Are Nazis running Victoria?
Currently the Neo Nazis who performed their Hitler salutes on Parliament House steps in Melbourne six weeks ago are effectively instructing Victoria Police which events the self-declared fascists will allow to take place in the state.
Premier Dan Andrews spoke out in horror on social media about the death threats made to councillors and others by the Neo Nazis. It is, however, the legal system and the police’s tolerance, at the very least, of these hateful figures that has led us to this point.
At the beginning of this year, the Neo Nazi making these threats avoided a jail term, instead being sentenced to 18-month community service after a disgraceful attack on a Black security guard outside Channel Nine in Melbourne. The attack was “brutal in its force, speed and repetition” on an unsuspecting victim. If the skin colour of the actors in this assault had been reversed, would the judge have left the assailant to walk free?
On the 18 March, the same man led a posse of threatening buffoons to join him in support of an English grifter’s anti-trans speech at Parliament House. The police kept the Nazis and the disinformation purveyors on the safe side of their activity, effectively protecting them while the fascists performed their Holocaust-linked signal. Meanwhile the small pro-trans justice crowd, emotional at this display of trans-exterminationism, were aggressively pushed around and teargassed by those same police.
These same far right figures infiltrated the conspiracy-world’s “freedom” rallies over the worst of the pandemic. The groups are loosely allied now in infiltrating this American campaign onto Victoria’s streets.
The new “crisis”?
A performance called a “rainbow story hour.” This is the grandchild of Dame Edna and the Panto Dame. Theatre has a heritage of “drag” performances as old and esteemed as the western tradition and beyond: Antigone and Juliet were both drag performances. A rainbow story hour is a glittery drag performance, where a child-friendly story is read at a ticketed event. It is no different to the clowns and fairies who perform for children too.
In America, however, the right has decided that these performances are the perfect event to turn into a grift and a culture war. It is an aspect of the war on trans existence that has brought into state congresses across America hundreds of bills aimed at persecuting a tiny, visible minority as the first step in erasing acceptance of LGBTQI+ rights. It is perpetrated by the same forces stripping reproductive rights and threatening to remove access to contraceptives and women’s right to no-fault divorce.
The attack on trans people is an unalloyed win for these groups in America. The evangelical/Pentecostal perversion of Christianity that has coopted the Republican Party is absolutely committed to “traditional” male and female roles. Complementarian marriage is the only choice: man will be masculine and dominant. Women will be feminine and submissive. Heterosexuality and breeding are compulsory. Any other action by anyone acts to prevent End Times and the return of Christ to rule for a Millennium. Climate change’s disasters tell them this event should be imminent if only humanity would be pure.
Their white supremacist colleagues are delighted to join the fight. They too loathe gender or sexual blurring as much as they hate “racial” blurring. The pink triangles that the Nazis affixed to the clothing of the homosexuals they sent to concentration camps are back in fashion as a symbol of resistance to this resurgence of fascist homophobia.
Over the last year there have been a number of events where rainbow story hours were targeted by militia and thugs and conspiracy theorists in America. The most dramatic vision emerged from Columbus Ohio last week, where a group dressed in red and black chanted, “There will be blood” outside one such event, while waving a swastika flag.
Donald Trump is using the attack on trans existence as a prominent part of his presidential campaign of retribution.
The attack on trans existence is America is very clearly the first wave of a campaign on LGBTQI+ existence. Acceptance of LGBTQI+ rights and existence is repeatedly targeted in the bills being introduced. There is talk of the death penalty for being gay.
The same nonsense talking point that led to so much violence in the past is being indiscriminately applied to LGBQTI+ people again now: they are wrongly accused of being a pedophile threat. One of the more unpleasant drongos attached to Australia’s conspiracy-right movement labelled Andrews a “groomer” as a result of his condemnation of the fascist threats to councillors.
The campaign coincides with attacks on women’s rights and on people of colour.
So Melbourne’s Neo Nazis are threatening the lives of people associated with LGBTQI+ events now. What will be the next form of event that these men – or their conspiracist associates – decide is intolerable?
Victoria Police have repeatedly “advised” councils that they cannot protect them from the Neo Nazi or conspiracist threat and that the event should be cancelled.
One Monash councillor fairly suggested the Neo Nazis’ actions could “reasonably be understood as terrorism.” Dan Andrews stated that “This Americanisation of our politics has no place here,” and nor do the bigots’ “hateful views.” The vast majority are in agreement, as the Coalition parties are finding.
That leaves Anthony Carbine, Victorian Police Minister, to work with his government colleagues and police leadership to decide how long the small group of Neo Nazis will be allowed to decide what Victorians can do. It won’t end with rainbow story hour.
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19 comments
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Anne Naomi Byam -
Lucy Hamilton -
Cool Pete -
New England Cocky -
Canguro -
leefe -
Terence Mills -
Michael Taylor -
Lucy Hamilton -
Clakka -
New England Cocky -
Anne Naomi Byam -
Andrew Smith -
Lucy Hamilton -
Michael Taylor -
Andrew Smith -
Terence Mills -
Lucy Hamilton -
Terence Mills
Return to home pageExcellent article – albeit a frightening one.
You made one mistake Lucy – just one error.
You called this extremist Nazi filth that is threatening us …” MEN ” .
Truly, that they are not.
Agree, Anne. They are appalling wretches, too many of whom think it’s all a big joke.
Not all far-right figures are male, though. One despicable far-right figure who has attended free-dumb rallies and has tried to have transphobic motions passed in Parliament is none other than hanson.
One thing that I have pondered in recent weeks has been this. James Macpherson, who appears on Sky with Rowan Dean and his bunch of clowns, helped me out when a group of my peers were tormenting me, when he was in Years 11 and 12 and I in Years 8 and 9. With who he was then and who he is now, would he still help me out, or would he add to the tormenting?
The similarities with Germany between the wars is growing by the day because it is time for good people to stand up and say ”NO!!”
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Police are there to keep the peace ….. remember the anti-Vietnam ”meetings”, the first Gay Pride street marches?? Has the Victorian Minister for Police forgotten the role of the Police?
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In an extreme reaction, there is always a SWOT Squad available to handle dangerous threats against the public.
Another excellent article, thank you Lucy.
Admittedly I fail in the endeavour to get under the skin of the fascista and to really get what it is that so upsets them in relation to the existence of others ‘not like them.’ Why do they seem so determined to denigrate others such as the LBGTQ community along with people born with different shades of skin pigmentation, to promulgate hatred, promote violence, spawn fear… I reckon even the professional mind-readers, psychiatrists & psychologists et al would have a hard time coming to a clear position on what it is about this nasty clique that so stirs them to rabble rouse and act like a clan of brain-damaged juvenile gorillas – with deep apologies to those beautiful creatures – setting out to run riot within the social groupings.
Is it a misplaced sense of injustice along with an undealt with sense of personal impotence in relation to the very real challenges facing all of us these days, things like the unfolding uncertainties with respect to global warming, the existential issues surrounding housing & employment, the deeply personal issues in relation to best practice personal relationships with others of both sexes, the lingering dissatisfactions and hostilities in relation to growing up in households where little attention was paid to critical child-raising elements such as appropriate maternal & paternal care & attention, such that the constellation of all of these spiky appendages bristling within the psyches of these antisocial cretins gives them such discomfort that all they can see is deep threat in the form of others ‘not like them’, and the only comfort in life being to find others ‘like them’ with whom they can commiserate?
It’s always risky to generalise, given the complexities of the human species, but it’s been a view long held that people who choose to join martial forces as their ‘fit’ within society, whether police forces or the military, are more or less defined by their willingness to act as herd animals, with the basis being that there’s safety within the herd, along with the heartening element that they get to enhance their safety by virtue of getting a handy weapon or two to lug around on a daily basis, and given the violence that so often accompanies the job description and circumstance, these folk aren’t all that tuned out when it comes to facing social challenges like the one under discussion here; ergo, the seeming siding with the fascista in a face-off with their protestors.
Troubling times indeed. Dan Andrews needs to give the upper echelons of the Vic Police a firm shakeup and put them on notice to get their priorities firmly in order.
Canguro,
I’ve long thought that there is a deep sense of inferiority and insecurity in such people; they can only feel big by making others smaller. It’s rooted in fear and they fear most what is not like them. Like all bullies they target the most vulneerable and marginalised individuals and groups.
A lot of the problem with policing their activities is that there are many police officers who sympathise with them and share their feelings and ideas. As the song goes “some of those that work forces are the same that burn crosses”.
This is also a driving force behind the difficulty in official responses to intimate partner violence. Too many cops (especially but not exclusively the blokes) are themselves perpetrattors and follow the bro-code at everey opportuniiy.
Yesterday (Friday 5 May) Peter Dutton was interviewed on ABC RN by Patricia Karvelas. During the interview he twice claimed that Daniel Andrews was corrupt and that Andrews was leading a corrupt government.
My expectation was that Karvelas would ask him what was his evidence of this corruption and had he presented this to the Victorian Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) but no, she let it go.
Can you imagine if Dutton was accused of corruption on national radio ? I’m sure he would be suing somebody.
I get worried about the ABC sometimes as there seems to be a very right-wing agenda. I shall be writing to the ABC but I don’t expect any action will be taken.
What do you think ?
What do I think, Terry?
I think you’re right and I think you should.
Great comments all.
Good article from the Independent (UK) at the moment saying that misogynists/bigots tend to be suffering from inferiority complex. I wrote in my last one about this topic that there is the spirit of trolling cruelty fostered by the chans (message boards) where young blokes – mostly – have been ramping up all the cruellest edgelord hatreds in memes and banter, also steered through jokes to extremist groups. I left teaching in a boys school because enough of the Trump (king of the trolls) spirit had infiltrated a certain type of boy and I couldn’t guarantee remaining professional in the face of the arrogant dismissal of others’ worth.
I am well aware it’s not just men but it is far more often the men on the streets. Good Atlantic follow-up on Lauren Southern who was one of the bimbo influencers working with the white supremacists. Apparently she was then (now?) living with a non-white partner and at least one child in Australia. I hope she regrets the damage done to people she loves.
Incidentally, Dan does have a corruption problem and his intransigence is not a good look. My father was one of the faces of the federal ICAC campaign. Indeed he designed the model of IBAC that Baillieu nobbled and Dan fixed a little. Dad’s book – which I helped him with – is Keeping Them Honest. He is outraged by Dan’s high handed disrespect for integrity, although not quite as gobsmacked as he was by the federal Coalition’s decade of increasingly brazen corruption.
Clearly it is politicians and their uniformed henchmen (and women) along with those masked malcontents from within neo-religious cabals that facilitate or form the wellspring for these cowardly potty-sitters. So consumed are they by their failure to be self-determined, and their cringing inability to join any productive society with generosity of spirit, that they resort to clubs of power within which they can hide and perhaps find a rote to patch over their sense of insignificance and deep seated desire for revenge upon existence.
Invariably these irreconcilable misanthropes coalesce as they recognise the whimpers of more of their kind, the precious ring of generations of Gollums.
In this world’s pursuit of greater understanding and inclusiveness, it is an error of generosity to tolerate the borrowed disingenuous displays of these misanthropes, as they will ceaselessly pursue any ‘other vulnerable’ newly accepted by society, so that they can campaign against wrong-thinking, divide, and project themselves as the keepers of righteousness. Their displays ought not be seen as boyish folly, they are a bravado diversion from their self-imposed ignorance and isolation, their meanness, their morbid xenophobia and hatred of anything familial – revenge is their raison d’être. It leaves them open to exploitation and funding by vested interests from the shadows.
Their displays for all intents and purposes mark them as terrorising supremacists, and they should be dealt with accordingly.
@ L8ucy Hamilton: RE 060523 post.
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Consider the lot of thinking Australian voters in New England where the representative of the NOtional$ is Barnaby Joyce aka Beetrooter. A self-confessed adulterer with a common knowledge addiction to alcohol. a practising sexual harasser and long term misogynist …. and yet the ladies of Tamworth voted him back into political office in 2022!!
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Could this be a self-inflicted wound??
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Did all these ladies simply follow the directions of their spouses and partners, or, as usually happened in the past, did the male spouses and partners simply vote for them at the polling booths of Tamworth??
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Electorates get the politicians they vote for, so it appears that New England is content to become a failing 19th century theme park living on the myth of the sheep’s back from the Korean War period.
At least some of the blame for this rise in neo-Nazi followings, must be placed at the feet of social media. e.g. it would only take one person who feels marginalized, scorned, who does ‘not fit ‘ etc. to have had the inkling to read something like ‘The Third Reich’ – just one of the trilogy would do – to start an on line chat with a person who has the same problems, and then – as we all know, social media spreads things like a fire in excessive windy heat.
Groups are formed on social media, and then, through conversation and suggestion, an activist mentality takes over. We then see the marches and Sieg Heil salutes and the dangerous possibility of this becoming a political type stance by others with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind because of their dissatisfaction with life in general. And, like so many before them, they pick on the latest most vulnerable groups of people. They are bullies at heart – perhaps made so by shocking treatment when young ( who knows, but that is hardly any excuse ) … or perhaps by being raised with an overly developed sense of entitlement, ‘they’ decide that the rest of humanity should be made to join them in their misery. Hence the call to “be like them ” at the root of their stands.
Am making no apology whatsoever for these miscreants nor is there any attempt at ‘analysing’ their motives and objectives.
Any which way one looks at it, it is a very dangerous situation that looms and it must somehow be stopped – period.
Good one, there is a symbiotic, if not direct relationship between transnational far right or neo Nazis, reactionary conservatives, culture wars round identity i.e. anti-LGBT, anti-woke etc. masquerading as freedom of speech etc. to denigrate the ‘other’.
Interestingly the recent Melbourne events footage has featured in anti-transgender agitprop of UK’s Toby Young i.e. Spectator contributor, head of the Free Speech Union, Daily Sceptic and featured in Spiked often (last three Koch linked), with incessant Tweeting and/or events for media talking points, narratives and influence.
Further, a former (existing?) Oz mainstream media journalist/reporter now spends his time Tweeting same anti-trans and anti-LGBT agitprop, drawing on much of Young’s product.
Then quelle surprise, late ’22 Young was hosted by the MCC (not the Melbourne Cricket Club; though views are probably shared by many), but the Matthias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest Hungary for an event titled ‘The Battle in Defense of Free Speech’ (where most media is now state managed).
Included the head of Danubius Inst. (called out by Anne Applebaum), Quadrant’s international editor O’Sullivan (former aide to Thatcher) & same MCC which employs US ‘conservative’ influencer Rod Dreher https://mcc.hu/en/event/the-battle-in-defense-of-free-speech
While many focus on the present CPAC ‘anti-woke’ event in Budapest, the MCC’s conga line of past ‘guest speakers’ includes every Anglo (esp. US) right wing, science denying, Trump/Putin hugging, conspiracy theory, nativist etc. grifter. One that stands out IMO is Krikorian head of deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton’s CIS Center for Immigration Studies that attempts to influence migration policy (in UK & Oz too):
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/05/19/mark-krikorian-head-anti-immigrant-think-tank-cis-testify-senate-today
Transnational and local grifting ecosystem of fellow travellers, but in fact there are not that many of them i.e. key players?
The interconnection with Hungary continues to astound. How the hell did such a peripheral country become the nexus of so much vile bigotry?! (rhetorical) The fact that, as we have both posted before, so many Liberal politicians end up on that speaking tour is dire.
We need to keep decoding their meaning of “free speech” or “family values” rather than allowing them to own such worthy sounding tropes for their poison.
Viktor Orbán is the new pinup boy of the GOP.
A friend in Central Europe joked years ago that there is obviously a .pdf file circulating on how to do far right authoritarian government; bit like IPA’s wish list for Tony Abbott years ago.
Orban was more moderate a decade plus ago, but (after loss of power early till late noughties) had support from Israeli PM Netanyahu (whose son attended CPAC) with recommendation i.e. couple of US GOP trained ‘pollsters’ or electoral consultants, Finkelstein and Birnbaum, who cooked up the ‘Soros conspiracy’ (though both are Jewish heritage) with Orban’s Fidesz absorbing (far) right party and adopting its issues (i.e. Jobbik, bit like ON).
Directly related to article above, an example of state authority being used on cultural issues and ‘free speech’ towards LGBTIQ etc. is another ‘NGO’… Koch linked franchise Turning Point US, an Oz version in Sydney plus UK who turned out, and described as ‘far right’, allied with the ‘Met’ police:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/07/met-accused-of-siding-with-far-right-group-in-anti-drag-act-protest
IMO it’s the same Kochian modus operandi of astroturfing and encouraging street, like their Tea Party, Covid ‘freedom rallies’ and the GOP ‘Freedom Caucus’ demanding freedom from taxes, science, sensible regulation and governance; but very aggressive in challenging others expressing their freedom of speech and assembly…..
Lucy, I’m intrigued by your comment : Incidentally, Dan does have a corruption problem……….
I don’t live in Victoria but I hear every day from the Murdoch press and overwhelmingly from the SKY echo-chamber that ‘Chairman Dan’ as they call him, is corrupt.
As Victoria has a rigorous anti-corruption commission why aren’t all these finger-pointers delivering a body of evidence to the IBAC for investigation or at the very least being held to account by the media.
Incidentally, it was Dutton last week who called Andrews corrupt but offered no evidence which you may recall was also the case when Spud claimed that children in Alice Springs were being sexually abused including while in foster care and when asked to provide evidence and present it to the police, he was unable to do so.
The truth matters and lies have consequences, Mr Dutton !
Terence. Vic doesn’t have a robust model. It is better than the model the Coalition was pushing but not nearly good enough. I recommend Dad’s book “Keeping them Honest” if you want a very readable account of the differences from a man who has designed that anti-corruption commission (before Baillieu defanged it), taught and written extensively on the topic. (And I made it less lawyer-dry with him 😀 ) Author SP Charles with Catherine Williams – she wrote a 1/3 so it could be out in time for the election last year.
The IBAC doesn’t have nearly enough public hearings. (That is the worst bit of it, and the feature Dutton apparently forced into the NACC.) It is resource starved. It also has a provision to provide natural justice to those with adverse findings that slows releasing reports to a snail’s pace. That’s why the reports didn’t come out before the Vic election. There are much quicker ways to provide allegedly dirty people with justice.
I like Dan. I thought he did a lot of great stuff. The opposition is a clusterfork. All that said, Vic Labor has some serious problems to sort out.
Re the Herald Sun and the Vic opposition? Dan needs to avoid giving them material. Their relentless rubbish allows him some cover but it’s not great that he’s allowing that propaganda to hide an urgent need to make-over IBAC.
Thanks, Lucy
I’ll put Keeping them Honest on my to read list
From what I read, the Liberal party in Victoria is not looking real flash at the moment, either.
I find the Moira Deeming situation also to be intriguing : is she really a Nazi sympathiser or just an uppity woman : both equally despised in the Liberal party.
PS: With Stuart Robert resigning and the budget tomorrow, I wonder if the Treasurer has made an adequate provsion to pay brother Stuie’s home internet account !