En Passant

Hate speech is an important part of the armoury of control of the ruling class.

Youth unemployment might be 50% in inner Western Sydney suburbs but all is well because we can vilify refugees. In fact it isn’t but the externalisation of hate diverts inchoate anger with the system towards the most powerless in society, people such as refugees.

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 Tamil asylum seeker, known as Anjan, was scheduled to be deported back to Sri Lanka on Wednesday. But an eleventh-hour appeal successfully overturned yesterday’s Federal Magistrates Court decision which denied Anjan an injunction on his removal. Importantly, the court appeal was backed up with direct action by refugee rights activists outside the Maribyrnong detention centre.

A refugee is dead. A protester has spent 24 hours in jail for being in the middle of Perth. And a war criminal walks among the other ‘dignitaries’ at CHOGM. The wrong people were imprisoned; the criminal is free.

The system is crooked, brutal and inhuman.

The war criminals are part of the one percent; that one percent looks after its own when it suits them.

Apparently a 9 year old Tamil girl, Brinda, is such a threat to the very existence of Australia that our beloved Prime Minister himself rang the Indonesian president to ask him to stop her boat and the 260 Tamil asylum seekers on it from reaching Australian waters.   Good one Christian Kev. Here’s part of what [...]

Rather than rejecting refugees, we should welcome all those fleeing the hellholes we have created or helped create.

I see Cuba, that great bastion of ‘socialism’ according to some sections of the Left, has supported Sri Lanka’s massacre of the Tamils.  There is a brief discussion in this month’s Socialist Alternative.  (Corey Oakley Stalinist states back Sri Lanka). Stalinism is not socialism, as John has written previously.  (Cuba: Stalinism is not socialism).  John is speaking on [...]

Bruce Haigh, former Deputy High Commissioner to Sri Lanka, has a great article in today’s Canberra Times, called Tamil genocide all but sanctioned by Australia’s apathy.  When a link is available I’ll put it in.  David Pope’s cartoon in the same edition is also fantastic, comparing our frenzy about a beer mat theft in Thailand with [...]