Neo-Nazis staying at Lower Hutt Top 10 Holiday

Does anyone know if theyve won any paintball competitions yet?

I think protesting the National front is a very good thing. My experience in life has been that people such as this are the tip of the iceberg; for every explicit fascist there are ten fascists who lack the courage to be explicit about their views and one hundred who share their essential spirit of patriarchal authoritarianism. Keeping a constant protest up against explicit fascists keeps the rest of the bullies scared and vastly reduces their ability to be politically effective. In a world where most civil institutions (families, churches, corporations, etc.) still do preach and socialise for essentially repressive values (which are always potentially lethal to free spirits, minorites, and humanity at large), anything which can be done to reduce the legitimacy of the most explicit and consistent advocates of such values is a good thing.

At the same time, I'm *very nervous* about the idea of trying to pressure private businesses not to deal with these fascists. This may make life more difficult for the National Front today, true. But it *also* establishes a precedent, and encourages the social norms, to the effect that corporations (and private businesses) ought properly to scrutinise the political opinions of their patrons. It further establishes profit-seeking businesses as proper enforcers of social norms. And I fear and suspect that to the degree this becomes customary the result will be bad for *all* people outside the social mainstream, and almost certainly worse for radicals and minorites than right-wing extremists, who after all ultimately have much more in common with the corporations running the hotels than we do.

I think that as long as it is unfortunately the case that the corporations have enough economic power that their willingness to do business can seriously help or harm a political movement we are better served in the long run to encourage social norms of strict political neutrality in corporate accommodations, employment, etc. If it's OK for a hotel to ban the National Front, then they'll ban anarchists, queers, or 'terrorists' tomorrow- and they'll do it with far more conviction and far less outside prompting than they'll exercise in shunning Nazis. And genuine social dissidents are usually far more hurt by these kind of measures than are ultra-conformists like the National Front; a religious rightist can and will put on a suit, look respectable, throw money around, and thus get past social exclusion policies- a bohemian youth with dreadlocks or a butch lesbian probably won't and possibly can't.

As a transgender girl whose life has been seriously impacted by discrimination, esp. by landlords in accomodations, I've often been in situations where cold commercial neutrality is the *best* I can hope for and my only protection against what has otherwise been a solid wall of prejudice. In the American South, many landlords wouldn't rent to unmarried couples; in San Francisco trying to find an apartment as a sex worker was a nightmare. The only security I had in both cases lay in finding people who treated business as merely business, and who didn't consider it their place to use their economic power as a base from which to enforce social standards. And speaking of hotels particularly, I've had terrible experiences with hotel managers and staff who wanted their 'high class' establishments visibly clean of anything outside the status quo. I fear greatly that pressure to exclude monsters like the National Front won't be heeded because of genuine objections to fascism, but will strike the nasty bossy hospitality nerve of wanting to keep everything squeaky-clean-respectable via the exclusion of anyone who might offend the hypocritical bourgeois sensibilities of business travelers and middle class families.

Part of the core of fascism is the investment in corporate business of the power of governance. Encouraging businesses to see themselves not primarily as commercial entities but as moral and social arbiters, civil institutions of the polity, 'pillars of the community' gives even more encouragement to the poisonous merger of civil society, state, and capital. This scares me; a tightened social atmosphere can only give myself and the free spirits I admire in this world less room to maneuver. And precisely because I don't trust the people who run the hotels, I very much don't want them to help them get in the habit of seeing themselves as cultural or political institutions invested with public responsibility. If we appeal to conservatives to close social space to attempt to get at the fascists we'll just find more space closed to people like us the day after tomorrow. And then, the National Front that much closer to achieving its end of a narrow and closed society where different people can't exist. I'd prefer the hotels think that dealing with anyone with the cash is good for business than to believe that enforcing social norms is good for business. However bad capitalism is, feudalism is worse- and in times like this capitalism is becoming all-too-feudal enough as it is.

respectfully,

Jeanine Ring

That was a thoughtful and well put point Jeanine.

I would suggest the various symbols of their hate be restricted. The skin head who gave the Nazi salute to Charles Uphams coffin was arrested and charged with insiting a riot.

Seriously restricting what they do in public rather than who they are would seem to be reasonable I would have thought.