THE STRATEGY OF TENSION

By Welf Herfurth

Introduction
This article has been written with a view to outlining an overall strategy for nationalist groups to follow – a course of action. In the weeks since the APEC demo, it has become clear to more than a few observers that our communist and militant anti-racist (Antifa) opponents are incapable of debating with us intellectually, and indeed are incapable of intellectual expression. A long, intellectual article posted at the New Right blog will have, in the comments section, abuse and threats of violence from our communist opponents – and never a discussion of the ideas and personages involved (e.g., Babeuf, Stalinist economics, Lorenz von Stein, de Benoist...). And, again and again, we at New Right (as do many other nationalists in Australia, whether they be German or not) get tagged with the ‘Neo-Nazi’ label – this is despite the fact that we here, at this site, have made our opinions clear on German National Socialism and the phenomenon known as Neo-Nazism (or Nutzism, as we disparagingly call it).

Having said that, the reaction from our communist opponents is, I think, beneficial. It can only benefit our cause, as I shall explain below, and part of our strategy ought to be to continue to provoke similar reactions in the future.

1. What is a Neo-Nazi?

Neo-Nazism is an attempt to revive German National Socialism in the modern era. As we know, German National Socialism was a form of fascism. There are a number of definitions of what fascism actually is, or was. Fascism can be defined as a radical form of socialism for the petit bourgeoisie (Hayek’s definition, and the definition of many other free-market conservatives who locate German National Socialism on the Left of the political spectrum, not the Right); or as an attempt to introduce a Traditional order in the modern world (which is how Evola understood it)... What distinguishes German National Socialism from other forms of fascism (Quisling’s, Mosley’s, Mussolini’s) is its adherence to the Führer principle. Simply put, National Socialism needed a Führer figure to hold it all together, and was nothing without him. As the German historian and liberal anti-Nazi Martin Broszat writes:

National Socialism was not primarily an ideological and programmatic, but a charismatic movement, whose ideology was incorporated in the Führer, Hitler, and which would have lost all its power to integrate without him. Hitler was never merely the spokesman for an idea that would have had an equivalent importance and existence without him. On the contrary, the abstract, utopian and vague National Socialist ideology only achieved what reality and certainty it had through the medium of Hitler. Thus there could be no effective opposition against Hitler in the name of the National Socialist ideology. Where this was none the less attempted, as for example by Otto Strasser and his mainly intellectual following, the features of the National Socialist ideology, which were composed of emotions, resentments and dreams, were exchanged for an ideology directed towards concrete material action (which was consistent in that respect and naturally permitted no omnipotent Führer) and failed to appreciate the charismatic foundation of the National Socialist movement. It had been far more typical of the general attitude of Party functionaries from the various ancillary organisations of the NSDAP
before and after 1933 that however much they thrashed out bitter quarrels amongst themselves they did not as a rule turn against Hitler, but tried to win him over to their respective interpretations of the National Socialist ideology and programme. That is they basically recognised him as the interpreter of the correct ‘idea’ and did not question his supreme authority to rule on ideological matters too. (Martin Broszat, ‘The Hitler State: the foundation and development of the internal structure of the Third Reich’, 1969, p.29).

So, in order for there to be a Neo-Nazism movement, there has to be a neo-Führer, who takes Hitler’s place symbolically as the integrating, charismatic head of the revived Nazi movement. The communist and militant anti-racist opponents of Western nationalism understand this instinctively: which is why, whenever they are on the look out for a ‘Nazi’ revival, are always hunting for the ‘new Führer’, whether he be Dr James Saleam, the ‘Reverend’ Patrick Sullivan, David Palmer, Jack van Tongeren.

On the other hand, it could be argued that there can be a ‘Führer’-less form of ‘Neo-Nazism’. The NPD is accused, by the German and international media, of being ‘Neo-Nazi’ all the time, even though it has no charismatic ‘Führer’ figure. In all fairness, the NPD does have a few things in common with the old German National Socialist and fascist movements. For starters, both are mass-movements, which emphasise extra-parliamentary organisation; both form women’s and children’s groups, and other groups which embrace people from all walks of life, all professions, with the intention of being more than political parties; both are on the Left, politically speaking, in many of their social and economic policies; both are radical and uncompromising; both have suffered persecution at the hands of liberal democratic States; both tend to make a mystique of street action and confrontations with communist opponents; both of course, are German and nationalist. One could, on that basis, apply the description ‘Neo-Nazi’ to the NPD. But, again, there is no Führer, and my argument (and Broszat’s) can be no German National Socialism, old or new, without a Führer-figure.

One of the problems of identifying the likes of the NPD with ‘Neo-Nazism’ is that so many other ideological groupings have appropriated parts of the National Socialist doctrine. Do we castigate the Greens, for instance, for being environmentalist, when one of the first environmentalist politicians was Adolf Hitler? A few scholars acknowledge the influence Hitler’s National Socialism had on Swedish social democracy – the welfare-statist brand of socialism which, in turn, influenced the British Labour Party (in the 1960s) and the Australian Labor Party (in the 1970s). In fact, one of the definitions of German National Socialism could be: welfare-statist social democracy plus dictatorship.

Incidentally, one can see how the Führer-as-integrator principle works for other political ideologies. Chavezism, for instance, is inconceivable with Chavez: in that respect, Chavezism is more ‘Neo-Nazi’ than the ideology of the NPD.

Oddly enough, the communists adhere more to the Führerprinzip, or ‘leader principle’, more than we nationalists do. Communism, even today, is nothing but a gallery of ‘great leaders’: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Jong-Il, Kim Il-Sung, Tito, lesser lights like Salvador Allende... Their word is law: none of the members of the communist parties are allowed to question the rulings, on any conceivable subject, by these men. Communism is the most authoritarian movement in the history of the world; it is also the most bound up with personality cults, ‘Great Leaders’ (or ‘Dear Leaders’). Hitler and Mussolini, of course, imitated this (and many other parts) of communist doctrine, and German National Socialism could be described as being little more than German Stalinism.

The advantage of the communist application of the Führer principle is that it discourages questioning, thinking and debate. Were the followers of communism allowed, for once, to question where socialism is going, what they, through their activism, are doing to achieve it, what a communist Australia would actually look like, communism would collapse. Or rather, belief in communism would collapse. Socialists would ask, for instance, how it is that mass immigration of Africans, Muslims and Indians helps the Australian working-classes – when these immigrants (especially the more disadvantaged ones, like the Sudanese) would compete with Australians for welfare benefits. And what on earth do gay rights have to do with socialism? Surely capitalism cannot be to blame for discrimination against gays? And why support socialism in Cuba when Cuba uses fierce state repression against gays? There are no answers to these questions: which is why the communist Führer principle is needed. It keeps communists from thinking.

2. What is wrong with Neo-Nazism?

To me, ‘Neo-Nazism’, particularly in its Nutzi, uniform fetishist form is a bizarre, antiquated and ultimately self-defeating ideology. Enough of it has been said here elsewhere at the New Right site. (See the article, ‘Freaks in the movement’, archived at http://newrightausnz.blogspot.com/2006/07/freaks-in-movement-this-is-statement.html ).

But, obviously, what I and many other nationalists dislike about ‘Neo-Nazism’ is not what our opponents on the mainstream Left dislike about it. To them, the objection to ‘Neo-Nazism’ is simple. During the Second World War (itself started by Germany, when it invaded Poland in 1939), Germany gassed eight million people, using weapons of mass destruction, and threw the corpses into giant ovens. Some were turned into soap; others into lampshades. The horrible, shrivelled corpses at Dachau and Bergen-Belsen are testimony to the evil of the ideology of German National Socialism, which committed the most terrible crimes of the twentieth century.

Now, according to the communists and the Antifa, the ‘Neo-Nazis’ want to bring back that order, and start gassing, not only Jews, Poles, homosexuals and gypsies, but anyone who is not a white European or of European descent. Alan Moore’s classic 1988 graphic novel, V for vendetta, offers a good summary of the communist and Antifa view of Western nationalism – and the consequences of a ‘fascist’ return to power. The graphic novel depicts a dystopian Britain in the late 1990s, where 1930s-style fascists have taken over the world and have killed a good many Jews, homosexuals, Pakistani and Caribbean immigrants in death camps, and like Dr Mengele, carried out sadistic medical experiments on the inmates. The mainstream Left sincerely believes that propaganda like V for vendetta depicts nationalist goals accurately: they believe that we nationalists are all working together towards the same goal – of eliminating, through death camps, the ‘racially impure’ (whatever that means) members of Western society.

The Antifa demonise their opponents, making them out to be satanic. Militant anti-racism plays on nothing but fear: it is pure emotion. And it is purely negative, as well: ask them what their political policies are on inflation and interest rates, for instance, or conscription or abortion or the death penalty, are – and they have no answer. Because of the lack of foundations, the lack of arguments, they can only appeal to fear. They are more a belief-system than a political ideology, and with their appeals to fear and irrationalism, plus the almost religious attribution of satanic qualities to their opponents, they resemble a cult, like the Raelians or the Scientologists.

In the Antifa and mainstream ideology, the New Right and the National-Anarchists are part of the same ‘Neo-Nazi’ conspiracy. A few individuals of the mainstream Left have expressed their trepidation that naïve youths (who have been insufficiently indoctrinated, i.e., not converted to Marxist-Leninism) may go over to the National-Anarchist side, not understanding that the National-Anarchists are ‘Neo-Nazi’ fakes. In the communist scenario, the naïve youths, after becoming members of a National-Anarchist group, will eventually be led down the path to ‘Neo-Nazism’. Possibly, the new National-Anarchist recruit will be brought to a secret cavern by the other members, where he will find framed portraits of the Führer and George Lincoln Rockwell, and swastika flags, on the walls. The secret ‘Führer’ of the movement shall doff his anarchist garb to reveal a homemade brownshirt uniform. He will then unveil a fantastic plan to take over Australia and build death camps, run by blonde, Nordic women in ‘Ilse the She-Wolf of the SS’ uniforms, and fiendish doctor-sadists like Mengele.

Regardless of whether or not one believes in a National Socialist gassing of eight million people, the interesting thing is that the communists have a long backlog of atrocities of their own to atone for – and they do not apologise for them. While many nationalists push a revisionist line, the communists do not. Confront a communist with the nine million Russians killed by Lenin and Trotsky – during the Red Terror, and the mass famine deliberately triggered by the Bolsheviks to pacify the Russian population – and he will shrug and regurgitate the old Leninist cliché that ‘One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs’. Then there is Mao, whose Great Leap Forward killed 18 to 34 million people (depending on whose figures you believe); Pol Pot; and lesser-known figures like the Ethiopian communist Mengistu Haile Mariam. Even Castro, who is fondly regarded by Australian communist groups, killed thousands after his takeover of Cuba.

My point is that, given communism’s track record, people ought to hold communism’s past atrocities against Australian communist groups like Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative and others. How do we know that these groups do not have a secret plan to collectivise Australian agriculture, and starve millions of Australians to death? Will Australian soldiers be rounded up, Khmer-Rouge style, bound with nylon ropes and have their necks broken with blows from pick handles? (Or perhaps they will be given the softer, North Vietnamese communist version: internment in a ‘re-education’ camp until they get their thinking straightened out?). And what of the capitalist class? Will the Packer family be liquidated on the spot, or will they be forced to work with their hands (for the first time in their lives) in the fields of our newly-collectivised farms, while communist overseers, wearing black pyjamas and carrying Kalashnikovs, jeer at them and curse them? (‘No rice for you today, Mr Packer! Work harder!’).

4. The reality

I am, of course, being facetious here. The Australian communists do not have the demonic drive of a Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Pol Pot, Mengistu: they do not have what it takes to bring about a revolution.

Even more important is the fact that no communist revolution has come about by the revolt of the working classes against the capitalists. All the communists in history have won power as a result of war. Lenin won power only after Russia’s catastrophic defeat, at the hands of Germany, in WWI; the Bolsheviks emerged from the ashes of the Russian Civil War as the most powerful and unified force, and took advantage of the subsequent chaos to impose a dictatorship. Likewise, every subsequent revolutionary owes their successes, not to mobilising the working classes, but from defeating their opponents on the battlefield. (One exception is Mengistu: but Mengistu came to power through a military coup, and was able to used soldiers to liquidate any bourgeois-liberal, monarchist or rival communist opponents).

The truth is that the old-school communist revolutionaries had a unique genius, lacking in today’s Western communist parties, for exploiting the political opportunities that arose as a result of chaos. That chaos is not present today, and it is unlikely that today’s communists would know how to harness it to their advantage.

And so today’s Australian communists, who are schooled in the theory, but not practice, of communism, naively believe that power will be theirs for the taking, once the inevitable downfall of capitalism gets going. Marxist theory proves, scientifically, that the capitalist mode of production will go the way of feudalism – into the dustbin of history. All the communists have to do is agitate at the universities and TAFEs (by selling the Green Left Weekly and trying to encourage students to attend pro-Chavez rallies), march at trade union anti-Work Choices rallies, and run in elections. Then revolution will come about. Australia will turn into Cuba, except it will be a Cuba where people of all sexual orientations will be free to do their thing…

In truth, the only communists to hold true to historical communist practice are a few isolated groups around the world who have taken up the path of armed struggle. The Maoists in Nepal, who adhere to a Pol-Potist ideology and are engaged in an off-again, on-again war against the Nepalese State, are classic, old school communists. Given the disarray of the Nepalese politics, it is not inconceivable that the Maoist revolution could succeed, and a handful of revolutionaries could end up imposing their will on a reluctant, and hostile Nepalese population. Naturally, however, such conditions are not likely to replicate themselves in Australia.

5. What to do

Unfortunately, much confusion exists among nationalists as to who our enemies are. Nationalists tend to speak of ‘the Left’, and lump together all the disparate factions of the Left into a single group: ‘lefties’, ‘crusties’ and the like. But the fact of the matter is that the communists, and the anarchists, for instance, are unaware that we nationalists exist – at present. The only faction of the Left who are aware of us, and consider us to be a serious threat, are the Antifa, the militant anti-racists – who strive selflessly to avert a second Holocaust by posting photographs, names, addresses, telephone numbers, etc., of nationalist activists on the Internet.

It should be mentioned that it is doubtful that the Antifa are really ‘Left’ at all. Although they adopt a Trotskyist rhetoric (‘smashing fascism’ is a Trotskyist phrase), they do not seem to support communism or anarchism – nor even the watered-down social democracy of the Labor Party. No, they believe in racial harmony and the brotherhood of man – and the use of violence to enforce it. They believe in the same pan-racialist, multi-racialist ideology as the Labor Party, or the Democrats, or the Greens – but, in their case, they make that ideology political. Schmitt defines the ‘political’ as any conflict that is raised to the level of war between two or more parties: and certainly, the Antifa are political by Schmitt’s definition. But they are not Left, and, in Australia, they are not do not possess the numbers, the discipline and the organisation of the European Antifa. (According to postings on Stormfront, European nationalist activists are disappointed by the calibre of the Australian Antifa. Indeed, the Antifa in the Netherlands, for instance, is so powerful that it controls neighbourhoods, and hides illegal immigrants who are being sought by the police there). Here, their warfare is psychological. They could not summon up the numbers needed to ‘smash fascists’ at an APEC or anti-Work Choices rally; the communists, however, can.

The point is, though, the communists are not aware of us. They do not acknowledge we exist, and to them, we are an irrelevancy. After all, history is inevitably progressing towards communism: does not the hostility of the Australian electorate towards Work Choices show this? We nationalists do not fit into the grand scheme of things. To the communists, nationalists are ‘Nazis’, and ‘Nazism’ was a tool of the German capitalist classes, who sought to lure the German working-classes away from communism. The capitalist class of Australia, however, is not, at the moment using ‘Nazism’ and ‘Fascism’ to trick the Australian working-classes; it is using the Australian Labor Party. Fortunately for communism, the Australian proletariat will eventually wake up to the Labor Party. The upshot is that communists and other like-minded progressives need not pay any heed, for the time being, to the ‘Neo-Nazis’ of New Right and other nationalist groups.

Were they to notice us, however, their reaction would be along the lines of: the ‘Neo-Nazis’ of New Right, National-Anarchism and other nationalist groups are in the pay of the Australian capitalist class and possibly the federal government itself. These ‘Neo-Nazis’ are trying to lure the Australian working-classes away from their salvation, communism. Really, all capitalism is ‘fascist, racist, imperialist’ – ‘Neo-Nazism’ is capitalism with the mask torn off. The solution? ‘Smash fascism’, use violence, use any means necessary…

The communists can be expected to say many things along these lines, and no doubt they will end up alienating potential members (e.g., left-leaning university students) with their hyperbole and bellicose rhetoric in attacking us; they will also, inadvertently, generate more publicity for us than we could manage to achieve ourselves. It is also possible that, by doing so, they will succeed in making us more attractive to the politically uneducated (that is, not indoctrinated with Trotskyism) university student.

I will, at this point, digress, and bring up the subject of Hugo Chavez, and in particular, one of the techniques he uses to get attention for his ideas. Recently, Chavez announced that he plans to bring his ‘Bolivarist revolution’ to Venezuelan high schools, and alter the content of high school text books along ‘Bolivarist’ lines, filling them up with the crapulous mumbo-jumbo of communist and other progressive ideologues (including the Colombian guerrilla groups). The reaction to Chavez’ announcement was entirely typical. Liberal democrats, in Venezuela and the United States, reacted with outrage, and demanded that Chavez adhere to the norms of free speech and liberal democracy. Chavez’ supporters (and he has many) reacted with enthusiasm.

Nowhere did anyone declare that Chavez’ policy was well-intentioned, but needed to be examined more closely, etc., etc., in the way that the Labor Party, for instance, reacts to any of John Howard’s policy announcements. No: Chavez polarises people, he splits them down the middle. You either love him or hate him. But this is precisely what Chavez wants. He wants the liberal democrats, the Bushophiles inside and outside Venezuela, to hate him; and he has, over many years, become awfully good at it. He instinctively knows what to do in order to get his opponents frothing at the mouth, hurling invective and hyperbole, making themselves look foolish, and piquing the interest of the otherwise apathetic masses. And he has done this, not once, but many times; he is, to a certain extent, a one-trick pony, pulling off the same stunt again and again. His opponents have such little regard for him that they do not see how they are being manipulated by the master. The solution to Chavezism? Incorporate him into the system, and treat him with respect: hold press conferences with him and George Bush, where the latter defers to him as respectfully as he would to Ehmud Olmert or Ariel Sharon.

One can see the parallels with Australian nationalism: all the communists at APEC had to do, for instance, was to invite the National-Anarchists up on stage and ask them to speak; the audience would have listened respectfully, and applauded – just as they did with the indigenous Australian woman at the start, and the North American conscientious objector – and National-Anarchism would have been neutered.

This will never happen. The communists can be expected to react with hostility and hyperbole, every time; and the same reaction can be provoked every time. In that sense, they are as predictable as machines.. The communist policy is always the same: no platform for fascists! No free speech for Nazi scum!

So how do we provoke them? How do we get their attention? Well, we only need to repeat APEC a thousand times over – APEC with more and more permutations. But it is essential to keep up the ‘Left’ talk, the ‘Left’ symbolism, the ‘Left’ imagery, the ‘Left’ sloganeering’, and the ‘Left’ methods of mass organisation, mass activism, extra-parliamentarism, and anarchistic, non-hierarchical, decentralised organisation. Such an approach will ensure that the communists will work themselves up into a state of hysteria: we are using their symbols, their ideas, to lure the naïve young away from progressive, multiracial, tolerant communism and towards ‘Neo-Nazism’ and capitalism. They will be unable to help themselves, and unable to see that the best means of ‘smashing’ us would be to give us equal rights and equal time at their rallies, and possibly in their publications as well.

The Australian communist groups appear to recruit using what I call ‘chaff-cutter’ methods. They attract literally hundreds of young Australians, mainly students. But many of the prospective new members are naïve about the communism of a Socialist Alliance or Socialist Alternative: they believe that these organisations are liberal, like the mainstream political parties – that they encourage free thought and free debate. But the prospective member learns, very quickly, that Lenin and Trotsky had, in advance, worked out the answer to every political problem in existence – and that he had better recognise this or ship out. Subtle, and then not so subtle, peer pressure is used to bring a recalcitrant into line. Eventually, the prospective member gets fed up and ceases his association. He is a liberal and an individualist – both traits fostered by our liberal democratic society – and, at the same time, like many idealistic young people, wants to do something good and progressive. But the inflexibility which lies at the heart of any Marxist-Leninist party, and which is communism’s greatest strength (and greatest weakness) repels him.

The scenario is not all bad, however, for the communist group: a small minority of the prospective recruits will stay on and the communist group is left with a small hard-core. Communism is, above all, a ruthless ideology, which often turns on its own (there is no need to cite the many examples from history). But their recruiting and indoctrination policies – more reminiscent of a cult than anything else – get results. The wheat is separated from the chaff.

Here, though, we nationalists can step in – and pick up the chaff. And, it has to be said, we are not going to expand as a movement by recruiting the same old faces from Stormfront Down Under – the same old white nationalists and Australian bush patriots who have been hanging around the nationalist scene for years and years. No, we are only going to expand by recruiting people who have a fresh perspective which comes from being on the outside of the existing nationalistic scene.

In this connection, it is advisable that nationalists go out and attend as many political meetings as possible: lectures on Lenin, Trotsky, Chavez, etc., delivered by Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative, Resistance. But not only political meetings of the left; nationalists should attend also meetings of the mainstream parties like, here in Australia, the Liberal party, the Greens, ect.
The best course of action is to go there, as normal, intelligent people, and ask questions about their beliefs, and try and engage them in the debate they are so averse to. This is a New Right Australia strategy.

6. Mistakes made

Recently, a nationalist friend of mine – a man with a long and distinguished career in Australian nationalist activism – showed me a nationalist publication which he had helped edit and publish. It was a handsome production. But, while looking through it, I found a caricature of an African immigrant – a giant African immigrant, stalking the streets of some Australian city, with a knife in his hand, and, needless to say, up to no good. I chided my friend for inserting such a crude caricature with overtones of old-fashioned racism: it could have come straight off Tom Metzger’s website. My friend joked, half-heartedly, that at least the cartoonist didn’t draw blood dripping from the African’s mouth. I rested my case.

On the back of the publication there was a reproduction of a beautiful painting, done one hundred years ago, of the inauguration of the first Australian federal parliament. Looking at the picture, I found myself confused as to who the intended target audience of the magazine was: monarchists? Old Australian types who voted for Menzies in 1949? Often this Australian nationalism is an emotional nationalism, with no intellectual foundations, no ideology. Ask them to define what is ‘Australian’, and they will have no answer.

Even if one is not a republican, one will find such imagery incongruous. Granted, governor-generals are part of Australia’s past: but the emphasis is on the word past. Any young person (and the only people who could revel in such patriotic Australian imagery must be very old indeed – at death’s door if they voted for Menzies, anyhow) would find such a nationalist publication off-putting – as dull as a school trip to a museum of Australian history.

As for the cartoon of the African – and there were similar crude caricatures throughout the magazine – there are other, more tasteful ways to address the question of immigration. Link immigration to globalism, for one; or point out how immigration drains Australia’s resources (e.g., water resources) and is bad for the environment… No need to use pictures of blonde, nordic women cuddling blonde, nordic babies, either.

Oddly enough, I agreed with around 90% of the publication’s content: the difference between their approach, and New Right’s, was one of emphasis, and of imagery. Thinking it over, I saw that the whole problem could be summed up in the form of a parable.

Suppose that Henry Lawson, or Jack Lang, or some other Australian ‘bush’ socialist could be transported in time to 2007. We nationalists would explain to him that the old Australian Labor Party, which championed white working man’s racialist socialism, has ceased to exist; in its place is a party of namby-pamby multi-cultism. The union movement, too, is no longer interested in fighting immigration: all it wants is the abolition of Work Choices and federal and state Labor government. Indeed, the union movement has lost the political power it once had – only 17% of the Australian workforce is unionised. The way forward for socialism – for a system where labour dominates capital, and not the other way around – is to restructure the entire political and economic system. That means changing liberal democracy. But that goal, in turn, can only be achieved by building up a mass movement on the streets, which will bring about radical change through mass pressure. To build a mass movement, we need to bypass the unions and the political parties, and start taking our message – of racialism and socialism – directly to the masses. What’s more, we need to talk the language of today – not the language of 100 years ago.

Unfortunately, our way is, for the moment, blocked – by communists, who, like parasites, attach themselves to every progressive cause, whether it be anti-globalisation or the trade union struggle for better wages and conditions. They are unpopular, in the minority, and they adhere to a theory which has been falsified by history. But they are convinced that their cause is the only moral one, and every political ideology contradictory to their own (including ours) is evil and immoral, and should be destroyed, by violence if necessary. Their bark is worse than their bite, but they are still numerous enough, and hostile enough, to prevent nationalists from reaching the masses and becoming a true, mass political force. And so one of the prime necessities of our movement is to unblock the communist blockage…

And that is what I would tell Henry Lawson.

In relation to this, it should be asked: why, if the communists have been going at it for so long, are they so unsuccessful? The communists enjoy all kinds of advantages that we nationalists do not: the media coverage they receive is generally favourable (e.g., see the media coverage of the APEC demonstrators); they can display their names and faces with impunity (at least, they will not be treated as harshly as a so-called ‘Neo-Nazi’ nationalist); they have numbers, nice newspapers, propaganda fliers, badges, flags, banners... And they can attend any demonstration for any cause whatsoever – anti-globalisation, anti-WorkChoices, anti-war – without being set upon by the other demonstrators. And, furthermore, most of Australia seems to support their positions on, for instance, the war in Iraq, or WorkChoices (or perhaps it is the case that the communists attach themselves to popular causes). And yet, they have made little to no headway in all the years they have been here: the communist revolution is further away than ever, and they cannot get one MP elected to state or federal parliament...

The answer, or the beginning of an answer, came to me when I was leafing through old issues of the Australasian Spartacist newspaper from the 1970s. This is a long-running Trotskyist-communist newspaper, which began in 1973 and which is still running today. More or less, it makes a cult, a fetishistic cult (like the Nutzi-cult of Hitler), out of Trotsky and Lenin: every political event – from the war in Iraq, to a trade union dispute in Sydney, to a scuffle between two rival communist groups holding stalls at a university – is interpreted from the perspective of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism. The frightening thing is that there is no difference between the writing style, and ideas, of the 1970s issues written thirty years ago, and the issues written today. Which raises the possibility that the same person has been writing all the articles for that newspaper all along – and getting nowhere. This obsessiveness, and the refusal to countenance anything other than orthodox Leninist and Trotskyist view of socialism and politics, makes me speculate that the authors of Australasian Spartacist, and other communist publications (like the Green Left Weekly) are literally insane.

And this is why the communists have been failing in Australia for so many decades: they cannot ditch Lenin and Trotsky. It is not that Australians do not want radical socialism; it is that they cannot understand what two dead Russians – who died a long time ago – have to do with a political struggle in Australia today. (The same could be asked of many nationalists today: why is Hitler, for instance, so important?).

7. Conclusion: The strategy of tension

Something else that leapt out of those old issues of Australasian Spartacist was an account of the famous ‘Battle of Lewisham’ in Britain in 1977, which was an epic confrontation between the British National Front and hundreds of communist protestors in South-East London. The clash was violent, leading to hospitalisations, and the police use of tear gas, riot shields, etc., against the protestors. Reading the venomous account of events from the communist perspective, I was reminded of the (far smaller, by comparison) Battle of APEC. Economic, and to a great extent, social, circumstances in Britain in 1977 differed from those of Australia in 2007: but otherwise, nothing has changed. The National Front in the 1970s was a mass-movement with a popular base, and left-leaning; it won a certain amount of support from the British working-classes, effectively challenging the communists and socialists in what the latter two regarded as their own domain. The communist response was to ‘crush fascism’. Hence, the ensuing confrontation at Lewisham.

Perhaps (depending on whose account you believe) some members or supporters of the National Front, who were still bourgeois in outlook, and still held to liberal democratic ideas, found the idea of a political confrontation with communists off-putting; that is, they did not want to suffer verbal abuse from communists, and have bricks thrown at them, and be assaulted. Which is a natural enough reaction. But they did not realise, and many nationalists in Australia today do not realise, the political value of these confrontations. Suppose that 500 or a 1000 nationalists from all around Australia joined up to march through Sydney or Melbourne. The police would be out in force, as would the media; and so would the communists. The spectacle would ensure more media coverage for nationalism than we could generate by ourselves (through pamphleteering, etc., or through websites); and, at the same time, events would radicalise our membership and draw them closer to one another. And the communists would do all of this for us for free. If we are to look at it in economic terms, the return from a demonstration pays even more than the investment in pamphlets and websites.

And all of this can be done tomorrow. Some liberal media commentators will argue that events like the Battle of Lewisham came about because of the high inflation and high unemployment in Britain in the seventies; which is untrue. All one needs is a large body of nationalists who are prepared to go out and demonstrate: then the communists will show up, and behave like they have behaved for the past ninety years. Like monkeys in a zoo cage, they will jump up and down, shriek and spit. And the average Australian will wonder what all the fuss is about, and some of them may even become interested in nationalism as a result.

The essential thing is this: all demonstrations have to be well-organised, for a worthy cause, and above all, disciplined!

We at New Right do not endorse violence. One can, however, use the metaphor of war: that is, any confrontation with communists is a battle in a political war. A good many nationalists in Australia and elsewhere are in political fairy-land; they think they can form a nice little bourgeois liberal democratic party, and be treated with the same respect, and enjoy the same rights, as all the other liberal democratic parties. But, once their parties get up and going, they are due for a shock. The communists will use non-liberal democratic means to deny them their rights. And, possibly, a more effective Antifa will spring up and oppose them with the same means.

Christian Blocher’s Swiss People’s Party (SVP) recently held a rally which was set upon by the Black Bloc of Left-wing Chaotics (an Antifa Black Bloc), who caused an enormous amount of property damage and disruption. The group was arrested, and the rally went ahead. Christian Blocher’s party posted a triumphant account of events at http://www.svp-udc.ch/internet-tv.html . But Australian nationalists cannot expect to get off as lightly. Which is why we must take the war (again speaking metaphorically) to the enemy.

And, while I am not a militarist, I must state my belief that this kind of confrontation is good: it cleanses, it purifies, it bonds the ‘soldiers’ – who are made up of disparate social groups who may have otherwise never have come into contact with one another – together. And, psychologically, to go on the attack is much better than going on the defence: which is the posture many nationalists take now, confining their ‘activism’ to the Internet and not trying to get their ideas out to the Australian community. Which is why we at New Right Australia/New Zealand endorse a strategy of tension. And we endorse direct political confrontation, with the goal of smashing political dogmas, and forming a real social alternative.

*Welf Herfurth is a political activist who lives in Sydney / Australia. He was born and raised in Germany. He can be contacted on herfurth@iinet.net.au

The Liberal Double-Talk & its Lexical and Legal Consequences

by Tomislav (Tom) Sunic


Language is a potent weapon for legitimizing any political system. In many instances the language in the liberal West is reminiscent of the communist language of the old Soviet Union, although liberal media and politicians use words and phrases that are less abrasive and less value loaded than words used by the old communist officials and their state-run media. In Western academe, media, and public places, a level of communication has been reached which avoids confrontational discourse and which resorts to words devoid of substantive meaning. Generally speaking, the liberal system shuns negative hyperbolas and skirts around heavy-headed qualifiers that the state-run media of the Soviet Union once used in fostering its brand of conformity and its version of political correctness. By contrast, the media in the liberal system, very much in line with its ideology of historical optimism and progress, are enamored with the overkill of morally uplifting adjectives and adverbs, often displaying words and expressions such as "free speech," "human rights," "tolerance," and "diversity." There is a wide spread assumption among modern citizens of the West that the concepts behind these flowery words must be taken as something self-evident.

There appears to be a contradiction. If free speech is something "self- evident" in liberal democracies, then the word "self-evidence" does not need to be repeated all the time; it can be uttered only once, or twice at the most. The very adjective "self-evident," so frequent in the parlance of liberal politicians may in fact hide some uncertainties and even some self-doubt on the part of those who employ it. With constant hammering of these words and expressions, particularly words such as "human rights," and "tolerance", the liberal system may be hiding something; hiding, probably, the absence of genuine free speech. To illustrate this point more clearly it may be advisable for an average citizen living in the liberal system to look at the examples of the communist rhetoric which was once saturated with similar freedom-loving terms while, in reality, there was little of freedom and even less free-speech.

Verbal Mendacity

The postmodern liberal discourse has its own arsenal of words that one can dub with the adjective "Orwellian", or better yet "double-talk", or simply call it verbal mendacity. The French use the word "wooden language" (la langue de bois) and the German "cement" or "concrete" language (Betonsprache) for depicting an arcane bureaucratic and academic lingo that never reflects political reality and whose main purpose is to lead masses to flawed conceptualisation of political reality. Modern authors, however, tend to avoid the pejorative term "liberal double-talk,” preferring instead the arcane label of "the non-cognitive language which is used for manipulative or predictive analyses." (1) Despite its softer and non abrasive version, liberal double-talk, very similar to the communist "wooden language," has a very poor conceptual universe. Similar to the communist vernacular, it is marked by pathos and attempts to avoid the concrete. On the one hand, it tends to be aggressive and judgemental towards its critics yet, on the other, it is full of eulogies, especially regarding its multiracial experiments. It resorts to metaphors which are seldom based on real historical analogies and are often taken out of historical context, notably when depicting its opponents with generic “shut-up” words such as "racists", "anti-Semites", or "fascists".

The choice of grammatical embellishers is consistent with the all-prevailing, liberal free market which, as a rule, must employ superlative adjectives for the free commerce of its goods and services. Ironically, there was some advantage of living under the communist linguistic umbrella. Behind the communist semiotics in Eastern Europe, there always loomed popular doubt which greatly helped ordinary citizens to decipher the political lie, and distinguish between friend and foe. The communist meta-language could best be described as a reflection of a make-belief system in which citizens never really believed and of which everybody, including communist party dignitaries, made fun of in private. Eventually, verbal mendacity spelled the death of communism both in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.

By contrast, in the liberal system, politicians and scholars, let alone the masses, still believe in every written word of the democratic discourse. (2) There seem to be far less heretics, or for that matter dissidents who dare critically examine the syntax and semantics of the liberal double-talk. Official communication in the West perfectly matches the rule of law and can, therefore, rarely trigger a violent or a negative response among citizens. Surely, the liberal system allows mass protests and public demonstrations; it allows its critics to openly voice their disapproval of some flawed foreign policy decision. Different political and infra-political groups, hostile to the liberal system, often attempt to publicly drum-up public support on behalf or against some issue - be it against American military involvement in the Middle East, or against the fraudulent behavior of a local political representative. But, as an unwritten rule, seldom can one see rallies or mass demonstrations in Australia, America, or in Europe that would challenge the substance of parliamentary democracy and liberalism, let alone discard the ceremonial language of the liberal ruling class. Staging open protests with banners "Down with liberal democracy!, or "Parliamentary democracy sucks"!, would hardly be tolerated by the system. These verbal icons represent a “no entry zone” in liberalism.

The shining examples of the double-talk in liberalism are expressions such as "political correctness", "hate speech," "diversity," "market democracy," "ethnic sensitivity training" among many, many others. It is often forgotten, though, that the coinage of these expressions is relatively recent and that their etymology remains of dubious origin. These expressions appeared in the modern liberal dictionary in the late 70s and early 80s and their architects are widely ignored. Seldom has a question been raised as to who had coined those words and given them their actual meaning. What strikes the eyes is the abstract nature of these expressions. The expression "political correctness" first appeared in the American language and had no explicit political meaning; it was, rather, a fun- related, derogatory expression designed for somebody who was not trendy, such as a person smoking cigarettes or having views considered not to be "in" or "cool." Gradually, and particularly after the fall of communism, the conceptualization of political correctness, acquired a very serious and disciplinary meaning.

Examples of political eulogy and political vilification in liberalism are often couched in sentimentalist vs. animalistic words and syllabi, respectively. When the much vaunted free press in liberalism attempts to glorify some event or some personality that fits into the canons of political rectitude, it will generally use a neutral language with sparse superlatives, with the prime intention not to subvert its readers, such as: "The democratic circles in Ukraine, who have been subject to governmental harassment, are propping up their rank and file to enable them electoral success." Such laudatory statements must be well-hidden behind neutral words. By contrast when attempting to silence critics of the system who challenge the foundation of liberal democracy, the ruling elites and their frequently bankrolled journalists will use more direct words - something in the line of old Soviet stylistics, e.g.: "With their ultranationalist agenda and hate-mongering these rowdy individuals on the street of Sydney or Quebec showed once again their parentage in the monstrosity of the Nazi legacy." Clearly, the goal is to disqualify the opponent by using an all pervasive and hyperreal word "Nazism." "A prominent American conservative author Paul Gottfried writes: "In fact, the European Left, like Canadian and Australian Left, pushes even further the trends adapted from American sources: It insists on criminalizing politically correct speech as an incitement to "fascists excess." (3)


The first conclusion one can draw is that liberalism can better fool the masses than communism. Due to torrents of meaningless idioms, such as "human rights" and "democracy" on the one hand, and "Nazism" and "fascism" on the other, the thought control and intellectual repression in liberalism functions far better. Therefore, in the liberal “soft” system, a motive for a would-be heretic to overthrow the system is virtually excluded. The liberal system is posited on historical finitude simply because there is no longer the communist competitor who could come up with its own real or surreal "freedom narrative." Thus, liberalism gives an impression of being the best system – simply because there are no other competing political narratives on the horizon.

What are the political implications of the liberal double-talk? It must be pointed out that liberal language is the reflection of the overall socio-demographic situation in the West. Over the last twenty years all Western states, including Australia, have undergone profound social and demographic changes; they have become "multicultural" systems. (multicultural being just a euphemism for a"multiracial" state). As a result of growing racial diversity the liberal elites are aware that in order to uphold social consensus and prevent the system from possible balkanization and civil war, new words and new syntax have to be invented. It was to be expected that these new words would soon find their way into modern legislations. More and more countries in the West are adopting laws that criminalize free speech and that make political communication difficult. In fact, liberalism, similar to its communist antecedents, it is an extremely fragile system. It excludes strong political beliefs by calling its critics "radicals," which, as a result, inevitably leads to political conformity and intellectual duplicity. Modern public discourse in the West is teeming with abstract and unclear Soviet-style expressions such as “ethnic sensitivity training”, "affirmative action”, "antifascism", "diversity", and “holocaust studies". In order to disqualify its critics the liberal system is resorting more and more to negative expression such as "anti-Semites", or " "neo-Nazi", etc. This is best observed in Western higher education and the media which, over the last thirty years, have transformed themselves into places of high commissariats of political correctness, having on their board diverse "committees on preventing racial perjuries", "ethnic diversity training programs", and in which foreign racial awareness courses have become mandatory for the faculty staff and employees. No longer are professors required to demonstrate extra skills in their subject matters; instead, they must parade with sentimental and self-deprecatory statements which, as a rule, must denigrate the European cultural heritage.

By constantly resorting to the generic word "Nazism" and by using the prefix "anti", the system actually shows its negative legitimacy. One can conclude that even if all anti-Semites and all fascists were to disappear, most likely the system would invent them by creating and recreating these words. These words have become symbols of absolute evil.

The third point about the liberal discourse that needs to be stressed is its constant recourse to the imagery of hyperreality. By using the referent of "diversity", diverse liberal groups and infra-political tribes prove in fact their sameness, making dispassionate observers easily bored and tired. Nowhere is this sign of verbal hyperreality more visible than in the constant verbal and visual featuring of Jewish Holocaust symbolism which, ironically, is creating the same saturation process among the audience as was once the case with communist victimhood. The rhetoric and imagery of Holocaust no longer function "as a site of annihilation but a medium of dissuasion."(4).

The Legal Trap
 
Other than as a simple part of daily jargon the expression "hate speech" does not exist in any European or American legislation. Once again the distinction needs to be made between the legal field and lexical field, as different penal codes of different Western countries are framed in a far more sophisticated language. For instance, criminal codes in continental Europe have all introduced laws that punish individuals uttering critical remarks against the founding myths of the liberal system. The best example is Germany, a country which often brags itself to be the most eloquent and most democratic Constitution on Earth. This is at least what the German ruling elites say about their judiciary, and which does not depart much from what Stalin himself said about the Soviet Constitution of 1936. The Constitution of Germany is truly superb, yet in order to get the whole idea of freedom of speech in Germany one needs to examine the country's Criminal Code and its numerous agencies that are in charge of its implementation. Thus, Article 5 of the German Constitution (The Basic Law) guarantees "freedom of speech." However, Germany's Criminal Code, Section 130, and Subsection 3, appear to be in stark contradiction to the German Basic Law. Under Section 130, of the German criminal code a German citizen, but also a non-German citizen, may be convicted, if found guilty, of breaching the law of "agitation of the people" (sedition laws). It is a similar case with Austria. It must be emphasized that there is no mention in the Criminal Code of the Federal Republic of Germany of the Holocaust or the Nazi extermination of the Jews. But based on the context of the Criminal Code this Section can arbitrarily be applied when sentencing somebody who belittles or denies National- Socialist crimes or voices critical views of the modern historiography. Moreover a critical examination of the role of the Allies during World War may also bring some ardent historian into legal troubles.

The German language is a highly inflected language as opposed to French and English which are contextual languages and do not allow deliberate tinkering with prefixes or suffixes, or the creation of arbitrary compound words. By contrast, one can always create new words in the German language, a language often awash with a mass of neologisms. Thus, the title of the Article 130 of the German Criminal Code Volksverhetzung is a bizarre neologism and very difficult compound word which is hard to translate into English, and which on top, can be conceptualized in many opposing ways. (Popular taunting, baiting, bullying of the people, public incitement etc..). Its Subsection 3, though is stern and quite explicit and reads in English as follows:

"Whoever publicly or in a meeting approves of, denies or renders harmless an act committed under the rule of National Socialism… shall be punished with imprisonment for not more than five years or a fine."

If by contrast the plight of German civilians after World War II is openly discussed by a German academic or simply by some free spirit, he may run the risk of being accused of trivializing the official assumption of sole German guilt during World War II. Depending on a local legislation of some federal state in Germany an academic, although not belittling National Socialist crimes may, by inversion, fall under suspicion of "downplaying" or "trivializing" Nazi crimes - and may be fined or, worse, land in prison. Any speech or article, for instance, that may be related to events surrounding World War may have a negative anticipatory value in the eyes of the liberal inquisitors, that is to say in the eyes of the all prevailing Agency for the protection of the German Constitution (Verfassungschutz). Someone's words, as in the old Soviet system, can be easily misconstrued and interpreted as an indirect belittlement of crimes committed by National-Socialists.

Germany is a half-sovereign country still legally at war with the USA, and whose Constitution was written under the auspices of the Allies. Yet unlike other countries in the European Union, Germany has something unprecedented. Both on the state and federal levels it has that special government agency in charge of the surveillance of the Constitution. i.e., and whose sole purpose is to keep track of journalists, academics and right-wing politicians and observe the purity of their parlance and prose. The famed "Office for the Protection of the Constitution" ("Verfassungschutz"), as the German legal scholar Josef Schüsselburner writes, "is basically an internal secret service with seventeen branch agencies (one on the level of the federation and sixteen others for each constituent federal state). In the last analysis, this boils down to saying that only the internal secret service is competent to declare a person an internal enemy of the state." (5)

In terms of free speech, contemporary France is not much better. In 1990 a law was passed on the initiative of the socialist deputy Laurent Fabius and the communist deputy Jean-Claude Gayssot. That law made it a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to 40,000 euros, or one year in prison, or both, to contest the truth of any of the "crimes against humanity" with which the German National Socialist leaders were charged by the London Agreement of 1945, and which was drafted for the Nuremberg Trials. (6) Similar to the German Criminal Code Section 130, there is no reference to the Holocaust or Jews in this portion of the French legislation. But at least the wording of the French so-called Fabius-Gayssot law is more explicit than the fluid German word "Volksverhetzung." It clearly states that any Neo-Nazi activity having as a result the belittling of Nazi crimes is a criminal offence. With France and German, being the main pillars of the European Union these laws have already given extraordinary power to local judges of EU member countries when pronouncing verdicts against anti-liberal heretics.
For fear of being called confrontational or racist, or an anti-Semite, a European politician or academic is more and more forced to exercise self-censorship. The role of intellectual elites in Europe has never been a shining one. However, with the passage of these "hate laws" into the European legislations, the cultural and academic ambiance in Europe has become sterile. Aside from a few individuals, European academics and journalists, let alone politicians, must be the masters of self-censorship and self-delusion, as well as great impresarios of their own postmodern mimicry. As seen in the case of the former communist apparatchiks in Eastern Europe, they are likely to discard their ideas as soon as these cease to be trendy, or when another political double-talk becomes fashionable.

The modern politically-correct language, or liberal double-talk, is often used for separating the ignorant grass-roots masses from the upper level classes; it is the superb path to cultural and social ascension. The censorial intellectual climate in the Western media, so similar to the old Soviet propaganda, bears witness that liberal elites, at the beginning of the third millennium, are increasingly worried about the future identity of the countries in which they rule. For sure, the liberal system doesn’t yet need truncheons or police force in order to enforce its truth. It can remove rebels, heretics, or simply academics, by using smear campaigns, or accusing them of "guilt by association," and by removing them from important places of decision - be it in academia, the political arena, or the media. Once the spirit of the age changes, the high priests of this new postmodern inquisition will likely be the first to dump their current truths and replace them with other voguish "self-evident" truths. This was the case with the communist ruling class, which after the break down of communism quickly recycled itself into fervent apostles of liberalism. This will again be the case with modern liberal elites, who will not hesitate to turn into rabid racists and anti-Semites, as soon as new "self evident" truths appear on the horizon.


DR. TOMISLAV SUNIC
……………………….

This article is based on Dr. Sunic's speech at the Sydney Forum, Sydney, Australia, August 25, 2007. Dr.Tom Sunic is a former US professor in political science and author. His latest book is: Homo americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age (2007).
http://www.amazon.com/Homo-americanus-Child-Postmodern-Age/dp/1419659847

Notes:
1. A. James Gregor, Metascience and Politics (1971 London: Transaction, 2004), p.318.

2. Alan Charles Kors, "Thought Reform: The Orwellian Implications of Today's College Orientation," in Reasononline, (March 2000). See the link: http://reason.com/0003/fe.ak.thought.shtml

3. Paul Gottfried, The Strange Death of Marxism (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2005), p.13.

4. Jean Baudrillard, The Evil Demons of Images (University of Sydney: The Power Inst. of Fine Arts, 1988), p.24.

5. Josef Schüsslburner, Demokratie-Sonderweg Bundesrepublik (Lindenblatt Media Verlag. Künzell, 2004), p. p.233

6. See Journal officiel de la République française, 14 juillet 1990 page 8333loi n° 90-615.

THE BATTLE OF APEC

by Peter Middleton

1. Introduction: how to form your own Black Block

For some time now, we had been discussing here at the New Right blog the Freie Nationalisten, the importance of an anti-capitalist, anti-globalist, and above all, ‘social’ ideology. We decided, at the APEC summit at Sydney on the 8th of September, to put words into action. All the planning was done by word of mouth – either by phone or by face to face contact. Because of the lack of the advertisement on the Internet, neither the police nor the left-wing demonstrators at APEC were prepared for our arrival. We insisted on an all black, anarchist dress code, and the use of baseball caps, sunglasses, and masks – either bandannas or half-face masks – like the Black Bloc at Seattle in 1999. Why? We all knew, from bitter experience, that our enemies at the demonstration would use photographs and film – either their own, or the mainstream media’s – to find out who we were. The next step would be to find out addresses, phone numbers, places of employment, etc., and then make threatening phone calls to ourselves and family members, send threatening mail, and do their best to get us fired. The Black Block look, to our minds, seemed to be perfect for protecting our identities. (Indeed, mainstream anarchist literature always claimed that anarchists adopted that look to protect their identities from the State).

As well as that, the outfits, I have to say, looked menacing. They also made us look anonymous – they erased our individuality, and in a liberal society, that is a very frightening thing in itself. Finally, there was a strength in uniformity, which is why armies make all their soldiers dress the same…

Added to all this was the benefit of camouflage, pure and simple. We predicted (and we were wrong, as it turned out) that there would be a large ‘Black Bloc’ of mainstream anarchists in attendance – in particular, two groups, Mutiny and AC/DC. The handful of individual anarchists who were there at the demonstration were mistaken for us throughout the day, much to their chagrin.

The banners we designed ourselves. They contained a positive message: ‘Globalisation in Genocide’, ‘Australia free nation – or sheep station’ and ‘Power to the people – not political parties'– nothing what the traditional left would expect from us so called ‘Right- Wingers’. They were also the product of our own hard work, with members on their hands and knees working on the stencils of one banner the days before. (Six of the bandannas were sewn by a female member of our group). All the money came from our pockets: we did not receive any donations from any political party or any trade union. In general, we pushed ourselves hard, physically and mentally, in the weeks before the demo: what you get is what you invest.

2. The start of the demo

The march was scheduled to start at around 10 o'clock. We had collected all of our number - around 30 to 35 people - and walked through the Sydney CBD to the rally assembly area. We passed plenty of Socialist Alliance members, handing out propaganda and newspapers, on the way. I have to admit that, at this point, I was feeling quite cocky - a little nervous, but sure that our march would proceed peacefully, with minimal interference from the police and the communist and anarchist demonstrators. We were told, by our demo co-ordinators, that the police would see our 'Black Bloc' uniforms and at first think that we were a mainstream 'Black Bloc' anarchist group. Because the police would have briefed, beforehand, that 'Black Bloc' anarchists were one of the groups of trouble-makers at anti-globalisation demonstrations - that is, one of the groups who smashed up Starbucks windows - they would surround us, and stay very close to us, as soon as they saw us. This turned out to be the case. We arrived in the assembly area, in the midst of many other demonstrators and media, and began 'suiting up', putting on our bandannas, hoodies and sunglasses. Straight away, the police began looking at us in a hostile manner: one policeman even sneered, 'People who aren't cowards don't hide their faces'. He then went on to announce, to all the media photographers and cameramen (and possibly a few police photographers in the vicinity), 'Take photos of all these guys - these are the ones we'll arrest when the trouble starts'. Obviously, the police, at this point, believed we were violent anarchist demonstrators.

The media began closing in, pointing cameras at our (covered) faces, and firing off questions. Now, anyone under such circumstances normally feels flattered that the media are paying attention: that's human psychology. The next step is to go and shoot one's mouth off, in the hope that a soundbite will end up on the six o'clock news, where all of one's friends and relatives can see it... After all we were at the demo to represent an idea and not our personality. To paraphrase Descartes: it is not a case of 'I think, therefore I am', but 'I am on the six o'clock news tonight, therefore I am'.

But, for this demonstration, we enforced a strict 'no comment' policy. That is, we were told to say 'No comment' to all questions; and, if the media persisted, we would tell them that all the answers could be found at the New Right websites and pass them a brochure. Our demo co-ordinators upheld this rule most ruthlessly, and reprimanded any of our number who violated it.

The result was that our brochures started circulating in the crowd early. At first, we were taken by the other demonstrators to be mainstream anarchist Black Bloc; one lone Black Bloc demonstrator, waving a black flag, and not part of our group, at first came over and tried to join us. But, after the brochures were handed out, one of the communists there obtained and decided, rather slowly, that we were FRN - Fascist/Racist/Nazi. One young woman walked over, pointed to us, and chanted, 'Racist, racist, these guys are racist' and walked off. That was the first shot fired by the communists - a weak and ineffectual one, perhaps, but the first.

A round of applause went up when the trade unions marched down the road - and by trade unions, I mean the CFMEU and others. Then came the communist ‘red bloc’, with their impressive forest of red flags mounted on high poles (all what was missing was the swastika and one could have thought it was a Nazi parade, just not an organised one). I was quite taken with these flags: as a visual effect, they have the effect multiplying the number of demonstrators. I wondered, though, what the communists would do with them - the police had specified that flagpoles of a certain length (1 metre) could not be carried into a demonstration site, as they could be used as weapons.

By this point, we had attracted the full attention of the communist demonstrators. One thin, impudent little man came up mouthing obscenities, in a jeering way - obscenities of a sexual nature, specifying what he would like to do us. Another man, with spiky blonde hair, came up and asked us if we were the New Right Australia/New Zealand, and if we intended to stay dressed like the Black Block all day. When we told him yes, he shook his head, laughed and said, 'Good luck'. (I was told later, that at the end of the day, he came up and congratulated us for sticking it out). By this point, I knew that we had walked into the lion’s den: we were outnumbered, by an opponent, who would not let us march unmolested.

We were told, by our demo co-ordinators, to get onto the road and unfurl the banners. We had been given a pep talk beforehand to stay disciplined, not respond to provocation and to keep the demonstration peaceful, at all costs. The moment the police saw any sign of violence, they would throw us into a mobile holding cell, and at the least, shut down the demonstration. Given the impending communist assault, however, that discipline may have been difficult for us to maintain. It would have been easy for a communist to provoke a scuffle, which would, in turn, lead to us being thrown into the clink. We were being forced to play by the Marquess of Queensbury rules, while they were not.

The precariousness of our situation dawned on all the members of the group. By this point, we knew that arrest by the police, or a beating at the hands of the communists, was a real possibility. The natural human reaction to that is fear. We were starting to feel rather nervous by then. As we crossed from the footpath into the street where the march was to take place, I reached over and clasped the hand of one of the others (who, exactly, I can't remember, as all of us were masked, and almost indistinguishable); I said to him, 'This is it, brother: you stand by me and I'll stand by you'.

We crossed from the gutter to the street and unfurled the banner, taking up our positions. The large banner was rolled out at the front, the other two, smaller banners on the left and right flanks. Unknown to us, the communists had appointed their own informal ‘march security’ stewards – old men wearing reflector vest jackets with ‘security’ written on the back. One approached us straight away, and told that we as the Black Blocks weren’t allowed to march with masks, or start any violence. He went away, and when he returned, told us we had no right to be there, that we would be forbidden from marching. (He told another communist that we were affiliated with the ‘racist, fascist’ Internet forum Stormfront). A tall, intimidating communist walked up to the front of the banner and informed us coldly: ‘You no be here, man – you be gone’, and that we were not allowed to march.

It dawned on me that the communist groups had assumed ownership of the entire anti-APEC/anti-Bush demonstration: they were, in effect, masters of the ‘Stop Bush’ coalition. All the other community groups were there at the communists’ sufferance. That is, indigenous rights groups, environmentalists, trade unionists, liberal Christians and pacifists, ordinary mums, dads and concerned citizens, were only allowed to be present because the communists allowed them to be there. And, clearly, we so-called ‘Fascist racist Neo-Nazis’ were not. They would use verbal intimidation to get rid of us, and take pictures of us – plenty of them had their cameras there. They shoved, and spat, especially at the smaller members of our group, but stopped short of a real physical assault: after all, plenty of CCTV cameras were rolling, and the police were ever-present. And, of course, we were an unknown quantity. Our masks, our black clothes, made us look menacing. We were under strict orders from our co-ordinators not to respond to violence, or verbal provocation; but the communists didn’t know that.

So what were the police doing? It took them a while to realise that we were not mainstream ‘Black Bloc’, and that we were not with the communists. They concluded, then, that we were ‘Far Right’. After that, they said the same thing they always say in these ‘Far Right’ versus ‘Far Left’ situations: they told us that they could not guarantee our physical safety, so we had to leave. Our co-ordinators told the police, in turn, that we were citizens of Australia and thereby constitutionally guaranteed the right to march like anyone else at the demo. We only wanted a peaceful march, and had briefed all members not to respond to violent provocation. That did the trick: the police assented to our presence there.

The police then insisted that it was a regulation – probably a ‘special power’, especially introduced for the APEC summit – that no-one could march masked. Again the co-ordinators told the police that we had families, jobs, and that the Left would do their best to take as many photos of us as possible and work out who were. So we needed the masks to hide our identities to prevent negative repercussions in our private lives. After looking at all the cameras around our group, the media’s cameras in particular, the police officer gave his permission but warned us again that he would pull us out at the first sign of violence.

Surprisingly enough, the police were not the enemy here – they were a neutral third party. They, in all probability, thought little of both us and the communists. Their main concern was to prevent any violence and any damage to property. At the time when we left, the senior police officer present thanked us for our co-operation, our discipline and that we were not giving in on any provocations hurled at us. (One woman communist approached the police claiming, falsely, that we had hit her. The police officer informed her dryly that he watched her for a while abusing us and that she was lucky he didn’t arrest her himself).

3. The battle begins

We were in the middle of a crowd of three to five thousand people. Police snipers, visible in the skyscrapers above, had their sights trained on us. The media were pressing cameras in our faces, taking literally thousands of photos, often from only two or three feet away; one TV camerawoman got behind our banner and started filming the backs of our necks. (We joked later that at last we understood how Paris Hilton and Britney Spears must feel when being confronted by the paparazzi). Dozens of police stood around, watching. We stood there, in the same spot, moving only a little at a time, for hours. And, non-stop, the communists and the so called peace loving liberal democrats would come over, verbally abuse us, screaming obscenities, calling us all sorts of names under the sun. I would shout, whenever one of our number showed signs of becoming abusive in return, ‘Don’t respond, don’t respond – peaceful march!’.

I was told, a few weeks beforehand, that at these rallies, the communists resemble a pack of hungry wolves, or jackals, surrounding a handful of people crowded around a campfire. The jackals, in this instance, were afraid of the fire, and the human beings. But some were so driven by hunger that all fearfulness had been forgotten. So one or two of the more desperate and foolhardy jackals would approach the humans, sniff at them, bark and yap, and then return to the safety of the pack. This is exactly what happened. The ‘jackals’ approached us all day throughout the rally. They would swear, try and ‘psych’ us out by rambling on in a threatening manner, or announce that we had no permission from the rally organisers to be there. They would then return to the safety of the pack and then, incredibly, only a few metres away, set up an informal study group and discuss our ideology, who we were, and what we stood for. Often our pamphlets would be scrutinised. They did this even though we were a short distance away: because we were, for the most part, mute, they assumed we were deaf as well.

The communists were in a complete state of confusion as regards to our ideology and aims. During one ‘study group’ session, one, older communist woman pointed at the picture of Subcomandante Marcos in our brochure, and said to the other communists there, ‘No. No. No!’. (It was not always negative: in another ‘study group’, one communist woman smiled wistfully, looked at our banner and informed her fellow travellers: ‘If only we had a banner like that, and had been dressed like that, we could have gotten all that attention…’). In the end, they concluded that we were ‘Nazis’ – a term they apply to all their opponents they do not understand or do not want to understand. That was the correct communist party line, handed down by the democratic central committee…

Some really bizarre characters approached us. One old man, with a ‘dancing skeleton’ mounted on a pole, walked over and lisped: ‘Where’s your ID? Your police ID? I know you’re police!’ He became more and more hysterical, and sweaty, until even his fellow travellers realised that he was a liability, and hauled back into the crowd.

Some time later, a bearded man with a sign about Osama Bin Laden and George Bush walked over and declared: ‘You’re not anarchists! You can’t be nationalists and anarchists!’, and then, in a pleading tone, ‘I’m an anarchist, I’m an anarchist’. Indeed, he wore all black – his clothes looked at least ten years old and hadn’t been washed for nearly as long. (One of the communists snarled, ‘They can’t be real anarchists – their boots are brand new!’. I chuckled at this, because I had been telling the others beforehand that our clothes did look too clean and new – too clean and new to be mainstream ‘Black Bloc’).

I saw a good many interesting things: in fact, the entire demo was a masterclass in Australian street politics. At one point, a few metres away from my side of the banner, a communist ran into a tall, old CFMEU man, who was wearing a hard hat. They knew each other, and hated each other, on sight, apparently, and had had a long-running enmity. The union man started pushing the communist around, telling them to get out of here.

After our set up, things gradually became more and more intense. We were doing nothing but standing there, rooted to the spot, unable to march, and being approached by ‘jackals’ at every point of the line – on every side of the banners. It was as though we were a bunch of cowboys in a circle of wagons, being surrounded by Indians galloping around on horseback, shooting at us and yelling their war-cries. Things suddenly became more intense when one rather unpleasant looking communist woman, well into her fifties, came up and reprimanded us primly, shaking her head and scolding us, and then mounted the podium after the first two speakers (http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/node/51736/play), and announced, ‘There’s a bunch of people down the back who are impersonating the Black Bloc. We don’t know who they are – they may be Neo-Nazis, they may be agent provocateurs. Their banners are worth thousands of dollars… They’re police! Don’t give in! Don’t give in to provocation!’. All the communists in the street, including the ‘red bloc’ – the Socialist Alliance red-flag wavers at the front of the march – had now been made aware of us. We were in even more trouble now. Orders had come down from the line from our demo co-ordinators, passed from man to man along the chain of men manning the banners, that at the first sign of trouble, we were to abort the mission – no exceptions. We were not there to start any trouble and the co-ordinators' first priority was the safety of our group.

The odd thing was that a few of the speeches were quite good. One, in particular, by a fiery individual who remains unknown to me, sounded excellent: he inveighed against neoliberalism and liberal democracy, and the content reminded me of the essays at the New Right Australia/New Zealand blog. Quite a few of us roared in approval. He could have been a communist himself, for all we knew, but his ideas were sound. And as members of the New Right we are not slaves of one dogmatic ideology and are able to approve with people that are not ‘with us’.

Astonishingly, there were no other large groups of ‘organised’ anarchists, no Black Bloc, except for us. Mutiny and AC/DC were a no-show. There were one or two individuals alone by themselves, dressed in black, who claimed to be anarchists (perhaps individualist anarchists, of the Max Stirner type?). But there was no anarchist group: I was surprised that the mainstream anarchists, with all their belief in community, solidarity and collective action, could not organise enough of their members for a decent presence at a rally.

The scene there was full of political dilettantes. One young, very short young man, in a black jumpsuit-type outfit, came up, grinned and said, ‘I am an anarchist’, and then, that question: ‘How can you be nationalists and anarchists?’. I was in no mood for his taunts. One of our number was passing by my sector of the line with a camera. I asked him, ‘Film him!’ and pointed at the young man. After having the camera shoved in his face, he stuttered, ‘Are you filming me?’. I nodded yes. He mumbled something… I relented, and told one of my comrades to hand the young man a pamphlet. He took it with trembling hands and walked off.

After the speeches had finished, the march advanced on to Hyde Park. But we were pinned. A group of around five protestors had set up a purple banner a metre in front of us, with the intention of blocking us. They were lead by a tall, rather plain and thin-lipped young woman, who had previously been handing out Socialist Alliance literature, and had been annoyed that the media had been photographing and filming us non-stop. ‘That’s right!’, she shrieked sarcastically, ‘Film them! That’s where the politics is! Don’t film this!’, waving a SA pamphlet. The communists behind the purple banner began chanting a ‘stamp out racism now’ chant, against us. (I was curious, myself, as to what was written on the front of the banner – but none of us ever got to look at the front, only the back). One of our number responded to this with the chant: ‘Nazis out! Nazis out! Nazis out!’, pointing at them. Then all of us joined in. The reaction of the communists was remarkable: they literally staggered backwards in surprise. It was the first time that they had been called ‘Nazis’ in their lives.

But they had succeeded in blocking our progress. All was not well for them, however. Another person from the crowd made his way and began screaming at them, accusing them of racism. They squabbled for a while. Then a senior police officer walked over to the purple banner communists and asked them, ‘Are you moving or what?’. They argued with him, and then packed up their banner and rejoined the rest of the march.

We advanced – around 20 metres. And then, because of the jackals, we halted. By this time, the march down to Hyde Park had paused: the marchers were sitting down, listening to speeches, at the end of the street. Policemen stood in our front, at the rear and on the right flank. The jackals stood a safe distance away, and the pressure relieved somewhat.

4. Towards the end

Then a bizarre thing happened – something which goes to show that you can never plan for everything. A crazy but entirely benign old Greek man, waving two flags – one Australian, one Greek – bounded over, and began screaming gibberish. He started with a rendition of the Australian folk ballad, ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and then launched into a mad stream of consciousness ramble about Gough Whitlam, Vietnam, how he loved Australia… He told us, ‘Don’t be afraid to go to Long Bay jail! There’s coffee there, ice cream, TV, a nice bed – what more could you want?’. One of our number bawled out, ‘You’re speaking from experience?’. We laughed. Not deterred, he walked over straight to the front banner, leaned over it and shouted at the police and the communists. He sounded so crazy that even one of the stone-faced policemen to the front of us cracked a smile.

What was the reaction of the general public to our presence? One of the human rights observers came up to each and every one of us and presented with a free legal aid hotline number business card. We thanked him sincerely. A communist woman stopped him and told him, ‘Don’t give those cards to the Nazis’. He shrugged, told her, ‘They have as much right to demonstrate as you do’, and walked off.

One of our demo co-ordinators was approached by a woman from the crowd who told him, ‘Good on you’, and handed him a $50 note. Others came up and offered us their support: they told us that not all the anti-globalist demonstrators in attendance were communists - that quite a few were from other political spectrums as well. The communists didn’t believe in the cause, they had hijacked the event and put it in the service of their ideology. They, the non-communists anti-globalists, wanted to march with us, but were afraid that they and their families would be attacked.

Ironically, from a corner, I saw a man lurking by the newsstand, wearing a cap and sunglasses, watching us. He was a Sydney based activist who I had tried to convince a few weeks before to join us all at the rally. He refused, and made his excuses. Now he had turned up – to watch from a safe distance. Near the end of our demonstration, he walked up, and said, ‘Hey fellas, how are you? How did it go?’. Our reply to him was not fit to print here.

The truth was that we were desperately short of men at the demo: we had expected at least ten more. Instead, those ten had pulled out at the last minute. And many other activists we had invited had refused to come – even though we had offered to drive them. Some of these activists claimed to be tough men, telling us stories of how good they were in fights, how brave they were, and showing us all the clever punches and kicks they had used on people. But now, when it came to the punch, they were nowhere to be seen. Instead, their place at the barricades – and our banners were a barricade – had been taken by some women, teenage boys who had never been to a demo before, and elderly people aged around 70. The communists knew, despite our disguises, who the women were in the group, and picked on them mercilessly. These women found it hard going, more hard going than the males who were there, and should not have been at the front line. In an ideal situation we would not have put them there. But we did not have enough men and these women took their place without hesitation and a courage that had to be admired. And they knew that all of the men in the group would defend them and all the others who were not able to defend themselves.

All of us there were anxious: our hearts were beating, our stomachs churning, our guts twisting, our shirts soaked in sweat. Anyone who was there on that day of September the 8th and who says they were not anxious, is lying. But: no-one wavered; no-one turned on their heels and ran home. Not all of us there were rough types, used to the threat of physical confrontation: some of us were highly-educated, intellectual types who were physically slight. But we stood our ground. I learned the lesson that fear is not shameful: it is giving into fear, running away, and leaving your comrades in the lurch, which is.

From the start, my field of consciousness had been restricted: the events had been so intense that I was only aware of myself, the comrade to the left of me at my place on the banner, and the comrade to the right. The co-ordinators were the ones who kept the group together, spoke encouragement and rushed to potential hot spots to stop any trouble. They made sure that everybody had enough water and when one of us needed a rest they made sure they got it. In all these sea of hate they were the ones who keep us calm and made us feel safe.

But now I heard a noise from the rear. I looked around, and saw the water-cannon – the legendary APEC water-cannon, which had been so hyped in the media weeks beforehand – had pulled up; so had a van which disgorged black-suited SWAT types. I also heard the sound of attack dogs yapping; meanwhile, a police helicopter flew menacingly close. One communist, watching, crowed to the other: ‘Their anarchist strategy has backfired!’. Evidently, he believed that the water-cannoners were there to deal with us.

The police to the front of us looked to the rear, equally surprised as I was. This gave me encouragement: surely the police in our rear wouldn’t water-cannon their own? Word got around our group, from our demo co-ordinators: a scuffle had developed in the crowd at the head of the march, and the water-cannon crew had driven up this direction to be on standby.

Then a senior police office walked up and said to one of the co-ordinators: ‘Your part in the march is over: masks off, banners down’. After analysing the situation and thinking about what we had achieved the co-ordinator told us to get ready in 2 minutes and move out in a disciplined and organised group. We walked away, and folded up our banners ceremoniously – again with the cameras being jammed in our faces. Word got around again, from the demo co-ordinators, as to why we were leaving. The senior officer had told us that he had received intelligence that the communists, ahead in the march, were arranging an ambush for us. So he felt it best to avoid a confrontation which would result in violence, and for us to leave.

We walked, at a very brisk pace, in an elongated formation away from the march, past the police and the cameras, and into what seemed another world: the world of everyday Sydney, away from APEC. I was flooded with feelings of relief: no arrests, no assaults, no nothing. Could it have all been that easy?

I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, two communist men, in their fifties, walking alongside us. I wondered, idly, how far they would follow us– our rendezvous point was quite a distance away. I expected them to lose heart by then.

Suddenly, the train of ‘Black Blockers’ came to a halt. We stood there, as a group, as one of us announced, ‘We’re being followed’ and pointed to the two men. At that moment, I saw that all the blood drained from their faces: it had occurred to them that they two were now alone with around 30 men and women who they had been abusing for hours, and now they had no police standing by – nothing. They thought we were going to do a Franco or a Pinochet on them. Then one of the co-ordinators announced: ‘Split up’. We split up, and walked off in groups of two, three or four.

With three other comrades, I walked into a shopping mall. We caught our breaths, changed into our ‘civilian’ clothes, and made our way back to the rendezvous point. During this time, we relaxed: chatting, eating snacks, smoking. The first SMS messages started coming in, from friends who were following events on the news: it was reported at the site nine-msn.com, for instance, that ‘our leader’, whoever he was, had been arrested. That amused us no end.

Suddenly, a blonde, curly-haired man appeared, sat down near us, and got out his phone. One of our group said, ‘He’s a commie – I saw him at the march’. We concluded, at once, that the communist was calling for his comrades, and telling us where we were. Our co-ordinators ordered us to pack up and move on, straight away, which we did. The last thing we wanted to end the day in a street brawl with some communists that wanted to brag to their comrades that they beat some ‘Nazis’ so they could safe some face. Eventually we arrived safely home.

The battle of APEC was over.

5. Conclusions

We were tremendously pleased, afterwards, that no arrests had occurred and that none of us had been physically assaulted. We had avoided identification, too.

The most common response among our fellow activists was, ‘I wish I could have been there – I would have stood by you’. Well, they were offered every opportunity – cars to be driven in, places to stay, but they refused. I was told weeks beforehand, by one person who jabbed his finger in my chest to prove his point, that no-one in the general public would approve of the ‘Black Bloc’ look, that he himself was a working-class man and knew what other working-class thought. So his place at the march was taken by teenagers, the elderly and women.

As for the communists: we received hate mail in the e-mail accounts listed on the pamphlet. They also made outraged comments on the communist forums. Here is a sample from RevLeft.com:

SpikeyRed writes:
I was there with the Socialist party and saw them too!
We automatically got talking about who they were and where they were from, becuase, they had about $4000 worth of banners (estimated off the cost our our own similar sort of banner) and they were all wearing brand new shiny black boots! Not cheap at all! So they have some major financial backing from someone. We thought some of them might of been police provacteurs or have had some kind of high level government or corporate sponsoring. Also discussed was the possibility of American Fash sponsorship.
We got a few copies of their brochure, and those fuckers had the audacity to use IWW cartoons including the wildcat strike symbols. They also used a statement from the Zappatista's that was taken out of context, and two picture of Marcos, one where he was waving to the people in a way that these fuckers were able to stretch it so he looked like he was giving the Sig Heil salute.
Another thing I forgot to mention is that their brochures where just that, expensive, glossy nicely folded brochures, not printed and photocopies paper like everyone else.
Very suspicious.
Word is alot were up from Melbourne, so the Melbourne reds and (real) blacks will be watching...
Spartan writes:
we have got to watch out though as groups like the national anarchists and national bolsheviks are successfully bridging the gap between nationalism and anti capitalism which confuses many young anti capitalists. thus they can attract quite a bit of support unless of course we strangle this movement in its cradle.

GuerillaE writes:
These guys most likely have backing, as mentioned before, because their set up and their resources (the speed of it alone) is a bit much for just a backyard nazi group.
Their anarchist idealogy is most likely a trick to get more members onto their side, we all know how the nationalists play these 'snag em while they're angsty' games.

[end]

And we received plenty of new enquiries from members of the public, and donations. The New Right websites are doing more traffic than they have before. And all from one demo…

6. The way forward

The day of September the 8th drove home some hard political truths to me. Who were the ones stopping us from marching? The police? The Liberal Party? The Labor Party? The Greens? ASIO or any of the other intelligence services? The anarchists (they couldn’t get out of bed in time)? The Antifa (they were nowhere in sight)? The Muslims? No: it was the communists. They constitute a massive extra-parliamentary opposition, which is unelected, and which prevents anyone from using the liberal rights of freedom of speech and assembly, which we are all supposed to have, through the use of physical and psychological intimidation.

These are standard communist tactics. One only has to look at two recent examples. After Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, he was besieged – literally – whenever he spoke in public. Student communists, led by the likes of then student communist activist Jack Straw, used all the tactics mentioned here to prevent him from speaking and to intimidate members of the audience. Powell’s speeches at the time take a rather dark, anti-student tone, speaking of a mob rule which is invading British political life… More recently there was the case of Pauline Hanson in Australia. A friend of mine told me that Hanson had scheduled a meeting at a hall which had been booked for the purpose. But the communists were everywhere: they had even climbed up on the roof and were drumming on it. The meeting was cancelled – either because the owner was afraid of bad publicity, or property damage, or both. I asked my friend, who was there, if Hanson had any substantial security. My friend shrugged and said no. And that is typical: liberal democratic parliamentarians like Hanson and Powell were not used to the communist game. They did not understand the concept of an unelected parliamentary opposition which was not interested in the gentlemanly, civil debate of parliament and academic seminars. This unelected parliamentary opposition believed in one thing: force. What’s more, the professed moral superiority of the communists justified any amount of intimidation…

At one point in the rally at APEC, a woman approached one of my comrades and asked for a pamphlet. He gave her one. ‘Give me another’, she said. He gave her another. ‘Give me a third’, she said. After he had given her three pamphlets, she threw them at his feet. (Luckily, we had foreseen this contingency, and had printed up over a thousand). Now, such conduct is unacceptable in any form of life – so is shouting, spitting, threatening, especially so to women. But communists do such things in a state of high moral dudgeon.

In this connection, I was surprised by the calibre of the communists I saw on that day: they were not average people; often, they seemed freakish, socially abnormal types. Thinking it over, I was inclined to classify communism as a refuge for social outcasts – or perhaps the political equivalent of a lunatic asylum. But mad people can be dangerous.

Which is not to say that the communists were physically intimidating types: many of the communist men were soft and effeminate, lisping, ‘Nazith, you guyth are all Nazith… That’th a Nazi thymbol on your banner’. I asked myself, whatever happened to the standards of Australian Leftism? Where were the communists who ate glass for breakfast, the thugs who beat up Labor leader Arthur Calwell, for example?

No: the communists were a threat because of their numbers – once we had the numbers on our side, we would win. And this gets to the heart of the matter. Okay, some nationalists are divided on certain points: should nationalism be anti-Islamist or anti-Zionist? Should we have a movement or a party? But, in the real world, these concerns are irrelevant so long as the major problem is not dealt with. I say to the party-political party types: your party will need to do a march at some time – when, where and how will you march when communists are blocking you, physically, in the street? How are we going to hold meetings, when communists are interfering with them and putting pressure on the hall owner to shut them down? How are you going to hold fund-raising dinners? How are you going to keep a political party office open when it gets the windows smashed in, or worse, firebombed? (The communists will not attack the office of the local Labor or Liberal MP – they will attack yours). And it will all be justified in the name of ‘smashing fascism’. (One of the comrades at the march complained to me afterwards, ‘Why do they call me a Neo-Nazi? I’m not a Neo-Nazi!’. I told him, ‘That’s what they’ll always call you – you had better get used to it).

I would like to see marches by nationalists, and I would like to attend gentlemanly seminars by nationalists, and gentlemanly debates between opposing nationalist factions. But, in order to hear Guillaume Faye and Alain de Benoist debate their respective points of view, we would have to smuggle them into Australia like rats. We have to do that already with visiting nationalists from overseas, lest they suffer the fate of de Benoist, who once had his glasses broken by an Antifa on a trip to Canada.

The bottom line is: at some point, nationalists will have to get out from behind the Internet keyboard and connect with the community. But how can they get their ideas across to the community when the communists are blocking them?

When I turned on the TV news after the APEC summit, I saw the leaders of the Stop Bush campaign – many, if not all, card-carrying members of communist parties who tried to crush us – hobnobbing with mainstream liberal democratic politicians and having their soundbites quoted respectfully by the mainstream media. They were expressing their outrage at the police treatment of some of the people at the rally, and demanding their free and unfettered right to freedom of expression, free of coercion. They talked about how their right to demonstrate was trampled on and that excessive force was used by the authorities.

I will leave the reader to draw his own conclusions on their moral posturing.

So how do we move forward? Well, we have to have more of the same as we had at the APEC demo: except we need more people. If half the macho bigmouths of nationalism, half of the activists we had begged to come weeks before the rally, had shown up, our numbers would have been greater than what they were. We could have physically intimidated the communist enemy, simply by our presence, and without breaking the law (we at New Right do not endorse anyone breaking the law). Think of what a difference a hundred nationalist men in balaclavas, guarding a One Nation meeting hall in 1997, would have made. The same goes for Powell in 1968… Certainly, men dressed like that may look menacing, and may alienate some sections of the general public. But we are not playing a civilised game here. After the APEC demo, I was reminded of an old Oswald Mosley post-war interview. The interviewer harangued him for the ‘thuggish’ tactics of the British Union of Fascists in the pre-war era. Mosley replied simply, ‘We adopted those tactics in response to those of the Left’. Before APEC, I didn’t understand what Mosley meant; after APEC, I do. (And keep in mind that the communists of the 1930s were much more violent and forceful than those of today).

A hundred, two hundred, NA activists men and women at APEC would have lead to the complete paralysis and demoralisation of the communist forces. We would have been able to appoint our own ‘March security’ men and decide who can, and who cannot, attend the march. We could approach the communist ‘red bloc’ and say, ‘Commies, hey? Tsk, tsk, tsk… You no march here, man. You be gone’.

And why can’t a ‘Stop Bush’ spokesman be a nationalist? Why does he have to be a communist, at each and every one of these events – ‘Stop Bush’, ‘Stop the war in Iraq/Iran/Lebanon’, ‘Stop globalisation’, ‘Stop poverty’…

Instead of a sea of red flags, we could have a sea of black – National-Anarchist – flags. It is possible: we only need more numbers, and more effort. But many nationalists are too stuck in the mud, ideologically, and too afraid of mixing with other nationalists, and not to mention the community (at rallies and other public events) to do it. A European statesman once remarked that pacifism was a fallacious philosophy because everything worth having had to be fought for. We nationalists can have the freedom to express our ideas to the community, and to debate positions among ourselves and with the mainstream public, only by fighting for that freedom. We have the numbers – we have enough men and women around Australia – but what we need is the will. The battle of APEC shows that.

The battle of APEC might be over, but others will follow.............