The racist riots across much of England and in Northern Ireland stand out for their geographical reach, for their viciousness and because they involve a far wider range of participants than the small groups of committed fascists who helped instigate the violence. Football hooligans, sympathisers with the anti-Islam and anti-immigration messages that have circulated online since the murders, bored kids who want to fight the police or engage in looting and curious onlookers have all joined in. Muslims, refugees and people from visible ethnic minorities have been the targets: beyond the attempts to attack mosques and set fire to hotels housing asylum-seekers – and in Belfast, the firebombing of immigrant-owned businesses – there has been a stream of smaller incidents of violence and intimidation, such as the attack on a group of Eastern European men while they were driving through Hull.
We spoke to Aurelien about the broader political and social context in which the riots have taken place, how anti-immigrant and racist sentiment has been cultivated by the political mainstream, and how the (far) right has profited. See, for example : Creating a crisis: Immigration, racism and the 2024 general election, Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Runnymede Trust, 2024.
We last spoke to Aurelien in June when we talked about ethics, research and the (far) right.
4.30pm, Thursday, August 8, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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4.30pm, Thursday, August 1, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Tomas Rothaus [X/Twitter]. Tomas is the author of several forthcoming titles, including Another War Is Possible: Militant Anarchist Experiences in the Antiglobalization Era (PM Press, 2025). We spoke to Tomas about Argentina under Milei, the importance of political spaces such as La Cultura del Barrio, anarchism, anti-fascism and more.
4.30pm, Thursday, July 25, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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July 25th is the International Day of Solidarity with Antifascist Prisoners. To mark the occasion, compañerxs at Final Straw Radio recently interviewed Walter of the Antifa International social media project — and you can find relevant links with more information about the Day there. (#j25antifa was inspired by solidarity with formerly-imprisoned anti-fascist Jock Palfreeman, whom we interviewed for Yeah Nah Pasaran! this time last year.)
Unsurprisingly, while some attention is paid to the role of Christian nationalist crowdfunding site Give Send Go in helping to provide a financial lifeline to the NSN in the article (though it also under-estimates this support by tens of thousands of dollars), no reference is made to its founders speaking at and sponsoring Warren Mundine’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney last year. In any case, the right-wing circus returns to the Sofitel Hotel in Brisbane in October (5–6).
Last weekend (July 15), members of Sewell’s gang in Adelaide joined a small gathering of typically gormless cookers outside a public library in Salisbury in order to protest ‘Drag Queen Story Time’. To add to the spectacle, the Hitler-worshipping losers dragged out the same banner their Melbourne kameraden displayed when they joined Lady Parker & Co. outside the state parliament in March last year.
Incidentally, Lady Parker’s ‘Party of Women’ contested 16 seats at the UK general election earlier this month, to negligible effect. As party lvl boss, Parker ran for the seat of Bristol Central, but received just 196 votes (0.5%). The winner, Carla Denyer of the Greens, on the other hand, got 24,539 (56.6%). Otherwise, M’Lady’s erstwhile ally in Melbourne, Moira Deeming (MP), continues to pursue her defamation case against Opposition Leader John Pesutto, with the court in session in September. More recently, The Mad Monk has thrown his support behind Deeming and the Victorian branch as a whole appears to be at risk of being further subsumed by the religious right. Speaking of which, see also : Christian Extremists Continue Attempts to Infiltrate Australian Politics, Paul Gregoire, Sydney Criminal Lawyers, July 19, 2024.
Finally, the NSN’s denunciations of ‘pedo filth’ — meaning, in their eyes, the rainbow families who’d gathered at the library to hear an entertainer read them children’s stories — is rather curious, not only because of the Adelaide cell leader’s previous immersion in the rather notorious death-kvlt known as the Order of Nine Angles but also on account of the current attitude of the NSN towards underage girls. See : Channel Seven openly promoting neo-Nazism, Tom Tanuki, YouTube, July 21, 2024.
This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Susannah Crockford [X/Twitter]. Susannah is an anthropologist who specialises in environmental and medical anthropology and the anthropology of religion. Susannah has also produced a limited-edition podcast called Miss Information, ‘about the ways online misinformation and conspiracy theories infiltrate wellness communities and religious paces’. We spoke to Susannah about misinformation, conspiracies, US politics and more, with particular reference to:
4.30pm, Thursday, July 18, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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Rachel has a weekly column with Crikey, and is ‘a freelance writer with an unfortunate penchant for Australian politics. She is the former editor of The Politics and currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.’ Her latest piece for Crikey (July 6, 2024) is titled ‘Labor’s outdated rules come back to bite in Payman saga’ and asks ‘With independents on the rise, can Labor really cling to an archaic rule that has cost it a young, smart, passionate Muslim senator?’
We spoke to Rachel about aspects of these latest, exciting developments and The Wonderful World of Australian Politics (and Media) more generally.
4.30pm, Thursday, July 11, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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The death this week (June 26) of Mr Stefan Romaniw OAM has been mourned by many, including numerous and very prominent Australian politicians. Among these is former Australian Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, whom Rob Harris notes (Tony Abbott, John Howard earn Putin’s ire, hit with sanctions by Kremlin, The Sydney Morning Herald, June 28, 2024):
paid tribute to the “late, great” Stefan Romaniw, co-chair of the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations, who died suddenly this week in Poland after attending a conference in Lithuania.
Romaniw, 68, the former chairperson of the Victorian Multicultural Commission and Multicultural Arts Victoria, had rallied support for [his] country of heritage in recent years against Russian aggression, and was influential in the last push for … Canberra to divert billions in “dirty money” held in Australia since it sanctioned Russian oligarchs and others deemed to have aided and abetted the invasion and the occupation of Ukraine.
Others to have issued public statements (on Twitter/X, below) include the current Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and Opposition leader Peter Dutton:
The reaction to Mr Romaniw’s death is inseparable from its context — his activism in support of Ukrainian resistance to its attempted annexation by Putin’s gangsta state — but, leaving aside this factor, and whatever contributions Romaniw made to Australian public life in the various other roles he undertook (see, for example, Farewell to Stefan Romaniw OAM, Fotis Kapetopoulos, Neos Kosmos, June 27, 2024), one aspect of his career that seems to have been overlooked in these tributes is his former role (2009–2022) as the leader of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (B): OUN/B. And, while there’s naturally a good deal of debate about the historical role of the OUN (and this, its ‘militant’, Banderist wing), I think it worthwhile noting some aspects of its activities in Ukraine in World War II; and, post-war, in Australia: especially as we are being called upon by some of the same figures who now lament his death to re-double our efforts in ‘the fight against antisemitism’.
Thus, with regards the OUN/B, the antisemitic and fascistic dimensions of these activities were documented by Mark Aarons, author of Sanctuary: Nazi Refugees in Australia (William Heinemann, 1989: reviewed by Drew Cottle for the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History here) and War Criminals Welcome: Australia, a Sanctuary for Fugitive War Criminals Since 1945 (Black Inc., 2001), relevant portions of which I republish below.
In chapter three of Sanctuary, ‘ABN is for Action’, Aarons writes that:
By the beginning of 1957 the small enclaves of former Nazi collaborators, hidden among the mass of Central and Eastern European migrants in their new homeland, felt so secure that they organised a major political convention. The key speaker was Jaroslav Stetsko, one of the most senior international émigré Nazi leaders. Stetsko arrived in April to establish the Australian Central Delegacy of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), an international ‘peak council’ of émigré Nazis which had helped Western intelligence to launch what proved to be a disastrous series of operations behind the Iron Curtain in the late 1940s and early 1950s …
Who were these ‘anti-bolsheviks’ who met in 1957 to form the Australian branch of the international ABN? According to its own version of history, this alliance of anti-communist crusaders was born in 1943 in the Ukraine where Jaroslav’s Stetsko’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists was defending ‘the honor of the Ukrainian nation during World War II’ as the leader of both the anti-Nazi and anti-communist armed struggle to achieve ‘Ukrainian independence and freedom’ …
However, the true history of ABN is somewhat different. United States intelligence supremo, Allen Dulles, says that the ABN was created from three extreme right-wing nationalist organisations …
The most prominent of these groups, the OUN, was formed in 1929 by fascist-oriented Ukrainians, distinctly anti-parliamentary, anti-democratic and pro-Nazi, who from the beginning forged close links with the German Nazi Party through one of its chief ideologists, Alfred Rosenberg [1893–1946] …
[In 1939, following the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and the assignment of the Polish-dominated Ukrainian area to Stalin, Stepan Bandera and] Stetsko led a split from the main OUN leadership, establishing an even more radical fascist organisation named OUN/B, after its supreme leader, Stepan Bandera. The OUN/B adopted a virulently anti-Semitic, pro-Nazi program in April 1941, pledging to combat ‘the Jews as the prop of the Muscovite-Bolshevik regime’. This was not idle rhetoric; Bandera’s second-in-command, Stetsko, wrote in his memoirs that he approved of ‘the German methods of exterminating the Jews’ …
Aarons then proceeds to describe the Soviet repression of the Ukrainian nationalist uprising in Lvov in June 1941 (following the launch of Operation Barbarossa), the Nazi and OUN/B’s pogrom (resulting in the deaths of 7000 Jews as Soviet forces withdrew), the installation of Stetsko as Prime Minister, the disbandment of his government by the Nazis, and the subsequent imprisonment of he and Bandera in Sachsenhausen concentration camp. According to Aarons:
The repression of the Stetsko ‘government’ created a myth that he and the OUN/B were anti-Nazis, victims of German repression, helping them to establish their anti-communist credentials with the West after the war. The truth was that they never broke with the Nazis, and although their Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), occasionally harried the Germans towards the end of the war, throughout most of the war years it carried out massacres of Jews and Poles and helped the Nazis to fight Soviet partisans and the Red Army … The OUN’s unofficial program was summarised by the slogan ‘Poles behind the Sun [river], Germans to Berlin, Jews to the gallows’. They implemented this policy with great savagery, as testified to by Jewish and Polish survivors who witnessed massacres perpetrated by the Banderovsky, as they were dubbed.
Finally, in War Crimes, with regards Stetsko’s reception in 1957, Aarons writes that:
Many prominent Australians received Stetsko during his 1957 visit, including Victorian Premier Henry Bolte, Sydney’s Cardinal Gilroy and Lord Mayor Harry Jensen, Melbourne’s Archbishop Mannix and Democratic Labor Party Senator Frank McManus. Most supported Stetsko’s anti-communist and nationalist crusade, apparently without inquiring into his deeper background.
One who did inquire, and who especially objected to the role of Stetsko’s ‘major champion’ Victorian Liberal Senator John Gorton in welcoming Stetsko to Australia, was Stephen Dattner, a Melbourne businessman and member of the Jewish Council to Combat Fascism and Anti-Semitism. Raising his concerns with Gorton over Stetsko’s warm reception, Dattner, who also considered himself ‘an anti-communist’, wrote:
‘I cannot regard service under this banner as redemption in whole or in part for crimes committed against my people.’ He also quoted from evidence given before the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal proving that the OUN and Stetsko had been responsible for massacring the Jews of Lvov in western Ukraine.
This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to SOS and Sandee of Tinfoil Tales [X/Twitter, Patreon], ‘a podcast about anti-vaxxers, conspiracy theorists, SovCits & politics – with an Australian bent’. We talked to the story-tellers about their experience covering the antics of the various characters who’ve emerged, slightly worse-for-wear, from under #DictatorDan’s jackboot. Inter alia, we also discussed the National Workers Alliance meeting at the Polish Club on June 19 (and how it represents a point of convergence between cookers, white nationalists and neo-Nazis).
4.30pm, Thursday, June 27, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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Compañerxs in Buenos Aires are facing heightened state repression in very difficult circumstances. Currently, La Cultura Del Barrio, ‘the first and only antifascist social and sports club in Latin America’, is appealing for funds in order to continue its vital work. As they note, ‘The outlook is not encouraging, but it is precisely at times when the capitalist class is waging its most frontal attack on workers, trying to impose a vision of society which degrades our existence to a war of all against all to survive that it is most important to support and maintain self-managed collective spaces.’ Please donate to Accion Antifascista Buenos Aires if you’re able.
1) ‘Oh Stefanaki, will you ever learn?’
It’s not been reported by Australian media as far as I know, but last week Melbourne-based neo-Nazi Stefan Eracleous (AKA ‘Australian Meditations’) was sentenced in Heidelberg Magistrates’ Court for a number of minor crimes.
The St Tarrant fan’s crimes included his publication/distribution of a video in 2022 targeting Senator Lidia Thorpe (use carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence) and ah, scrawling swastikas on a public library toilet (intentional damage to property and intentional display of a Nazi symbol). For his troubles, the ex-University of Melbourne Liberal Club office-holder got a slap-on-the-wrist from the courts and was further instructed to stop. being. such. a. naughty. little. boy. in the future: ie, the court imposed a 15-months corrections order, 150 hours of community work and a smol fine ($550). As such, apart from anything else, Stefanaki would appear to have the signal honour of being the first individual in Victoria, and possibly Australia, to have been convicted of laws prohibiting the public display of the Hakenkreuz (see also : Nazi salute accused to fight charge in two-day hearing, Sara Cosoleto, The Canberra Times, May 9, 2024).
Curiously, Stefanaki — along with his #BFF and fellow gang member Jim/eone Roberts, who in September 2022 was judged to have been criminally responsible for ‘one of the most disgusting, vile, repugnant acts of antisemitism and racial behaviour’ that the sentencing magistrate had ever seen — was also allegedly responsible for the production/distribution of another, very similar video last year, which at the time the Australian Federal Police stated it would investigate (see : Notorious Neo-Nazis likely architects of ‘menacing’ video directed at Lidia Thorpe, Kevin Nguyen and Pat McGrath, ABC, October 11, 2023).
In any case, to compound Stefanaki’s legal difficulties, the poor wee fella was recently expelled from Tom Sewell’s nazi gang, the ‘National Socialist Network’ (NSN). The primary reason for this, according to the boy from Balwyn, was because Stefanaki had misappropriated tens of thousands of dollars that had (ostensibly) been donated to the NSN.
Nevertheless, it must be said that this modern abandonment by the Germans of individual liberty and of the easy and pleasant things of life has something rather magnificent about it. The Germans may be pulling down the Churches, but they have erected the State, with Hitler at its head, into a sort of religion which produces spiritual exaltation that one cannot but admire and some small portion of which would do no harm among our somewhat irresponsible populations.
That’s Robert Menzies, the founder of the Liberal Party and the federal MP for Kooyong (1934–1966), in a letter from London to his family, dated August 6, 1938.
Prior to this, on March 30, 1933, the SS opened the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich, followed promptly by the institution of a boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses in Germany (April 1), the introduction of the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which excluded Jews and political opponents of the Nazis from all civil service positions (April 7) and the Law for the “Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases”, which mandated the forced sterilisation of certain individuals with physical and mental disabilities (July 14); in 1935, the (re-)introduction of military conscription (March 14) and the ‘Nuremberg Race Laws’ (September 15); in 1936, the occupation of the Rhineland (March 7) and on March 11-13, 1938, the annexation of Austria into the Nazi Reich in the Anschluss.
His letter was also sent just three months prior to Kristallnacht (AKA Pogromnacht).
Anyway, where was I?
Oh yeah.
Last month, Josh Frydenberg, another former federal Liberal MP for Kooyong (2010–2022), presented Never Again: The Fight Against Antisemitism for Sky News Australia. Columbus-like, it claims to examine ‘the alarming rise of antisemitism in Australia and its impact on our country and our democracy’.
In my view, Rupert Murdoch’s local iteration of Fox News is an especially, ah, ‘interesting’ avenue for ‘the fight against antisemitism’, given its status as having provided a platform for both the failed Frankston Führer Blair Cottrell and Canuckistanian AltRight propagandist Lauren ‘The Great Replacement’ Southern — while also being home to notedanti-racist activists like, er, Rowan Dean.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I’ve not watched Frydenberg’s documentary (and I obviously dunno how many of the Boomerwaffen who watch Sky were convinced one way or the other by his presentation), but Tom Tanuki loved it so much he watched it twice: you can read his thoughts on the subject viaFrydenberg documentary ‘reframes’ legitimate protest as antisemitism (Independent Australia, June 18, 2024) or even watch how impressed he was by way of viewing Frydenberg’s Lock-Em-Up Weepfest Review on The YouTubes (June 21, 2024).
Sadly, in his fight against antisemitism, Frydenberg failed to interview fellow Tory anti-antisemite Warren Mundine, one of several celebrities to join ex-PM Scott Morrison in Sydney early this year to bravely declare ‘Never Again is Now!’ (Morrison also accused the United Nations of antisemitism at the rally). If they had spoken, it would’ve provided Comrade Josh with a truly wonderful opportunity to ask Comrade Warren why Christian nationalist crowdfunder ‘Give Send Go’ was happy to both sponsor Mundine’s ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’ and provide numerous opportunities for the NSN to raise funds to support its activities in Orstralia. That said, Fundraising website GiveSendGo defends decision to host Australian ‘whites-only’ community campaign on platform (Hannah Murphy, ABC, April 30, 2024) also manages to avoid the question, so perhaps I shouldn’t be too harsh.
On June 19, the Polish Club in Rowville — a suburb which previously hosted a relatively short-lived housing/training project for Sewell’s previous group ‘The Lads Society’ — was the venue for a public meeting organised by former Lad Matt Trihey of the ‘National Workers Alliance’ (NWA) in order to oppose ‘cultural diversity’, gender affirmative health care, ‘globalism’ and ‘mass immigration’ — in defence of ‘Western civilisation’.
You may remember Trihey from when he was, um, one of the women speaking out against the trans* community outside the Victorian state parliament in March this year.
The event itself was host to a glittering array of local cookers, including Craig ‘Pitbull’ Cole, Nick ‘Peacemaker’ Patterson and ‘Bad Neighbour!’ Damien Richardson. With Trihey acting as MC on the evening, the freedumb-loving throng (a few hundred mostly Boomerwaffen) was also treated to an intervention by members of the NSN, including lvl boss Tom Sewell and (his now-sidekick) Blair Cottrell, along with blabbermouth Joel Davis. Oddly enough, Mr Patterson was also one of those who helped provide security for the Melbourne leg (May 19) of the ‘Never Again is Now!’ series of rallies organised by local Christian Zionists. Featured among the speakers on May 19 was, of course, Warren Mundine (though it seems that on this occasion he needed no sponsorship from Give Send Go in order to attend).
For those of you coming in late, Christian Zionism is informed by the belief that the restoration of the state of Israel is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ:
Allies for Armageddon traces the history of Christian Zionism from its sixteenth-century Calvinist roots to today’s American Christians, led by the likes of the late Jerry Falwell and John Hagee, who fit a fervent this-worldly support for Israel into their millenarian beliefs. Clark has done much more than examine the copious literature, past and present, asserting the central role of Israel in end-time prophecies. She became a sharply critical participant-observer, interviewing Christian Zionist leaders, mixing with the rank and file, attending church services, and even joining a Holy Land tour. The resulting book is an intimate portrait of what can fairly be called a cult, tightly organized and embracing a Manichaean doctrine that, being accepted as God-given, is impervious to worldly reasoning. Clark also brings out in full detail the theologically dubious alliance between the Israeli leadership and Christian Zionism, which depicts Israelis doing the heavy lifting in provoking Armageddon but not ultimately saved unless they convert to Christianity. She persuasively argues that Christian Zionism, embracing wars and rumors of wars as divinely mandated, has a significant and unfavorable impact on U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and the Middle East in general.
See also : Allies for Armageddon: The Rise of Christian Zionism, Victoria Clark, Yale University Press, 2007.
4) Very Metal
Another metal gig starring Haste (AKA Gurn) is scheduled to take place in a vewy secwet location in Melbourne in August. A model adopted by numerous fashy groups, the need to be sneaky (‘venue will be messaged on the day’) was occasioned by the unhappy fact that the last gig the boys arranged in March fell over in a heap.
Please note that June is Radiothon month at 3CR and Conrads are cordially invited to donate to the station in order to keep community voices on the air.
This week on Yeah Nah Pasaran! we talk to Aurelien Mondon [X/Twitter]. Aurelien is a Senior Lecturer in Politics, Languages & International Studies at the University of Bath, the co-author with Aaron Winter (with whom we spoke in November) of Reactionary Democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream (Verso, 2020) and the co-editor (with Antonia Vaughan, Joan Braune and Meghan Tinsley) of The ethics of researching the far right (Manchester University Press, 2024). Inter alia, we spoke to Aurelien about the dynamic relationship between right-wing political formations, media representations of same, the ethics of researching the far right, and the upcoming French and British elections.
4.30pm, Thursday, June 20, 2024 /// 3CR /// 855AM / streaming live on the 3CR website
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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?"
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