Nick Griffin Down Under?

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Griffin plans visit to Australia
Matthew Collins
Searchlight
September 14, 2008

The BNP has announced that its leader Nick Griffin intends to visit Australia in the “very near future” at the invitation of the miniscule far-right Australian Protectionist Party.

The APP is a tiny, minority party (led by a former BNP leading light) that seeks to drag Australia back to the dark ages of the “White Australia policy”, a policy that prohibited non-white immigration until 1973.

The proposed December visit by the leader of Britain’s premier racist party would help a tiny minority there in their attempts to drag Australia back into the dark ages of unapologetic imperialism and racism. It would also give Griffin the opportunity to act like some kind of spokesperson for ex-patriots, damaging Britain’s tolerant reputation while at the same time attempting to raise funds for his party’s coffers.

This year, the Australian parliament’s first order of business was to make an apology on behalf of the nation to the “stolen generation”, Aborigines who were removed from their families and ancestral lands to be “anglicised” (made to behave more like white people) for over one hundred years, until 1969. Only a tiny minority of Australians were opposed to this long overdue sentiment.

As a modern nation, Australia celebrates its new, modern and diverse culture with great pride. A visit by the BNP, a party notorious for sewing the seeds of intolerance, hate and mistrust, is likely to only be attractive and beneficial to the sort of Neanderthals who took pleasure from race-related rioting against Muslims in Cronulla New South Wales in 2006. Since those riots, described as a “pogrom” by some Australian journalists, the Australian far-right has gone to great lengths to recruit and galvanise support for their policies.

The BNP and its Australian supporters will attempt to use Griffin’s controversial visit to garner support to their campaign against the new Australia. In a time of sweeping economic turmoil, the APP will be hoping to learn from Griffin how to make local gains on the back of world-wide difficulties. This weekend (September 13th) the APP is standing in local elections as a litmus test for its policies.

Britain has strong historic, cultural and sporting ties with Australia. In 1998, Griffin was refused entry to the country as was Holocaust denier David Irving before him. The Australian government is being urged once more not to soil those positive ties by allowing Australia to take in another one of our criminal undesirables.

Jeremy Jones, a spokesman for Australia’s Jewish community said: ”A visit by Griffin ought to be a matter of concern for Australia’s Muslim community, indeed by all communities here who have found that tolerance and engagement is a better path than division and hatred.”

To add your voice to the campaign, send a ‘He’s not fair dinkum’ postcard to the High Commissioner. Click here.

[vid removed]

Comments, corrections, clarifications, and c*ckups

The APP is indeed a “tiny, minority party”, with a very short history: it announced its formation last year as a splinter from the Australia First Party, lead by veteran fascist militant Dr James Saleam. (AF split three ways: a third splinter claims to be the original — and er, the best.) Thus far, only three individuals have gone public as APP members: Darrin Hodges, Andrew Phillips, and Mark Wilson. Mark Wilson is the “BNP former leading light” whom Searchlight claims leads the party, and is also the person who attended the BNP’s recent Red White & Blue festival. As noted elsewhere ‘Australian Friends of the BNP’ was set up (in 1999/2000) by Wilson, a former BNP organiser from Hertfordshire.

Nick Griffin has indeed previously attempted to enter Australia, in 1998, under the auspices of the now defunct far right organisation ‘National Action’. NA was lead at one point by Saleam, but upon his imprisonment for organising a shotgun attack on the ANC representative to Australasia, his place was taken by Michael (de) Brander, who has most recently been embraced by Quadrant magazine.

[Previously] the main support for the BNP in Australia has come from the group, Australian Friends of Europe (AFE), formerly known as Australian Friends of the BNP, based in Petersham, NSW.

The AFE’s principal organisers are Welf Herfurth and Mark Wilson. Wilson migrated to Australia in the 1980s from Britain where he had been the BNP local organiser in Essex. He has previously spoken to Australia’s oldest racist group, the Australian League of Rights, which has touted him as an expert on “the effects of multiculturalism in Britain”.

A resident of Riverstone, NSW, Herfurth is a former executive member of the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) in Bavaria, Germany. He has previously spoken to the Australian League of Rights and is next scheduled to speak at its AGM on 28 August 2001 on “The threat to freedom and democracy in Germany today”. He has also contributed to far-right forums, including the now-defunct Australian National News of the Day website and The News Report email list. Amongst the views Herfurth espouses is that Hitler “achieved some remarkable things”.

Source : ADC Online, Vol.2, No.4, July 2001

Welf Herfurth has since become Saleam’s right-hand man, the pair being the principal organisers of the annual Sydney Forum, a far right gathering in — you guessed it — Sydney. Herfurth is also the leader of another tiny fascist grouping called the New Right/’national anarchists’. Modelled on similar developments on the fascist fringe in Germany and the UK, they, like the APP, are also a very new formation, making their first public appearance in Sydney last year at the APEC protests. Included among the 20 or 30 or so members of the fascist ‘black bloc’ was Darrin Hodges.

    A former member of the NPD, and a street militant, Herfurth maintains very close relations with his fellows in Germany (as well as Australia’s leading Holocaust denialist Frederick Toben of the Adelaide Institute), and has twice attempted to arrange tours by “leading lights” of the NPD to Australia.

There is no love lost between Hodges/APP and Saleam/AF, Hodges having described Saleam as being a “criminal lunatic”, an “oily spiv”, a pathological liar, a “political gold digger” and in many other, less flattering terms. One of the principal dividing lines between the two is on The Jewish Question. Thus Hodges has abandoned his former anti-Semitism for the greener fields of ‘Islamophobia’, while Saleam contends that Zionism remains a principal enimy of The White Man, retains his membership on Stormfront (as ‘radnat’), and AF even announced its recent electoral campaign on the rancid, Florida, US-based site. (On the electoral results for AF and APP (that is, Hodges), see: NSW local council election results : far left and far right, slackbastard, September 14, 2008; also “Nazi rubbish”: James Saleam is unamused, slackbastard, September 15, 2008.)

Most recently, Saleam has announced AF’s desire to get warm and cuddly with a range of European fascist parties forming the ‘European National Front’, a manouevre preceded by AF’s establishment of a formal alliance with some racist kooks in Aotearoa/New Zealand. The Front consists of five parties: the Falange (Spain), Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (National Democratic Party of Germany/Gerrmany), Forza Nuova (New Force/Italy), Noua Dreaptă (New Right/Romania) and Πατριωτική Συμμαχία ΠΑΤΡΙ.Σ/Patriotiki Symmachia PATRI.S (Patriotic Alliance/Greece). Note that the ‘Alliance’ supposedly folded in January 2007 — although reports of its death may have been exaggerated… Note also that numerous other fascist parties have been members of or allied with the ENF: in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, England, France, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and elsewhere. Finally, it appears likely that the ‘Alliance’ was in reality a brief evolution in the history of Χρυσή Αυγή/Chrysi Avyi (Golden Dawn), a fascist formation which apparently has a habit of collaborating with Greek police in repressing antifa protest.

Cronulla

“Race-related rioting against Muslims in Cronulla New South Wales in 2006” took place in December 2005, and was fairly indiscriminate in terms of its targets. That is, any person not deemed white enough who happened to be in the area was at risk of coming under assault, and many did. (The ‘rioting’ was also followed by reprisals on residents in Cronulla and neighbouring suburbs.)

Strong ties

The “strong ties” between Australia and Britain date back to 1788, in which year British authorities established a penal colony in what formally, in 1901, become the nation-state of Australia. Approximately 3/4 of the population is native-born, the bulk of the remainder of British ancestry. In 2006, more than 270 ancestries were separately identified by Australia’s population. The most commonly stated were Australian (37%) and English (32%), while other main ancestries included Irish (9%), Scottish (8%), Italian (4%), German (4%), and Chinese (3%).

Anyway, lots happened between 1788 and 1901, but one event widely recognised as being pivotal in shaping subsequent relations occurred in 1882, when an Australian cricket team beat England on an English ground for the first time. The following day, on August 30, 1882, the Sporting Times carried a mock obituary to English cricket which concluded that: “The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”.

Hence: The Ashes.

NB. The first team to tour England, in 1868, was composed of Australian Aborigines, and coached by Tom Wills, who was instrumental in developing the game of Australian Rules football. Wills is honoured with a sculpture at the MCG by Louis Laumen, erected in 2002. The sculpture reads that Wills: “Did more than any other person – as footballer and umpire, co-writer of the rules and promoter of the game – to develop Australian Football during its first decade”; a contribution based — arguably — on his knowledge of and familiarity with the game of marngrook

Finally, as for the BNP, and one of the keys to its modest success:

Meir resident Alan Hough, 62, angrily asks why the police cars parked nearby, clearly keeping an eye on the BNP leader, “aren’t out catching criminals”.
Mr Hough says he has voted for Labour all his life, but says he will vote for the BNP in future.
“My father will be turning in his grave, he fought the fascists for six years,” he says.
“But Labour aren’t doing their job, and that’s why people are voting for the BNP, they’re desperate.
“There’s no alternative, people won’t vote Tory and they’re fed up with Labour.”

~ BNP looks for cracks in the Potteries, Mario Cacciottolo, BBC News, September 20, 2008

[vid removed]

About @ndy

I live in Melbourne, Australia. I like anarchy. I don't like nazis. I enjoy eating pizza and drinking beer. I barrack for the greatest football team on Earth: Collingwood Magpies. The 2024 premiership's a cakewalk for the good old Collingwood.
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19 Responses to Nick Griffin Down Under?

  1. Pingback: Austrolabe » Bad News for BNP

  2. Donovan says:

    If the APP is such a “miniscule, tiny” party, why are you so worried about them?

    Pseudo-tolerant fundamentalists like yourself are the problem, not supposed-fascists who are silenced and have their rights removed. The BNP is the only political entity in Europe (and possibly the entire Western world at this time) offering a glimmer of hope to the oppressed.

  3. @ndy says:

    G’day Donovan,

    I’m not “worried” about APP; I am opposed to ‘White nationalism’, of which APP are an expression. I’m not especially concerned if you believe that I am a “pseudo-fundamentalist”, or that you regard the BNP as being the Great White Hope. You remain at liberty to post something more coherent.

    Rant long and loud
    Repeat ’til you’re blue in the face
    Ever get the feeling you’re always on a losing streak?

    Their silence is deafening
    From the havens of thieves and kings

    Empower those who serve to deflect suspicious minds
    Action and answers as likely as a reversal of time

    Their silence is deafening
    From the retreats of tamed apologists
    Their disdain is crippling
    For those whose crises they have fixed

    I am your “untermensch” – a trace of filth to be scraped off
    A trace of filth to be scraped off

    Yet when it’s you who’s in their debt
    The strong-arm brings you to your knees
    So much for “progressive authority”
    A trace of filth to be scraped off

    Power for the powerless – well, where?
    Screaming at the wall to make more sense…

    … I melt back into indifference

    The silence is deafening
    The silence is deafening
    The silence is deafening

  4. Smithy says:

    ndy s stll pshig hs “Fr Lft Gg”! Why r y s frghtn f th BNP, thy r jst vry smll pltcl prty n th .K., wtht ny rl mny nd pwr. Th Fr Lft Fscsts lk y hv WN th WSTRN WRLD, tht s wht y hv lwys bn ftr. Why wld y bthr wth th BNP, y hv WN NGLND, y nw WN NGLND. Wht wll y d wth t? Dstry t lk Htlr trd t d, bt thn Htlr ws Scilst.

  5. Steve J says:

    I am an Australian, not because I was born in Australia or have a piece of paper which says I am naturalised, but because I have Aussie blood and the history of the Australian people is also my history, and the blood of my ancestors, shed at Gallipoli and other places of conflict is also my blood.

    All true Aussies share this common blood and history.

    Pretend Australians, you know, the ones who call themselves ‘Australian’ when it suits them but when they go home they are some other nationality, the hyphenated ‘Australians’, do not in the main care about our history or our ancestors, for our history and our ancestors are not their history and not their ancestors which lie somewhere else.

    This logic is not unique to Australians but is in fact the logic of all peoples everywhere: all peoples everywhere value their unique national identity which includes valuing their shared common history as a nation. Thus the crime of Multiculturalism (and our current immigration policy and the associated refugee policy which adds to our intake).

    Multiculturalism says that other peoples from other lands can keep and celebrate their unique identities, and cultures, but also take our Australian identity and history as their own as well when it suits them and we Aussies are not allowed to have any say in this and instead just have to put up with it for fear of the ‘racist’ tag.

    As a result, since anyone can become an ‘Australian’, being Australian ceases to mean being a member of a unique people, a unique nation (where ‘nation’ equals a unique people by common blood and history), and comes to mean simply a person who currently has citizenship, as doled out by our ruling elite, to Australia.

    As a result being Australian is equivalent to simply being human. Potentially this means that all humans on the planet are potentially Australian. This renders the people who regard themselves as uniquely Australian by blood and history as without any identity as a result.

    So our ruling elites and others like you resort to calling us Aussies ‘Anglos’ for want a better word because you can’t call us Australians anymore as this would exclude the rest of humanity who you dream will one day also take our identity as you build your perfect (socialist/communist?) ‘we are all one’ society.

    When you do genocide studies you learn that this process of stealing away a people’s right to have a unique identity is one way to commit genocide against a people: steal a people’s identity away from them and render them identity-less. For when a people are rendered identity-less, with no particular right to call themselves a unique people anymore, with a unique history and identity and existence of their own, then you leave such people open to eventual genocide as governments will no longer allocate time and resources to defend that people if the government no longer sees that people as unique and therefore worth saving as a unique people. This is in fact what has happened to many nations over the centuries.

    In Australia alone many Aboriginal nations have disappeared or almost disappeared because governments did not recognise them as unique peoples and therefore did not allocate time or resources or even care to save them. Such a fate is now happening to my people, the Australian people, and unless something changes we too will disappear, victims of indifference, victims of the banality of indifference, nay, of evil, for genocide is evil, is it not?

    Since you support Multiculturalism you are therefore a supporter of the genocide of the Australian people, my people. For that you stand condemned, along with all the rest who think like you, with your ideologically driven hatred of Australians, and British and any other people who happen to be White and want to preserve their unique identities and existences as peoples, as nations in their own countries.

    I know the Left. The Left dream, and work toward a world where there will be no more nations (especially no more White nations which seem to be a particular pet hatred of the Left), no more borders, no more differences, only one common enforced equal humanity, sharing everything for the common good and caring about each other all the time, under a one world government and a globally planned central economy ‘for the good of all humanity’ (whether we want to live in such a world or not).

    Well this might appeal to you but in eliminating nations and ‘re-engineering’, that is, forcing, people to give up their differences for the sake of ‘the greater good’ you will be creating the sort of enforced altruistic tyranny that people living under the Soviet Union and in other communist countries like North Korea lived and still live under today. I reject such a tyranny, no matter how well intentioned or noble are the motives of those who push it. The road to hell is paved with good intentions as they say.

    Australians are a distinct and unique people, like the Japanese, Greeks, Chinese, and others on this planet, and we value our uninque identiy and existence and have as much right to exist as any other people and you and others like have absolutely no right to try to wipe us out just because you think you are building a better society. We value our differences as nations! It is our differences that make life more interesting! Wiping out difference for the sake of making things supposedly better for all cannot be justified just because the end result appeals to you and your ilk.

    The end does NOT justify the means!
    Viva la difference!
    Down with enforced altruism!
    Down with the Left and their misplaced utopian agenda!!!

  6. @ndy says:

    Steve J,

    A few things.

    Obviously, logic is not your strong point.

    You write:

    “I am an Australian, not because I was born in Australia or have a piece of paper which says I am naturalised, but because I have Aussie blood and the history of the Australian people is also my history, and the blood of my ancestors, shed at Gallipoli and other places of conflict is also my blood.”

    Blood is blood. There is no such thing as ‘Australian blood’. According to the Australian Red Cross, there are 8 different blood types: 49% of Australians have type O blood; 38% of Australians have type A blood; 10% of Australians have B blood type; 3% of Australians have type AB blood.

    But let’s take your argument at face value. Given that ‘Australia’ — and hence ‘Australian-ness’ — is not an eternal phenomenon, at some point, in the past, your ancestors were not ‘Australian’, whether by birth or by government decree. By your logic, not being of Australian descent (in your terms, having ‘Australian blood’ coursing through your veins), you are not Australian.

    The rest of your diatribe proceeds in a similar manner, drawing upon very familiar historical myths of blood and war (encapsulated by the inter-imperialist slaughter at ‘Gallipoli’) and demonstrating an acute, racialised sense of paranoia.

    [Fascism is] a genuinely revolutionary, trans-class form of anti-liberal, and in the last analysis, anti-conservative nationalism. As such it is an ideology deeply bound up with modernization and modernity, one which has assumed a considerable variety of external forms to adapt itself to the particular historical and national context in which it appears, and has drawn [on] a wide range of cultural and intellectual currents, both left and right, anti-modern and pro-modern, to articulate itself as a body of ideas, slogans, and doctrine. In the inter-war period it manifested itself primarily in the form of an elite-led “armed party” which attempted, mostly unsuccessfully, to generate a populist mass movement through a liturgical style of politics and a programme of radical policies which promised to overcome a threat posed by international socialism, to end the degeneration affecting the nation under liberalism, and to bring about a radical renewal of its social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization. The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.

  7. @ndy says:

    Further:

    Australia and its history is the subject of political contestation: its meaning is not fixed but, like all historical and social phenomena, changes over time, and as a consequence of struggle. In 1688, there was no ‘Australia’; at some point in the future, it, like you and I, will disappear.

    All things must pass.

    LESSONS OF THE WAR
    To Alan Michell

    Vixi duellis nuper idoneus
    Et militavi non sine gloria

    I. NAMING OF PARTS

    To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
    We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
    We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
    To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
    Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
    And to-day we have naming of parts.

    This is the lower sling swivel. And this
    Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
    When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
    Which in your case you have not got. The branches
    Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
    Which in our case we have not got.

    This is the safety-catch, which is always released
    With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
    See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
    If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
    Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
    Any of them using their finger.

    And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
    Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
    Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
    Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
    The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
    They call it easing the Spring.

    They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
    If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
    And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
    Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
    Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
    For to-day we have naming of parts.

  8. Dr. Cam says:

    Good work on being shat out onto a particular patch of dirt, Steve. We are all very proud of you.

  9. Steve J says:

    What I wrote I stick by. I am an Australian because I have Australian blood, Aussie genes. You say that because at some point some of my ancestors were not Australian and that therefore I cannot be Australian because some of my ancestors did not have Aussie blood is warped thinking, Einstein. Listen, by your logic, none of us have the right to call ourselves human since if you go back far enough some of our ancestors were bacteria swimming around in the seas of early Earth’s history. So by your warped logic we are all just bacteria. Yet that would be stupid, now wouldn’t it, but that would be the conclusion if one followed your warped line of thinking all the way to its logical conclusion?

    There is a little thing called ‘The Theory of Evolution’. Have you heard of it? It says that new living species and sub-species are formed by splitting off from previous species and sub-species. So where once there were no Australians then after the British opened up Australia to settlement the ‘crimson thread’ of Britain bifurcated to form a new branch of the human species, which we nationalists call the Australian people. Sure no nation is cut and dried, there will always be input from other nations at the margins but if you are not completely addled in the brain you will know that Australians saw themselves by the late 1940s as a recognisably distinct people, 96 to 98% homogenous, with our roots in Britain, yes, but our distinctness as a new nation also within us. Lefties like you want to deny that Australians ever existed, or that we are all British convicts or some rubbish, that we are all non-indigenous immigrants from other lands with no identity of our own and no entitlement to an identity of our own. Well the facts contradict you, don’t they? Australians do exist, we are a distinct people, and even though our existence and history as a distinct people is shorter than some other nations we are still a distinct nation despite this. All new nations start somewhere as they bud off from some previous nations. That’s history. That’s life.

    As for your connection of nationalism with fascism it has no meaning in what I wrote: I am not a fascist, I am a nationalist. Obviously you are so ideologically blind-sided that you cannot or will not see that there is a difference. It is true that fascists employ nationalism as a tool sometimes to mobilise and control the masses but so do communists on occasion and so do democrats so nationalism is not unique to fascists. But just because fascists employ nationalist imagery does not mean all nationalists are fascists. Your line of reasoning is deeply flawed and simplistic here. As I said, democracies employ nationalist imagery: would you therefore call democracies fascist? Perhaps you would. Probably everything that isn’t fanatically extreme Left is considered ‘fascist’ by you I guess. It is so much easier to throw various hate labels at those whose views you despise, like calling everyone ‘racist’ or ‘fascist’ or whatever, than it is to try and see things from an objective position or understand how it is for the people you seem to hate.

    Fascism is an ideology that is used by those in power to run the state. Nationalism is a philosophy that simply describes one’s identity and one’s relationship to other people. Nationalism can be employed by those in power but it is not about running states per se, it is about identity. Pure nationalism is about identity, that is all. What flows from that is that some peoples, seeing themselves as distinct nations, fight to protect that identity, which they see as important, from others like you who want that identity to go away because it gets in the way of some agenda. Well as a nationalist I am proud of my identity and I am not going to deny being a distinct Australian just because it stands in the way of whatever agenda you and your Left-wing haters are trying to promote: an Australia without any Australians I gather, so that Australia becomes a place for all of humanity and not just one people, who call themselves Australian (and are Australian), am I right?

    As already stated previously I know the Left. As I noted before, you and your like-minded ilk want to end all nations, especially White nations, whom you seem to hate the most, and bring about a new so-called golden nationless age of humanity where we all go round calling each other brothers and sisters and giving each other big hugs and telling each other how much we love one another, and sharing everything in common ‘for the greater good’, and caring about each other all the time. Yuk!!! I reject such tyranny. Enforced permanent altruism is tyranny of the worst kind. Collectivists all think that the problems of the world will all be solved, or nearly all solved, if we live in such a utopian way, but I tell you your recipe for future global happiness is a nightmare worthy of the best Twilight Zone episode. ‘We are all brothers and sisters under the skin’ is a common Left wing creed but it has even less basis in fact than saying Australians are not a distinct people because some of our ancestors once were not Australian. Your loopy Left philosophy is on a par with the belief in Prestor [Prester] John or Shangri-La or that UFO which is supposed to take us all away to permanent bliss as believed in by those nutters who killed themselves, the Heaven’s Gate cult. I have read Plato, and his utopian Republic has been the grandfather of many Left wing utopian fantasies ever since. But Plato’s Republic was condemned even by his most famous pupil Aristotle as being totally unrealistic. Isn’t it time that the Left admitted that what they too are trying to achieve and force us all into accepting is also totally unrealistic? Nations exist, people are different, races exist, people value their identities and that includes national and racial identities and race and nation will always play a part in human relationships. Get real, mate! Nations and races are here to stay, at least for many thousands of years to come. So why rant and rail against what you cannot change? Come down off your ivory tower and face reality. Race and nations (based on blood and common ancestry) exist. Get over it.

    I am an Australian, of the Australian nation, and Aussie blood flows through my veins. That is who I am and there is nothing you can do about it. We Aussies are real, we exist, and we will fight you if you try to destroy us.

  10. @ndy says:

    Steve J,

    You read like some kinda racist teenybopper who’s just discovered the existence of a library at his local TAFE and yea and verily a book by a dead philosopher about politics ‘n’ that. Why a post on the subject of Nick Griffin’s cancelled tour of Australia dating from September 2008 should attract your attention — let alone prompt you to indulge in some juvenile posturing on the subject of white nationalism — who knows? But props for discovering the existence of paragraphs: the burden of responding to such a dense concatenation of logical fallacies and factual errors is made marginally easier by your voluntarily separating one stoopid from the other.

    So, I really don’t care that you ‘stick by what you wrote’. Your opinion means nothing to me. I’ll only add that the capacity to critically scrutinise your own beliefs is one sign of a mature intellect. That said, and notwithstanding the fact that, ‘against stupidity, the Gods themselves contend in vain’, and leaving to one side Proverbs (‘Rebuke not a scorner, lest he hate you. Rebuke a wise man, and he will love you. Give an occasion to a wise man, and wisdom shall be added to him. Teach a just man, and he shall make haste to receive it’):

    Nationalism. According to you, it’s in the blood.

    Usually, when nationalists converse on such matters, they admit a tendency to speak in metaphorical terms. You, apparently, do not, regarding The Nation as being some kinda genetic malfunction: a sexually-transmitted disease. You are also, and rather more obviously, incapable of understanding my point: in demonstrating the circularity of your claim, I was exposing its absurdity.

    Yes, it is a stoopid argument, and what’s more, it’s yours.

    In the very faint hope that, in the space of 24 hours, your grasp of basic logic and reasoning may have suddenly sprouted wings and left the denser material your juvenile brain has laboured to produce to loll about on the ground in its wake before finally expiring, I’ll repeat my earlier, banal observations.

    You claim that nationality is a function of familial descent. In your terms, this means that nationality is not the result of an individual’s possession of a piece of paper, but ‘of blood’. Thus you are an Australian because your parents are Australian; your parents are Australian because their parents are Australian; and so on, and so forth.

    It really doesn’t take a fucking genius like Einstein — or even a fucking moron like Bush — to detect the flaws in your argument. Unfortunately, being much closer to a moron than a genius, you don’t get it, and instead start talking about humans, bacteria, and evolution, and the fact that human beings make distinctions between one species and another; acting as if further demonstrating the flaw in your argument by placing it in a different context somehow renders it — and you — less stoopid.

    Given the fact that you have a severe mental blockage on this point, I’ll try another approach.

    If the Australian nation is not eternal, natural, then it must be historical, social. (Note that the distinction between the natural and the social is, alongside of the ability of little fascist pipsqueaks such as yourself to read Plato, another gift given to us by a bunch of very dead wogs.) That is, at one point in time, there was no ‘Australia’; no ‘Australian nation’. That being so, it must have emerged at some point in the past: how and why is an intriguing question. If you wish to learn more, consult a library, but for the time being, suffice it to say that the idea that there was such a thing dates from the 1800s, gained popularity only in the later decades of that century, and even at the time of Federation (1901) was considered controversial, with many feeling greater attachment to their own colony/state than to the federal political structure known as ‘Australia’.

    The point of drawing attention to this is to accentuate the fact that nationality is an ongoing, historical process, and involves various struggles over inclusion and exclusion; of determining who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. These boundaries are drawn on multiple levels: by the state, for example, in its capture, imprisonment, processing and incorporation or expulsion of asylum seekers; in the various, generally tawdry, ‘cultural battles’ played out by various local celebrities in various local media; and even inside your own little head, as you battle the imaginary leftists who you think give a fig what you think about this, that, or the other.

    Moar later, if I could be arsed.

  11. @ndy says:

    History. It’s what’s happening.

    As is typical of a self-proclaimed ‘nationalist’, your version of Australian history belongs on the back of a cereal box.

    Once upon a time there was The British.
    The British ‘opened up’ Australia for Settlement.
    The British then ‘bifurcated’ and — voila! — there was The British and there was The Australians.

    History — like life, like evolution, like science — is a little more complex.

    You write: “Australians saw themselves by the late 1940s as a recognisably distinct people, 96 to 98% [homogeneous], with our roots in Britain, yes, but our distinctness as a new nation also within us.”

    O rlly? Not 94%? Or 96%? Are you sure?
    What were these distinctive features which these Australians believed they shared?
    And if I were to go back in time, and slice open one of these Australians, where would I find this Australian distinctness? In the stomach? Or somewhere else?

    “Lefties like you want to deny that Australians ever existed, or that we are all British convicts or some rubbish, that we are all non-indigenous immigrants from other lands with no identity of our own and no entitlement to an identity of our own.”

    Listen meathead, if you want to argue with something I’ve written, cite it. Some thing called ‘Australia’ exists, but precisely what it is, what it means, and its significance, is dependent upon the context in which it’s invoked. Further — and here again I suggest you read a little more of those dead Greeks — what it means for one thing to exist is not the same as it is for some other thing… but here I’m veering off into philosophy; an activity alien and in fact deeply antagonistic to your paranoid, delusional worldview: you’re hopelessly confused not only about nationality, nationalism, Australia and history, but indigeneity, ethnicity, identity and what it means, in reality, not to suck your thumb and wave a flag.

    Fucking hell.

    Two paragraphs down.

    Four to go.

  12. @ndy says:

    On nationalism and fascism.

    The definition I cited was written by Roger Griffin, Professor in Modern History at Oxford Brookes University, England.

    Roger has a blog.

    There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he would quite literally jump for joy if you were to write him with your keen insights into modern ideologies such as nationalism and fascism.

    Beyond this: yes of course there’s a ‘connection’ between ‘nationalism’ and ‘fascism’; so too ‘nationalism’ and ‘socialism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘fascism’, chalk and cheese, you and me.

    You are a master of the obvious and an accomplished writer: “it has no meaning in what I wrote”.

    Whether or not you’re a ‘fascist’ or a ‘nationalist’ depends upon the definition of those terms and the degree to which these definitions correspond with reality. Thus if a ‘fascist’ is defined as being ‘someone with a firm grasp of Australian history’, you’re a staunch anti-fascist.

    After tracing some of its other features, Griffin writes: “The core mobilizing myth of fascism which conditions its ideology, propaganda, style of politics and actions is the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence”. (See also : ‘The palingenetic core of generic fascist ideology’, Chapter published in Alessandro Campi (ed.), Che cos’è il fascismo? Interpretazioni e prospettive di ricerche, Ideazione editrice, Roma, 2003, pp. 97-122, PDF.)

    Well as a a nationalist I am proud of my identity and I am not going to deny being a distinct Australian just because it stands in the way of whatever agenda you and your Left-wing haters are trying to promote: an Australia without any Australians I gather, so that Australia becomes a place for all of humanity and not just one people, who call themselves Australian (and are Australian), am I right?

    Yeah.

    You’re right.

  13. @ndy says:

    “As already stated previously I know the Left.”

    Sure you do. I bet you can sing Donner’s Song from Das Rheingold as you free yourself from the straightjacket you’re wearing while suspended upside-down from the West Bridge too.

    And still make it home for dinner.

    What are you, 12?

    Now I, on the other hand, am going to dip the piece of paper I got last week at the citizenship ceremony (the one guaranteeing me all the rights but none of the responsibilities of being an Australian) in a small vial of blood, collected from an old digger in the retirement village my cousin with the unpronounceable surname works at. Then I’m going to set fire to it at a !cinataS mass dedicated to defiling the memory of the thousands of Australians who died at Gallipoli. The mass will actually be a piece of performance art for which I obtained a very large grant from The Australia Council for the Arts. Having obtained a legal exemption from the Equal Opportunity & Human Rights Commission, I am very proud to boast that nobody with Australian Blood™ will be admitted to the government-sponsored and taxpayer-funded performance. At the after-party, anyone calling themselves an Australian will be ejected, and praise heaped upon all non-White nationalities, with the bulk of the conversation revolving around how much we all agree we really couldn’t care less about Australia, Australians, and most especially their ancestors. At the end of the night, we shall raise our glasses in a toast to Evil.

    And multiculturalism.

    The following morning, I will return to my job: devising a strategy to force all White Australians to wear a tag with the word ‘racist’, to change the law so as to make it unlawful for any white male to refuse a black female’s request for a piggyback ride to their car upon completing their shopping at the supermarket, and to invent a poisonous substance strong enough to finally silence the voice of the fair-minded Andrew Bolt.

    …fuck this — even for a joke.

  14. Steve J Troll says:

    Yo Steve J, I’m really happy for you, I’mma let you finish, but greg / Full-wit Mick / Tony / Mick / Timmy / WR / Mick Reyfield / Tony Whitemore / Michael J Reyfield / Exchron / Big Beautiful Man had one of the best trolls of all time. One of the best trolls of all time!

  15. Steve J Troll says:

    I think it is disappointing when someone can’t deal with a cogent and well reasoned argument, but instead has to delete that argument in order to avoid having to deal with the issues raised within it. You can cut and run from people like me, but can you run from the demons within yourself? Sooner or later you are going to have to face them, or else they will destroy you. One of these demons is your belief in Communism as a solution to the problems of this world.

    Communism is a form of utopianism. Utopianism is always flawed when compared to reality. When one tries to make reality fit the utopian dream one is always frustratingly disappointed in the end. The difficulty for the utopianist is that he, or she, cannot accept that the dream might be flawed, no the dream is perfect, therefore people are to blame for not meeting the ideal. Result: people must be made to conform to the ideal, in order to fit the dream, to make it work, and if they don’t co-operate, then … then they must be deliberately trying to ruin the dream, they must be evil, or agents of a foreign power, or trouble-makers or ‘dissenters’ or whatever who must be dealt with. For the dream cannot die, it must go on. Pol Pot comes to mind here.

    That the dream itself might be flawed never seems to enter the heads of the utopian dreamer.

    This is why communism also fails, beyond the reasons I have given previously. It is impossibly unrealistic and no one can ever match up to its perfectionist requirements. For we are human, all too human.

  16. Eliot says:

    Did you know that the ‘white Australia’ policy was brought in by socialists, namely, the Labor Party of Australia?

    Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with your opposition to Nick Griffin’s attempts to enter Australia, I cannot help but feel that you are being disingenuous in suggesting that racism is exclusive to the far right. The far left have been equally guilty throughout history and Labor’s white Australia policy is a classic example of that.

    The latest form of racism gaining popularity with the far-left is anti-Semitism in the thin guise of ‘anti-Zionism’. The hatred spewed by militant socialists against the Jewish race is absolutely disgusting and their approval of the ‘Die Sturmer’ cartoons utilised by Hamas is indicative of the racist attitudes of the far-left. Far-leftists have glorified the holocaust denying, Jew hating leader of Hamas, namely, Sheikh Syed Hassan Nasrallah.

    Israel has a right to exist… get over it! There has never been a nation state of Palestine and nor did Israeli Jews invade it. The idea of a Jewish invasion and occupation is a wicked lie perpetrated by Islamists and far-leftists. Palestine has always been a region (not a nation state) until Great Britain established the Mandate of Palestine in 1920 as a result of the Balfour Declaration of 1917. The idea that Jews forced the Arabs to leave is utter racist drivel. The Arabs left of their own accord and were encouraged by radical Islamist clerics who seeked to destroy the new Israeli state right from the start. How do the far left explain the Muslim anti-Jewish pogroms of 1912 and 1932? The first of which, took place 5 years before the Balfour Declaration? I think this evil alliance between the far-left and Islamofascists such as Nasrallah has got to stop. It is time for socialists to listen to Christopher Hitchins.

    The far left e.g. Islamist Respect Party are every bit as despicable as the fascist BNP! George Galloway should swing from the gallows for treason along with Nick Griffin (holocaust denying Nazi).

  17. Eliot says:

    I meant Hizbollah. Syed Hassan Nasrallah is Hezbollah leader. Apologies for the error.

  18. @ndy says:

    Steve J Troll,

    I too think it disappointing when someone can’t deal with a cogent and well reasoned argument, and I urge you to seek help for your inability to construct one. My advice is to actually think a little more before you write and, in responding to others, rather than concentrate on chasing wild geese, try to pay attention to the substance of their concerns. If you continue to encounter problems, ask your Mum, Dad, older brother or sister, or another grown-up for help.

    Eliot,

    Yes, I’m familiar with the history of the White Australia policy: it enjoyed support from across the political spectrum, and continued to do so for much of the twentieth century, with an initial rupture coming in the wake of WWII, and then more determinedly in the 1960s and 1970s. With regards the failure of Nick Griffin to come to Australia, I’m ambivalent. That is, while the one-eyed wanker is a repugnant figure, to rely on the state to control expressions of ‘racism’ is ultimately foolhardy.

    “I cannot help but feel that you are being disingenuous in suggesting that racism is exclusive to the far right.”

    Where have I done so? I’ve re-read the post, and cannot find evidence for this in the above. In any case, ‘racism’ and the ‘far right’ are related but conceptually distinct (although much depends, of course, on how these are defined: the same applies to the ‘far left’).

    With regards anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, I’ve (briefly) discussed the subject elsewhere on my blog (see: Anti-Fascism, Anti-German, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Zionism…, June 29, 2009). Otherwise, I’ve participated in a dialogue with the blogger ‘Anti-German Translation’ on related matters, including issues surrounding Ken Loach’s decision to withdraw his film from last year’s MIFF and the BDS campaign. I’ve also discussed the film Defamation and made occasional reference to the Israel/Palestine conflict, most often by way of reference to comrades in ‘Anarchists Against The Wall’. In historical terms, I’ve also made reference to the Jewish contribution to anarchism, one contemporary example of which is the work of Uri Gordon.

    I’m unsure precisely who/what you mean by militant socialists and their approval of the ‘Die Sturmer’ (sic); feel free to elaborate. As for Hamas/Hezbollah, attitudes vary, and it seems to me unhelpful to over-generalise, or exaggerate commonalities where often sharp differences exist. Better, I think, to ask: what is the position of this party, or that person?

    To conclude: as an anarchist (but also as someone with some degree of familiarity with moral and political theory in general), I do not accept that ‘Israel’ has a ‘right’ to exist, any more than any other state does. Where I think what might be termed ‘anti-Semitism’ enters into the equation is with regards the exclusive or near-exclusive focus upon the crimes (both real and alleged) of the Israeli state — as opposed to all others. From an anarchist perspective, the state is a crime — against humanity.

    But that’s another story.

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