So if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists...
Yes, its Manics Monday! By which I mean I have, in a desperate bid to somehow inspire myself to post SOMETHING, SOMETIME on this godforsaken fucking blog, I have invented another novelty I'll drop more or less straight away.
I have decided to institute days of the week to post songs according to the name of the act, and so this is the first Manics Monday, in which I post a classic track from the veteran Welsh socialist rockers.
I was going to post A Design For Life, the Manics '96 anthem about working class life and defiance that, a decade ahead of its time, seems to capture something essential about the rich's class war austerity in their native Britain and beyond.
But, well.. I dunno... there is just something about Australia right now... with our government absolutely determined, like it is a MOTHERFUCKING POINT OF PRINCIPLE for these pricks, to send MORE BABIES to the hellish prison camp on Nauru -- a place the scene of serious allegations of child abuse where employees are actually bound by law TO NOT REPORT CHILD ABUSE... I dunno... It just makes it impossible NOT to post "If You Tolerate This, Then Your Children Will Be Next" (and a great "live in the in studio" recording I hadn't heard before)
Coz that is not just the NEEDED sentiment... it is the actual sentiment of large numbers of people across the country in a humanitarian uprising of sorts to say NO. At the centre of this, baby Asha -- in a Brisbane hospital after suffering bad burns in the Nauru jail, whose medical personnel refused to discharge her to be sent back... with an ongoing picket focusing the government to promise to place the baby in :community detention"... only to then come out and insist that, as soon as they can, they send the one-year-old to the widely condemned hell camp. Despite NZ offering to take Asha and dozens of other innocent asylum seekers the government is determined to jail in on an isolated island in hellish conditions.
Say what you will, you gotta admire principles, even if the principles seemingly belong to 1930s Nazi Germany.
The Manic Street Preachers' 1998 track was about the Spanish Civil War -- in which thousands international volunteers travelled to fight against those principles... resisting General Franco's fascist forces under the slogan "No Pasaran" (they shall not pass).
The title comes from a recruiting poster (below) urging working class anti-fascists and socialists to join the anti-fascist side -- and the phrase "if I can shoot rabbits, then I can shoot fascists" was the explanation a Welsh farmer gave for deciding to fight.
But today, in Australia and elsewhere in the Western world where asylum seekers face growing racist hysteria and terrible treatment, the recruiting poster slogan carries its own resonance. It is something captured by Tony Benn, the late English socialist politician and longtime comrade and mentor to current British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, when he said:
“The way a government treats refugees is very instructive because it shows you how they would treat the rest of us if they thought they could get away with it.”
Well there you go. I plan to do another post tomorrow based on an act starting with T for Tuesday, but I dunno... I don;t know if I can think of any act I like at all that starts with T. I've wracked my brains and nothings comes up... maybe something will come to me before midnight tomorrow.
