New Zealand cops
Up to 100 cops in riot gear, including two special armed
units, evicted a small group of Maori protesters occupying
a former school in the small Northland town of Takahue, New
Zealand, September 21. Fifteen protesters were arrested.
The group, members of the Te Paatu tribe, had occupied the site on March 29 to demand the return of the land, which had been given to the government by the tribe last century for education purposes on condition that it be returned with compensation when no longer needed. The school closed in 1978.
At the height of the violent police operation, the school building burned to the ground. Police claim the protesters deliberately set fire to the building. The occupiers deny this. The delay by government in returning the land, which has been the subject of a long-standing claim, has caused division in the local community. Some of the residents who opposed the occupation recently signed a conditional lease for the land with the official government owner, the Department of Land and Survey Information.
Felicity Coggan
Auckland, New Zealand
Radicals and rightists
Martín Koppel's rejoinder to reader Ed Meredith in the
September 25 Militant ("No common ground with rightist
groups") is a clear and timely explanation of the rightist
dead-end where lack of clarity can lead progressive-minded
forces if they bend, or adapt to reactionary "antigovern
ment" demagogy.
At a summer rally in Minneapolis called in defense of Mumia Abu-Jamal, one speaker, identifying himself as a member of the "Black Panther Party," told the crowd that he planned to meet with the "Minnesota Militia" because both organizations are "against the government."
As the Militant explains, taking the right's antigovernment sucker-bait only gives their reactionary radicalism more political cover, and blurs their danger to working people and their allies.
I think Koppel's characterization of Republican presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan as a "fascist politician" is accurate, and deserves some elaboration.
In his current campaign, Buchanan's rhetoric is, far more than his 1992 effort, directed at the growing frustrations layers of working people - as well as anxious elements of the middle class - feel under the weight of the deepening capitalist economic crisis. At a Labor Day barbecue for factory workers in Candler, Florida, reported on in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Buchanan criticized President Clinton for sacrificing "American workers" to trade agreements that benefit a "corporate and financial elite."
"While the profits of multinational corporations are soaring, the real incomes of working Americans have been falling steadily for almost 20 years," Buchanan stated at the event.
The "financial elite" Buchanan usually names by name is the "New York investment firm of Goldman, Sachs," a polite way of saying "Jewish bankers."
Buchanan's bombast harkens back to Louisiana governor Huey Long, and his "Share the Wealth" program of rightist populism. This got a big hearing by demagogically appealing to terrified middle-class layers, and some workers and farmers in the 1930s, using anticapitalist and antigovernment language.
Buchanan's approach draws heavily on the Long-type of radical rightist populism, which is worth study by today's fighters. A speech of Long's could easily appear in many of today's "progressive" periodicals. A recent series in the Nation positively stresses that "populism" is the "bridge" between, "right" and "left," transcending both, and calls for a national convention of like-minded forces to build a "new American populism."
The attention the Militant pays to the first stirrings of the danger of "bridges" to rightist and fascist "antigovernment" forces is a critical part of working-class political education today.
Jon Hillson
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Major's spying cameras
In his keynote address to the Conservative Party
Conference in Blackpool, Prime Minister John Major said he
would put "10,000 more closed-circuit cameras in shopping
areas." (New York Times, Oct. 15, 1995.)
In February of this year, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that 75 British towns use surveillance cameras, and 200 more have applied for government seed money to finance the technology. "According to one survey, at least 29 percent of Britain's 369 district governments have public cameras, an additional 29 percent have firm plans to install them, and 23 percent have hopes to do so" said the Inquirer. One small town, King's Lynn, has 60 surveillance cameras sending images to 23 video screens monitored 24 hours a day.
The British government wants video surveillance to be as common, and accepted, as the corner pub. A few British civil libertarians are outraged, but the vast majority of British subjects have a slavish, in-bred respect for authority that allows for extreme government control in the name of "security."
It is no accident that two of the greatest novels ever written about the evils of absolute government control, Brave New World and 1984 were both produced by Englishmen: Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, respectively. To the modern, safety-conscious Britain, those terrifying predictions must be ancient history.
Visitors to occupied Northeast Ireland will find that the "spy-on-a-pole" camera is already omnipresent. According to the Irish Republican Information Service, (May 29, 1995) the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] has plans to install enough to "monitor almost every street and alley in downtown Belfast," and then move on to 27 other towns. Can anyone doubt it?
Those who think "it can't happen here" better check out the special U.S. courts already operating under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They have received 7,539 applications to authorize electronic surveillance within the United States, sometimes to meet British "security" needs. They granted 7,538 of the applications. (Covert Action, Summer 1995.)
We know that Britain has no written constitution or bill of rights, and if we follow Britain's lead in street corner surveillance cameras, our Bill of Rights won't be worth the newspapers we tape over our windows.
James Mullin
National Coordinator
Irish Action Coalition
Moorestown, New Jersey
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