The REAL Scottish Defence League

"Hope over Fear" - A vote for Scottish independence is a vote for working class pride as well as national dignity

2014-09-04T04:49:00.001-07:00

Scottish Independence Referendum 18th September 2014 - Six Months Until Scotland Makes It's Choice Between Two Futures...

2014-03-18T10:24:00.001-07:00

Six months until we decide to live our progressive dream as an

independent nation, or continue with the nightmare of deepening

austerity and never-ending war as part of the UK...

World In Action - Violence With Violence - The Battle of Welling Oct16 1993 and the Criminalistion of Anti-fascism.

2013-10-16T12:05:00.001-07:00

On the 20th Anniversary of the Oct 16 1993 'Battle of Welling', it is well worth revisiting this early attempt at criminalising militant anti-fascists. This episode of ITV's World In Action starts out looking at the spate of racist murders that blighted the early 1990's, but then goes on to blame anti-fascists for creating a culture of violence by taking the fight back to the fascists and putting the scum on the run.

Other than Red Action and Anti-fascist Action, the programme also focuses on Class War and the now-defunct Panther UK (both factions, confusingly labled "Militant faction" and "Non-militant faction". The reformist faction (labelled "Militant faction") was a puppet of Militant tendency. The others were the black nationalist militants who broke away hoping to emulate (rather than just cash in on the legacy of) Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and Marcus Garvey. However, both groups soon slipped into oblivion - where are they now? (Serious question btw)).

Also featured/promoted is "Red" Ken Livingston and the careerist/collaborationist Labour Party liberals and "black nationalists" of Marc Wadsworth and Lee Japser's Anti-Racist Alliance.

Recommended viewing...

20 Years Ago - October 16 1993 - ITN News report on the "Shut down the BNP" Welling demo 1993

2013-10-16T05:52:00.001-07:00

Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond at the Scottish Independence Rall...

2013-09-23T09:10:00.001-07:00

Margo McDonald MSP speaking at the Scottish Independence Rally, 2013

2013-09-23T08:52:00.001-07:00

Days of Glory (1944) - Gregory Peck, Tamara Toumanova - Soviet anti-fasc...

2013-07-07T02:01:00.001-07:00

Classic piece of Second World War Hollywood propaganda, but this time from that short period when the Communists were the good guys. Stirring stuff, especially the last twenty minutes. Melodrama, yes, but as you watch, especially the stirring finale, you know that millions of partisans and Red Army men and women fought and died in a similar manner, for the same anti-fascist cause.

Gideon Osborne: Putting the "n" in Cuts...

2013-07-02T21:01:00.003-07:00

In the spirit of "we are all in it together", Tory Chancellor George Osborne today announced that in light of the huge cuts in jobs and benefits he is inflicting upon the country, he has volunteered to make drastic and deeply felt cuts in his own standard of living. So from now on, he promises that he will only be using coke and hookers just the twice a week until the end of the financial year when the situation will be reviewed...

"Hooker: Osborne ‘a regular coke user’
Tart tells of 'drug party' with Chancellor
By CHRIS POLLARD - THE SUN
29th February 2012

AN ex-hooker has repeated claims that Chancellor George Osborne used to snort cocaine. Former escort agency boss Natalie Rowe told a TV show he “regularly” took the drug with her in the 1990s while a Tory aide. She said: “He took it on a regular basis with me, with his friends. There were more witnesses, not just me, that witnessed George Osborne taking cocaine. There are other people out there that know the truth.”

Speaking about a party in 1994 at which she was pictured with Mr Osborne, she said: “On that particular night he had taken a line. “I said to George jokingly that when you’re Prime Minister one day I’ll have all the dirty goods on you. “And he laughed and took a big fat line of cocaine. “I’ve always said that the truth will always catch up on you. And it’s going to catch up on him.”

Rowe, who was talking to Australian TV show Lateline, first made the claims in a UK newspaper in October 2005. At the time Mr Osborne said he was the victim of a smear campaign and added: “The allegations are completely untrue.”

He said he did know Rowe because a friend had once dated her and they had met up occasionally. Last night his spokesman said of the renewed claims: “These are old allegations that were widely reported and denied years ago. There is nothing new.” Rowe ran an escort agency called Black Beauties, hiring out girls at £300 an hour."

Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3810687/Hooker-Osborne-a-regular-coke-user.html#ixzz2XOv9nXD7

Tommy Robinson Knows Surrender...

2013-07-02T20:59:00.001-07:00

Margaret Thatcher: imperialism personified

2013-04-10T09:57:00.001-07:00

Margaret Thatcher: imperialism personified

A sworn enemy of workers the world over

By Danny Shaw

APRIL 10, 2013

While the ruling class mourns the death of one of their most loyal politicians and mouthpieces, the British and Irish working classes and oppressed peoples the world over are certainly not mourning Margaret Thatcher’s passing. From the streets of Belfast to the streets of Brixton, we are seeing a different response from working-class communities who remember all too well the “festival of reaction” that Thatcher reigned over.

Thatcher’s term as prime minister and Ronald Reagan’s as president symbolized U.S. and British imperialism’s brutal offensive against the working classes of their two countries and increased military aggression abroad. “Thatcherism” and “Reaganism” represented union-busting, greater poverty and an enriched elite.

Thatcher’s track record included the intense suppression of the Irish liberation movement, military invasion in Latin America and a war against the interests of British workers.

Ireland—the oldest colony in the world

Nowhere was Thatcher more hated than in Ireland, meaning that she believed the six northern counties of Ireland were part of the United Kingdom. Ireland was in fact divided by British imperial dictate in 1921, leaving the six northern counties under the jurisdiction of the British crown.

When Thatcher became prime minister in 1979, “the Troubles” had already raged for over 10 years. She continued the repression against the Irish Republican forces. Republicans in Ireland are those who advocate an Irish Republic free from British control.

The “Troubles” refers to the two decades of intense violence that began in 1968 when the oppressed Catholic population in northern Ireland—who began massive civil rights marches to demand the end of systematic repression and discrimination—were brutally attacked by the fascist Royal Ulster Constabulary. Armed resistance arose by the republican forces against the pro-British terrorist paramilitaries.

Thatcher refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Irish resistance, the fighters having been stripped of their political-prisoner status in 1976. She infamously stated: "Crime is crime is crime. It is not political."

In 1981, the Republican prisoners went on a hunger strike to protest being treated as criminals and not prisoners of war. Thatcher stood by callously as one by one, the beloved Irish revolutionaries died in a series of 10 continuous hunger strikes that popularized Ireland’s struggle across the world.

In retaliation, the Irish Republican Army narrowly missed killing her in 1984, exploding bombs at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton, killing four other Conservative Party delegates and seriously wounding members of Thatcher’s delegation.

In 1988, she introduced a broadcasting ban in the six counties making it illegal to broadcast the views of the political party Sinn Fein "to deny terrorists the oxygen of publicity on which they thrive.”

Despite her best attempts to break the back of Irish resistance, that freedom struggle pushed on with hundreds of thousands of people coming into the streets in support of the hunger strikers. Before his death, Bobby Sands said: “They won’t break me, because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon.”

An imperialist abroad, a racist at home

Thatcher oversaw Britain’s role in its war with Argentina over the Malvinas islands, which are situated 8,000 miles away from London in the south Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Argentina. Britain first claimed the islands in 1833 as part of its global empire.

In April 1982, the Argentinian ruling junta under fascist general Jorge Rafael Videla ordered the military to retake the Malvinas in an attempt to distract workers from the dictatorship's repression and tap into long-standing Argentinian anger at Britain’s claim on the islands. Despite having helped the Argentinian dictatorship come to power, U.S. imperialism sided with its British imperialist ally by providing intelligence and transport help.

Thatcher gave direct orders for the British nuclear-powered submarine called “The Conqueror” to attack an Argentinian naval vessel even though it was outside the area of conflict. In that attack, 323 Argentinian sailors were killed. Britain continues to claim the Malvinas because of their interest in plundering the oil in the region.

The 1980s represented a sharpening of global class war from Nicaragua to Mozambique to Moscow. Thatcher and Ronald Reagan worked hand in hand to carry out a neoliberal agenda and quell liberation movements worldwide. Thatcher was a close ally of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile and other infamous fascist dictators. She allowed the U.S. Air Force to bomb Libya from airbases in England. She supported Boris Yeltsin and Mikhail Gorbachev, who would oversee the restoration of capitalism in Russia. She supported apartheid in South Africa even as governments around the world began to impose sanctions on the apartheid regime. She labeled the freedom-fighting African National Congress “terrorists.”

Within Britain, Thatcher’s role was to carry out a vicious ruling-class agenda to dismantle the social safety net and crush the voices of oppressed sectors of British society.

In 1981, a social rebellion swept across Britain sparked by high unemployment and unequal social conditions. The racist police brutality against the Black Caribbean population of Brixton in South London was the spark that led to months of insurrection. When confronted with this pressure from below to address segregation and provide opportunities to youth, Thatcher rejected the idea that social conditions had anything to do with the unrest. In her typical inhumane, cold-blooded fashion she stated: “What absolute nonsense. ... No one should condone violence. No one should condone the events. ... They were criminal, criminal."

Thatcher sought to break the power of labor unions—attacking nationalized industry, upholding the "free market" and waging a war against the "welfare state."

Thatcher presided over the 1984 privatization of the coal mining industry in Great Britain. The denationalization meant that 20 coal pits were shut down resulting in the loss of 20,000 jobs. Many families in the north of England, Scotland and Wales lost their primary source of work

On June 18, 1984, near Rothertham, thousands of police brutally attacked striking miners in what was dubbed “The Battle of Orgreave.” Seven miners were killed in the conflict by the police who functioned as the shock troops for capitalist interests.

While Thatcher herself has died, Thatcherism, the legacy of unfettered attacks on workers and their right to live in peace continues. There is still saber rattling against Argentina over the Malvinas. Irish Republicans continue to be targeted for harassment and violence by the British state. Oppressed communities continue to be scapegoated and ruined.

We should not be misled by the Obama White House’s statement: “The world has lost one of the great champions of freedom and liberty, and America has lost a true friend.” The truth is that the pillagers and looters of the world lost one of theirs. We have no reason to mourn the loss of this loyal servant of our exploiters.

Content may be reprinted with credit to LiberationNews.org.

Thatcher Dead: Why we celebrate.

2013-04-08T16:21:00.001-07:00

TabTV Inside: A Day with the EDL - The Pride of England

2013-02-26T04:31:00.001-08:00

Scottish born, Irish rebel, James Connolly - Documentary

2013-02-19T20:13:00.003-08:00

Scottish born, Irish rebel, James Connolly - Documentary

2013-02-19T20:13:00.001-08:00

First Minister - Chinese New Year Greetings and Scotland-China Friendship

2013-02-13T10:34:00.001-08:00

Al Qaeda: Made in the USA And UK

2013-01-27T01:03:00.002-08:00

Saturday, 26 January 2013 00:00

Al Qaida is imperialism’s offspring

SOURCE: SOCIALIST ACTION

Mali - commandos plan an attack with US Special Forces Photo by: ussocom_ru

By Tom Castle

Representative of both French and British imperialism have begun to talk of prolonged military operations in North Africa, lasting a decade or more. Although the US wishes to limit its own commitment of troops to the adventure the sentiments were echoed by departing Secretary of State Clinton.

The imperialists claim that their protracted intervention is necessary to struggle against Al Qaida-linked terrorist groups that cannot just be defeated in a pitched battle.

The reality is that Western powers are simply pursuing their own strategic political and commercial interests. The ‘scramble for Africa’ in the latter part of the 19^th century began under a cloak of humanitarian intervention. Imperialist ambitions are essentially the same now as then.

The current intervention in Mali has prompted comparisons with Afghanistan. This alone ought to give pause for thought as Western powers are winding down their military presence in Afghanistan - having been completely unable to defeat an insurgency consisting of rebels, tribal militants, Taliban and remnants of Al Qaida.

Afghanistan is also important because it highlights who created the forces that constitute Al Qaida and continues to nurture them.

In the 1980s the US formed an alliance with ‘mujahedin’ rebel forces that it funded to fight against the government of Afghanistan. The latter was receiving armed support from the Soviet Union.

The CIA organised what was called ‘Operation Cyclone’ to channel hundreds of millions of US Dollars to arm these rebels and train their leading personnel, including Osama bin Laden. The US was full aware of their reactionary ideology and terrorist activities. The world has been reaping this cyclone ever since.

US motivation for forming such alliances is straightforward – it opposes regimes which take some independent stand and deviate, however timidly or inconsistently, from the policies favoured by the US.

In Afghanistan the government’s transgression was to call on Soviet military support to fight the insurgents. In organising the overthrow of the Kabul government US imperialism was willing to ally with the most reactionary and sectarian forces.

In effect, the US created Al Qaida as a fighting force in order to attack a regime which was not wholly subservient to it.

This has been a repeated pattern of US-led interventions in the three decades since.

Despite vociferous clams to the contrary, Al Qaida forces were virtually unknown in Iraq. In fact the evidently false claim was made that Saddam Hussein, a secular bourgeois nationalist, was in league with the Al Qaida sectarians – when the latter actually regarded him as an apostate whom they had a duty to murder.

Effectively the reality in 2003 was the US was allied with Al Qaida, not Saddam Hussein. And, in the process of the US overthrowing him it provided a whole new space in and around Iraq for the terrorists to operate.

Saddam Hussein’s crime was his refusal to come to heel in the face of Western sanctions, creating a potential example that could not to be tolerated.

When in 2011 Western powers overthrew Gaddafi’s regime in Libya, the most hardened fighters among the ground forces that followed up NATO’s airstrikes were Al Qaida-linked forces. Gaddafi attempted to militarily crush them in their strongholds in the east of the country around Benghazi, an area the CIA had long identified as being the main recruiting ground for international terrorist forces.

These Libyan fighters are now channelling support into the fight to overthrow the Syrian regime, where a similar process is currently underway and the ties between Al Qaida and the Western powers are even closer.

There is lots of public hand-wringing in Washington about arming these forces to overthrow Bashar al Assad, although it should be noted much less so in London and Paris. But Qatar and Saudi Arabia, with whom the West is closely allied, are arming the sectarian terrorists who carry out atrocities against the supporters of the government.

The Syrian regime is being targeted by the West because of its opposition to Israel and its material support for the Palestinian armed resistance. The level of US engagement reflects its reluctance to commit resources as it ‘pivots’ towards Asia and curbing China’s rise.

Now it is also claimed that all the militants in northern Mali and southern Algeria are Al Qaida. On the contrary, there is the age-old independence struggle of the Tuareg people. Some also fought alongside Gaddafiagainst the Western-backed Al Qaida combatants, who are now among the militias terrorising the population of Libya, especially black Africans.

More plausibly, it is claimed that Gaddafi’s well-armed allies have lost some of their weaponry to the ultra-sectarian militias. That may be so. But without the Tuareg resistance, the West’s policy of using the Al Qaida forces as its ground troops in Libya would have resulted in all the sophisticated armaments sold to Gaddafi falling into sectarian hands.

It is the West that has introduced chaos in to Mali and the surrounding countries, including encouraging a proliferation of 'Islamist' militias.

This is all a repeating pattern. The claim that all forces in Muslim countries that deviate from imperialism’s policies are Al Qaida or its allies is a monstrous lie. It was directed towards the secularist nationalist regimes in Iraq, Syria, Libya and elsewhere. It is now being applied to similar forces of Tuareg resistance, including the MNLA.

It is imperialism which has unleashed Al Qaida and has repeatedly found it a convenient ally in its struggle to overthrow regimes which even partially interfere with imperial interests. Al Qaida’s grotesque and bloodthirsty methods dovetail with those of imperialism. Unable to command mass support and with an ideology that is both anti-nationalist and anti-communist, Al Qaida represents no fundamental threat to US strategic interests.

Allying with the Soviet Union, holding out against sanctions or arming the Palestinians is regarded as intolerable.

Consciously and unconsciously the Western powers are the prime movers behind the growth of Al Qaida.

Red Army Smashed Fascism: The 70th Anniversary of the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad

2013-01-27T00:58:00.000-08:00

The REAL Scottish Defence League honours the fallen fighters against fascism. We remember the courage and martyrdom of the socialist warriors of the Soviet Red Army who never flinched, never wavered as they stamped on the fascist rats, never forgetting the horrors the scum inflicted upon humanity. No compromise in the fight against these vermin, then or now. Victory to the Red Army, Smash Fascism, Saor Alba!
Friday, 25 January 2013 14:14

The 70th Anniversary of the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad

SOURCE: SOCIALIST ACTION

Soviet soldier waving the Red Banner over the central plaza of Stalingrad in 1943 Photo: German Federal Archives Georgii Zelma

By Jane West

The battle fought across the Volga River in Stalingrad from summer 1942 until 2^nd February 1943, which cost the lives of an estimated half a million Soviet solders was one of the greatest and most decisive class struggles in history. It broke the back of Hitler’s Eastern army and ensured Nazi defeat in the Second World War.

Together with the events of 7^th November 1917, the victory in Stalingrad on 2^nd February 1943, constituted the two most decisive events in the first half of the 20^th century. Not only did this battle ensure the defeat of German fascism, and the victory of the USSR, but the successful revolution in China in 1949 could only have happened given this victory.

In short the battle of Stalingrad was a decisive hinge of history.

Its consequences – in the victory and survival of the USSR – continued until 1989-91 saw the Soviet bureaucracy deliver the victory Hitler had failed to achieve in re-establishing capitalism in the Soviet Union – and indeed destroying the USSR itself. The Russian working class is still paying the price of that defeat. It led to the worst decline in life expectancy ever seen in peacetime in an economically developed economy and an absolute decline in the population of Russia..

But in 1943, the victory in Stalingrad, and the immense sacrifice by the Soviet population that achieved it, ensured the end of Hitler’s imperial ambitions for German Nazi domination of both Western Europe and Russia. Its genocidal racist ideology that created the death camps and the murder of millions of Jews, alongside gypsies, gay people, communists and socialists, was smashed.

The incredible resistance put up by the soldiers of the Red Army and the people of the Soviet Union not only defeated Hitler in the East but, in breaking the back of the military capacity of the German Reich, ensured its defeat in Western Europe was just a matter of time.

The immediate consequence of that Soviet victory – the driving back of imperialism from the whole of Eastern Europe – laid the basis for a new rise of the anti-colonial struggle, of which the high points were the Chinese revolution and the defeat of the US in Vietnam, and included the end of the British colonial empire in India and Africa. It also created the conditions for the wringing of concessions out of capital in Western Europe in the form of the ‘welfare state’.

This reality is, of course, scarcely noted in the West, where the revisionist histories of the Cold War and American ascendancy have minimised or even airbrushed out entirely the role of the Soviet Union in defeating Hitler. Instead the conventional wisdom is that the West was saved by the timely intervention of the US and, rather than the heroic Red Army soldier freezing on the banks of the Volga, the victory is put down to the GIs rolling through France.

In fact, by the time of the D-Day invasions on 6^th June 1944, Hitler was already defeated and the long-delayed decision to launch the invasion was primarily to prevent the westward advance of the victorious Red Army.

Churchill and Roosevelt had ignored Russian pleas for the opening of a Second Front in the West, which Stalin made continuously from the launch of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 through to the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943. Instead the US and Britain, on the particular insistence of Churchill, concentrated on securing Britain and France’s colonial interests in North Africa and Southern Europe. Hitler was already in headlong retreat before the advancing Soviet troops when D-Day was launched.

Moreover the scale of sacrifice involved between the US and Britain on one side and the USSR on the other simply does not bear comparison.

The personal courage of those who participated in D-Day is undoubted and equivalent to those of the individual Soviet soldiers. While every single one of the estimated 4,414 British and US lives lost in the D-Day landings was a sacrifice no less than any other death, nonetheless in sheer scale it should be noted that the USSR lost nearly this many people every single day during the 164 days of the battle on the Volga.

However, even the crushing victory in the battle of Stalingrad could not have been won by the USSR, indeed the fight would not even have taken place there, if the German army had not already been turned suffered its first defeat in the war at the gates of Moscow in December 1941-January 1942.

Two factors made the victory at Moscow possible.

Firstly was the rapid industrialisation of the USSR in the 1930s, which, despite Stalinist distortions, had only been possible because of the revolution of 1917 and the resulting state control of economic development. This meant that by 1939, total Soviet industrial production was second only to that of the United States and equal to that of Germany.

However, the centre of Soviet industrial strength lay in the west of Russia, right in the path of the Nazi invasion. As the German armies advanced through Western Russia, by an amazing feat of organisation, these factories were moved, brick by brick, to the east of the Urals, and re-assembled for production within weeks.

The second factor was the determined struggle of the Chinese people against Japan. Bogging it down in protracted resistance, meant Japan’s intention to break its neutrality pact with the USSR and launch an invasion to support Barbarossa from the east was not possible. The removal of this threat allowed the USSR to move its Siberian divisions from the Eastern front to the defence of Moscow precisely when the initial defeats by the advancing German Panzer ‘Blitzkrieg’ made the city’s fall seem likely.

If it was the victory of the USSR in the Second World War that made possible the Chinese revolution of 1949, it was the Chinese people’s resistance to Japanese invasion that made possible a Soviet victory by preventing the USSR being invaded not only from the west but from the east.

This struggle of the Chinese people against Japanese imperialism in the second Sino-Japanese war also involved the most incredible level of sacrifice. The Japanese occupation of Nanjing alone resulted in the massacre of 300,000 people.

In the Second World War, the Russian dead numbered 27 million, 14 per cent of the entire population. In absolute numbers only China approached this with up to 30 million dead, but this was a much lower proportion of China’s population.

By way of comparison, the accepted figure is that around 185,000 US soldiers lost their lives in the European theatre of WWII, with a total loss of lives, including in the Pacific, of 418,000 (0.32 per cent of the population). British lives lost totalled an estimated 451,000, just less than 1 per cent of the population of the time.

The historical debt owed by humanity to the defenders of Stalingrad is therefore almost impossible to over-estimate.

Recently it was put eloquently by Brad Delong, Professor of Economics at Berkeley, who is by no means a socialist or fan of the former Soviet Union. His blog commented of Stalingrad:

‘We are the heirs to their accomplishments. We are their debtors. And we cannot repay what we owe to them. We can only remember it.

‘But how many NATO leaders or European Union presidents and prime ministers have ever taken the time to visit the battle site, and perhaps lay a wreath to those whose sacrifice saved their civilization?’

‘May there never be another such battle. May we never need another one.’

Eternal glory to the victors of Stalingrad!

Blue Labour: Cowards flinch and traitors sneer...

2013-01-16T13:05:00.001-08:00

Crises of Capitalism

2013-01-14T04:43:00.001-08:00

Nationalist community under attack by loyalist thugs - Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams TD visits Short Strand.

2013-01-13T10:10:00.001-08:00

5 plead guilty in anti-racist attack at Tinley Park restaurant

2013-01-10T10:30:00.001-08:00

5 plead guilty in anti-racist attack at Tinley Park restaurant

Full solidarity from THE REAL SCOTTISH DEFENCE LEAGUE with Chicago Anti-Racist Action activists who are facing jail time after being charged with an attack on a neo-Nazi meeting.

5 plead guilty in anti-racist attack at Tinley Park restaurant

Top row: Cody Sutherlin, Jason Sutherlin and Dylan Sutherlin. Bottom row: Alex Robert Stuck and John Steve Tucker have been charged in connection with a mob attack at the Ashford House Restaurant Saturday in Tinley Park. Police are still seeking about a dozen people who attacked what they believed to be a gathering of white supremacists. (Tinley Park Police Dept.)

By Andy GrimmTribune reporter

5:12 p.m. CST, January 4, 2013

Five men charged in connection with a brawl between alleged white supremacists and anti-racists inside a Tinley Park restaurant pleaded guilty today and will serve sentences ranging from 3 ½ to 6 years in prison.

At a hearing on a motion to suppress evidence in the case Friday, brothers Dylan, Cody and Jason Sutherlin and co-defendants Alex Stuck and John S. Tucker all agreed to plea deals with prosecutors, pleading guilty to three of the 37 counts they were charged with.

“We were ready to go to trial,” said Brian Barrido, lawyer for Dylan Sutherlin. “I was very surprised when they said they wanted to take the plea … but I think they did the math, and if the trial didn’t start for a year or six months, they might be out just as soon” as they would under the plea deal.

The five men, all from the Bloomington, Ind., area, are members of the Hoosier Anti-Racist Movement, and had driven to Tinley Park May 19 to confront a group of alleged white supremacists who had planned to meet at the restaurant.

The Sutherlins have maintained they had planned to stage a “peaceful protest,” but security video shows as many as 18 men entering Ashford House, some wearing masks and carrying batons and other club-like objects. Within minutes, a melee broke out among the two groups, and several bystanders also were injured in the scuffle.

In all, the five men faced 37 felony counts, and prosecutors pushed for maximum sentences of 7 years on each, based on the most serious charge, armed violence. The five had balked at that sentence, and their attorneys, all working for free, had planned to go to trial, Barrido said.

As at previous hearings in the case, a crowd of supporters filled the courtroom, many of whom had written character references attesting to the men’s work with charitable organizations — including a domestic violence shelter, Barrido said.

Jason Sutherlin received a 6-year sentence, Dylan and Cody Sutherlin were sentenced to 5 years each, and Stuck and Tucker each received 3 ½ years.

agrimm@tribune.com

REBEL DIAZ - CRAAZY Ft. C_RAYZ WALZ (OFFICIAL VIDEO)

2013-01-09T08:20:00.001-08:00

The REAL Scottish Defence League digs this bigtime. One struggle. One Enemy. One Goal. Liberation for our people.

Benefits cuts frenzy grips coalition

2013-01-04T03:56:00.003-08:00

The News Line: Editorial - http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/8254Friday, 4 January 2013Benefits cuts frenzy grips coalitionTHE New Year has kicked off with a frenzied attack by both Tory and their LibDem coalition partners on the low paid, unemployed, the elderly, families with young children and even the overweight.

Leading the attack over the weekend was Tory benefits hatchet man Iain Duncan Smith who in a newspaper article attempted to portray all those low paid workers who rely on tax credits in order to survive as ‘fraudsters’ living off the fat of the land.

Tax credit, introduced by Labour, is nothing more than a state subsidy to employers paying poverty level wages, in wanting to end this Smith is not advocating pay increases but that workers and their families should simply starve.

To support his case Smith claimed that tax credits had increased by 58% – an independent check on the figures by Channel 4 News revealed the increase was actually only 8% – but accuracy and facts matter nothing to Smith when it comes to vilifying the working class and placing the blame for the economic crisis on the shoulders of low paid workers.

This orgy of hatred for the low paid from Smith was complemented yesterday by an attack on the winter fuel cost payment made to the elderly by the senior Liberal Democrat MP, Paul Burstow.

According to Burstow the £200 one off payment made every Christmas to pensioners should be means tested with the result that 80% would lose it.

In a period of sky-high rising energy bills this MP is seriously putting forward the proposition that 80% of pensioners, most of whom are existing on a hand-to-mouth daily struggle to keep up with escalating prices on a low pension, are wealthy enough not to require any help with fuel payments.

Burstow’s argument for cutting this vital benefit for pensioners is so that the money saved can be used to fund care for the elderly, in short it would be used to pour into the coffers of the private care home providers and make up the money they are losing as a result of local government cuts in funding imposed by the government.

If Smith and Burstow are whipping up a frenzy of hatred towards the elderly and the low paid then the Tory council of Westminster is trail-blazing an equally vicious attack, this time against the overweight.

The council has produced a report that it is actively considering implementing which states that anyone in receipt of benefit who is deemed to be overweight would have their welfare payment cut unless they attended gyms or swimming pools.

The report says: ‘Where an exercise package is prescribed to a resident, housing and council tax benefit payments could be varied to reward or incentivise residents.’

This may sound completely insane but, as Westminster Council points out, it is entirely within their legal powers to force people into exercise regimes or lose housing benefit.

This attack comes on top of the cuts of 14-25% in housing benefit due to come in April.

Cuts that are taken in conjunction with steep rent increases will result in poverty, debt, evictions and homelessness.

Already councils in even the most affluent parts of the country are reporting sharp increases in homelessness forcing people into situations previously thought impossible – Cambridge authorities this week reported that in one cemetery the lids from tombs had been lifted and homeless people were sleeping in them.

The grim reality in Britain is that the unemployed, the low paid, the elderly and now the overweight are being blamed for the banking crisis and being told they must pay for it through all these cuts even if it means sleeping in tombs.

Finally HM Revenue and Customs have just told 784,000 families that they must either stop claiming child benefit or else pay a new tax to cover the cost of the child benefit payments.

There you have it. This government with its policy to save the bosses and bankers at any cost is the enemy of the people, all of the people, from the unemployed to the elderly to the homeless, to the working poor, to the workers on the average wage and to millions of families to whom child benefit makes all the difference.

They are all to be crushed by the coalition, to save the bosses and the bankers and capitalism.

There can be only one answer to this obscenity and that is to forcibly evict this government with a general strike and an uprising to go forward to a workers’ government and socialism.

A FRENZY OF BENEFIT CUTTING! – Coalition goes for the poor

2013-01-04T03:55:00.004-08:00

The News Line: News http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/8255Friday, 4 January 2013A FRENZY OF BENEFIT CUTTING! – Coalition goes for the poor

Workers throught the UK have had enough of Tory coalition austerity – time for action has come

THE Coalition and its supporters are engaged in a frenzy of benefit cutting which is victimising and pauperising the working class and many sections of the middle class.

The British Medical Association (BMA) yesterday condemned ‘draconian’ proposals by Tory-controlled Westminster Council to cut the benefits of claimants judged overweight or unhealthy.

The measures are contained in a joint report entitled A Dose of Localism: The Role of Council in Public Health, by Westminster Council and the Local Government Information Unit (LGiU).

Responsibility for promoting public health will move from the NHS to local authorities in April.

Westminster said the aim was to save £5bn from the NHS budget by cutting benefits to overweight or unhealthy people who refuse to attend exercise sessions.

GPs would be told to prescribe leisure activities like swimming and fitness classes under the plans.

Smart cards would be brought in to monitor the use of leisure centres, meaning local authorities could reduce welfare payments for those who fail to follow their GP’s advice.

Resident, housing and council tax benefit payments ‘could be varied to reward or incentivise residents’, the report said.

Chair of the BMA GPs Committee, Dr Lawrence Buckman, called the ‘draconian’ proposals ‘some of the silliest things I’ve heard in a long time’.

He added: ‘The best way councils can intervene is to stop restaurants and fast food chains providing the kind of food that makes people put on weight, and interfere with the way foods are sold in shops.’

Meanwhile, the Defend Council Housing (DFH) campaign has warned: ‘Council housing is more important than ever, but faces major threats in 2013.

‘Councils will decide whether to remove some Secure Tenancies and introduce up to 80% market rents. And rent rises plus housing benefit cuts threaten more poverty, debt, evictions and homelessness.’

It added: ‘Rent rises and benefit cuts will hit council tenants in 2013. Many councils are proposing rent rises well over inflation and benefit changes from April 2013 will cut 14-25% off housing benefit for up to 600,000 tenants hit by the “bedroom tax.”

‘Council Tax Benefit reductions mean millions will have to pay more and from October 2013 the introduction of “Universal Credit” will cut benefit further for some, including disabled people, households with two earners, mothers and people paying for childcare.’

There are also plans to end the universal winter fuel allowance for pensioners by introducing a means test, removing 75% of the recipients, and saving £1.5bn by freezing pensioners.

• Police have warned that people are moving the lids from tombs in a cemetery between Mill Road and Norfolk Street, Cambridge, so they can sleep in them for the night.

PC Alan Tregilgas of Cambridgeshire Police said in a statement that in some cases ‘tombstone lids have been pushed off so they can sleep inside them’.

A local resident told News Line: ‘I thought you only had this kind of thing in “Third World” countries like Egypt.’

The cemetery is maintained by Cambridge City Council, on behalf of 17 parishes.

Parish committees representative, Reverend Margaret Widdess, said: ‘The cemetery is open to the public and that includes people who are down on their luck.’

U.S. surge in police and neo-fascist lynchings

2012-12-23T12:16:00.001-08:00

U.S. surge in police and neo-fascist lynchings

By Leslie Feinberg on December 20, 2012 Oppressed have right to fight ‘by any means necessary’, part 3

An “unwritten law” in the U.S. “dictates that nothing unusual is happening when 13 cops shoot 137 bullets at an apparently unarmed Black couple in Cleveland, a Black-run city,” writes Glen Ford, the executive editor of Black Agenda Radio. (Dec. 5)

“Community members charged the victims were lynched,” Ford reported.

Ford’s online commentary is headlined “Massacre in Cleveland: Lynch Law Was Never Repealed.”

“Less than two weeks before, in Jacksonville, Fla.,” Ford recalled, “a white man who didn’t like Black teenagers playing loud music at a gas station fired eight or nine shots at 17-year-old, unarmed, Jordan Davis, killing him.”

Armed killers of Jordan Davis and Trayvon Martin both claimed the “right” to gun down these unarmed Black youths was “self-defense” under Florida’s “stand your ground” law — which has emboldened vigilante, death squad terror.

“Young Trayvon drew his last breath in time to be listed among the 120 Black people known to have been extrajudicially executed in the first six months of this year — one killing every 36 hours.”

The damning evidence of these executions was compiled by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement in its report on the “Extrajudicial Killings of Black People by Police, Security Guards or Self-Appointed Law Enforcers,” posted online on July 9, 2012. The full report can be downloaded at mxgm.org.

This compelling study was the second produced for the “‘No More Trayvon Martins Campaign,’ demanding a National Plan of Action for Racial Justice.” It found that “sixty-nine percent of the lives lost belonged to people from the ages of 13 to 31.”

The online report states: “The corporate media have given very little attention to these extrajudicial killings. We call them ‘extrajudicial’ because they happen without trial or any due process, against all international law and human rights conventions.”

‘Institutionalized violence of white supremacy is intensifying’

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement emphasizes that “this 6th month update proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the institutionalized violence of white supremacy is not only alive and well, but is, in fact, intensifying.

“To complete the picture, we must take into account the extrajudicial killings and other repressive policies directed at other targeted peoples and communities such as Indigenous peoples, Latinos, Arabs, Muslims, and immigrants.”

“Those few mainstream media outlets that mention the epidemic of killings have been … unwilling to acknowledge that the killings are systemic — meaning they are embedded in institutional racism and national oppression,” the report explains.

BAR Editor Glen Ford noted: “The report, compiled by a handful of people for the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, had to be pieced together from news clippings and other sources. That’s because there is no database on the extrajudicial killing of African Americans, a practice that is not considered a crime, based on America’s ‘unwritten law.’

“In fact, it’s treated even more casually than a sport — at least in sports they keep statistics.”

Ford concluded that Black anti-lynching organizer and journalist “Ida B. Wells kept statistics. She and a few colleagues tallied 3,436 lynchings of Blacks in the 33 years between 1889 and 1922. Eighty-three of the victims were women. Lynching reached its high-water mark in 1892, when 160 African Americans were slaughtered because of their race.

“That number will be far exceeded this year, at the rate the blood is flowing.”

CeCe McDonald punished for surviving racist lynch mob

CeCe McDonald — a 22-year-old Black (trans)woman — and her friends survived a white-supremacist attack by a racist mob on the streets of South Minneapolis. McDonald has been punished by sheriffs, jailers, prosecutor, judge and prison guards ever since.

McDonald’s web support site states: “Around 12:30 a.m. on June 5, 2011, CeCe was walking to the grocery store with some friends, all of them young, African American, and LGBTIQ or allied. As they passed a local bar, the Schooner Tavern, a group of older, white people who were standing outside the bar’s side door began hurling racist and transphobic slurs at them, without provocation.”

In the trial transcript CeCe McDonald testified that at least four or more white adults took part.

The website states: “When CeCe approached the group and told them that her crew would not tolerate hate speech, one of the women … smashed her glass into CeCe’s face. She punctured CeCe’s cheek all the way through, lacerating her salivary gland.” (supportcece.wordpress.com)

One of the neofascists, Dean Schmitz — a white man whose body was emblazoned with a swastika tattoo — was stabbed and died.

McDonald was the only person arrested that night.

Repressive show of state force against CeCe McDonald

After being arrested, her website states that McDonald “was briefly taken to the hospital where she received 11 stitches in her cheek. While McDonald was still suffering both physically and mentally from this traumatic incident, she was left alone in a room for three hours. She was then interrogated and placed in solitary confinement at the Hennepin County men’s jail.

“She spent the next several months in jail and had to wait almost two months between her initial doctors’ visit and a much-needed follow-up appointment.

“After her arrest, CeCe was quickly charged with second-degree murder. In short, she was prosecuted for surviving a violent, racist, transphobic attack.”

A Crime Library online article, posted Oct. 2, 2012, reports: “Prosecutors offered McDonald a deal: Rather than face trial for second-degree murder, she could plead guilty to first-degree manslaughter and serve just seven years in prison. She refused the plea bargain.”

The article added that on Oct. 6, 2011, “Prosecutors added a second charge of second-degree murder, this one ‘second-degree intentional murder.’

“Each of these two charges could damn her to as much as 40 years in prison if she were found guilty in court.”

The Crime Library article stated that McDonald’s lawyer and the Legal Rights Center charged that “prosecutors were retaliating for McDonald’s refusal to take a plea.” (trutv.com)

McDonald’s web support site points out that Hennepin County Attorney Michael Freeman — a white prosecutor “who describes himself as ‘the Michael Jordan of prosecutors’ — held the power to drop the charges against her.

“But in the face of powerful community demands to ‘Free CeCe,’ Freeman did not drop the charges: instead, he dug in his heels and escalated the attack against CeCe by adding an additional charge of second-degree murder.”

Crime Library notes: “Freeman continued to maintain that it wasn’t self defense. Schmitz wasn’t the one who’d hit McDonald with the glass, he pointed out. And nothing stopped McDonald from running away from the scene at any time.” (trutv.com)

Katie Burgess, executive director of the Minneapolis-based Trans Youth Support Network, said in April, “People were very enraged about what had happened to her and the refusal of Hennepin County to recognize her right to self-defense.”

Burgess continued: “And word has spread across the nation and across the world. We have seen local support from LGBT organizations and politicians and also national support from organizations such as the National Center for Transgender Equality and the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. We have a petition that’s circulating with over 15,000 signatures asking Hennepin County to drop these charges.” (April 27)

She said that 44 percent of hate murders in the U.S. are committed against young trans women of color.

“And we would like to also point out the ways that this violence plays out in the courtrooms.” (democracynow.org)

Journalist Marc Lamont Hill wrote in an Ebony article: “The injustices of McDonald’s case continued inside the courtroom. Throughout the trial, the judge and prosecution consistently and intentionally misgendered McDonald, referring to her by masculine pronouns, further demonstrating a refusal to acknowledge her as a woman.

“Despite considerable evidence — including medical evidence, toxicology reports, eyewitness accounts, and unrefuted testimony that Schmitz initiated the altercation — McDonald’s self-defense claim was dismissed by prosecutors.

“Even worse, the judge ignored the fact that McDonald was the target of a hate crime, despite the racist and homophobic language used by Schmitz seconds before the fight began.

“The court even refused to admit Schmitz’s criminal record into evidence, not to mention the swastika tattooed on his chest, as evidence of his history of violence and bigotry,” Hill reports.

A May 22 article in Mother Jones points out, “The judge also ruled that the defense could not call an expert witness who would testify to transgender people’s experiences of violence in their everyday lives.”

Crime Library concluded: “Meanwhile, McDonald’s family and friends reported that they were being harassed by people connected with Dean Schmitz. They recounted threatening phone calls, and said that people they recognized from the Schooner Tavern had thrown bottles at them from a car” and yelled racist epithets. (trutv.com, Oct. 2)

‘By any means necessary’

It is always “legal” for ruling classes and their hired guns to attack and wage war against those they exploit and oppress. This same legal fiction deems it “illegal” for those who are oppressed and exploited to fight back.

The Emancipation Proclamation— signed Jan. 1,1863 — was necessary, for example, because the inhuman violence of the system of chattel slavery had been “legal.”

The Proclamation spelled out the right of Black people to self-defense. Yet McDonald was arrested for defending her life against white-supremacist attack, and later sentenced during the month of Juneteenth, a celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation — the formal abolition of “legal” enslavement of peoples of African descent.

McDonald was sent to prison in June — the month when the Stonewall Rebellion ignited in the streets of Greenwich Village in 1969. From the Compton’s Uprising to the Stonewall Rebellion, defense against oppressions is a law of survival.

During the month of March, McDonald and her book club supporters read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” as told to Alex Haley. (supportcece.wordpress.com)

Black revolutionary Malcolm X spoke out repeatedly about the right to self-defense: “I’m nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with me.

“I don’t call it violence when it’s self-defense, I call it intelligence.”

In a speech Malcolm X gave only weeks before being assassinated on Feb. 21, 1965, he told an interviewer, “We declare our right on this earth to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.” (Quoted in “By Any Means Necessary.”)