From Aotearoa Indymedia:
Over 100 anti-fascist protesters chased approximately 20 members of the fascist National Front out of Wellington today when they attempted to hold a rally at the Cenotaph.
The day started when Steve Larsen and George Walters, two members of another fascist group, New Right, were spotted across the road taking photos as antifa were gathering. A group of approximately 12 antifa went over to let them know that their presence was not welcome, and they were soon forced to run away.
The National Front, attempting to hold their third annual rally, had hoped to hold it at the Cenotaph next to Parliament, but anti-fascist activists had already occupied the area, blocking entrances with banners and setting up barricades with large plastic road barriers which were found nearby.
Upon arrival, the Police removed the barricades and attempted to move the antifa off the Cenotaph, but the high number of antifa compared to police meant they soon gave up. Upon arrival, the National Front were redirected by Police to Parliament, where they were surrounded by a ring of police.
Over 100 antifa soon followed up the hill to Parliament, repeatedly forcing the police lines back towards the fascists. Sid Wilson, National Front fuhrer, attempted to read a similar speech to the previous two years but was drowned out by chants of “Follow your leader, shoot yourself!”, “National Front, Nazi fascists!”, “More hair than brains”, “Twenty members nationwide”, “No room for racism/fascism”, “Run, run, Nazi scum!”, “Nazi scum your time has come” and more.
One antifa was arrested for assault at Parliament, but was later released and his charge withdrawn, after spending an hour sitting handcuffed in a paddy wagon.
After a short time, the National Front were forced to leave down the hill, where they were surrounded by antifa, harassed and pelted with dumpstered bagels and other projectiles. This continued all the way to Wellington railway station, where antifa again pushed through the police line trying to keep us out of the station so the fascists could escape.
The fascists ran onto a train, which soon took them to the Hutt, where they are staying at Top 10 Hutt Park Holiday Park, the same location they have used for the previous two years.
You can call Hutt Park Holiday Park on 0800 488 872 or email info@huttpark.co.nz and accom@huttpark.co.nz to let them know how you feel about them hosting fascists.
NO ROOM FOR FASCISM! NO PLATFORM FOR FASCISTS!
October 21, 2006 at 5:44 pm
A friend of mine had a leaflet from these fascists shoved through their door the other day, on the topic of “political correctness”. Apparently, it is all a communist plot aimed at the destruction of “our Christian heritage”. Naturally, it carefully avoids mentioning that they’re Nazis, but the celtic cross gave it away.
October 22, 2006 at 12:47 am
That leaflet sounds like New Right-style crap. They like avoiding overtly Nazi symbolism and terminology but it doesn’t take much to read between the lines, eh?
October 22, 2006 at 12:52 am
Good to know the National Front are being treated the way they ought to be. However, i’m seriously disturbed by the amount of ‘legitimacy’ given them in the mainstream.
October 22, 2006 at 10:55 am
Blah Blah asher full of shit as usual.You,d make a fine accountant the way you ajust the figures aye.
October 22, 2006 at 2:34 pm
Good to hear George got a few smacks in the head
October 23, 2006 at 6:06 am
Nice.
(Did the trains run on time?)
October 23, 2006 at 12:17 pm
Barrie: yes, it was from the New Right. I’ve asked my friend to pass on any siilar material they receive.
October 23, 2006 at 8:14 pm
Do you freedom fighting anti-fascists make an acception to free speech when the speaker holds an opinion that is contrary to your own? All the NF are doing is exercising their birth given right to hold their own views and opinions. Does that give you the right to behave in the manner displayed by those so called ‘anti-fa’ individuals? who act more moronic and thuggish than any of these ‘evil nazis’ Do you think the NZ public neglect to take on board the fact that at every one of the NF rallies all the ONLY trouble has been started by the ‘anti-fascists’ fighting valiantly against the ‘evil doers’ of the NF. You people do not fool anyone with a brain and it is obvious where the real fascism is coming from, from those people who think they have the right to disrupt and sabotage the demonstrations of a rival political group. Freedom is a two way street, you cant demand freedom for yourself and alos demand anothers freedom is taken away simply because you disagree with their opinions. Wise up kids, all you do by acting like this is play right into the NF’s hands.
October 23, 2006 at 8:44 pm
Ahh, I always love it when the fash pull the “free speech” spiel out of the hat.
Since when do you guys believe in free speech?
I think the NZ public are smart enough not to buy into the NF’s lies or so it would seem by their last poll results
October 23, 2006 at 11:10 pm
Ah the old ‘if you guys don’t allow free speech to nazis then you’re the real fascists, haha got you in a paradox’ one, that’s been going around for a few centuries now
Hate speech is not free speech.
October 23, 2006 at 11:23 pm
“Wise up kids, all you do by acting like this is play right into the NF’s hands. ” No, doing nothing at all or letting them spout their bullshit unresisted would be playing into their hands.
October 24, 2006 at 7:31 pm
“Freedom is a two way street, you cant demand freedom for yourself and alos demand anothers freedom is taken away simply because you disagree with their opinions.”
It’s not that ‘we’ ‘disagree’, it’s that your ‘opinions’ involve curtailing the freedom of massive amounts of the population, and the spreading of prejudice and hate. People should not be ‘free’ to murder, and capitalists should not be ‘free’ to exploit, freedom doesn’t mean ANYTHING goes, if you start hurting or oppressing other people, you don’t stand for ‘freedom’ but for its curtailment.
October 24, 2006 at 8:38 pm
Just for the record, I’m not National Front and I’m certainly not a Nazi.
“if you guys don’t allow free speech to nazis then you’re the real fascists, haha got you in a paradox”
Got me in a paradox? Its fact, the way you act towards members of a far-right political group like the NF is no different that what the Nazi ‘Stromtroopers’ would do to the socialists.
Hate speech is not free speech.
How is celebration of a flag Hate speech? The only hate I saw there was coming out of the foul mouths of the beleclava clad anti-racists. A passive and intellectual opposition to multiculturalism is not hate speech, if you people beleived so much in multiculturalism then why do you feel the need to take down and demonize those who hold an opposing view? I would have though having a peaceful intellectual discussion would do a better job to shaming the ‘fash’ All I was getting at is that if you want to be taken seriously stop dressing like bank robbers and trying to bash people because you just look as foolish (if not more) than those you claim to despise.
“No, doing nothing at all or letting them spout their bullshit unresisted would be playing into their hands”
As I said, Debate with the people. Publically. Dont chant ‘nazi scum nazi scum’ and try to beat them up, is this so hard to understand? Boy and people think ‘nazis’ are thugs.
“People should not be ‘free’ to murder, and capitalists should not be ‘free’ to exploit, freedom doesn’t mean ANYTHING goes, if you start hurting or oppressing other people, you don’t stand for ‘freedom’ but for its curtailment. ”
I agree with this 100% But from what I read about the national front they can hardly be considered a ‘hate group’ If you feel their views are so fallible then prove so, inciting violence and chaos will acheive nothing. And the only race being oppressed in western nations is the white race, we are the global minority, and we have a right to secure a cohesive voice for our individual and unique group interests, but not at the expense of human suffering.
October 24, 2006 at 8:50 pm
“from what I read about the national front they can hardly be considered a ‘hate group’”
Hmm, maybe you should stop reading and start looking. Last time I checked, this was not a gesture of anti-hatred!
http://img.search.com/b/bc/300px-NZNFnazisalute.jpg
Really, boring argument, and been done many times over.
“All I was getting at is that if you want to be taken seriously” – where was it documented that this is the aim of anti-fascists? I for one don’t care about whether I’m taken seriously or not, it makes no different to the cause or the outcome of it, does it, genius? Maybe the cause is more important. Don’t pop a fuse over it
October 25, 2006 at 11:45 am
“it makes no different to the cause or the outcome of it, does it, genius. Maybe the cause is more important. Don’t pop a fuse over it”
So the end result justifies the crime? you sound more like an SS officer than an anti-racist
P.S. Im sure that NF picture is over five years old. Regardless, they weren’t holding a Nazi rally they were holding a flag rally. I heard no hate in the speech delivered. As I said, the hate was coming from the anarchists. You can throw that term ‘hate speech’ onto ‘racism’ but hate is hate, since when did just racism consititute hate. You fight against their ‘hate’ with your own, and I can’t see how that can be productive.I don’t care what you say, chanting ‘nazi scum’ ‘run nazi scum’ and ’shoot yourself’ is HATEFUL and is therfore HATE SPEECH. Too bad you don’t live in the states, they have REAL nazi rallys there, then you would actually have something to cry about.
Oh and I wasn’t suggesting you anarchists wan’t to be taken seriously, after all, you put on masks and hold home made flags chasing the ‘nazis’ If that doesnt make you look rediculous what will?
October 25, 2006 at 1:45 pm
“thor”. even the name says ‘aryan’.
you. are. a. fantasist.
the national front is a bunch of violent, racist, losers. they advocate hatred, and tart it up in fancy-dress leather boots and butt-ugly bald heads.
dude, if you think you’re oppressed, you are oppressed. if the only job you can get is cleaning toilets, it ain’t ’cause another race is keeping you down.
it’s because you’re a freaking munter.
October 25, 2006 at 2:43 pm
“thor”. even the name says ‘aryan’.
you. are. a. fantasist.”
No, My name is Thorsten, Thor for short. Please stop making wild assumptions
“the national front is a bunch of violent, racist, losers. they advocate hatred, and tart it up in fancy-dress leather boots and butt-ugly bald heads.”
Violent like the anti-racists? Trust me you guys look way more retarded
“dude, if you think you’re oppressed, you are oppressed. if the only job you can get is cleaning toilets, it ain’t ’cause another race is keeping you down.”
OK ‘dude’, there you go with assumtions again, I never claimed to be oppressed by a specific race, or oppressed by anything for that matter. Get your facts straight
“it’s because you’re a freaking munter.”
An insult, nice. Very mature, I’d expect nothing less.
October 25, 2006 at 3:14 pm
This Thor guy has taken the right position here. Yeah the NF beliefs aren’t necessarily right, but there are two sides to each coin.
Stop laying into the guy because he has the balls to point out that what happened there wasn’t right.
October 25, 2006 at 3:26 pm
“Stop laying into the guy because he has the balls to point out that what happened there wasn’t right.”
Thank you buffalo, thats all I was trying to say.
October 25, 2006 at 7:52 pm
I wonder if this is the same thor posting aggressive racist threats on some other blogs..
Hmmm….
October 25, 2006 at 7:57 pm
“Only one thing would have stopped our movement – if our adversaries had understood its principle and, from the first day, had smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement.”
The words of Adolf Hitler.
Fascism is fascism, no matter how it’s dressed up. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find the hate. Nazis deserve no mercy. Yes, this is a war, and it’s one we cannot afford to lose. When fascists try to organise, our response must be uncompromising – we cannot afford the liberal luxury of democratic niceties. Violence is a political weapon and one we will use to achieve our objective. Working class people standing up for working class people and driving fascist scum from the streets is something to be proud of. Anti-fascism must be seen, not just heard. Every defeat for the fascists at our hands is a victory for our class and an inspiration for the future. I really don’t care if one or two liberal sensibilities are offended along the way. The goal is much more important than that.
October 27, 2006 at 2:38 pm
“A passive and intellectual opposition to multiculturalism is not hate speech” ,this doesn’t in any way refer to the NF. They are not the slightest bit passive or intellectual. I’m not saying the left has a monopoly on intellectualism, but the NF just don’t qualify.
Its a piece of liberal fantasy to propose the idea of debating with fascists as if that will somehow deal with them. Historically, being wrong never stopped them and nothing has changed there. Hitler, Mussolini and friends never stopped doing what they did because lots of people wrote detailed treatises debunking the fallacies of corporatism, anti-semitism, pseudo-scientific racism etc.
Even if the NF’s views were comprehensively shown to be false, it would not deter them from continuing to hold those ideas or acting on them. A subjective mythos of martyrdom and struggle doesn’t pay much heed to concrete facts. It basically comes down to whether they have the physical power to impose their views on everybody else in society. Thats something they would do if they could and is why emphasis has to be placed on countering them physically as well as arguing against their views (thats not the same as debating them directly). There might be questions about the merits of certain tactics (e.g. masking up, timing of actions, degree of intervention required) in that physical struggle, but thats another question.
October 29, 2006 at 12:06 pm
mmm, just had a good read. no wonder the RWNZ dudes don’t like y’all. LOL. keep giving it to them. they it.
October 29, 2006 at 12:07 pm
oops typo. i meant “they need it.”
October 31, 2006 at 6:33 am
Thor,
I think yr decision to abandon the hammer for the keyboard was… an interesting one.
The NZNF is a neo-Nazi groupuscule, trying desperately to cultivate a respectable image. Having recently changed leadership and, as a result, lost a considerable number of its members, it’s experiencing something of a crisis. One of the principal sources of tension within the tiny party is, obviously, its political direction, both current and future. Its historical record and contemporary make-up makes it very clear though: the NZNF represents a violent, organised tendency within the NZ far right.
So, some people think that’s bad, and organised to do something about it: namely, organise a counter-protest. This they did, and it appears to have been successful.
The question of obscuring one’s face — say, in order to avoid being profiled on something like Red Watch — is a tactical issue (one best left to folks in Wellington to decide). Otherwise, as far as I can see, it’s a simple attempt at avoiding possible violent retribution, and therefore sensible.
I don’t care so much if neo-Nazis are ranting online, in their diaries, or on toilet walls. Organising and mobilising on the streets, however, is another question. Beyond that, it’s about being flexible, I think. Fighting fascism and racism isn’t just about saying ‘no, piss off’ to the meatheads in the NZNF or AFP/PYL, it’s about creating alternative, more positive ways of living together.
(Plus what Barrie and Durruti said.)
November 5, 2006 at 3:48 pm
You say Fascism implies support for big business, and a large, controlling, central power and talk about beer-swilling yobs????.
When I hear the word ‘fascist’, I do not think of the assorted pub bores or the few full-blooded bigots who are the stereotypical activists of the ‘far right’. Nor do I think of half-drunk, testosterone-driven skinheads in tight-fitting jeans or combat trousers, bawling out racist slogans richly spiced with obscenity.
None of these people are fascists, in any meaningful sense of the word. They are victims rather than aggressors – victims of failed social experiments, heartless economic programmes and, above all perhaps, of betrayal by a Labour movement that was set up specifically to defend them.
You would like us to visualise fascists as aggrieved, poorly educated working class whites – white males in particular, since they are a double negative for the Politically Correct.
You use accusations of racism and fascism as excuses to bully and oppress impoverished white communities and isolate them in racially based ghettos.
For you anti-racism becomes a form of auto-racism, directed at members of your own race who are deemed to be socially inferior.
It is, in other words, a new type of snobbery and social exclusion.
The true heirs to fascism are not skinheads. They are the far right’s sworn enemies, the ‘anti-fascist’ shock troops of the left, the stormtroopers against hate whose slogans of contrived defiance, melodramatic gesture politics and emotional blackmail reach far beyond the Marxist coteries where they originate.
At Birmy, the paradox of anti-fascism was apparent in a demonstration by the Anti-Fascists, images of which were widely disseminated on Indy. Piously anti-racist and inclusive, the protesters are overwhelmingly white and middle-class. Proclaiming the virtues of tolerance, their eyes shine with the purity of hatred that is the prerogative of extremists the world over. In that almost archetypal left-wing demo, the chants and clenched fists of the scruffy men, the screams and hot tears of the even scruffier women, the banners calling for suppression (in the name of tolerance, presumably).
For anti-fascists base their campaigns on a sense of outrage that anyone, anywhere should dare to disagree with them. In their appeal to feeling over reason, force over argument, such activists resemble most those phantom Nazis they are claiming to ‘fight’. This is why, in a stroke of post-modern irony, anti-fascism is the new fascism.
Anti-fascism shares with its alleged opposite a belief in the cleansing or redemptive power of violence. They share as well an obsessive preoccupation with race. Indeed it could be said that anti-racists do the most to keep racial awareness alive.
It is easy, and tempting, at times, to dismiss anti-fascism as a peripheral fringe interest, irrelevant to our lives and thoughts. However its crocodile-tear appeals are in some ways more effective than those of the more traditional far left. Anti-fascists claim to be opposing a political evil. In so doing, they evoke memories of that evil and the wrong done to millions of our fellow human beings. Many people of good will, therefore, fail to see that they are being manipulated.
Anti-fascism, like its fascist precursor, is primarily anti-human and misanthropic. It despises its supposed constituents as much as its sworn enemies, and has a vested interest in promoting racial conflict. When we recognise that fascists and anti-fascists are as one, their rhetoric of hatred will lose its power.
November 7, 2006 at 7:48 pm
nothing wrong with the National Front. I dont share their views but i have no qualms with them. They have every ‘right’ to express themselves. Its silly-billy leftys that are a menace. They incite violence more often than not when others are conducting peaceful demonstrations. Shame on you
November 18, 2006 at 1:29 am
The problem with fascists is not so much their ‘peaceful’ meetings, but the consequences. When you’re getting beaten and murdered because you’re not ‘pure’ enough for their liking, it’ll be too late. In Russia, children are being beaten and stabbed to death by nazis who have managed to organise without resistance. They are ‘expressing’ themselves and the ideology that they hold dear. It is the same ideology at the heart of fascist groups the world over, and the National Front is no different.
That’s why they must be fought and defeated at every opportunity as quickly as possible and by all means necessary. Anything else is compromise, surrender and defeat.
I don’t fight fascists because I like violence, I fight them because I am a moral person and it is the right thing to do. I suggest you think a little more about what a fascist state may look like (hint: 1930’s Germany) and then reassess your position. Failure to do so may be harmful to your future health and wellbeing.