Posted by John, July 26th, 2011 - under Nazism, Socialism from below, Socialist organisation.

Tags: ASIO, Asylum seekers, Fascism

Dear Australian Security Intelligence Organisation

On 4 March I received a death threat on Facebook. I reported it to Facebook and in doing that it lost the photo of a man (me presumably at some future time) with his brains blown out.

The message with the photo said ‘Fuck you. Or BOOOOOOM and your head looks like that beautiful photo.’

There was also from memory some anti-communist symbol in the background, but that too disappeared with the photo or might have been part of it.

The Facebook name, Yuan Freeman, is obviously made up.

I thought about referring it to the cops or to you, ASIO. But despite friends urging me to do so, I didn’t. I thought about it but dismissed the threat as coming from some crackpot who would get perverse satisfaction if I showed any concern.

Now after the fascist attacks in Oslo I am not so sure.

There was another reason I didn’t refer it to the agents of the capitalist state. The cops, and especially you, ASIO, aren’t really about watching right wing terrorists. You have sympathy with them. Least of all are you about protecting socialists.

Why, the very idea is preposterous. ASIO sees the left as the enemy. It is why you were set up as in effect the Australian equivalent of the Stasi, spying on us, planting informers in our meetings, setting up the local cops to arrest us when we protest against apartheid Israel etc etc. The list of your despicable actions goes on and on and on.

You reject everything we stand for – democracy, decency, equity and equality. To protect us is to give succour to the enemy.

So I didn’t refer the death threat to you. I have no faith in you. I don’t trust you. You are part of the organised section of the enemy.

The struggle for a new society, a democratic society in which production is organised to satisfy human need, will see the vast majority of the producers smashing the state and setting up an alternative truly democratic one. That includes smashing the secret police of the bourgeoisie and its not so secret police, the ones in blue we see every day. Both in different ways have the role of protecting the rich and propertied.

The crises of capitalism – environmental, economic and political – will force the bourgeoisie into more and more serious attacks on workers and their organisations.

The rise of fascism in the twenty and thirties was a bourgeois response to falling profit rates and the inability to drive down wages and conditions enough to restore profit rates without brute force.

Today across Europe, in the US and Australia we can see nascent fascist organisations and a more generalised disquiet among sections of the bourgeoisie and small business. The middle class of course was the backbone of Nazism until the ruling class swung its support behind Hitler in 1932 and the fascists became the battering ram of capital against labour.

If the old methods of addressing economic decline and crisis do not work then these various groups, from the ‘respectable’ extreme right like the Progress Party in Norway and the bovver boys in groups like the English Defence League, can meld and try to carry out the bourgeoisie’s goal. This is to smash the organised working class – unions, social democratic and revolutionary organisations – and in doing that drive down wages and conditions and restore profit rates.

Thus Hitler’s concentration camps were filled first with the leaders of the working class.

To date different countries have different levels of extreme reaction. The formation of the Tea Party in the US shows the process has begun in the US but it appears to be maturing in some countries in Europe at a faster rate.

Thus Norway’s Progress Party won 23 percent of the vote by seemingly moderating its positions. Hitler did the same in the late 20s and early 30s, moving from putschist to ‘democrat’ to win wide levels of support, especially in rural areas.

In Australia middle class disquiet found expression in the late 90s with the rise of One Nation, an organisation made up of small often rural business owners and other middle class elements together with some non-unionised regional workers. Conservative Prime Minister corralled this vote, and gave the class focus through demonising refugees and aborigines. It will not always be ever thus.

These fascists in waiting serve a useful purpose for captial. They help drag the debate further to the right and provide a base for future assaults, physical, legal and economic, on workers and their organisations.

A common thread among the extreme right has been its anti-Muslim rhetoric. In Australia this has merged with anti-refugee rhetoric, a rhetoric made acceptable and broadcast by the two main parties of neoliberalism, the Labor Party and the Liberal Party.

This Islamophobia is widespread across Europe. From France where the Conservatives have banned wearing the burqa in public, to Switzerland with its bans on minarets, to Luxembourg with its ban too on the burqa (the only joint action in an otherwise paralysed Parliament without government for the last 8 months), and on to The Netherlands and its Party of Freedom with 15% of the vote and the Danish People’s Party with almost the same level of support, the ‘Islamisation’ of society is a common theme.

Now French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British PM David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have all declared multiculturalism dead.

As Socialist Alternative in its article ‘Mainstream Muslim bashing sowed the seeds of right-wing terror’ puts it:

Far-right organisations across Europe have flourished in the foetid atmosphere that has been created by a decade of imperialist war in the Middle East. The far right takes its violent cues from the racist campaign whipped up against Muslim immigrants by politicians of all stripes.

As the global economic crisis has savaged Europe, mainstream politicians have tried to divert anger over bankers’ greed and savage austerity measures by sowing seeds of hatred against Muslims and other minorities. They cannot now escape responsibility for what that hatred has unleashed.

Labor’s Malaysian solution and Abbott’s ‘stop the boats’ fit neatly into this agenda of racist demonisation and Islamophobia.

The murderous imeprailist killings in the Middle East and Afghanistan make our leaders even bigger terrorists than Breivik.

The fight against the encroaching extremism of the right and the cloak of respectability the mainstream parties here and across the world give it is the fight specifically against the fascists and their ‘respectable’ legitimisers but more generally is the fight to build a genuine socialist alternative.

That means as a first step building an organisation of thousands of workers and others committed to a new society in which the threat of fascism is wiped from the earth for good. Only overthrowing the system that breeds fascism can do that. Only the working class as working class, the millions for example in Australia who produce the wealth of Australian society, have that power.

We have seen glimpses of that power in Egypt, in Wisconsin and in Europe generally and Greece and Spain specifically. From the workplaces to the squares there is resistance.

We socialists want to build an organisation of the most class conscious elements to win a new world. The first step to doing that is to build an organisation that relates to the struggles of the day and doesn’t sink into the sewer of racism and Islamophobia but which challenges at every step of the way the creeping extremism of the right and becomes strong enough to smash this violent and abhorrent expression of capitalism now and into the future.