En Passant

A treaty, recognising prior ownership and sovereignty, paying the rent to the indigenous owners of the land and allowing Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders to run their own affairs is a set of systemic solutions to the systemic problems of dispossession and disempowerment, systemic solutions to the past and ongoing genocide against the indigenous peoples of this country.

That would require an attack on capital in Australia and its interests. Labor won’t do that. Far better from the point of view of Gillard as the captain of the second level of capital to pick Nova Peris to open the batting in the battle for the Senate than actually take on capital to address the real issues. Nova Peris will be a willing accomplice to Gillard’s anti-Aboriginal agenda.

The Invasion Day protests, the burgeoning Idle No More indigenous peoples’ movement in Canada which is spreading across the globe, the campaigns against the Intervention and deaths in custody, all offer an alternative approach to winning better lives for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. They are movements from below, not machinations from above. That way lies the future, not one bum on one seat for a Gillard puppet in the Senate.

Australia Day perpetuates the country’s ‘founding’ racist myths and is part of the system that enslaves our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander brothers and sisters and as a consequence, all of us here. In the spirit of true reconciliation let’s abolish this celebration of genocide. Let’s instead celebrate the 65000 years of indigenous history and stewardship of this land. Recognise aboriginal sovereignty, negotiate a treaty and pay the rent. It is time to fight for justice.

In recent weeks a campaign has developed momentum calling for a boycott of Sri Lankan cricket matches to protest both the Sri Lankan regime’s genocide of Tamils and the Australian government’s attacks on Tamil refugees. Andrew Cheeseman in Socialist Alternative explains why.

For too long, Australia has turned a blind eye to the mounting evidence that the ruling regime in Sri Lanka has committed war crimes, including the slaughter of more than 40,000 innocent Tamil civilians at the end of the civil war in 2009.

This cricket season, Australia’s attention will be trained on the batting and bowling of the Sri Lankan cricket team at the Melbourne Cricket Ground. By calling for a boycott we can expose the human rights abuses that the Sri Lankan cricketers just can’t hide. And we can encourage our own government to recognise that refugees from Sri Lanka are fleeing genuine persecution.

A single Palestine on the basis of secularism, democracy, and socialism would be transformed from a cornerstone of the capitalist-imperialist world order into a cornerstone of an emancipatory one. The prerequisite for this possibility is the defeat of Israel as a Zionist entity, the defeat of its inherent settler logic (and Zionism is historically just one example of settlerist ideology), and thereby the dissolution of its current social formation into one that is not irredeemably anti-emancipatory. There can be no ‘Zionist left’, no ‘liberal Zionism’, and so forth, for such propositions are incompatible with the practical logic of the settler state. The concept of Israel must die so that a Palestine may live for Jews and Arabs, Druze and Bedouin alike.

In the case of Israel, as long as the Zionists attempt to maintain a predominantly Jewish state they are pushed to be genocidal – witness the repeated wars, the continuing destruction of Palestinian society in the West Bank, the relentless stealing of land, the continuing military incursions and massacres, the destruction of the Palestinian economy and the blockade and now bombing and imminent invasion of Gaza.

John Howard, Mal Brough, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbot and Jenny Macklin should be sent to the Hague to face genocide charges or put on trial here.

Genocide is not only the mass killing of a people. The essence of genocide is acting with the intention to destroy the group, not the extent to which that intention has been achieved. A major intention of forcibly removing Indigenous children was to ‘absorb’, ‘merge’ or ‘assimilate’ them, so Aborigines as a distinct group would disappear. Authorities sincerely believed assimilation would be in the ‘best interests’ of the children, but this is irrelevant to a finding that their actions were genocidal.

Zionism is not interested in peace with the Palestinians. It has only one goal – the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from Palestine. It wants nothing less than the destruction of the Palestinians as part of the ultimate gaol of Zionism – an expansionist Jewish state across the region without Palestinians or their memory