The draconian fifteen-month prison sentence imposed on climate activist Violet Coco has been overturned in New South Wales. 
Violet was arrested early last year after blocking a single lane of traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. She and three other protesters—Alan Glover, Karen Fitzgibbon and Jay Larbalestier—had been demanding that more resources be allocated to firefighting services and the immediate rehoming of people displaced by floods and fires. 
The four activists were the first to be sentenced under anti-protest laws rushed through the state parliament with bipartisan support. In December, Violet was sentenced to fifteen months in prison with a non-parole period of eight months.
During Violet and Alan’s appeal on 15 March, the prosecution argued that the peak hour protest caused a “massive inconvenience” to commuters. In response, district court Judge Mark Williams noted that it looked “like a normal morning on the Harbour Bridge”. 
The defence argued that Violet had been sentenced under false information. Previously, the police alleged that the activists had “prevented an ambulance responding to an emergency”. 
But they were forced to retract this lie on 7 March during the sentencing of Alan Glover and Karen Fitzgibbon. Glover’s solicitor, Julia Grix, spoke to the motorist who called 000 on the day of the protest and found that they did not call for an ambulance. She was also able to uncover the transcript of emergency services’ communications on the day, which did not indicate that there was an ambulance on the bridge at the time. 
The success of Violet’s appeal is a victory on several fronts. For those arrested with her, it offers the hope of gaining justice for the repression they faced.
Jay Larbalestier narrowly avoided jail time when he was sentenced last year for his involvement in the protest. He was given the maximum sentence that could be served in the community—an eight-month Intensive Correction Order with strict conditions, a fine of $7,196 and 350 hours of community service. 
Before he was sentenced, Jay had already spent four days in custody and 42 days under house arrest.
Jay attended the rally outside Violet’s appeal on 15 March and told Red Flag that he, like Violet, plans to pursue legal action against the police. 
The success of Violet’s appeal is also a victory for basic democratic freedoms. As her lawyer Eddie Lloyd noted outside the court, the NSW police in recent months have cracked down on activists with seeming impunity:
“Our democracy is under attack. And it was Violet today, but it could be you tomorrow ... Friends in our community are getting arrested for Blu-Tacking a piece of paper on a statue, for drumming in the street, and friends are getting dragged out of their homes at midnight, hauled down to the police station to face a trespass charge.”
Violet’s freedom is also a victory for the climate movement. Bipartisan support for expanding the fossil fuel industry and for narrowing the bounds of what is considered lawful protest means that averting climate catastrophe will require much more determination. 
“We are in a climate emergency. We are in the final hours to change the trajectory of hell on earth”, Violet said. “We must continue to raise the alarm on the climate and ecological emergency as loudly and as boldly as possible ... It is time for courage, if we are to save billions of lives.”

Lily Campbell

NSW climate activist exonerated

Sick of capitalism? Yeah, us too. That’s why we’re organising the <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org">Marxism Conference</a>, the biggest anti-capitalist gathering in Australia. Here are seven reasons why you should join us over the Easter weekend.
1. You can name drop a few inspiring radical figures, like Malcolm X, Angela Davis or Rosa Luxemburg, but you’re not sure you can trust what your textbooks said about them. History is full of rebels whose amazing personal stories are intertwined with inspiring social movements and revolts against the system. The conference is an opportunity to learn more about these individuals, draw inspiration from their experience and unlearn the conservative spin of the school curriculum.
2. You’ve saved a few sick Instagram posts about the ingenious strike methods deployed in France, inspiring women in Iran or the strike wave hitting the UK. Across the world, people are taking to the streets to fight against exploitation and oppression. The Marxism Conference offers a unique opportunity to hear from and meet seriously staunch radicals from all over the world. One of these unmissable guest speakers is <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/speakers/hossam-el-hamalawy">Hossam el-Hamalawy</a>, an Egyptian journalist, revolutionary socialist and active participant in the 2011 Egyptian revolution. 
3. You’re seriously concerned about the influence of the far right in global politics. For these monsters to be stopped, more left-wing people need to understand what we are up against. <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/themes">One of the themes of this year’s conference</a> is discussing the <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/program?city=&amp;topics=fascism-and-antifascism-">modern far right</a>, debating theories of fascism and unearthing vital histories of movements that have stood in their way. 
4. You’re mad that corporate greed is destroying the planet. The climate crisis is already here. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies continue to expand and make record profits. Maybe you aren’t sure if there’s a way out of this disaster? The Marxism Conference is <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/program?city=&amp;topics=the-environment-">chock-full of sessions</a> designed to break beyond the bullshit greenwashing and argue for radical solutions to the climate crisis. 
5. You were part of the gang at school that hated Andrew Tate and his legion of incel minions. Or maybe you marched last year for abortion rights, when five supreme misogynists voted to strip millions of Americans of their reproductive rights. Another theme of the conference is dedicated to understanding the roots of gender and sexual oppression, dissecting the contending ideas of different theorists and organising a serious fightback to defend our rights. 
6. You’re an anti-racist, a regular at Invasion Day marches and want to hear the real story of colonialism in Australia. This country was built on genocidal dispossession, a process that still informs Indigenous oppression today. At Marxism, telling the truth about the crimes of Australia will take centre stage. Even better, the conference is a megaphone for radical fighters against oppression, including the legendary <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/speakers/gary-foley">Aboriginal activist and historian Dr Gary Foley</a>. If you haven’t heard him speak before, get keen for what will be a seriously captivating session. 
7. You’re looking to meet more like-minded people who want to change the world as much as you do. Marxism Conference is about <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/speakers">bringing together as many left-wing people as possible</a> from across the country because we want to understand the world in order to change it. It isn’t a series of lectures, with one expert talking to a room of bobble heads, and it’s the opposite of bingeing Netflix alone in your room. This is a space where you can bring your own ideas and questions. It’s an opportunity to learn how the world works and how it can be radically changed for the better. <a href="https://www.marxismconference.org/tickets">Do yourself a favour: get a ticket now</a>.

Seven reasons to come to Marxism 2023

Fair-trade initiatives, known by a variety of names, are promoted as a way of alleviating the suffering of people in the Third World by insulating poor producers from the downward pressure on prices caused by global market competition. Proponents argue that fixed prices for their commodities allow fair-trade producers to pay their workers a living wage, hire adults instead of children, produce in a way that is better for the environment and local communities, and ensure that the conditions of production can be reliably reproduced. 
It’s easy to understand the appeal. The suffering that capitalism inflicts on billions, paired with the feeling of powerlessness that ordinary people experience, is embedded in the philosophy of fair trade: that Western consumers have the power to make the marketplace moral. 
In reality, fair trade has dismally failed to make an impact on global inequality, which is now worse than ever before. Take just one area, child labour. According to a 2021 International Labour Organization and UNICEF report, the number of child labourers has risen to 160 million worldwide, 70 percent of whom are engaged in the agricultural sector. The same report found that in sub-Saharan Africa alone, the number of child labourers has grown by 16.6 million in the last four years. Most of this labour is unpaid. The failure of ethical consumerism and fair-trade initiatives to make even a dent on this exploitation should tell us much about the system we’re up against and the methods that will be needed to challenge it.
Fair trade proposes an easy fix for global capitalism. The problem, however, is not at the consumer end of the process, but at the very beginning. For capitalists producing chocolate, paying workers less means selling chocolate cheaper. And because there are lots of other capitalists producing and selling the same or similar products, there’s a constant, inescapable downward pressure on production costs—and one of the biggest costs is labour.
The result of this pressure is evident in today’s chocolate industry. According to a 2015 US Department of Labor report, 2.1 million child labourers work in West African cocoa production. According to the World Economic Forum, most cocoa farmers earn less than USD$1 per day, below the extreme poverty line. 
The obvious solution to this impoverishment is to redistribute the wealth of the global chocolate industry, which has annual revenues of some US$130 billion. But most chocolate companies, no matter how much they are criticised, are unwilling to pay more for cocoa because to do so would give their competitors a price advantage. To end the slavery in chocolate manufacturing would go against fundamental capitalist logic.
The minority of companies that don’t employ child labour are sometimes able to survive on the fringes. Tony’s Chocolonely, for instance, prides itself on producing “100% slave free chocolate”. But as Tony McCoy, spokesman for the World Cocoa Foundation, pointed out in an interview with the Washington Post, this is possible only on a very small scale, because the company sources only a few thousand tonnes of the 5 million tonnes of cocoa produced across the world. 
More recently, the NL Times, a Netherlands-based news website, reported that Tony’s Chocolonely has been removed from a US list of slavery-free chocolate producers because the company has recently expanded and begun collaborating with Barry Callbaut, one of the big seven cocoa companies considered responsible for entrenching slavery. 
In a statement responding to the move, Tony’s Chocolonely said, “Most chocolate companies don’t know how many cases of illegal labour there are in their cocoa value chain and therefore cannot do anything about it”.
Proponents of fair trade argue that you can “vote with your dollar” and search out more ethical companies. But it’s impossible to purchase a morally virtuous capitalism. World poverty is a product of a global system dominated by the concentration of capitalist wealth and power in the global North and smaller concentrations in the global South. 
To get rid of this poverty will require directly challenging those in charge of that wealth, in every country. Production and distribution can’t be organised ethically because exploitation and oppression don’t begin with First World consumption habits. The blame lies with those who set these dynamics in motion, and have organised the system according to their first priority: profit.
While many proponents of fair trade are well meaning, the fair-trade industry itself is often anything but. Fair trade turns the moral outrage of Western consumers into a commodity that big brands can purchase in the form of fair-trade certification. For brands such as confectionery giant Mondelez, the decision to buy into such certification models is not made on a moral basis. Rather, as Peter Whoriskey reports in the Washington Post, it’s a means of shoring up their consumer base and evading criticism for their persistent use of child labour in Ghana and the Ivory Coast. 
In response to criticisms over the past decade, the major chocolate companies have pledged to buy increasing amounts of cocoa certified by Fairtrade, Rainforest Alliance or UTZ. But, as reported in Whoriskey’s investigation, both the certifiers and the chocolate companies have been forced to acknowledge that such certifications have been totally inadequate in eradicating child labour. Whoriskey quotes a 2017 Nestlé report that summarises the weakness of such schemes: “Put simply, when the [certification] auditors came, the children were ushered from the fields and when interviewed, the farmers denied they were ever there”. 
Even the certification itself has become a commodity subject to market competition. In the race to compete with its global chocolate rivals, Mondelez has since found a cheaper way to paper over its involvement in slavery, establishing the in-house fair-trade certification CocoaLife. With even less accountability than Fairtrade, CocoaLife allows Mondelez the same cover for the same crimes, at a cut price. Ethical certification, rather than fixing the problem of competition, often gives cover to companies that continue to profit from the most exploitative and oppressive of production methods.
Advocating for fair trade means fundamentally accepting the logic of the market as a means to solve inequality. This has consequences that go far beyond inducing guilt in consumers. For example, due to the limited impact of fair trade on prices, non-governmental organisation Oxfam has called for extra initiatives to raise prices on commodities such as coffee beans. Responding to a slump in coffee prices two decades ago, Oxfam published a briefing paper arguing for “the destruction of 15 million bags of low-grade coffee in exporting countries to reduce exports and stocks”. 
This obscene capitalist practice of destroying consumable goods to make their production more profitable, famously described in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, is pitched as a crucial component in reducing poverty. In reality, commodity slumps caused by supply exceeding demand are a routine expression of a system that produces for profit, rather than for human need. Fair-trade strategies, rather than challenging the most obscene aspects of capitalist production, can exist comfortably alongside them. 
The alternative to fair trade is understanding that oppressed workers and small farmers are not simply victims, but potential fighters for their own liberation. Paying an extra dollar for chocolate isn’t going to save anyone. As consumers, we have no power to change the world. Either you purchase the products of their pre-existing system, or you purchase the apparently ethical alternatives, which rarely do a thing to challenge inequality. 
Ending global poverty and exploitation will require a joint struggle against the concentrations of power and wealth in both the global North and South that dominate global production and reproduce oppression. Winning that struggle means rejecting the idea that we can civilise capitalism, or use the market against itself.

The myth of fair trade

The climate crisis is causing hellish disruption around Australia. In the past week alone, more than a quarter of NSW government areas have been declared disaster zones, and evacuation orders have affected 47,000 people. Meanwhile, many victims of the earlier Lismore floods are still homeless, after 4,000 buildings were rendered uninhabitable by the record-breaking deluge. Beyond our corner of the world, people in the poorest countries are suffering the worst effects of climate change.
The phrase “natural disaster” can offer the convenient impression that such extreme weather events are unavoidable tragedies, akin to a meteor shower or an earthquake. Nobody is responsible, so politicians can shake their heads and offer brief thoughts and prayers, while business can continue as usual. 
But this is a smokescreen to protect the fossil fuel industry from blame. In a just society, these climate vandals, who have known about the greenhouse effect for decades, would be held responsible for their premeditated crimes against humanity and the environment. Instead, they are rewarded, with profits for gas giants Santos and Woodside Petroleum set to double this year.
The real criminals, we are told, are those who protest for climate action. In the last few weeks, Blockade Australia activists have been described as “dangerous”, “professional pests” and “bloody idiots”, as they have dared to disrupt commuters in the Sydney Harbour Tunnel. The subsequent treatment of these activists is a significant attack on democracy and a grim illustration of how the system works at every level to defend and uphold the death drive of the coal, oil and gas bosses. 
On 19 June, the Blockade Australia camp in Colo, north-west of Sydney, was raided by police. One hundred uniformed officers entered the camp, assisted by a dog squad, riot police, helicopter units and the Raptor Squad—the menacing name of the organised crime elite task force.
The raid followed activists’ discovery of two armed police officers, who were lying face down in the scrub above the Colo property. Dressed in camouflage, they remained motionless and unresponsive upon being approached, before an unmarked black vehicle sped onto the site and the two men bolted towards it. The car raced down a driveway towards a dead end, hitting and injuring two people, according to witnesses. Despite the activists having no weapons, police have claimed that they “feared for their lives” as activists surrounded the car and demanded they identify themselves. 
Two hours later, the cops returned with a vengeance. According to a statement from Blockade Australia, the raiders smashed the windows of every vehicle on the property, seized mobile phones, and trampled on food and personal possessions. Seven people were arrested, and 40 were detained before being removed from the campsite.
Of the seven, five were subjected to punitive bail conditions. Two arrestees, Tim Neville and Max Curmi, were refused bail and will be imprisoned until their court date. At the time of writing, they have been held together in an isolation cell in Parklea Prison for twenty days, deprived of sunlight and exercise, according to Blockade Australia’s Facebook page. 
In the days after the raid, another activist was arrested by plain-clothed police at a Sydney train station. Four of the activists were charged with “aid of commission of crime”, the crime being a traffic offence that had not yet occurred. Evidently, just thinking about protesting can now land you in prison in New South Wales. 
Max Curmi published a statement from jail connecting the repression to the ongoing destruction of the planet:
“I am a political prisoner. I am being held on premeditated charges, because I refuse to let this system continue destroying this continent, the climate, and our right to a liveable future. I am in a cage, because we are upholding the truth and backing the experts who are saying we need to make transformational change now in order to survive. 
“We need to stop destroying the world for profit, and that means dismantling and replacing the current legal, political and economic frameworks that encourage the exploitation of this earth and those living on it. We need systems that are set up to minimise environmental impacts, protect what remains, and repair the damage that Australia and its allies have done to our planet.
“This system is going to destroy us all ... It cannot facilitate the transformational change we need. The power-holders work every day, in the parliaments, the courts and the uniforms, to protect and preserve this exploitation system.”
Blockade Australia’s “week of disruption”, which began a week after the raid, aimed to disrupt the Sydney CBD to force the powerful to act on climate change. Approximately 50 people took part in the first day of action, and one activist, Mali Cooper, locked herself to the steering wheel of a car that blocked access to the Harbour Tunnel. 
Mali and the 22 others arrested during the week face up to two years in prison and fines of $22,000 under anti-protest laws introduced earlier this year by the state government. Mali was held in custody for 30 hours before being granted bail on the condition that she return to her flood-ravaged hometown, Lismore, within 72 hours. But she was pulled over and rearrested on her way home, as police anticipated that she wouldn’t reach Lismore in time and was thus in breach of her bail conditions. 
After two days, the group called off further action on their Telegram channel, citing the need to “rest, regroup and support one another”. The impact of the repression clearly took its intended toll on the group. On top of the personal hardship of losing basic liberties, most arrestees were subject to bail conditions that denied them the ability to communicate with any other Blockade Australia activists. 
Blockade Australia arrestees deserve solidarity from all who value the essential democratic right to protest. Often, demanding justice doesn’t make you popular—it’s not like we have a mainstream media monopoly on our side. But justice is rarely won through polite protests that abide by the ever-narrowing boundaries of lawful democratic expression. History is made by determined minorities who have used disruptive protest to galvanise others in rebellion. Abolishing the fossil fuel industry is an immense but necessary task. It will require an upheaval of the entire economic system of production and distribution. Needless to say, a few roads will be blocked along the way.

Defend Blockade Australia—lock up the climate criminals

23 September 2020 will go down in the University of Sydney’s activist history books as the day students and staff successfully defied the New South Wales government’s anti-protest laws and resisted the Liberal Party’s attacks on universities.
Tertiary students and staff are facing major restructures pushed by the federal government and university administrations. Domestic fees for arts and communications degrees will double under the plan. Commerce, law, economics and other courses deemed of little immediate value to the economy will also be subject to significant fee hikes. Students who fail more than half their courses in their first year will be denied access to HECS loans, and government funding of higher education will decrease.
Meanwhile, university bosses are using the cover of the COVID-19 crisis to carry out mass sackings and force remaining staff to shoulder greater workloads. Sydney University has cut $93 million from its casual staffing budget since the crisis hit and has directed heads of faculty to aim for a 30 percent reduction in full-time staffing levels. The University of New South Wales has likewise announced 500 full-time job cuts.
Police have shut down four previous student demonstrations against these cuts, using the special COVID-19 measures as a pretext. Dozens of students have been fined, despite rally organisers implementing strict safety measures. Various tactics have been employed by students, including organising a “Footy against Fee Hikes” event, during which fewer than twenty students (the maximum number allowed under the current restrictions) gathered in a park to kick a ball around while chanting. 
Astoundingly, this action was shut down by the police under the pretext of COVID-19 safety. Yet the nearby Broadway shopping centre remains open and in-person lectures at the university—where face masks are not mandatory—continue. It’s now obvious to many students that the repression of protests has nothing to do with safety.
For the last month, campus activist collectives have been debating how to organise against the cuts in the face of this assault. Following an action on 16 September, when small, masked, socially-distanced and dispersed groups of student protesters were broken up by the police, Socialist Alternative student members decided it was time to take a stand, arguing for another rally the following week involving a central rally in defiance of the repression.
This proposal was widely supported on the student left. Activists from several other campuses organised contingents, and University of New South Wales students held their own successful action at the same time. Only Solidarity, a small socialist group based at Sydney University, objected, arguing that the proposal was ultra-left, unsustainable and unachievable. Solidarity members argued that another protest would alienate students and staff afraid of being arrested and would therefore be a barrier to building a mass movement.
This assessment couldn’t have been more wrong. The rally was a triumph, widely seen as the most radical and successful protest the student left has organised all year, and an important victory against police repression.
Around 350 students attended the action, which featured an outdoor teach-in organised by National Tertiary Education Union activists. The teach-in was titled “Higher education and democratic society: perspectives on dissent” and featured speakers on resistance in the Arab world and the history of student protest, along with other left-wing topics. It had university approval to go ahead and became a central meeting point for the various student contingents.
From there, hundreds of students almost spontaneously charged from the campus onto the busy surrounding arterials, scrambling to get ahead of the police and stop traffic. Sitting down at a busy intersection, we held our ground. Once the police appeared, we again ran from the cops, this time back to the campus, police horses galloping behind. Several protesters jumped a tall metal fence to get away, others just ran to avoid being grabbed by swarming police.
In the end, 21 fines were issued to protesters, much like previous actions. But students left the demonstration confident our point had been made and emboldened to continue the fight. The protest attracted more news coverage than all of the previous actions combined and has led to a welcome public discussion of the hypocrisy of the state government’s unofficial ban on protests.
This is just the beginning. In the next few weeks, it’s likely that the Morrison government will ram its attacks on higher education through the Senate. Sydney University’s multi-millionaire vice-chancellor Michael Spence wants hundreds more staff axed as soon as possible. Students and staff will have to continue standing together to stop this. To have any chance of success, this means challenging police repression too.
Lily Campbell is a member of the Education Action Collective at the University of Sydney

Sydney students defy repression to protest university cuts

The time for waiting for governments and corporations to act on climate change is over. It is delusional to think that they will, of their own accord, take the drastic action required to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial-society levels (the limit after which scientists say we reach a climate crisis tipping point). So we have two choices: act now, or put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening. I’ve chosen to act, along with thousands of others around the world, by joining the Extinction Rebellion protests.
Politicians say they support the right to protest. But whenever there’s a protest, we discover that their support is conditional: only impotent actions that can be ignored are acceptable. Alan Tudge, the minister for population, cities and urban infrastructure, told the ABC on 9 October he was sick of disruptions and that if people want to protest, they should do it in a park. A day earlier, Liberal senator Eric Abetz insisted that protesters had no right to prevent the usual operations of business.
But the business as usual of capitalism is leading to climate disaster and threatening the lives and wellbeing of millions of people. We have a right to protect ourselves from this destruction. Coal companies do not have the right to destroy the planet, but they get a legal pass to keep going about their business. If it continues, huge areas of the planet will become uninhabitable. So we must make our protests count by stopping business as usual in whatever way we can.
Disruption has an effect that polite protest doesn’t. It attracts an enormous amount of media attention and signals to people not yet involved that climate activists are serious and that the stakes are high. It conveys a sense of urgency that can embolden more people to get involved. And it creates a sense of crisis that pressures governments to act – a pressure they have so far largely escaped.
Blocking streets is a great start. But we need much more disruption than Extinction Rebellion can carry out. We need workers to strike – to refuse to allow the system to continue on its catastrophic path. We need mass blockades of companies to stop them destroying our world. We need social and economic priorities that put people and the planet before profit. This will require a much more democratic society – one in which workers make the decisions, not bosses concerned only about profits. It will involve a revolutionary challenge to capitalism. It will be disruptive – but disruption is absolutely necessary.
The people in power don’t want it to come to this. Politicians want to continue getting away with downplaying and dismissing the climate emergency so that multinational companies can keep making billions of dollars. They’re happy to destroy the planet in “the national interest”. So they are trying to nip the movement in the bud in time honoured fashion – by sending in the police to break up protests and intimidate people.
I have had firsthand experience, being held in custody for 27 hours for peacefully protesting on a city street. I was arrested with 37 others and taken to Surry Hills police station in Sydney, where we were charged with the very minor offence of refusing to comply with a police direction. The cops refused to release us unless we agreed to bail conditions restricting our basic civil liberties, including a ban on speaking to other Extinction Rebellion “members” (there is no formal membership) and a ban on attending any Extinction Rebellion protests – violations of our right to freedom of political association. They also tried to create a 2.5 kilometre exclusion zone around central Sydney.
I refused to agree to these conditions, so the cops held me overnight in a cell. I went without food for more than 17 hours. When I was finally taken before a magistrate the next day, they ordered my immediate and unconditional release. Yet the police took me back to the cell and held me there for another six hours – such is their disregard not only for the rights of protesters, but also for any arm of the state that challenges them.
How did our representatives in parliament, supposedly so supportive of the right to protest, respond to this? By calling for more draconian measures. Home affairs minister Peter Dutton had insinuated that he supports vigilante action and punitive government measures against protesters. “People should take these names and the photos of these people and distribute them as far and wide as they can”, he told Sydney radio 2GB’s Ray Hadley in early October. “They should be jailed until their behaviour changes.” On the ABC, Alan Tudge described protesters as ferals and refused to distance himself from Studio 10’s Kerri-Anne Kennerly, who said that we should be used as “a speed bump”.
The Labor Party is no better. The Queensland branch is trying to legislate more anti-protest measures. Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is bending over backwards to help the climate criminals in the coal industry and is facilitating Adani corporation’s massive coal mine in the Galilee Basin. Victorian premier Daniel Andrews, supposedly the most progressive politician in the country, has also attacked the Extinction Rebellion actions.
All this is a reminder of what we’re up against. To build an effective climate movement, we can’t appeal to the powers that be or give in to their intimidation. We need to mobilise all the power our side has at its disposal to stand unapologetically against a system hurtling towards climate catastrophe, not beg politely in a park.

Why I’m prepared to save the planet by any means necessary

Under the guise of freedom of speech, defending religious freedom and “letting kids be kids”, LGBTI people have faced an assault from recently anointed prime minister and homophobe in chief Scott Morrison. 
He went on 2GB radio earlier this month to gabber with cretin Alan Jones, discussing the supposedly “skin curling” Victorian high school program teaching students about “building respectful relationships”. 
Parents beware! This seemingly innocuous consciousness-raising program, designed to prevent family violence, is cultural Marxism in sheep’s clothing. 
Jones claimed the program would include role playing of sexually deviant teens, including “Megan”. “We’re told that Megan is 17, she lives in the city and works in the local cafe. She’s had 15 sexual partners and describes herself as bisexual. And these girls in class are told to role model these particular people!” 
Morrison said that “Megan” makes his skin curl, and assured listeners: “It’s not happening in the school I send my kids to, and that’s one of the reasons I send them there”.
According to Fairfax, Morrison promised at the end of 2017 – a year in which tens of thousands took to the streets to celebrate marriage equality, a historic win for LGBTI rights – that he would fight against “discrimination and mockery” of Christians and would enact “preventative regulation and legislation”. 
Considering the obvious lack of discrimination against Hillsong Church devotees, Morrison’s repeated calls for greater religious freedom are yet another coded message to his bigoted base. For Morrison and his supporters, freedom of religion means a law to permit homophobes to refuse service to queer people. As Catherine McGregor asked in the Sydney Morning Herald:
“Will the mythical army of persecuted bakers and wedding planners also refuse service to adulterers, thieves, divorcees, usurers, women who have terminated pregnancies and other categories of sinner? Perhaps a helpful sign clarifying which categories of sinners will not be served may avoid needless confrontations.”
During another interview, Morrison was asked by 3AW’s Neil Mitchell about his position on gay conversion therapy – long discredited pseudoscientific attempts to change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity, considered by some doctors to be a form of torture. 
Conversion practices are carried out by evangelical churches and ministries across Australia, taking the form of exorcisms, prayer groups or counselling disguised as pastoral care. They’re also done by some religious schools.
But Morrison refused to condemn it. “It’s not an issue I’m focused on at all”, he said. “I think people should make their own choices about their own lives.”
The hypocrisy of the right in crying about free speech while demanding to have a say over the sexual and gender identities of children is stunning but predictable. 
Morrison begs on twitter to “let kids be kids” and describes a program to help teachers identify transgender children as “gender whispering”. This is blowback from a sore loser who hates the idea of LGBTI equality. Those who fought for our civil rights last year must be organised to take on the bigotry of the sore losers.

Morrison: bigot and loser

Images of battle-weary soldiers and children drenched in napalm are burned into the minds of those who lived through or have studied the Vietnam War, a conflict that left up to 5 million people dead. 
The war is often painted as a dark chapter in the history of an otherwise free and democratic world order. This story is spun despite the US invasion being initiated by liberal Democratic Party hero John F. Kennedy, then escalated by fellow Democrat Lyndon Johnson. 
These politicians were not lunatics, nor were they misguided. The United States, with help from Australia, inflicted calculated mass murder upon an oppressed people for demanding national liberation. 
It did so to maintain the US’s position at the apex of the world order. Even when it became clear that the US could not win, it continued to kill, not just in Vietnam but hundreds of thousands in Laos and Cambodia, in a futile attempt to force the Vietnamese to surrender. 
Textbooks commonly erase the incredible resistance that the Vietnam War generated, which fuelled a revolutionary wave that swept the world. The three key strands of resistance – the Vietnamese peasant revolt, the US soldiers’ revolt and the global anti-war movement –combined to create a deep crisis for the ruling classes in several countries. Together, their movement defeated the greatest military machine the world had ever seen. 
Vietnamese resistance
In 1954, French colonialists were embarrassingly defeated at the hands of the Viet Minh, a peasant-based national liberation coalition formed in 1941 by Ho Chi Minh. At the Geneva Conference that year, the world’s most powerful imperialists met with the Vietnamese leaders and decided that the country would be divided into two states, North and South. 
The Viet Minh took control of North Vietnam. The United States, keen to contain any force threatening its influence in the region, installed a puppet dictatorship in the South. This far right regime in South Vietnam proved very unpopular and unstable. President Diem unleashed a wave of terror against supporters of the Viet Minh, tens of thousands were jailed or killed, and sympathy for their cause among the population grew. 
By the end of 1963, the Kennedy administration decided that, to avoid the collapse of the Saigon government, Diem had to go. Despite his swift removal, the movement led by the National Liberation Front (NLF, also known as the Viet Cong), which had been formed in 1960 to emulate in South Vietnam the success of the Viet Minh, continued to grow. By mid-1964, the NLF controlled 40 to 50 percent of the South Vietnamese countryside.
Several factors led Lyndon Johnson to send marines in the spring of 1965. Allowing South Vietnam to fall to communist forces would have been a defeat in the Cold War against Russia. And it would have weakened the position of US-backed regimes in other countries and strengthened their respective national liberation movements. 
Less understood are the domestic motivations behind the war. Anti-communism had been a very effective tool in attacking the US workers’ movement; the ruling class feared the confidence the US left, especially the radicalising civil rights movement, would gain if the US were defeated by the North Vietnam communists. 
From the beginning, US strategy in Vietnam was destruction – hoping the population would demand that the leadership of the NLF surrender. The US had at its disposal more killing power and advanced technology than any military in the history of the world. It faced guerrillas armed with old rifles and homemade grenades fashioned out of Coca-Cola cans. 
The total munitions unleashed by the US in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia added up to the equivalent of 640 atomic bombs. The air war on North Vietnam targeted schools, hospitals and churches with cluster bombs. 
Perhaps most devastatingly, the US used chemical weapons, predominately napalm and Agent Orange, in a way not seen before. Rarely counted in the casualties of the war are the 3 million Vietnamese who suffered illnesses due to exposure to Agent Orange – this number does not include their children and grandchildren, many of whom still suffer the effects. 
This extreme violence was no mistake, but it was miscalculated. The more the US forces brutalised the population, the more they turned to the NLF. Stanley Karnow, author of Vietnam: a history, quotes US marine William Ehrhart: 
“They’d be beaten pretty badly, maybe tortured. Or they might be hauled off to jail, and God knows what happened to them. At the end of the day, the villagers would be turned loose. Their homes had been wrecked, their chickens killed, their rice confiscated – and if they weren’t pro Viet Cong before we got there, they sure as hell were by the time we left.”
Hundreds of thousands of communists and guerrillas gave their lives, and millions of peasants died in a heroic fight for national liberation. Their victory is a monument to what is possible when ordinary men, women and children fight for a world of dignity and a fair share of what is theirs. 
What the Vietnamese call the American War was the last hurdle in an 80-year struggle against many oppressing nations. The tunnels of Cu Chi give an idea of the courageous resilience. They were originally dug in the 1940s, when the Viet Minh were fighting French colonialism, as hiding places for the guerrillas and bomb shelters for the villagers. 
When the American War began, the NLF dug more tunnels and linked them together – from one village to another – making hundreds of miles of tunnels. For years, the guerrillas lived underground. They dug rooms in which they slept, ate, carried out medical procedures, held organising meetings and much more. Many of the highly respected fighters were women, and even children, who saw no alternative but to resist US imperialism.
Anti-war movement
The invasion and the Vietnamese resistance to it sparked a global anti-war movement. Students and workers demonstrated immense solidarity in their fight to bring down the war machine. This movement created a political crisis for ruling classes across the world, feeding a revolutionary fervour not seen since.
In 1965, in response to president Johnson sending troops, a group of faculty at the University of Michigan organised the first teach-in to educate people about what was going on. It was scheduled to begin at 8pm after classes had ended. Three thousand students showed up and debated the war until 8am the next morning. In the months that followed, more than 100 colleges held similar events. The largest teach-in was at the University of California, Berkeley, where 36,000 students attended a teach-in that lasted 36 hours.
For thousands of students, the teach-ins and early demonstrations were eye-opening; the realisation that this was not a war for the liberation of Vietnam came as a tremendous shock. The president of Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Paul Potter, described this political impact in a speech delivered at a march on Washington in 1965:
“The incredible war in Vietnam has provided the razor, the terrifying sharp cutting edge that has finally severed the last vestige of illusion that morality and democracy are the guiding principles of American foreign policy … 
“What kind of system is it that justifies the United States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose … that consistently puts material values before human values and still persists in calling itself free and still persists in finding itself fit to police the world? We must name that system. We must name it, describe it, analyse it, understand it and change it.”
SDS chapters grew at campuses across the country, the war sparking protests that were often violently attacked by university administrations and police. Shocked at the violence of the authorities, thousands of students who had sat on the fence were pushed into the anti-war movement.
Inspired by the US students and disgusted by our own government’s crimes, Australian students established their own SDS, which organised thousands of students in protests across the country. At Sydney University, students hid draft dodgers in the student union building, publicly filled in fake conscription papers (often with the names of Liberal politicians) and staged mass burn-ins of draft papers.
In Australia, the trade union movement was stronger than in the US, and played a greater role in the anti-war movement. In 1965, 2,500 waterside workers walked off the wharves in Melbourne to protest against prime minister Robert Menzies’ decision to send troops. 
Five hundred seamen, waterside workers and ships’ painters picketed the US embassy in Brisbane. The trade unions gave the anti-war movement “muscle” that it otherwise would not have had. Activists argued to a greater section of the population that the Vietnam War was not just a question of morality; it was a question of class war.
In January 1968, the NLF launched the Tet Offensive, a coordinated attack in 140 cities and towns, including on the US embassy in Saigon. Hue, the ancient capital of Vietnam, fell to the combined forces of the North Vietnamese Army and the NLF. It was a shattering defeat for the South Vietnamese government and the US military.
The US decimated whole cities from the sky to push back the offensive. Newspapers across the world carried a quote from a US major about the annihilation of the town of Ben Tre in retaliation: “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it”. 
The horror of the US revenge was widely broadcast – and people in America realised that they had been lied to, that the war was unwinnable, that there was no light at the end of the tunnel, as president Johnson had promised. The US was not only losing, but it became increasingly unclear who the bad guys were. 
The crisis led to Johnson’s refusal to stand for a second term as president and pressured Richard Nixon, a Republican, to lie, and run as the “anti-war” candidate.
GI revolt
Meanwhile, the US military faced an ever ballooning crisis – the soldiers’ revolt. “By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous”, colonel Robert Heinl wrote in the Armed forces Journal in 1971.
Two years earlier, the armed forces began to be withdrawn. Soldiers in Vietnam were writing “UUUU” on their helmet liners, meaning the unwilling, led by the unqualified, doing the unnecessary for the ungrateful. Unauthorised absences soared; in 1971 a quarter of soldiers were absent without leave or had deserted. 
Soldiers who refused to fight faced execution or court martial. Those who wanted to stop the war and stay alive had to be prepared to shoot their officers, because their officers were prepared to shoot them. Violent uprisings and fragging – murdering gung ho officers and sergeants who repeatedly sent soldiers on dangerous patrols – were widespread. The result was a severe breakdown in military effectiveness and combat capability.
Of all the soldiers, Black and other minority GIs were consistently the most active in their opposition to the war and military injustice. Blacks faced greater oppression in the military than whites. And many of the Black soldiers brought the politics of Black Power into the army, often forming solidarity groups and rap clubs that became centres of political resistance. 
Eventually, the combination of the soldiers’ rebellion, the domestic radicalisation and the undying resistance of the Vietnamese people meant that the war could not be sustained. In 1973, Washington folded and signed a peace deal in Paris, agreeing to remove all troops. In 1975, the conscript South Vietnamese army fell apart and the North Vietnamese Army conquered Saigon with limited effort. The war that had cost 5 million lives was over and Vietnam won its independence.
Unfortunately, the anti-war movement was not strong enough to permanently cripple the US military. The US still dominates the world with ruthless violence. But the resistance to the Vietnam War is a reminder that even the biggest imperialist armies can be defeated.

A people’s history of the Vietnam War

University of Sydney vice-chancellor Michael Spence has spent many months in negotiations with the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, causing a great stir on campus and in the national media. 
The $3 billion centre – established with a bequest from private healthcare tycoon and greatest ever donor to the Liberal party, Paul Ramsay – has reportedly offered the university tens of millions of dollars to establish a Bachelor of (or rather, for) Western Civilisation. 
The idea of “Western civilisation” is hard to pin down. Ramsay CEO Simon Haines says we “can’t say what it is [but] we all know what it is, we all live with it”. 
Perhaps we can glean insight from the mind of Ramsay board member Tony Abbott, who hopes that the Ramsay Centre will remedy university curricula that are “pervaded by Asian, Indigenous and sustainability perspectives”. 
History is a washing machine load of “civilisations”. Wars, imperial conquest and trade have scattered and scrambled together people and cultures across all the artificial lines that divide the world today. 
But the Ramsay Centre ideologues paint a simplistic and false portrait of civilisations as sealed-off entities; plastic packaged worlds labelled “West”, “East” and, most feared, “Arab”. Such chip-packet-style civilisations are conveniently rid of the countless currents and counter-currents that have characterised all of human history.
Take, for example, pre-colonial Indigenous Australia. Often believed to be isolated from the rest of the world, evidence increasingly suggests the opposite. Discovered only recently, on the margins of a 13th century manuscript written by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, are four sketches of an Australasian cockatoo, revealing how trade in the waters around the continent’s north was flourishing in medieval times, its produce reaching across the world.
Or take the Islamic Golden Age. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
“The Arabic-Latin translation movements in the Middle Ages, which paralleled that from Greek into Latin, led to the transformation of almost all philosophical disciplines in the medieval Latin [European] world. 
“The impact of Arabic philosophers such as al-Fārābī, Avicenna and Averroes on Western philosophy was particularly strong in natural philosophy, psychology and metaphysics, but also extended to logic and ethics.”
Veneration of Western civilisation is not just scholastically dubious – it’s motivated by racism and the ideology of empire. The rhetoric of civilisational divide is a constant feature of contemporary Islamophobia, for example. 
Pauline Hanson has called for anyone who supports Sharia Law to be deported because they don’t respect the allegedly Australian values of equality for women and gays. Ironic from a politician who opposes legalising abortion and marriage equality.
And those like Abbott promoting the wonders of our Western Christian heritage have little to say about the role of the Church in opposing every advance during the European Enlightenment. 
While he laments “Asian” and “Indigenous” perspectives being taught in universities, he defends one of the greatest criminal organisations in world history – the Catholic Church, whose monstrous crimes continue to be uncovered.
An honest study of Western civilisation must include more than Homer’s Odyssey and the breakthroughs of Copernicus, Descartes and Newton. Western civilisation also has a history of imperial conquest, rapacious environmental destruction, racist violence, militarism and genocide of indigenous populations across the world. 
From the 1 million dead because of the 2003 invasion of Iraq to many more in the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s, all were the cost of extending or defending Western-style “civilisation’”.
But the Ramsay Centre doesn’t want to examine the contradictory legacies of Western philosophies and societies. It wants to pursue a one-sided defence that covers over the atrocities. In Abbott’s words, Ramsay is not “merely about Western civilisation, but in favour of it”. 
Ramsay was rejected by the Australian National University because it wanted to have control over the curriculum, staffing and teaching. Ramsay intended to employ people to sit in on classes and monitor content – dare anyone say anything critical of the West. Ramsay Centre CEO Simon Haines said himself, “We would not be willing to hire somebody who is coming in with a long liturgy of what terrible damage Western civilisation had done to the world”. 
In other words, Ramsay is unwilling to employ anyone willing to examine the whole truth.
Why, then, would Sydney University be so willing to deal with the centre? The answer lies in what has become the central value in all Western societies: money.
As government funding for education dwindles, universities look for funding from the private sector. The typical neoliberal university has multi-billion dollar investment portfolios and seeks financial relationships with all manner of grotesque bedfellows, including the world’s largest weapons manufacturers and international military forces.
Indeed, the Ramsay Centre is only the latest private institution to attempt to control a section of the curriculum and impose right wing ideology on the Sydney University campus. The United States Studies Centre was set up by media mogul Rupert Murdoch in 2006, with the explicit aim of “countering the bias against the US-Australia alliance”. 
It’s excellent that Ramsay was beaten back at the Australian National University. Hopefully, the campaign at Sydney University will do the same. However, we cannot forget what has led us to this point. 
It is the responsibility of student unions and university staff unions everywhere to demand a free, fully funded education system. That is our best defence against corporate interests buying a space for their propaganda on campus.

What’s behind the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation?

On the evening of Saturday 4 August, 21-year-old Pakistani international student Abdullah Qaiser was driving to the University of Newcastle library to finish an assignment. On his way, he was approached by a group of eight men and one woman. 
The group stepped out in front of the car, in the middle of the road. They began to hurl racist abuse. “Terrorist!”, “Go back to your f**cking country, you don’t belong here!” 
The woman reached through the passenger door window and snatched Qaiser’s mobile phone. Meanwhile, one of the men opened the driver’s side door and punched Qaiser in the face, with a fist wrapped in a knuckle duster. 
Qaiser blacked out in his car. Blood spilled everywhere; his nose had been broken so badly it will require surgery. 
In an outrageous move, the NSW police have released a statement about the incident saying they do not believe the attack was racially motivated. This is despite the repeated Islamophobic verbal abuse Qaiser described being subjected to immediately prior to being hit. 
This kind of racist violence is becoming more common. Research conducted by SBS last year found that 77 percent of Muslim women had experienced racism on public transport or on the street. Last year, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination warned that racist discrimination is “on the rise” in Australia, including instances of violence.
Scapegoating migrants and refugees continues to be a key political weapon of both Liberal and Labor politicians, supported by their friends in the media. As a result, far right individuals and their groupuscules, who should be consigned to the fringes, feel emboldened to attack people on university campuses. Not surprisingly, the police seem unconcerned about stopping them. 
Newcastle University Student Association president Christy Mullen told Red Flag, “The attack reflects the growing amounts of racially fuelled violence within Australia. With a continuation of othering people of colour, people now have the confidence to share racist and xenophobic views, as well as taking more violent actions”.
The attack follows the discovery last year of far-right propaganda on the university’s Callaghan campus, and reports that white supremacist organisations have been recruiting in the Newcastle area.
Also condemning the attack, National Union of Students’ ethnocultural officer Hersha Kadkol told Red Flag, “The increasingly racist rhetoric from the government and the media is emboldening bigots to organise and carry out attacks. We stand in solidarity with international students and commit to opposing racism wherever it rears its head, and we encourage all students to do the same”.
The brutality inflicted upon Abdullah Qaiser should be a wake-up call to anti-racists across the country – it’s time to get organised to challenge the institutional roots of racism as well as its ugly face on our streets.

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