To the uninformed, I will begin by giving some context.

Gonzaloism?

Manuel Ruben Abimael Guzman Reynoso (hereafter known as “Abimael Guzman”) was born eighty-six years ago in 1934. Guzman was loosely a Maoist, inspired by the founder of the Peruvian Communist Party and became a member himself. However, he’s more infamous for the Shining Path insurgency.

The Shining Path was a split from the original Peruvian Communist Party. Their insurgency began officially in 1980 when they burned ballot boxes in a church near Chuschi, a village in the Ayacucho region, where the Shining Path was based. At first, the Shining Path was welcomed (if not lukewarmly) by the locals, until it became apparent that the Shining Path was more interested in enriching itself and its leader than in supporting the Peruvian people.

In no instance was this more apparent than the Lucanamarca Massacre of 1983, ordered directly by Guzman himself. The massacre was ordered after Ronderos, autonomous peasant patrols, stoned and executed a local Shining Path commander. This happened because the Shining Path were a nuisance in the region, and the Ronderos were defending themselves from further Shining Path encroachment. Was this because they were counter-revolutionaries? Quite the opposite. The locals had, at first, embraced the Shining Path. What did the Shining Path “revolutionaries” do?

They made absurd demands of the locals. Alcohol was banned, strict curfews were put into place, the Shining Path expropriated supplies from the locals whilst doing no work in return, and exacerbated conflict between different families. After the Shining Path commander was (rightfully) assaulted by the Ronderos, Guzman himself ordered the Sanderos (Sendero Luminoso – Shining Path) to attack the villages of Lucanamarca, Yanaccollpa, Ataccara, Llacchua and Muylacruz. In total, sixty-four locals were murdered, the youngest of which was a six-month old baby. Was the baby a revisionist counter-revolutionary, then? In what world would it be justified for self-described “revolutionaries”, who are meant to be subordinate to the masses, to slaughter them?

There is no doubt that the Shining Path was nothing more than a Gonzaloist death cult – they idolized the use of extreme cruelty, and the “blood quota” was a core tenet of their organization. The “blood quota” was Guzman’s desire to throw the lives of his underlings into the proverbial meat grinder.

Any principled communist should be against the Gonzaloist tendency of so-called “Maoism”, if not for the purpose of subjugating the Shining Path revisionists, who tarnish the very name of Marxism and Communism. Gonzalo was fortunately arrested in Lima in 1992, and sentenced to life imprisonment in 2006. He remains there to this day.

Red Eureka Journal and Gonzaloite Revisionism

Red Eureka Journal describes itself as “principally Maoist”, and normally I don’t spend too much time fretting over niche internet journals, however, I came across them oft-handedly and feel as if I should try and clarify a few things. Before I can explain how Red Eureka Journal and other Gonzaloites follow a revisionist line, I will explain what revisionism actually is.

Revisionism is the purposeful misappropriation of Marxist principles, some of those being: the universality and primacy of contradiction, organizing the masses via the mass line, the primary contradiction in the world being between the imperialist countries and the countries oppressed and exploited by the imperialists, and that working class organization and power is the only way to eradicate the capitalist mode of production.

For example, the Communist Party of China (CPC) is a revisionist organization as it follows the Dengist line, in which bourgeois elements are allowed to thrive within the party. It is for this reason that China is not a socialist state, as it does nothing to facilitate the transition from capitalism to socialism, instead, China maintains a flourishing millionaire and billionaire class that exploits the working masses of China and Asia, as much as the imperialists from America and Europe do.

Gonzaloism is a fundamentally revisionist tendency as it hyper-focuses on Guzman the Man. It is, first and foremost, a personality cult centered around Guzman, and exists solely to make Guzman feel special for the rest of his life whilst he rots in a Peruvian prison.

As BlackLikeMao, a pan-Afrikan Maoist, writes:

The Gonzalo/Peruvian left-deviation in the International Communist Movement considers the principle of “great leadership”, the “universality of Gonzalo thought”, and the “militarization of the Party” as being additional principles of Maoism, but other than their small groups, no other Maoist formation in the First World nor the Third (including every Party that is actively waging People’s War) considers these universal principles and has rejected them as being the products of sectarians justifying their own existence. It is also the habit of these creatures to use revisionism as a cheap slur, hurled towards anybody who disagrees with their attempts to impose a dogmatic mirror of revisionism into the ICM — we’ve seen everybody from Joma Sison to Huey Newton to J. Moufawad Paul to even myself labeled as revisionists for a variety of reasons, most of which have something to do with rejecting the dogmatic and infantile antics of the left-opportunists. Revisionism is a real threat, not a slur.

Hero Worship, or Great Leadership, is against the very principles of Marxism and Maoism. Marx rejected the antiquated notion that it was Great Men who advanced society, but instead the working masses. While people might claim to be staunch Marxists whilst idolizing the cruelty of Guzman and his Shining Path, they are doing little but indicating their opportunism to other communists.

This is indicated in the Founding Statement of Red Eureka Journal, where they write:

Principally Maoism was synthesized by Chairman Gonzalo in Peru. We vehemently uphold him as the greatest living Communist on the face of the Earth. Accordingly, we also uphold the Communist Party of Peru (PCP) and the Peruvian People’s War which is still being waged to this day.

This is not something that principled Communists would say off-handedly. It comes from a place of worship, upholding one man above the entire masses is opportunism, using the revolutionary potential of the working class simply to enrich yourself and your party. It’s the kind of behavior principled communists would scoff at.

Another failing of the Red Eureka Journal is that they treat parties as sovereign, i.e, that it is the duty of communists to shed blood for their party. This once again demonstrates their opportunism; it is not the working class for whom revolutionaries die, it is the party, more often than not, their (Gonzaloites) party, because they are as perverse as they are pervasive, injecting themselves into communist spaces like ticks and fleas, siphoning away revolutionary energy into self-serving Guzman worship instead of working class power.

I write this not because I find it interesting to write long-winded responses to tiny niche Gonzaloite journals, I do this because I do not want people to fall for the opportunist lies of organizations such as Red Eureka Journal and the “principally Maoists”, who throw away Marxist principles in order to justify the existence of their Gonzalo cult. Ideological unity is a key tool of success for the communist working class movement worldwide, which is why it is necessary to call out organizations who are acting poorly, or have poorly thought out ideas, such as the Gonzaloite revisionists that manage the Red Eureka Journal.

In summary, Red Eureka Journal follows a Gonzaloite revisionist tendency that exists for no reason other than to throw working class people into the proverbial meat grinder, and to make Abimael Guzman feel special whilst he rots in some Peruvian prison somewhere.

Red Eureka Journal is also probably just two to five people sitting in Melbourne somewhere with a wordpress subscription and an Abimael Guzman poster on their wall.

I invite the people behind Red Eureka Journal to contact me with any qualms they have with this piece, however.

References/Bibliography/Sources/etc

Sullivan, C. (n.d.). Abimael Guzman. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Abimael-Guzman

El Diario interview with Abimael Guzman, https://web.archive.org/web/20071108165711/http://www.blythe.org/peru-pcp/docs_en/interv.htm

Profile of the Shining Path, https://perureports.com/shining-path/

International Center for Transitional Justice: Hatun Willakuy, https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/subsites/peru-hatun-willakuy-en/

Red Eureka Journal Founding Statement, https://redeurekajournal.wordpress.com/2021/07/12/red-eureka-journal-founding-statement/

Red Eureka Journal, ‘About Our Journal’, https://redeurekajournal.wordpress.com/about-our-journal/

‘What is Revisionism? Three types, all suck’ by BlackLikeMao, https://blacklikemao.medium.com/what-is-revisionism-three-types-all-suck-30ab42364a19

Blayney, S. (2018, May 20). The “Great Man” Theory of History and New Labour. Retrieved from https://newsocialist.org.uk/the-great-man-theory-of-history-and-new-labour/

This is going to be a tough ride.

Some context…

“Reignite Democracy Australia” was allegedly formed in Victoria during the early days of the pandemic. At the time, the pandemic was ravaging Victoria, and Premier Daniel Andrews had implement policies that were… unpopular, to say the least. Most unpopular of them all was the state-wide lockdown, which entailed border closures, the closing of all “un-essential” businesses, and the worst crime of them all: mandatory mask wearing. Of course, I jest, but to the average conservative, mandatory mask wearing is a worse crime than Srebrenica.

This was a turbulent time in Victoria. SkyNews pundits, conservative talking heads and your bog-standard lumpens rallied together to attack Daniel Andrews personally, as if degrading Daniel Andrews would suddenly make the lockdown go away, whilst the Layberites circled the wagons in uncritical support of their man, Dan.

To my knowledge, Victoria is still locked down, and the conservative pundits are still begging for Andrews’ head on a platter, bible style. And so, in this time of uncertainty and stress, one Monica Smit formed Reignite Democracy Australia, a group more focused on uplifting Smit and securing the essential right to do whatever you want without consequences than, well, actually “reigniting” democracy.

The Who

Monica Smit is, for all intents and purposes, your average middle-aged marketing person. Her LinkedIn describes her as the “Managing Director” of Reignite Democracy Australia, as opposed to a role such as, say, “Coordinator”, or “Organizer”. “Managing Director” is an interesting choice of words, however There Is No Time For That. It’s clear that she’s a blatant careerist, exploiting the somewhat valid concerns of stressed-out locked down people in order to siphon their energy into unproductive pursuits, such as protesting against lockdowns and trying to get people to refuse the vaccine. Reasonable questions about the vaccine aside, there is no doubt that Monica is yet another conservative grifter.

Monica Smit, 2017. Still taken from her Australian Survivor audition tape. Yep, she auditioned for Australian Survivor back in 2017.

Monica is hardly the only talking head in the RDA, mind you. Recent livestreams of their so-called “Truth Truck” (which were covered in a video by Tom Tanuki) show that she’s managed to rope in her younger nephew into her anti-vax grift as well. Poor little bugger.

She also worked as an “independent journalist” at one point, which is hilarious. Monica appears to have abandoned this in lieu of a more lucrative business opportunity.

One Dr. Peter A. McCullough (gosh, a doctor? they must be right!) is also referenced by RDA and Monica numerous times, so I believe it would be important to dig into this McCullough character.

Peter McCullough is a yank, and worse still, a Texan. Most notably, he went on Tucker “White Power” Carlson’s Fox show to shill hydroxychloroquine as a miracle cure to COVID-19, all despite the fact that no hard evidence proves that hydroxychloroquine is anything close to a treatment, let alone a cure. It doesn’t take a guy with a doctorate to figure that out. If you’re still on the fence about the hydroxy, just read this.

The fact that McCullough shilled hydroxy and was on Tucker Carlson’s soapbox is enough evidence that McCullough is, if I’m to be frank, a crank. McCullough also stated that there were “4,000 vaccine-related deaths” in relation to the COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, a blatantly false claim. His “source”, being otherwise valid Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) reports, is inaccurate. VAERS simply records adverse health outcomes of people who have taken vaccines, not whether or not the vaccine itself had anything to do with it. Not even VAERS itself rejects the notion that VAERS reports should be used as evidence for the “lethality” of vaccines, although clearly that has not stopped certain someones from doing so regardless.

The Broadbent Affair

It’s Monday, the 5th of July. You’re Russel Broadbent: bit of an older bloke, but otherwise an average Liberal Party MP, the Member for Monash. You’re having a great time sitting in your Warragul office doing whatever it is Liberal MPs do in their spare time when, suddenly…

…Monica Smit and RDA “protestors” arrive at your office. They’re protesting against mandatory vaccinations for aged-care workers, something so universally necessary that even you, a Liberal MP, can get behind.

It was their real Bastille moment. Monica Smit and a hundred and fifty of her RDA goons swamped Broadbent’s office that day, demanding to be personally seen by and to talk to Broadbent himself. After protesting in front of the office for a while, Broadbent caves and they eventually make their way inside; either because Broadbent decided to let them in, or they forced their way in, although I believe the former is true.

They lectured Broadbent (poor guy) on the evils of the vaccine and immune systems. Broadbent, stuck with over a hundred kooks in his little office, has no other choice but to nod in silent agreement, hoping to himself that if he just pretends to agree with them, they will leave him alone. The protest was about mandatory vaccines for aged-care workers, and one attendant, herself an aged-care worker studying medicine, concerned me with how callously she dismissed the vaccine, or even basic health restrictions. What good could possibly come from aged care workers, people who take care of the most vulnerable (medically and otherwise) members of our society, completely ignoring basic medical facts?

How is “liberty” maximized by killing people’s grandparents with the flu because washing your hands or wearing a mask is literally George Orwell’s Eighteen-Ninety-Four? Where is the “freedom” in killing old people through medical negligence? I will decline to speak of the Yugoslavian grandmother and her alternative medicines.

Smit once again centered herself during this affair, thinking that she was in a position to make demands of Russel Broadbent. Now, I’m as critical of politicians as the next person, but I don’t think waltzing into an MP’s office with over a hundred of your kook friends is going to make them any less annoyed at you. If anything, Broadbent was doing himself a disservice by allowing them to enter his office – because they will now conduct themselves with the attitude that they are entitled to a politician’s time simply because they showed up with crank placards demanding counsel.

I would say to expect more of these stunts in the future, as Smit tries to build up a support base for the Reignite Democracy organization and its parliamentarian wing.

Democracy and Lumpens

“Reignite Democracy” is a strange name for her organization, as Smit has no interest in actually “reigniting” democracy. Electoral reform and workplace democracy are nowhere to be seen on any of her websites, and it seems the only thing she wants is the freedom to be callous in her disregard for the safety of others. This is why I use the word “lumpen” to describe RDA’s supporter base: they are, at best, deluded middle-class reactionaries with wool tightly wrapped around their eyes.

“Democracy” only matters to these people insofar as it benefits them directly. Rampant political corruption is only bad when it’s lockdowns and mask mandates, and not when the ruling party is so chock full of rapists and sexual predators that they may as well rebrand to the Rapist Party. I say this with complete sincerity.

As a long-time marketing manager, Monica Smit is a petty bourgeois reactionary holding up the torch for the swarms of reactionary lumpens, uncritical supporters of the capitalist status quo, to rally around. They don’t care about democracy, or “freedom”, or “liberty”, they only care about themselves. Guy DeBord once said:

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.”

-Guy DeBord, “The Society of the Spectacle”

And in no other circumstance is the Spectacle more apparent than in the reactionary anti-vax lumpen: they are so alienated from their labor, their communities and the rest of the world that their entire identity is based around commodities that they consume; lockdowns and mask mandates prevent them from living out their consumerist spectacles. Only now that government policy effects them directly is the government “evil” and “treasonous”. Not when it was rounding up scary refugees to intern indefinitely, or sending their stormtroopers to harass journalists or activists. It is, quite frankly, an infantile worldview.

Reactionary nationalism is inherent to anti-vax ideology, and “Reignite Democracy” is no different. They claim to “respect” the ANZACs, yet their “respect” is only surface level: they respect the myth of the ANZACs, brave and stoic men fighting and dying for the good of the nation, but they detest the reality of the ANZACs, working class Australians whose lives were thrown away in imperialist wars. In fact, it isn’t too far fetched to assume that most of these people would be fine with starting more wars, say with China or some Middle Eastern country, to create more names to put on the walls of the War Memorial.

To the uncritical middle class, working class lives are disposable, and should be thrown away at the nearest opportunity, anything to satiate their never-ending hunger for spectacles.

Hilariously enough, Reignite Democracy Australia maintains a “business directory” with the names and addresses of RDA-adjacent and sympathetic businesses. The next section will be a doozy.

Naming and Shaming

The RDA’s “business directory” is an enlightening read. It contains the names and addresses of what I assume to be COVID-skeptic businesses. In their own words:

RDA has built a Business Directory to showcase businesses who understand the masks exemption laws, QR-code check in regulations and that cash is a legal tender.

Businesses who sign up will need to agree to these terms (which have been looked over by lawyers).

• We understand that, if someone has a medical condition that prevents them from safely wearing a mask, they are not obliged to reveal that condition or show us evidence. We will not refuse entry or service to anyone not wearing a mask.
• We trust you to use the QR code. Anyone who wishes to enter our store is welcome.
• We accept cash.

Find local, interstate and businesses Australia-wide that support our freedoms. A Directory of businesses who refuse to enforce unlawful directions from corrupt Governments. A place for us all to find businesses that we want to support.

In order to get your business listed on the directory, you need to either pay the Monthly Membership ($3.30 per month, first month for free) or the Yearly Membership ($29.00 per year, first month for free), which establishes that all of the businesses on this directly intentionally gave their details to the RDA, and weren’t just listed without their approval.

The membership fees for listing your business on their business directory, in case you needed more than my personal testimony.

Therefore, I am going to name and shame them all. I would encourage the reader to, if any of these businesses are in their local area, bring this up as a matter of concern with your local community, or even send them an email or something. Boycott them maybe? I don’t think blatantly callous business practices such as this should be tolerated by the community.

Anyway, this is going to be a LONG section, so skip it if you just want the rest of the article.

New South Wales:

Coral Creative Address: Kingscliff NSW 2487 Kingscliff New South Wales 2487 PH: 0467029760

Byron Health and Nutrition Address: Ocean Shores NSW 2483 Ocean Shores New South Wales 2483 PH: 0455440466

Sammi Zajko Holistic Counselling Address: Caves Beach, Lake Macquarie City Council Caves Beach New South Wales 2281 PH: +61407766525

Francey’s Fermented Food Address: Baulkham Hills NSW 2153 Baulkham Hills New South Wales 2153 PH: 0298996286

Illuminate Yoga Address: 1/24 Elizabeth St Wetherill Park New South Wales 2164 PH: 0404876820

LoanOptions.ai Address: 27 Hunter St Parramatta New South Wales 2150 PH: 0422812460

Breathing Rehabilitation Address: 109-113 Blaxland Rd Ryde New South Wales 2112 PH: 0421611278

Eclipse Body & Soul Massage Address: 28 Crystal St Waterloo New South Wales 2017 PH: 0452067549

Affordable Web Design Address: 4 Coldstream St South Coogee New South Wales 2034 PH: 0424224810

Southern Chiropractic Address: 34 Captain Cook Drive Caringbah NSW 2229 Sydney New South Wales 2229 PH: 02 9526 1555

True Colors PEOPLE Solutions Address: Camden Park Rd Camden South New South Wales 2568 PH: +61406488213

Roasted Kombi Cafe Address: 249 Clarinda St Parkes New South Wales 2870 PH: 0477136606

Holistic Health and Crookwell Address: 7012 Boorowa Rd Lost River New South Wales 2583 PH: 0448362129

Kurt Staples Building and Carpentry Address: 163 Loralyn Ave Sanctuary Point New South Wales 2540 PH: 0423592165

Healthier Home Healthier You Address: 3/28 Pinnuck St Finley New South Wales 2713 PH: 0423206590

Queensland:

PastaEnvino Address: 2 Mowbray St Port Douglas Queensland 4877 PH: 0431226126

Lov Mate Address: Cairns QLD Cairns City Queensland 4870 PH: 0403575267

SEED Creative Lab Address: Cairns QLD Cairns City Queensland 4870 PH: 0431 154 465

Plant Essentials Address: 158-162 Duckworth St Garbutt Queensland 4814 PH: +61416124210

Eternal Spirit NQ Address: Townsville City Townsville Queensland 4810 PH: 0402761898

My-Art Therapy Address: Wycarbah, Rockhampton Regional Rockhampton Queensland PH: N/A Website: https://myarttherapy.com.au/

Jacquie McIntyre Address: Southside Southside Queensland 4570 PH: 0411495037

SPIRIT TALK – Readings Address: Isabella Ave Nambour Queensland 4560 PH: 0414462265

Wardle Parners Pty Ltd Address: 8 Otranto Ave Caloundra Queensland 4551 PH: 07 5492 0300

John’s Painting Service Address: Taigum QLD 4018 Boondall Queensland 4034 PH: 0412744982

Ayurvedic Wellness & Rejuvenation Address: 28 Brookfield Road Brisbane City Queensland 4069 PH: +61430272501

MacDonald Boxing and Fitness Address: 25 Michlin St Moorooka Queensland 4105 PH: 0429166660

Fundamental Energy Address: 9 Phyllis St Eastern Heights Queensland 4305 PH: 0421164224

Natural Therapies Redbank Plains QLD Address: 38 Vicki St Redbank Plains Queensland 4301 PH: +61434868100

Mediaglue Pty Ltd Address: 41 Reedmans Rd Ormeau Queensland 4208 PH: 1300 884 757

Giri Kana Cafe Address: 82 Marine Parade Southport Queensland 4215 PH: 0755913555

Gold Coast Digestive Health Address: 13 Kurrambee Ave Ashmore Queensland 4214 PH: 07-56765076

TESOL Australia Address: Gold Coast Gold Coast Queensland 4215 PH: 07 3806 4802

Western Australia:

The Spicy Coconut Address: Denmark WA 6333 Denmark Western Australia 6333 PH: 0470149941

Awaken Denmark WA Address: 130 Springdale Heights Hay Western Australia 6333 PH: +61419926285

Craig Hitchens Therapies Address: 3 Duffy Place Dunsborough Western Australia 6281 PH: +61421213898

Wendy Schulze – Physiotherapist, Kinesiologist and Life Coach Address: 85 Solomon St, Fremantle, WA, Australia Fremantle Western Australia 6160 PH: +61418921778

Cura Integrative Medicine Address: Level 1, 206 Stirling Hwy Claremont Western Australia 6010 PH: 0892844644

BioEnergetic Wellness Address: 122 Toorak Rd Rivervale Western Australia 6103 PH: 0423669649

Kalamunda Jewellers Address: 11/22 Haynes St Kalamunda Western Australia 6076 PH: 08 9293 3043 0480 106 921

The Hangout Indoor Climbing Center Address: 12 White St, Bayswater, WA Bayswater Western Australia 6053 PH: 08 93719939

Neuro Body Balance Address: 237 Ocean Keys Blvd Clarkson Western Australia 6030 PH: 0433659730

Beyond Health Natural Therapies Address: 16 Cameley Ct Bullsbrook Western Australia 6084 PH: 08 9362 3666

Victoria:

Mech-Elech Automation Address: Benalla Road, City of Greater Shepparton Shepparton Victoria 3630 PH: 0358224499

Denfield Blind and Curtain Cleaning Address: 22 Michelle Drive, Maiden Gully Maiden Gully Victoria 3550 PH: 0439132021

Susie Your Thermomix Consultant Aus Wide Address: Unnamed Road Bendigo Victoria 3550 PH: 0409 980 519

Bendigo Body and Soul Address: 22 Michelle Drive Bendigo Victoria 3550 PH: +61448531056

Bendigo Wellness Center Address: 37 Langston St Bendigo Victoria 3550 PH: +61408953156

Wood Fired Pizza 2 You Address: Amphitheatre, Shire of Pyrenees Melbourne Victoria 3468 PH: 0421222717

The Source Holistic Therapies Address: 42 High St Beaufort Victoria 3373 PH: 0353093289

Gabriele Address: 33 Reynolds Grove Romsey Victoria 3434 PH: 0408233899

Bar Fridges Australia Address: 40 Production Dr Alfredton Victoria 3350 PH: 0438590267

Lake Bolac Caravan & Tourist Park Address: 115 Frontage Road Lake Bolac Victoria 3351 PH: 0353502329

Cocoon Window Furnishings Address: Princes Hwy Port Fairy Victoria 3284 PH: 0400 103 419

Happy Spaces Address: 4 Gilbert St Torquay Victoria 3228 PH: 0417349727

Kismet BnB in Geelong Address: 15 Norfolk Ave Grovedale Victoria 3216 PH: 0427939531

Organic Mojo Address: 364b Pakington St Newtown Victoria 3220 PH: 0416409783

Naughty gifts & sunlite hydro (trust me, I don’t know either) Address: 65 Nobility St Moolap Victoria 3224 PH: 0352298434

Seaire Yoga Address: Malop St Geelong Victoria 3220 PH: 0417556175

Trades maintenance Address: Lara VIC 3212 Lara Victoria 3212 PH: 0422311642

Lateral Insights Address: 32 Purchas St Werribee Victoria 3030 PH: +61406000969

Romacom Data & Electrical Serices Address: Point Cook VIC 3030 Point Cook Victoria 3030 PH: 0447310214

Susan Rissinich Kinesiology Address: 114 Holts Ln Darley Victoria 3340 PH: 0409114218

Pimp My Pond Address: Serrata Ct Hillside Victoria 3037 PH: 0492294732

MSB Painting Address: 17 Lemco Walk Delahey Victoria 3037 PH: 0434027828

Qtech electrical services Address: Cairnlea VIC 3023 Cairnlea Victoria 3023 PH: 0432175079

Sheppard Electrics Pty Ltd Address: Unit 6/22 Disney Ave Keilor East Victoria 3033 PH: 0411424042

Psychic Oracle Lizzy Rose Address: 6A Tuppal Pl Keilor East Victoria 3033 PH: 0449740132

Souls truth healing Address: Hillcrest Drive, Westmeadows, City of Hume Melbourne Victoria 3049 PH: 0409385562

Body First Chiropractic Pascoe Vale Clinic Address: 155 Derby St Pascoe Vale Victoria 3044 PH: 9354 2202

Jim’s Home Fresh Address: Somerton VIC 3062 Somerton Victoria 3062 PH: 03 59028674

A Better Driveway Address: 2/21 Halley Cres campbellfield Melbourne Victoria 3756 PH: +61412537776

No Fuss Painting Painting Address: South Morang VIC 3752 South Morang Victoria 3752 PH: +61401525782

Balloonaversal Entertainments Address: Doreen VIC 3754 Doreen Victoria 3754 PH: (03) 8669 1303

Melissa Gonella Kinesiology Address: 4/57 Buena Vista Dr Montmorency Victoria 3094 PH: 0418990619

Aliki Zouliou – Shiatsu Therapy Address: Mossman Dr Eaglemont Victoria 3084 PH: 0415369964

Telex / AHL / EMA Address: 38 Hall Road Warrandyte South Vic 3134 Warrandyte South Victoria 3134 PH: 03 9844 2524

Kev the Towie Address: Brice Ave Mooroolbark Victoria 3138 PH: 0405230714

Present w/-Passion Address: 1a Old Gippsland Rd Lilydale Victoria 3140 PH: 0419 130 115

Beck’s Automotive Repairs & Service Pty Ltd Address: Factory 6/2 Macquarie Place, Boronia Melbourne Victoria 3155 PH: (03) 9729 9918

Sondy Ward – Artist Address: Bellevue Court, Boronia, City of Knox Melbourne Victoria 3155 PH: 0400 662 638

TDP Tidey Design & Print Address: Boronia VIC 3155 Boronia Victoria 3155 PH: 0411828794

Invocation Holistic Clinical Psychotherapy Address: Yarra Street, Yarra Junction, Shire of Yarra Ranges Melbourne Victoria 3797 PH: 0466 599 837

Moonleather Address: 20 Forest Rd Wesburn Victoria 3799 PH: 0408565308

Boss Glass & Glazing Address: Cockatoo VIC 3781 Cockatoo Victoria 3781 PH: 0418 344 673

Martial Arts Gym Address: 1/13 Kilvington Drive, Emerald Melbourne Victoria 3782 PH: 0410 558 393

L.B DISABILITY SUPPORT SERVICES Address: Bairnsdale VIC 3875 Bairnsdale Victoria 3875 PH: 0477709616

Rosedale Traditional Joinery Address: 91 Huffers Ln Rosedale Vic Rosedale Victoria 3847 PH: 0351992088

Latrobe Valley Home Cleaning Address: 34-38 Haunted Hills Rd Newborough Victoria 3825 PH: 0467469701

Gippsland Vacuums Address: 10 Lakeview Ct Drouin Victoria 3818 PH: +61400492487

MCI Renovations Address: White Road Wonthaggi Victoria 3995 PH: 0411911068

Our Van RV Address: 2-4 Henry Wilson Dr Capel Sound Victoria 3940 PH: 1300 068 700

Chrome Projects HOME RENOVATION & CONSTRUCTION decks pergolas paving Address: Shire of Mornington Peninsula Rosebud Victoria 3939 PH: 0418548911

DHP Team Address: 45 Villawood Dve, Hastings Melbourne Victoria 3915 PH: 0414511162

Pakenham Appliances Address: 2/24 Bormar Dr Pakenham Victoria 3810 PH: 03 5607 5752

Reignite Democracy Australia Address: Pakenham VIC 3810 Pakenham Victoria 3810 PH: 0458765804

ACTEK GROUP PTY LTD Address: Pakenham VIC 3810 Pakenham Victoria 3810 PH: 0458 867 575

The Essential You – Counselling and Family Constellations Address: Somerville VIC 3912 Somerville Victoria 3912 PH: 0409705637

Tomcat Tree Services Address: Cannons Creek, City of Casey Melbourne Victoria 3977 PH: 0433294187

Aqua Live Australia Address: 15A Bonnyview Rd Mount Eliza Victoria 3930 PH: 0417858685

Jade’s Dog Walking, Pet and Aquarium Services Address: 8 Wallace Ave Frankston Victoria 3199 PH: N/A

All Scope works Address: South-East Melbourne berwick Victoria 3806 PH: 0417588228

Leaf me Blissful Address: South-East Melbourne berwick Victoria 3806 PH: N/A

Gregorys Antennas Pty Ltd Address: 15A Bonnyview Rd Mount Eliza Victoria 3930 PH: 0417858685

Refinement30beauty Address: 8 Wallace Ave Frankston Victoria 3199 PH: 0438642623

Sheoak Design Address: PO Box 6108 Frankston Victoria 3199 PH: 0402693292

Babet Brothers Real Estate Address: 2/66 Victor Cres Narre Warren Victoria 3805 PH: 0403247200

Bayside scaffolds Address: ½ Interchange Way Carrum Downs Victoria 3201 PH: 0431540497

Boudoir Photography Melbourne by Jacinta Mae Address: 619B Nepean Highway Melbourne Victoria 3197 PH: 0432997347

[Fangshi Shotokan Karate]( Fangshi Shotokan Karate) Address: 5 Blantyre Ave Chelsea Victoria 3196 PH: +61425779934

Soulfully Skin Address: 32 Cunningham Drive Endeavour Hills Victoria 3802 PH: 0416007397

Word Nerds Communication Services Address: 18 Edward Street Melbourne Victoria 3160 PH: 1300 731 955

The Holistic Virtual Assistant Address: Mordialloc, Vic 3195 Melbourne Victoria 3195 PH: 0413 776 954

Tully’s Tows Address: Mentone, Parkdale, City of Kingston Melbourne Victoria 3194 PH: 0414555141

Universal Tradesman Address: 6/2-6 Independence St Moorabbin Victoria 3189 PH: 1800411811

Dance House International Address: 189 Chesterville road Melbourne Victoria 3189 PH: +61400882779

Infinite Profit Address: 6 Bright St Brighton East Victoria 3187 PH: 0466593676

Chrysalis Kinesiology Address: 1 Winston Way Murrumbeena Victoria 3163 PH: 0421193975

Bowl Me Over Address: 414 New St Brighton Victoria 3186 PH: 0370380506

Adam and Weave Hair – Barber and Salon Address: 62 Poath Rd Hughesdale Victoria 3166 PH: 0390173727

Tim Cookson Kinesiology and German New Medicine. Address: 1/201 Ormond Rd Elwood Victoria 3186 PH: 0410454737

Adriatic St Kilda Address: 83 Acland St St Kilda Victoria 3182 PH: 0499842073

Vitality Organic Allied Health Address: 282 Richardson St Middle Park Victoria 3206 PH: 92828866

AJ Financial Planning Address: 49A Porter St Prahran Victoria 3181 PH: 03 90770277

Top dog walking Address: 53 Withers St Albert Park Victoria 3206 PH: 0430961081

Tiger Clean Address: 300 Plummer St Port Melbourne Victoria 3207 PH: 0468 443 758

Southwark Prestige Service Center Address: 155 Buckhurst St South Melbourne Victoria 3205 PH: 03 96998533

Her Property Collective Address: PO Box 494 Richmond Melbourne Victoria 3121 PH: 0407540490

Greener Cleener Address: Hawthorn East VIC 3123 Hawthorn East Victoria 3123 PH: 0455441191

Memorable Inserts Address: Queen St Melbourne Victoria 3000 PH: 0404023456

Beauty by Mil Address: Melbourne VIC 3000 Melbourne Victoria 3000 PH: 0407291816

Wasted Rubbish Removal Address: Melbourne VIC Melbourne Victoria 3000 PH: 0404131224

The Authentic Birth Keeper Address: Melbourne VIC Melbourne Victoria 3000 PH: 0412106795

Ethereal Wings Address: Melbourne VIC Melbourne Victoria 3756 PH: N/A

Normanby News & Lotto Address: 638 High St Thornbury Victoria 3071 PH: 0394842802

Big Dreams Emporium Address: Northcote VIC 3070 Northcote Victoria 3070 PH: 03 9489 2193

Classic Chiropractic Address: Suite 2, 27 Railway Place Fairfield Victoria 3078 PH: 0410306600

Henshaw Electrical & Maintenance Address: Ivanhoe VIC 3079 Ivanhoe Victoria 3079 PH: 0409198006

Lymphatic Drainage Address: 129A Canterbury Rd Blackburn Victoria 3130 PH: 0488417788

Middletons Cleaning Address: 14 Tilson Dr Vermont Victoria 3133 PH: 0421017680

Mosaic & Moonlight Natural Products Address: Mitcham VIC 3132 Melbourne Victoria 3132 PH: +61433101330

Charis Natural Nutrition Address: 36 Davison St Mitcham Victoria 3132 PH: 0409951665

Body First Chiropractic Ringwood Clinic Address: 139B Wantirna Rd Ringwood Victoria 3134 PH: 9879 8338

South Australia:

Coober Pedy Views Address: Coober Pedy SA 5723 Coober Pedy South Australia 5723 PH: 0428717550

Matilda Bawden Social Work Services Address: Quondong Ave Parafield Gardens South Australia 5107 PH: 0412836685

Off The Couch Therapy Address: Pimpala Rd Woodcroft South Australia 5162 PH: N/A

Hemp Hemp Hooray Pty Ltd Address: 20 Gawler Street Mount Barker South Australia 5251 PH: 0883983809

Ask the Body Kinesiology Address: Acacia Street Mount Barker South Australia 5251 PH: N/A

Greenscope Termite and Pest Control Address: 25 Midhurst Ave Christie Downs South Australia 5164 PH: 0406935576

“Freedom Fighters” or Useful idiots?

Members of Reignite Democracy Australia often describe themselves as “freedom fighters”. This is laughable for several reasons. Primarily, RDA is not “fighting for freedom”, it is at most a stuffy reactionary movement that will serve as useful idiots to even worse advocates and the typical mob of conservative grifters. Secondary to this is that the “tyranny” they cry about simply does not exist. This is not me trying to gaslight them into silence, mind you, I am just acknowledging reality.

These people wouldn’t know what “tyranny” is even if the black jackboots of state stormtroopers stomped their teeth out on their living room carpet one day. Tyranny is not lockdowns and mask mandates; these are necessary measures to stop the spread of a very real global pandemic. If they want tyranny, they need only look at the foul mistreatment of Kristo Langker at the hands of the NSW government’s secret police. But the RDA crowd don’t care about police violence (unless it happens to them), in most circumstances they will Back The Blue and lick the boot of the Thin Blue Line.

They are not fighting for “freedom”. Their intended outcome is for hundreds of thousands to have their freedom stripped from them through death, or worse. What good is “freedom” when you’re sick as a dog from COVID-19? What possible material benefit could they gain from the “freedom” to ignore health advice? None, I say. Because they don’t care about anyone else, they are so alienated from their surroundings that all they can think about is how it will benefit them.

RDA and the anti-vax/anti-lockdown scene is also inexcricably tied to the reactionary sovereign citizen movement, a deranged cult of nationalists who declare themselves sovereign from the Australian government, and believe themselves to have legal “cheat codes” that can allow them to get out of things like paying taxes. Once again, conservatives show their true colors, and reveal themselves to be infantile delinquients who care about no one and nothing but themselves and maybe their immediate social circle.

One such Sovereign Citizen, deranged ultra-nationalist Mike Holt (from the organization Citizens Initiated Referendum) wrote an open letter of congratulation to Monica Smit, further cementing the overlap between Smit’s brand of anti-vax conspiracy mongering and Holt’s ultranationalist Sovereign Citizenship. They believe that parliament acts on behalf of a “foreign corporation” (trust me, it’s complicated), and while Holt is correct in saying that parliament does not exist to serve “the people”, he is incorrect in stating that this is because of some New World Order conspiracy by Post-Modern Neo-Marxist Hippie Greenie Anarcho-Communist Marxist-Leninist-Maoists.

The open letter was an email sent to Monica after she spoke at the “Millions March” rally in Melbourne, a gathering of reactionary conservatives and far-right goons. Monica Smit and Mike Holt are good at one thing, and that’s playing the part of populist leaders. And that’s what it is at the end of the day: an act. They, like other politicians, do not care about working-class Australians, and simply use them as pawns in their careerist schemes to enrich themselves at our expense.

Please, for the love of God and all that is holy, do not fall for their tricks, and wizen up to the fact that they are playing you like a God-damned fiddle. While Mike Holt peddles his “Common Law” tripe, and Monica peddles her “people’s will” garbage, it is up to us, working-class advocates and anti-capitalists, to dismantle their political factions and scatter their organizations to the wind.

I shall now conclude.

Reignite Democracy Australia is a cult, centered around Monica Smit and other psuedo-intellectual figures with empty doctorates. It is an inherently reactionary movement alienated from the material reality of the conditions we live within, and exists solely to prop up post-COVID capitalism, and act as a controlled opposition to the Neoliberal beast of the Liberal Party and the Labor Party.

They have numerous supporters across several states, primarily business owners (big shocker), and their connections to nationalist groups and sovereign citizens is concerning, to say the least. What is to be done? We must organize against Reignite Democracy and its sympathizers, and deny Monica the platform she so desperately craves for herself.

Quick reading recommendation (because I do these now): The Society of the Spectacle by Guy DeBord.

Bibliography/References/Sources

Reignite Democracy Australia homepage: https://www.reignitedemocracyaustralia.com.au/

Monica Smit’s LinkedIn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/monica-smit-b9012438

Monica Smit’s website: https://www.monicasmit.com/news

Davies, A. (2021 Jan 10). How an anti-mask firebrand fans the right's flames against Dan Andrews online. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jan/10/how-an-anti-mask-firebrand-fans-the-rights-flames-against-dan-andrews-online

Simons, M. (2021 Feb 22). Melbourne doctors under review for promoting discredited Covid treatment. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/feb/22/melbourne-doctors-under-review-for-promoting-discredited-covid-treatment

Teoh, F. (n.d.). Vaccines are a safer alternative for acquiring immunity compared to natural infection and COVID-19 survivors benefit from getting vaccinated, contrary to claims by Peter McCullough. Retrieved from https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/vaccines-are-a-safer-alternative-for-acquiring-immunity-compared-to-natural-infection-and-covid-19-survivors-benefit-from-getting-vaccinated-contrary-to-claims-by-peter-mccullough/

On Russel Broadbent: https://www.russellbroadbent.com.au/

Monica Smit “confronts” Liberal MP Russel Broadbent: https://www.reignitedemocracyaustralia.com.au/confront/

Mike Holt’s open letter to Monica Smit: https://cirnow.com.au/an-open-letter-to-monika-smit-of-reignite-democracy/

Bruce Pascoe’s 2014 piece Dark Emu puts forth a compelling argument for Australia to reconsider its precolonial history. It provides primary and secondary sources to back the claim that Indigenous Australians were not uniformly “hunter gatherers”, and instead had diverse and complex societies. Overall, it is an interesting read, and poses important questions about Australian pre-colonial history.

Dark Emu Exposed, however, it the opposite, in more ways than one. It attempts to “disprove” Dark Emu with what can only be described as intellectually dishonest claims: most of which rest on Bruce Pascoe being “politically motivated” (as if the only motivation to challenge historical misconceptions is “politics”, or that Dark Emu Exposed is any less “political”). The ultimate thesis of this site is, in all honesty, a reinforcement than pre-colonial Indigenous society was uniformly a “stone age hunter gatherer” society, and it only follows then that therefore they were savages and inferior to the superior and intellectual European tradition.

This is not a stretch, mind you; they describe themselves as “Quiet Australians”, a moniker used by Scott Morrison to refer to LNP voters, an overtly political phrase used by the reactionary right-wing to refer to the mythical majority who agree with them but are too frightened to say so, or else risk being attacked by the totally real Woke Mob. This is an infantile position to hold.

In this piece, I will do my best to critique Dark Emu Exposed, by not only addressing the arguments they make which supposedly “disprove” Pascoe’s original, but also do what many people have probably forgotten to do: contemplate the implications of such “rebuttals”. As I am not myself an academic (don’t worry, neither are the Dark Emu Exposed crew, so I am no less under-qualified than they are in this field), I will do my best to cite as many relevant sources as possible.

First, I will go into the background of Dark Emu Exposed and give you a general outline of the people involved.

This article will also go into genocides against Indigenous people, so consider this a sensibility warning. If you would rather not read about justifications for colonial genocide, or the murder of Indigenous Australians, give this one a miss. I won’t mind.

Part One: The Who

According to their about page, they are managed by one Roger Karge, and allegedly have “thirty independent researchers”. The next sentence, “Unfortunately, in the current climate in which we live, most of our researchers need to operate under pseudonyms to protect their careers” gives the general impression that these “researchers” are more-than-likely the kind of “academics” who think they are being “censored” by the Woke Mob for telling The Truth!

Roger Karge is himself somewhat of an enigma. He cannot be found by a single google search, however I did manage to procure the link to a LinkedIn page which turned out to be dead. My only frame of reference for this “Roger Karge” person is a twitter post by Kate Emerson calling him a “liar” and a “fraud” (a great first-impression of Karge, I’m sure) and a brief write-up on Richard O’Brien’s isocracy blog.

In it, O’Brien posits that Karge is part of the right-wing reactionary upheavel in response to Pascoe’s book, which includes their disgusting attempts at degrading Pascoe by “disproving” his aboriginality. I don’t think I need to go into the problematic implications of white people feeling the need to “disprove” someone’s indigenousness (as if they have the right to), however I will talk about this later in the piece.

Karge’s blog (Dark Emu Exposed) is the source of these claims, and Karge describes himself as, get this, AMATEUR HISTORIAN! The “amateur historian” and his merry band of kooks demand to be taken seriously, it seems. Karge is allegedly a businessman based in Melbourne, and an occasional writer for the Murdoch Press. This has given me enough of an impression of Karge: a right-wing faux-historian who gathered his other faux-historian mates to make baseless, vitriolic claims about Pascoe’s book.

Now, am I saying that Pascoe’s Dark Emu is some perfect record? Of course not, nothing ever is, but it is a far better historical analysis than anything Karge and his kook friends could come up with. The primary and most fatal failing of Karge is that he mistakenly believes that Dark Emu is an academic work, which it isn’t, because Pascoe is not a historian. Does this take away from the central thesis of the book? Not necessarily. But does this lend credence to Karge’s argument? Not in the slightest.

The crew behind Dark Emu Exposed appear to be nothing more than right-wing charlatans, and I’m using the most civil words possible to describe them. A businessman amateur historian has no right to declare himself more qualified to speak on a matter than Pascoe, especially when Pascoe himself does not make a similar declaration. Karge is throwing knives in the dark and hoping one sticks.

Part Two: The What

I will now talk about the site itself. Dark Emu Exposed is essentially a blog, which mostly focuses on Pascoe the Man and not Dark Emu, ironically enough. Karge and his kooks put great effort into trying to paint Pascoe as a liar, a narcissist, and worst of all – a Leftist! It even goes so far as to reference GEORGE ORWELL, a renowned socialist, in the classic conservative style.

One of the main arguments that Karge makes is that pre-colonial Aboriginal societies were, and I quote:

“classic stone age hunter-gatherers”

There are… many problems with this statement.

Firstly, does Karge mean for us to believe that hunter-gatherer societies were all identical? There is no other way to interpret this statement, which leads us to another critical flaw of Dark Emu Exposed: it is an idealist interpretation of history! It views “hunter gatherers” as all being poverty stricken savages who, somehow, can’t figure out language or religion. On the contrary, you don’t even need a PhD in prehistory (or whatever the relevant field is, I’m unsure) to figure out that there is no such thing as a “classic stone age hunter-gatherer society”. Do they mean cavemen? Such caricatures did not exist in reality. Karge and his ilk are idealists, pure and simple.

In reality, hunter gatherers had fairly complex economic and social structures. To put it into context: hunter gatherers did not work nearly as much as we do today, as much of their labor was expended in, well, hunting and gathering. This was not an all-consuming process, and often left entire weeks of free time available to them. I believe this comes from a fairly eurocentric view of “progress”: one that is represented accurately by the “tech tree” notion of technological progress, one that posits that technological and social advancement is a linear process, in which certain pre-requisites must be made before a new advancement can be “achieved”. How can you have religion if you don’t have a writing system? How can you develop societies without the wheel?

These misconceptions sour all discussion of any pre-colonial civilizations, be they from Australia, Africa, Asia, Turtle Island (the Americas, North and South), the Pacific, the Carribean, and so on. It fuels ahistorical “Western Chauvinist” narratives that The West Is Best, which is an idealist tendency.

Karge also tries to argue that Dark Emu is a “political” work, and that Pascoe is some kind of “Leftist”. Bruce Pascoe’s personal political beliefs are only tangentially related to Dark Emu; and it’s not like Karge challenges the political convictions of the settlers he believes uncritically either. That brings me to my next point.

Karge quotes the diaries of settlers and takes them at face value, whilst simultaneously waxing poetic about the need for “intellectual honesty”. He’s really showing that he’s less “historian” and more “amateur”. Anyone who is even superficially interested in history would (or at the very least, should) know that primary sources such as diaries must not be taken at first hand, they must be approached from a critical perspective. Consider these important questions:

• Who is the source? In this case, who is writing the diary?
• What are they writing about?
• What is their context?
• What is the purpose behind their writing?
• Who are they writing to?

These questions are by no means perfect, but they address the general who-what-when-where-why. Now, consider the following quote:

“They [the Australian Aborigines] are, of course, nomads — hunters and foragers who grow nothing, build nothing, and stay nowhere long. They make almost no physical mark on the environment…They move about, carrying their scant possessions, in small bands of anything from ten to sixty persons…Their tools and crafts, meagre — pitiably meagre — though they are, have nonetheless been good enough to let them win the battle for survival, and to win it comfortably at that. With no pottery, no knowledge of metals, no wheel, no domestication of animals, no agriculture, they have still been able to people the entire continent…”

- W.E.H. Stanner, The Dreaming & Other Essays, Black Inc Agenda, 2010, p 64,65 & 70 [Taken from the Dark Emu Exposed ‘about’ page]

When approaching this quote, we need to take a critical position. Who is the writer? W. E. H. Stanner was no random settler, he was an anthropologist who worked closely with Indigenous Australians and also helped establish the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. However, it must be acknowledged that Stanner himself was impressed by the cultural richness of Indigenous Australian culture, which he divulges about in The Dreaming and Other Essays, the alleged source of this quote. It must be said, though, that this quote, if it even is from Stanner, is incorrect.

It is possible to be profound whilst also factually incorrect. This is not fault of Stanner’s himself, in his time this was probably the accepted fact, however this notion of the unsophisticated hunter-gatherer was disproven by evidence found in Victoria. It should also be said that the above “Stanner” quote is similar to another quote from an unrelated 1984 text, Their Ghosts May Be Heard:

The Aborigines were nomads or wanderers. The wandered from place to place as they searched for food and water. But each tribe has its own special territory and members of the tribe did not move outside this area […] The Aborigines knew the places where they would be most likely to find water and things to eat and they visited each place in turn […] The Aborigines did not farm the land. They didn’t plant and harvest crops or herd animals.

- “Their Ghosts May Be Heard: Australia to 1900”, Sheena M. Coupe, 1984.

Am I saying that Karge invented a quote by a renowned anthropologist in order to prove his point? No, of course not, however the similarity between the quotes cannot be dismissed. Either way, archeological evidence found in the 1970s disproves this claim nonetheless. Which is startling for Sheena Coupe’s piece, as it was written after these claims had already been proven as factually incorrect.

On Gunditjmara country in Victoria, it was discovered (as early as the 1840s) that the Gunditjmara people had been constructing and using eel traps. Right off the bat, this disproves the notion that they were simple “hunter gatherers”, however if you aren’t immediately convinced by eel traps alone, they had also constructed roughly six hectares’ worth of channel systems that worked in tandem with the eel traps. Hunter gatherer nomads do not do this. This was initially discovered in 1841 by one George A. Robinson, who was Chief Protector of the Aborigines at the time.

On this, he wrote:

“an immense piece of ground trenched and banked, resembling the work of civilized man but which on inspection I found to be the work of the Aboriginal natives, purposefully constructed for catching eels.”

- George Augustus Robinson, on the Gunditjmara eel traps, 1841.

I have little reason to believe that Robinson invented these eel traps himself, especially when contemporary evidence was found further proving their existence. At the time (the 1840s), this clear and conclusive evidence of Indigenous agriculture was ignored. After all, they were engaging in a process of dispossession, and it was politically inconvenient for them to acknowledge that Indigenous Australians tilled the land.

The proper investigative work began in the 1970s with Dr. Peter Couts, from the Victoria Archeological Survey. The survey was carried out at Lake Condah, which was central to the Gunditjmara eel-trap channels, as originally discovered by George A. Robinson. Writing on this investigation, Ian J. McNiven commented:

Coutts and his team found what local Gunditjmara people had long known about – extensive Aboriginal fish-trapping systems comprising hundreds of metres of excavated channels and dozens of basalt block dam walls constructed over innumerable generations before European contact. Coutts estimated that the volume of basalt blocks moved measured in “the many hundreds of tonnes”.

(McNiven, 2017)

Coutts, then, had stumbled across the same set of extensive fishing systems, among them the aforementioned eel traps, thus proving conclusively that (in Victoria at least), pre-colonial Indigenous Australians had developed methods of agriculture unique to their material circumstances. This was a long tangent, but for good reason. There is no mention of this by Karge and his kooks, only further declarations of Pascoe’s “political bias” and of the “Dark Emu hoax”. Accepting that pre-colonial Indigenous Australians had complex societies would force European-descending Australians to challenge their preconcieved notions of their national identity, and require them to embrace a more plural, multicolored interpretation of their national history (McNiven and Bell, 2010, pg. 83).

Part Three: The Frontier Massacres and the Truth Telling Commission

I believe this requires a section of its own as I will go into the necessity of “Truth-Telling” Commissions as they pertain to anti-Indigenous massacres of the past, generally during the Frontier Wars. This is a single article posted by Karge on the Dark Emu Exposed blog, which I have many problems with. Firstly, the title. “Massacres & Makarrata – Truth-Telling or Moving-on? It's Our Choice”. I disagree with the framing.

Karge words this as if Indigenous Australians, suffering from two centuries of inter-generational trauma brought upon them by imperialist genocide, can simply “move on”. Imagine the shock and horror from rightists if I was to write a popular article entitled “War and the Anzacs – Truth-Telling or Moving-on? It’s Our Choice”. They would go mad and scream for blood. And they both suffer from the same fatal flaw: that they dismiss the importance of their respective massacres.

Another primary mistake Karge makes in his article is that he attributes telling the truth about Australia’s colonial history to “denigrating Australia”, immediately poisoning the well in terms of the conversation itself. How can we ever have a truthful, honest conversation about Australia’s history if the rightists can’t even accept that it’s possible to be critical of the wider narrative of Australia without “denigrating” it? This belies the entire purpose of the Dark Emu Exposed blog: they are not interested in “conversation”, they are trying to stop it. The “arguments” this blog makes are thought-terminating. They do not want you to think critically about Australia’s history, they want you to nod along and agree uncritically with their ahistorical narratives. Now, with that aside…

The Frontier Wars are an unrecognized series of guerilla conflicts in Australia between Indigenous Australians and the European settlers. Contrary to the popular narrative, Australia’s settlement was far from peaceful. In fact, roughly 20,000 Indigenous Australians and 3,000 Europeans died in this conflict, spanning from 1788 (from first contact with the Europeans) to at the latest, 1934. However, by that time, the fighting had mostly died down, as the Settlers consolidated power.

“Makarrata” is a Yolgnu Matha word referring to “peacemaking”. The purpose of “makaratta”, then, is to make peace between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, by telling the truth about our history. Australian colonization was a brutal, genocidal process. This is not the fault of individual white people. No one is blaming them for this. What we simply want is, well, the truth. Makaratta will heal the wounds of inter-generational trauma, and begins with acknowledging that this brutal history is shared by all Australians (Grieve-Williams, 2019).

In response to this, Karge instead declares that he will create a map plotting areas in which massacres against Indigenous Australians by other Indigenous Australians took place. What does he hope to accomplish with this? What does this have to do with the Frontier Wars? He has done the equivalent of throwing out “13/50” in a discussion about police violence against POC Americans. It is a lacklustre attempt at dodging the core thesis of Makaratta, and instead distract people by presenting a dodgy map of “native on native violence”. It is an inherently reprehensible act.

In their article, Karge does not even attempt to disprove the presented Frontier Massacres, but instead dodges this by talking in length about his reprehensible “Indigenous Massacre Maps”, that is, maps of massacres of Indigenous Australians by other Indigenous Australians. This only serves to prove further that Karge has an infantile thought process, and is incapable of accepting criticism of what to him is a universal fact. This is the main issue with “debating” conservatives: they don’t care about debate, they don’t care about facts, they only care about their own feelings and emotions. They are idealists, and will remain idealists.

Karge makes particular reference to a piece by Michael Grewcock entitled “Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide*”*. In the usual Karge fashion, he insults Grewcock by declaring that he “hates his country”, and dismisses his piece as being “post modernist rubbish”. Again, Karge does not try to hide his political biases: he is a rightist through-and-through, and treats his contemporaries as traitors if they don’t support his ahistorical narrative.

On the topic of Grewcock’s piece, I found it to be unproblematic. Of course, I’m not a rightist such as Karge, and find no issue with someone questioning the predominant narrative of Australian history. I found his abstract to be the most interesting:

This article explores ways in which state crime theory, which is predominantly based on contemporary conceptions of human rights, might be applied to settler-colonial violence and the forced dispossession of the land from Indigenous peoples. The Australian state was established through the foundational violence inherent to settler colonialism and the processes of primitive accumulation that underpinned it. This created the conditions for ongoing structural violence, inflicted through a continuum of criminogenic, arguably genocidal state practices designed to disrupt – if not eliminate – the social worlds and collective identities of Indigenous peoples. These practices have been normalized through Australian nationalist ideology and its associated narratives of progress, democracy and the rule of law. Theories of state crime need to break from these normative narratives to make sense of the criminogenic nature of settler colonialism.

- Abstract, “Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide”, Matthew Grewcock

If the abstract interested you as it did me, I implore you to read the full piece, found here. Anti-Colonial ideas are not “post modernist trash”, on the contrary, they are enlightening perspectives on historical issues relating to Settler-Colonialism. Karge’s blog is rightist trash. In response to this, Karge edited a few words to create a version that degrades Indigenous Australians, which again, proves his infantility. See below:

Aboriginal societies were maintained by laws which required institutionalized violence for their maintenance over the 50,000 years of occupation. This created the conditions for ongoing structural violence, resulting in regular, systematic and ritual conflict that varied from display-parrying right up to whole clan or tribe extirpation and genocide. These practices were so normalized by 1770-1788 that many Aboriginal Nations were unable to negotiate or treat with the British settlers at First Contact in a legal, non-violent way. This normative narrative of systematic and structural tribal violence allows us to make sense of the failure of Aboriginal societies to successfully make agreements with settler colonialism.

- Dark Emu Exposed

What is this, if not a childish attempt at dunking on someone you don’t like? Why should the Indigenous Australians have “negotiate” with the invading British settlers, anyway? What right to the British have to “non-violent” and “legal” contact? They are invaders in a foreign land. They deserved no civility in the same way Wehrmacht soldiers in France during World War Two did not deserve “non-violent legal contact”. This laughable attempt at dismissing Grewcock’s abstract is a reflex defense of the nationalist mythology of Australian colonization: that Australia was a wild and savage continent that had to be tamed by the civilized Europeans. As conservatives tie their identity to this mythology, it is no wonder that they respond in such a way to anyone who dares to challenge it.

Makaratta is an important process. I’m now going to completely ignore the original article from Dark Emu Exposed now, as I have substantially proven that it is nothing more than reprehensible shlock. Truth Telling is a fundamental process of reconciliation. How can we uplift Indigenous Australians and heal the shared scars of history if we are incapable of acknowledging the historical truth? Denying history is but a political convenience for the rightists. History to them is but a tool to bludgeon the marginalized with. Those who control the historical narrative, it is said, control the way we think. This is no more truer than with the conservative hit piece Dark Emu Exposed, which, like a baby having a tantrum, flails about in a juvenile attempt at silencing opposition.

Makarrata, and truth telling, is an important step on the road to reconciliation. Through the peace making process, deeper connections can be made with our Indigenous contemporaries. We (royal ‘we’) must not view them as tamed savages, but as equals, people who were brutally suppressed, and need to be given the chance to heal. This is not helped by rightists such as Karge who throw tantrums at the mere suggestion that British settlers weren’t perfect Super-Men who were superior in every way. Karge and his ilk make me angry beyond belief. I will, however, temper myself.

Part Four: The One Where It Gets Awkwardly Personal

The implications of Karge’s worldview, especially how it pertains to Indigenous Australia, is incredibly problematic. It views the Indigenous as inferior savages who needed to be tamed, inherently violent, cruel and brutish. This is far from the truth, of course. It was the settlers who were savage, who were violent, cruel, brutish, uncaring, genocidal. Where is the civility in mass murder? In dispossession? In massacring pregnant women and children? There is none, except that which exists in the deluded brains of rightists.

I refuse to accept this narrative. To make this personal, I am “biracial”. White mother and Pasifika father. My great-grandfather on my mother’s side was Indigenous. Making me Indigenous, insofar as I am related to him. There are various insults and narratives thrown out about biracial people, especially Indigenous Australian ones: that they are only pretending, that they are pulling a “grift” to try and “benefit” from being Indigenous. What, pray tell, could someone possibly gain from being Indigenous? Our inheritance is two centuries of inter-generational trauma, dehumanization, animalization, dispossession. I don’t know his name, or where he came from, but I know that my great-grandfather was Indigenous.

He lived through the 30s and 40s, and passed away in the 50s. During his lifetime, he could not vote. He, more likely than not, had to live under a paternalistic colonial goverment that treated him like a child who could not make his own decisions without the enlightened guidance of the White Man.

I mention this because it is because of this that I relate to Bruce Pascoe’s struggle. Having all sorts of people publicly deny your Aboriginality, to try and gaslight you into believing that you’re just another White Savior. It is degrading. What is the “benefit” in that? There is no material benefit in being Indigenous. As much as rightists want to make out that Indigenous Australians get “free money”, there is no dignity in welfare. The welfare state exists to keep people in a constant state of almost-poverty: never providing so little that you are constantly starved, but never so much that you can feel like a dignified human being ON YOUR OWN LAND.

I refuse to accept Karge’s narrative because I, an Indigenous Australian, disconnected from my heritage because of men like him, refuse to continue to believe that I am inferior, or that the massacre of my people was justified. I have made that choice, as has Pascoe and many others. White rightists such as Karge are threatened by our demand for humanity, why else would they put so much effort into silencing us and our struggle? Makaratta will come in spite of the conservative status quo.

I do not need a special piece of paper signed by the State to “prove” my heritage. No one does. Whites pretending to be Indigenous is nothing more than a myth invented by rightists to justify draconian restrictions on Indigenous heritage and identity. We deserve, at the very least, the slightest glimmer of dignity. But I am no idealist: I know we won’t get it from the righists, or the State itself.

You may reject this view as being an overly pessimistic “black armband” view of history. You are free to make your own choices, as I have made mine.

Conclusion

Karge’s vitriolic blog Dark Emu Exposed is nothing more than an intellectually dishonest, superficial attempt at “disproving” Bruce Pascoe’s book. Karge’s fatal flaw is that he treats Dark Emu as if it’s an academic record, which it was never intended to be. Pascoe is a storyteller, not a historian. Although historians do tell stories, Pascoe is not an academic, and received no formal education in the field of history or archaeology. He simply compiled the sources he had at hand to create a compelling argument to challenge the predominant narrative: that Indigenous Australians were nothing more than simple hunter gatherers prior to the European settlers invading in 1788.

I hope in this article that I managed to provide a somewhat convincing counter argument to Karge’s Dark Emu Exposed, and it has at least interested you enough to do some independent reading. Dark Emu is far from perfect, and Bruce Pascoe isn’t either, but it is nonetheless an interesting and thought-provoking work that should be read critically, of course, but not denied wholesale because of pre-existing political biases, such as is that case of the rightists who reject it as a “hoax”.

This was a big article, my biggest, in fact. I wrote bits and pieces of this in last two weeks, mostly my thoughts on Dark Emu Exposed, my thoughts on the historial idealism of rightists such as Karge, and so on. Refined it with research.

Now, I could critique every single blog post on Dark Emu Exposed, but neither you nor I actually care enough about the idealist arguments it poses.

I was originally going to post a chapter-by-chapter analysis and review of Trotsky’s Fascism: What it is and how to fight it (which is really just a collection of various essays and letter extracts he wrote on the topic) but this Dark Emu Exposed thing was really weighing me down and I had to get that out first to the twentyish people who seem to read these things, l-o-l.

Below will be all of my references/sources. Go nuts.

Bibliography/References/Sources

Pascoe, B. (2014). Dark Emu. Broome, WA: Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation.

Dark Emu Exposed. About Us. Retrieved from https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/about-us

Hirst, M. (2020, January 24). How ‘Dark Emu’ upset the right-wing media. Retrieved from https://independentaustralia.net/australia/australia-display/how-dark-emu-upset-the-right-wing-media,13523

Marks, R. (2020, February 5). Taking sides over ‘Dark Emu’. Retrieved from https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/russell-marks/2020/05/2020/1580868886/taking-sides-over-dark-emu#mtr

Earp, J. (2020, January 11). Australians Are Standing With Author Bruce Pascoe After Peter Dutton Referred Him To The Police. Retrieved from https://junkee.com/bruce-pascoe-andrew-bolt/237558

O’Brien, R. (2020, January 11). Bruce Pascoe Exposed?. Retrieved from https://isocracy.org/content/bruce-pascoe-exposed

Moore, R. (2020, August 3). The enduring myth of the hunter-gatherer. Retrieved from https://www.utas.edu.au/news/2020/8/3/1043-the-enduring-myth-of-the-hunter-gatherer/

McNiven, I. (2017, February 8). The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind-the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800

McNiven, I. & Bell, D. (2010). Fishers and Farmers: historicising the Gunditjmara freshwater fishery, western Victoria. La Trobe Journal, No. 85 May, 83-103.

Dark Emu Exposed. (2021, March 24). Massacres & Makarrata – Truth-Telling or Moving-on? It's Our Choice. Retrieved from https://www.dark-emu-exposed.org/home/2016/2/6/chairs-for-the-foyer-yrkzx

Grieve-Williams, V. (2019 July 4). Makarrata: The Aboriginal healing process we should all know about. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/topics/voices/culture/article/2019/07/04/makarrata-aboriginal-healing-process-we-should-all-know-about

Grewcock, M. (2018). Settler-Colonial Violence, Primitive Accumulation and Australia's Genocide. State Crime Journal, 7(2), 222-250. doi:10.13169/statecrime.7.2.0222

Russel, L. (2021, April 23). The ‘frontier wars’: Undoing the myth of the peaceful settlement of Australia. Retrieved from https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2021/04/23/1382962/the-frontier-wars-undoing-the-myth-of-the-peaceful-settlement-of-australia

Allam, L. (2019 March 7). Australia risks 'dysfunction' without truth telling about massacres, advocates say. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/mar/07/australia-risks-dysfunction-without-truth-telling-on-massacres-advocates-say

Reconciliation Australia. (2020, August 19). Truth-telling and reconciliation. Retrieved from https://www.reconciliation.org.au/truth-telling-and-reconciliation/

Look at this image. “Hospo Voice Plus Membership”. Does this sound like you're joining a union, or signing up for some internet streaming service? Words cannot describe how wrong this is.

“Hospo Voice” is a project of the United Worker's Union and at one point did, in fact, have good organizers, and was fairly militant. Now look at it. It has “membership tiers” and is structured like an internet streaming service. Pay $79 a month and we'll help you deal with a dodgy boss, but unless you have that Golden Platinum Plus membership the most we can do is offer you some comforting words.

How completely divorced from reality do you have to be to consider this anything close to a good idea? What thoughts were running through the heads of the people who made this? What tangible, material benefit does having tiered membership in a union achieve?

I'll tell you: nothing. Why nothing? Because union bosses (a disgusting concept) are nothing more than scabs. They want to rake in the dues money and run off to do a Labor Party run in the Senate or something, then become Prime Minister and screw over the same workers they were meant to be helping.

This is not about building a “bigger and more powerful union”, you don't thousands of dollars to do that, what this is about is out-of-touch union bureaucrats displaying their complete and total disconnect from the workers they supposedly represent. The true irony is that most hospitality staff can't even afford $79 a month! Who did they even think would pay that much anyway? The boss? The fact that none of these “membership tiers” ever even mention decision making at all is concerning enough in and of itself.

Hospo Voice 2.0, described as a “major upgrade”, has been nothing more than a cheap attempt at gig-ifying unions. Its name will forever be tarnished by this laughable and disgusting attempt at rebranding, and so the only hope left for hospitality workers is for them to form their own unions, not join the pet projects of bigger unions led by out-of-touch bureaucrats who wouldn't even piss on them if they were on fire.

Unions in this country have, over time, become nothing more than the mere mediators between workers and capital, instead of being the organ of working class power. Staffed with middle class university-trained bureaucrats and bourgeois politicians, the major unions of today are nothing more than thinly veiled attempts at controlling workers, and exploiting them further for political brownie points. Much of Labor's apparent “legitimacy” comes with their connection to the ACTU monopoly.

Self proclaimed “unionists” have become nothing more than out of touch drones hooked on party politics, with no other aspiration than to have a career in “unionizing” and in politics. Careerist cockroaches continue to, time and time again, spit in our faces and laugh at our misery. They are the same kind of fools to get excited because Anthony Albanese made a flimsy promise to publish a white paper on full employment, once he's elected Prime Minister, of course...

Empty promises and $79 a month membership fees are all you're going to get from the Labor aristocrats of 2021. Is it just me, or is this going to be the future of unions now?

This is probably going to be a big one. In this piece, I'm going to talk about:

• A critique of Bob Hawke,
• A critique of Jack Lang,
• A critique of Kevin Rudd and Labor optimism,
• Why you can't trust reformists!

There's gonna be some scrolling in this one.

Bob Hawke, Union Smasher

source

Bob Hawke. Usually when he's mentioned, you think of nice things such as Medicare, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1984, “opening up Australia's economy”, and so on. All great things, I'm sure. But what needs to be said, because it isn't said enough, is that when Bob Hawke “opened up the economy to the world”, what he did was introduce a series of neoliberal corporatist economic reforms that amongst other things, gutted union power in this country. So-called “union man” Bob Hawke's Accords not only restricted the circumstances in which unions could “lawfully” engage in industrial action (i.e go on strike), but introduced severe, draconian punishments for unions that didn't play ball.

Hawke was a tough man. He was tough on unions, tough on workers, and tough on anyone who didn't follow the ALP line at the time. He entered the Prime Ministership in 1983, serving until 1991, having come after Fraser, who himself replaced the unrightfully deposed Whitlam, which is a discussion for later in this article. Even though Hawke was backed by the “leftwing” of the Labor Party, which in those days included the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), Hawke himself was far from what you would call a “leftist”, unless your definition of “leftist” is vague enough to encompass literally anyone who isn't in the avowed Conservative Party.

Hawke (later Keating) was the pioneer of Australian Neoliberalism: pushing in industrial relations reforms that tipped the scales in favor of the employers, at the expense of the workers. Labor's general neoliberalism is something I will address later. People loved “accords” back then. “Accords” were essentially deals between the government and the unions, in this case, the ALP-ACTU Accord of 1983 was a deal between the Australian Council of Trade Unions, at the time led by Cliff Dolan, and Prime Minister Bob Hawke (who had just entered the spot), alongside his Treasurer Paul Keating (keep that name pinned in your head for now).

The ALP-ACTU accord came with several amendments over the years, but the basic plan was this: The ACTU and its affiliated unions would stop pushing for wage increases for workers, and in return, the government would minimize inflation, which in theory would've made it easier for the government to implement sweeping social reforms such as Medicare. However, there were a few problems: for starters, the ACTU essentially signed away any chance the workers of Australia had to real wages increases for the next, well, forever, because today in 2021 we are still seeing a stagnation and decline in real wages. Wage growth in this country is the worst in the so-called Developed World, and many of the causes of this stagnation and later decline of wages stems back from the ACTU-ALP Accord in 1983. Simply put: it was a bunk deal.

I would say that Hawke “betrayed” Australia's workers, but to say that is to say that Hawke at any time in his life ever had allegiance to the workers. In the later years of his government's reign, he abandoned the workers entirely, opting instead to befriend billionaire owners such as Kerry Packer and Alan Bond. By “opening the country's economy”, Hawke essentially opened the floodgates for the criminal business practices that plague this country today: the rorts, the dodgy land deals... To workers, Hawke should be seen as nothing less than a snake, as are all reformists at the end of the day.

I will accept that Hawke did some good things. Medicare, for example was good, although it built off the Medibank program implemented by Whitlam, and at the time (and even today) falls short of the National Health Service which is a staple of British healthcare. Was this worth killing union power? Of course not. Workers deserve better than this.

Hawke's Accords shaped Australia's economy and created the landscape we see today. His accords laid the groundwork for Howard's atrocious WorkChoices program, which was scrapped in favor of Rudd's FairWork system, which was only a slight improvement from Howard's openly anti-worker and anti-union program. The Accords were the product of a misguided belief by the unionists of the day that collaboration with the government could lead to better outcomes for workers. While this happened occasionally, more often than not, the government would use its position of power to strong-arm the unions into cooperation, effectively forcing the unions into compliance, by threat of deregistration.

“The concept is we would provide improvements, particularly in health and education, which they [the unions] would regard as an offset to increase in money wages, so they wouldn't look for the same degree of increase. That meant they were protected, employers didn't have to pay as much, so it increased their competitive position. That was the overall concept of justice all round.” -Hawke, on the Accords source.

The ACTU of the day was basically hoping that Hawke's economic reforms would offset the need for wage increases. After all, if the cost of living isn't pushed up by inflation, what need would the workers have for increased wages? Oh, if only they could see into the future, I'm sure they would have had second thoughts. Hawke had turned the Labor Party away from even pretending to be on the worker's side, and instead aligned them with the interests of the bosses, something which remains a tendency of the ALP to this day. The ACTU, in those key moments, were turned into an ALP lapdog, more so than before.

As I keep saying time and time again, Labor is not a viable alternative to the Liberal-National Coalition.

JACK LANG WAS A WHITE SUPREMACIST

As was stated in a previous piece of mine, I have some serious problems with what appears to be outright historical revisionism about figure Jack Lang. If you were to take what professional Labor defenders such as Jordan Shanks say about Lang at face value, you would have the impression that Jack Lang was just a standard Labor politician: a working man's hero in the time of great economic turmoil.

Jack Lang was, well, to put it kindly, a bit of a racist. Actually, to say he was a “bit” of a racist is a severe understatement. He was an avid supporter of the White Australia Policy (Immigration Restriction Bill 1901), and continued to show his support for this bill, even when doing so was politically taboo (in the 70s, when the Whitlam government all but tore it to pieces). I mean, come on, an entire chapter of his autobiography (“I Remember” by Jack Lang) is called “White Australia Saved Australia”. Get real.

“The greatest Australian of all time”. If Jack Lang is the “greatest Australian” of all time, then I think we should all reconsider this whole “Australia” thing. Source: Youtube/Friendlyjordies

Jack Lang should not be defended. His smug, smirking face shouldn't even adorn the t-shirts of nonethewiser Jordan Shanks viewers. It's honestly disgusting how much revisionist history Laborites eat up about Lang. They're only further proving that Labor was the party of White Australia. Between the draconian anti-refugee policies and the Jack Lang worship, I'm starting to think that Labor never stopped being the party of White Australia.

Jack Lang was forced, and I mean forced, into adopting most of his economically progressive policies by the NSW caucus of the ALP, and at most he was only interested in withholding debt payments from the government. Did he hire men with sticks to guard the treasury money? Probably, but even if it's not true, it's still a funny story. Did he care about the working class? As a real estate agent, probably not, to even call Lang “working class” is pushing the boundaries of what “working class” even means.

I'll keep this section short, because I already wrote about Jack Lang, but the too-long-didn't-read of this is that Jack Lang was a cruel white supremacist, and if you can't critically analyze Lang's legacy, or even, god forbid, wear his face on a t-shirt, then I have some serious concerns about your own leanings.

KEVIN '07 and Laborite Optimism

Photo: Lukas Koch/Getty Images

John Howard beat out Paul Keating in the 1996 election, and served for the next eleven consecutive years. The Howard government was awful, cruel, draconian in its punishment of unions and refugees, heavy-handed in its dismissal of the plight of Indigenous Australians, and thoroughly homophobic. By 2007, when Kevin Rudd positioned himself as an alternative to the darkness of the Howard regime, Australians seemed to buy into the bright bloomer optimism of the Labor Party, and Rudd won.

Rudd's primary challenge as Prime Minister was to address the global financial crisis of 2008. Kevin Rudd ignored calls for austerity and tightened spending, using a sizable stimulus to pump life back into the Australian economy which, against all odds, seemed to have worked in the moment. This success was in spite of being dragged through the mud by the right-wing press, which would have preferred if Rudd adopted the cruel austerity policies of the US and UK. Unlike in the US, to my greater knowledge, very few Australians had their savings entirely wiped out by the crisis. The careful economic management of the Rudd government not only sheltered Australia's economy from the worst effects of the GFC, but also proved that government management of the economy can work, and is not always just the top-down command economies of the old socialist projects.

My grievances with Rudd are unrelated for the most part to his GFC activity. I'm speaking of the baseless way he tried to portray himself as some morally upstanding Christian “socialist”, in which Rudd used his religious faith to pander to the Christian voting base of the Labor Party. Rudd's faith was not a mystery during his time as Prime Minister, although unlike the other Christian conservatives of his time, he did not use his faith as a bludgeon to attack LGBTQ+ Australians, even though at best the most he could bother to give them were kind words on an episode of Q&A, as opposed to the legalization of same-sex marriage, which would not come until 2016.

Rudd also continued Howard's draconian strong-arming of refugees and asylum seekers. Even though the Rudd government dismantled the Pacific Solution plans in 2008, he would back-peddle on this decision in 2013, showing support for Gillard's renewed plans to ramp up funding for the Nauru and Manus Island “detention centers” (internment camps). Why he back-peddled on this, I cannot say, but I can only assume that Rudd was cynically trying to win back the support of the now more conservative Labor voting base, which ultimately failed.

Rudd, then, comes off as an opportunist. He exploited his faith to pander to Christian voters, he exploited racist hatred against asylum seekers to try and secure his prime ministership in 2013, his wife even exploited the working poor of the UK to make serious bank to the tune of $198mil through the privatization of the UK's welfare system. Labor politicians have a bit of a habit for harboring opportunist tendencies, don't they?

Rudd made Labor supporters optimistic for the future. His GFC stimulus sparked some new life in Australian economy, even though since Hawke's days real wages had stagnated and were later in decline. Everything seemed to be going on the up-and-up. Then Rudd was gone. Rudd, their special little hero, had left, and with him left their hopes and dreams for some utopian Australia where the middle class could exist comfortably (what they leave out, however, is that the working class of not just Australia, but of the global south, would be working hard to subsidize this luxury) and where The Bad Things didn't happen. It was essentially Liberals and reformists getting high on the drug of electoralism, which, as always, proves to be a disappointment every single time. The last fifty years of Labor policy has been empty promises, all the time.

As an aside: Van Rudd, old boy Kevin's nephew, is a very interesting person.

Why you CAN'T trust reformists!

Reform or Revolution is a question socialists have been tackling since the old days of Karl Marx. Reformists would have us believe that we can implement the positive social changes that we want simply through the electoral process. Just vote for the candidate/party you want, and eventually you will win these changes. What this leaves out is that the entire system itself is built to preclude us from winning. Do you think the capitalist nation-state would actually allow socialists to win huge concessions and, god forbid, take over the government? Of course not! The best you can hope for is a never ending cycle of big election campaigns, elections, minor concessions, and the sadness that comes with watching all of your hard earned concessions be rolled back by the next government.

Some would say that's democracy, but the thing is: it never was. Why should working people have to put the effort in to fight hard for concessions, just for them to be taken away soon after? This is why ultimately, revolution is not only necessary, but inevitable if you truly do want to abandon the capitalist mode of production. Socialists who win elections either lose them, or get the Salvador Allende Medal for Electoral Prowess, or in other words, a bullet to the head. Just look at the history of the Labor Party: it was formed by the old unions to try and win concessions for the workers in parliament, and look how great it worked out for us.

The Labor Party abandoned its working class roots, instead opting to play coy with the bosses, outright ignoring the interests of the workers most of the time. The unions themselves became overrun with conservative bureaucrats, trained by universities to operate within the restrictive and limited framework of the government-approved industrial relations system, and abandoned any ideas of worker power.

Reformists “social-democrats” are infatuated with the system we live under, despite the constant cries of “inequality” and “unfairness”. At the end of the day, they want to preserve the system that creates these unequal and exploitative outcomes, but want to give it a human face, with flowery language of mateship and a fair shake of the sauce bottle. Don't be fooled – social democrats and liberals have been nothing more than snakes, trying to co-opt the working class movement to keep it passive and prevent the boat from being shaken. They are cowards who hide behind the lies of the Ruling of Law or Due Process, and don't want the working class to be free, instead, they want to be the ones in charge.

Professional Labor Defenders similarly don't care about the working class, or if they do, it's only the white working class, as they seem to care more about middle class suburbanites than they do about Indigenous Australians, or even working class whites, who are often insulted and degraded by being branded with the disgusting title of “bogan”, who despite popular media is seen as a laughing stock, an animal to laugh at, and not a funny, quirky national icon.

I could write article after article about the shortcomings, failings and cruelty of the LNP, but then I would just be harping on about the exact same thing over and over again, and the ALP would be getting off scot-free, so no thanks.

Further Reading/Viewing

Louise O'Shea, “Beware union leaders bearing deals”

Tom Bramble, “The ALP, pioneers of neoliberalism”

Mick Armstrong, “Labor is not a genuine alternative”

Daniel Hurst, “Bleak outlook for pay rises: Australians might have to wait five years for return to 2% wage growth”

13 Myths about the Rudd government's GFC stimulus

Kevin Rudd, “Kevin Rudd: How we staved off recession and the GFC”

Kevin Rudd, “The global financial crisis”

David Alexander, “How Australia weathered the global financial crisis while Europe failed”

Emma Alberici and Carrington Clarke, “Global financial crisis: Reflections from the heart of Australia's government 10 years on”

Carolyn Holbrook, “Australia’s asylum seeker policy history: a story of blunders and shame”

Tom Gilchrist, “The 'cancer on democracy' is more than just Murdoch”

Ben Conway, “How the Myths of “Progressive Neoliberalism” Hollowed Out Australia’s Left”

“Australian Unions Suck, And Here's Why” by BadEmpanada (YouTube)

“Why friendlyjordies and Labor are attacking the AUWU” by BadEmpanada (YouTube)

This is a hastily written follow-up to yesterday's opinion piece You Don't Build A Movement By Making Youtube Videos, Son. In the absence of comments, I will assume that article was perfect in every way, and in my hubris will create something even worse, with Misfits puns. The section on Riley Grace Roshong was, in hindsight, much angrier than it needed to be, and I also forgot to complain about the big man himself (Density).

Also, I should probably go into that “eat the rich” d i s c o u r s e in more detail, just to provide context, or something. Like, it's such a benign thing to start d i s c o u r s e over.

Like some unholy beast, I rise, if only to complain about the internet for two hours and then die again.

THEY CALL US WALKING CORPSES, UNHOLY LIVIN' DEAD

Okay, so let's set the scene, eh? It's the fourteenth of October, 1793, and you're standing in a public square in the Paris Commune (the first one) during the aptly named Reign of Terror. Now, your first concern is whether or not you're going to live through the year (this Robespierre guy is taking the whole “revolution” thing a bit too seriously) and Pierre Gaspard Chaumette is giving a speech to everybody, in which he makes reference to the late Jean-Jacques Rosseau.

“Rousseau était peuple aussi, et il disait: Quand le peuple n'aura plus rien à manger, il mangera le riche” he says. [1]

In english, it's something along the lines of, “Rosseau, who was one of the people, said: When the poor have nothing to eat, they will eat the rich.” Oh boy, if only Chaumette could see the future...

That's essentially it. No big dogwhistle for the immediate execution of anyone earning above a certain paygrade, no call to violence, nothing. In its original context, “eat the rich” was simply a declaration of the obvious: when the poor have nothing to eat, they will “eat the rich”, which in this context means take all their stuff and hand them over to old boy Robespierre for some uh, Enhanced Shaving Techniques. However, luckily for us, Robespierre has been dead for about two centuries, so nobody has to worry about French guillotines anymore.

Now, with this in mind, let's go back to the future.

“Eat the Rich” is now something of a funny meme leftists share on twitter and scream out In Real Life. It's our slogan now, you see. It's our declaration that when the working poor have nothing to eat, they will take it from the rich, “eating” them. It's not meant to be taken literally, like, not even Rosseau or Chaumette meant it literally. You would have to be incredibly foolish to take the phrase “eat the rich” literally. We are not cannibals, we don't want to literally “eat the rich”.

And it's a harmless slogan primarily because the “eating” part doesn't come until “the poor have nothing left to eat”, which, I might add, is coming soon, but the time is not yet upon us. Do Weird Internet People have a thing against the working poor seizing what is rightfully theirs? I thought half of them were meant to be “socialists”, not posturing Liberals. But then again, they are Weird Internet People after all.

“Eat the Rich” is what you say to declare your opposition to wealth inequality, mostly, the inequality that created the working poor and The Rich in the first place. The meaningless decadence of the modern bourgeois prick, with the five storey mansion who makes more money in sixty seconds than any of us could dream of making in a lifetime. It's not just saying that rich people are only bad when they act out against the working poor, that's infantile, it declares that the rich are in an of themselves bad.

They create the working poor. That's how capitalism works, after all. Half of these people are “socialists”, I would've expected them to understand that.

THEY HAD TO LOCK US UP, PUT US IN THEIR YANKEE HELL

Back to the Empanada. Something he said in his video really resonated with me: that a lot of these content creators stick to comfy reformist electoral politics because it's what reels in more new viewers. And I started thinking about that. And it made sense after a while. Very rarely do any them go into anything... radical. Now that can be for a variety of reasons: mainly being that “radical politics” is hardly... legally sound? Going on YouTube and screaming DEATH TO THE RICH, DISMANTLE THE STATE, GUNS GUNS GUNS is probably not the best idea, in hindsight.

However, Shaun manages to remain somewhat radical by not declaring his intent to murder the bourgeois owner's class every five seconds, and so do others such as dreaded tankie Hakim. The aforementioned Weird Internet People do, for the most part, stick within the limited confines of reformist electoral politics, because it's comfy, it's easy, it “wins” Liberals over, and it requires less thought power to discuss 24/7, if at all. The fault lies on all sides.

Social Democrats, for the most part, have been disappointing. A hundred years ago, they had something going for them, but then it all fell apart, like a boring house of cards, tumbling down until all that's left is a centrist going “yeah nah, too much effort mate.”

This “coalition building” with the Liberals, if it can even be called that, is infantile. Many things are infantile, this included. As RGR's behavior has displayed, trying to “coalition build” with internet Liberals is as productive as cutting down a tree with a herring. Liberals, RGR included, don't care about meaningful change. Liberalism exists solely to reproduce material conditions that create the working poor and keep them that way. Such has been history, such is how the world is today. Homeless people living in Manilla aren't helped by RGR shilling for Liberalism, in fact, her shilling for Liberalism will only make their situation worse.

I don't know why I need to reiterate this, but I will anyway: we are socialists, which means we want socialism, not socialism democracy, not liberalism, not some liberal “democracy” with a better social security net, say it with me now, SOCIALISM. It's not “when the government does stuff”, it's when the workers own the means of production directly and control the government. You don't get that through Liberalism, in fact, Liberalism produces the opposite outcome.

Should've just said that in the last article with less swear words, now that I think about it.

CAN'T HAVE NO DIRTY DEAD

This is, in my opinion, the Liberal Mind-Prison in action. The Liberal Mind-Prison being that one that traps and limits your thoughts to the incredibly limiting purview of Liberal ideology. Change is too hard, the most you can get “”“realistically”“” is mild reform. Noooo, you need slow incremental change, all the working poor suffering under our current system must continue to suffer for the Greater Good! I'm sure we've all had enough of smug Liberal pricks trying to condescend to us about how we just need to “work harder”, or how change has to be slow.

Slow, incremental “change” is more beneficial to an affluent Liberal twitch streamer than to the working poor. Do you think RGR or Density actually give a shit about workers? Of course they don't, you imbecile! People don't “embrace” Liberalism and The Market because they care about working people in their own country and abroad, they do it because it benefits them specifically, and it isn't overly conspiratorial or speculative for me to suggest that these Liberal content creators peddle this garbage because it benefits them materially.

To reiterate a previous point, many of these content creators are themselves business owners, and run their respective channels/platforms like one would run a business. This is why RGR's habit of embarrassing herself on twitter has been nothing more than a cynical PR move on her part. Why else would she go out of her way to disavow a portion of her own community just to win over a new one? It's cynical, and I know I've said “cynical” a lot in these pieces, but I just need to emphasize how mindless these decisions are. When you're a content creator, every little thing you do can either make the number go up, or go down, and (quite reasonably) they want those numbers going up. Being a Liberal makes the number go up faster than it does by being a principled anti-capitalist.

The insufferable gaze of Capital has struck once again. Once more: content creators are not political activists, they are content creators, and shrewd ones at that. “But,” you might say, “RGR talks to legislators!” Sure. Whatever. That's cool, but how is that a criticism against any of us? It's not like everyone can talk to a legislator (I think I only have once, and not for some Liberal twitch stream) let alone get them to do something. Politicking is complicated, and politicians are bastards. Come back to me when a politician has actually done something between Miss Twitch Streamer asked them to, or because they were genuinely influenced by some twitch stream with less viewers than they have constituents.

I can say this from speculation (with reasonable backing), but politicians don't give a shit about content creators regardless of how many geeks watch their twitch streams. There is no politician shaking in their boots because Vaush did a take down stream, or RGR said something mean about them. Why? Because again, political movements aren't built through youtube videos. The Alt Right wasn't build by youtube videos, it leaped from a foundation of Neo-Nazi organizations from the 70s and 80s, as well as pre-existing infrastructure which allowed for reactionary conservatives to organize politically. Socialists don't have that. Conservatives and Liberals do, to varying degrees.

These people are also insufferably America-centric. From Liberals like RGR and Destiny I can understand, but Vaush, Xanderhal etc? They're meant to be “socialists” (according to their own description), where's the internationalism? They act like the January 6 attack on Capital Hill was something the entire world should've been cowering in fear over, as if the fall of America would lead to the destruction of the entire world order. Pure idealism. Although, if I'm being honest, I don't want any of the Weird Internet People talking about Australian politics, because I can assume they'd all just side with Layber anyway. Not cool.

I WANT YOUR SKULL, I NEED YOUR SKULL

Political movements aren't build through youtube videos, and if I'm being honest, the Weird Internet People are preventing any meaningful movement from being built anyway. My advice? I have none. I'm a weirdo sitting at my desk at seven in the morning typing out a poor excuse for an “article” laden with Misfits puns, I'm probably not the first person you should go to for advice on how to build a political movement. But I can offer nice sounding words, if that helps.

Politics is what you do, not what you are. You can call yourself a Marxist-Leninist or an Anarchist-Syndicalist, that's the easy bit, the hard bit is actually fucking doing it, you imbecile. You've called yourself a socialist. So what. Am I meant to be impressed? I'll be impressed when you actually put your ideas into action, as much as you can, when possible. Don't just watch twitch streams and “debate” politics on discord all day, actually get out and talk to people, real people, not content creators operating with a profit motive to keep you watching their twitch streams and youtube videos.

Set aside your pre-conceived misconceptions about politics and meet people outside, join an organization (if you're Australian, visit the ORGS page), just do something other than watch these buffoons argue about two hundred year old slogans on their twitch streams. And for the love of God, abandon Liberalism! Liberals do nothing but pour gasoline into a hot burning fire, while pretending that it's more pragmatic than grabbing a fire extinguisher.

Do you have to murder every Liberal you encounter? No. Do you have to completely ignore them in situations where tacitly working together would be beneficial? No. But do you have to kneel before them and worship them as political messiahs? Also no. If you call yourself a socialist, prove it, instead of just saying that you're one, demonstrate how you are. If all you do is read books, you're a walking bookshelf, and for the most part, walking bookshelves are useless.

Something something hack the heads of Liberals and put them on my wall.

The time has come, my friends, to sook about weird internet people. Into the fray!

The man who would be known as Vaush (source: Vaush/YouTube)

The internet is a horrible place. Absolutely terrible. Don't ever go on the internet (except to read my pieces of course...). But if by chance you happen to go on YouTube in the near future, and you're a socialist (first mistake!), then you'll likely find your feed bombarded with recommendations for various internet personalities I have resorted to calling weird internet people, for various reasons. But first, a history lesson.

Long ago, in the dark ages of 2015-2016, YouTube politics was dominated by right-wing reactionaries and various other flavors of conservative. The fire of GamerGate was burning, “Anti-SJW” politics was all the hype, and a certain somebody had just won the US election. It was painful to see. Kraut, Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, Thunderf00t... the amount of weird internet people pushing out reactionary content was too great to list.

And so, being marginalized on the platform, leftist media consumers and content creators came together, and “BreadTube” was formed. The name comes from Kropotkin's famous book The Conquest of Bread, and it was initially a small group of leftwing content creators: hbomberguy, PhilosophyTube, Contrapoints, Lindsay Ellis and Shaun, then known as Shaun & Jen.

This piece was partially inspired by a BadEmpanada video I watched quietly while sitting at my desk one night, but that video only confirmed a few of the feelings I having toward leftwing content creators on various platforms. I will address a few things in this piece, and it might be a long because I have a lot to say about these weird internet people, and I'll go into each one separately to voice my criticism etc.

Ready? Let's dive in. Also, this is not a hit-piece, it's an opinion-piece. I'm going to try and remain as impersonal as is necessary. Angrily share this around though I need to push past the average 15-17 readers I usually get on my articles, wink wink.

EDIT: Just in case you were wondering: I do, in fact, respond to DMs over twitter/discord. Find them here if you feel so inclined. Wink wink.

Part One: Tactical N Words and Tedious Citations

Vaush, again. (source: [reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/VaushV/comments/ey0su1/vaushwhenheseesabadtake/)

Vaush, or “IrishLaddie”, or whatever else you want to call him, has humble beginnings as someone who would call-in to Destiny's streams and “debate” him (more on “debating” later). After a while, he gained a following, and then started streaming independently, getting banned of twitch hilariously for controversial statements about Israel which I will NOT get into because I value my tiny platform.

Anyway, Mr. Vaush has been mired in controversy since day one, which I guess is a winning PR tactic because his subscriber count has been on the uptick these last few months, and good for him. Context out of the way, allow me to now talk about my main criticisms of Mr. Vaush.

When Vaush is criticized by conservatives and other rightwingers, they mainly just call him fat and ugly and insult his partner. Some leftwingers do this too, and I detest it, primarily because when you criticize someone like Vaush, you should just address their ideas and behaviours, not their appearance. Also, terminally online racist shut-ins calling Vaush fat is pretty funny. Not because I like it when people call Vaush fat, but because those shut-ins in question probably haven't left the house for months, coronavirus aside.

Mr. Vaush, with his background in gaming (already a red flag), is what many would refer to as a “big shouty white man”. Online gaming does not have the best reputation for being fair and nice, and Vaush, being the product of such an environment, is really no different. His “debates”, if they can even be called such, amount to little more than shouting matches, in which Mr. Vaush shouts very loudly at some racist fifteen year old while playing Bloodbourne. Now, not to throw shade at people who enjoy shouting matches, but don't call them “debates”, because it's an affront to the respectable practice of, well, actual debates.

I won't address the tactical n-word thing, because it's been talked about to death, and there's nothing I can really add to the conversation.

I get the impression that a substantial portion of Vaush's viewers, like the viewers of other weird internet people, develop parasocial relationships with him. This alone isn't out of the ordinary, it happens much more often with internet personalities, but I would like to talk briefly about how this affects the state of internet d i s c o u r s e.

When political discussions start and someone inevitably mentions Vaush, the conversation suddenly becomes an argument about whether or not you like Vaush's content or Vaush as a person, as opposed to his ideas. People who like Vaush will die on the hill of defending his honor online, whilst people who don't like him will sook for fuckin aaaaaaages about how Vaush is worse than Hitler and literally kills Venezuelan babies. It's unproductive, it's annoying, it's boring, it's stale, just stop it. Me saying “just stop it” won't make it stop, but it makes me feel better about the whole thing.

How are we supposed to discuss Vaush's political beliefs when the discussion always turns to whether or not Vaush is either a saint or the incarnation of the dark lord Lucifer?

This dogmatic defence of an individual as a person instead of, say, their ideas, is something that socialists have problems with. They do the same with long-dead revolutionaries and writers: if you say something critical about their favorite one, they take it as a personal attack, or an attack against socialism as a political ideology. I'm allowed to not like revolutionaries and still be a socialist, guys. The point is to discuss the politics, not so much the people. Unfortunately this piece is the exact opposite of that. People will bravely defend Lenin or Stalin's honor online, without considering the fact that they've been dead for god-knows-how-long and nobody really cares about what they were like as people.

Vaush is bombastic, some may even say he's a firebrand, but his behavior is mildly agitating and somewhat concerning. Mr. Vaush and the people in his circle (I'll get to them later) tend to overuse the word “tankie”, which at this point is a meaningless jab that only reveals which internet person you get all of your ideas from. Generally, people who get called a “tankie” range from Marxist-Leninists voicing somewhat reasonable ideas, to the most deranged Dengist (i.e a REVISIONIST), to even people who just don't like Mr. Vaush for whatever reason. Pretty sure I've been called a tankie once, fun times.

“The Left”, as we know it anyway, is divided on the internet because vaguely politically-aware internet users cling to their Internet Person of choice and their esoteric set of ideas, picking that as a hill to die on. You will begin to see that for the most part, “Left Unity” has existed In Real Life for about two centuries, and not much is going to stop that.

Vaush describes what he's doing as “building a movement”, which I will address later, because GOOD GOD I need time to breathe first.

On the Market “Socialism” thing: I honestly feel like “market socialism” is only becoming more popular because of Vaush. I get the whole Tito in the 60s and 70s thing, but what Vaush advocates for seems specific to a modern time, and his constant reliance on worker cooperatives is a bit annoying. Worker cooperatives are not inherently socialist, contrary to the misconception. Mondragon, which many supporters of cooperatives point to, was promoted by the fascist Franco regime, and its founder, one José María Arizmendiarrieta, received a medal from Franco himself. Worker cooperatives are effective, yes, but are they inherently socialist? No. Another point I should make is that worker cooperatives don't make themselves. Does Vaush expect us to sit around and wait for worker cooperatives to magically and spontaneously come into being? He hasn't talked much about going out and forming them, to my knowledge. Cooperatives also have a... tenuous relationship with unions.

Cooperatives are also not “worker control” over the means of production. It's indirect control at best: workers still have managers, they just get to elect them, which is better than nothing but hardly “control”. I can “elect” a local councilor but that doesn't mean I “control” my local council.

Conclusion: Vaush is agitating to say the least, not particularly disappointing, but his contribution to internet d i s c o u r s e is... tenuous, at best. People from the Destinyverse (Vaush included) tend to mostly be exclusionary, counter-productive, retain awful gamer habits, and for some reason tend to be nicer to rightwingers than to “The Left”. Also, “market socialism” is annoying, speaking to “market socialists” tends to be irritating, just read Lenin or something idk.

The Good, The Xan and the Ugly

Xanderhal (source: wikituba)

Xanderhal (previously known as Pig Puncher, nice) is a more recent addition to the pantheon of weird internet people, and probably the youngest too. He was once a gamer, as they all were, and fell down the “alt-right pipeline”, something he made a video on. That was actually the first video of his I saw, many months ago, while hunched at my desk murdering people in Mount and Blade: Warband. Fun times.

For a long time, Xanderhal called himself an anarchist. Now, as someone who can accurately be described as “anarchist”, that interested me. That was, until I realized that he didn't know what anarchism was and probably just thought the word sounded cool. Now, there's no harm in not being informed, but not putting in the effort to learn when you can is just lazy. Xanderhal is a social democrat, as can be evidenced by, well, the things he says (see below), and was quite clearly never an anarchist to begin with.

The behavior that Xanderhal demonstrated was that of a stubborn, arrogant person. True arrogance is pretending to be in a position to educate other people about a political system you not only don't know the first thing about, but have no interest in learning more about either.

If I had to criticize Handerxal for anything else, it would also be the tankie thing. Flagrantly throwing the word “tankie” around at people you don't like is infantile. It's made the word pointless. Hell, people call themselves “tankies” proudly now. It gives off the wrong impression. It's strange how these people who claim to care so much about “optics” only do so to put down other leftists.

Xanderhal also proudly calls himself a “debate bro”, something that is used derogatorily to refer to Vaush, Destiny, etc. It is a further display of stubbornness, the kind you can only find among Weird Internet People. Xanderhal also makes a crucial mistake Vaush does, which I will address later on, because I Need To Breathe.

Behold – a rapid fire!

The Serfs

The Serfs is the best of a bad situation.

DemonMama

Better than Vaush, I guess?

ChudLogic

Not too bad.

SheepInTheBox

He's alright.

PhilosophyTube

Good stuff.

LonerBox

I am contractually obliged to say that the Loner Man is good.

ProfessorFlowers

Very interesting.

The Kavernacle

Nice voice.

Tom Tanuki

My king.

ThoughtSlime

The Dark Lord Oculon demands I say that the Slimer is good.

Shaun

My spirit animal.

Riley Grace Roshong

Now, Riley Grace Roshong is far from a “leftist”, but recent d i s c o u r s e has her visage floating around in my fried brain, so I must sook about her too for a while. The recent d i s c o u r s e which is ongoing was about “eat the rich”, a harmless slogan, which RGR denounced as being “a dogwhistle for mass murder”, I shit you not. It turns out Riley Grace Roshong didn't realize that socialists do in fact believe in socialism.

Riley is a liberal. A centrist, you could say. She's a streamer, some law student or something, and is another one of those content creators who pretends to be a political activist, quite like Destiny, or the V Man. What happened with RGR is a clear reminder that internet content creators aren't “activists”, they're, big shocker here, content creators, operating on a platform, where clicks and subscriber counts are king (or queen, or general secretary depending on who you talk to).

This “eat the rich” d i s c o u r s e is nothing more than a cynical attempt by RGR to gain followers from Destiny's “community”, so that she could profit more from the increased viewership from comfy centrists who find realpolitik to be too hard for their weak, spineless selves. RGR won't be open about this, of course, none of them will, but that is what is happening right now.

Liberals are not “leftwing”, and never have been. As an Australian, I don't have this stupid misconception of Liberals somehow being “allies” in the struggle for political and economic equality. THEY AREN'T. They BENEFIT from this inequality. They just want more diverse oppressors. Riley Grace Roshong is arrogant for stating that we can get what we want through Liberalism, as if Liberalism isn't what got us in this fucking mess in the first place.

Yeah, just pour gasoline into the fire, at least we're doing something you dumb stupid lefties!!!

Also, RGR blocked me instead of engaging with what was at the time a more mild mannered criticism. She seems to have a habit of embarrassing herself on twitter and then blocking anyone who says anything slightly critical of her. Should've seen that coming.

Stating the Obvious

“BreadTube”, “LeftTube” and everything else is just content creation cynically disguised as political activism. When Vaush shouts at a fifteen year old, it isn't seen as a grown man shouting at a child (as it should be), but as “antifascist activism”. When Xanderhal kisses Lauren Southern's feet on stream, that's not Xanderhal spinelessly engaging with Miss Genocider, that's “deradicalization”. When RGR cynically pivots into the Destinyverse, it's seen as a legitimate political act, when in reality, it's a marketing stunt, no different to when corporations do “good things” for good PR.

You don't build a political movement by posting online, son. No amount of “PSYCHO TANKIE DESTROYED BY FACTS AND LOGIC #69” is going to make the world less shit. I post online a lot, sure, but I also don't pretend to be some political messiah at the head of a political movement either. I don't pretend to be something I'm not, something that “BreadTube” is too keen to do, because it gets them clicks. Poor sods then end up contributing to the Patreon funds of content creators who earn way more than they could possibly dream of, thinking that they're contributing to some big political movement, deradicalization program or a liberal-to-leftist pipeline, when in reality they're just contributing to the hapless viewer to content creator's bank account pipeline.

If you want to donate to something legitimate, donate to the People v. Dutton legal fund. Peter Dutton, that shrill fuck, is unfairly suing refugee activist Shane Bazzi for “defamation”, because Bazzi had the courage to call Dutton out on his shit behavior. If you can, please chip in, because this will legitimately do some good in the world. If not for me, do it for the kids stuck in cruel internment camps off-shore.

You don't build a political movement by making youtube videos. It can help, sure, but it isn't the be all end all. You need to go outside, meet people, talk to the public, establish some infrastructure, to build a movement. I hope you all get around to doing that. I will, I can assure you that.

The end of this piece might've come off as a bit angry, but my brain is fried, I haven't had a healthy sleep habit lately (the Dengists are keeping me awake), so I wrote what came to mind. Do your best to read the whole thing before you make any comments. The key phrase is: Jack Mundey. If I don't hear the key phrase, I'll assume you haven't read the piece. Going through an arsehole arc right now.

Follow up

Book Rec

This week's book rec is Green Bans Red Union, which can be found here. Good stuff about Mundey, the BLF, the Green bans and more.

Dare to struggle, dare to win!

Darrian Traynor/Getty Images

Want to hear a joke? The internet. Haha, very funny, I know. The bird app (twitter) was a mistake from the beginning, and internet leftists arguing on twitter is probably the most pointless, unnecessary thing to exist on this god-forsaken planet. Vaush this, Destiny that. Who even cares? I do, for some reason.

Riley Grace Roshong comes from the Destinyverse, Liberal twitch streamers who value (or fetishize, depending on who you ask) intellectualism, being smart, and having Evidence™. They quote studies, they argue about sources, they debunk things. This is not necessarily a bad thing, mind you, as your ideas should at least have some basis in reality. The problem, however, is the people themselves.

Destiny is a combative Liberal who became popular for debating Nazis, and I use “debate” sparingly. If nobody develops their ideas, or learns to approach the world from a new perspective, then you weren't debating, you were having a shouting match. And believe me, Destiny has a lot of shouting matches.

Riley Grace Roshong, who is known to most for embarrassing herself in an internet argument with Demon Mama (another internet person), recently went on twitter to rant about how socialists are “inherently violent”. Her reasoning? Eat the rich. Apparently, “eat the rich” is a dogwhistle for mass violence. I would link the tweet in question but as of writing (21st April 2021), her twitter account is locked down. Either way, she blocked me (LOL), so I can't anyway. Not even my best friend and comrade Jimmy O'Reilly from the Boozer Creek Proletarian can help me out. Sad!

Anyway, a pointless twitter argument inspired me to write a long winded pretentious article about political violence. Enjoy.

If you can't be bothered reading, skip to the bottom for the tl;dr and a list of books I think you should give a read.

Introduction

Violence is something of a dirty word, and for good reason. It conjures images of men fighting each other, pummelling one another with their bare fists, or people smashing store windows and shooting men dead in the street. Violence, pacifists say, is immoral and unnecessary, and it is, even though most people have misplaced opinions about what violence is and when it occurs.

Violence doesn't necessarily need to be physical (i.e me punching you), but can take many forms. If, for a long period of time, I degrade you verbally, ruin you emotionally, all without laying a finger on you, that is still violence. Violence, then, is someone using force on another person, almost always to harm them. However, violence transcends interactions between individuals.

When people are forced into poverty, they are the victim of systemic violence. Every homeless person, be they sleeping rough on the street, or couch surfing, or stuck in precarious crowded housing is also a victim of systemic violence. Systems, especially the nation-state, are violent to an immense scale beyond that of two people having a punch-up.

But most people, when talking about violence, don't mention systemic violence. They talk about individuals. Individual cops killing civilians. Individual soldiers committing war-crimes. Individual landlords mistreating tenants. Individual men murdering their spouses (often women). Individual conservatives harassing LGBTQ+ people. But all of these individuals are simply perpetuating the system of violence that already existed before them and will exist long after they're dead.

Like a wise man once said, “Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help, help, I'm being repressed!”

The Spectre of Political Violence

“Political violence” is a phrase often thrown out to condemn one's political opponents. “Unlike them,” you would say, “we use peaceful means to achieve our political ends”. But what is politics if not a power struggle? Contrary to popular misconception, a power struggle between two antagonistic forces (working class v. owning class, one state v. another state, party a v. party b) is not “peaceful”.

People often view “political violence” as when activists stage a protest that turns violent, but what about when the State enforces borders and laws? Is that not also “political violence”? It is, after all, the State using violence (borders and the police) to achieve its political will (total domination). Yet most don't see it that way.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend that political violence is in any way “good”, but I don't take the moralistic position that all violence is inherently evil and is therefore unnecessary and must be avoided. I'm not a supporter of “political violence”, I'm simply acknowledging that all politics requires force, which is violent. That is the reality of the world in which we inhabit.

Socialists and Communists, especially Anarchists, are particularly maligned for “political violence”. Anarchists, after all, are stereotyped as being bomb chucking rioters, which hasn't been the case in most places for seventy years. The old Anarchist bombers of the 19th and 20th centuries are long gone. Most Anarchists these days are too busy to be chucking bombs, I should add.

But are socialists, communists and anarchists more prone to political violence than their liberal counterparts? I would say no, for a few reasons. Firstly, this is because Liberals, being proponents of the status quo, don't need to personally engage in “political violence” themselves, because that's what the State exists for. Individual Liberals and Conservatives don't need to, say, stage a protest in order to get something done, because they control the State apparatus which does so on their behalf.

Socialists are forced to use “political violence” to achieve their ends because the State exists as an antagonistic force that must be struggled with. Liberals and Conservatives also don't engage in “political violence” because they have no political aims to achieve: their politics is that of maintaining the status quo, which is violent, but they do so by delegating someone else to do the violence on their behalf, that “someone else” being the State.

States are inherently violent. Lenin described the State as being an organ of class rule, used by the owning class to suppress the working class. Liberal Democracy is an example of this. Under a Liberal Democracy, working people get one chance every three to five years to vote for a politician to rule them, and in between that time are dominated cruelly by their employer. Democracy in the Liberal sense then is a sham. “What is the use of political liberty, so called, to a man who works twelve hours a day for three pounds a week? Once in five years he may get the chance to vote for his favourite party, but for the rest of the time practically every detail of his life is dictated by his employer” (Orwell, 1941).

Liberals would prefer if we all lived in their electoral fantasy, where all we need to do to change the world is vote for the right candidate. And because of this, they malign anyone who goes beyond their myopia, and denounce it with the worst words in their vocabulary: violent, terroristic, etc. Because these words stir up images of balaclava-clad men waving around machine guns, they get an immediate response from the public.

Socialists are not inherently violent, but many acknowledge that politics is power and power is violent, therefore “political violence”, whatever that may be, is inevitable. “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, after all.

Can't we all just get along?

No, we can't. Capitalist society is full of contradictions, and the antagonism between the two primary classes (workers and owners) cannot be reconciled simply through dialogue. The owning class understands this, which is why they are defended by world-class militaries, by paramilitaries, police departments, militias etc. The only people who seem to not understand the basic truism that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” are defeatists, electoral reformists and Liberals.

The working class cannot simply “get along” with the owning class, that would be class collaboration, which does not uplift or empower the working class. Such class collaboration is the staple of a fascistic regime, having the workers and owners band together for the Good of The Nation™ only to abandon the workers almost immediately thereafter.

And the owning class cannot “get along” with the working class either, after all, the owning class must suppress the working class in order to maintain its position at the top of the hierarchy. Workers and owners are antagonistic forces: when one rises, the other falls. When workers gain power, the owners lose power, and vice versa.

This antagonism between workers and owners cannot be resolved through dialogue or conversation. The owning class understands this, so why don't you?

Violence as a means

Violence is neither inherently “good” or inherently “bad”, morally it is neutral, and the “goodness” or “badness” of it depends on how it's used. A person physically assaulting another person is “bad” because Person A is using violence to harm Person B with no tangible benefit, but if I intervene and use violence against Person A, or Person B was to fight back, that would be “good violence”.

When marginalized communities defend themselves, be it violent or otherwise, that is “good violence”. When the State uses force to suppress marginalized communities, that is “bad violence”.

Violence is an important tool for advancing your political will. After all, the State has been doing it for as long as the State has existed as a concept, and will continue to.

Violence against People v. Violence against Property

The BLM protests of the last year sparked conversations about violence and property damage. Is it okay to damage public and private property in protest? The answer is: of course it is, because you're only damaging property. Property, such as windows, street bins, bus shelters etc can be repaired. Expensively, sure, but can still be repaired, replaced.

Human life is not like a window: it can be replaced. When a person dies, they're gone for good, they can't be brought back. The BLM protests were sparked primarily by the cruel murder of George Floyd, and racist police violence in general. When statues and shop windows matter more than human lives, at what point do we stop and think about the society we find ourselves in?

Violence against property, as with violence in general, is not preferable. We should not have to smash starbucks windows with soup cans in order to force the State into changing, but unfortunately that is the situation we find ourselves in. If standing on the street corner waving placards for three hours was all we needed, that would be all we're doing. And yet we aren't, because “riots” can be more effective than peaceful protests, which is a sad reminder of the state of the world right now.

Violence entails the use of force against another person, which fundamentally strips them of power and autonomy. In a very Libertarian manner (the “classical” Libertarianism of Joseph Dejacque and not the abomination that is modern “Libertarianism”), I take the position that force should never be used against another person unless absolutely necessary, i.e for self defence.

The Too Long, Didn't Read

Politics is power, power requires force, force is violence. Literally as simple as that. I don't know why I have to explain that to people, but apparently I do.

Liberal “democracies” are violent states, because all states are violent. They turn their violence outwards, toward the colonised world.

Fascist states are also violent, of course, but their violence is more brutal than that of the Liberal “democracy”, although that depends on whether or not you're asking a colonised person or a citizen.

Socialist states, then, are violent, because all states are propped up by force, which is violent. Socialist states have been known to be more outwardly violent and authoritarian than others, however, this is a result of a siege mentality that comes from being encircled by hostile forces as opposed to a core tenet of Socialism.

I disagree with the siege socialist mentality of strict centralism, mind you. I'm just giving a reasonable explanation that many like to glaze over as part of their anti-communist hysteria. “Anti-Communism” is nothing but a reactionary religious dogma at this point. Anti-Communists will invent their own new reality just to justify their repression of workers.

How many people have socialist states killed? 100 million? 100 billion? 100 trillion? It doesn't matter, because you can say any number (for example, 7916597465827935629386 gorjillion) and the conservative reactionary horde will gobble it up like it's a packet of milk arrowroot biscuits. Human life doesn't matter to them: winning does.

I am willing to discuss this topic further. I can be contacted through the links on my about page.

Interesting Reads

I've been reading recently and have a few recommendations, if you're interested:

“Fascism and Democracy” by George Orwell, 1941. Orwell puts forward some interesting things to consider regarding fascism and liberal democracies.

“Dark Emu” by Bruce Pascoe, 2014. This radically changed the way I viewed pre-colonial Indigenous Australians, and I would recommend that anyone interested in learning more about Indigenous Australians read Bruce Pascoe's other works.

“The State and Revolution” by V. I. Lenin, 1917-18. Although I disagree with some of Lenin's views on the role of the State, I do think that State and Revolution is an interesting look at how Lenin viewed the State should function in the transition to Socialism.

John “Jack” T. Lang: A hero mostly to Laborites and friendlyjordies fans

Jack Lang had a complicated history, but one thing that can be accurately said about him was that he was a very questionable man. Loud, bombastic, charismatic, but most of all: pretty racist. In fact, “pretty racist” might be an understatement. In his book I Remember (1956), an entire chapter is named “White Australia Saved Australia”, and includes several paragraphs of Jack Lang defending the draconian and white-supremacist White Australia policies, with such excerpts as below:

“White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave. There would have been no need for the Japanese to invade this country. We would have been swallowed up by the rolling advance of a horde of colored people, anxious to escape the privations of their own countries and prepared to impose their own standards on this country.

It is necessary only to examine the racial composition of present-day Fiji, where the Hindus have elbowed the natives out of the picture, to visualise what could have happened in this country had the White Australia policy not been fought for doggedly at the end of the l9th Century. We were then fighting for our national survival. Had we weakened, the flood gates would have opened and the natural increase of population according to Asian standards would have done the rest. It would then have been too late. This country would have become a pushover for the Asiatics.” -I Remember: An Autobiography.

Jack Lang came from the old Labor of the early 1900s, which, as it should be repeated time and time again, was incredibly racist. When the Immigration Restriction Bill 1901 became the Immigration Restriction Act, it was Labor who worked with Barton's Protectionist Party to enact this law. Unions and government worked together to enforce an explicitly white-supremacist status quo in the colonial state of Australia, suppressing non-white workers for nothing more than meagre concessions from the bosses and ruling class of politicians. Such is the bargain that is often made by white workers.

Was Jack Lang entirely a bad person? Not necessarily, despite being questionable and outright cruel in his racism, Jack Lang did make marginal improvements to the working conditions of [white] Australian workers during his two terms as Premier of NSW, from 1925-1927 and later 1930-1932. But was he some kind of hero, some shining beacon of hope in a field of darkness? Also no.

Australia as a nation-state is inextricably connected to its colonial past. We see it in its institutions, its government and laws, its policing and its ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Jack Lang and the Labor Party were one such organ of a white-supremacist colonial government.

Jordan “friendlyjordies” Shanks is an online media personality and “comedian”, and his main achievements are managing to be the centre of numerous controversies both frivolous and meaningful. He's known more recently for his questionable statements about Indigenous sovereignty politics and baseless attacks against the Australian Unemployed Worker's Union (which further display his disregard for the unemployed).

I have what I like to call friendlyjordies derangement syndrome. Simply put: I do not like friendlyjordies. I think he has a very limited and myopic view of how politics works, and is incredibly obnoxious.

January 1st, 2020: friendlyjordies releases a video about Jack Lang. Nothing too egregious, yet. Then I start thinking. Then I'm reading. Then I'm shaking my head.

Much of what Shanks said is mostly correct: Lang was a firebrand politician and a nasty contrarian, but what Mr. Shanks completely forgets to mention is that all of the concessions Lang pushed for was for white workers, not all workers. Sounds like somebody needs to be reminded that black people also existed in the 1930s.

Lang was part of a wider populist movement that had developed since the crisis of 1893, a staunchly anti-bank movement that persists to this day. Banking, being a primarily capitalist institution, is a bad thing, but taking into account the fact that Jack Lang and his contemporaries were incredibly racist and xenophobic, it wouldn't be too far fetched to guess that their anti-banking populism was less about being opposed to capitalist exploitation as much as it was about, well, hating Jews.

Ignoring this, however, Lang's policies reducing the power of banks in the New South Wales economy were interesting, and unfortunately have fallen on the wayside since. Breaking up the banks is still a hot topic nowadays, even though the likelihood of the government intervening on behalf of people and not the banks is still incredibly unlikely.

But there's no doubt that Jack Lang resonated with [white] workers: people would go to their workplaces adorned with “Lang Was Right” pins and badges, would march in the streets in the tens of thousands with huge placards depicting Jack Lang's face, and at one point formed paramilitary militias to fight against the fascist New Guard in street skirmishes almost reminiscent of the American labor battles of old.

Don't be fooled though, if the racism wasn't enough of a red flag, Jack Lang was a bitter and hostile anti-communist, a staunch opponent of the Communist Party of Australia (the CPA is a topic of a different long-winded piece).

With this in mind, it's important to recognise that Jordan Shanks is, at most, the most stale of Social Democrats, and is incapable of a proper material analysis of anything, really. Lang's premierships were part of an ongoing class war between [white] Australian workers and the bosses, and figures such as Lang chose not the side of workers, but their own side: aligning with bosses to malign non-whites in order to win the smallest of concessions for predominately white workers only.

This is the same bargain that Nazi supporters made: in order to win the possibility of progressive economic reform, they abandoned anyone who didn't conform to their myopic ideal of a “German worker”, and we all know what happened to them when the Nazis eventually did come to power.

Now, the point: we mustn't let firebrand populists convince us that in order to win economic reforms, we must abandon our non-white fellows. Class struggle is intersectional, and the liberation of the working class comes with the liberation of women, of LGBTQ+ Australians, of Indigenous Australians and of all people. You cannot win progressive economic reforms by abandoning other members of the working class simply because they don't conform to your internalized view of “working class”, such thinking is dangerous and counter productive, and leads to people engaging in spiteful class-collaboration, as we saw with the old unions of the early 1900s.

People like Jordan Shanks are indicative of a renewed push toward Labor, but pose a question of their own: is Labor even worth supporting now? Progressives across Australia have been asking this question for decades now, and many have abandoned Labor to join the Greens instead, or focus on their own non-parliamentary grassroots movements.

We must look back at figures such as Jack Lang with healthy skepticism, and not just blindly parrot centuries old talking points and buy into a dead personality cult just to appear edgy and contrarian. The same could be said of certain other communists, as well. As Lang himself said: “In the great game of life always back self-interest, because at least you know it’s trying”.