Category Archives: Australia

Anarchist, Antifa, Australia, Colonialism, Colonization, Immigration, Nazis

Antifa + Anarchy Down Under: Andy Fleming of SlackBastard

Antifa + Anarchy Down Under: Andy Fleming of SlackBastard

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This week, we’re sharing a recent conversation with Andy Fleming. Andy is an anarchist and anti-racist organizer based out of Melbourne, Australia. For the episode, Andy tells us about his research into far right organizing in Australia and, to a lesser degree, Aotearoa (aka New Zealand), who key players are, what tendencies are present and their influence in popular and political culture. We also speak about the resistance to the far right, Australia’s immigration policies, Settler-Colonial status, cultural context for far right organizing in Australia and a bit about government counterinsurgency-style repression of radical left, ecological and indigenous movements in Australasia.

[Sean Swain starts at 3min 17sec, Andy Fleming at 10min 07sec + Announcements at 1hr 34min 21sec]

We apologize for the audio quality on this chat, we had connection issues consistently and upping the quality of the sound is a thing we’re striving for. If you are listening to the radio edition of this episode, you should REALLY check out the podcast version for extra chat and some musical suggestions from Andy.

Archives of Andy’s writings can be found dating back over 15 years at SlackBastard.AnarchoBase.com, and his commentaries on the far left and the far right in Australia are well worth reading. Andy also contributes to the SUWA radio show on 3CR on the 4th Fridays (good luck finding archives of the emission, you may just have to listen within a week of the broadcast). You ca also find Andy on twitter and fedbook and he just started up a patreon where you can support his research and commentary. Here’s a link to the Oxford University Press book containing his essay “The Far Right in Australia”. A question I’d meant to ask but because of time differences and it being 1am my time by the time we stopped talking I forgot to ask was about his ideas on Antifa as an anarchist and the need to go beyond Antifascist organizing, the internal limitations of a lack of a positive program. Turns out Andy wrote about this topic in an article called “Antifa is liberalism, feminism is cancer, and I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

Announcements

BRABC Letter Writing

If you’re in Asheville, Blue Ridge Anarchist Black Cross and Companeros Inmigrantes en las Montanas en Accion (or CIMA) invite you to join us for letter writing at 5pm, Sunday May 5, Cinco de Mayo. We’ll be writing letters to support the parole campaign for Jalil Muntaqim and to Joseph “Shine White” Stewart who’se faced repression for speaking out. CIMA will also about HB370, a North Carolina law heading across the desk of Gov. Cooper for a final approval or veto that would re-deputize local law enforcement as ICE or immigration agents. CIMA’s going to help us write letters to express our opposition to cops acting as Migra in the racist internatlization of the border that is ripping apart our families and communities in this state and across the country. This is 5-7pm today!

Misremembering the Shoah

The band psych-rock band Trupa Trupa from Gdansk, Poland, helped the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produce an hour long audio documentary about the un-remembering of the first Nazi death camp of the Shoah (or Holocaust), called Stutthoff. This work is worth a listen and contemplation as lead singer Grzegorz Kwiatkowski as lead singer of the band points out many places face a mis-remembering of inconvenient history and a rise of right populism that seeks to white wash what came before. There is a link in our show notes to the CBC piece entitled “The Invisible Shoes of Stutthof Concentration Camp”. Never Forget.

external links:

Fight Dem Back
Campaign Against Racism and Fascism

Raids and repression in Urewera in 2007

The Day The Raids Came (2010)
Operation 8: Deep Into The Forest (2011)

Musical selections (usually we’d just stick them in the playlist) :

Lynton Kwesi Johnson – Fite Dem Back
Last Quokka – Nazi Scum
A.B. Original – January 26th (feat. Dan Sultan)
Inner Terrestrials – No Pasaran! From an as-yet-unreleased album

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playlist

activism, Antifa, Art, Australia, Humor, media

Humor, Shaming and Yelling At Racist Dogs w Tom Tanuki

Humor, Shaming and Yelling At Racist Dogs w Tom Tanuki

Tom Tanuki foto (stolen from Subversion1312)
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On the show this week, Bursts spoke with Tom Tanuki, front man of the group Yelling At Racist Dogs (Y.A.R.D.), a performance anti-fascist group that directs insulting yells at far-right, xenophobic events and speakers. For the hour we talk some about Tom’s background, the landscape of far-right politics in Australia and the place of humor and public shaming in confronting racist public figures in the work that Tom and his comrades do. You can follow Tom on twitter at the handle @tom_tanuki, on instagram at the same handle minus the underscore (@tomtanuki), and on fedbook by finding Yelling At Racist Dogs. And you can find the shirts Tom talks about at their bigcartel page.

[Sean Swain at 2min 53sec, Tom Tanuki at 11min 23sec]

We stole this picture from Subversion1312’s interview with Tom. A couple of the resources that Tom references at the end of the interview are Blackfulla Revolution and Black Feminist Ranter by Celeste Liddle, both pages on fedbook, and the book on Australian history he suggests is called Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe. Stay tuned for an upcoming episode where we share my interview with Andy Fleming, the maniac behind SlackBastard, an exhaustive commentary on the far right in Australia (as well as the tankie left and Andy’s thoughts about anarchism, antifa and more) up at slackbastard.anarchobase.com.

Announcements

May Day in Asheville

If you’re in Asheville this May 1st, Wednesday, there’re a few events we’re happy to share. At 10 am there’s a rad families meetup at Vermont Ave playground at the West Asheville Park. Buncombe County schools are closed due to call ins by teachers as a part of the organizing wave known as Red4Ed and there’ll be a large march and rally in Raleigh, the state capital. For those unable to make it, there’s an 11am rally by teachers at the Vance monument downtown. Festivities begin at 3pm at the park on Vermont Ave with a roving bike ride, with some bikes provided. This’ll be followed at 4:30pm by a game of kickball and at 6pm, a short parade will commence from 644 Haywood Rd complete with a marching band. At 7:30 there’ll be a potluck with free vegan and gluten-free options and, finally, a public showing of the working class-ic, “9-5”, featuring Dolly Parton. More info by visiting https://tfsr.wtf/avlmayday

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playlist

Australia, Canada, CFRC, CKUT, Immigration, June 11, Manus Island, media, Papua New Guinea, Prisons, Radio

Prison-related Audio Project Roundtable & an update from Walid on Manus Island

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For a 59 minute long, radio clean version for syndication purposes, please visit the archive.org collection.

Prison-Related Audio Roundtable

This week we feature two segments. The first is a roundtable discussion with producers from various audio projects around North America that focus on prisoner struggles and amplifying incarcerated voices. In the chat you’ll hear from me, two producers of The Prison Radio show on CFRC radio in Kingston, Ontario, a producer of the Prison Radio Show on CKUT from McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, and a producer of the June11 audio  series released this last year and revving to mark the day in solidarity with Marius Mason and other long term anarchist and ecological prisoners.

Follow-Up with Walid Zazai on Manus Island

The second conversation is an update from Walid Zazai, the 24 year old Afghani man being held on Manus Island off of the coast of Papua New Guinea. Walid has been in detention for 4 years now awaiting resettlement at the pleasure of the government of Australia. We spoke with Walid two weeks ago after the Manus Regional Processing Centre in which he was living had been closed and he and roughly 450 other refugees stayed in protest of their longtime lack of freedom of movement and the violence they feared from PNG security forces and locals on the island. More coverage of the struggle immigrants against the Australian border authorities and other updates from the Oceania can be found on the long running Anarchist radio show based there, Subversion1312. Subversion1312 is also a recently added member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts.

Now For Some Fun Events

If you’re in the Asheville area today (December 3rd 2017), at 5pm at Firestorm Books and Coffee, Blue Ridge ABC will be hosting it’s monthly letter writing session, where you can swing by, find out about political prisoners in the U.S., write to some with upcoming birthdays and meet other local radicals. After that, tonight at 8pm at the Lazy Diamond, 98-A, North Lexington Ave in downtown Asheville, comrades will be hosting a Radical Trivia night to benefit the 2nd Asheville Carolina Anarchist Bookfair, or ACAB2018, planned for this summer. Alone or in teams, you are invited to test your wits on subjects of Black Liberation, Anarchist History, Queer Resistance and more. A cash prize will go to the winning team or individual.

This episodes playlist

Australia, Certain Days, Daniel McGowan, Immigration, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, Political Prisoner, Sara Falconer, WhichSide podcast

A Refugee on Manus Island & the 2018 Certain Days Calendar

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This week on the Final Straw we feature 2 interviews.

Walid, an asylum seeker held at the Manus Regional Process Center, Papua New Guinea

First up, you’ll hear a conversation that Bursts had with a refugee seeking asylum in Australia. His name is Walid, he is 24 years old and from Afghanistan. Manus Regional Processing Centre, where Walid is being held alongside nearly 450 other men, is a facility on Papua New Guinea on the PNG Lombrum Naval Base. The processing center, from here out called Manus for short or MRPC, was run up until October 31st by the Spanish multinational company Grupo Ferrovial on behalf of the Australian Government as a way of off-shoring the housing of people seeking asylum. The center was closed October 31st after the Papuan Supreme Court determined the facility unconstitutional in breech of the promise of personal liberty.

So, the Australian government withdrew it’s medical workers, shut off electricity and water and food shipments. However, the residents of MRPC have refused to be resettled into other facilities in PNG due to fears of physical harm by members of the PNG Defence Forces, as is alleged to have happened in April of this year, as well as violence coming from local gangs wielding machetes and other weapons. The population of the island is just short of 6,000 people and locals have expressed concern that resettlement would affect their economy greatly. In the conversation, Walid mentions two fellows from the MRPC who were found recently hung by their necks in the jungle near the Processing Centre as a proof of danger the refugees face if they leave the premises.

The Obama administration had agreed in 2016 to resettle many of Australia’s asylum seekers. However, do you remember that first presidential phone call that Trump made, where he ended by saying it was a stupid deal and it was the worst conversation ever? That was #45 chatting with Australia’s Prime Minister Turnbull about the resettlement deal for refugees on Nauru and Manus Islands. Cancelling that at the time fed into the issues in PNG & Australia’s national politics with the refugees being caught in the middle as pawns. The U.S. has now apparently changed it’s tune about the Asylum seekers, having applied for whatever “extreme vetting” it was seeking and has taken in 24 of the men and resettling them.

I will admit to being a bit ignorant of the situation in Manus that people like Walid are facing, but what I do understand is this: borders are imprisoning some of the most marginalized people fleeing dangerous situations and holding them in dire circumstances. The men at the Manus Regional Processing Centre are refusing to leave for fear of their lives and in hopes of reaching a safer space and are being starved by bureaucracy. And many Australians are voicing a desire to resettle these people on the mainland.

We at the Final Straw wish the residents of MRPC the best of luck and solidarity and will continue to air their words as we receive them.

Aaaaalso, a big big big thanks to Linda from Subversion1312 podcast for helping us make this contact with Walid and with some pointers on the questions. Definitely check out their work, it’s (under various names) one of the longer running English-language anarchist radio shows and is jam packed

Sara Falconer and Daniel McGowan on the 2018 Certain Days Calendar for Political Prisoners

Secondly, we are airing an interview presented recently by the Which Side media collective with Sara Falconer and Daniel McGowan about the 2018 Certain Days Calendar for Political Prisoners. Jordan Halliday and Jeremy Parkin host the interview, and range along a wide array of ideas and topics.

From the show notes “The calendar is a joint fundraising and educational project between outside organizers in Montreal and Toronto, and three political prisoners being held in maximum-security prisons in New York State: David Gilbert, Robert Seth Hayes and Herman Bell. The initial project was suggested by Herman, and has been shaped throughout the process by all of our ideas, discussions, and analysis. All of the members of the outside collective are involved in day-to-day organizing work other than the calendar, on issues ranging from refugee and immigrant solidarity to community media to prisoner justice. We work from an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist, queer and trans positive position.”

You can check out the Which Side online store to see some giveaway deals regarding the Certain Days calendar by visiting http://www.whichsidecollective.org/ and see more from this project at http://whichsidepodcast.com

If you’d like to hear The Final Straw’s conversation with Herman Bell’s daughter in law Dr Kihana Ross which details the incident mentioned in the interview plus some more about his case, you can visit our website.

Whichside Podcast is a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts, of which we are as well. Check out our website for a steady stream of up to date anarchist audios and keep an eye out for our mobile app coming soon.

Audios of Interest:

Just a heads up, if you missed it. we launched our occasionally weekly intro to tech security podcast series, Error451 this week with a conversation on safer approaches to burner phones. Check it out and keep an ear out for more!

Also, the Anarchist Radio Network just released the November episode of B(A)DNews: Angry Voices From Around The World, which is up on the new A-Radio Network website. Keep up on episodes there.