2009 Sydney Forum

We are not the wackos, we are the “enlightened ones”!

The paranoid wackos of this seedy West London tenement had one thing in common — the conviction that Jews, Freemasons, homosexuals, Gypsies, Jesuits, anarchists and Communist Party members were all agents of subversion under the control of a ruthless global elite directing world events to their advantage…

Readers,

The Sydney Forum — in addition to the Inverell Forum, Australia’s largest (rather small) annual gathering of the far right — is, after a one-year absence, taking place again in September (26/27). This is exciting news for trainspotters, especially as the announcement by Dr James Saleam of this world-historical event (on the world’s leading anti-Semitic/White supremacist website Stormfront) has prompted former Thales employee Nicole Hanley to once again jump on her nutzi high-horse:

BlueEyedBlonde
Join Date: Aug 2006
Location: Canberra, Australia
Posts: 91

Re: Sydney Forum 2009!

If you are on Myspace, please add the Sydney Forum as a friend to help advertise and ensure the success of the event.

http://www.myspace.com/sydneyforum

Cheers

BlueEyedBlonde

PS. Hello to those who remember me… yes I’m still alive…

stormfront.org/forum/showpost.php?p=7057216&postcount=3

Awesome!

And remember folks, as Ms Hanley stated in regards to her belief in ZOG: ‘We are not the wackos, we are the “enlightened ones”‘ (December 12, 2006).

NB. Nicole also has some fashion tips for other ladies wanting to spend a weekend with fellow fascists: “The top hat should be silk but we do allow beaver now. You always have a bun and if your hair isn’t long enough for a bun you put on a fake bun, then you’ve got the veil over your face. It’s a severe look but that’s what makes it elegant.”

Author! Author!

As in previous years, as guest speakers 2009 brings to Sydney the usual suspects. Well, two of them anyway: James ‘110% White’ Saleam and Andrew ‘Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ Fraser. Also scheduled to speak is John ‘911 Was An Inside Job!’ Bursill, and a mystery speaker from the United States. Sadly, Forum organisers “can’t release the names and details of some of our speakers as the system and other “democratic” and liberal democratic forces will do anything to stop them from participating in this even[t]. In the past invited speakers were intimidated and even prevented from entering Australia by the system to prevent them addressing the Sydney Forum.”

As far as I’m aware this is a reference to attempts in 2002 and 2005 to have as guests at the Forum speakers from the German fascist party NPD (the National Democratic Party of Germany / Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands): Udo Voigt and Holger Apfel [sic] Gerd Finkenwirth. On both occasions, entry to Australia was denied them by Immigration authorities on the basis that they were not of ‘good character’.

A list of the good characters who have performed @ the Forum includes:

    Sydney Forum 2001: December 1/2 @ ?
    Fredrick Töben (and others)

    Sydney Forum 2002: September 7/8 @ ?
    Neil Baird, Joe Bryant, Bob Doring, Bevan O’Regan, James Saleam, Reg Smedley (and others)

    Sydney Forum 2003: August 30/31 @ ?
    Joe Bryant, Leon Gregor, Eve Hillary, Geoff Muirden, Ron Owen, James Saleam, Fredrick Töben, Darrell Wallbridge, June Weston, Peter Whitfield — and “Joe” (Syrian Social Nationalist Party)

    Sydney Forum 2004: August 28/29 @ Bexley RSL
    Dave Astin, Neil Baird, Bonny Bauer, Joe Bryant, Robert Gribben, Stuart McBeth, John Rivett, James Saleam, Peter Whitfield, John Wilson, Terry Worthing

    Sydney Forum 2005: August 27/28 @ Russian Social Club / Jim’s Bunker
    Lachlan Black, Luke Connors, Doug Harrison, Dennis McCormack, Robert Osmak, James Saleam, Darrell Wallbridge

    Sydney Forum 2006: August 26/27 @ Estonian House / Jim’s Bunker
    Neil Baird, Greg Clancy, Andrew Fraser, Rex Gilroy, James Saleam

    Sydney Forum 2007: August 25/26 @ Eastwood RSL / Jim’s Bunker
    Lachlan Black, Rihab Charida, Andrew Fraser, Perry Jewell, James Saleam, Tomislav Sunic, Darrell Wallbridge

    Sydney Forum 2008: CANCELLED

In general, speakers are veterans of the far right, and closely associated with either the Australian League of Rights, Australia First Party (NSW), One Nation Party, one of their numerous predecessors (Confederate Action Party, National Action) or more obscure rivals. A handful of younger fascists — Lachlan Black, Luke Connors, Stuart McBeth — have also joined their older comrades in the last few years. All three were involved in the yoof group Patriotic Youth League, an unsuccessful attempt on Dr. Jim’s part to lower AF’s demographic.

Otherwise, the Forum has attracted a handful of single-issue advocates (Robert Osmak on homeschooling; Bonny Baeur — a Senatorial candidate for the Democrats in Queensland the same year she spoke to fascists in Sydney — on food safety; June Weston/Bevan O’Regan on ‘constitutional’ property rights) while some attempts have also been made to establish closer ties with local representatives of various Middle Eastern powers: Iraq and Syria in particular. Perhaps the most controversial speaker of late was Palestinian solidarity activist Rihab Charida. Her speech prompted one listener — a ferret-breeding racist from NSW — to remark “She would have been of much better use as a mud flap for my car”; a rather remarkable insight into racist psychosis, and a mark of the moral caliber of those attracted to this event.

Obviously, the Forum has experienced some ups and downs over the last decade. From 2005–2007 it had problems securing a venue, with the second day of the action-packed weekend being forced to take place @ (Dr.) Jim’s Bunker in Tempe. The Tempe bunker was formerly the Sydney HQ of defunct fascist groupuscule ‘National Action’ (which Saleam led until his jailing in 1991) and also the site of a grisly murder:

…[NA] began working its way down the enemies list, widening their attacks from vulnerable students and the occasional journalist to gays, lesbians, Aboriginal, peace and anti-apartheid groups, academics, liberal congregations such as the Pitt Street Uniting Church, the Anti-discrimination Board, union activists and, somewhat recklessly, a couple of Special Branch cops who had been assigned to their case. Terrorising the wives and families of heavily armed secret police­men was not the Nazis’ first step on the happy staircase to success. After [NA] raided the meeting of a gay migration lobby group the hammer came down.

Having suffered through months of harassment the gays were ready for a fight. Their resistance seemed to unnerve the storm troopers and a handful of hysterical pansies and angry dykes proceeded to bitch slap them out of the room. Special Branch quickly obtained a search warrant and charged over to a house in Petersham used as an alternative headquarters by [NA]. They found a tape recording and photographs of the raid. Most of those who took part were arrested and charged. The cases were heard in Glebe local court and attended by observers from a resistance group called Community Alert Against Racism and Violence.

‘It was unbelievably pathetic,’ said CAARAV’s Betty Hounslow. ‘Shane Rosier, one of their big men, was just this really pathetic bloke in his late forties who was, you know, a bit chubby. He wore these brown trousers that kept riding up the back and an old yukko-looking brown cardigan. They found a lot of weapons in his house… coshs, chains, and studded balls. And his story to the magistrate was that the weapons were part of his collection. He’d always been interested in weapons, he said. His grandfather was a famous gun collector. He and his dad had always wanted to have a gun collection just like old Granddad’s, but they’d never had enough money to collect guns so they had to collect cheaper, working-class weapons. And this was why he had all these things. He said the tape of the raid was left on his doorstep one morning. Like a little abandoned baby.’

The pressure told and the Nazis turned on each other as deeply repressed suspicions and rivalries burst through to the surface. Everybody seemed to accuse everyone else of being police spies and sexual deviants. The final slide into ignoble collapse was marked by the gunshot murder of Wayne ‘Bovver’ Smith in [NA’s] headquarters at Tempe a few years later. It was an almost perfect example of the hapless farce which so often attended the adventures of Sydney’s neo-Nazi elite in the 1980s. Bovver, twenty-five years old and already weighing 108 kilos thanks to the three or four stubbies of beer he’d consume for breakfast each morning, was shot eight times with a sawn-off .22 rifle by Perry Whitehouse, ten years his senior but less than half his size, during a drunken, confused and basically pointless argument. When Whitehouse blew him away, Bovver was wearing a singlet bearing the message: Say No To The New Gun Control Laws.

~ John Birmingham, Leviathan, Vintage, 2000, pp.115–117.

MC Welf

Since its inception, the Master of Race Ceremonies @ the Sydney Forum has been Welf Herfurth. A fascist militant, over the past few decades, Welf has thrown his lot into the pot with the NPD (in Germany), the Australian Democrats, One Nation Party, New Right, “National Anarchists”, Blood & Honour and Volksfront (in Australia). Thus, while maintaining close links with the neo-Nazi movement in Germany in its many and varied permutations, Herr Herfurth has, alongside of his Aryan (er) kamerad Dr. Jim, been a leading fascist ideologue Down Under. Popping an “anarchist” hat upon his head, in the last few years Welf has managed to attract a few teenage followers — their antics have been documented elsewhere on my blog.

Bonus!

An account of the 2004 Sydney Forum…

“Advance Australia Where?”
Mark Franklin
Reportage
September 10, 2004

One Nation may be a spent political force but there are still local activists with a strong nationalist agenda. Mark Franklin attends the Fourth Sydney Forum.

The wooden floor of Bexley RSL hall is polished to a high squeak. Australian flags hang above the Digger’s crest. The air smells of stale tobacco, and from behind the speaker’s podium a black and white photo of Queen Elizabeth stares down at the crowd.

Of the hundred-odd people who have gathered from the full stretch of the East Coast, all but five are men. Apart from a few Newcastle University students – members of the Patriotic Youth League – all are past middle age. They sit scattered in ones and twos throughout the hall.

Welcome to the fourth annual Sydney Forum: two days of talks by Australian patriots about modern society.

Last weekend, as Prime Minister John Howard was calling a federal election, they gathered to share their thoughts on why Australian social life is rotting from its political core. Since the glory days of One Nation, these few activists (mainly supporters of the Australia First party) have become the sole surviving nationalist voice on the political landscape.

“Governments tell you fibs,” says Terry [Worthing], first speaker of the day. “But what’s worse, you believe those fibs and you continue giving the Government all your bloody money. Then they give it to the banks and the foreign owned companies … that’s what’s wrong with this country.”

Each of the speakers is frustrated and alienated by modern Australian politics, and each offers a theory as to what went wrong. “The Jews control Australia,” says [Worthing]. “Multiculturalism is destroying our country”, says Andrew [or possibly John] Wilson. “The multinationals have taken hold of our lives,” says Neil Baird.

Most of the speakers are retired blue-collar workers. Their clothes are a generation old and they speak with stilted, twangy accents. The forum’s organizer, Dr Jim Saleam, is one of the few who has been to university. He received a doctorate from Sydney University for his thesis on the right wing of Australian politics.

“The genius of the modern state that we live under,” he says, “is that its tentacles run much more strongly – through advertising, through the media, through consumerism, through the way we live our lives – it’s more integrated than it ever was before.”

Dr Saleam paints a truly Orwellian picture of modern life. The state, he says, is a “machine by which one group of people keeps another group of people out of power. It is comprised of politicians, the media, the judicial system, and the multinational companies.”

In one sense, his views could be seen to overlap with the “Trotskyite left” (as he calls it) but when it comes to the question of multiculturalism, there is an insurmountable point of difference. He is proudly opposed to Australian cultural diversity.

“This belief that different cultures can live together in the same place is false,” he says. “It takes an enormous amount of effort for culturally different groups to get along. Sure, you can make it work, through laws, through policing, through a lot of effort. But in the end it’s an artificial harmony and it has to break down.”

This brand of nationalist believes each country should have its own identity, its own culture, its own ethnic population, and the nationality of each country should be homogeneous. Mexicans in Mexico, Chinese in China, Australians in Australia.

Australian nationalists see their heritage as being strictly European in origin. At the back of the forum, display tables carry booklets such as The Poems of Banjo Patterson and Arthur Calwell: A Great Australian. Federation flags hang from the walls, and there’s a pile of stickers reading: “Mass immigration = water restrictions.” (Go figure!)

Stuart McBeth, founder of the Patriotic Youth League (PYL) says: “We are distinct in culture and direction from our Asian neighbours in the South Pacific”. The gravest threat facing Australia today, he says, is “the divisive and socially destructive concept of multiculturalism.”

Recently, the press has attacked the PYL over a supposed “race-hate” campaign at Newcastle University and it has accused McBeth of links to various neo-Nazi groups, labelling him a “white supremacist”.

But the PYL is so haphazardly organised it can barely link arms, let alone link with groups on the other side of the world. And McBeth is no more a white supremacist than Pauline Hanson. He’s a softly spoken, bespectacled economics student who works for the Salvation Army. “We’re not racists,” he says. “We don’t think we’re better than anybody else just because we’re white, but we do have a right to protect our way of life.”

    Note that the bespectacled McBeth also attempted to establish a Volksfront franchise in Australia in 2002; an effort now being pursued by Welf Herfurth. Stuart resigned from his position as PYL President in January 2005 (to be replaced by Lachlan Black; Black being replaced by Luke Connors; Connors being replaced by John Drew) after being sacked from his job working for the Salvation Army.

Whether or not nationalism equates to racism is a matter of opinion. However, the solution it offers Australia’s indigenous communities sounds remarkably like apartheid. “In one sense, Hanson was wrong”, says Dr Saleam. “You can’t have one nation, because the Aboriginal people are not part of the same nation. They are unique at the start… so therefore, you must have a different set of laws for Aboriginal people from white people.”

Dr Saleam sees this as the only fair solution. “The main emphasis would have to be on how [indigenous communities] preserve their language, their ceremonies, their history, while still giving them access to certain aspects of modernity that they desire.”

Nationalist thinking is not unique to Australia. It was fostered in Germany and Britain, where nationalist political parties now attract a significant proportion of the popular vote. It has since spread to countries as diverse as Thailand, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Yemen, and Russia.

“Nationalism is not about race, like many people would have you believe,” says Welf Herfurth, the Sydney Forum’s MC. (He talks with a thick German accent and runs the show exactly to schedule – speakers finish on the dot of their allotted time and he ensures questions are brief and to the point. “The media doesn’t call me fascist for nothing,” he quips.)

Herfurth has just completed a tour of South East Asia, promoting nationalist politics in Cambodia, Vietnam, and Thailand. “It is about preserving unique cultures all around the world,” he says. “We have to work together to break this monopoly of American pop culture…if you go to China these days, you’ve got a Kentucky Fried Chicken in the middle of Red Square. Now that’s scary.”

    Welf’s concern over ‘KFC in Red Square’ became, in late 2005, translated into an attempt to articulate the elitist and racialist ideas of the European ‘New Right’ in the context of Australia (and er, New Zealand). In the context of ‘national anarchism’ — which Welf embraced at approximately the same point — the NR provides the ‘brains’, while ‘national anarchists’ provide the ‘brawn’. Given the relative puniness of ‘national anarchism’ and ‘national anarchists’ in Australia (and er, New Zealand), Welf has more recently attempted to (re-)establish ‘Volksfront’ in Australia, in cooperation with a Novocastrian bonehead named Douglas Schott (of bonehead band ‘Blood Red Eagle’), a former supporter of Blood & Honour and the Hammerskins. For further disco, see : White nationalism v national anarchism (June 3, 2008).

The growth of multinational companies and the pervasive power of capitalist-inspired “monoculture” was a central theme at the Sydney Forum. Criticisms ranged from the real (the pervasive influence of American pop culture) to the absurd (multinational companies sucking the nutrition out of the very food we eat, reducing the working class to malnourished slaves of the capitalist system). But there was a firm belief all round that globalisation is resulting in a “new world order”.

The philosophy of the new world order, says Dr Saleam, is to gradually bring about a completely globalised world: open borders, free trade, unrestrained capitalism, and a single world Government. “It’s an open conspiracy,” he says. “It’s an arrangement conducted in full view of the public. I’m sure there are secret activities…but the fundamentals of it are argued every day in the newspapers and the parliament.”

It was because of their opposition to this new world order that Dr Saleam and his political allies campaigned so strenuously against the Iraq war. “All of the issues the so-called right is now concerned with flow through Iraq,” he says. “The rights of nations to sovereignty and to have their country the way they want it, the powerhouse of modern capitalism, the spread of American imperialism, the supremacy of the new world order – they’re all concentrated right now in Iraq.”

It may be surprising that this group, which adamantly opposes foreign immigration, is so critical of the Iraq war. At one stage, says Dr Saleam, there was a risk of the so-called right wing falling in behind the war, but he and a couple of others campaigned hard to turn opinion against it. “Iraqis should be able to have their country whichever way they want it, for better or for worse,” he says.

In a sense, this view encapsulates the modern nationalist perspective. “If I’m going to say, ‘I want my nation for my people representing my way of life,’ I’m hardly likely to say that people on the other side of the world can’t have the same, am I?” he says.

So what about Australia’s future – can the coming election help bring about change? “It’s irrelevant”, says Dr Saleam. “The major political parties are exactly the same, the new world order is well and truly ensconced in Australia. Both political parties are behind it, as is most of the population.

“In the end, Australia is in danger of simply becoming a geographical expression and, progressively, the things that we consider the Australian ethos or values will become increasingly marginalised until they disappear off the continent.

“What we need is a wakeup call”, says Dr Saleam, “some sort of political movement to spur people into action.”

Judging from the revolutionary rhetoric at the Sydney Forum, that is exactly how Dr Saleam’s nationalist allies see their role. But despite their zeal, with numbers dwindling and enemies everywhere, this greying bunch of activists seem unlikely to rouse a sleepy nation any time soon.

    Dr. Jim’s ‘wakeup call’ arguably came about 15 months later, when, in December 2005 — three months after the 2005 Sydney Forum — ‘Cronulla’ happened. This proved to be a significant event; AF’s failure to capitalise upon it later provoking a split in AF. Now, in addition to a rump party in Shepparton, Saleam’s Party must compete with a new mob called the ‘Australian Protectionist Party’ (whose most recent claim to fame came by way of former Griffith (NSW) DJ Terrie-Anne Verney).


Image courtesy Tom Metzger/’White Aryan Resistance’ by way of Martin Fletcher/’Australian Protectionist Party’.

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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  1. Pingback: Dreaming of An Aryan Jeannie : Australia First, Australian Protectionist Parties | slackbastard

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