Out of the shadows
The size and breadth of the March for Australia protests on the 31st of August rightfully shocked many Australians, who underestimated the potential support base of anti-migrant politics. Even more shocking was the open presence of the neo-Nazis of the National Socialist Network (NSN) at every rally – the purpose of which was not just to recruit and gain influence, but to scare their enemies. The small counter-protests that determinedly confronted the right did much to break that fear, clearing the way for more extensive counter-protests, but the Nazi threat is still very significant.
The NSN is the body that has spearheaded the protests, operating in an alliance with non-NSN white nationalists. The NSN advocates an explicitly white nationalist anti-migrant politics – dividing them from the right-wing populists that otherwise make up the movement.
While right populists would deny that they’re racist and point to some token “good migrants” they support, the NSN explicitly identify as racists. They decry what they call “optics-cucking” on the right – the idea that you should temper your positions in order to present a good public face to moderates. Instead, the NSN happily lets themselves be painted as extremists.
The last major far-right protest movement was the Reclaim Australia campaign of 2015, where far-right leaders like Blair Cottrell first became notorious. However, most of the Neo-Nazis present back then made a tactical decision to deny their Nazi beliefs, instead presenting themselves as everyday Australians concerned about Islamic terrorism. Now, they are doing the opposite – presenting themselves to the media and to the general public as open, Hitlerite racists.
For years, the NSN has operated quietly, recruiting members through social media and training them in martial arts and political activism. Their only real public activity revolved around small-scale stunts, like displaying racist banners in the middle of the night. Their years of quiet activity have served them well; they now have a few hundred members and branches in nearly every state, as well as a wider network of sympathisers to draw on for financial and logistical support.
The 31st of August was the turning point. The NSN came out of the shadows and marched unmasked, reveling in the spotlight of the cameras of news crews. Their reasoning for doing this is actually rather simple: they want to build a political party, and they need the numbers to qualify for registration with the Electoral Commission. The NSN has created their White Australia party in order to exploit the parliamentary system for propagandist ends. They believe that election to parliament may shield them from some of the more aggressive state repression that they’ve been targeted with so far, and that it will also bring their messages to a new, much larger audience.
An Australia that doesn’t exist
The extremism of the NSN is what makes them so feared, but it is also what will likely lead to the collapse of the wider movement they have built around themselves.
They are not just opposed to the left, but also to the elements within the right that want a “non-racist” anti-immigration movement. The NSN shouted down a token anti-migrant Indian man who was invited to speak at the Brisbane rally. They instigated a fight with far-right Zionist Avi Yemeni and his security crew in Melbourne. They also fought with attendees in Adelaide who attempted to stop them from speaking. Their obsession with Jews drives away the substantial amount of right-wingers who support Israel against “the Islamic threat”.
They are not a group that can hold together the kind of coalition needed for protracted electoral success. Hardline Nazi groups are rarely able to succeed electorally – the most successful hard right electoral projects, like Rassemblement National in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and Fratelli d’Italia in Italy have long since junked their Neo-Nazi wings, and have made a more determined effort to win voters from the mainstream right.
These concessions are necessary because of the fact that only a small percentage of the contemporary electorate would be won over to explicit, pro-white racism. The right – and even some sneering middle class lefts – pretend that “the average Aussie battler” supports white nationalism. This just isn’t true.
Most people, including Anglo-Australians, will have almost certainly grown up in an environment where multiculturalism is the norm. White Australians are likely to have non-white friends, family, partners and co-workers. They feel no connection to “white culture”, and hardly any would be able to identify what that even means.
Virtually every suburb contains a decent-sized minority of non-whites, most of whom are perfectly well integrated with their white neighbours. In the major cities, there are a number of neighbourhoods that contain well-entrenched, multi-generational ethnic communities that are not going anywhere.
It’s telling that the rally attendees were predominantly middle aged or older. Young people were a distinct minority, and in some cases the only young people there were NSN members. Most young people have never known a white Australia or anything like it – at least in the major cities.
The Australian working class has always been multicultural, but never more so than now. Essentially every industry is filled with non-whites, whether they were born here or whether they themselves migrated. A large number of industries and trades are majority-migrant. All unions contain substantial minorities, sometimes even majorities of non-whites. There is a significant migrant involvement in virtually all recent industrial disputes, and it would be trivially easy to point to examples.
The nature of the NSN threat
All of this is not to underestimate the problem. Anti-migrant ideas are common within the working class – they’re even common among people of migrant backgrounds. A less explicitly racist anti-migrant position has real potential to catch on and enter mainstream politics to an even greater degree than it has before. In addition, the NSN is a violent gang that will intimidate minorities and the organised left until they are stopped. There is a real possibility that they or others around them will turn to violent terrorism in the manner of the perpetrator of the Christchurch mosque shootings, or the murderer of English Labour MP Jo Cox.
The NSN themselves know they won’t ever be able to build a sustainable mass movement. They plan to use any electoral successes they gain as a pulpit, not as a means to secure governmental power. They focus primarily on the recruitment of an elite cadre, away from the degenerate masses.
The NSN openly states that “there is no political solution” to what they see as the decline of the West. Their strategy is based on accelerating a supposed coming civilisational collapse, an apocalyptic scenario that will present the NSN core with the opportunity to build some kind of white ethnic enclave.
It’s not even clear whether they will recruit substantially to the NSN itself from the rallies. Their preferred demographic of sixteen year old shut-ins was poorly represented at the rallies compared to the Facebook boomer mob; reaching the youth that can be groomed into Nazi cadre is much harder.
However, in organising the fightback, we need to know what the weak points of the movement are. For as long as the NSN and its fronts are so closely identified with the March for Australia movement, the marches themselves will struggle to grow, and will reach a limit. This is a fact that anti-fascists can use against both the NSN and the softer anti-migrant racists that tacitly support them.
The NSN’s current fixation is on the creation of their White Australia political front, through their presence as a part of a mass anti-migration movement. We might not be able to wipe out the NSN in the short term, but we can deny them their prized political party and send them back into the shadows. To do just this would be a real victory, and could trigger the kind of infighting within the NSN that leads them to fracture.
Fighting with class war
We also need to stress – and this is no less important – that we represent the working class movement, not them. Enough of the idea that they’re on the side of the average person! Every far-right movement that has ever been successful has accomplished this by attacking the working-class; the NSN would happily follow the example of Mussolini and Hitler if they ever got the chance. There are workers who support racism and anti-migrant politics generally, but the responsibility is on us to fight against these ideas and win people to our side.
There is a potentially enormous base of support that we can draw upon to oppose the NSN and the March for Australia movement, if we take the task of mobilising seriously. For all their obsession with combat training, they only feel emboldened to pick fights they know they will win. They may have felt confident enough to attack the small group of unsuspecting people at Camp Sovereignty, but would they feel confident enough to attack a thousands-strong crowd of young Arabs, Pacific Islanders, Africans, leftists, and trade unionists?
The Labor Party would undoubtedly oppose such an anti-Nazi movement; they’d rather have a vigil or hope that giving cops more powers will deal with the problem. Fuck them – the Labor Party has fed racism in this country with a long, long history of racist policies, like the current detention regime against refugees. It is in no position to fight, and we shouldn’t expect it to – even if we can gain support from some of their rank and file supporters.
Neither can we expect a great deal of support from the establishment leadership of many ethnic communities themselves. These established leaderships derive from the middle and upper classes of these communities, and conduct politics by networking with mainstream politicians, both Labor and Liberal. Many Muslim associations, for instance, continue to endorse Labor politicians – despite immense backlash in these communities against ALP support for Israel.
It would take solid work by militants to build a base among these communities and mobilise them without going through the local big-wigs, but it is certainly not impossible. It was only a couple of months ago that hundreds of thousands were mobilised in each major city in support of Palestine – an Olympic swimming pool full of water, compared to the bucket of flag-waving racists. The counter-protests on the 31st were small, but they can and will grow as people overcome their fear, and gain the confidence to beat back the right.
If we take it seriously, we can beat them back. They might find confidence in their isolated fight clubs and men’s retreats, but we can find our confidence in the multicultural working class that actually makes this country run.
