antifa notes (may 11, 2023) : Vigilantes in Rockhampton, Nazis vs. Drag Queens +++

Posted on May 11, 2023 by @ndy

Rocky Justice

On Sunday, a lynch mob small group of concerned citizens attended several residences in Rockhampton they believed were sheltering criminals.

Their leader was Torin ‘TJ’ O’Brien and the alleged criminals were Indigenous youth.

9News described O’Brien as a ‘Local Muay Thai gym owner [who] had previously posted a $5000 reward on social media for information on youths believed to have robbed a home in town’, while subsequent reportage noted that O’Brien was a former PHONy candidate. On Tuesday, The Guardian revealed that the ‘Rockhampton mob ringleader was head of [a] ‘patriots’ group that posted anti-Islam content’: the group in question being the ‘Patriots Defence League’ of Australia (PDLA).

The PDLA first crossed my radar in July 2014, when a group employing that name (which had split from the ‘Australian Defence League’) held an event in Adelaide. In September 2014, I wrote an article for New Matilda about the ADL and terrorism. In it I referred to another article by Chris Johnston (Bendigo mosque a cause celebre for right-wing outsiders, The Age, June 27, 2014) which located the PDLA within a broader array of similar groups — Restore Australia, PHONy, Stop the Mosque In Bendigo, The Q Society, Defence Conservative Action Network, Concerned Citizens et. al. — while my own concluded as follows:

The changing political emphases of the far right and the attempt to build an Australian equivalent of the English Defence League demonstrates the flexible, syncretic nature of fascist ideology; the various conflicts, splinters, and rivalries the fractious nature of the milieu. In one sense, the ADL has found its real home on social media, allowing for the articulation and reinforcement of Islamophobic tropes which, the ADL hopes, will someday soon be translated into real mass action against Muslims.

In the next few years, these hopes gained some solid foundations and, while limited in scope, mass action took the form of public protests (against the construction of Bendigo mosque, halal foods and other expressions of Islamic life in Australia) along with political campaigns by various micro-parties. Also entryism and coalition-building among different elements of a broader far-right, both religious and secular. Such actions helped to foster a culture from which individualised actions arose: the most vivid and horrific demonstration of anti-Muslim feeling being enacted by one man in Christchurch in March, 2019.

In any event, to return to O’Brien and the PDLA, as I noted in December 2020:

…the PDLA continues to maintain dozens of pages and groups on Facebook, and one of its lvl bosses, Torin ‘TJ’ O’Brien, was Pauline Hanson’s nominee for Rockhampton at the Queensland state election in October. You may remember TJ from such cunning stunts as registering the PDLA as an ‘advocacy group for domestic violence victims’; quite something for a body devoted to eradicating Muslims (sadly, the Queensland Office of Fair Trading disagreed with TJ, and deregistered the organisation). Anyway, TJ got 3,714 votes for Pauline, winning third place after Labor and the LNP.

The context for this passing remark was the November sentencing of fellow ‘patriot’ Phill Galea to 12 years in prison after Galea was found guilty of conspiring to blow up various of his political opponents (myself included). Galea thus had the dubious honour of being the first ‘patriot’/’right-wing extremist’ to be convicted of terrorist offences in Australia (at least during the ongoing and seemingly-endless ‘War on Terror’ inaugurated by 9/11). In the years since, a number of other ‘extremists’ have been charged with alleged terrorist offences.

In an interview with 3AW’s Neil Mitchell on Monday, O’Brien announced that he’d compiled a list of 10 or so addresses in Rockhampton belonging to alleged criminals that he intended to visit. He also declared his intention to place pressure on the real estate agencies responsible for letting the properties. Subsequently, and following further media scrutiny, O’Brien’s Facebook account has been terminated, and a meeting with the ‘hopeless’ (according to O’Brien) MP for Rockhampton, Barry O’Rourke, has been cancelled.

See also : Fears of more vigilante mobs after Aboriginal men’s house surrounded in Rockhampton, Dan Butler, NITV, May 10, 2023.

The incident brought to mind similar events, such as when some patriotic Volk attended Catherine Deveny’s house in Melbourne in April 2018, when nazi serial pest Neil Erikson & Co. disrupted a church service in Gosford in May 2018, when Proud Boy turned neo-Nazi turned Fink Jarrad Searby paid a friendly visit to the presumed homes of critics in Albury-Wodonga in February 2021, when Mike Holt of Restore Australia fame published what he falsely alleged to be my own address on Facebook in March 2015 and so on and so forth. Some elements of these and other stories may be found in Ginger Gorman’s Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout (Hardie Grant, 2019), from which the following account of Deveny’s encounter is drawn:

After making controversial comments on Twitter and Facebook about Anzac Day in 2018 — describing it as ‘Bogan Halloween’ and a ‘fetishisation of war and violence’ — she was doxxed multiple times. Her home address was posted all over the internet and she received an avalanche of credible rape and death threats. She was the focus of several Facebook hate groups. One night, five men in a ute turned up to her house. One of them knocked on her door and videoed himself doing it … In contrast to many who’d gone before her, Deveny received significant and appropriate support.

Nazis: 1 def. Drag Queens: 0

While publicly threatening or seeking to intimidate others with violence can sometimes create legal issues for those responsible, it can also prove to be a remarkably effective political tool. Hence when neo-Nazis and others threatened a drag queen story time event scheduled to take place at an Oakleigh library this Friday, Victoria police advised Monash council to cancel the event, and its CEO agreed. Surprisingly, this didn’t provoke front-page headlines on any NewsCorpse property. Following several previous such cancellations, however, it did demonstrate the need for LGBTQIA+ communities to discuss possible responses, and some of these may be found in Richard Watts’ series for ArtsHub (see : Queer culture is under attack: fighting back, May 4, 2023).

Keyboard Warriors

After having written about several local fashy keyboard mashers, Cam Wilson has returned with news that one of these gentlemen, Sam Duncan, the Daily Mail reporter who ran a secret racist Twitter account is now an editor there (Crikey, May 5, 2023).

Hurrah for the blackshirts!

Along with Duncan, Wilson also wrote about Luke Hollowood, a contributor to Tim Wilms’ blog ‘The UnShackled’ — or, as I like to call it, ‘The Unhinged’. Armed with poor social skills and a rich imagination, Wilms has never met a right-wing extremist he didn’t like. Consequently, scores have featured on his propaganda network over the course of the last decade. Wilms’ embrace of the far-right has extended to wearing its merchandise, including promoting the notion of ‘Right Wing Death Squads’ (RWDS). And while gun massacres are seemingly a daily occurrence in the United States, a mass murder in Texas on May 6, in which thirty-three-year old Mauricio Garcia ‘shot and killed eight people and wounded at least seven others at a busy mall north of Dallas on Saturday’ has direct relevance. According to Hannah Gais, Michael Edison Hayden, Rachel Janik and Megan Squire:

Garcia’s social media history suggests he has a long history with fringe radical-right internet communities, due to the frequency with which he referred to their esoteric symbols and memes. He posted to Odnoklassniki photos of hand-drawn symbols associated with the radical right, including “Deus Vult” crosses, SS lightning bolts, swastikas and references to “right wing death squads,” a meme that celebrates extrajudicial killing on behalf of a fascist state. He also drew and posted photos of helicopters, which reference the killing of dissidents under the 20th-century regime of authoritarian Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. Garcia also shared photos that appear to be selfies on Odnoklassniki showing that he tattooed the logo of the Schutzstaffel, or SS, a Nazi-era paramilitary organization, and a swastika on his body sometime between 2022 and 2023.

For Bellingcat, Aric Toller writes ‘On 21 April, a photograph of a vest with the RWDS (Right-Wing Death Squad) patch that Garcia wore during the shooting was shared on the OK account’ (Tracing the Odnoklassniki Profile of the Texas Mall Shooter, May 8, 2023), while in The Progressive, Zach D. Roberts elaborates upon How the Texas Shooter’s RWDS Patch Became a Meme (May 11, 2023).

Still, it’s all just for the lulz, eh Tim.

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #161 w Ali Breland on Groypers, Germans & Internet Grotesques : May 11, 2023

Posted on May 8, 2023 by @ndy

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Ali Breland [Twitter]. Ali writes about the internet, politics, and disinformation for Mother Jones. His most recent contributions to the zine include The Website That Wants You to Kill Yourself—and Won’t Die (‘How the trolls on Kiwi Farms hounded people to commit suicide and created the online culture we have today’) and It Came From the Basement (‘How Nick Fuentes groomed a new generation of racist hate’). He’s also responsible for Surviving Germany’s Neo-Nazi Resurgence in The New Republic (April 26, 2023).

• On Kiwi Farms, see also : Hard lessons for Australia from the Drop Kiwi Farms campaign, Natalie Feliks, Overland, September 29, 2022 | Uncovered Tweets Show Katherine Deves Seemingly Encouraging Visits To A Far-Right Forum, Michael Di Iorio, Pedestrian, May 20, 2020 (‘In a string of now-deleted tweets from 2021, Deves seemingly encourages her followers to visit Kiwi Farms, calling it a “valuable” source of information’).

• On Nick Fuentes and groypers, see also : ‘It’s Like F-cking Mean Girls’: Yiannopoulos Return Roils Kanye’s 2024 Campaign, Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone, May 5, 2023 | Nick Fuentes Holds Racist Conference Across From CPAC, Hannah Gais and Creede Newton, Southern Poverty Law Centre, March 4, 2023.

• On an earlier Nazi resurgence, see also : Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens, Little Brown & Co., 1997. ‘This is the saga of an underground political movement that has reawakened after a half century of hibernation. It is the history of something long hidden reappearing in a new form, a thing once forbidden that is gradually gaining influence and respectability. Most of all, it is a story about a cadre of old-guard fascists who kept the torch burning and bequeathed it to a new generation of extremists who are carrying on the struggle today.’

4.30pm, Thursday, May 11, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #160 w Alex Hinton on 2023 CPAC, anti-trans politics, genocide and justice : May 4, 2023

Posted on May 1, 2023 by @ndy

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to return guest Alex Hinton [Twitter]. Alex is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights, UNESCO Chair on Genocide Prevention. We first spoke to Alex in June 2021 about his book It Can Happen Here: White Power and the Rising Threat of Genocide in the US (NYU, 2021).

On this week’s episode we spoke to Alex about his experience at the 2023 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) in March, ‘ground zero for the current onslaught of anti-trans rhetoric and legislation in the U.S.’ (see : Two Myths Fueling the Conservative Right’s Dangerous Transphobia, SAPIENS, April 2023). We also spoke to him about war crimes and the International Criminal Court, genocide, hate speech, conspiracy theories, education and more. (NB. The recent publicity tour of Australia and New Zealand by anti-trans activist ‘Posie Parker’ was sponsored by CPAC’s Australian franchise.)

See also : Opinion: The International Criminal Court wants to prosecute Russia for war crimes. The U.S. should help, Alex Hinton, The Los Angeles Times, March 13, 2023 | Violent extremists are not lone wolves – dispelling this myth could help reduce violence, Alex Hinton, The Conversation, February 24, 2023.

4.30pm, Thursday, May 4, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• A longer version of this episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

Bonus! Cat Tebaldi

Last week’s episode of YNP! (#159) featured Cat Tebaldi on Trad Wives and Granola Nazis.

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Sam Duncan, The Daily Mail & Anti-Semitism

Posted on April 29, 2023 by @ndy

After having exposed keyboard warriors Luke Hollowood and Ryan Anderson, Crikey’s Cam Wilson has done it again, this time zeroing in on semi-pro anti-Semite and The Daily Mail contributor Sam Duncan.

See : Daily Mail reporter secretly ran a popular racist, anti-Semitic Twitter account, Crikey, April 26, 2023.

The Daily Mail has a chequered history on the question of fascism, with its co-founder Harold Harmsworth, 1st Viscount Rothermere openly recruiting for the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s. Of late its online version has been subsisting on a steady diet of plagiarism and prejudice, with only rare Ws for the good guys.

Sam Duncam, better known as ‘Based Patrick’ (@patrickbasedmn), was a prolific twit whose profile received a massive boost after the platform was purchased by Emerald Mine Guy.

Cam writes:

[Sam Duncan’s] account regularly tweeted racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigration and anti-vaccine content to its 32,000 followers. This includes criticising people for their “Naziphobia” and commending countries for expelling Muslims and Jewish residents.

It has collaborated with a group called Anti-White Watch, which was called a “sinister new effort from white nationalists to co-opt the language of social justice”. One of its posts was even featured in an investigation revealing a Fox News producer’s history of liking racist and sexist tweets. The account was deleted last week after Crikey sent a request for comment.

‘AnonCommieStan’ provides a few more details about Sam’s online twattery, which otherwise includes: positive references to Tom Sewell & Co.’s presence at Posie Parker’s rally outside parliament; agreement with Andy Ngo about anTEEfa; the dangers of non-violence; unfavourably comparing the physiques of CARF supporters to those of NSN members; crowing about owning libs and indulging in anti-feminist, white supremacist and anti-Semitic stoopid.

TLDR : Sam ‘Leftoids hate that we’re better looking, funnier and more interesting than them.’ Duncan is a nazi shitpoaster.

More broadly, while Sam Duncan, Luke Hollowood, Ryan Anderson, David Hiscox, David Hilton et. al. share much in common politically, they have other common attributes, being mostly tertiary-educated, well-travelled members of the multi-cultural/multi-ethnic/multi-racial lower-middle class. Thus, while anti-Semitism, misogyny and vulgar, ‘semi-ironic’ racism is more often than not (and quite happily) assigned to working-class meatheads by churnalists and crackademics, angry petit bourgeois boys such as these rarely get the credit they (well and truly) deserve.

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Keyboard Warriors of the Australian #AltRight (2023) : The UnShackled, The Spectator, Luke Hollowood & Ryan Anderson

Posted on April 24, 2023 by @ndy

See also : Keyboard Warriors of the Australian #AltRight : XYZ & David Hiscox, February 5, 2018.

Above : Luke Hollowood.

1) Spectator Australia keeps publishing white supremacists and anti-Semites writes Cam Wilson (Crikey, April 21, 2023). The white supremacists and anti-Semites in question: ‘Lucas Rosas’ and ‘@rjhenderso1’.

2) Tim Wilms, editor of The UnShackled The UnHinged blog: ‘Lucas Rosas has spent years monitoring far left extremists so you don’t have to. He lives in a secure location with multiple large and hungry guard dogs.’

3) Cam Wilson, Crikey’s associate editor: ‘Rosas appears to be the pseudonym for Luke Hollowood, a Townsville-based former member of the Australian Defence Force (ADF). A title search shows that his address is leased to Defence Housing Australia.’

4) Michael Cook, editor of MercatorNet: ‘Ryan Anderson is an essayist based in Australia. His work has appeared in Quillette and other assorted publications.’

5) Cam Wilson, Crikey’s associate editor: ‘[Ryan Anderson’s Twitter] account spews white supremacist, anti-Semitic and anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric, as well as engaging with other bigoted accounts. It retweeted baseless George Soros-esque conspiracies about support for the Voice to Parliament campaign, and posted photographs of people praying to Mecca in public parks, attacking them.’

So far, so typical.

Above : Tim Wilms poses for a photo with some of his #BFFs.

Hollowood began contributing to Tim Wilms’ blog in 2018 in defence of Stefan Molyneux and Lauren ‘The Great Replacement’ Southern. In subsequent years and scores of articles he assumed the role of an anti-antifa specialist. As such, the ex-soldier regularly disclosed the shocking-but-true fact that anarchists and leftists have played an active role in organising anti-fascist and pro-refugee rallies, local councils and progressive MPs have denounced racism, and both the ABC and the Greens take climate science seriously.

The increasingly shrill tone that’s characterised Hollowood’s blogposts over the last five years reflects his despair that outside of Wilms’ audience of various species of reactionary his diatribes are — with the exception of Rowan Dean and The Spectator and Tom Sewell and the National Socialist Network — largely ignored. Further, his near-constant whining about the nefarious influence of ‘Marxists’ upon the Australian body politic is standard fare for NewsCorprse, and racism and xenophobia are hardly unknown features of ‘Australia’s most-read columnist’:

As a general rule, however, the explicit endorsement of antisemitic perspectives is still considered a bridge too far, and why every now and again contributors to reactionary right-wing publications like The Spectator get into trouble if they’re revealed as such. As Cam notes, Hollowood and Anderson:

… join David Hilton as another former Spectator Australia writer exposed for anti-Semitic views. In 2018, the Southern Poverty Law Centre revealed that Hilton published under the nom de plume Moses Apostaticus in The Spectator along with the Daily Caller. The investigation also laid out his history of pro-Nazi comments, such as a Facebook post sharing an article about IBM’s involvement in the Holocaust with the caption “IBM did nothing wrong”. (That same investigation also drew attention to Scott Greer, the then-Daily Caller editor referenced by Anderson, and his links to white nationalists).

David Hilton’s cack-handed contributions to the defence of Western Civilization from (((Cultural Marxism))) were also noted on the blog in September 2017 and July 2017. But when he’s not helping ‘a Christian schools network, Australian Christian College’ develop its curriculum, David can be found inhabiting the classic Nazi paradox: simultaneously celebrating while also denying the Holocaust. Here, for example, he expresses delight in the macabre torture of a Jewish woman by Nazi scientists (The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, Simon Baron-Cohen, Basic Books, 2011):

A few days after the Christchurch massacre, David opined that he has a much better command of written English than the killer:

And so on.

Above : Ryan Anderson.

As for Ryan Anderson, unlike his Brizvegas kamerad Herr Hilton, Ryan is BASED in Melbourne. He’s also had a little more success in educating the public than David, having been published over a dozen times by #RowanFromMarketing, about as many times by ‘Mercator’, having lamented the impact of ‘demographic change’ *nudge nudge, wink wink* on the Victorian Liberals for Quadrant and — just once — been a cultural critic for Amateur Phrenology (sic) zine. Mr Anderson would appear to have deleted his Twitter account shortly after being contacted by Mr Wilson, but happily enough his tweets have been preserved for your reading pleasure.

What’s it like walking through Melbourne CBD at night Ryan?

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #158 w Jason Wilson on American Night Terrors : April 13, 2023

Posted on April 12, 2023 by @ndy


This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to our semi-regular US correspondent Jason Wilson [Twitter/Mastodon]. Jason is a journalist and researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center and we last spoke to him in October 2022. See also : Violent White Nationalist Rob Rundo Arrested in Romania, Hannah Gais, Jason Wilson and Michael Colborne, Hatewatch (SPLC), March 31, 2023.

4.30pm, Thursday, April 13, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• A longer version of this episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #157 w Ray Acheson on Banning Bombs & Abolishing State Violence : April 6, 2023

Posted on April 3, 2023 by @ndy

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Ray Acheson [Twitter]. Ray is an abolitionist, organiser and the author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages (Haymarket, 2022). We spoke to Ray about their work as the Director of Reaching Critical Will — the disarmament programme of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) — and with International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the campaign to Stop Cop City in Atlanta, Georgia and the meaning and possibilities of abolitionism.

• Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy ‘offers a look inside the antinuclear movement and its recent successful campaign to ban the bomb. From scrappy organizing to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 and achieving a landmark UN treaty banning nuclear weapons, this book narrates the journey of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and developments in feminist disarmament activism.’

• Abolishing State Violence ‘argues that abolition is transformative. It is about defunding, demilitarizing, disbanding, and divesting from current structures of violence, but also about imagining new ways to organize and care for each other and our planet, and about building new systems and cultures to sustain ourselves in a more equitable, free, and peaceful way. It shows that change is possible.’

See/hear also : Countering militarism: In conversation with Ray Acheson, Radioactive Show, 3CR, April 1, 2023 | Stop Cop City, Ray Acheson, Counterpunch, February 9, 2023 | Australian Anti-AUKUS Coalition (AAAC).

4.30pm, Thursday, April 6, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• A longer version of this episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #156 w Simon Hunt on Posie Parker, art, culture, activism : March 30, 2023

Posted on March 28, 2023 by @ndy

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Simon Hunt (Facebook /// Twitter /// YouTube). Sometimes AKA ‘Pauline Pantsdown’, Simon has a long history as an activist, artist and raconteur. We spoke to him about Posie Parker’s recent tour, anti-trans and homophobic sentiment, art and activism, and how humour can be utilised in order to subvert social prejudice, then and now.

See also : As George Pell departs, every ribbon tells a story the church tried to silence, Simon Hunt, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 1, 2023 | (I’m A) Back Door Man: Simon Hunt and the Slippery Humour of Pauline Pantsdown, Mitch L Ryan, Disclaimer, 2022 | Who were the neo-Nazis at Posie Parker’s rally in Melbourne? (March 27, 2023) | “Posie Parker, you can’t hide. You’ve got Nazis on your side.” (March 20, 2023) | Posie Parker’s 2023 Publicity Tour Down Under (March 12, 2023) | Fred Nihilist by Kol Dimond.

4.30pm, Thursday, March 30, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• A longer version of this episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

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Who were the neo-Nazis at Posie Parker’s rally in Melbourne?

Posted on March 27, 2023 by @ndy

As noted, Balywn Gauleiter Tom Sewell and some of his followers attended Posie Parker’s anti-trans rally in Melbourne on Saturday, March 18. While a number were known, some were not. Helpfully, the nazi geeks were more than willing to pose for some happy snaps outside their organising base at Tim Lutze’s Legacy Boxing Gym in West Sunshine and, somehow or other, these have made their way into the hands of the anti-fascist research group ‘White Rose Society’. WRS has since released the photos and is appealing to the public for assistance in identifying Lady Parker’s neo-Nazi allies (write : [email protected]).

In related news, ‘Paparoa’ (Aotearoa/New Zealand — [email protected]) has identified a number of the neo-Nazis who attended Lady Parker’s abortive attempt to make trouble for the trans- community in Auckland. This included Sam Brittenden, whose adventures in Ireland were documented as The Neo-Nazi and The Priest: An Extremist’s Journey To West Cork by the Far Right Observatory in March of last year.

See also : “The NSN is dead! Long live the NSN!” (September 9, 2021) | Senior neo-Nazi slips out of Australia to fight Russian army, Nick McKenzie and Anthony Galloway, The Age, March 2023 | Soldiers of hate: Army investigates neo-Nazis in its ranks, Nick McKenzie, The Age, March 18, 2023 (‘The Australian Army has discovered serving members are neo-Nazis, as a new generation of far-right leadership emerges with a declared interest in guns’).

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #155 w Jayne Persian on Ustaše in Australia : March 23, 2023

Posted on March 22, 2023 by @ndy

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Jayne Persian [Twitter]. Jayne is an historian and the author of Beautiful Balts: From displaced persons to new Australians (NewSouth, 2017) and the co-editor — with Evan Smith and Vashti Jane Fox — of Histories of Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Australia (Routledge, 2023) to which she contributed (with Evan) a chapter on ‘European and Australian Fascisms: The Case of Ferenc Molnár and National Socialism in Cold War Australia’. We spoke to Jayne about how and why the Ustaše in Australia was to be, in the opinion of the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood (Hrvatsko Revolucionarno Bratstvo, HRB), ‘the citadel of Croatian national consciousness abroad’.

See also : antifa notes (october 2, 2022) : nazis @ Australia Cup (Sydney) + Youth Fest (Melbourne) (October 2, 2022) | Melbourne Croatia/Knights ultras still being d*ckheads (February 22, 2015) | Croatian fascism in Australia (January 20, 2010) | “Scum” issue statement on 2007 ISD gig at Melbourne Croatia (November 7, 2007) | Neo-Nazis split Croat community (October 7, 2007) | Dr. Cam on Helen Coonan’s fascist flirtation (May 3, 2007).

4.30pm, Thursday, March 23, 2023 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• A longer version of this episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
• We also have a Facebook page for the show, which you’re invited to ‘Like’ and to ‘Follow’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

BONUS! Spotting

THE “LEFT-WING” USTASHA OF THE HDP

The HDP (Croatian Movement for Statehood) never hid its admiration for the Ustasha puppet regime established after Hitler’s troops conquered Croatia and the rest of Yugoslavia in 1941. Like other Ustasha groups in the West, it celebrated April 10, the date the neo-Nazi regime was established. It glorified the Ustasha fuehrer Pavelic and General Luburic who were responsible for the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Gypsies and anti-fascist Croats.

The HDP leader was Nicola Stedul, who left Yugoslavia in 1956 for West Germany to join the movement headed by Pavelic and later a rival one, the HNO (Croatian National Resistance) headed by Lubiric. He was an HNO representative in Australia from 1966 to 1971, a time when the HNO and other radical Ustasha groups carried out a series of bomb attacks. The then Liberal Government and ASIO outrageously covered up for those responsible for these bombings. The SWP at the time condemned these terrorist attacks.

The HNO, which later became the HDP, was also on record as carrying out numerous terrorist attacks in Western Europe. In one attack, HDP hero, Miro Baresic, assassinated the Yugoslav Ambassador in Sweden in 1971. He was released the following year when Ustasha terrorists hijacked a jet. He went to Spain, then Paraguay, where he joined the death squads of the dictator Stroesner. Baresic was arrested in the USA by the FBI and returned to prison in Sweden.

The neo-Nazi credentials of the HDP were as clear as a pike-staff. But they also tried to woo the left. Stedul formed the “Socialist Party of Croatia” in exile precisely for the purpose. In Australia, they approached Left Labor figures …and the SWP. Only the SWP welcomed them.

In 1982, the HDP tried to march on May Day in Melbourne and received a hostile reception. The SWP took up their cause and for the next few years campaigned vigorously on their behalf against every other section of the left and progressive movement who pointed out the HDP’s attitude to the Ustasha and its terrorist and neo-Nazi links. It was pointed out that in the early 1970s, war criminals here such as Srecko Rover tried to woo the Left and that early Ustasha and then the HDP had a well documented record of trying to woo the Soviets ever since the Tito split with Stalin in 1948.

What were the reasons for the SWP’s blind endorsement of these Ustasha? SWP leader David Holmes wrote in August 1983 that “the HDP leaders are revolutionaries…As a result of the collaboration between the HDP and the SWP and also through the development of the class struggle in this country, many more Croatians will come to see the need to build a revolutionary workers’ party here and fight to overthrow capitalism.”

It is easy to see the very special “entrism” involved here. It is into a whole community – there were then over 150 000 Croatian migrants in the Australian workforce. The HDP had some support among them. By “collaborating” with them, the SWP hoped to recruit among that community which would see the need for a “revolutionary workers’ party” (that is, naturally the SWP/DSP). It is a very big raiding party involved; a couple of hundred SWPers taking over the Croatian community… Such is the stuff of dreams!

Enough then to ignore what the HDP actually wrote about the Ustasha regime, enough to even lionise the terrorist neo-Nazi Baresic in the columns of Direct Action (now “Green Left Weekly”).

The SWP did recruit a few HDP members into their ranks, but after all their abject apologising for the HDP, its leaders here soon broke off links with the SWP, precisely because the SWP was trying to recruit its members. Even then, the SWP refused to criticise the HDP or admit its error, speaking of it following a “rightwing drift” in 1984, although its extreme-right credentials were available well before.

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