Below : Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes (L) and Dr Jim Saleam (R), attending a Reclaim Australia rally in Sydney, 2015 (see also : The rise of the Australian far right, Late Night Live, Radio National, November 26, 2015).
File Under : TOP KEK.
Sydney resident and Australia First Party (AFP) member Nathan Sykes — AKA ‘Hamish Patton’, ‘Stanley Dangerfield’, ‘Michael Slay’, ‘Great Australian Bite’ et. al. — has been revealed as both ‘one of Australia’s worst online trolls’ … and as being of Jewish descent:
In a ramshackle inner Sydney boarding house, surrounded by his collection of Adolf Hitler dolls, a 48-year-old unemployed neo-Nazi plies his trade as one of Australia’s most aggressive online trolls.
Nathan Sykes – a former journalist and bankrupt – has spent much of the past few years under various pseudonyms harassing and baiting left-wingers and Muslim activists through social media, and writing anti-Semitic articles on neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer …
But what makes Nathaniel Jacob Sassoon Sykes particularly unusual is that, despite his neo-Nazi persona, he himself is a Jew.
Sykes was born in December 1968. Virtually everything else about his upbringing is shrouded in mystery and he has gone out of his way through pseudonyms to obscure his identity.
But Fairfax Media can now reveal that Sykes is part of an international network of trolls, and has been crucial in the campaigns to vilify a number of high-profile Australians, including Racial Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, Muslim activist Mariam Veiszadeh and Guardian journalist and left-wing commentator Van Badham …
See : Revealing the secrets of one of Australia’s worst online trolls, Luke McMahon, The Age, April 16, 2017.
A few additional notes:
• As noted, this is not the first time that a Jewish man has been revealed as being a major contributor to Andrew Anglin‘s Daily Stormer website, ‘the best-read English language neo-Nazi website in the world’, which fact is rather … odd.
• As well as contributing articles to the Daily Stormer, Sykes was also a contributor to the now defunct neo-Nazi Whitelaw Towers (WLT) blog. The WLT blog was established over ten years ago by neo-Nazis Peter Campbell (NSW) and Jim Perren (QLD), both formerly members of the ‘White Pride Coalition of Australia’ (WPCA : 2002–2004), an online forum for neo-Nazis, Klan members, and assorted other White supremacists. Campbell deaded in August 2013, with Sykes seemingly joining Perren at some point thereafter; all three have been fulsome supporters of Dr Jim Saleam’s White nationalist AFP. In February 2016, Perren was also responsible for helping to organise the United Patriots Front (UPF) tour of Toowoomba in Queensland.
• Sykes has also been active on the neo-Nazi/White supremacist website Stormfront since December 2011 as ‘Great Australian Bite’, posting over 12,000 comments. His contributions to Daily Stormer number well over one-hundred-and-fifty separate articles.
• Sykes wrote a piece about me for Daily Stormer back in March 2015 (slackbastard ~versus~ Australia First Party, Daily Stormer, Reclaim Australia (etc.).) I could be wrogn, but I don’t believe he’s much of a fan.
• Sykes is a big fan of fellow AFP member Chris Shortis, one of three men currently facing charges as the result of a UPF stunt in Bendigo in October 2015. Sykes attended court last month in Melbourne, along with Dr Jim Saleam, to express support for Shortis. Looking rather stylish in his blue suit, Sykes was also sporting several rings, including one with a Golden Dawn symbol. Prior to this, in December 2016 in Sydney, Sykes attended a rally outside the Russian consulate, where he was joined by other AFP members (including Saleam), Golden Dawn members, and assorted other far-right elements. Oh, and University of Sydney academic Tim Anderson.
But that’s another story …
Above : (L to R) : Sykes (w camera); Tim Anderson, Simeon Boikov (Zabaikal Cossack Society of Australia), Dr Jim Saleam (AFP), Iggy Gavrilidis (Golden Dawn Australia).
Q: Mr Sykes, you’re both a Nazi & a Jew. Is that correct?
A: Yes, that’s correct.
Q: As a Nazi & a Jew, would you volunteer to be first into the ovens?
A: No. I’ll go in last and shut the door behind me.
The confusion and conflation of religion with some sort of ethnicity (?) or something more to do with Marxist-style-socialism, is not something anarchists should encourage imho. Many anarchists are born into religious families. That doesn’t make them religious.
This isn’t just a “Jewish Problem” (sorry) either.
It’s seen a lot in the confusion and conflation of Islam with ‘race’ of some, usually considered undesirable, sort. We really need more clarity in politics – not less. And these are not academic issues either. Stalin managed to get his class-war Holodomor a pass when ‘genocide’ was being defined.
Yrs for lucidity and anarchism
Professor rat
Professor Rat: “The confusion and conflation of religion with some sort of ethnicity (?) or something more to do with Marxist-style-socialism, is not something anarchists should encourage imho.”
1. It’s racists who define race. The Nazis, for example have an openly biological definition of Jewishness. You can’t escape it by conversion, as you could traditional Christian anti-Semitism. I have a friend who’d dearly love to stop being Jewish, but he can’t. Despite his atheism and his complete opting out of Jewish cultural identity, he knows the Nazis want him dead. He’s Jewish because the Nazis say he is.
2. On the topic of genocide, I seem to recall the time Professor Rat spoke up in favour of it. The genocide in question was the Indonesian Genocide of 1965-66, where General Suharto (using death lists provided by, amongst others, the CIA & ASIS) organised the Army and some mass Muslim organisations to murder as many members & sympathisers of the Communist Party of Indonesia as they could lay their hands on. The rivers were choked with bodies. Few credible commentators estimate the death toll as less than 600,000 and there is reason to think the total number of people murdered could be as high as 2,000,000.
Professor Rat praised this genocide, because the victims were supposedly Communists (and most, in fact, probably were PKI members or sympathisers). I objected when he said it at the time and I’ve continued to object whenever he’s popped his head up somewhere I can see it. There is no excuse for genocide. Ever.
“It’s the racists who define race”
Similar to race being an important category in Marxist economics?
Look if someone says they are at war with me I won’t query that. I’m querying why the media are buying into this ‘racists define a person’s religious belief by their parents’ ‘argument’.
The anarcho-communist (oxymoron alert) Greg seems to also buy this thesis. I don’t and I suggest no anarchist should accept the category of ‘race’ in any context let alone the religious one.
As for my alleged support for genocide, I made the provocative argument that in the context of the times (Great Leap Forward) it was understandable that some Indonesians went crazy in ’65. Especially the Balinese. This was NOT to suggest that many innocent people died but the ‘bait’ aspect of it worked enough to get the neo-Marxist Greg to rise to it.
That he misrepresents me so badly is firmly in the tradition of Marxists attacking anarchists since 1917 and so HE is unfit for activism, let alone anarchism.
Now, out of respect for Andy’s work I don’t propose to ever address this lying, neo-Tankie turd ever again at this site.
Goodbye ‘Lenin’!
Professor, if you believe that “… race … [is] an important category in Marxist economics …” then you must’ve read different parts of Marx (or Lenin or Trotsky or Stalin or Mao, etc.) to those that I’m familiar with. If you’re going to make such a claim you need to provide specific references so as not to mislead the gullible. Even the homicidal Khmer Rouge regime conducted its mass killings on the basis of class.
Professor Rat:
1. “I don’t and I suggest no anarchist should accept the category of ‘race’ in any context let alone the religious one.”
This is an example of the “I don’t like it, therefore it doesn’t exist” school of thought. Scholars agree that “race” is an illogical and incoherent concept. The problem is, however, that this concept exists in the minds of racists and is given material reality by the practice of racists. Racists create race by acting out their racism. Accordingly, race is whatever racists define it is in practice (which may or may not be what they say it is). The fight against racism will therefore be won, not by achieving equality between races, but by abolishing race as a category.
2. “Neo-Tankie”. Well, this is the first time anybody’s ever called me that. It doesn’t surprise me, though, since he’s been projecting political positions onto me ever since he first read me describe myself as a communist. He seems to think that to be a communist is to be a Marxist, a Leninist or even a Stalinist. For the benefit of readers:
(a) Communism is the principle of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”. There is nothing in it that necessitates support for the State.
(b) Many of the most famous figures of historical Anarchism have called themselves communists. Kropotkin & Berkman are just two that come to me off the top of my head. Berkman’s classic introductory text “ABC of Anarchism” was first published as “What is Communist Anarchism?” and later re-issued as “ABC of Communist Anarchism”.
(c) Property cannot exist without the State. If there was no coercive body, over and above society, to dominate it regardless of its wishes, employers would not be able to extract profits or to sack workers. Landlords would not be able to compel the payment of rent. And banks could not demand the repayment of debts, with interest. The only viable economic basis of a stateless society is communism.
(d) Most Anarchists are communists – even ones who vehemently deny it. If, as most Anarchists maintain, you advocate the abolition of the institution of property, you are in favour of communism. If you advocate the abolition of property but maintain an opposition to communism, it is because you don’t understand what communism is and instead identify it with the vile regime that ruled the former USSR.
(e) People who identify communism with the USSR aren’t as sceptical of authority as they think they are. There are only two possible reasons for calling the USSR communist:
(i) That it meets an objective definition of communism; or
(ii) That the ruling regime of the USSR described itself as communist.
Firstly, the USSR did not meet the only universally agreed definition of communism – the one I gave at point (a) above. People did not contribute to society according to their ability and did not receive according to their need. It didn’t even come close.
Secondly, we need to consider the truthfulness of the tyrants that ruled the USSR. People who reject the concept of communism because of the USSR are pretty universal about their pathologically mendacious nature. In short, they lied about their friends and they lied about their enemies; they lied about the arts and they lied about science; they lied about industry and they lied about agriculture; they lied about the news and they lied about history; they lied about war and they lied about peace.
These critics of the USSR are, I find, in agreement with me up to this point. I have a question for them, however. If the co-called “communists” lied about everything else, why should we believe them when they tell us who they are?
I don’t call the regime that ruled the former USSR “communist”. I call it Stalinist.
3. Genocide. It’s over 10 years ago now, but here’s the link that I’ve preserved (though it could well be dead now). Professor Rat’s contribution in italics:
http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/01/105182_comment.php#105192
Vanessa again…
‘… As for the ‘boo hoo hoo’ of the left in Indonesia over their PHYSICAL destruction, well there was not a lot of boo hoo hoo at all – especially by the West. So many people were killed or imprisoned (estimates of up to 3 million of anyone linked to any leftist movements- yes you would probably have been wiped out as well in that time, PR). Do you condone this?…’
As during my lifetime Marxist – Leninist pogroms conservatively created red fascist holocausts of over 33 Million innocent men, women and children I do condone this.
So, Professor Rat condones genocide of up to 3 million people on ideological grounds. He has disqualified himself from civilised discourse and I propose to Slackbastard that he be banned from this blog. Let him spout his genocidal so-called “Anarchism” somewhere else.
Ablokeimet, just a few points.
(i) Property can exist without the state. Take the example of the ‘wild west’ era in North America. Occupation of the land went well ahead of the appearance of the state, and disputes over property claims and contract breeches were often prosecuted by force of arms. It’s not as though anarchist communism would suddenly appear if the state were to disappear. It’s more likely that a chaotic Hobbesian capitalism would develop, with private police forces, etc., a situation that would invite the re-establishment of the state so as to regularise proceedings between parties involved in the market and society.
(ii) The Soviet Union never described its socio-economic system as communist. It described it as socialist, being the stage, according to its ideology, between capitalism and communism. Under Brezhnev it was decided that Developed Socialism had been achieved, and this then became the official position. Of course, the party in power was the Communist Party whose stated aim was the eventual development of communism, so this is where the confusion originates. With the advent of the Cold War, US agencies of state insisted on calling the USSR ‘communist’ in order to avoid confusions with many of the US’s political allies in Europe who were nominally ‘socialist’.
(iii) Communism, in a complex socio-economic setting, has never existed and has never shown any sign of coming into existence, primarily because its premise — from each according to etc., etc., — is a load of ideological horse-shit that goes against the grain of what it is to be human. The anarchist theorist with perhaps the most nuanced, sensible and realisable approach to libertarian socialism was Proudhon because he understood something about human behaviour and human needs. Of course, the world as it manifests itself today shows no signs of approaching mutualism, communism, democratic socialism or anything else that might improve upon capitalism.
I.S.:
(i) Property can exist without the state. Take the example of the ‘wild west’ era in North America. Occupation of the land went well ahead of the appearance of the state, and disputes over property claims and contract breeches were often prosecuted by force of arms.
It is correct to observe that property can be come into existence without a State, with disputes being settled by force of arms, but this is an unstable situation and necessarily evolves into a State. Basically the existence of property relations creates conflicts that cannot be resolved without violence and the State is that institution that comes into being to regulate that conflict and render the violence implied and threatened rather than actually implemented.
It’s not as though anarchist communism would suddenly appear if the state were to disappear. It’s more likely that a chaotic Hobbesian capitalism would develop, with private police forces, etc., a situation that would invite the re-establishment of the state so as to regularise proceedings between parties involved in the market and society.
This is quite correct. Anarchists (at least those active in the Anarchist movement for a period of time, and therefore those who have had their comrades point out their most obvious contradictions) don’t advocate that the State just “disappear”. And, indeed, none of us possess a magic wand to make that happen. What class struggle Anarchists such as myself advocate is the building of mass democratic working class organisations that can abolish property and conduct the administration of things without committing the government of women and men.
The Soviet Union never described its socio-economic system as communist. It described it as socialist, being the stage, according to its ideology, between capitalism and communism. Under Brezhnev it was decided that Developed Socialism had been achieved, and this then became the official position.
This does not demolish my case. If anything, it strengthens it. Brezhnev’s “Developed Socialism” actually evolved away from rather than towards communism, as the Party bureaucracy was forced to introduce progressively more market measures in order to arrest the stagnation and ossification to which the Stalinist State command economy was prone and into which it progressively sank. The fact remains that the Stalinists were not practicing communism and, given their record of lying about everything else, there is no reason to believe them when they said they supported it.
(iii) Communism, in a complex socio-economic setting, has never existed and has never shown any sign of coming into existence, primarily because its premise — from each according to etc., etc., — is a load of ideological horse-shit that goes against the grain of what it is to be human.
For good or ill, human nature is a marvellously flexible thing. People are capable of the most amazing feats of heroism, the most inspiring acts of kindness and the most disgusting acts of brutality – in large part depending on the circumstances in which they find themselves. In most societies today, slavery is considered a repugnant institution and has no support, while in Ancient Greece, even great thinkers of the calibre of Aristotle believed in the justice and inescapability of slavery as an institution and considered that some people were naturally suited to it. What has changed in the meantime is not human nature, but society. People living in different societies live in different ways and consider the way they live to be a consequence of human nature.
The anarchist theorist with perhaps the most nuanced, sensible and realisable approach to libertarian socialism was Proudhon because he understood something about human behaviour and human needs. Of course, the world as it manifests itself today shows no signs of approaching mutualism, communism, democratic socialism or anything else that might improve upon capitalism.
Appearances can be deceiving. We are immensely closer to communism now than we were even a generation ago. This is because of the industrialisation of a large number of populous Third World countries. The working class is now the largest class on Earth, outnumbering both the peasantry and the urban petit bourgeoisie. We now have the material base upon which communism can be constructed globally – at the time of the Russian Revolution that could only be said about Europe, the United States and the White Dominions of the British Empire (and perhaps Japan – I don’t know enough about Japanese economic history to make the call on that question).
Communism is only capable of coming into existence when there is a social agent to create it. Until the emergence of the working class under capitalism, communism was just a noble idea that could inspire a gifted intellectual or an especially militant minority in a revolutionary period. After the development of a large working class in Europe in the 19th Century, many more people became communists, since communism is the logical end point of working class struggle. And the working class has both a strong material interest in abolishing capitalism and establishing communism, and the social power to do so due to its position in production.
Communism will be “common sense” and correspond to popular views of human nature when property has been abolished and automation has reduced necessary working hours to the level where people will do them voluntarily. There now exists the material base on which to reach this. This doesn’t mean that production is sufficient to provide plenty for all with only a very small working week, but rather that there is now a capital base sufficient to manage a transitional period to communism without establishing a State. If we have a workers’ revolution that abolishes capitalism and the State, society will have enough revolutionary solidarity to endure the temporary hardships involved in automating production, eliminating poverty and reorienting the economy in a sustainable direction without constructing a coercive body above itself in the meantime. It won’t happen if we just abolish the State with a magic wand.
Ablokeimet:
“Appearances can be deceiving. We are immensely closer to communism now than we were even a generation ago. This is because of the industrialisation of a large number of populous Third World countries. The working class is now the largest class on Earth, outnumbering both the peasantry and the urban petit bourgeoisie. We now have the material base upon which communism can be constructed globally …”
This is a joke, right? An ironic quip aimed at naive historical materialists?
Any examination of the social proclivities of the classes shows overwhelmingly that the working class seeks to better its material conditions by rising up through the social structure, not by making demands for, or taking action to achieve, communism. When it does take action it tends to be to increase its share of the surplus it produces, to increase its control over the job, and to increase its access to the social surplus. When it achieves a certain level of comfort it tends to stop any further movement forward and tries to merely maintain the position achieved. Of course, it’s always subject to counter-attack by the bourgeoisie. It’s mostly in situations of economic and social crisis that workers actually get sucked into communist-oriented movements en masse, only to regret it later on.
Advocates for communism, on the other hand, overwhelmingly come from the more over-educated, socially-unhinged elements of the bourgeoisie, or, in the case of some anarchists, the aristocracy. If one swallows the ideological nonsense that the working class, contrary to all the evidence, is the class that will usher in communism, then, I agree, you will see the seeds of communism everywhere you look.
This is a joke, right? An ironic quip aimed at naive historical materialists?
No. I’m serious. Marx was a thinker far ahead of his time – and the authoritarian flaws in his thinking don’t detract from the analysis of capitalism he did. He was correct in saying that you can’t build communism in circumstances where production of goods & services is insufficient, but he didn’t anticipate how long it would take to get to that stage.
Any examination of the social proclivities of the classes shows overwhelmingly that the working class seeks to better its material conditions by rising up through the social structure, not by making demands for, or taking action to achieve, communism.
This resort to empericism is, I must say, rather smug. It makes sense for individual workers to seek to rise up through the existing social structure. This is what liberalism is all about. If workers find rising individually is difficult, it then makes sense for workers to organise to achieve reforms that make individual rise possible. This is what social democracy is all about.
What IT has missed, however, is that capitalism is a system prone to crises and with an ultimately insoluble contradiction between the need to extract surplus value and the need to realise it. This contradiction has been been evaded by bringing ever more resources and labour into the system (whether through geographical expansion or the drawing of previously uncommodified labour into market relations). This evasion has begun to reach its limits if it has not done so already. World economic growth is slowing down and, in the advanced countries, looks set to stagnate. Social mobility is once more looking impossible for many, while highly indebted States find they no longer have the wherewithal to stimulate their way out of slumps.
It is fashionable to pour scorn on predictions of economic doom, on the basis that previous radicals have predicted it only to be proven wrong. We can now see, however, that the factors which allowed the world to escape previous slumps either no longer exist or (in the case of war) would threaten to wipe out the human race rather than produce a new field for reconstruction. It is therefore quite reasonable to:
(a) Accept Marx’s theoretical case for the eventual collapse of capitalism; and
(b) Consider there is a high probability of this collapse occurring within the next generation.
Of course, this is completely different from saying that communism is inevitable. There are two possible outcomes from the collapse of capitalism. One is libertarian communism. The other is, in Marx’s words, “the common ruin of the contending classes”. We can already see two possible mechanisms for this (nuclear war and catastrophic climate change). More may emerge. It is only the struggle of the working class that can prevent that ruin. I choose to join that struggle and anticipate more will do so as time goes on.
Capitalism is doomed. What is at stake is what will follow it.
Ablokeimet, all this ultra-left catastrophism makes me lol and rofl uproariously.
When it comes down to it, all the justification you can bring to the table for the imminent ‘collapse of capitalism’ is Marx’s declining-rate-of-profit humbug. Not only has this theory been impossible to demonstrate over the last century and a half since Marx ordained it, it has been, and, undoubtedly will continue to be, a site of riveting controversy amongst revolutionist eggheads for some time to come. (Is it overproduction, is it underconsumption, is it …? Who cares? Life’s too bloody short to be spending years analysing this sort of nonsense.)
For me, the most dangerous aspect of class struggle theory is the demonisation of the bourgeoisie that occurs, which, in the past, has led idiot revolutionaries to commit acts of barbarism, on greater or lesser scales, when they confused the abolition of bourgeois relations with the physical liquidation of the bourgeoisie itself.
The only sensible approach to social and economic change is gradualism against a background of liberal democracy — anarchists like Proudhon understood this, as did non-revolutionary Marxists like Bernstein. Revolutionary guff is best suited for self-righteous maniacs who believe it’s their role to guide the course of history.
When anarchist and Marxist concepts and approaches are liberated from the ‘revolutionary’ ghetto, and make it into social movements such as the Greens, then interesting public uses can be made of them. The Greens have brought the idea of consensual democracy into the public realm and their periodic left critiques of the socio-economic structure are unique in the mainstream. Better than leaving them in the ghetto. Anarchism and Marxism are wasted on anarchists and Marxists.
Addendum:
Ablokeimet: “This resort to empericism is, I must say, rather smug.”
I presume you mean ’empiricism’, ablokeimet, and I wasn’t being consciously empirical nor was I being consciously smug. However, I have no problem with empiricism as a method of ascertaining what appears to exist, along with other methods. For instance, I don’t recognise the supposed incompatibility of empiricism and phenomenology. I don’t know what your objection to empiricism is but I’m guessing it has something to do with the claim of Lenin and others that it’s incompatible with that load of mystical nonsense, dialectics.