigenousx.com.au/what-are-dishonesty-offences/">explains at Indigenous X</a>, there’s almost certainly no legal basis for a police investigation. The AFP probably isn’t investigating and never was: despite the press headlines, all that seems to have happened is that federal police received a complaint. That complaint came from Josephine Cashman, an Indigenous entrepreneur and conservative activist. She’s been backed by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Warlpiri/Celtic woman who previously <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/news/mark-latham-launches-dystopian-save-australia-day-ads">appeared in Mark Latham’s unhinged “Save Australia Day” commercial</a>. 
The mobilisation of Indigenous conservatives for an attack on an Indigenous progressive illustrates the need for the left to emphasise politics over identity. Cashman and Price might be Indigenous, but they’re prepared to work with people like Bolt, <a href="https://www.gladstoneobserver.com.au/news/andrew-bolt-tidal-wave-new-tribes-dividing-us/3484052/">a man who tabulates the percentage of Jews in Caulfield</a> and <a href="https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/frenchspeaking-raspailloving-handwriting-sleuth-wanted/news-story/bde076c9267eed2ad3dbef40965830de">boasts about his signed copy of Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints</a>, a novel the New York Times calls “a must-read within white supremacist circles”.
Equally, Dark Emu remains a fascinating and useful text, regardless of Pascoe’s heritage. “Bruce Pascoe is undeniably Aboriginal”, <a href="https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2020/01/12/opinion-bruce-pascoes-identity-no-business-commonwealth">says Jack Latimore</a>, “he identifies that he has in his possession documents that confirm he is of Aboriginal descent; and he is acknowledged and vouched for by senior Yuin lore men. By that measure, Bruce Pascoe satisfies the criteria of the official three-part definition of Aboriginality”. That’s quite true – but it’s still shameful that he’s being asked to prove it. 
As for the substance of the right wing attacks on Dark Emu, they replicate, for the most part, the pettifogging footnote crawling that Windschuttle relied upon in his attempt to show that the colonisation of Tasmania had been a tremendously peaceful affair. Tom Griffiths, who actually knows something about history and isn’t too scared to put his name to his opinions, provides a much more interesting assessment. He suggests, for instance, that Pascoe might have engaged with modern academic writing, a body of work that, he says, has collectively overturned older scholarly blindnesses. 
More importantly, he queries Pascoe’s presentation of Indigenous people as “farmers”, a treatment that risks, as Pascoe himself acknowledges, importing old evolutionary hierarchies. We don’t need to compare Indigenous crops to Western agriculture to value methods by which people sustained a culture and civilisation over tens of thousands of years. Yet, whatever his reservations, Griffiths describes Dark Emu as “vital” and “marvellous”, and praises its author as “a gifted Australian whose work has struck a chord with the public and whose words – written and spoken – are inspiring and empowering Australians, black and white”. That’s because Griffiths approaches the book in good faith, a method unknown to Pascoe’s conservative critics.
The denunciation of Dark Emu rose to a crescendo in the last few weeks, just as Australians struggled to respond to the most horrific bushfires the country’s ever seen. After a year of record temperatures, the government and its allies grappled for ways to derail discussions of climate change. Most chose to blame environmentalists, insisting, without any evidence, that so-called green tape had prevented necessary back-burning and thus increased fuel loads. 
To buttress this dubious theory, they invoked Indigenous history. In the Spectator, for instance, Tim Blair explained that “the pre-settlement indigenous population had long conducted controlled burns of overgrown flora” because “they knew an absence of controlled burns would invite uncontrolled burns – such as the gigantic wildfires that have ravaged much of this drought-hit nation since September”. The argument comes directly from Pascoe and Gammage, both of whom write about the use of fire to change the landscape and encourage certain animals and plants. Of course, traditional Indigenous fire management depended on a social structure largely destroyed by dispossession. It can’t be equated with the practices Blair describes – or, at least, not in any simple way.
But that doesn’t matter when the aim is simply to bash greenies and provide a justification for climate inaction. As a result, many of the same publications monstering Pascoe are, in different pages, appropriating his theories without any cognitive dissonance at all. Conservatives would rather stab out their eyes than acknowledge Aboriginal achievement – but they’re quite prepared to use Aboriginal history when it’s time to stab somebody else.

Why conservatives want to discredit Bruce Pascoe

The war in Afghanistan is approaching its end – and no-one in Australia seems to much care. Last week, Washington’s chief negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, announced a framework for peace, based upon a supposed Taliban commitment to prevent terrorist groups using the country as a base.
That’s much less of a concession than it seems, given that the Taliban, as it prepares for power, views al Qaeda and the Islamic State as rivals, and has been fighting against the latter. The talks might still come to naught, foundering on the Taliban’s rejection of other key US demands. The insurgents won’t negotiate with a national government they classify as a puppet regime; they won’t disarm prior to a complete American withdrawal. And why should they?
Khalilzad’s statement amounted to an admission, if one were needed, that the US has effectively lost the war, with the Taliban playing much more of a role than the Americans in Afghanistan’s future. You might think that such an outcome would interest the Australian political class, given that an entire generation has come to maturity with the nation fighting in Afghanistan. But if you search “Australia” and “Afghanistan”, you return more news stories on the cricket than about a conflict that has killed 41 Australian Defence Force members.
One of the few to take an interest in recent developments was Clive Williams, an academic at the Australian Defence Force Academy. “The real reason [for the continuing] Australian presence in Afghanistan”, he explained, “is of course to show we are a willing ANZUS and Western alliance partner in order to be well regarded by the US and receive the defence and intelligence benefits that go with active membership of the Five-Eyes relationship. Afghanistan per se is of little strategic importance to Australia”.
The “of course” in that passage implies that this cynical trade – a few dead soldiers sacrificed for better intelligence ties – was commonly understood. Maybe, among the defence establishment, that was so. But when Australia first signed up for the war, the political class painted the intervention in quite different colours. “Australian military forces are joining a long-overdue fight against evil”, explained Piers Akerman in October 2001. “Is that too difficult to understand?”
The rhetoric shifted as the campaign settled down into the familiar strategies of armed occupation, with the violence of the American military machine bolstered by alliances with brutal warlords and corrupt local elites.
Nevertheless, those of us who argued that the war depended upon bolstering forces no better (and often considerably worse) than the Taliban, that the foreign presence was causing deep and sustained resentment, and that military occupation wouldn’t produce a stable or democratic regime were still pilloried as fools or traitors or both. 
“Let us stay the course”, editorialised Melbourne’s Herald Sun in July 2005, using the slogan that would become a ubiquitous justification for the entire operation. John Howard promised to “stay the course” in Afghanistan – and so too did Alexander Downer, Joel Fitzgibbon, Tony Abbott, Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. So complete was the political consensus that parliament didn’t even debate the intervention until nine years after it began. When, in mid-2011, four Australian soldiers died within a fortnight, air chief marshal Houston knew precisely what he had to say: “Believe me, we need to stay the course”.
Now that there’s no longer a course on which to stay, we’re due some accountability. “For a decade or more after the Vietnam war”, noted James Fallows in 2013, “the people who had guided the US to disaster decently shrank from the public stage”. That, however, was a different era. Those who backed the Afghan catastrophe – basically, the entire political class – remain entirely unrepentant. If some of the politicians associated with the debacle have shuffled off the stage, that’s more to do with parliamentary instability than any sense of shame. After all, the Liberals still consider John Howard, the man who led Australia into both Iraq and Afghanistan, a potent electoral weapon.
As for the pundits, they’ve simply changed the conversation. In late January, for instance, Akerman, the man who viewed the invasion as a crusade against evil, treated us to a fulmination entitled “Why the policies of selfish lefties are lethal”. Lethal, you say? No-one really knows how many Afghans have died in the war that he championed, though most estimates put the figure in the hundreds of thousands. And for what?
In October 2001, the Taliban offered to hand over Osama bin Laden for trial if the US ceased its bombing campaign. In other words, more than 17 years ago, the Americans were presented with a deal on terrorism as good as the one they’re pleading for now. But president Bush dismissed the offer out of hand and persisted with his war, with backing, every step of the way, from Australia.
That decision becomes even more unforgivable when we think about the state of the planet today. The Guardian recently carried a heartbreaking piece describing the return of scientist Brad Lister to the Luquillo rainforest in Puerto Rico where he discovered that 98 percent of the insects he had catalogued 35 years ago were gone. “We are essentially destroying the very life support systems that allow us to sustain our existence on the planet, along with all the other life on the planet”, Lister mourned. “It is just horrifying to watch us decimate the natural world like this.”
Environmentalists have long called for a massive injection of resources to the fight against climate change, along the lines of the national mobilisations during and after the Second World War. But where might that kind of funding come from? Well, consider the following assessment from the New York Times, America’s paper of record:
“The United States alone has spent $932 billion since 2001 in Afghanistan; its allies and international agencies, many billions more. On reconstruction aid alone, America spent more on Afghanistan than on the entire Marshall Plan to rebuild post-World War II Europe, in today’s dollars.”
It’s enough to make you weep. If, back in 2001, the resources flung at Afghanistan had instead been devoted to environmental projects, perhaps the state of the planet wouldn’t be so uniformly bleak. Instead, George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard, with the tacit support of most of the commentariat, launched a war that now seems to be ending, having achieved absolutely nothing.
Such are the priorities of our time.
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First published at <a href="http://www.EurekaStreet.com.au">www.EurekaStreet.com.au</a>. Jeff Sparrow is a writer, editor and honorary fellow at Victoria University.

Reckoning is due after Afghanistan endgame

An Australian politician doesn’t usually become immigration minister all at once.
Generally, the portfolio takes some time to work its evil magic on new appointments. Think of the slow desiccation of Liberal moderate Philip Ruddock, transformed, over a period of years, into an animated cadaver clutching an Amnesty badge in its withered claws.
Think of the Socialist Left’s Tony Burke, mumbling Rudd’s Manus Island talking points on 7.30 with all the enthusiasm of Bukharin at the Moscow Trials.
Peter Dutton, however, has taken to the ministry like a fish to water. Or, rather, like a pig to mud, given his snout-first dive into the dirt.
“They won’t be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English”, Dutton told Sky News. “These people would be taking Australian jobs, there’s no question about that.”
To date, the so-called “refugee debate” in Australia hasn’t often involved such a direct discussion of jobs. That’s because “border protection” generally functions as a proxy for other issues.
The polls show that most voters don’t care very much about refugees.
They don’t care about them in the sense that they’re not moved by humanitarian rhetoric (<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/17/poll-shows-almost-half-of-labor-voters-oppose-bringing-manus-island-detainees-to-australia">45 percent of voters</a> want the refugees on Manus Island to stay there, even after the PNG High Court declared the facility illegal). But they also don’t care in the sense of not being particularly invested in the subject.
Last year, when Essential Media polled voters on the issues most important to them, “treatment of asylum seekers” came in at 11th place, nominated only by 8 percent of respondents. The highest ranked issues were: “management of the economy” (47 percent), “Australia’s health system” (46 percent), and “jobs and protection of local industries” (39 percent).
When Enoch Powell delivered his famous “rivers of blood” anti-immigration speech in Britain in 1968, he was backed by a significant mobilisation of unionists, with a thousand dockworkers marching to Westminster to support him.
Nothing similar is happening here. During the leaders’ debate at Sky’s so-called People’s Forum, the attendees repeatedly asked about house prices and the behaviour of the banks. None mentioned immigration.
That’s the reason for Dutton’s new intervention.
For politicians, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/06/whats-the-end-game-for-australias-border-policy-a-world-of-walled-city-states">as I’ve argued elsewhere</a>, the refugee issue serves as a substitution for good governance, with “controlling the borders” a metaphor for “controlling the country”. It’s much, much easier to talk tough about asylum seekers than to deliver economic growth, reform the health system or create jobs. In that sense, border control is the perfect political issue, lending itself perfectly to macho posturing and media stunts.
Certainly, the Liberals would much prefer to talk about boat arrivals than, say, tax reform or inequality. By referring to jobs, Dutton’s trying to whistle-up an anti-immigration populism, in order to undercut the “top hats versus hard hats” narrative that’s begun to dominate the election.
Obviously, he’s also trying to exploit the divisions within the ALP over offshore detention. Almost every second day, a fresh Labor candidate gets exposed as having once been committed to decent treatment of refugees, an offence that necessitates an immediate public recantation.
Bill Shorten, quite correctly, compared Dutton’s comments to the rhetoric of Pauline Hanson. But you can see how, once again, the Labor Party’s managed to wedge itself.
For if refugees do take jobs, what’s wrong with Dutton saying so? Alternatively, if Dutton’s wrong – if they don’t take jobs – why’s the ALP so determined not to allow refugees to come to Australia?
As it happens, there’s a robust literature out there about the effects of immigration. Last year, Peter Martin, the economics editor at the Age, <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/comment/immigration-the-economic-benefits-of-open-borders-20151115-gkzeeo.html#ixzz48yQs8mg0">published a piece arguing that the effect of increased immigration</a> to Australia was comparable to the mining boom.
“The case for opening our borders”, he wrote, “as part of a staged process, in concert with other countries, is extraordinarily strong”.
Now, you can argue about Martin’s formulations. But, given the centrality of border protection to Australian politics over the last decades, it’s striking how rarely arguments like that (which are commonplace within the academic literature) get articulated within the public domain.
It should be noted that Dutton’s efforts to drag the campaign down the low road present dangers for the Liberals just as much as they do for Labor. Border control remains, after all, indelibly associated with Tony Abbott (you may have heard how he “stopped the boats”), a man whose political ghost continues to gibber within the Liberal Party.
If Turnbull now goes full Abbott, voters may well wonder as to the point of the leadership change. If it doesn’t – if the PM distances himself from Dutton – the gesture will fuel the hostility of those Liberals activists who currently regard Turnbull as a slightly upmarket version of Bill Shorten.
Anti-refugee sentiment is generally seen as a winning strategy for the conservatives. But that’s not necessarily the case. Much depends on whether the left is capable of articulating an alternative.

Ghosts at the borders

The fascist United Patriots Front is not about to take state power, but just because it is a small fringe group doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or that it can’t grow, writes Jeff Sparrow in an article for <a href="http://eurekastreet.com.au/">Eureka Street</a>.
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The emergence of the fascist groupuscle the United Patriots Front from within the larger, more amorphous Reclaim Australia movement poses a challenge to the media: namely, how should such an organisation be described?
In the face of controversy, journalists too often revert to the old “he said, she said” convention. That is, when covering a contested issue, they report what both parties to the dispute say and then let the readers make their own judgements. Jay Rosen, the influential journalism academic, <a href="http://archive.pressthink.org/2009/04/12/hesaid_shesaid.html">notes</a> that the practice offers a solution to “quandaries common on the reporting trail”:
“When, for example, a screaming fight breaks out at the city council meeting and you don’t know who’s right, but you have to report it, he said, she said makes the story instantly writable. Not a problem, but a solution to the reporter’s (deadline!) problem.”
The practice becomes particularly handy when writing stories in which you know you’ll get pushback. Think of your standard Middle Eastern correspondent quoting, with professional evenhandedness, what first the Israelis and then the Palestinians say about a deadly incident in the Occupied Territories.
As that example suggests, “he said, she said” often functions as an evasion. The Golden Mean might be a classical principle of aesthetics but reporters’ loyalty should be to accuracy, which isn’t necessarily about compromise between extremes. When denialists and climate scientists take diametrically opposed stances, the truth doesn’t lie somewhere in the middle. Sometimes, one side’s objectively right and the other’s just wrong.
Blair Cotrell, the leader of the UPF, denies being a fascist.
He’s lying.
Yes, “fascism” is a term thrown around lightly, used by some as a simple insult for any politician to the right of the Greens.
Paradoxically, it’s also freighted with an almost impossible heft, serving to signify the ultimate evil. For understandable reasons, after Auschwitz, fascism in general — and Nazism in particular — can seem, as manifestations of incomprehensible depravity, entirely divorced from the everyday world. Hence the popularisation of Godwin’s law, in which the first party making reference to the Nazis during an online debate gets adjudged the loser.
Yet fascism was once a mass phenomenon, a political philosophy with adherents in every developed nation. Its followers did not come with devil’s horns attached. They were everyday people, who just happened to agree with fascist principles.
To put it another way, fascism grew once and it can grow again. By ruling the term out of polite conversation we deny ourselves the ability to recognise the continuities between the past and present.
In most newspaper reports about the UPF, journalists quote anti-racists accusing the group of fascism and then follow with a UPF leader denying the charge. There’s nothing wrong with that. But reporting others’ perspectives doesn’t abrogate the publications’ responsibility to make its own judgements.
The Age piece on Shortis, for instance, describes the UPF as an “anti-Islam street movement”. Elsewhere, Fairfax <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/united-patriots-front-leader-step-down-after-video-mocking-him-surfaces-online-20151016-gkapyo.html">calls</a> the group “far right”. The Herald Sun <a href="http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victoria/new-antiislam-reclaim-australia-protests-planned-for-melton/news-story/12a55c593d4fc166982ecbe11b77a410">prefers</a> the term “hardline”. Crikey <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/11/09/nationalist-group-invades-3cr-office-uploads-dramatically-scored-video/">uses</a> ”nationalist”.
These terms aren’t wrong. The UPF is all of those things. But calling it “fascist” isn’t mere bluster. It’s an accurate, even necessary, description of the group’s core beliefs.
In an article for the Sydney Morning Herald, Michael Bachelard and Luke McMahon note UPF leader Blair Cottrell’s <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/blair-cottrell-leader-of-aussie-patriots-upf-wanted-hitler-in-the-classroom-20151016-gkbbvz.html">enthusiasm for Hitler</a>: Cottrell once responded to a Facebook image of the Nazi dictator with the words “there should be a picture of this man in every classroom and every school, and his book should be issued to every student annually”.
Veteran anti-fascist “Slackbastard” has <a href="http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=38730">compiled</a> far more extensive screenshots of Cottrell’s (since deleted) ruminations about Nazism. A sample passage: “Please shut up and take a week off the internet to read Mein Kampf. The basis for national socialism is race, which exists, it is real and important. The basis for communism on the other hand is a set of abstract ideals hidden within a mendacious global (yes Jewish) agenda. No more bullshit please, just read the book”. 
And there’s much more where that came from.
Cottrell’s main lieutenant is a certain <a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Neil_Erikson">Neil Erikson</a>. Erikson, <a href="http://slackbastard.anarchobase.com/?p=38146">says Slackbastard</a>, has “a criminal conviction for harassing a rabbi and has otherwise been active with the (now defunct) European Australian Civil Rights League and Nationalist Alternative, as well as having attended neo-Nazi gigs organised by Blood &amp; Honour and the Southern Cross Hammerskins, met with Canadian Holocaust denialist Paul Fromm during his tour here in late 2010 and attended various anti-Muslim protests in the company of other neo-Nazis”.
On the UPF Facebook page, Cottrell and the other spokespeople generally eschew the references to Hitler. But they don’t hide their adherence to fascist principles. In Cottrell’s video rants (some of which have been <a href="http://media.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national-news/is-blair-cottrell-a-neonazi-6937493.html">republished</a> by the Brisbane Times), he regularly outlines his contempt for egalitarianism, his belief in natural hierarchies (including between races) and his desire to smash those he describes as “communist traitors”.
Again, describing the UPF as “fascist” isn’t hyperbole. It’s an accurate description of the philosophy it espouses.
Why does this matter?
<a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/11/09/nationalist-group-invades-3cr-office-uploads-dramatically-scored-video/#comments">Last Sunday</a>, members of the UPF, led by Cottrell, made their way inside Melbourne community radio 3CR, where they filmed themselves strolling about and then uploaded the footage to Facebook.
They also went at the headquarters of the Melbourne Anarchist Club. Again, they filmed the encounter; again, they posted the clip online.
A few days later, Fairfax published a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/guntoting-antimuslim-crusader-at-lead-of-united-patriots-front-20151105-gkrk80.html#ixzz3r7LVT3D5">profile</a> on a man called Chris Shortis, one of the UPF members present at the raids. It included several photos of the burly Shortis posing with a Bible and an assortment of pistols and high-powered rifles.
The University of South Australia academic Chloe Patton, an expert on the far right, told Fairfax: “Here we have an individual who is clearly radicalised, who is brandishing firearms while preaching holy war. The intricate conspiracy theories and crusader symbolism immediately brings to mind Anders Breivik”.
Breivik, of course, murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, as part of his campaign against Muslims and the “cultural Marxists” who he said were enabling them.
This is not Germany in 1933 and the UPF, with its tiny band of supporters, is not on the brink of state power. But Patton’s comments highlight just how intimidating the group already is. Both 3CR and the Anarchist Club have associations with anti-Nazi activists, particularly the aforementioned Slackbastard.
As the comments on the UPF Facebook site made clear, the visits were intended by the UPF to send a message to campaigners against racism: we know where you are and we can reach you if we want.
It’s easy to mock the philosophical pretensions of the UPF’s roided-up leader. But the UPF is not simply a joke. It’s tiny, yes, but it’s still dangerous and it needs urgently to be stopped. Calling it by its real name is a step in the right direction.
[First published at <a href="http://eurekastreet.com.au/">Eureka Street</a>.]

A fascist by any other name

According to one count, the neoconservative ideologue <a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/04/61-times-kristol-reminded-of-hitler-churchill.html">Bill Kristol has written no fewer than 61 opinion pieces</a> referencing the Munich agreement that prefaced the Second World War.
In the lead-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, Kristol joined with all the other warmongers warning of the dangers of “appeasement”. Since then, he’s distinguished himself by discovering echoes of Munich in Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Israel, Russia and just about every place else where the possibility of avoiding or ending military conflict has even momentarily arisen.
This is not an accident. As Donny Gluckstein notes in his introduction to the excellent new book Fighting on all fronts, the Second World War serves as a key reference for today’s politicians, since it’s the most widely accepted modern instance of a “just war”. The 100th anniversary of the Great War might have spurred a certain degree of revisionism, but we’re still unlikely to hear pundits spruiking the next Middle Eastern adventure with comparisons to the struggle against Kaiser Bill, which is still popularly understood as a horrific and futile slaughter.
The Second World War seems different, most obviously (though not only) because of the Holocaust. Given Hitler’s methodical extermination of millions, the war that brought him down seems unequivocally a good thing. And if Western military forces played a progressive role in 1945, why can’t they serve the same function today?
The present, then, has a lot at stake in the past. “Seventy years separate the end of the Second World War from 2015”, says Gluckstein, “and yet the issues it raised remain fundamental to our understanding of the world today”.
To unpick those issues, Gluckstein divides the war into a series of phases, in which different elements predominated. He notes that the conflict began as a simple clash of imperialisms, with the older empires first accommodating and then resisting German expansion. Most of the Western leaders had no principled opposition to Hitler – indeed, many openly admired the militant anti-communism he espoused. But the invasion of Poland conclusively demonstrated the extent of Nazi territorial ambitions and thus made war inevitable between the upstart German empire and the older powers it threatened.
Most ordinary people showed little initial enthusiasm for a new world war only two decades after the last bloodbath had ended.
“Yet something extraordinary happened as the war progressed”, writes Gluckstein. “Instead of the usual waning of militaristic ardour after initial euphoria, and despite millions killed and maimed at levels unprecedented in human history, backing for the fight against the Axis grew.”
Gluckstein attributes the shifting sentiment to, on one hand, the rise of resistance movements in countries under occupation and, on the other, mounting anti-colonial sentiment throughout Asia. The conflict, he says, should thus be understood as two distinct struggles, intersecting in complex ways that changed over a time: both an imperialist war and a people’s war.
It’s a thought-provoking argument, but the brief introduction leaves many questions unanswered – possibly because Gluckstein intends it to be read alongside his own A people’s history of the Second World War.
Fighting on all fronts is, by contrast, a collection of essays. Its strength lies in detailed analyses of specific fronts and issues, from the Huk rebellion in the Philippines to the “emergency” in Ireland. A short review like this cannot do justice to the extent of the material covered in Fighting on all fronts: readers are advised to get a copy and read for themselves.
Briefly, though, Kay Broadbent and Tom O’Lincoln contribute an important chapter looking at political struggle inside Japan, a nation often portrayed as entirely populated by fanatical militarists giving their lives joyfully for the emperor.
They describe instead low level but heroic resistance taking place throughout Japanese society, from factory workers going absent without leave to anonymous pamphleteers daubing factory poles warning that “thousands die for the glory of a single general”. In particular, they write of the Tokyo Printers Union, which kept fighting “to show the determination of Japan’s entire union movement”. It remained active until its male leaders were arrested in 1942 – and then it continued under the stewardship of women.
Similarly, Janey Stone looks at Jewish resistance in Eastern Europe, seeking, in particular, to dispel the myth of passivity in the face of genocide. She chronicles the famous Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in which impossibly brave (and mostly very young) activists fought off 2000 battled-hardened Nazis for six long weeks. But Warsaw was not the only example. She writes:
“There were underground resistance movements in approximately 100 ghettos in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe (about a quarter of all ghettos) and uprisings occurred in five major ghettos and 45 smaller ones. In addition there were uprisings in three extermination camps and 18 forced labour camps. Some 20,000 to 30,000 Jewish partisans fought in approximately 30 Jewish partisan groups and 21 mixed groups while some 10,000 people survived in family camps in the forest.”
Stone notes that, even in the ghetto uprisings, politics made a huge difference, with Zionist organisations that preached emigration rather than resistance incapable of leading the fight against Nazism.
Elsewhere, the heroism of those battling against fascist occupation was sacrificed by a Stalinist leadership more concerned with Soviet interests than social transformation. Gluckstein’s chapter on the battle between Germany and the Soviet Union – by far the bloodiest front – illustrates the extent to which the Second World War represented the culmination of what, in the thirties, Victor Serge was already calling the Midnight in the Century. Gluckstein writes that the Nazi invasion was beaten back by a popular resistance, which was handicapped at every stage by bureaucratic Stalinist brutality.
In his chapter on Australia, Tom O’Lincoln takes aim at a number of nationalist myths about the war. He points out that, while Labor’s great hero John Curtin claimed to be fighting for “the rights of free people in the whole Pacific”, the whole region was actually a bastion of white colonialism with, for instance, a kind of Jim Crow system enforced in Papua by white Australians. The famous “Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels” of the Kokoda legend did not assist the diggers out of love. On the contrary, they were conscripted, and often treated abominably. In other places, such as Timor, local people alternated between support for Japan and support for Australia, as each power seemed as bad as the other.
The Australian army itself was not immune from discontent. O’Lincoln cites troops stationed on the Atherton Tablelands near Cairns who, deciding they were being treated like dogs, took to barking in protest. “The idea took on like wildfire …” one of them remembered. “Faintly at first you could hear the yapping and barking from far away units and then louder until it reached our camp.”
O’Lincoln accepts that “the great majority of Australians would endorse the war effort on the simple grounds that a Japanese invasion must be avoided”. He dismisses this on the basis of the recently established scholarly consensus that Japan never intended to invade and lacked the resources to do so.
It’s not an altogether satisfactory response. After all, ordinary workers could not have known Japan’s weakness at the time. If they did believe an occupation imminent, what attitude should they have taken? In his brief and somewhat cryptic comments to his Australian followers, Trotsky urged a struggle against invasion, with the caveat that workers should maintain their independence while fighting. What, concretely, would that have meant?
These are not easy questions to answer. In some ways, it’s a shame that the format of the book (as a collection of disparate essays) militates against a more systematic exploration of the concepts Gluckstein outlines in his introduction, particularly the idea of “people’s war”. One might also have hoped for a chapter (a complement to Stone’s writing on Jewish resistance) looking specifically at issues associated with the Holocaust, given their centrality to contemporary debates about the war.
Nevertheless, the book is an important intervention, one that draws attention to aspects of the Second World War that you’ll never hear mentioned by the propagandists who invoke Hitlerism each time they launch an air strike.
In that respect, it’s a fantastic resource, one that will be consulted again and again by writers and activists in our own era of permanent war. Have it on hand the next time Bill Kristol mentions Czechoslovakia.

Popular resistance during WWII

Jeff Sparrow, author of Killing: Misadventures in violence, outlines the ugly parallels between the refugee crisis unfolding in the waters to Australia’s north, and the treatment of Jewish refugees by the West at the time of Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. This article first published at <a href="https://overland.org.au/2015/05/the-last-time-they-turned-back-the-boats/">Overland Literary Journal</a>.
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Today in the Straits of Malacca, we’re seeing a grotesque re-enactment of one of the great moral failures of the twentieth century, as the nations of the region collaborate to produce a new “Voyage of the Damned”.
Some 8,000 Rohingya asylum seekers and Bangladeshi migrants are currently stranded, lacking food, water and sanitation – and the governments of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia are pushing their boats back into the ocean, knowing they have nowhere to go.
“In the name of humanity”, pleads the International Organization for Migration, “let these migrants land.”
But appeals to basic human decency carry little weight given that much wealthier countries have made the exclusion of asylum seekers a national priority. In particular, with Australia now towing refugee boats back to Indonesian waters, Ban Ki-moon’s call to the nations of South-East Asia to “keep their borders and ports open in order to help the vulnerable people who are in need” rings extraordinarily hollow.
It’s all depressingly reminiscent of the infamous voyage of the St Louis, a vessel that left Hamburg for Cuba in 1939 carrying 937 Jewish asylum seekers fleeing the intensifying Nazi persecution.
By then, the treatment of the Jews had produced a refugee crisis spilling out across Europe. In 1938, the world’s leaders met at the Évian Conference, ostensibly to plan a unified response. At the time, Hitler taunted the participants at Évian about their hypocrisy: they condemned Germany but few welcomed Jews to their own countries.
“I can only hope and expect”, he said, “that the other world, which has such deep sympathy for these criminals [Jews], will at least be generous enough to convert this sympathy into practical aid. We, on our part, are ready to put all these criminals at the disposal of these countries, for all I care, even on luxury ships.”
The St Louis – which was indeed a luxury liner – duly put the world to the test.
By the time the St Louis reached Havana, news of its journey had spurred huge anti-Semitic demonstrations, in which demagogues urged Cubans to “fight the Jews until the last one is driven out”. The Cuban government refused to allow the asylum seekers to disembark. The ship, officials insisted, had to turn around.
The captain tried instead to land at Florida. But, in the US, the reaction was the same: the American state department told passengers they must take their turns on the waiting list.
The St Louis stayed in limbo for a month, becoming an international cause célèbre. Eventually, Jewish organisations negotiated entry visas for European countries thought to be safe. Some of the refugees arrived in Britain. Others, however, were offloaded in France, Belgium and the Netherlands – and when Germany conquered the continent, many of them were murdered.
After the war, the story of the St Louis became a cautionary tale, an awful example of casual indifference in the face of atrocity. Indeed, the so-called “Voyage of the Damned” helped inspire the refugee conventions of the post-war era, which were explicitly intended to prevent such scenes playing out again.
Yet, here we are, 76 years later, with boatloads of desperate people bounced from harbour to harbour by governments unwilling to take responsibility for someone else’s suffering.
If you want evidence for how thoroughly the norms established after the Holocaust have been trashed, you need only look at the conservative press in this country.
The UN human rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/16/world/asia/migrant-boat-myanmar-thailand.html?smid=tw-nytimes&amp;_r=0">condemned Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia</a> for “pushing boats full of vulnerable migrants back out to sea, which will inevitably lead to many avoidable deaths”.
But the editorialist at the Australian <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/editorials/border-control-in-the-spotlight/story-e6frg71x-1227354009883">welcomed a vindication of Tony Abbott’s domestic policies</a>. Indonesian’s decision to turn back refugee boats was, it said, “awkward news for those who seek to maintain the rage against Operation Sovereign Borders”. <a href="http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/europe-is-all-at-sea-over-its-boatpeople-policy/story-e6frg76f-1227356860980">Foreign editor Greg Sheridan agreed</a>: “A lot of nations are now looking at Australia’s policy success. Not before time.”
It’s a dynamic familiar from the 1930s, when the refusal of one nation to accept refugees emboldened others to do the same: the Australian policy legitimises an Indonesian decision which, in turn, normalises the Australian position.
But there’s another, even grimmer, parallel.
By turning back the St Louis, the US and other nations behaved precisely as Hitler had predicted, allowing him to argue that, despite the Évian Conference, the democratic states despised the Jewish people as much as he did. In other words, the international failure to provide refuge for that vessel did not merely jeopardise the Jews travelling on it, it also threatened those already subjected to Nazi rule by signalling that no-one cared what was done to them.
Today, <a href="http://karennews.org/2015/01/burmas-citizenship-law-fuels-repression-says-human-rights-watch.html/">Human Rights Watch says that Burma’s treatment of Rohingya constitutes a crime against humanity</a>. But the footage of the navies of South-East Asia treating the Rohingya as dangerous intruders provides an important propaganda victory for the Burmese regime. Look, it can say – all our neighbours hate them, too!
It’s worth pointing out that the Rohingya are predominantly Muslim, at a time in which Islamophobia has become, in the industrialised nations, the main socially acceptable form of bigotry. The Australian Senate has, after all, just agreed to a public inquiry into halal certification, in an obvious fillip for the Islamophobic lobby.
Again, there are echoes from the past. The St Louis was rebuffed in part because, in the nations to which it appealed, low level anti-Semitism was an unremarkable aspect of public life. The constant demonisation of Islam in the West – of which the Senate’s shameful inquiry is an obvious example – helps foster a public indifference to refugees who are Muslim (or assumed to be such). Ask yourself this: what would be the reaction in Australia if the TV footage of the boats in the Straits of Malacca showed white Christians screaming and pleading for mercy?
At the moment, Tony Abbott is self-consciously showcasing hard-line refugee policy to the world, a program based, as the odious Katie Hopkins approvingly noted, “tiny hearts and whacking great gunships”. The maintenance of such a model in Australia – one of the richest and most secure nations on the planet – helps normalise and justify similar policies by other nations, particularly those facing much larger population flows.
The struggle for refugee rights in Australia is thus more important than ever.
[Jeff Sparrow is the former editor of Overland. His other works include Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within (both co-authored with Jill Sparrow), Left Turn: Essays for the New Left (co-edited with Antony Loewenstein), <a href="http://catalogue.mup.com.au/978-0-522-85347-6.html">Communism: a love story</a> and Money Shot: A Journey into Censorship and Porn. Twitter: <a href="http://twitter.com/Jeff_Sparrow">@Jeff_Sparrow</a>.]

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