antifa notes (august 14, 2024) : Let’s Get Active!

Look, I wasn’t gonna bother, but then …

The subject of Active Clubs was given a terrific boost at the Australian Senate inquiry on Right wing extremist movements in Australia a few weeks ago when on July 25 experts from the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) testified on the importance of recognising their existence and potential growth. FWIW, while the CEP is one of Over 9,000 ‘anti-extremist’ QUANGOs, the term ‘Active Club’ (along with its associated political methodology) is most closely-associated with sometime neo-Nazi fugitive and Rise Against Movement founder Robert Rundo. Rundo is currently facing charges of rioting and conspiracy to violate the Anti-Riot Act in 2018 — a legal affair which continues to be dragged through the US federal court system — but his clever plan to establish a global network of white nationalist fight clubs carries on, so over to The Experts.

According to the CEP’s ‘Special Adviser’ Alexander Ritzmann:

I will focus on the Active Club strategy and I will highlight how this development is relevant for Australian policymakers and law enforcement. The white supremacist active clubs are arguably the largest and fastest-growing violent extreme-right network worldwide, with more than 100 groups in at least 25 countries. At the time of the writing of the report for this committee, there were no Active Clubs in Australia, but we highlighted that it was very likely that this strategy would be implemented in Australia in the near future. Just six weeks later, a ‘Croweater’ Active Club was founded in South Australia.

The Active Club strategy was developed to build a shadow militia while evading law enforcement scrutiny. The strategy is originally from the United States. To achieve this, Active Clubs pretend to have deradicalised and to only focus on sports and brotherhood. They are often founded by members of established openly extreme-right Neo-Nazi groups to attract members from mainstream society. Thomas Sewell, leader of the violent, extreme-right European Australian Movement and the National Socialist Network, founded an Active Club called ‘Croweater’, as mentioned.

A few weeks ago, after the creation of the ‘Croweater’ Active Club, the Active Club branding was removed and the Telegram channel is now named ‘Croweater’ only. It appears this transformation has failed from moving the National Socialist Network—which was very present, with open references to national socialism, as the title of the group also indicates—to an apparently deradicalised version. This is relevant because it indicates, in my understanding, that Thomas Sewell and the leadership of these two organisations are trying to respond to counterextremism efforts of the Australian government and civil society. I therefore recommend that the Australian authorities and civil society closely monitor these developments. Even if this one approach has failed so far, I assume that there will be others.

Quite.

(For his part, the Director-General of ASIO, Mike Burgess, confessed ‘I’m not familiar with the terminology ‘Active Club”.)

But, as others have indicated — see, for example, Media, government, spies — collectively they’re memory-holing neo-Nazism (Tom Tanuki, Independent Australia, August 10, 2024) and White Supremacist Active Clubs Have Long Operated Here, Yet Have Been Ignored (Paul Gregoire, Sydney Criminal Lawyers, July 31, 2024) — there are numerous problems with Ritzmann’s account, both in terms of the evolution of the Active Club model and its relationship to RWE in Australia as a whole (especially in terms of its recent history).

TLDR : First, the ‘Active Club’ model can be read, most simply, as a contemporary iteration of a longer-term organisational mode, one extending across a century of fascist militant and paramilitary mobilisation. Secondly, the roots of the model in Australia are in the United Patriots Front (2015–2017) and its evolution into The Lads Society, from which the EAM/NSN — its current practitioners — grew (after The Lads also collapsed). Before it imploded, The Lads in Melbourne even established a semi-professional gym/social centre in Cheltenham and a home gym in Rowville. After those dissolved, the newly-formed (and explicitly neo-Nazi) EAM/NSN were embraced by Tim Lutze and his Legacy Boxing Gym in West Sunshine (boo hoo).

The UPF’s former Perth representative, Kevin Combes (AKA Kevin Coombes/Elijah Jacobs[e/o]n) has recently been charged with the sexual assault of two young women in the early 1990s. See : Kevin Frederick Combes charged with assaulting two teenagers in Perth in the early 1990s, Joanne Menagh, ABC, July 18, 2024. See also : Blair Cottrell : ” … and I started getting arrested after I did that.” #Fortitude /// #UnitedPatriotsFront, February 23, 2016.

Like media reportage on ‘right-wing extremism’ in general, the response to the inquiry’s stunning revelation about the appearance of Active Clubs on Australian blood-and-soil has left a lot to be desired (see : Extremists volunteering in soup kitchens: How ideologies have evolved to attract Australians, Charis Chang, SBS, August 12, 2024).

See also : Inside Scotland’s disturbing far-right groups since English riots, James Walker, The National, August 11, 2024 /// Active Clubs & Accelerationists – Neo-Nazi tactics and strategies in Australia, White Rose Society, July 25, 2024 /// How Close to Neo-Nazi Terrorism is the New Fascist Homeland Party?, Red Flare, February 27, 2024.

Finally, the EAM/NSN have undertaken several fashion shoots/publicity stunts of late, with an appearance in Melbourne’s CBD on July 27 and another in Brisbane on August 10. On both occasions, several members were detained but, somewhat remarkably, police in Queensland showed a greater determination to stop nazis marching through their city than is usually the case in Melbourne (or Ballarat).