By Lisa Macdonald
The Pauline Hanson phenomenon has sharply polarised opinion. Hanson's statements, and the failure of the establishment parties to counter them, have created more space for every reactionary idea and organisation to crawl out from under their rock and raise the flag for inequality and injustice.
But there has also been a strong counter response from progressive individuals and left-wing organisations. Hanson's opponents have outnumbered her supporters at One Nation meetings by 10 to one. Many new anti-racist networks and committees have been formed by people who recognise the need to publicly confront her racist ideas.
Included in the still silent majority are many people who are undecided about Hanson and what she represents, who respond to the fact that she appears to be addressing issues (such as unemployment and workers' declining living standards) that have been ignored by the major parties.
Others who have chosen not to take a stand against Hanson, however, include former activists who won their left credentials in the social movements of the 1960s and '70s, but who have capitulated to the Thatcherite ideological offensive, the demobilisation of the movements and the rise of "compromise" politics under ALP governments of the 1980s.
Beatrice Faust, a prominent "feminist" and "left" libertarian in earlier years, is among those who have sold out the struggle against injustice and reaction. She is the author of a dishonest and shameful article, "Left holding the liability", in the July 19 Australian.
Under the guise of offering advice to the left from their own side, Faust takes just 800 words to demonise anti-racism activists (both Australian and African-American), misrepresent the positions of much of the socialist left, rewrite the history of the anti-Vietnam War movement and the anti-apartheid struggle, and shift the responsibility for violence from the racist hate-mongers and the state to left activists.
The dishonesty of Faust's piece is stunning.
The first lie is her assertion that the people responsible for bashing Keith Warburton as he left the One Nation meeting in Dandenong on July 7 were "no doubt ... among the adherents of Resistance, Militant, the Democratic Socialist Party (DSP) and various anarchists and Trotskyites who were bussed in to protest". In fact, the three arrested for the bashing were local residents, unaffiliated to any left party.
Had Faust done some basic research instead of simply falling in behind the capitalist media's red-baiting, she would have discovered that the activists who attended the protest as members of Campaign Against Racism have formally adopted and publicly advocated a position of peaceful demonstration and no censorship.
She would also have discovered that, contrary to her claim that "the protesting left value freedom of assembly and free speech so much that they do not want to share them", only a small minority of the left (the International Socialist Organisation and the Spartacist League) advocate closing down One Nation meetings.
Resistance, the DSP and the overwhelming majority of independent left anti-racism activists have argued consistently and forcefully for the right to freedom of speech for all. They know that only when there is complete freedom of expression can public discussion and debate be widened and deepened and large numbers of people be won to the movement for racial equality.
At the centre of Faust's betrayal is her claim that the anti-racist protesters are denying Hanson's freedom of speech. This is a complete distortion of reality: it is the protesters, vilified by the monolithic media and all major party politicians, whose right to protest against injustice is under attack.
Worse, she accuses the left of "a more general violence" — their "frustrating [of] peaceful celebrations of diversity".
Yes, left anti-racism activists have chosen to work mainly outside the "respectable" channels of the ALP and its followers, the organisers of these "celebrations". This is not because the left opposes cultural diversity or peaceful protest, but because these events have been consciously used to de-politicise anti-Hanson sentiment and keep the lid on the huge potential for a mass anti-racism movement.
Such a movement would make concrete demands for racial justice which would make the ALP very uncomfortable. But not even Kim Beazley would denounce as "violence" a refusal to attend one of the "celebrations" — to get away with a stupidity like that, you need to be paid by Rupert Murdoch.
Faust's targeting of the left fuels the right's attacks by diverting attention from the real issues — the revival of racism, and Hanson, Howard and Beazley's efforts to limit and silence the movement.
The "sectarian left" is a parasite on the feminist, environment and trade union movements, says Faust. "Under the Kennett and Howard administrations, the left sects are ... identified with delinquency".
If delinquency is understood to mean militancy, the refusal to be bought off by the ALP and a steadfast commitment to the original ideals of those movements, then leftists proudly admit to being delinquents. Unlike Faust, they have kept their principles intact.
Faust claims that the left is perceived to "discredit" the "legitimate" goals of those movements. This reflects her own agreement with the ALP and even more right-wing forces about what goals are "legitimate". After 13 years of ALP control and manipulation, the real goals of those movements' leaders have, all too often, more to do with containing and diverting the anger, political independence and mass action of the oppressed into the re-election of parties whose policies and practices are racist, sexist, anti-worker and environmentally disastrous.
Revealing her true blue colours, Faust invokes the memory of the arch-conservative former Victorian premier Henry Bolte to chastise the left's tactics. Bolte's reaction to protesting teachers, she says, is worth recalling: "Let them march up and down till they're bloody footsore — see if I care!".
With staggering hypocrisy, Faust then praises "Jim Cairns' splendid Vietnam Moratorium marches" for their peacefulness. In the process of hanging herself on an obvious contradiction — it was largely by marching up and down until they were bloody footsore that ordinary people helped to bring an end to the Vietnam War — Faust attempts to rewrite history.
Winning the right to protest against the Vietnam War was far from violence-free, as the socialist left who started the Vietnam Moratorium will attest. Then, like now, governments, the police and right-wing journalists like Faust attempted to intimidate and coerce activists out of protesting.
Those demonstrators, like the left demonstrators of today, refused to give up. Over time, they built a mass movement which could not be ignored and forced the government to withdraw the troops from Vietnam.
With the same disregard for the truth, Faust's elevation to centre stage in the anti-apartheid struggle of the largely white South African women's movement, which protested against apartheid by wearing black sashes, is a gross trivialisation of the sacrifices made by thousands of black South Africans who took up arms with the African National Congress, led a mass struggle against the state and forced the racist government out of power.
Rather than defending Hanson and her supporters' right to be left in peace by anti-racists celebrating cultural diversity in halls on the other side of town; rather than aligning herself with Howard and Beazley's abstentionism (ignore her and she won't go away); and rather than acting as lackey journalist for the capitalist media's attempts to terrorise supporters away in a potentially strong anti-racist movement, Faust would do more justice to everything the "splendid Vietnam Moratorium movement" stood for by joining the left in defending the right to protest on the streets against the resurgence of ideas that incite violence on a mass scale.