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.
See also : Holocaust denial materials prompt concerns after distribution at Australian universities, Jordan Hayne, ABC, April 24, 2017.
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