Just a brief note to remind youse that tomorrow night at Cafe Gummo in Thornbury there’s ‘A Night of Antifascist Oi!’, featuring Permanent Revolution, Louts and Dire Need, and proudly presented by the Brisbane City Skinheads & Northern Suburbs Melbourne SHARPs:
Please note that at a previous gig, Balwyn Gauleiter Tom Sewell — last month convicted, along with a sidekick, of assaulting a small group of picnickers, and sentenced to a slap on the wrist by the courts as a result — instructed members of his neo-Nazi grouplet, some armed with knives, to disrupt the event. Unfortunately for his little gang, skinheads and other patrons told the neo-Nazis to shoo. The incident was the subject of some reportage, so it’s possible — but unlikely — that they may RETURN (or at least lurk nearby looking for easy targets to assault). As such, expect a visible police presence in the area, look out for yourselves and each other, and rock on!
PS. Another member of Sewell’s gang, Stefan Eracleous, was in court this week for a mention hearing. Currently, the ex-UniMelb Young Liberal turned neo-Nazi fanatik and fan of St. Tarrant* is facing charges for allegedly scrawling antisemitic graffiti at a public library and using a carriage service to menace Senator Lidia Thorpe.
*See also : ‘“Praise the saints”: The cumulative momentum of transnational extreme-right terrorism’ by Graham Macklin in A Transnational History of Right-Wing Terrorism (Routledge, 2022):
This chapter traces the transnational wave of extreme right-wing terrorism which began in March 2019 when the Australian extremist Brenton Tarrant murdered 51 people in two consecutive terrorist attacks on mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, an atrocity which he livestreamed on Facebook. It explores both the unique features of this attack as well as the other successful and attempted mass casualty attacks that followed in its wake: Poway, California; El Paso, Texas; Bæarum, Norway; and Halle, Germany. This is followed by an examination of the cumulative momentum that the Christchurch terrorist attack generated and the violent, subcultural milieu online that nurtured this “wave” of violence. It explores the “dark fandom” of this online environment and its construction of a set of secular “saints” and “martyrs” whose acts of racist terrorism are applauded and glorified as a means of inspiring and inciting others to commit further atrocities of their own.
