Sunday 10 October [1943] was a cold autumn day, but the enthusiastic Nazi volunteers eagerly took the Slovene flag from the army barracks, which was carried proudly at the head of the procession by Vladimir Menart, one of Urbančič’s close colleagues who also found his way to Australia. Urbančič quickly demonstrated his leadership abilities to the Nazis, directing the volunteers from the side of the column, his tall military frame and bearing giving the rag-tag band of civilians a disciplined air. As the parade marched from the barracks through the city, the volunteers halted in front of the local cafe Emona. Accompanied by two uniformed quisling officers, Urbančič and a senior clerical member, Stanko Kociper, delivered ‘fiery’ speeches from the cafe’s first-floor balcony. This was the first of Urbančič’s many speeches as an official Nazi propagandist. Proclaiming that ‘fate ordered’ the Home Guard ‘to hoist the flag and to carry it in front of the multitudes, never behind’, Urbančič’ boasted that the Home Guard was not scared of anyone ‘because their everyday order is to sweep away the present unhealthy public opinion and establish the new’. Although it mirrored the Nazis’ propaganda message about the ‘New Order’ in Europe, it was a moderate speech compared to his subsequent efforts, which were carbon copies of the most virulent propaganda manufactured by Hitler’s master propagandist, Joseph Goebbels. Urbančič concluded by telling the crowd that ‘we have to clean accounts for the future;
he who is not with us, is against us’.
~ Mark Aarons, War Criminals Welcome, Black Inc., 2001, pp.343–344.
For Nazis…
Vladimir Menart
The Hon. J. M. SAMIOS [12.47 p.m.]: “It has been impressive listening to speakers describe a number of aspects of the career of our former Premier, the late Sir Eric Willis. One particular aspect I would like to relate to is his involvement with and recognition of the changing demography of New South Wales and, of course, Australia. Sir Eric Willis played a very important role in relating the coalition parties to that changing demography. I can recall when, as a member of the Ethnic Communities Council, and later as its chairman between 1979 and 1981, having an important and regular dialogue with him about this.
As I recall, Vladimir Menart from the Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales and I approached Sir Eric Willis about the importance of the coalition parties establishing the correct dialogue with the Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales, which had surfaced in 1975 as an important body, reflecting the opinions of about 1,000 associations that were part of the structure. He displayed a very humane, very compassionate and very astute understanding of the needs of people of non-English speaking background in Australian society. As an integral part of our Australian society he saw that they had particular needs, and hence the need to recognise a structure like the Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales and the whole host of other bodies that are very relevant and play a pivotal part in our multiculturalism.”
As The Hon. J. M. SAMIOS remarks, the Nazi volunteer and immigrant Vladimir Menart (deceased) was a foundation member of the Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales; Stanko Kociper, son-in-law to Leon Rupnik (President of the Provincial Government of the Nazi-occupied Province of Ljubljana from November 1943 to early May 1945) emigrated to Argentina, where he wrote a book in which he tried to vindicate Rupnik’s role in the war: Rupnik was found guilty of treason and executed by firing squad on September 4, 1946 at Ljubljana’s Žale cemetery, and was buried the same day in an unmarked grave.
Ljenko Urbančič
Ljenko Urbančič, on the other hand, carved out a highly successful career in the NSW Liberal Party, forming and heading the faction within it known as the Uglies, one which continues to play a dominant role. This faction is now led by The Hon. David John Clarke, MLC (2003–), for whom Urbančič was a mentor and close ally. Clarke has, in turn, performed the same role in relation to Alex Hawke, currently — and with the full endorsement of former Tory PM John HoWARd — the Federal Member for Mitchell (one of the safest Tory seats in the country), for whom Alex served as an adviser (2003-07 — prior to which he served as an adviser to to Helen Coonan). Helen — along with fellow NSW Tories David and Concetta Fierravanti-Wells — had her own brush with fascism in April 2007, when she attended a dinner to celebrate the 66th birthday of the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia, led by the Ustase. The Ustase murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, Romani, anti-fascists and pretty much anyone that didn’t approve of wholesale murder. Hundreds of thousands of people were also forcibly deported or forcibly converted to Catholicism as the Ustase played their role in the wider Holocaust. On the other hand — and wishing desperately to avoid being accused of adopting a black-armband view of history — its establishment did provide the opportunity for a Tory to join others 66 years later in drinking a toast to their bloody memory.
Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations
Urbančič’s legacy, and that of Nazism, lives on in other ways too, through the establishment of the Australian branch of the ‘Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations’ (ABN) and, in turn, the ‘World Anti-Communist League’ (WACL). According to the ABN, it formed in 1943 as an initiative of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and comprised representatives from twelve nations; other sources claim it formed as a result of a merger of three extreme right-wing organisations: the OUN, Prometheus League (Poland and the Baltic states) and the Intermarium Confederation (Catholic Central Europe). A central figure in the organisation was Jaroslav Stetsko — a Nazi collaborator who in July 1941 presided over the extermination of 7,000 Jews in Lvov in the Ukraine — who arrived in Australia in April 1957 to help launch the local franchise. The group included Nazis from the Ukraine, Byelorussia, the Baltic states, Hungary, Slovakia and Croatia. One of Stetsko’s champions was John Gorton (Australian PM, 1968–1971), who met the Nazi at a meeting of the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League: in 1966, the League and the ABN united to form the WACL.
McCain Advised Ultra-Right Group Tied to Death Squads
In the mid-1980s, Senator John McCain, was on the Advisory Board of the United States Council for World Freedom, the American affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League. McCain was at that time a member of the House of Representatives, and he voted for financial aid for the Contra rebels.
According to the Associated Press:
“The U.S. Council for World Freedom aided rebels trying to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. That landed the group in the middle of the Iran-Contra affair and in legal trouble with the Internal Revenue Service, which revoked the charitable organization’s tax exemption.”
At the time, the “leftist government of Nicaragua” was the democratically-elected government of Nicaragua.
In the 1970s, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) brought together conservatives, fascists, and representatives of right-wing death squads. WACL announced it had rid itself of unsavory elements, but in reality only a handful of overtly antisemitic and neonazi participants were ousted.
Anticommunist activist Geoffrey Stewart-Smith, who led his British affiliate out of WACL, declared in 1974 that despite a publicized housecleaning, “The World Anti-Communist League is largely a collection of Nazis, Fascists, anti-Semites, sellers of forgeries, vicious racialists, and corrupt self-seekers. It has evolved into an anti-Semitic international.”
In the 1980s the United States affiliate of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) was the United States Council for World Freedom (USCWF)…
Both the US Council for World Freedom and World Anti-Communist League helped nurture the U.S. government relationship with militant Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviet Union and its allies in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. This played an important role in the cascading series of unintended consequences that resulted in the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the creation and rise of the al Qaeda terrorist network and its imitators around the world.
~ Chip Berlet, huffingtonpost.com, October 7, 2008
For everybody else…
