Yeah Nah Pasaran! #223 w James Hogg on Greek & Yugoslavian Anti-Fascism in Melbourne’s “Long 1960s” : September 26, 2024

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to James Hogg. James is a PhD candidate and an organiser at Melbourne’s New International Bookshop. His research ‘focuses on Australian anti-fascism in the twentieth century, with an emphasis on the role of migrants and the Communist Party of Australia’. James recently authored ‘“Fascism Can Only Grow in Secrecy”: Greek and Yugoslavian Anti-Fascism in Melbourne’s “Long 1960s”’ (Labour History, No.126, May 2024) which elaborates on the role of anti-fascist groups Restoration of Democracy in Greece (CRDG), the Yugoslav Settlers’ Organisation (YSA), and its successor, The Committee for Democracy in Australia (CDA) during the ‘long 1960s’:

Studies of post-war anti-fascism in Australia have recently generated new insights into the continuities and transformations of post-war fascist and anti-fascist organisations. However, despite this upsurge in scholarship, the 1960s remain neglected. This article revises this absence through a case study of the Committee for the Restoration of Democracy in Greece (CRDG), the Yugoslav Settlers’ Organisation (YSA), and its successor, The Committee for Democracy in Australia (CDA). It draws on press reports, left-wing publications, and security files to suggest the anti-fascisms of Melbourne in the 1960s were influenced by a parallel politics of anti-imperialism. It shows how both organisations were influenced by the historical experience of resisting fascism, particularly the concept of a “united front” that facilitated a pan-left struggle against fascism and wider systems of oppression and domination. In doing so, this article contributes to the growing historiography on varieties of anti-fascism and their overlap with related emancipation movements.

NB. The New International Bookshop is currently undertaking a fundraiser in order to assist its relocation.

See also : Unwanted Australians, Kristina Kukolja, Lindsay Arkley, John Zubrzycki, Nathan Kopp, SBS & The Dictatorship, George Zangalis, Neos Kosmos, April 29, 2013 /// Greek Resistance Bulletin on 3CR : ‘Bringing you news from the social movements of Greece in English and Greek, the anti-fascist and anti-racist front and news of actions and political initiatives from below.’ /// Yeah Nah Pasaran! #171 w Max Kaiser on Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism : July 27, 2023 / Yeah Nah Pasaran! #155 w Jayne Persian on Ustaše in Australia : March 23, 2023 /// A whole new world: Global revolution and Australian social movements in the long Sixties PhD Thesis, School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics, The University of Queensland, Jon Piccini (2013) /// The 1973 Ford Broadmeadows riot, People’s History of Australia, No.8, August 2021 /// The Long 1960’s and the ‘Wind from the West’, Kristin Ross, Crisis & Critique, Vol.5, No.2 [Ill Will Editions, May 2019].

4.30pm, Thursday, September 26, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website

• This episode will be available as a podcast on Apple, Spotify and other platforms after broadcast.
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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #222 w Lucy Hamilton on The Atlas Network & Right-Wing Junk Tanks : September 19, 2024

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Lucy Hamilton [X/Twitter]. Lucy is a PhD student @ UTS and an explanatory journalist who writes about the international right’s influence on Australian politics and society. We spoke to Lucy about: the Atlas Network and its various ideological progenitors; the origins of neo-liberal doctrine and propaganda networks; some of its key ideologues and institutions, and their increasing influence on state policy and political practice across the world, especially the intensifying assault on climate science, progressive politics and social movements.

Lucy recommends the work of Jane Meyer (Dark Money), David Sirota, Jeremy Walker, the Bad Faith documentary and the Master Plan podcast: more to come …

4.30pm, Thursday, September 19, 2024 /// 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! #221 w Ariel Bogle on AI slop, tech & online weird0es : September 12, 2024

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Ariel Bogle [X/Twitter]. Ariel is an investigations reporter at Guardian Australia with a focus on technology, extremism and online culture. Her latest articles on these subjects may be found here, and include an examination of AFP misconduct, magical cures and AI, and Leaving Gaza. We spoke to Ariel about Tenet Media, the AI slop that’s dominating Facebook and preoccupying MAGA, the (very) recent indictment of Terrorgram Collective members Dallas Humber and Matthew Allison (for soliciting hate crimes, the murder of federal officials, and other offences) and more.

We previously spoke to Ariel in September 2021.

See also : US says white supremacist group tried to incite followers on Telegram to spark race war, Richard Luscombe, The Guardian, September 10, 2024 /// US says leaders of white supremacist group plotted global attacks online, Holly Honderich, BBC, September 9, 2024 /// “That’s three strikes, run for your life”, Hannah Gais, Posts From Underground, September 9, 2024 /// Neo-Nazi terrorist group using Steve Bannon account to radicalize people, Ben Makuch, The Guardian, August 21, 2024 /// Here’s The Gore Artist Turning Terrorgram Manuals & Manifestos Into Audiobooks, Social Research Club and Michael Boorman, Left Coast Right Watch, March 1, 2023.

4.30pm, Thursday, September 12, 2024 /// 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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Lauren ‘The Great Replacement’ Southern, Tenet Media & Daddy Putin

The SHOCKING! revelation that Putin’s gangsta state has been sneakily funding far-right propagandists in the United States has certainly caused A Splash. Not unreasonably, those at the centre of the scandal — Tenet Media’s owners Lauren Chen and Liam Donovan, along with professional binfluencers Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Dave Rubin, Lauren Southern and Pim Tool — have thus far defended themselves by simply claiming Useful Idiot and/or Victim status. Thus while more than handy at detecting the evil influence of (((Soros))) & Co. at every political moment, the group was, unfortunately, deeply incurious as to who was paying them millions of dollars to shitpoast far-right talking-points.

Sad!

See : Russia Secretly Worms Its Way Into America’s Conservative [sic] Media, Steven Lee Myers, Ken Bensinger and Jim Rutenberg, New York Times, September 7, 2024 /// What Right-Wing Influencers Actually Said in Those Tenet Media Videos, Tim Marchman and Dhruv Mehrotra, Wired, September 6, 2024 /// Russia Today, YouTube, and the US Department of Justice: How an online web of Russian disinformation crumbled, Esther Linder, ABC, September 5, 2024 /// Russia made useful idiots out of MAGA’s top influencers. It was nearly effortless., Jared Holt, Posting Through It, September 5, 2024 /// Media start-up from Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Dave Rubin was secret Russian influence campaign, indictment alleges, David Covucci, Daily Dot, September 4, 2024 /// Alternative Influence: Broadcasting the Reactionary Right on YouTube, Becca Lewis, Data & Society, September 18, 2018.

As for Lauren Southern — the only one of the Tenet propagandists to have apparently visited and indeed, in Southern’s case, even settled for a brief period in Australia — she first brought her grift to the country in July 2018. And while she may not have displayed any knowledge of Sydney, let alone Australia — while accompanied to Lakemba by Lads’ member Stuart von Moger, the tourist was soon put in her place by a local reporter — wearing an ‘It’s OK To Be White’ tee did have a profound effect upon the Australian Senate, which in October 2018 narrowly voted down (28 ‘Yes’ vs. 31 ‘No’) a PHONy motion to that effect. Her promotion of ‘The Great Replacement’ thesis also paid grisly dividends only a few months later, when another Great Aussie Patriot massacred 51 Muslims in Christchurch. (Note that the current lvl boss of the neo-Nazi EAM/NSN, Tom Sewell, while Führer of predecessor grouplet ‘The Lads Society’, tried and failed to recruit the killer to it.)

Southern’s sojourn in Australia was mercifully brief and, despite being happily adopted (post-massacre) as a semi-regular commentator by Sky News Australia, it seems as though local pickings were relatively slim and, following separation from her partner, she eventually RETVRNED to Canada, where her talents were picked up by Tenet Media. Of course, now that Tenet is in deep trouble, Southern, like the other schmucks, will have to seek alternative sponsors for her propaganda. Fortunately, the far-right media eco-system in which she’s thrived to-date shows no sign of disappearing any time soon, and the army of gormless bigots it depends upon are thriving on anti-social media platforms like Apartheid Clyde’s, so things aren’t all bad.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention Southern’s contributions to the campaign to discredit the horrific accounts of the abuse of Indigenous children at Indian Residential Schools in Canada, or to note that Canadian serial killer Jeremy Skibicki, who last month was ‘given four life sentences for the 2022 murders of four Indigenous women in Winnipeg’, was apparently also a bit of a fan.

See also : Meet the right-wing Canadian influencers accused of collaborating with an alleged Russian propaganda scheme, Jonathan Montpetit and Aloysius Wong, CBC News, September 6, 2024 /// Far-Right Media Outlet Linked to Secret Russian Influence Campaign Produced 50+ Videos Focused on Canada, Progress Press, Luke Le Brun, September 5, 2024 /// Canadian Content Creator Behind Company Named in U.S. Election Interference Indictment, Peter Smith, Canadian Anti-Hate Network, September 5, 2024.

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antifa notes (september 5, 2024) : nazis gonna nazi

Local …

Tom Sewell’s little nazi gang (AKA ‘National Socialist Network’ AKA ‘European Australian Movement’) have been Carrying On, as usual. This has included having various scrapes with the law (about which there’s nothing I could be bothered adding). That said, since the last notes dropped (August 14), the boys have been Active in Adelaide, ‘Croweater’ having embarked upon a campaign to oppose the construction of a mosque in Evanston. Last week (August 29), the Islamic Society of South Australia noted:

During the last two months, we applied for planning approval from the Gawler Council for a mosque we plan to establish in Evanston-Smithfield. However, after The Advertiser published an article about the project in June, a Neo-Nazi group in the northern area known as “Croweater” began a campaign against the mosque. They distributed flyers in local letterboxes urging residents to submit objections to the council to block the approval. As a result of this campaign, the council received nearly 28 submissions, most of which were Islamophobic and contained highly negative feedback about Muslims and the mosque.

Despite this, the Gawler Council Town of Gawler addressed the situation with a high level of professionalism and granted us planning approval, as most of the complaints were not technical and had no relevance to the mosque’s structure or construction.

This incident adds to a troubling pattern of rising Islamophobia in South Australia, following previous events such as the dead kangaroo left at the Marion mosque and the attack on a hijabi Muslim woman at Marion Shopping Centre, with no significant action taken by the authorities thus far …

Neo-Nazis campaigning against a proposed mosque is of course hardly a novel phenomenon — and indeed, the roots of the current crop may be traced, by way of the United Patriot Front’s (2015–2017) failed campaign in Bendigo, to the campaign by the similarly-defunct Melbourne-based grouplet Nationalist Alternative (see : Nationalist Alternative : “just a bunch of students from Melbourne”, July 8, 2009) — but when they also happen to be yuge fans of St Tarrant, it’s not good.

Meanwhile, on August 16 in Melbourne/Naarm, the boys put in an unwelcome appearance near a solidemo with refugees outside Home Affairs in the Docklands, where asylum seekers on TPVs — in order to pressure the government into granting them permanent visa status — have been maintaining a presence for many weeks (see also : Grief and shock in Melbourne after Tamil asylum seeker dies by self-immolation, ABC, August 28, 2024). Having successfully posed for a fashion-shoot for the benefit of their many neo-Nazi kameraden and other fanboys overseas, the boys left: yet another Total Aryan Victory.

In other, related news, a(nother) Rich Kid (pictured above) called Hugo ‘AusPill’ Lennon (see : ‘Migration Watch Australia’) has apparently decided to go on an anti-antifa hunt, and to that end established an account (‘White Rose Society (Inverted)’) on Apartheid Clyde’s failing mini-blog, Twitter.

Personally, I reckon it’ll end in tears.

See also : Rejecting racism towards Palestinian visa applicants, Migration Scholars against Australian Border Racism towards Palestinians, Overland, August 21, 2024.

… And/Or German

In the NSN’s spiritual home of Germany, the AfD has had an electoral breakthrough in the state of Thuringia (Darker Turn, Loren Balhorn, New Left Review/Sidecar, September 5, 2024):

The AfD performed slightly above expectations, taking 32.8% of the vote and thereby gaining a so-called blocking minority in the state parliament, which would allow it to hinder constitutional amendments. Die Linke, whose polling numbers had been declining slowly but surely since former parliamentary speaker Sahra Wagenknecht split off to [form] her eponymous Alliance (BSW) last October, came in fourth with 13.1%, less than half of its electorate from 2019, most of which seems to have decamped to Wagenknecht’s new formation, whose 15.6% put it in third place, between the CDU and Die Linke.

Thuringia also happens to be the birthplace of the murderous National Socialist Underground.

See also : Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld: An Invocation, CrimethInc, August 19, 2024 /// Infiltrating the Far Right, David D. Kirkpatrick, New Yorker, August 18, 2024 /// Anarchist Black Cross Belarus.

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #220 w Gabriel Kuhn on SAC, Sweden, class struggle & more : September 5, 2024

    NB. The last NEW! episode of YNP! was on August 15, when Cam spoke to Joe Mulhall of Hope Not Hate: the last two weeks (August 22 and 29) were repeats.

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Gabriel Kuhn. Gabriel is currently the general secretary of the Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation (SAC: Central Organisation of Swedish Workers), a syndicalist union federation BASED in Sweden: ‘Labor union struggle without fat cats!’ (the bad kind, not the good kind).

He’s also the author/editor of several books — including, most recently: Pangayaw and Decolonizing Resistance: Anarchism in the Philippines; Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North; X: Straight Edge and Radical Sobriety and; Life Under the Jolly Roger: Reflections on Golden Age Piracy — and more of his writing may be found on his BLOG LeftTwoThree. We talked to Gabriel about the SAC, Sweden, social democracy, the far-right and more.

See also : Which Labor Union Is the Best: The Bureaucratic Union or the Rank-and-File Union?, Rasmus Hästbacka, libcom, September 3, 2024 (Article from Znetwork. Translated from the Swedish syndicalist paper Arbetaren) | The Head of SAC: Tesla Faces a ‘Stalemate’ in Sweden as the Longest Strike in Decades Drags On, Gabriel Kuhn, Turning Point, May 8, 2024.

4.30pm, Thursday, September 5, 2024 /// 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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CPAC Australia & Candace Owens Down Under

The Australian franchise of the Trumpist ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’ (CPAC) RETVRNS to Australia in October.

Huzzah!

Last year’s event, under the wise leadership of Chairman Mundine, featured the usual array of reactionary right-wing blabbermouths and grifters, along with the comic stylings of Elijah ‘Slightly Racist’ Schaffer. It also starred, and was indeed sponsored, by the founders of Christian nationalist crowdfunder Give Send Go, whose other major contribution to the Australian way of life has been by way of providing a financial pipeline for Tom Sewell’s National Socialist Network. Curiously, this fact did not intrude upon the consciousness of the anti-anti-semites of ‘Never Again is Now’, whose stage in Sydney was shared both by Mr Mundine and noted anti-racist activist *checks notes* ‘Scott Morrison’.

Yanqui ‘conservatism’ is a strange beast.

Speaking of antisemitic weird0es, Turning Point Australia’s Joel Jammal is bringing Candace Owens to Australia in November — or hoping to. The fact that Owens’ otherwise standard batshittery has recently begun to target Jews — as a result of which, in March, she was fired from Ben Shapiro’s propaganda network The Daily Wire — provides ample grounds for the Minister to exercise his wide-ranging powers to deny her a visa to enter the country. Further, given the hateful and idiotic nature of her (increasingly-deranged) diatribes, she’s been left with relatively few defenders among the right-wing commentariat who can typically be relied upon to squawk about #FreezePeach in these circumstances.

A cut-price Charlie Kirk, Jammal joins a long list of recruiters for foreign right-wing trolls, on this occasion supplemented by a PR company called Rocksman. How much rocking and/or rolling Owens actually does Down Under is an open question at this stage, but she can at least boast of an interview with a sympathetic Ben Fordham on 9Entertainment’s 2GB.

See also : The Protocols Are So Back, QAA Podcast, August 2024 /// Candace Owens has gone so conspiratorial, she’s now citing forgotten Jewish heretics, PJ Grisar, Forward, July 29, 2024 /// Candace Owens: “If Hitler Just Wanted To Make Germany Great And Have Things Run Well, OK, Fine.”, Mark Di Stefano and Alex Spence, Buzzfeed, February 9, 2019.

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CFMEU Forever?

[Update (August 23) : The union has been placed in administration. Further, ‘The Administrator of the CFMEU’s Construction Division, Mark Irving KC, says 11 people have been removed from their paid employment as a result of the administration [and] 270 officers have been removed from voluntary positions.’ In response, the ETU has decided to withhold more than $1 million in political donations to the ALP for the next federal election (and to re-direct funds to any potential legal challenge). It will also reportedly ‘refuse to pay ACTU affiliation fees while the CFMEU is suspended, and debate its ongoing ACTU affiliation’. See also : A Labor factional war is dictating Australia’s foreign policy, GRundle, Crikey, August 22, 2004.]

Mostly for my own benefit (and maybe a reader — even two).

Since Building Bad dropped in July with tales of crime and corruption, the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees’ Union (CFMEU) has been in some trouble. Widely-regarded as being among the more successful of #ausunions, as a result of these, ah, difficulties, it appears as though the CFMEU is soon to be placed under government administration. Hence today it was announced that: ‘All branches of the militant CFMEU could be forced into administration from as early as next week after Labor and the Coalition struck a deal to pass the stalled legislation, turning on the Greens for failing to rule out accepting future political donations from the beleaguered union.’ But wait!: ‘The CFMEU is receiving legal advice from Maurice Blackburn lawyer Josh Bornstein and is expected to decide by the end of the week whether to challenge the new laws in the High Court. Already, the United Firefighters Union and Electrical Trades Union have signalled they could back a CFMEU legal challenge.’

I’m not a law-talking guy, so I dunno if the challenge has legs — we’ll find out soon enough (see also : A bill to kill a union: What is actually in the government’s CFMEU legislation, Eko, Red & Black Notes, August 9, 2024).

While it’s unsurprising that the Coalition has backed the deconstruction of the union, so bad are relations between the union and Labor following its legal response that the national secretary, Zach Smith, has even raised the possibility of the CFMEU disaffiliating from the party. Disaffiliation is of course an exceptionally rare occurrence but one which, despite the millions of dollars the union pours into the party, may actually be welcomed by it. Certainly, disaffiliation would have some important ramifications for the factions which run the show (The Labor government would be a very different beast if this factional war went the other way, GRundle, Crikey, August 12, 2024):

Labor now is a machine for the representation of capital, plugged into high finance through industry superannuation funds and the wider capital-science nexus. From Gillard to now, it has given us a capital-friendly arbitration body and made strikes illegal. Now it is going to permanently gut a union that developed militant tactics to represent its members, precisely because genuine worker representation had been made virtually illegal, by Labor.

At this stage, among other unions it’s unclear the degree of their opposition to the imposition of government control over the CFMEU. While on the one hand a number of employers have already moved to cut pay and undermine conditions negotiated as part of the CFMEU’s 2024 EBA campaign, on the other hand, the ACTU — which suspended the CFMEU’s membership of the peak body immediately after the scandal broke — appears to have welcomed the decision to place the union under government administration.

Having successfully flexed its considerable financial, industrial and political muscle in order to overturn a ban on duck-hunting in Victoria last year, the Building Industry Group may now have to embark upon another, even more militant campaign to save its largest and most powerful member.

See also : ‘Serious threat’: The controversial laws targeting the CFMEU, explained, AAP/SBS, August 20, 2024 | About the crisis at the CFMEU, Sarah Missen and Sam Wallman, Overland, July 19, 2024.

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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).

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).

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).

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Yeah Nah Pasaran! #218 w Aurelien Mondon on race riots in the UK : August 8, 2024

This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Aurelien Mondon [X/Twitter] about racist rioting in the UK and Belfast in the wake of the murders in Southport. Daniel Trilling:

The racist riots across much of England and in Northern Ireland stand out for their geographical reach, for their viciousness and because they involve a far wider range of participants than the small groups of committed fascists who helped instigate the violence. Football hooligans, sympathisers with the anti-Islam and anti-immigration messages that have circulated online since the murders, bored kids who want to fight the police or engage in looting and curious onlookers have all joined in. Muslims, refugees and people from visible ethnic minorities have been the targets: beyond the attempts to attack mosques and set fire to hotels housing asylum-seekers – and in Belfast, the firebombing of immigrant-owned businesses – there has been a stream of smaller incidents of violence and intimidation, such as the attack on a group of Eastern European men while they were driving through Hull.

We spoke to Aurelien about the broader political and social context in which the riots have taken place, how anti-immigrant and racist sentiment has been cultivated by the political mainstream, and how the (far) right has profited. See, for example : Creating a crisis: Immigration, racism and the 2024 general election, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Runnymede Trust, 2024.

We last spoke to Aurelien in June when we talked about ethics, research and the (far) right.

See also : This time it’s worse, Daniel Trilling, London Review of Books, August 6, 2024 | UK Communities Mobilize to Defend Themselves as Police Fail to Stop Far-Right Attacks Spurred by Viral Misinformation, It’s Going Down, August 6, 2024 | Reactionary Politics Research Network.

4.30pm, Thursday, August 8, 2024 /// 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’.
• I have a Patreon account which youse are also invited to support.

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