On this month’s edition of ‘Floating Anarchy’ on The SUWA Show (5.30pm /// Friday, May 26 /// 3CR /// 855AM or livestreaming) Dr Cam Smith & I chat w Dr Jason Wilson (The Guardian) about the Alt Right, the far right, fascism, irony and more.
i thought i may as well update the links to journals & zines i’ve chucked up on the blog. many of these are anarchist or otherwise radical; others liberal &/or left: some are lost, a few are found. at some point, i’ll prolly go thru the rest of the links, many of which are similarly gone, but which otherwise remind me that i’ve been blogging for freaking ages/far too long nao …
dead &/or resting:
A Murder of Crows [2006–2007] Abolishing the Borders from Below [–2010]
aduki [–2012?] Alternative Press Review [–2010?]
Black Star Review [?]
clamor [1999–2006] Collective Action Notes [–2009]
D!ssent [2014?]
Do Or Die [1992-2003]
Eat The State [?]
FIRE To The Prisons [–2011]
Green Anarchy [2000–2009]
Harbinger [–2003]
ideas & action [1982–1997]
Incendio! [?]
Killing King Abacus [2004?]
Last Hours [2003–2010]
Linchpin [–2013?]
Multinational Monitor [–2009?]
Mutiny [–2014]
Mute [–2013]
Race Traitor [–2005]
SchNEWS [1994–2014] shift magazine [2007–2012]
The Commoner [–2012] The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest [–2014]
The Northeastern Anarchist [–2011]
turbulence [–2010]
venomous butterfly publications
zine library [?]
still kicking:
325 /// Anarchist Studies /// Anarcho-Syndicalist Review /// Anarchy /// Arena /// Aufheben /// b o r d e r l a n d s /// Breakdown Press /// Capital & Class /// Chain Reaction /// Columbia Journalism Review /// counterpunch /// Direct Action [?] /// Dissident Voice /// Dollars & Sense /// Earth First! Journal /// El Libertario /// Fifth Estate /// Freedom Fight /// Foucault Studies /// Going Down Swinging /// Le Monde diplomatique /// Links /// MAXIMUMROCKNROLL /// Monthly Review /// New Internationalist /// New Left Review /// New Matilda /// New Politics /// NOT BORED! [?] /// Organise! /// Overland /// Prickly Paradigm /// Profane Existence /// Quarterly Essay /// Radical Philosophy /// Rebel Press /// slingshot /// Smearcasters /// Social Alternatives /// Social Anarchism [?] /// The Baffler /// The Indypendent /// The International Journal of INCLUSIVE DEMOCRACY /// The Monthly /// Upping The Anti /// Upside Down World /// Urban 75 /// Wildcat /// WW4 Report /// Z Magazine
The Three Stooges — Blair Cottrell, Neil Erikson and Chris Shortis — made a brief appearance in Melbourne Magistrates’ Court today for a contest mention. The three have been charged with four offences — serious religious vilification, defacing property, willful damage and behaving in an offensive manner in public — following a UPF publicity stunt outside Bendigo council offices in October 2015. The circus returns to court on September 4.
According to Ben Hillier, more than 50 people attended court in order to support the trio, while another few dozen protested in opposition outside the court. The Five Flag General dominated proceedings outside, while inside Neil Erikson demanded Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and Police Commissioner Graham Ashton be subpoenaed to appear. Last week, his co-accused, Blair Cottrell, called upon his followers to be prepared to stage an occupation of the court room in the event that they were found guilty. A very odd proposal, given that it was a contest mention, and one which begs the question: stupid, or just plain liar? In any case, beheading a dummy is a big step up from attempting to decapitate his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend, so fair play.
In a rare sighting, two boneheads were spotted on a train on the Ballarat line yesterday. (It’s unknown if the bones have any relation to the bones spotted in Ballarat back in March.)
Fakes and AltReich Creeps
As mentioned previously, there’s been a few fake antifa soc.media accounts created recently. Recent entrants include Brisbane Antifa (Twitter), Hobart Antifa (Facebook), Melbourne Antifa (Facebook), Sydney Antifa (Facebook/Twitter).
STRAYA follows Yanqui fashions, and the AltReich trend is no exception, from Breitbart to Proud Boys to various patriotik deformations. One bizarr0 publication, called xyz.net.au, features the musings of former hemp crusader Ryan Fletcher. For reasons best known to himself (possibly because of one too many knocks to the head?), of late Ryan has dropped HEMP for Hitler.
UPDATE (June 6, 2017) : As expected, Zakhariev has been found guilty of ‘training with a Kalashnikov with the intention of carrying out a terror attack’ and sentenced to four years in jail (Australian-Bulgarian John Zakhariev sentenced for terrorism, Nick Miller, The Age, June 6, 2017).
John Zakhariev (above) is a 21yo dual Australian-Bulgarian citizen currently on trial in Sofia, Bulgaria. Arrested in September 2016, John is accused of undertaking weapons training in Bulgaria in order to join Daesh in Syria. He denies all charges.
I was recently forwarded the following letter from John which I reproduce below:
======
Since the 20th of September 2016 I have been stripped of my liberty and locked up in the heart of darkness otherwise known as Sofia Central Prison. The reason being that the Bulgarian authorities allege that I came to this country in order to train with firearms in order to fight with Islamic State or Daesh. To date, after nearly seven months, neither me nor my lawyer have seen or been presented with any evidence by the prosecution to back up these absurd allegations. One would expect that there would be a huge burden of proof on the part of the prosecution to back up her claims, which she herself has proudly boasted in court is ‘irrefutable’. Yet to date all that the court has been presented with in terms of evidence are as follows:
Firstly, workers from the legal shooting range I attended in Sofia (four times over a four week period), who all testified that my behaviour was perfectly normal and that they never had any issues with me as a client. Furthermore they all testified that I stopped attending the shooting range in early August 2016. This is in complete contrast to the claims of the prosecutor that I continued to attend until the 19th of September. Other witnesses to testify include a police provocateur who was sent to befriend me at the Banya Bashi Mosque in Sofia, Muhammad Dabbousi. In his witness statement he claimed that I said to him that I love Daesh and that me and him have to go and fight alongside them and yet in court he claimed that I was merely talking about them in a neutral manner. He made no mention of the alleged attempted recruitment or anything about me saying that I love them. He even expressed shock when the judge presented him with his original witness statement, leading me to believe that the police wrote his statement for him and asked him to sign it without even looking at it: an all-too-common practice here in Bulgaria with its law enforcement. At this point I wish to note that all the witnesses from the shooting range testified that I was always accompanied by a man to the shooting range. I never went alone. I knew this man as Peter Petrov, who I strongly suspect was a police agent.
Secondly, the prosecution presented to the court statuses which people on my Facebook friends list wrote about the ongoing war in Syria which was pro-opposition in nature. I will now make a point here which is that I never commented, shared or even liked these statuses, nor have I ever corresponded with the individuals who wrote them. The prosecution has further sought to use religious books on my computer as evidence of my support for Daesh even though a court-appointed expert himself testified that the books, though conservative in nature, do not in any way promote violence and cannot be linked to the ideology of ISIS. In my view this further shows the sheer Islamophobia of the case against me where anything even remotely connected to Islam is labelled extremist or jihadist. Yet even more disturbing for me is the court’s unwillingness to allow my defence to present any evidence in my favour. On the 21st of December I told the court that I had already left Islam months before my arrest. I further told the court evidence which could be found to support my claims including a 12 page email I sent to Canadian ex-Muslim Abdullah Sameer titled ‘Notes on Islam’ where I point out several flaws in the Islamic faith and also its claims of being a perfect faith valid for all times and places. I also told the court about some anti-radical Islamic literature which could be found on my computer and which were all downloaded in the same period beginning in early August ’til my arrest on September 20th. I also informed the court about emails I wrote to the Canadian Tourism College and International Guide Academy in Denver, Colorado enquiring about courses available in 2017, which clearly show my intention to continue my studies and not to join ISIS. And finally I told the judge that my Facebook correspondence would prove that I am indeed anti-ISIS since I spent a lot of time on it refuting the ideology of ISIS to its supporters. I even told the judge that I was also in touch with ex-Muslims weeks before my arrest discussing the possibility of setting up a Council of ex-Muslims in Australia similar to the one in the UK. The judge ordered that all this evidence be gathered, which raised my hopes of receiving a fair trial. Yet on May 16th 2017 when after many delays all this evidence had been gathered and presented to the court, the judge suddenly did a 360 and refused to even look at the evidence and calling the request of my lawyer to examine the Facebook correspondence, emails and for an examination of the books ‘groundless’ and ‘unnecessary’ since there was already enough evidence gathered by the prosecution seemingly ignoring the fact that they only ever sought evidence which would support their case.
This decision by the court confirms my fears since day one of my arrest that I would be subjected to a show trial and denied a fair hearing. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will be found guilty even though I will always maintain my innocence and insist that I was the victim of a poorly-attempted entrapment operation, whose pathetic nature would be almost laughable if its consequences weren’t so serious.
I’ve just finished reading John Safran‘s new book Depends What You Mean By Extremist: Going Rogue with Australian Deplorables (Penguin, 2017). Having been a resident in these parts for some time, I enjoyed tagging along with John as he romped through this ‘mad world of misfits’ in ‘the year the extreme became the mainstream’, and had some fun identifying (or trying to identify) the various characters in the book, frequently shielded by pseudonyms. While reactions among friends and comrades has been mixed, and I haven’t read too many reviews as yet, Simon McDonald reckons it’s an easy-reading but hard-hitting expose of political extremism in STRAYA, which I suppose is apt. So in lieu of a proper, y’know, literary review, I thought that, as an anarchist and someone who’s also paid close attention to the far right Down Under, I’d jot down a few notes.
Overall, few of the ‘extremists’ in the book, whether nominally anarchist or Muslim or patriotik, are depicted as being much more than laughable, even if — with the possible exception of the teenybopper who organised the pro-Trump rally in Melbourne in November last year — they’re not engaged in ‘politics’ for the #lulz, and even if for some, principally the Muslim radicals, their religiopolitical practice can entail some fairly serious repercussions (arrest and prosecution, imprisonment, even death). With regards the far right in particular, the cast of characters includes most if not all of the individuals I’ve previously referred to on the blog and who’ve assumed central roles in the far right’s most recent and spectacular excursions into public life: Shermon Burgess aka ‘The Great Aussie Patriot’ (Australian Defence League/Reclaim Australia/United Patriots Front), Ralph Cerminara (ADL), Blair Cottrell (Nationalist Alternative/UPF), Rosalie Crestani (Rise Up Australia Party), Neil Erikson (Reclaim Australia/UPF), Nick Folkes (Party for Freedom), Dennis Huts (UPF), Scott ‘Potty Mouth’ Moerland (RUAP/UPF), Danny Nalliah (RUAP/UPF), Debbie Robinson (Q Society/Australian Liberty Alliance), Dr Jim Saleam (Australia First Party), ‘Farma’John Wilkinson (UPF), Avi Yemini — even geriatric neo-Nazi Ross ‘The Skull’ May makes a brief cameo.*
Perhaps the most coherent perspective, surprisingly enough, is provided by UPF fuehrer Blair Cottrell, who outlines a rational (if rather unlikely) pathway to state power for him and his mates, and for whom the hullabaloo over halals represents merely a convenient platform from which to practice his best Hitler impersonation. Notably, Der Uber Der confesses (p.152) to viewing his followers in much the same way as he views Jews: as divided into highborn and lowborn, order-givers and order-takers. (Of course, there are no prizes for guessing to which category Blair assigns himself.) The seeming absurdities and contradictions which plague the various deplorable characters in the book are remarked upon continually throughout the text: valour thief, serial pest and implacable opponent of Islam, Communism, ‘Third World’ immigration and multi-culturalism, Ralph Cerminara (pp.23–27), apparently has an Italian father, an Aboriginal mother, and a Vietnamese partner, while Dr Jim Saleam causes other white nationalists to snigger behind his back on account of his Lebanese ancestry. John is also keen to underline the fact that religion, especially Christian evangelicalism and fundamentalism, plays a critical role in the worldview of a large segment of Deplorable Australians. Enter Danny Nalliah’s Catch The Fire Ministries/Rise Up Australia Party, that grouping which has done the most to add some, ah, colour, to the various events organised by Reclaim and the UPF. Speaking of Danny, Scott Moerland also stars as ‘Mr Normal’ (p.79). Well for a time at least, before eventually being revealed as being ‘some sort of doomsday Christian’ (p.84): a fact which helps explain why he ran as the RUAP candidate for Oxley at the 2013 federal election (Scott got 400 votes or 0.43% for his troubles).
Those Opposed
In terms of mobilising opposition to Reclaim Australia, the UPF, et. al., the book concentrates on one project: No Room For Racism (NRFR) in Melbourne, for which Mel Gregson is deemed the ‘matriarch’ (p.92). For those of you coming in late, NRFR was established in early 2015 in order to promote opposition to the first (April 4, 2015) Reclaim rally in Melbourne. (Other anti-fascist and anti-racist groups and projects emerged in other towns and cities at the same time.) After April 4, another campaigning group was established in Melbourne called Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF), but its activities play no part in John’s account. In any case, given that both NRFR and CARF are capable of making their own assessments, in the remainder of this post I’m gonna concentrate on a coupla Muslim figures portrayed in the book, before concluding with an assessment of John’s portrayal of my comrades, Les Anarchistes.
(Radikal) Muslims
The ‘extreme’ Muslims featured in the book are Musa Cerantonio, some bloke called ‘Hamza’ and some other fella named ‘Youssef’. Also making a special guest appearance is ‘Ahmet the Turk’, and in ‘The Sufi in the garden’ (pp.40-44), John meets a Sufi; someone who might function as a ‘counterpoint’ to two other Muslims (Musa and Hamza) he talks to about Islam and politics. While the ‘Sufi’ is, like other characters in the book, unnamed, it wasn’t too difficult for me to work out to whom John might be referring. For what it’s worth, they have a very different recollection of their conversation to John’s. Later in the book (p.224), John makes reference to a ‘famous-enough Muslim’, and pays particular attention to something the Islamic semi-idol posted on their Facebook page. Again, it wasn’t too difficult for me to discover who this person is, and I thought it would be worthwhile examining the incident a little more closely, both because of what it reveals about the writing process, but also because it helps shape what eventually becomes one of the key themes of the text: anti-Semitism and its (ab)uses. John writes:
‘We, French-Muslims, are ready to assume our responsibilities.’ Dozens of celebrities and academics have written a letter to a Paris newspaper. The signatories say that local Muslim communities must work harder to stop the extremists in their midst, and to honour those killed the letter lists all the recent terrorist attacks in France.
Except one.
The one at the kosher deli.
‘You are ready to assume your responsibilities’, writes a French Jewish leader in reply, ‘but you are off to a bad start. You need to understand that these anti-Semitic attacks were committed against Jews, who were targetted for being Jewish. In any case we’ll always be here to remind you.’
Those signatories aren’t the only Muslims who believe in Jewish exceptionalism. From France to my hometown …
In which context, a few things:
• The terrorist attack on the kosher deli/the Porte de Vincennes siege (January 2015) involved a man who’d pledged allegiance to Daesh/Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, killing four Jewish shoppers and holding others hostage before being shot dead by French police.
• The statement by some French Muslims was published in Le Journal du Dimanche on July 31, 2016 (see : “Nous, Français et musulmans, sommes prêts à assumer nos responsabilités”). The letter makes explicit reference to five terrorist attacks: at Charlie Hebdo (January 2015); at Bataclan theatre (November 2015); at Magnanville (June 2016); at Bastille Day celebrations in Nice and at a church in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray (July 2016). The list is not exhaustive. Thus the letter fails to reference the Toulouse and Montauban shootings of March 2012 (in which a French rabbi, among others, was shot dead), the La Défense attack (May 2013), the Tours police station stabbing (December 2014), the February 2015 stabbing of three French soldiers on patrol outside a Jewish community centre in Nice, an attack upon churches in Villejuif in April 2015, the Saint-Quentin-Fallavier attack of June 2015, the Thalys train attack of August 2015, a man who drove his car into soldiers protecting a mosque in Valence in January 2016, an attack upon a police station in Paris later that month and, finally, an attack upon a family at a holiday resort in Garda-Colombe in July 2016.
• The French Jewish leader is Robert J. Ejnes, Executive Director at the Conseil Représentatif des Institutions Juives de France (CRIF)/Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions. He posted a comment in response to the statement on his Facebook account on July 31, 2016 [https://www.facebook.com/robert.ejnes/posts/10155122557237942]; the CRIF later posted a modified version of this comment on August 1, 2016. See : Jewish Leader Slams French Muslims for Omitting anti-Semitic Violence From Anti-jihad Petition, Haaretz, August 1, 2016.
• Given that my French-language skills are as advanced as my admiration for Carlton FC, it’s a little difficult to follow the story of the statement, but it’s worth noting that, in response to the criticisms leveled at it of ‘Jewish exceptionalism’, on August 1, 2016, one of the signatories, Socialist Party politician Bariza Khia, published a statement on Facebook [https://www.facebook.com/bariza.khiari/posts/10154298138245900] — later added to the statement published in Le Journal du Dimanche and endorsed by all signatories — in which the signatories claim that the omissions were not deliberate, that they wished to avoid unnecessary controversy, and that ‘Jewish students in Toulouse or clients of the Hyper-Kosher murdered because they were Jews, a Catholic priest martyred in his church, a soldier or a Muslim policeman slaughtered in service … the list of victims is terribly long and so diverse, our nation in all its components, that we must face adversity together’ [machinetranslation]. I suppose it would also be worth adding that it was a Muslim immigrant from Mali who saved the lives of other Jewish shoppers at the supermarket, an action which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised (even if Robert Ejnes did not). See : Malian Muslim hailed for saving lives at Paris market, France24, January 12, 2015.
To return to Almost Famous, John writes that:
… I see today that he’s busy on Facebook, tormenting a family of Israeli immigrants (so, to be clear, Australians) who run the cafe around the corner from my flat. A Muslim friend of his wandered in for a snack a few hours ago and spotted an item on the menu: ‘Israeli breakfast’. Finding out that the family running the cafe are Israeli, she lashed out at them, freaking out everyone in the cafe, and now the famous-enough Muslim is lashing out too, ‘exposing’ this family for being Israeli …
… His Facebook fans pile on: Jews are stingy, so no doubt this Israeli breakfast is the stingiest breakfast ever. That sort of thing.
Again, for what it’s worth:
• While John implies that the discussion takes place sometime in late 2016, in reality the Facebook post is over three years old (May 2013).
• The friend is not described as being ‘Muslim’ but rather ‘Palestinian’.
• According to the account relayed by Famous-Enough Funny-Man: the Palestinian woman cancelled her order because she found out it was an Israeli business; when the owner demanded to know why, she said ‘Because Israel occupies my land’. Allegedly, the owner then followed the Palestinian woman down the street, abused her, and told her to never come near his café again.
• While the post has some caustic commentary, nobody accuses Jews of being ‘stingy’. [EDIT (May 21, 2017) : Somebody did comment to that effect but at some point b/w now + then it was deleted.]
• While I’ve got no idea what happened, and either account could be true, in John’s retelling the Palestinian has become a Muslim, and even if one believes that it’s wrongful for a Palestinian to boycott an Israeli business on account of Israel’s colonial status, a national conflict has become a religiously-motivated one. (Surely there are better examples of anti-Semitic actions on the part of local Muslims than the above?)
Anyways, back to John (p.229):
But hey, maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way. Maybe I should drop in on Mrs Sneer and Mr Snort at the Melbourne Anarchist Club and they can explain to me how spreading avocado over soft-toasted challah is in fact structural violence.
Which would seem as good a time as any to examine how ratbag anarchists are portrayed in the book.
Mrs Sneer & Mr Snort
As part of his journalisms, John joins the UPF as they party after their second rally in Bendigo in October 2015. (A detour finds him at the wrogn pub, one at which members of ‘Nationalist Alternative’ — ‘They’re like the UPF except they don’t sugarcoat their views on Jews’ — are drinking. Not mentioned in the book is the fact that Blair Cottrell, along with Neil Erikson, is a former member of the tiny groupuscule.) Partying with the UPF includes being filmed doing shots of tequila with them. This is later shared by the UPF on their Facebook page, where they jokingly claim that John is now an official member of the gang. John notes that the reception by some on the left to this example of fraternising with teh enimy is frosty. According to John (p.92), ‘The Melbourne Anarchist Club — those guys who turn up to the rallies with their faces wrapped in bandannas — seem particularly miffed’. This is incorrect, and in this instance John seems to have mixed-up the MAC with ‘Melbourne Antifascist Info’, who did indeed ‘hope there’s a good explanation for why John Safran went out for drinks with the United Patriots Front last night’.
After recounting the UPF’s trip to the Melbourne Anarchist Club (MAC) and radio station 3CR (the expedition consisted of Blair Cottrell, Chris Shortis, Neil Erikson, Andrew Wallis and Linden Watson), John attends the Open Day the MAC organised in response: ‘There are more hot anarchists than I expected here. Don’t get me wrong, there are also flabby radicals who wouldn’t be able to throw a Molotov cocktail without breaking into a wheeze, but still’ (p.157). LOL. It’s at this point that Mrs Sneer and Mr Snort enter the story.
After criticising John for his (inadvertent) appearance in the UPF’s promotional stunt, Mr Snort registers his displeasure with John’s article on the Golden Dawn and AFP rally in Brisbane in 2014. It’s at this point that the distinction between ‘structural’ and ‘non-structural’ violence is introduced: Mr Snort says far-right violence is a form of ‘structural violence’ (that is, part of State, corporate and systemic violence), and left-wing violence isn’t. And furthermore, my ‘comedic story’ contributed to this ‘structural violence’ by equating the two. For John, this distinction, and its flaws, comes to encapsulate what he considers a worrying trend, both on the left and among some Muslims (the Sufi’s view on the Charlie Hebdo attack), one which tries and fails to escape the ethical dimensions of discussions on the uses of violence and which, in the end, dismisses various examples of anti-Semitism as being trivial and unworthy of a serious response. Thus Mrs Sneer claims that [t]here’s not meaningful anti-Semitism these days … in the way there’s meaningful Islamophobia, and in practice, this distinction merely becomes a way of separating worth from unworthy victims, the Naughty from the Nice.
Or something.
Mrs Sneer and Mr Snort are then unfavourably compared to the arguably more nuanced approach of ‘Ahmet the Turk’, who attended the open day to express solidarity with the MAC. Beefy and bald, he says he’s new to politics but when he saw ‘these people getting attacked for essentially defending Muslims? I thought, You know what? We’ve got to show them some solidarity. We need to tell them, “You are not alone.” Just like how they’ve told us that we’re not alone.’ Ahmet and the Seven Turks then rock up to the Reclaim/UPF/True Blue Crew rally in Melton (pp.169–180), where inter alia they’re photographed with Senator Lee Rhiannon (or at least, that’s what Ralph Cerminara reckoned LOL) but otherwise try and keep the peace. (As an aside, John writes that the reason the rally was held in Melton was in order to protest the fact that the local council had approved the building of a mosque. This is incorrect. Rather, protesters were angry and upset because they claimed, falsely, that Melton Specialist School had planned to re-locate from Coburns Road to the former site of Victoria University’s Melton campus in Rees Road, Melton South, but was forced to abandon the site to make way for the Al Iman College. See : Anti-Muslim rally reveals a racism both shocking and commonplace, Crikey, November 23, 2015.)
The other anarchist featured in the book is referred to as ‘The CEO’ (p.186): ‘At the rallies he points his finger here and there, muttering into ears, and the little ninjas scuttle off on the mission’. Again, The CEO was not difficult to identify and again, their recollection of their conversations differs from John’s. In any case, insofar as The CEO’s role is understood to be reflective of actual anti-fascist action, organisation and planning, it immediately reminded me of a white nationalist’s account of the TBC rally in Coburg in 2016, in which at one point in the day’s proceedings ‘advance ANTIFA scouts relayed some order via their weird coded street language of whistles and the mob took off at a dead run’. In other words, there are few if any secrets revealed about ‘ANTIFA’ in John’s book.
Finally, the concluding chapters of the book examine Trump’s victory in the US, Pauline Hanson’s return to the Australian Parliament, and the failure of the UPF (as the stillborn ‘Fortitude’ party), the Australian Liberty Alliance and Rise Up Australia Party to make a dent at the 2016 federal election. In the meantime, Musa Cerantonio has been arrested and charged with terrorisms, as has Phill Galea, while Avi Yemini’s attempt to introduce Pauline Hanson and Malcolm ‘Jew World Order’ Roberts to the Jews of Melbourne not unexpectedly fell in a heap. Cory Bernardi has split from the Coalition to form the Conservatives, swallowing Family First and recruiting former ALA candidate Kirralie Smith. Most recently, Bernardi’s neo-reactionary comrade-at-arms George Christensen, having undergone radical weight-loss surgery in Muslim-majority Malaysia, and having previously been a guest speaker at a Reclaim Australia rally and starred on a local neo-Nazi podcast, has now demanded that their New York comrade Mike Peinovich (‘Mike Enoch’) be prevented from entering the country — in order to attend a conference organised by the same crew of nipsters. Neil Erikson has denounced ‘Nazism’ while Shermon Burgess has embraced it. Having been kicked off Facebook, the UPF circus rolls into court again next week (May 23) while the boys in the True Blue Crew have taken some time out from assaulting their partners in order to wave some flags in the CBD on June 25.
* ‘The Skull’ appears as a foil for the UPF in Sydney, which is credited with kicking him off the bus the boys organised to take a small crew of patriotik volk to Melbourne for the joint July 18 Reclaim Australia/UPF rally. At the time, ‘The Skull’ had been adopted as the elderly mascot of a short-lived neo-Nazi groupuscule called ‘Squadron 88’. While the incident is claimed as being proof that the UPF didn’t tolerate the participation of neo-Nazis in its activities, leaving aside the fact that its leadership is (or was) neo-Nazi, in reality ‘The Skull’ was not the only neo-Nazi on the bus, as John Lyons and Martin McKenzie-Murray reported at the time.
A bus trip from Sydney to Melbourne highlighted the way neo-Nazi elements are trying to infiltrate the Reclaim Australia movement. Just after 9pm on Friday, July 17, a mixed group of activists — including four neo-Nazis — turned up at Sydney’s Central station to board a bus organised by UPF. But police were waiting for them. They sought out [John] Oliver, the man who had tried to reveal the identity of Fleming, who was carrying a gun. Oliver tells Inquirer he had notified the police firearms registry that he was transporting the gun to Melbourne but, nonetheless, police did not want the gun on that bus.
Oliver says he was taking the gun to Melbourne so over that weekend he could combine sports shooting and the rally. “Maybe I made an error of judgment to think that I could do the two things on the one weekend,” he concedes.
But he insists that those in Reclaim Australia are mainstream Australians opposing extremism. He says he was concerned there were four neo-Nazis on the bus. “The first thing I saw when I sat down was the guy in front of me draw a swastika on the mist on the window,” he says. “Two of the neo-Nazis were kicked off in Yass and two made it to Melbourne.”
One of those forced off the bus was Ross “The Skull” May, who has become the figurehead of Squadron 88, Australia’s newest neo-Nazi group …
For the few men who comprise the anti-immigration Australia First Party and the neo-Nazi Squadron 88, the numerals referring to “HH” or “Heil Hitler”, it was an opportunity to augment the United Patriots Front’s rally in Melbourne, itself a supplement to the Reclaim Australia rally organised for the foot of the Victorian parliament. A road trip was planned, a bus rented. The journey would be a merry drive from Sydney to Melbourne, a city they deemed a leftist “stronghold”. They packed a gun but Sydney police – aware of the groups – searched them before they departed and it was confiscated …
So the Sydney group were happy to help storm the fortress of Melbourne. They’d take a coach bus into battle. Nine hours of ribald camaraderie before they smashed some commies. It’d be fun. A real weekend.
Except news got out that one of the boys on the bus was Ross “The Skull” May, one of Australia’s more notorious neo-Nazis, and his presence was suddenly considered detrimental.
It is hard to satirise May. As accords his nickname, he looks like a desiccated corpse re-animated by the dark voodoo of Nazism. In reality he’s a semi-coherent octogenarian with few teeth and a sunken face, who in earlier years wore Nazi uniforms and intimidated political opponents.
According to sources, May was told a short way into the road trip to abandon the crusade and he disembarked just outside Canberra. The departure of one man wasn’t insignificant, given there were only about 30 aboard – about 10 to 20 per cent of the eventual anti-Islam congregation in Melbourne.
Finally, and for what it’s worth, on the evening that the bus departed Sydney I took note of the fact that ‘The Skull’, along with members of S88 and AFP, were on board, as did media. I think that this, rather than the UPF’s putative opposition to ‘Nazism’, is what really explains why poor old Ross was told to get off.
The keyboard warriors of the United Patriots Front (UPF) have been experiencing some technical difficulties on Facebook of late.
Ruh-roh. Poor old Facebook Patriots. Previously a ‘safe space’ for flag-waving twats, a few weeks ago the UPF Western Australia page was unpublished and then, a week or so ago, the UPF media page — which mostly published fanboy material and dank neo-Nazi memes — was unpublished. Finally, in the last day or two, the main UPF page, which had attracted over 120,000 ‘Likes’, has also been given the boot. Presumably, the UPF, which in terms of its public presentations has been reduced to two neo-Nazis in Melbourne (fuehrer Blair Cottrell and his sidekick Thomas Sewell) and one of their boofhead mates in Perth (Dennis Huts), will carry on as before, publishing new Facebook pages, and continuing to whinge and whine about bloody Muslims, rotten Communists, and African migrants. (Note that the UPF QLD page and UPF Bendigo pages remain up and running.)
As their principal means of communication with the Australian and, increasingly, American public, Facebook has been absolutely critical to the popularisation of the UPF and, moreover, its neo-Nazi leader Cottrell. Thus despite declaring, on more than one occasion, that accumulating Facebook ‘Likes’ was not the main goal of the UPF, after hitting peak derp in Bendigo in October 2015, its ‘Likes’ appear to have risen in inverse proportion to its ability to actually draw a crowd: the last UPF rally in Melbourne in November 2015 attracted barely a few dozen supporters, while the campaign to launch their political party ‘Fortitude’ in February 2016 was a complete fail. Since that time, most of their activity has been dedicated to circulating fake news and propaganda on Facebook, organising media and publicity stunts and, most recently, celebrating Hitler’s birthday at a local German restaurant.
Sad!
*Ralph Cerminara‘s Facebook page ‘Left Wing Bigots & Extremists Exposed’ also appears to have been unpublished.
**Fuehrer Cottrell, along with ex-UPF members Chris Shortis (Australia First Party) and Neil Erikson, are due back in court on May 23 to face charges of serious religious vilification, defacing property, willful damage and behaving in an offensive manner in public following a UPF publicity stunt outside Bendigo council offices in October 2015.
Reclaim Australia ~versus~ True Blue Crew
True Blue Crew Reclaim Flag-waving
For reasons best known to themselves, the Sydney-based arm of ‘Reclaim Australia’ has cancelled its proposed rally in Melbourne on June 12. Undeterred, the True Blue Crew (TBC) has organised a flagwit rally in Melbourne on June 25. Last year’s flagwit rally attracted around 100 or so participants, the TBC busing in several score supporters from Bendigo and Melton, their numbers supplemented by Christian fundamentalists belonging to Catch The Fire Ministries (AKA ‘Rise Up Australia Party’), a small group of whom used the occasion to engage in the traditional Australian practice of a haka (presumably in honour of their Pope, Sri Lankan migrant Reverend Daniel Nalliah). Also joining the TBC on the day was one of their most vocal supporters, alleged ‘terrorist’ Phillip Galea. Appearing on April 28, Galea ‘told a court he won’t be using mental health as a defence’, and will be back in court sometime in August for a committal hearing.
Above : Phill Galea in happier times at the TBC flag rally, June 2016; just a few weeks later, he was arrested and charged with terrorisms.
Mastika ~versus~ Golden Dawn
“Mastika? We thought it said swastika!”
Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn (GD) is in all sorts of legal trouble in Greece, but in Australia is trying hard to move from the margins of Greek cultural and political life into its centre. Recently, a small group of GD members went on a publicity tour of Belmore in Sydney; the group then posted pictures of themselves distributing the Golden Dawn newspaper, including to two cafe workers at Mastika, who seemed quite happy to be receiving neo-Nazi propaganda. For its part, the cafe has disavowed any affiliation to or support for neo-Nazi politics. (It’s also closed its Facebook page.)
Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes ~versus~ Reality
“I’m not crazy! You’re the one that’s crazy!”
A few weeks ago, Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes was revealed as being a member of the (White) Australia First Party, Jewish, and a contributor to the world’s leading neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer. From this vantage point, Sykes tried his best to crank up The Internet Hate Machine and to direct it at various Australian public figures to whom he’d taken a particular dislike; a tricksy neo-Nazi, Sykes assumed the nom de guerre of ‘Hamish Patton’ while crafting his tasty insults. One of Sykes’ earliest targets was Muslim lawyer Mariam Veiszadeh, whom he lovingly described as a ‘towel-headed halal-harpy’ and a ‘country-shopping daughter of a goat-herding family of conniving peasant trash from the dunghills of Kabul’. Hurr hurr. In an article titled Waaambulance Please! Mariam Isn’t Happy! These Feels! and published on the Daily Stormer site on March 11, 2015, Sykes went into bat for a Queensland woman called Jay-Leighsha Bauman, who on that date appeared in Ipswich Magistrates Court ‘charged with using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence’:
The charges stem from an alleged online hate campaign she directed at human rights activist Mariam Veiszadeh in early January [2015].
The allegedly expletive laden, anti-Islam campaign by Ms Bauman was unleashed on Ms Veiszadeh’s personal Facebook page, where police will allege she referred to the human rights activist as a whore, a prostitute and a rag-head and urged her to return to her “sand dune country”.
Sykes’ Waaambulance article called upon the neo-Nazi readership of Daily Stormer to rally behind Bauman and boasted of the campaign’s success in being featured on ABC’s Lateline (Hate groups launch global attack on Muslim advocate, March 10, 2015). Perhaps wanting to avoid any legal repercussions for himself, however, at some point between March 11 and April 3, 2015, the authorship of the article was changed from ‘Nathan Sykes’ to ‘Hamish Patton’.
Over the course of the last day or two, a number of questions have been posed regarding a website and self-proclaimed anarcha-feminist collective, seemingly based in the US, called the ‘New Wave Army’ (NWA), for which Twitter user ‘@AnarchyMami’ (joined November 2016) served as chief booster, and is claimed to be its founder. I’ve looked, but despite declaring that it came into existence in 2002, traces of its activities over that period are virtually nil. The NWA website — newwavearmy.org (created August 25, 2015) — does note that the co-founder of NWA (whether ‘AnarchyMami’ or some other person) established something called ‘Arm The Homeless’ (ATH), also in 2002. Again, I can find little trace of ATH, although it is documented that in the early 1990s a hoax using that name was conducted (and of course there’s Tom Morello).
Note that, according to the NWA website, this project to ‘arm the homeless’ is one of many proclaimed activities on the part of NWA, including: ‘Operation Orange Crush’ (‘NWA Antifa Network comes together under Operation Orange Crush’); ‘Operation Blowhard’ (‘a media swarm and adbusters campaign aimed at talking heads’); offering ‘pre-membership’ courses and training and; ‘OpValentine’ (‘part of the ongoing Letters to Prisoners campaign’). Interested parties are also invited to ‘join NWA in South Carolina as we face the KKK in #OpHoodsOff’. Finally, NWA was also soliciting donations for some thing called the ‘New Wave Army & Natives With Achievements Winter Caravan’ (which was allegedly to take part in the #NoDAPL camp at Standing Rock) and was even organising a trip to Chiapas, possibly under the auspices of another (derelict) website ‘AnarchyMami’ linked to (brigadadesolidaridad.org, created April 22, 2017). Almost all these activities are accompanied by calls for donations/financial assistance. Joining in the call for $ is (was) another organisation founded in 2015 called ‘A Woman’s Worth, Inc.’, which would appear to be an NGO for which ‘AnarchyMami’ serves as ‘Founder and Executive Director’:
Subsequently, the ‘@AnarchyMami’ account has been deactivated, along with the @NewWaveArmy account, and a number of other accounts — @CosmoShivaCyan, @DeannaInsurrect, @KristenStonedAF, @marinaxxxross, @NewWaveArmyLulu, @NewWaveArmyRuby, @nwa_valmedina, @QueenAmareen, @TiaAnarchistNWA — which may (or may not) have functioned as sockpuppets.
It appears that a number of people had some doubts about the bona fides of NWA, sparked by various forms of ‘odd’ behaviour. For example, ‘@BlackAutonomist’ tweets:
The NWA described itself not only as having been established in 2002, but as comprising everyone from radical feminists to (lesbian?) separatists to liberal and even neo-liberal feminists ‘across two waves’: a very odd assortment of ideologies and practices. NWA also published information on its website regarding courses in ‘self-defence’, including a list of suitable providers. Oddly for an anarchist project, NWA recommended seeking self-defence training from various police departments, seemingly from all over the United States. So … it’s a little difficult to know what to make of it all, but it’s curious that the response by ‘AnarchyMami’ and NWA to what would otherwise be considered reasonable questions was to almost immediately shut down their accounts across various social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, YouTube et. al.). Before this took place, however, the NWA Twitter account also twatted that it was gonna d0x ‘Black Autonomist’ and even threw in a reference to d0xxing the neo-Nazi skinhead network the Hammerskins for good measure.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
All very odd stuff, but I suspect that this is far less likely to be the result of some hostile force playing funny buggers on teh intarweb than it is some over-enthusiastic ‘anarchist’ LARPing.
One minute, you’re celebrating Adolf Hitler’s birthday at Hofbräuhaus …
Nek minnit …
• The above photograph originally appeared in Anzac Day 2017: Dawn service and Shrine of Remembrance live coverage but was later removed from The Age website. You can read more about the neo-Nazi leader of the ‘United Patriots Front’ in Blair Cottrell, rising anti-Islam movement leader, wanted Hitler in the classroom (Michael Bachelard, Luke McMahon, The Age, October 15, 2015), while in ASIO monitoring of right-wing extremists uncovered alleged plan to attack radical left (Nick McKenzie, Michael Bachelard, The Age, August 13, 2016), it’s noted that A Reclaim offshoot, the United Patriots Front, led by Melbourne bodybuilder Blair Cottrell, is among the most hard-line of the recent right groups. Mr Cottrell once called for Adolf Hitler’s portrait to be hung in every Australian classroom. More recently his image featured in a localised version of a European white supremacist video, This is Europa, which was hosted briefly on the UPF Facebook page. In the video, images of Hitler were replaced by video of Mr Cottrell. (The alleged plan was hatched by UPF fanboy Phill Galea, who returns to court on Friday, April 28.)
• Note that, following the end of WWII, the Returned Services League fought against allowing Jewish refugees into Australia — Ken Bolton, the NSW state president of the RSL, ‘claimed that the postwar refugee migrants were “German Jews of the same ilk as those who came before,” and that they would work for their own, rather than Australia’s, benefit’ — but a few managed to sneak in, including some who in 1984 established the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick, Melbourne. (Apparently, ‘Melbourne has the highest number of Holocaust survivors in Australia and Australia has the highest number of survivors per capita in the world outside of Israel’.)
• Finally, unlike anti-Semitism, (neo-)Nazism has obviously never been a Big thing in Australia, but in the wake of Reclaim Australia, a small number of younger adherents to neo-Nazi doctrines have been inspired to take action, and the UPF helped to give birth to one of the latest additions to the milieu: ‘Antipodean Resistance’. Having previously plastered Swinburne University and the University of Melbourne in propaganda, like the leadership of the UPF, they too celebrated Hitler’s birthday in style.
A little under 12 months ago, the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association / Asociación Internacional de los Trabajadores (IWA-AIT) underwent an acrimonious split. Well, of sorts. In any event, at its XXVI Congress (December 2-4, 2016, Warsaw, Poland), the (Spanish) CNT, (German) FAU and (Italian) USI sections were disaffiliated ‘as a result of a conscious disregard for process, statutes and dues of the IWA’. For its part, in November 2016 the CNT organised a conference in Barakaldo, with participants from ‘comrades from IWW from the USA and Canada, IWW from the UK and Ireland, FAU and IWW from Germany, IP from Poland, USI from Italy, ESE and Rocinante from Greece, CNT-GAP and CNT-Vignoles from France and FORA from Argentina, as well as receiving solidarity statements from the Sociedad Obrera from Paraguay, FOB from Brazil and CNT-STCPP from France’. The purpose of the gathering was to establish a new international. In January 2017, the FAU published a statement elaborating upon its issues with the IWA-AIT and committing the organisation, along with the CNT and USI, ‘to jump-start a new international project’. More recently (April 17, 2017), segments of the CNT have published a statement [ESP] which suggests that at least some will be adhering to the IWA-AIT rather than joining in this new project.
From various unions of the CNT-AIT that left what is now called the “CNT”, together with others that remain in it but with a critical stance, as well as with many others that were expelled or purged for having denounced the irregularities committed, we have met in Villalonga from the 13-16 of April in the Congress of Restructuring the anarchosyndicalist organization. We would like to publically communicate the reasons and the resolutions of our Congress and make a call to unite in our organization in order to strengthen and give potential to revolutionary, anti-authoritarian and emancipatory anarchosyndicalism.
Motivations: In the last few years, what now calls itself “CNT” has been suffering an ideological derive [ie, drift] in all senses. This has included a series of scandalous situations in which some things are decided in the absence of assemblies, there has been a rupture of Confederal pact and federalism, a lack of solidarity, the inexistence of transparency[1], executive decisions of the Committees, the buying of votes, falsification of agreements, committees that veto the unions or their proposals without putting them on the agenda, centralism and even physical aggression. This derive has produced a weakness in [the] CNT that anybody can see: the need to have paid position[s] because of an absence of militants, the inability to publish the CNT newspaper, the decrease in the number of unions federated… Above all, it has provoked the serious fact that it was expelled from the IWA, our International which established anarchosyndicalism in the world, because of the numerous irregularities committed by its Spanish section, the “CNT”, among others not paying the dues[2], as established in the statutes, but also trying to organize a parallel international, only because it could not impose its agreements in the Congresses of the IWA[3].
The Congress of Restructurization: We met in order to give structure to the numerous anarchosyndicalist unions that exist in the geographical area, to affirm anarchosyndicalism and the values that have inspired it, especially direct action, against parliamentarianism and bourgeois representationism that are being injected into supposedly revolutionary organizations, including the “CNT”.
We have taken the following agreements:
– We have adopted new statutes which are free of provisions which have supported or can support authoritarian practices, vertical structures and executive committees. In exchange, we are fostering consensus among the unions, more means for the local organizations and more autonomy against the committees, which will be reduced to authentic organs limited to coordination.
– Affiliation to the IWA, with the CNT-AIT being its Section in Spain, putting an end to the irregular situation that has been promoted by the Committee of the “CNT”, and contributing to the promotion of internationalism which is so necessary for the opposition of a globalized capitalist world, a question that characterizes the real anarcosyndicalism and not this colonialism of a negative and irrational “CNT”.
– We consider ourselves the continuation of the CNT created in 1910, the anarchosyndicalist and historic one.
– We call on all the anarchosyndicalists in the geographic area to retake and resurge anarchosyndicalism and to put it in the place that it should be: as a libertarian and emanicapatory reference for the working class in the whole world.
From Villalonga, libertarian greetings, in solidarity and internationalist, to all the people, groups and organizations that aspire for freedom.
======
1. Such an absence of transparency, for example, encouraged the theft of around 20,000 euros from the CNT treasury by the General Secretary based in Valladolid.
2. For example: The union responsible for the CNT newspaper is no longer nominated by the unions and decided in Plenaries, but by the Confederal Committee, since the XI Congress in Zaragoza. (Translator’s explanation: The CNT’s reformist and executive wing have caused the situation in which the paper has not been published in years, due to the fact that they are trying to keep control of the publication and infuse it with their politics.)
3. A paradox since some unions that were expelled from the CNT were for dues arrears. While the CNT failed to pay dues to the IWA, it paid for a legal office of cronies whose cost were higher than the dues to the IWA. This office also absorbs all the resources destined to help repressed workers and prisoners that are from or collaborate with the CNT.
4. This decision was made by the Committees of the CNT without any agreement of the unions or the Congress. Leaving the IWA was not proposed in the XI Congress of the “CNT”.
======
See also : ASF-IWA (Australian section of the IWA).
Michael Schmidt
In September 2015, AK Press issued a statement about one of its authors, historian Michael Schmidt, describing him as “an undercover fascist” and “a white nationalist trying to infiltrate the anarchist movement”. Subsequently, Alexander Reid Ross and Joshua Stephens published a series of articles detailing the allegations, and there has been a good deal of discussion online About Schmidt. Most recently, the Instituto de Teoria e História Anarquista (ITHA) / Institute for Anarchist Theory and History (IATH) have published a 2017 Statement on Michael Schmidt Case / Declaração sobre o caso Michael Schmidt (March 23, 2017) and Schmidt’s one-time co-author Lucien van der Walt has also released a statement: Lucien van der Walt – 2017 Statement on Michael Schmidt Affair – 10 April 2017 while anarkismo has published a Statement on the Schmidt Case and Proposed Commission of Inquiry. Schmidt himself has recently announced his intention to complete an anarchist history titled Wildfire, ‘a 16-year study [which] will be the most comprehensive global history of the anarchist movement over 15 decades’.
Other …
• On ANZAC Day, the Melbourne Anarchist Communist Group has issued a statement on the subject of WAR: WWI was a crime against humanity, with two rival imperialist alliances fighting it out to redivide the colonies, markets and resources of the world. The lives of soldiers, Australians included, and civilian populations were sacrificed to the power and profits of their own ruling classes …
• On the Role of Black Bloc: A Critical Look, K., First of May Anarchist Alliance (M1), April 18, 2017: When we, as anarchists or anti-fascists, go out into the streets, questions should arise: What are we doing here? What are our goals? What is the most appropriate or powerful way to achieve those goals? Our tactical choices should always be in service of our goals — they should never be goals in themselves. I fear that in the anti-fascist movement, the tactic of black bloc has become fetishized and that this fetishization has impeded the growth of our movement and struggle …
• Channel Zero is a newly formed podcast network of several anarchist and anti-authoritarian podcasts across so-called North America. Our goal is to create an ever growing platform to expand the reach of anarchist analysis into a larger and more public audience. Currently, we are made of up the Final Straw, the Crimethinc Ex-Worker Podcast, SubMedia, the Solecast, Which Side Podcast, Resonance: an Anarchist Audio Distro and the IGDCAST. Our goals with this network are several fold. First, we aim to support each other and expand the audience of all of our podcasts with a common website and platform where each of our shows can easily be found.
Jewish neo-Nazi, Australia First Party (AFP) member and Daily Stormer writer Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes (AKA ‘Hamish Patton’) has been confirmed as one of the contributors to the ‘United Nationalists Australia’ blog and Facebook page (which largely functions as an online shitsheet for the AFP).
The Southern Poverty Law Center, along with its Montana co-counsel, filed suit in federal court today against the founder of a major neo-Nazi website who orchestrated a harassment campaign that has relentlessly terrorized a Jewish woman and her family with anti-Semitic threats and messages.
The lawsuit describes how Andrew Anglin used his web forum, the Daily Stormer – the leading extremist website in the country – to publish 30 articles urging his followers to launch a “troll storm” against Tanya Gersh, a real estate agent in Whitefish, Montana. Gersh, her husband and 12-year-old son have received more than 700 harassing messages since December.
Fortunately for the mixed-up Jewish neo-Nazi, Sykes’ own organisation and promotion of similar troll campaigns directed at various public figures in Australia remains entirely lawful and er, kosher. Further, Anglin is happy to have a Jewish man contribute to his hatesite.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3) whatever happened to … ?
April 4, 2015 was the date of the first series of ‘Reclaim Australia’ rallies; a second took place on the weekend of July 18/19, and the third and final series of rallies on November 22, 2015. Since that time, one other rally has been organised under the auspices of Reclaim, in Sydney on January 29, 2017, while a further rally is scheduled to take place on June 12 in Melbourne. Otherwise, the network has given birth to a range of other groups and projects, including the United Patriots Front (UPF), True Blue Crew (TBC) and Soldiers of Odin (SOO), each of which has staged its own events and activities.
Oh, and speaking of the TBC, their #BFF Phillip Galea was in court again last week:
An alleged extremist accused of plotting an attack against Melbourne’s anarchists engaged in “preparatory” acts rather than an actual terrorism attempt, a court has heard.
Phillip Michael Galea, 32, appeared in the Melbourne magistrates’ court on Wednesday via video link charged with collecting or making documents to prepare for terrorist acts between November 2015 and August 2016.
The anti-Islamist [sic] is also charged with acts in preparation for a terrorist act between September 2015 and August last year.
Magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg said Galea was charged with plotting, not with attempting to commit an attack. Galea’s defence team requested access to tapes and other prosecution materials.
Rozencwajg granted the request amid hopes the case could be expedited. He said Galea had allegedly engaged in preparatory acts of plotting attacks against various locations inhabited by Melbourne’s anarchists [?!] and the Melbourne Resistance Centre.
Prosecutors are relying on evidence contained in secretly recorded phone conversations during which Galea allegedly talks to other people about his plans.
Galea allegedly said: “They thought what I was planning before was dangerous. They’ve got no idea.”
Police allege Galea also researched homemade bombs, ballistic armour and guns.
The matter was adjourned until 28 April.
When Reclaim Australia first emerged, its figurehead was Shermon Burgess (AKA ‘The Great Aussie Patriot’), while in October 2015 Novocastrian John Oliver (Patriots Defence League of Australia), Wanda Marsh from Adelaide, and Liz Shepherd (AKA ‘Catherine Brennan’) in Sydney appeared as its putative leaders on Seven’s Sunday TV show. In 2016, the trio appear to have gone their separate ways, and there now exists two iterations of ‘Reclaim Australia’: one an incorporated association (including Oliver), the other under the control of Shepherd. It was this latter grouping that organised the rally in Sydney in January and is organising the Melbourne event in June (which has drawn the support of whatever remains of the TBC and assorted other dregs).
Prior to this, in May 2015, Burgess abandoned Reclaim to establish the UPF, which held its first, ‘anti-communist’ rally in Richmond that month, a feat which the TBC attempted to replicate in Coburg a year later. (Burgess abandoned the UPF to neo-Nazi and convicted stalker Blair Cottrell in late 2015.) The UPF held two more major rallies in Bendigo that year, on August 29 and October 10, both in opposition to the construction of a mosque, and one tiny rally in Melbourne (in November). The October rally attracted as many as 1,000 participants — the largest rally to be organised by either the UPF or Reclaim. Buoyed by this apparent groundswell of support, in November the UPF announced that it would be forming a political party, ‘Fortitude’, and in February 2016 they held meetings in Orange, NSW, Toowoomba, QLD and again in Bendigo in order to promote it. Sadly, the party never formed, and the UPF spent most of the rest of 2016 shedding members, engaging in publicity stunts, tagging along on other demonstrations, being a minor nuisance, and gathering tens of thousands of ‘Likes’ on Facebook.
Recently, Burgess has been posing online as one half of Facebook page ‘Nationalist Uprising’ (previously: ‘Australian Settlers Rebellion’), talking up the threat (((bankers))) pose to the Western world, and opining that national socialism is actually A Jolly Good Thing. This has provoked local (Melbourne) crank and Pauline Hanson fanboy Avi Yemini to denounce Burgess as a ‘Nazi’. At the same time, the other half of ‘Nationalist Uprising’, Neil Erikson, has been trying to further distance himself from his neo-Nazi past (he has a criminal conviction for harassing a Melbourne rabbi and was active in various neo-Nazi projects for around 15 years or so), partly by way of cuddling up to … Avi.
Erikson hopping into bed with Yemini is slightly … odd … but comprehensible given how much they share in common, including but not limited to a pathological hatred of Muslims (along with dirty rotten stinkin’ commies: Public Enemy No.1 according to the new #BFFs), and joint opposition to non-White immigration (Yemini has likened African migrants to human garbage). Given that Yemini and UPF fuehrer Blair Cottrell — whom Erikson has denounced on many occasions as a ‘Nazi’ — have been making eyes at one another these last few months, it may even be that Erikson and Cottrell will kiss and make up at some point — perhaps while the pair are sitting together in court?
Of course, the other person Erikson and Cottrell have been jointly charged with — following the UPF stunt in Bendigo in October 2015 — is Chris ‘The United Nations is attempting to install the Pope as leader of a new world government!’ Shortis, who left the UPF to join the AFP last year. Slightly coy when under Cottrell’s fuehrership, the Christian fundamentalist bizarr0 is now openly promoting White nationalism (Cottrell continues to wear a mask), and has very grave concerns over the ‘Judeo-‘ in Judeo-Christianity, the poor boy. Note that all this is occurring just as fellow AFP member & Daily Stormer writer Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes has been exposed as … a Jew!
They’re a weird mob, and the weirdness extends to Nick Folkes and the Peanuts (‘Party’) For Freedom, who like AFP (and UPF) also apparently oppose ‘White genocide’. (Folkes himself has ‘mixed race’ children — which would seem to suggest that there’s one law for Nick; another for the rest of us: LOL!) Thus, in the latest in a seemingly endless parade of dingbat publicity stunts, on Easter weekend in Sydney, Folkes and a half-dozen or so other Peanuts picketed a childcare centre, babbling on about its dastardly dedication to committing White genocide thru integrated care. The fact that non-White folk, presumably residents and/or citizens, joined in the idiocy is somewhat remarkable … though it should also be obvious that the patriotik and White nationalist milieu in Australia is shot thru with such absurdities and contradictions.
Finally, to return to Cooma, when he’s not picking fights with the TBC 600kms away in Melbourne, Burgess can of course be found blathering away on Facebook, regurgitating half-digested and very dank memes produced by cranks like Alex Jones (see below). Oh, but while it remains unclear if Burgess has cleared his debt of $170,000+ to Sutherland Shire Council, on the weekend the keyboard warrior from Cooma was kicked off that rascally ‘Zionist’ Zuckerberg’s site. Peter Grace explains:
The King of the Konspiracy Kooks, Alex Jones, has had his lawyer admit in court that he’s, like, ‘playing a character’ (see : President Trump’s Favorite Conspiracy Theorist Is Just ‘Playing a Character,’ His Lawyer Says, Maya Rhodan, Time, Apr 18, 2017). This has not gone down too well with at least some of his fans, but the wanker who hounded families of the Sandy Hook massacre is also insisting others’ respect his privacy in his custody battle with his former wife (see : Sandy Hook truther Alex Jones asks for privacy in custody battle ‘for the sake of my children’, Cleve R. Wootson Jr., The Washington Post, April 22). For anyone who cares, an interesting profile of Jones was published in RS a few years ago. See : Meet Alex Jones, Alexander Zaitchik, Rolling Stone, March 2, 2011 (‘The most paranoid man in America is trying to overthrow the ‘global Stasi Borg state,’ one conspiracy theory at a time’). Otherwise:
What do you get when you combine an atomized, alienated public that possesses a deep and justifiable mistrust in institutions with a floundering press-political-entertainment complex that’s desperate to hold our nanoscopic attention spans? You get a nation of half-assed shamuses who’ve traded genuine political argument for paranoid fantasies about alien masterminds, lizard overlords, and government airplanes dispersing mind-control mist over population centers, not to mention presidential candidates who think and talk just like conspiracy theorists.
That’s Corey Pein (Protocols of Moron, Magical Thinking, The Baffler, September 20, 2016). His podcast, News from Nowhere, is also recommended listening, especially, in this context, episode one, in which he ‘considers the role of conspiracy theories in the 2016 US presidential elections, with special guest appearances by Alex Jones, Donald Trump, the John Birch Society and an assortment of Holocaust deniers and the politicians who pander to them, such as Green Party vice presidential candidate Ajamu Baraka.’ Closer to home, Jason Wilson contributes his conspiratorial insights in Conspiracy theories used to be a fringe obsession. Now they’re mainstream, The Guardian, April 13, 2017. See also : Alt Wrong, Richard Cooke, The Monthly, April 2017:
Given that Hanson is so often described as “speaking for” ordinary Australians, or ordinary people, or a silent majority, or a real Australia, one wonders why these constituencies have chosen a champion who isn’t much good at speaking at all. Hanson is not just inarticulate by the standards of a politician; she is inarticulate by the standards of ordinary people. It would not be difficult to enter an average pub or RSL club and find someone more knowledgeable, nuanced and capable of stringing a sentence together, and on just about any topic. But that is not what Pauline Hanson is for. Her similarity to Trump is much exaggerated (for one thing, she did not mount a hostile takeover of the Liberal Party), but they do share one critical component: their relationship with language.
On ‘conservatism’ in the US, also worth listening to is Corey Robin on the Reactionaries’ Minds Under Trump (The Dig, Jacobin, March 28, 2017): ‘What a moment to read, or to re-read, The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, political scientist Corey Robin’s 2011 collection of essays — especially if you need to disabuse friends and family of the notion that Trump is some historic degradation of conservatism’s good name rather than a malignant, nasty outgrowth of a long history of violent reaction against left movements for equality.’
Two Greek anarchists are making molotov cocktails. One says to the other: "So who will we throw these at then?" The other replies: "What are you, some kind of fucking intellectual?"
