The ABC’s Sarah Ferguson delivered one of the most pathetic interviews of the year on Monday night. The Four Corners presenter gave US far right figure Steve Bannon free rein to outline his reactionary ideology, and failed to challenge almost any of his lies.
The first of these was Bannon’s insinuation that he is some kind of fighter for the working class. Bannon is as far from the working class as Pluto is from the Earth. According to US business magazine Forbes, he is worth between $9.5 million and $48 million – “well within the top 1 percent of Americans”. 
He previously was a Goldman Sachs executive, sent his children to expensive private schools, lives in a mansion and owns a fleet of cars including Jaguars, Range Rovers and Fords. So for all the big talk about his hostility to the elites, Bannon’s class position is well in their camp. As Connor Kilpatrick wrote last year at US website Jacobin: 
“Behind his supposed working class economic program lies the same shitty elitist views he pillories in liberals. Like every rich, right wing asshole, he plays GI Joe in public before settling in with a nice bottle of Amarone in a climate-controlled beachfront property.” 
The second was the claim that president Trump is reshaping the US economy in the interests of working class people. In December, Trump passed huge corporate tax cuts, reducing the headline rate from 35 to 21, which will ensure a continuing transfer of wealth from workers to bosses and blow an increasingly large hole in public finances – a trend accompanied by cutbacks to already diminishing public services. 
The conditions in public schools for instance, filled with the working class kids Bannon claims to represent, are appalling. The recent spate of teachers’ strikes across the country revealed the crumbling infrastructure – rat infested classrooms, holes in walls, letting in icy blasts during winter. 
Trump’s offensive against public health also reveals how far his administration is from supporting working people. Millions of working class Americans cannot afford to see a doctor or get treatment for chronic illnesses. Yet Trump is doing everything possible to undermine the meagre public health system. 
Not once were these issues raised by Ferguson. She was swept away by Bannon’s claims that Trump is “bringing jobs back to the USA” and that he is playing the long game to rebuild working class incomes. But the share of national wealth going to workers always depends on their capacity to organise in trade unions. And Trump is overseeing a legal offensive against unions’ right to organise. 
The third lie was Bannon’s repeated assertion that he and Trump are turning the Republican Party into a workers’ party. This is a farcical claim. Like the Democrats, the Republican Party is not a membership organisation – it is just a network of big business donors and right wing politicians. A majority of the party’s voters are non-college educated whites on lower than average incomes, but they do not at all control the party; nor do party officials act in the interests of workers. In Trump’s first year in office, he has brought hundreds of representatives of industry and business into key government positions. 
Bannon and the far right 
The other free kick that Ferguson gave Bannon was on the question of the far right. Half way through the interview she seemed ready to press him on his association with fascist and neo-Nazi movements. Bannon swatted away her half-hearted efforts by claiming that the neo-Nazi movement in the US is an irrelevant part of the political scene, and essentially a fiction created by the liberal media. 
“The neo-Nazis, the KKK and the confederates have no place in society”, he said. But we must look beyond his words to his actions. Bannon in 2007 was a co-founder of right wing website Breitbart news and became its executive chair in 2012. The website’s lurid ALL CAPS headlines often were (and continue to be) indistinguishable from the immigrant bashing, Islamophobic drivel in fascist publications. 
Breitbart ran flattering interviews with far right figures and it published UK libertarian writer James Delingpole’s piece “In praise of ‘Hate Speech’”. It also ran an interview with Sean Gabb, who, while director of the Libertarian Alliance in 2006, said, “We believe in the right to promote hatred by any means that do not fall within the Common Law definition of assault”.
Breitbart has played an important role in reflecting and amplifying the far right’s ideas. One far right leader Brad Griffin, the creator of the website Occidental Dissent, described the process: 
“You write for a pro-White website like the Council of Conservative Citizens, AmRen or VDARE, you have been labelled and stigmatised as an ‘extremist’, ‘notorious racist’ and a ‘member of a hate group’ and when you wake up in the morning and look for the subject to write about, say a refugee rapist, you realise that it is semi-pointless because UK Daily Mail or WorldNetDaily has already covered it. What is there left to do but link to the Breitbart story?” 
Bannon claims he is worlds away from fascism. But there is a symbiotic relationship between the neo-Nazi thugs and the wealthy figures of the far right who wear suits, inhabit boardrooms and stalk the chambers of government. The wealthy figures of the far right make respectable the extremist views of the neo-Nazi thugs. They can reach greater audiences. 
A case in point is the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) in Germany. This party, presenting itself as respectable and distinct from the explicit neo-Nazi movement, endorsed the fascist mobilisation in Chemnitz over the last week. A leading member of the AfD marched alongside the fascist street movement Pegida. Another tweeted: “If the state is no longer to protect citizens then people take to the streets and protect themselves. It’s as simple as that!” Bannon wants to incorporate the AfD into his “movement”. 
While Bannon says that he isn’t a racist (on this Ferguson seemed willing to agree with him), he is building a movement of parties peddling racism as government policy. Last year, he held a speaking tour across Europe to strengthen, in his words, the “connective tissue” between various parties of the European far right, from the National Front in France to the Lega in Italy. These parties, many of which are in prominent parliamentary positions, are playing a key role in promoting racist sentiment and enacting racist, deadly border policy measures. 
Bannon is a danger. He is an articulate and forceful proponent of a far right politics for the 21st century; one that cloaks itself in the language of standing up for the working class. We shouldn’t be fooled. This is a story as old as capitalism. Many fascist movements of the past claimed plebeian sympathies but acted purely in the interests of the wealthy by fostering working class division through racism.
Ferguson had an opportunity to rip the mask from Bannon. She chose a smile and a playful caress.

Vashti Kenway

Bannon gets kid glove treatment on the ABC

At last. The mainstream media are finally printing what Melbourne’s anti-fascist campaign has been saying for years. Blair Cottrell is a Nazi. 
It doesn’t take a genius, and it shouldn’t have taken this long. After all, the guy called for a picture of Hitler to be hung in every school more than five years ago. On this basis alone, there should have been a furore after Cottrell appeared as a guest on the ABC’s Hack program. There should have been companies pulling their funding from Channel 7 after it crossed live to Cottrell and his mates during a fascist vigilante meeting.
Perhaps some of the difficulty has been that, besides the Hitler fandom, Cottrell’s pitch isn’t that different from the daily dirge of hate speech we get from “Sky after dark”, the Murdoch press and right wing politicians such as Peter Dutton and Pauline Hanson. 
Australia’s media are populated with journalists and commentators who gleefully embrace far right talking points such as “imperilled South African farmers” or “African gangs”. Cottrell is driving down a freeway paved by broad sections of the mainstream right, people who baulk at Hitler references and open anti-Semitism, but are otherwise nearly as vile as Cottrell. 
Now, however, something’s changed. Sky overstepped the mark, and the condemnations have been swift. I can’t say exactly why this has happened, but I am glad it has. 
After Sky’s one-on-one interview with Cottrell about immigration, the backlash has been widespread. Labor ex-minister Craig Emerson quit the station, claiming this was “another step in a journey to normalising racism and bigotry in our country”. 
Huggies, Specsavers and Amex all pulled sponsorship. The Victorian Labor government banned Sky from TV screens on train platforms. Even arch-conservative columnist Andrew Bolt, a man whose views are only a hair’s breadth away from Cottrell’s, called Sky’s actions “a serious and embarrassing error of judgement”. 
Faced with this avalanche of condemnation, Cottrell has fought back. Raving on Twitter, he said of Sky presenter Laura Jayes: “I might as well have raped [her] on the air, not only would she have been happier with that but the reaction would’ve been the same”. Such sexist smack talk is hardly a surprise coming from Cottrell, who claimed that he used “terror and fear” to control women. But it did add fuel to the fire. 
It was to be expected that Cottrell would back himself. Perhaps it is also unsurprising that the Murdoch media empire would step in with a counteroffensive. A Herald Sun editorial lambasted the Labor minister Jacinta Allan for her decision to pull Sky from Metro train screens as “Stalinism”! 
Bolt, perhaps afraid that his earlier criticism of Sky might be misinterpreted, re-entered the fray and called for Allan to be sacked.
Who knows where or how this political skirmish will end, but one thing is certain: our campaign of directly confronting the far right has been vindicated. Our counter-rallies attempted to rip the mask of respectability off Cottrell and his far right associates. We weren’t embarrassed by accusations of lack of nuance. We didn’t resile from the truth. We called them fascists because that’s what they are. 
When the United Patriots Front held a demonstration of hundreds in the rural Victorian city of Bendigo to try to shut down a mosque, we said it was racism, plain and simple. We held a counterdemonstration to welcome the mosque. We argued that the far right were attempting to use Islamophobia to build a street campaign in the image of an insurgent fascist movement across Europe. 
We understood that these forces speak a language of racism, violence and brutality and that, if we didn’t do something about it, events in Europe could be the shape of things to come: fire bombings of refugee camps, the murder of leftists and attacks on unionists. We said then, and we say it now: we must protest the far right and try to stop them from growing. 
Through all of the mud slung at us for protesting, the liberal opinion pieces that claimed we were “just giving them oxygen”, we maintained that what gives the far right oxygen is the political establishment and the mainstream media. They have paved the way for the rise of this new fascism and amplified its voice. 
Because of the public acknowledgment that the Nazis in our midst are very dangerous, I hope we never have to read another column that suggests that anti-fascists are just the same as the fascists. 
And I hope that at the next anti-fascist demonstration I will be standing arm-in-arm with Craig Emerson, Jacinta Allan and the other luminaries who have spoken out against Sky for promoting a Nazi.

Cottrell outcry shows it is right to counter the fascists

Melbourne Aboriginal activist Robbie Thorpe has a saying: “Australia is a crime scene”. He uses the phrase at almost every rally. 
In his speeches, Robbie flips the idea of crime. The criminals, the murderers and thieves, are not in Australia’s prisons; they are in the establishment, overseers of a system that has brought endless violence against Indigenous people. 
A recent protest in Melbourne against anti-African racism brought Robbie’s phrase to mind. The action had been called by a group of young South Sudanese people against Channel 7’s coverage of the concocted “African gang crisis”. 
“Barely a week goes by when they’re not in the news. African gangs running riot, terrorising, wreaking havoc”, tweeted Channel 7’s official account earlier this month. 
The protest organisers argue that there is no African gang crisis. There is only an attempt to vilify and scapegoat the South Sudanese community for electoral gain. I would go a step further. Not only is the African gang crisis a concoction, but the real criminals are those in parliament and their co-conspirators in the mainstream media. The crimes being committed are against the South Sudanese community, rather than by them. 
Take the story of Liep Gony, an 18-year-old South Sudanese man who died in 2007, bashed to death with a metal pole. His murderers were two young white men. They attacked him after scrawling the vile slogan “fuck da n****s” in giant letters on the walls of their house.
Gony’s mother and cousin spoke about the magnitude of their loss and their never-ending grief. Through tears, they spoke about Gony’s desire to be a basketball player, about how he loved his family and was a generous, quiet and kind young man. 
In his death they tried to bring him to life, to give people a sense of Gony as a man, rather than a cardboard stereotype of an “African”. They tried to bring home the realities of a system that feeds on racism. 
“These are the consequences of Channel 7’s racism: racist murder”, said one of the protest organisers. And he was right. The criminals who run Australia create environments that foster interpersonal racist violence. 
Several speakers talked about the experiences of their younger brothers and sisters at school and the increased racist bullying they are subject to. Others described the simmering hostility they feel when they get on trains or buses. 
“Because I fit the description, they think I’m a thug. Because I fit the description, they think I’m in the Apex gang. Because I fit the description, they think I’m violent. I get comments and looks every day”, one man said. 
Such dehumanisation creates a climate in which the deaths of Africans from racist violence barely register. I would wager that more people know the names Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner (victims of racist police brutality in the US) than Michael Atakelt. 
But Michael’s death was just as outrageous as theirs. He was a young man whose body was discovered beaten, bruised and cut in the Maribyrnong River after spending a night in the Footscray police station in 2011. 
No police officer was ever charged over his death. No mass protests swept onto the streets. No riots started. The silence surrounding his murder indicates the normalisation of racism toward people of African backgrounds in Australia. 
When the media and political establishment spin a narrative that blames African migrants and refugees for social disintegration, diminished access to public services, crowded trains and suburban social decay, the inevitable consequence is increased racism. They know this. It isn’t an accident. It is racism. 
The Australian ruling class is full of recidivist offenders, people who commit the crime of racism over and over and over again. Peter Dutton is a case in point. He can’t stop, because locking up refugees in concentration camps and stoking racist hysteria that justifies such crimes is an integral part of 21st century Australian life. 
Turnbull blows the racist dog whistle about African gangs because he knows that it will aid his colleagues in the Victorian Liberal Party to make the upcoming state election a battle over law and order. 
When Mathew Guy blames African gangs for the social ills of Victoria, he hopes that people will direct their anger toward the South Sudanese rather than the governments and the big companies overseeing high levels of unemployment and decaying social services. 
These people are criminals. Australia is a crime scene.

The real criminals are in parliament and the media

The brutal rape and murder of young Melbourne woman Eurydice Dixon prompted an outpouring of public grief and outrage. Thousands of locals created a makeshift memorial of flowers and cards and left remembrances in Princess Park near the place where her body was found. 
A few days later, mourners awoke to discover that the memorial site had been defaced. A 25-metre penis had been painted in white on the grass nearby. Fire crews took hours to hose out the markings. 
Such an offensive act seems incomprehensibly cruel. Yesterday, Andrew Nolch, 31, was charged with the vandalism. In an interview with the Age, an unrepentant Nolch said he was making a political statement. 
It was, in his mind, “an attack on feminism, on mainstream media for hijacking a vaccine-causing issue and turning it into a men are bad, women’s rights issue”. (The day after Dixon’s body was discovered, a young autistic man was arrested for her rape and murder.)
His Facebook page is filled with statements about vaccines causing autism and, rather than blaming “all men” for the murder and rape of Dixon, culpability should be laid at the door of “big pharma”. Nolch’s anti-vaccine ravings come with an obsessive focus on the mainstream vilifying and marginalising men. Another lengthy post argues:
“The mainstream media is running a brainwashing program which is designed to make everyone think that males are bad. Any event that comes along they twist the reporting so that average males are made to feel as bad as if they did it. 
“But here’s the big question, why? Well because men are the protectors of a society, they are the leaders, they are the soldiers, thats [sic] their job in tribes, families etc. If you take them out then you can easily enslave, capture or do whatever to society. Women can be fantastic leaders too but naturally they fit the caring, nurturing child making role … Our entire society is being taken over is what I’m saying.”
The penis painting attempts to assert masculinity; a declaration of male virility against a shadowy force determined to emasculate men and cripple society’s capacity to resist hostile forces (namely the Chinese and/or the Communists). 
Nolch’s posts read like the gibberish of a conspiracy theory nutcase. But the ravings of the paranoid sometimes reveal something about the political moment. 
Nolch isn’t a trail blazer. His comments about men reflect a growing current in right wing politics across the world. His twitter account is filled with far right talking points about Muslims, refugees, the Chinese and British fascist Tommy Robinson. He has retweeted several prominent far right figures. 
On Tuesday night, SBS’s Dateline featured a story about the alt-right American group the Proud Boys. Founded in 2016, the Proud Boys organise under the slogan: “I am a proud Western chauvinist who refuses to apologise for creating the modern world”. 
The founder of the movement, Gavin McInnes, regularly makes statements indistinguishable from Nolch’s. For example, in 2013, he said, “There’s a real sort of anti-masculinisation going on. Not with just grown men, but with little boys. There’s a real war on men going on”. 
Later in the year he spoke about his relationship with women: “I learned they want to be downright abused. When I stopped playing nice and began totally defiling the women I slept with, the number of them willing to sleep with me went through the roof”. 
This deeply misogynist narrative refuses to acknowledge that women are still structurally oppressed, are paid less at work, don’t have full control over our bodies or fertility and are the main victims of sexual and domestic abuse. 
But facts never get in the way of bigotry. 
And bigotry is front and centre of world politics in 2018. The Proud Boys interviewed on Dateline talked about the confidence they gained with the election of Donald Trump. When you have one of the most powerful men in the world proudly and loudly proclaiming his sexism you are bound to feel entitled. And proud.
In Australia, groups such as the Proud Boys, and the ideas they espouse, are gaining traction. 
When Canadian right wing writer Jordan Peterson visited Australia earlier this year his shows were sold out. His book, 12 Rules for Life, a self help book for aggrieved men, is a best-seller here. 
Milo Yiannopoulos, one hero of the Proud Boys and famous for statements such as “feminism is cancer”, spoke to more than 5,000 people across the country when he toured this year. 
In late July, two other Canadian far right personalities are touring the country. Reports indicate that they will be speaking to large audiences. Stefan Molyneux writes extensively about how “bad mothers” cause the world’s ills. He was one of the keynote speakers at a “Voice for Men” conference, at which he railed against single mothers and unmarried women. “If you don’t have a husband, if you chose the wrong guy, to keep the child is abusive, almost always”, he said.
So there is an increasing intersection between the so called “men’s rights” movement and the far right. Resentful, isolated young men are finding a place in growing online and offline societies that claim that they are speaking “truth” to the “power” of a society dominated by diversity-mongering liberal elites. 
The truth is that, governmental rhetoric aside, oppressed groups – Muslims, refugees, migrants and women – are increasingly under attack. The barbaric border policies being played out in Europe, the US and Australia at the moment are a case in point. 
In such a context, it is inadequate to dismiss Nolch’s graffiti as a random act of the mentally disturbed or direct our moral outrage at one pathetic and vile specimen. 
Nolch’s actions express a growing, deeper, darker current in Australian and world politics. This will not be the last of such despicable acts. We need to organise and challenge all those attempting to build a political movement based on Nolch’s reactionary ideas. 
----------
The Campaign Against Racism and Fascism is organising a protest on 20 July in Melbourne against the speaking tour of far right figures Stefan Molyneux and Lauren Southern. 
For details, go to <a href="http://www.facebook.com/events/169270423766223">www.facebook.com/events/169270423766223</a>.

Andrew Nolch is an expression of growing far right confidence

In 2002, Israeli army chief Moshe Yaalon declared: “The Palestinians must be made to understand in the deepest recesses of their consciousness that they are a defeated people”. 
More than any other quote from any other Israeli official, this statement reveals the heart of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. 
The levels of obscene violence directed at Palestinian protesters in Gaza over the last month attest to Israel’s intentions. To quash aspirations for a homeland, for a future, even for water and food, Israel must enact daily and spectacular violence against the Palestinian population. 
Destroying Palestinian self-respect, national aspirations and identity is important for the Israeli state in two ways. To fulfil its expansionist aims, it must conquer land – this means Palestinian territory. And to maintain itself as a “democratic” ethno state, it must maintain a Jewish majority. This means ensuring that as few Palestinians as possible are granted rights under Israeli occupation. 
They take the land, but expel the people.
So, when unarmed protesters in Gaza, in their tens of thousands, call for the right of return to their traditional lands, Israel considers this democratic demand an existential threat.
Protesters are shot with live ammunition. Bullets blast into the bodies of teenage boys, the skulls of fathers and the backs of women running. Tear gas canisters explode near protesters and babies choke on the fumes. 
This spectacular violence is almost routine. Israel was built on brutal dispossession and ethnic cleansing. 
Bloody history
During the process of state formation and land clearance, Zionist paramilitary organisations were given free rein to terrorise the Palestinian population. 
In one example, in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin, the Irgun (“The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel”) massacred hundreds. 
“They ran like cats”, Yehoshua Zettler, the commander of the operation, said, describing Palestinians fleeing from their homes. “I won’t tell you that we were there with kid gloves on. House after house ... we’re putting in explosives and they are running away. An explosion and move on, an explosion and move on and within a few hours, half the village isn’t there anymore.” 
Palestinians who resisted were tied to trees and shot. Their bodies were burnt. Yair Tsaban, a former government minister and member of one of the Zionist youth brigades tasked with “cleaning up the village”, described the scene: 
“I saw a fair number of corpses. I don’t remember encountering the corpse of a fighting man. Not at all. I remember mostly women and old men. 
“An old man and a woman, sitting in the corner of a room with their faces to the wall, and they are shot in the back. That cannot have been in the heat of battle. No way.”
Moderate elements of the nascent Israeli state criticised some actions, but this spectacular violence served its purpose: it sent a clear signal that resistance would be obliterated. As Zionist militias entered other Palestinian towns, they reported locals fleeing, yelling “Deir Yassin!” 
Menachem Begin, prime minister from 1977 to 1983, had been a leading member of the Irgun. What he began in 1948, he continued in the 1980s. Begin and defence minister Ariel Sharon presided over the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, another expansionist adventure. 
They oversaw massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. The Israeli military facilitated and encouraged the killing of up to 3,500 Palestinians by members of the Kataeb, also known as the Phalange, a Lebanese Christian party. US journalist Robert Fisk was one of the first on the scene. He described what he saw in horrifying detail: 
“[T]here were women lying in houses with their skirts torn up to their waists and their legs wide apart, children with their throats cut, rows of young men shot in the back after being lined up at an execution wall. There were babies – blackened babies because they had been slaughtered more than 24 hours earlier and their small bodies were already in a state of decomposition – tossed into rubbish heaps alongside discarded US army ration tins, Israeli army equipment and empty bottles of whiskey.”
Again, this violence had its intended effect. It sent a signal to Palestinian resistance movements: stand down or you will be slaughtered. 
Israel’s spectacular violence toward the Palestinians has come with what the Australian journalist John Pilger has called “creeping genocide”. This is the everyday violence that Israel enacts on the Palestinian population. This is the violence that rarely elicits global press, violence that is all the more shocking for the silence that surrounds it. 
Take the Gaza Strip. The territory is suffering an Israeli-imposed economic blockade slowly killing the 2.5 million inhabitants. Between 2007 and 2010, Israeli authorities devised mathematical formulae to determine how much food to allow into the strip, based on a count of how many calories were needed to allow the population barely to survive. 
The siege of Gaza results in the strip having only four hours of electricity a day. Running essential services is extremely difficult. Gaza’s hospitals rely on generators that often fail. Death rates in hospitals are high. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza’s drinking water is contaminated. Sara Roy from Harvard’s Centre for Middle Eastern Studies recently said: “Innocent people, most of them young, are slowly being poisoned by the water they drink”. 
In the occupied West Bank, daily indignities humiliate Palestinians. To get to work, visit family or go shopping, many thousands of Palestinians are forced to walk through armed checkpoints. These checkpoints resemble cages and are opened or shut at seemingly random intervals. So Palestinians are made to wait, held at gunpoint, sometimes for hours, before they can get to their destination. This is daily violence, largely unquestioned by the world. 
Many people were shocked by the contrast between the images of the bloodshed in Gaza and those of Netanyahu, Ivanka Trump and diplomats celebrating the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem. 
While protesters were weeping over lost friends or family, some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet were drinking champagne and nibbling on expensive canapés. 
This callous disregard for Palestinian life is shocking. But it is standard. Violence, spectacular and mundane, is part and parcel of the Israeli project. It always has been.

The logic of Israel’s brutality

It is a heartbreaking scene. A woman covered in dust, dirt, and blood, cradles a dead young man. “He was my nephew”, she cries. “My love. My soul.”
Across Gaza today families, communities, schools, workplaces and friendship circles are mourning the loss of someone. Someone they loved, someone they shared a joke with, someone they protested with, someone they smiled at on the street or in the shops.
In just one day 58 Palestinians were murdered, and more than 2,700 were wounded. The Israeli military fired live ammunition, rained down tear gas, and launched firebombs at protesters who were marching on the Gaza-Israel border to demonstrate against 70 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing. This came after weeks of determined civil disobedience, which was met with brutal repression by Israel. Since the protest movement began in March over 100 Palestinians have been killed.
What happened yesterday was a massacre. What happened the week before was a massacre. And the week before that. But you wouldn’t know it from the press coverage in the West.
The Age headline this morning declared that the protests in Gaza were “deadly” and the Adelaide Advertiser announced that Palestinians had “perished”. This is the language of natural disasters. Snakes are deadly. Sharks are deadly. People perish in droughts, floods, tsunamis. They don’t “perish” from bullets, from choking on poison gas or from blood loss after their limbs have been amputated. The perpetrators of this massacre are written out of such headlines. The murderers are disappeared.
Contrast the reports of this massacre with the aftermath of any of the recent terrorist attacks. The individuals who were killed are named, given histories, lives. Their families and friends are interviewed and photos of them as children, teenagers and adults flash across our screens. In their death they are brought to life. It is a rare Australian news report that will afford a Palestinian the same honour.
Take Fadi Abu Silme a 29 year old Gazan. Father of two and husband of 7 years. Silme had grown up in the hell hole that is Gaza. He had survived the bombings of 2009 and 2014. He had survived the brutalising siege, that slowly creeping genocide.
Ten years ago, an Israeli drone strike hit his home. He only just survived but he had both legs amputated. Despite this injury he was a determined man. He refused to be cowed and participated in participating the March of Return. He went daily in his wheelchair. Yesterday he said goodbye to his children and wheeled himself off to the protest. He didn’t return.
If the mainstream media won’t provide these martyrs with names and stories, then we must.
The Australian media is in lock step with our political establishment. Turnbull called the massacre a “tragedy” this morning. A Shakespearean tragedy? A Greek tragedy? A “tragedy” where the players have no control and the forces of fate dictate the inevitable spiral of death and destruction? Again, the perpetrators of the killing are absolved.
Julie Bishop went on to declare the inalienable right of Israel to “defend” itself. What kind of defence is this? The “defence” of constant land theft? Of geographical expansion through the barrel of the gun? The “defence” of shooting to kill and maim unarmed protesters or refugees? Israel is not engaged in self-defence. It is engaged in an aggressive act of ongoing ethnic cleansing. This reality is covered up by an Australian state that has long had an interest in protecting and defending Israel: a major trade and military partner. Turnbull and Bishop are determined to maintain this partnership, and with it the “special relationship” with the US, no matter the number of deaths.
While the massacre was taking place, establishment figures of many nations were celebrating the opening of the new US embassy in East Jerusalem. The event was a testament to the terrifying state of world politics. The rabid right have taken centre stage and the world turns as normal. Far right, settler parties are key players in Netanyahu’s cabinet. And Likud, Netanyahu’s party, has been on a rapid, aggressive trajectory rightwards. Likud's Avi Dichter, chair of the Knesset defence committee, for instance, declared that the Israeli military “had enough bullets for every [Palestinian protester]”.
Ivanka Trump, the madman’s daughter, was there celebrating. She stood alongside other significant figures from the US administration and Pastor Robert Jeffress, leader of a Dallas-area Baptist church and a spiritual adviser to President Donald Trump. Jeffress is notorious for calling Islam and Mormonism “a heresy from the pit of hell” and saying Jews “can't be saved”.
During his speech Netanyahu paid homage to Trump. He said, “President Trump, by recognising history you have made history”. He then went on to say. “This is a good day for peace, too. You can only build peace upon truth, and the truth is that Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel for 3,000 years.”
We would agree that truth needs to be spoken. And here is the truth: Palestine is an occupied land and its people have been subject to the imperial games of the powerful for too long. It is time that the institutions of lies, hypocrisy and bloodshed are not only challenged, but torn down. Free Palestine.

Call it what it is: Israel massacred 58 Palestinians

15 May marks 70 years since the beginning of the Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe), when more than 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their land by Zionist militias clearing the ground for the formation of the Israeli state. 
Before 1948, Palestine was contested territory. After the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Western imperialist powers negotiated to carve up the Middle East. In Palestine, the British demonstrated ruthless duplicity, promising independence to the local Arab population while secretly dealing away the land with the French and Russians. 
By 1922, the British had established a League of Nations mandate in Palestine. Local Palestinians had few democratic rights, and any opposition to British rule was put down violently. In the language of the mandate, Palestinians were “the other sections of the population”. 
The British encouraged waves of Jewish migration and land purchasing to build up a new European-oriented population whose sympathies would lie with their benefactors. Underground Jewish paramilitary organisations were founded. One of these, the Haganah (Defence), was secretly armed, trained and deployed at strategic sites across the territory. 
This Jewish population developed an economy based on Jewish-only labour, the beginning of a Zionist apartheid policy. Conflicts between the local Arab and Palestinian populations and the new coloniser communities intensified. 
By the end of the Second World War, British power was declining. Direct rule over the massive colonial empire was difficult to maintain. Faced with insurgent anti-colonial movements in country after country, they withdrew. In Palestine, the growing settler population increasingly turned to terrorism. They wanted to push out the British and establish a Jewish-only state in as much territory as they could gain from the imperial powers. 
These pressures mounted on the British state, which turned to the United Nations to enact a succession plan. This involved dividing Palestine into two states: one Arab, the other Jewish, with Jerusalem as an international city. 
In late November 1947, this plan was largely agreed upon by the UN General Assembly. For the Palestinians, it meant the dismembering of their communities. 
The Jewish state was given 56 percent of the land; the city of Jaffa was included as an enclave of the Arab state; and the land known today as the Gaza Strip was split from its surrounding agricultural regions. 
The Zionist population, now aggressively armed, wanted to enact the partition on the best terms for themselves. This involved a fierce campaign to disperse Palestinians from their towns and villages, and the creation of what was, until the last few years, the largest refugee population in the world. 
On 15 May 1948, the new state of Israel was declared and recognised by the United Nations. This is why, while 15 May is Israel’s national day, Palestinians mourn their loss and fight for restitution. 
For Palestinians, memories of 1948 are fresh, and the injustice is deeply felt. The stories of the terror of ethnic cleansing and dispossession are passed on from parents to children, meaning that this often ignored history of colonisation is not forgotten. 
At least 70 massacres occurred, and around 13,000 Palestinians were killed. Sometimes, parents were killed while their children were forced to watch. Others were spared, but told that, if they wanted to live, they should leave immediately. 
Five hundred and thirty Palestinian villages were razed. In one incident, more than 100 were killed in the village of Deir Yassin by members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, terrorist militias.
“They ordered all our family to line up against the wall and they started shooting us”, related Fahimi Zeidan, who was a child at the time. “I was hit in the side, but most of us children were saved because we hid behind our parents. 
“The bullets hit my sister Kadri [four] in the head, my sister Sameh [eight] in the cheek, my brother Mohammed [seven] in the chest. But all the others with us against the wall were killed: my father, my mother, my grandfather and grandmother, my uncles and aunts and some of their children." 
There are small stories of casual violence. Audeh Rantisi, in the book Palestine Is Our Home: Voices of Loss, Courage and Steadfastness, tells of his family’s expulsion from the town of al-Lydd in July 1948:
“Outside the gate, the soldiers stopped us and ordered everyone to throw all valuables onto a blanket. One young man and his wife of six weeks, friends of our family, stood near me. He refused to give up his money. Almost casually, the soldier pulled up his rifle and shot the man. He fell, bleeding and dying while his bride screamed and cried. I felt nauseated and sick, my whole body numbed by shock waves.”
Others tell of the offensive from the skies. “They bombed us from the air just as we were breaking the fast for Ramadan – they knew we would all be in our homes”, said the late poet Taha Muhammad Ali. He and his family fled the town after the bombing and the later Zionist occupation of his village. They were forced north toward the refugee camps in Lebanon. Shortly after their arrival, his sister died from heat exhaustion. “My mother would sit by her grave every day, lost in grief.”
The stories go on and on. 
The Israeli state was born in blood. 
Life for Palestinian refugees was bare, difficult and grief stricken. The camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria were bleak places, full of poverty. Those states discriminated against Palestinians, denying them services and rights. 
In Palestine, the nominally Palestinian-controlled areas increasingly came under the control of the ever expansionist Israeli state. As it took more land, conditions for Palestinians became unbearable. This situation fuels the resistance. 
Many Palestinians long for return. Thousands of refugees from 1948, and their descendants, have kept the keys from their homes as a symbol of their desires. The right to return has been a central and animating demand of the Palestinian movement for seven decades. 
Although the original refugees of the 1948 ethnic cleansing are declining in number, their descendants number more than 5 million. The assertion of this right would provoke a major disruption to the apartheid Israeli ethno-state. 
So making this demand central to the recent marches on the Gaza border was bold and heroic.

Understanding the Palestinian catastrophe

1968 has become known as the year of the student. Across the world, campuses were aflame with political activity. Students challenged university administrations and demanded student control over student life; they railed against racism and inequality in their own countries and fought imperial barbarity in Vietnam.
In some countries, the student movement connected with radicalising workers, and the seemingly stable foundations of capitalist rule were shaken. Regimes and governments, from the openly authoritarian to the nominally democratic, felt under threat and sometimes responded with deadly force.
These experiences led millions of young people across the world to identify as revolutionaries.
University life
The growth in student numbers and the transformation of universities from training grounds for the privileged elite into institutions of mass education created fertile ground for revolt. Young people were being brought together in vast numbers in ways they hadn’t been before. A rebellious youth culture, hostile to the staid conservatism of an older generation, was developing.
The state of the university sector also pushed students along a radical path. Many new universities were created: often bare bones operations, underfunded, sterile and desolate. Poet and participant in the French uprisings Angelo Quattrocchi described Nanterre University in the suburbs of Paris in this way:
“[A]round the campus, still the Arab and Portuguese shantytown … Chimneys, council houses, wasteland. On the walls, written by a spray pistol: URBANITY, CLEANLINESS, SEXUALITY.
“Twelve thousand students. Fifteen hundred live in residence. The rooms are good and sterilized: big glass windows overlooking the Arab barracks. No visits by ‘foreigners’ allowed, you can’t add or change furniture. You cannot cook. No politics on the premises.
“On the external walls: HERE FREEDOM STOPS.”
The new universities trained workers for an evolving economy. While the ideology of the university as an institution of “higher learning” remained, they were increasingly called upon, in the words of Clark Kerr (chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley), to “merge activities with industry as never before”.
This contradiction enraged students across the world. Education should be about more than merely workplace training, it should expand consciousness, they argued. At Hornsey College, England, for instance, students occupied for six weeks against government “reforms” meant to enforce specialisation and academic qualifications on art students.
They took over the administration building and canteen and took on cooking and cleaning responsibilities. They dismantled partitions designed to keep students and staff separate and used general assemblies of hundreds to discuss the daily running of the campus and ways to radically transform education.
One occupier, Val Remy, said: “Nobody told anybody what to do; people discovered talents they’d never known they had. We wanted to prove we could run the college without bureaucratic administration. It was absolutely exhilarating, liberating”.
At the older universities, and in countries where the university system remained antiquated, students pushed against rigid traditionalism. They refused to defer to the authority of the professors. Their iconoclasm knew no bounds.
At Frankfurt University in Germany, radical students became increasingly frustrated with the political quiescence of academics such as leftist social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. They accused them of being “critical in theory, conformist in practice”.
Students from the revolutionary Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held “go-ins” at the lectures of politically exposed professors, to challenge them to discussion with the students. At one infamous “go-in”, the lecture theatre seats were strewn with leaflets declaring “Adorno as an institution is dead”.
University administrations, unhappy with the developing radicalism, attempted to ban, expel or otherwise discipline student leaders. This prompted further outrage and increased militancy.
At the London School of Economics, authorities installed steel gates to prevent occupations. In no time, students took to the gates with sledgehammers and picks. One student, Rachel Dyne, recalled: “It was a euphoric feeling, I felt a great sense of power. We were doing something authentic, we resented the gates, felt they were transforming the place more or less into a prison. Taking them down was a way of challenging authority”.
Vietnam
The situation in universities prepared the ground for a radicalisation, but from 1965 in Western Europe, the USA and Australia, the Vietnam war became an increasingly dominant political question for young people.
In the US, the Black and working class populations were against the war from early on. They were the first drafted, the first maimed, the first killed. But while hostility to the war was deep and widespread, the anti-war movement coalesced on campuses.
The ongoing brutality of the war shocked students – strafed villages and cold-blooded murder were caught live on camera. French student Nelly Finkielsztejn captured the moral outrage of the time:
“Napalm, bombings, mass graves, executions – the fury of military and economic might against a small population of a different race – that was the Vietnam war for me. It was intolerable. That’s why we went out into the streets chanting Ho! Ho! Ho Chi Minh!”
During 1968, there were increasingly dramatic student protests against the war. The Tet offensive in January proved that the Vietnamese could breach the defences of the US military. Tet punctured the veneer of US impenetrability and proved to be a lightning rod for students across the world. Tariq Ali, a British Vietnam Solidarity Campaign leader, asked, “If poor peasants could do it, well why not people in Western Europe?”
In February, an International Vietnam Conference was organised in West Berlin. It was attended by 6,000 representatives of international youth groups, along with artists, writers and intellectuals. The hall was decorated with Vietnamese National Liberation Front flags, pictures of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and Ernst Thälmann and slogans from Karl Marx, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. The mood was electric; 15,000 marched at the conclusion of the conference.
Students supported draft resisters. In Australia, the first national Draft Resisters Conference was held at the La Mama theatre in Carlton in 1968. The conference instituted the first large “Don’t Register” campaign, urging 20-year-old males to refuse to register for national service. This was hugely controversial.
In the USA mass protests regularly shut down draft centres. The US SDS linked up with anti-war soldier organisations and toured members of the Vietnam Veterans against the War around campuses to speak about their experiences.
In Japan, students put their bodies on the line to stop the war. When a US aircraft carrier attempted to dock at the Sasebo Naval Base before heading to South Vietnam, hundreds of students battled police to get into the base to stop it.
Many students tried to connect the war with campus issues. Universities often provided crucial research for war industries; students campaigned to have the universities break links with them. In Britain, one of the most significant occupations of 1968 took place at Essex University after a confrontation between students and a scientist who was complicit in the production of the chemicals being used by the US military.
State reaction and militancy
As 1968 wore on and student radicalism deepened, ruling classes became increasingly unsettled. Repression by the police, the universities and the state increased. Fascist violence and right wing vigilantism, often working hand in glove with the authorities, further radicalised many students to the left.
In London, the largest ever anti-Vietnam-war protest was viciously attacked. In Chicago, demonstrations against the Democratic Party convention provoked the Democratic mayor to crack down. One participant, Josh Brown, described events:
“I saw a cop hit a guy over the head and the club break. I turned to my left and saw another cop jab a guy right in the kidneys. And then I turned round and the cop behind me was saying ‘Move, move!’ and I took off and kept going.”
But he found that all the exits and bridges were cut off by National Guardsmen and police. Students were kettled, and in the glare of television lights pummelled, beaten and broken.
​After Martin Luther King was killed in April, 174 American cities were engulfed in rage and fire. German student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot by a right wing vigilante in the same month. Tens of thousands of students attacked the headquarters of the right wing publisher Springer Press. They built barricades, set fire to buildings and began, in the words of some student activists, “preparing for civil war”.
In Mexico, authorities were concerned about student rebellion during the Olympic Games and tried to close the vast and radical Autonomous University. Enraged students rebelled and massed in their thousands throughout the city.
On 2 October, a student rally at a central plaza was surrounded by military troops, some carrying machine guns. As students tried to escape, the military opened fire. To this day, the government has refused to release the number of people killed – estimates range from 50 to 500.
The violence awakened students to the underlying brutality of the system. Many ​drew revolutionary conclusions and realised that, on their own, students could effect minimal change.
Workers and students
The events of France in May 1968 had an impact across the world. That militant student struggle connected with a general strike and brought a conservative government to its knees, transforming the consciousness of many students.
Two days of students battling the police on the streets of Paris prompted workers at a small aviation factory in Nantes, western France, to go on strike. They locked the factory managers in their offices. Three days later, 2 million workers were out all over France; another three days, 9 million.
​The largest strike in French history had begun. Workers at industrial plants occupied factories or joined public demonstrations. Millions of French workers joined the actions. Sometimes, the occupations became more radical. Revolutionary students went to the striking enterprises and engaged workers in debate and discussion. Despite the hostility of the conservative trade unions, workers were open to discussions with radical students.
The workers’ actions – the crippling effect that the strike had on the French economy – won students to a world view with the working class at its centre. Nelly Finkielszetjn described it like this:
“The unthinkable had happened! The strikes were like a flame, like everything we had been saying at Nanterre. ‘Fuck hierarchy, authority, this society with its cold, rational, elitist logic! Fuck all the petty bosses and mandarins at the top! Fuck this immutable society that refuses to consider the misery, poverty, inequality and injustice it creates, that divides people according to their origins and skills!’ I had never dreamt such a thing could happen …
“Suddenly they realised that they had to find a new sort of solidarity. That was what was important about May. Not the slogans like ‘Imagination Is Seizing Power’ and the rest, not the poetry and exuberance, but this new found solidarity. That was what May meant to me.”
Many thousands of students across the world were inspired by these events. They ​hoped for, and sometimes agitated for, a working class response to inequality.
For millions of students, 1968 was a seminal year. Not only were the iniquities of capitalism increasingly exposed, but victorious resistance seemed possible. Thousands of students felt the same as Mike Wallace from Columbia University, who said:
“The usual rules of the game in capitalist society had been set aside. It was phenomenally liberating … At the same time it was a political struggle. It wasn’t just Columbia. There was a fucking war on in Vietnam, and the civil rights movement. These were profound forces that transcend that moment. 1968 cracked the universe open for me. And the fact of getting involved meant that never again was I going to look at something outside with the kind of reflex condemnation or fear. Yes, it was the making of me – or the unmaking.”
It was truly a time of universes cracking open, of tectonic plates shifting and of horizons expanding.

1968: the year the unthinkable happened

A journalist once reportedly asked Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi what he thought of Western civilisation. “I think it would be a good idea”, he is said to have replied.
The release of a new report into hazing rituals at elite Australian university residential colleges has yet again shown that barbarism lies at the heart of ruling class culture. Authors of “The Red Zone Report” spent 18 months investigating the vile, violent, sexist behaviour of some of Australia’s wealthiest young people.
The stories make you gag. The report tells of parties that end with young people being forced to eat their own vomit; students defecating in hallways and then smearing shit on the walls; groups of men masturbating into body wash bottles and then returning them to unsuspecting female students’ bathrooms; second and third year students forcing hundreds of first years (or “freshers”) into a dark airless room, turning off the lights and throwing rotting fish over them.
Drinking games in which younger students are forced to drink till they piss themselves are par for the course. And there are ritual sexual harassment and multiple instances of rape. The depravity and sexism on display in this report are extreme.
Ritual humiliation of first year university students has been a tradition since the establishment of the institutions. Newspapers and university publications have been reporting on the degrading practices of college life for decades.
In 1958, reports tell of freshers at the University of Sydney being bashed, chased, tackled and burned with silver nitrate during initiation rituals.
In 1965, newspapers reported that University of Sydney college students were forced to stand “with their noses to the wall for 5 hours” before being forced to run a 4km steeplechase while other students “struck them” and “pulled their clothes off”.
The stories get darker. In 1977, a young woman’s body was found on the grounds of St Paul’s college. She had been raped and murdered. At the same college, just five days after the body was found, four male students accused of gang-raping another female student were given a prize by the other male students: the Animal Act of the Year trophy.
The 21st century has been no better. In 2009, male students at St Paul’s began a pro-rape Facebook group. Graffiti appeared around the college bar, reading, “They can’t say no with a cock in their mouth” and “Any hole is a goal”.
Last year, Queensland University’s Emmanuel College produced a yearbook that included quotes such as “I’d rather choke her to sleep than talk her to sleep”.
The “Red Zone Report” is shocking. But the behaviour identified is an open secret. Much like Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement, the individuals and institutions now claiming to be “shocked” by the reports have known for years.
Why has such a culture flourished? Guardian columnist Brigid Delaney argues that it is just misguided:
“Three years of thinking it’s heroic to drink until you vomit, or throw fish on a room full of freshers, or make someone drink shampoo is not really good preparation for the real world – unless you are going for a job at Abu Ghraib.
“The big end of town has (at least in theory) strict standards about behaviour and are heavily invested in their reputation. Colleges with their hazing rituals are doing the students a disservice by instilling in them values and behaviour that are likely to get them fired or arrested once they enter the ‘real world’.”
It’s true that the corporate world in the last decade has been scrambling to pass new codes of conduct and anti-harassment policies to protect their brands from negative publicity.
But Delaney has missed the point. The elites in our society preside over a deeply unequal system. Beneath the surface, often not well hidden, lies the truth of Western capitalist “civilisation”. Capitalism means daily brutality for the majority of people around the world: barbaric wars, mass starvation, oppression and exploitation.
To oversee a system like this requires that human empathy be stripped away and that future “leaders” be trained to make the “tough decisions”. Ruling class schools and institutions such as university colleges have historically played this role.
As poet and novelist Al Alvarez said of his time at English private school Oundle in the 1940s: “As far as I can see, the point was to produce people to run the British empire: if you could survive five years … there was nothing the Kalahari desert or Antarctica could throw at you”.
If ruling class children and then young adults can learn to debase and demean people in their intimate lives and accept and defend interpersonal violence, they can more easily adjust themselves to life in the business and political world, where ruthlessness is an asset.
Sometimes CEOs reveal their true attitudes. Take Telstra’s former chief operations officer Greg Winn. His leaked 2007 comments are a classic example:
“We run an absolute dictatorship and that’s what’s going to drive this [company] transformation and deliver results. If you can’t get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice … then you just shoot them and get them out of the way.”
Those remarks were made at a time when several Telstra staff had committed suicide – reportedly because of the immense stress and workload being heaped upon them by management.
This is the real underpinning of the behaviour in colleges. It is the culture of the rich and powerful on display as today’s little darlings are turned into tomorrow’s corporate monsters.

College hazing rituals: turning today’s little darlings into tomorrow’s corporate monsters

1968 – 50 years ago – was the highpoint of the radicalism that had been sweeping the globe through the mid-60s from Belfast to Berlin, from Mexico to Melbourne, from Paris to Prague. It was a year of revolution and repression, of struggle and solidarity, of wild optimism and crushing defeat.
Anti-imperialist struggle
One of the radicalising issues for millions worldwide was the US war in Vietnam. The threat of the draft, combined with the increasingly shocking images of the war, began to unsettle increasing numbers of young people across the US from 1965 onwards.
John Levin, a student at Columbia University in New York, recalled:
“It was the first televised war, and that made it very vivid. We’d been brought up to believe in our hearts that America stood for fighting on the side of justice. World War II was ingrained in us – my father had volunteered. So there was this feeling of personal betrayal. And there was the absolute horror of it. I remember sitting by myself, crying, listening to the first reports of the bombings.”
The gulf between the rhetoric of the US government and the reality of its actions became increasingly clear. The war blew open the lie that the US was the leader of the “free world”. Far from exporting democracy and freedom, it was bombing, pillaging and strafing its way through the peasant villages and fields of Vietnam to back up a compliant and corrupt regime in South Vietnam. Why? To ensure US imperial domination of the globe and to push back against its rivals, in the USSR and China.
Once the mask had slipped, people couldn’t unsee the violent reality of the US state.
By the start of 1968, anti-war agitation was on the rise. Protests, teach-ins and occupations involving thousands swept across university campuses in the USA, Britain, Europe and beyond. In the US army, soldiers began to disobey actively and politically. In the US and Australia, young men began resisting the draft. In West Germany and France, activists demonstrated their opposition to the war by helping US GIs in Europe to desert.
All of this had laid the ground for a dramatic increase in anti-war agitation when, on 30 January, the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF) launched what came to be known as the Tet Offensive.
Tet is the Vietnamese lunar new year, and the NLF used the celebrations as a cover for raids on US military targets. The Vietnamese guerrilla army had been preparing for this offensive over the previous months by luring US forces into the countryside in a series of feints and skirmishes. The US high command, in its boundless arrogance, underestimated the Vietnamese forces and, as the new year fireworks were spitting and crackling, around 70,000 NLF soldiers attacked 34 of 44 provincial capitals, 64 district capitals and many military installations. More than 100 targets were hit all over South Vietnam, including the US embassy in Saigon. The US military was sent reeling. One of the smallest and least equipped fighting forces on the planet had publicly humiliated the world’s greatest superpower. The US couldn’t allow this situation to stand and began a devastating firebombing campaign. “We had to destroy the town to save it”, said one US officer after ordering the almost complete destruction of Ben Tre.
The legacy of the Tet Offensive was twofold. First, it confirmed that the US was waging a barbaric war against a peasant army in the interests of US profits and empire. Second, and very importantly, it demonstrated that US power was not invincible. For many years, the US state, with its nuclear weapons, its money, its laws and its standing army, had seemed all powerful. Now cracks were appearing and ordinary people across the globe gained confidence.
Student struggle
The university campuses were often the centre of activity in 1968. In January and February, students played a key role in challenging the repressive regimes of Belgium, Poland and Czechoslovakia, and after Tet the student struggle heated up in the centres of Western power. An International Vietnam Congress was organised by left wing German student organisation SDS in West Berlin a fortnight after the offensive began. The congress gathered thousands of radical students from organisations across Europe, the US and Latin America. Heated debates raged: about the Vietnamese revolution, national liberation, the role of students and workers in radical change, the place of violence in revolutionary struggle, and about art and history.
The congress concluded with a huge, tense and eventually exhilarating illegal march through the streets of West Berlin. British socialist leader Tariq Ali offered this description: “Twenty thousand people marching with red flags in what was the capital of the cold war! Phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal! As we marched through the old quarters you felt that the old revolutionary movement was being revived, that history was being re-made”.
In the weeks after the Berlin congress, student struggle began to turn from protest to resistance, leading to further radicalisation. Up to 10,000 students occupied their faculties across Italy, and state forces began to try to force them out. Britain had one of its most militant mobilisations in March, and in France, confrontations over Vietnam between students and the police and far right were increasing in frequency.
In April, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, riots and rebellions broke out in 167 US cities. City centres were in flames: “Harlem was on fire, all hell was breaking loose”, recalled Bill Sales, a leader of the Student Afro American Society at Columbia University. “The people took to the streets, police were running around cracking heads, fires were blazing. It was the first time I’d seen such social disruption where there was a real life and death situation.”
In West Germany, student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head by a right winger, prompting a student insurrection. Street fighting unlike anything seen for decades erupted. Two people were killed, 400 injured and 1,000 arrested over five days. More than 60,000 people blockaded the headquarters of the right wing Springer press.
In this increasingly heated context, reformist and pacifist ideas were being sidelined. To be a revolutionary was the order of the day. And then the French May happened, and the ordinary functioning of the system was upended.
the French May
The French May was in many ways unexpected. The student movement in France had been smaller and less militant than in other European countries, and the government stable and secure. Nevertheless, by the end of May the entire edifice of the French establishment was being shaken. Not only were students rioting and occupying on an insurrectionary scale, but workers too were going out on strike and occupying their factories in huge numbers.
Events began on 2 May, when a far right group attacked a student union office at the Sorbonne University in Paris. This prompted a protest of self-defence on the part of left wing students. The university called on police to arrest the student ringleaders, an unprecedented move. The police had not been allowed on the campus in living memory. In response, the students began to mobilise in their hundreds and thousands, and over the next few days the streets of central Paris became the site of insurgent, wonderful defiance. As the students mobilised, the state responded with more violence. The situation escalated. Henri Weber, one of the leaders of student Trotskyist group the JCR described the events:
“As we made our way towards the next street, the police fired tear gas grenades and attacked us with truncheons. We retreated, started to organise … The whole shapeless crowd transformed itself into an active, self-organising ant-hill. Everybody seemed to find something to do. And then the clear ring of steel as cobblestones were prised up.”
The most famous mobilisation occurred on 10 May, when between 20,000 and 30,000 people participated in what became known as the night of the barricades. For hours, people fought the police, built barricades made of cobblestones and attempted to take the Sorbonne University back from the hated riot cops, the CRS. Kids, university students, young workers and poorer Parisians all stood together – shoulder to shoulder, passing cobblestones to one another to build barricades, a homage to earlier French revolutionary moments.
Under pressure from their members, the union leaders called a strike and demonstration for Monday 13 May to oppose the government’s violence and to show solidarity with the students. Hundreds of thousands of people turned out. Some say more than a million.
The strike on 13 May set off a wave of strikes across the country. Workers seized the opportunity to take action after years of accumulating grievances – with the boss, with the De Gaulle administration, with the police, with everything that had kept them down for so long. Before long, 10 million workers were out, the biggest general strike in history at the time.
Workers in the car and aviation industry were at the forefront of the struggle. At the Sud Aviation Factory in Nantes, a simple work stoppage over conditions escalated into an occupation, the imprisonment of the boss in his office and the rapid radicalisation of the workplace. For a full week, the town operated under workers’ control. Students and workers mingled and shared increasingly revolutionary ideas. One student recalls his experience joining workers on strike at the factory:
“Around the shelters, in the cold night, we eat, we drink fraternally, and above all we discuss. But about what! If not the revolt, the revolution, the worker-student relations, the necessity to unite the struggles into one struggle, of the free university, of student power, of workers’ power, of the role of the middle management in the strike, of the refusal of students to become exploiters, of self-management.”
The economic concerns of workers became entangled with the political. Strike committees were established across the country. Importantly, many workers were going outside the traditional leadership of the Communist Party and the main trade union federation, the CGT, and making links with more radical groups. Unfortunately, these trends were not enough to burst beyond the limiting confines of the existing leadership, and although de Gaulle briefly fled the country, the calling of elections for early June had the intended pacifying effect – the union leaders now swung all their energy behind the coming poll. The movement in the factories faltered.
Although the French May ended without the revolutionary overthrow of the state, the radicalisation continued in the months and years that followed. In Italy, workers and students took up the radical mantle and, in what became known as the “hot autumn” of 1969, millions of workers engaged in impressive strikes and factory occupations, locking the bosses out and instituting workers’ control. In the US, while the student movement stalled, workers began to radicalise, and this laid the basis for serious and significant strikes into the 1970s. Furthermore, the US war machine was seriously bruised. The anti-Vietnam War movement would make the US ruling class cautious about launching open warfare for years to come.
The lasting legacy of 1968 was, however, most profound in the changed consciousness of millions across the world. The slogan of the French youth, “Be realistic. Demand the impossible”, encapsulated the spirit of 1968. This spirit expanded their horizons, raised their expectations and allowed them to dream of a different world: a world free from the stultifying conformity of mainstream society; a world in which war, racism, oppression and exploitation were things of the past. These dreams were not constrained by national borders. Across the globe, people, particularly the young, began to see themselves as part of the same movement. They became internationalists.
They also became revolutionaries. In challenging the prevailing order, many began to awaken to the realities of the system. They began to understand that it could be changed, that struggle, and victorious struggle, is possible. French revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit expressed this best:
“It’s a moment I shall never forget. Suddenly, spontaneously, barricades were being thrown up in the streets. People were building up the cobblestones because they wanted – many of them for the first time – to throw themselves into a collective, spontaneous activity. That night has forever made me optimistic about history. Having lived through it, I can’t ever say it will never happen again.”

Bannon gets kid glove treatment on the ABC

Cottrell outcry shows it is right to counter the fascists

The real criminals are in parliament and the media

Andrew Nolch is an expression of growing far right confidence

The logic of Israel’s brutality

Call it what it is: Israel massacred 58 Palestinians

Understanding the Palestinian catastrophe

1968: the year the unthinkable happened

College hazing rituals: turning today’s little darlings into tomorrow’s corporate monsters

1968: the year the world shook

Other Media

Shop

Conferences

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us