A-Infos (en) [AFIB] Neo-nazi Thugs Offer Their `Services' to Hanson

[Tom Burghardt <tburghardt@igc.apc.org>]

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                       * SPECIAL EDITION *
 
                              * * *
 
                      * GREEN LEFT WEEKLY *
                  E-mail: greenleft@peg.apc.org
              Web: http://www.peg.apc.org/~greenleft
                 - Number 329, 19 August 1998 -
 
                              -----
_________________________________________________________________
 
          NEO-NAZI THUGS OFFER THEIR SERVICES TO HANSON
_________________________________________________________________
 
                          By Norm Dixon
 
                              * * *
 
     The Queensland director of Pauline Hanson's One Nation
party, Peter James, said on August 6 that the party would accept 
``support'' offered to it by the Adelaide-based neo-Nazi outfit, 
National Action. NA fuehrer Michael Brander offered One Nation 
the services of its bully boys to ``defend'' One Nation meetings 
from ``leftist mobs''.
 
     In an attempt to intimidate anti-racists, NA has letterboxed
leaflets in Sydney that include the home address of an organiser
of the recent national secondary student walkout against racism.
 
     One Nation's footsy with Australia's main neo-Nazi street
thugs makes a mockery of Hanson's claim that her party is not
racist. NA and its offshoots are virulently and crudely anti-
Asian and anti-Semitic. They lauded the vicious South African
apartheid regime and continue to propose that Aborigines be
subject to a policy of ``separate development''.
 
     The links page on NA's web site is a who's who of
international neo-Nazis, far rightists and assorted Ku Klux
Klans. The only Australian ``nationalist sites of interest'' -
other than NA and its allied Australian Republican Movement - are
none other than One Nation and former Labor MP Graeme Campbell's
Australia First.
 
     ``Australian Nationalists seek advantage from the political 
disorder brought on by the emergence of the One Nation party'',
NA's June ``National News Online'' proclaims with glee.
``Particularly, we take comfort from the confusion amongst
establishment politicians, the angst of the Left and the
hardening of attitudes across Australia on serious questions of
the national futures.''
 
     James told the August 7 Australian that One Nation would
have to look at National Action's ``objectives'' before allowing
its members to join his party.
 
     Apparently, the Victorian branch of One Nation was not too
disturbed about white supremacists joining its ranks. In June, it
was revealed that Andrew Guild, a former Victorian chairperson of
NA, had been preselected as One Nation's candidate in the federal
seat of Deakin. Guild denied he was a racist, but added that his 
views were the same as Hanson's.
 
     Brendan Gidley, a founder of the Australian Republican
Movement, also joined the Ringwood One Nation branch with Guild.
Both resigned when their previous affiliations became public.
 
     That Hanson sees little wrong with associating with neo-
Nazis was shown during the 1996 federal election. In the seat of
Oxley, which she subsequently won, Hanson directed preferences to
Victor Robb, a former Queensland state secretary of the defunct
National Front - a party that shared a common ancestor with
National Action.
 
     The publication by NA of Resistance activist Marina Carman's
(fortunately incorrect) address is a not-too-thinly veiled threat
of violence. In January 1996, the house of two Melbourne
activists was daubed with swastikas, and their car windows
smashed, soon after the activists' address and car registration 
number appeared in a NA newsletter.
 
     NA has a long history of violence against migrants,
Australians of non-European ancestry and anti-racist activists.
 
     NA's origins can be traced to the Australian Party, formed
in 1955. The Australian Party evolved into the pro-Nazi
Australian Nationalist Party, which then mutated further to
become the Australian National Socialist Party in 1963. Its first
act was the desecration of a Sydney synagogue.
 
     Members of the ANSP dressed in full Nazi regalia and made a
habit of beating up anti-war and anti-apartheid demonstrators.
They openly admired Adolf Hitler, stockpiled arms and ammunition
and kept a ``death list'' of people they would kill if they took 
power.
 
     It is suspected the ANSP was behind the April 20, 1972 (the 
anniversary of Hitler's birth), bombing of the Brisbane office of
the Communist Party of Australia.
 
     The ANSP's most notorious member was a tall, musclebound and
shaven stormtrooper by the name of Ross ``the Skull'' May. The 
Skull intimidated protesters in Sydney until the late '70s. He
was jailed for six months for bashing a journalist in 1972, and
served other stints in jail for similar offences over the years.
 
     May and another Nazi Party leader, Robert Cameron,
eventually formed the National Front in the 1980s, an imitation
of the British party of the same name (May's activities these
days are limited to being a fanatical follower of the St George
Dragons rugby league team, to the acute embarrassment of
dedicated supporters).
 
     Another young ANSP member, Jim Saleam, was arrested in 1974
and found guilty of firebombing a left-wing Brisbane bookshop.
After the collapse of the Nazi Party in the mid-'70s, Saleam
moved to Sydney and enrolled at Sydney University. He soon fell
out with May and Cameron.
 
     In 1977, Saleam formed a group which proclaimed its
commitment to the ``permanent and unapologetic reintroduction of
the White Australia Policy''. In 1978, the group announced: ``The
Australian National Alliance has the greatest pleasure in 
announcing to the enemies of Australian nationalism that their
days are numbered''. Other former members of the Australian Party
and the NSAP joined.
 
     National Action was officially launched on Anzac Day, 1982,
the culmination of a number of fusions with tiny far-right and
racist sects.
 
     Under Saleam's tutelage, NA replaced open identification
with Hitlerite Nazism with an emphasis on home-grown anti-Asian
racism and nationalism of early Australian labour movement
figures like William Lane and Jack Lang, as well as poet Henry
Lawson.
 
     NA hailed as ``revolutionary'' incidents such as the
atrocities committed against Chinese diggers by white miners
during the gold rushes of the 19th century. It adopted the flag
of the 1854 Eureka Stockade rebels as its symbol.
 
     In the 1983 campus year, NA launched a campaign against the 
presence of overseas students. Asian students and anti-racists
were threatened by NA thugs late at night. NA violence increased 
when it launched a goon squad called the ``Sons of Kokoda''.
 
     In 1983-84, NA thugs: beat and hospitalised an anti-racist
UNSW student leader; attacked the offices of Greenpeace and the 
Movement Against Uranium Mining, Community Aid Abroad, the
Socialist Workers Party, Bob Gould's Pitt St Bookshop, and the
Maoist East Wind Bookshop; threw a brick through the window of
the home of anti-apartheid activist Meredith Burgmann; and made 
threatening phone calls to members of the Southern African
Support Committee after a mailing list was stolen. A firebomb was
thrown through the bedroom window of an anti-apartheid movement 
leader John Brink.
 
     Another escalation in racist violence occurred in 1987-1989:
in Adelaide, the People's Bookshop was firebombed and the New Era
Bookshop and the Resistance Centre were attacked. In Sydney, 10
NA thugs wearing balaclavas disrupted and intimidated a Sydney
meeting of the Gay and Lesbian Immigration Task Force.
 
     The most serious act of violence occurred in January 1989,
when the home of the Australian representative of the African
National Congress, Eddie Funde, was shot at. Two NA members were
arrested.
 
     They testified that Saleam had supplied them with the
shotgun. Saleam had also thoughtfully given them each some money
to buy a drink to calm their jitters before the attack. Saleam
was sentenced in May 1991 to three and half years' jail.
 
     On April 20, 1991, NA member Perry Whitehouse murdered
another NA member, Wayne ``Bovver'' Smith, at the organisation's 
inner-Sydney headquarters after an argument.
 
     With the departure Saleam and the collapse of its Sydney
base, control of NA fell into the lap of Adelaide NA fuehrer
Michael Brander.
 
     Little was heard from the group until 1994, when NA
relaunched itself in public with rallies in Melbourne and
Adelaide. The rallies attracted about 30 in Melbourne on March 5,
and 50 in Adelaide on April 9 (including many who attended both).
 
     The majority were skins wearing T-shirts emblazoned with 
swastikas. In Adelaide, loud, scratchy martial music was played, 
and Brander's mum was on hand to proudly give her son a stiff-
armed fascist salute.
 
     A counter-demonstration of 600 anti-racists greeted the
Melbourne rally, and more than 1000 rallied in Adelaide. On March
12, 500 anti-racist demonstrators chased Brander and 30 neo-Nazis
from the inner-Melbourne suburb of Brunswick when they attempted 
another rally. A week later, a small band of skins trashed the 
offices of the LaTrobe University Students Representative Council
in retaliation.
 
     Brander's attempts to extend NA's base from Adelaide to
Melbourne have been frustrated by violent faction fights with
rival neo-Nazi grouplets in Melbourne and, most decisively, by
mass anti-racist mobilisations.
 
     On March 18, 1995, more than 300 anti-racists mobilised
against 30 or so neo-Nazis on the steps of the Victorian
Parliament House. Police allowed the NA thugs to break through
their lines and attack the anti-racists. Five demonstrators were
assaulted and one was taken to hospital. In September, Brander
was convicted of assault.
 
     After a 14-month campaign of demonstrations by local
residents and anti-racists, in April this year NA was forced to
close its bookshop in the working class suburb of Fawkner. It
scuttled back to Adelaide without even paying the rent.
 
     Brander's offer of NA's services to One Nation seems to an 
attempt to revive the neo-Nazi sect's flagging fortunes.
 
                              *****
_________________________________________________________________
 
                  PATHFINDER BOOKSHOP ATTACKED
_________________________________________________________________
 
                              * * *
 
     SYDNEY - The Pathfinder Bookshop, which shares its office
with the Communist League, was vandalised on August 9 by an 
organisation called White Aryan Resistance.
 
     The front of the shop was scrawled with the slogan:
``Execute Asian, Arab and African drug dealers - White Aryan
Resistance, fight or die''. There had been an attempt to smash
the front window.
 
     Ron Poulsen, who is a NSW Senate candidate for the Communist
League, stated: ``The vandalism of our headquarters was aimed at all
those who have taken to the streets in protest against the racist
ideas of Pauline Hanson ... Racist attacks will not intimidate my
campaign or those protesting against Hanson's One Nation party''.
 
     All rights reserved, Green Left Weekly. Redistribution
     permitted with this notice attached. Redistribution for
     profit prohibited.
 
                              * * *
 
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