THE BATTLE OF BRISBANE: AN OPINION FROM NATIONALIST ALTERNATIVE - 6 MAY 2014

Introduction Readers of the Nationalist Alternative website have written to us asking for our opinions on the recent assault on members of Australia First and the Australian chapter of the Greek Golden Dawn in Brisbane last week – an assault carried out by rogue elements of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, the CFMEU, led by three individuals, two of them known to the police (Luke Collier and Joe Myles) and who have extensive criminal records, and a third, as-yet unidentified man (see photos of him here and here). I won’t rehearse the entire grisly story – one can find accounts of it here and here – save to say it is grisly (one of the victims, a 70 year old Greek man, had his face bloodied and ended up in hospital). To sum up: the rogue individuals, who are not representative of the CFMEU as a whole, launched a political attack which was co-ordinated by the self-professed ‘anarchist’ and ‘anti-fascist’ James Hutchings (who uses a variety of pseudonyms – ‘Anarchist Andy’, ‘Andy Fleming’, ‘Slack Bastard’). This was a carefully planned attack, designed to dissuade nationalist groups – specifically, nationalist groups of a Western and Christian heritage – from going on marches and mounting further demonstrations in the future. (It goes without saying that, had the Brisbane marchers been Hindu or Jewish or Indian or Chinese, they would never have been attacked). The likes of Hutchings inhabit a warped moral universe, similarly to that of other political groupings (e.g., the IRA, the Jewish Defence League, radical Islamist terrorist groups) who believe that the use of violence against political opponents is acceptable. They subscribe to an ideology that dehumanises their political opponents – an ideology which makes their political opponents less than human, unworthy of any basic political rights, and deserving of the violence inflicted upon them. The political opponents of the ‘anti-fascist’ are always of a white and Western nationalist or extreme right-wing persuasion and are usually marginal and politically weak (and so can thereby be harassed, assaulted, with relative impunity). Usually the ‘anti-fascist’ method is one of harassment. The ‘anti-fascist’ activist tries to determine the identity of a nationalist or extreme right-winger, and then publicise his personal information (name, date of birth, address, phone number) on the Internet and, hopefully, stalk him and attempt to get him fired from his job. The other method is one of what I call the contrived riot – an old communist tactic – which is to launch a counter-demonstration against a nationalist group and make a disturbance with the intention of calling in the police, who, in the interests of public order and safety, will shut the thing down. ‘Anti-fascists’ will normally try and assault the nationalist demonstrators, but, being few in number and physically weak types (more often than not), don’t have much luck in that endeavour. For years, they have been trying to solicit criminal elements from the Australian trade union movement to carry out physical assaults on demonstrators – comrades of mine have witnessed this on the spot – but with little success. That was, of course, until last week’s attack, when Hutchings had the good fortune to use the services of career criminals and professional beater-uppers such as Joe Myles and Luke Collier. The Brisbane nationalists won’t be deterred, of course, by physical obstruction and beatings, and Australia First will be carrying out demonstrations in the future. The question is whether or not Hutchings will. attempt to obstruct those demonstrations – and those carried by other nationalist groups – and use the services of Collier, Myles and the third as-yet unidentified man in the future. Collier and Myles seem to be based in Victoria, but are highly mobile – they seem to travel up and down the country on ‘union business’ – and can be, it seems, easily redeployed to, say, Sydney, at a future Australia First demonstration. What can what nationalist groups can do in the future to protect themselves from physical assault and to exert their democratic rights? This is what this article shall address. What I am sketching out here is a plan for a three-pronged political offensive. What would Jeremy Jones do? As mentioned before, had the Australia First and Golden Dawn marchers not been white and European, it seems unlikely that they would have been attacked; it also seems unlikely that their plight would have been ignored by the state, the media and the police. Imagine, for a moment, that the Brisbane marchers had been pro-Israel Jewish students – imagine the outrage! The three self-appointed ‘leaders’ of Australia’s Jewish community – Jeremy Jones, Michael Danby, Mark Liebler – would have turned the event into a national scandal. Politicians in all political parties would have voted (by now) on a resolution condemning violence against young Jews; a police manhunt would be underway for Collier, Myles and their accomplices; Jewish intellectuals and journalists would be bewailing that the attack was-yet another instance of ‘The New anti-Semitism’, i.e., old-fashioned anti-Semitism (leading to murderous violence) masquerading as a left-wing critique of Israel’s policies. Jones, Danby and Liebler would have mobilised a phalanx of lawyers and taken the CFMEU, and Hutchings, to the cleaners. To say the least, the CFMEU, and the Australian union movement, would have to apologise and disavow Collier and Myles and expel them, and throw a cordon sanitaire around Hutchings – anyone who dealt with him would be dead meat, politically. Unfortunately, the nationalist movement in Australian doesn’t have the deep pockets, or the political influence, of the Jones-Danby-Liebler trio. But criminals such as Collier and Myles can be made to feel the full weight of the law. Myles is a somewhat delusional individual who regards his arrests and summonses as a kind of badge of honour – he is a scoff-law who thinks that the law doesn’t apply to him and that his trade-union politics somehow vindicates immoral behaviour. In this respect, he is rather like Hutchings. One can psychologise, and attempt to understand and categorise them, but in the end, we live in a society which operates under the laws, and these men have to be prevented from breaking it. Nationalists, then, have to force the police and politicians to uphold the law and invoke their rights, as Australian citizens under the law, to be protected from assault and to have criminals punished. Another course of action could be the law-suit: the CFMEU can be sued. I follow the old Bolshevik practice here and make a distinction between the trade union leadership and the workers in that union. In the Bolshevik ideology, the trade unionist leaders – when they were anti-communist – were corrupt men who were compromisers with capitalism and social democracy; the masses, on the other hand, were innocent and being led by the nose. In this instance, the shoe fits: the CFMEU leadership doesn’t seem to pay much attention when the likes of a Collier or Myles carry out an assault – it’s merely a case of lads larking around, who cares if an elderly Greek man was pummelled with brass knuckles – while the vast numbers of rank-and-file CFMEU think that the actions of a Collier or Myles are criminal and morally reprehensible. The leadership is indifferent, and the only way to make them sit up and take notice is to sue the union and incur substantial damages. Joining the unions Who knows what the ideology of Colliers, Myles and the as-yet unidentified third man is – is it communism, ‘anti-fascism’, social democracy? Whatever it is, these three men are political, and represent, in communist language, a cell or fraction within the union movement which enlists union resources (i.e., union membership) to carry out political tasks (i.e., beating up people of a nationalist or extreme right persuasion). Without a doubt, they aren’t representative of the CFMEU, or the union movement, or the working class, as a whole. We know this fact. But pointing it out – and pointing out that, for instance, the Australia First platform is for the Aussie worker and his class interests – doesn’t seem to have much effect. To do so would be mere propaganda and rhetoric; it’s not politics as such. We nationalists need to fight fire with fire and have our own fraction within the union movement, in particular the CFMEU and the Maritime Union of Australia. One may ask, ‘What would that entail and what good would it do?’. To answer the first question: the nationalist movement (again) needs to follow the example of the communists. It needs to organise itself as a disciplined minority, see itself as a vanguard party (that is, a party whose ideas are in advance of the workers), not isolate itself from the workers and thereby involve itself in a mass organisation (such as a student union or construction union or public sector union) and attempt to steer the membership away from (what the communists call) ‘reactionary thoughts’ and ‘false consciousness’. Nationalists should, then, if they are in a trade such as construction, forestry, energy and mining, join the CFMEU, not announce themselves as nationalists (at first) but attempt to make the workers in that union see the links between the trade union struggle and the national struggle. The leader of the American Communist Party, William Z. Foster, wrote a classic essay on the subject of vanguardism, ‘Secondary Aspects of Mass Organisation’ (1939). He proffered there a method of analysis which, if applied to an organisation such as the CFMEU, divide the union into two parts, a primary and a secondary. In the view of Foster, the primary part of a CFMEU is the foundational: that is, the reason why the organisation was founded, what it was intended to do (that is, be a trade union for individuals in those sectors of industry). The secondary part is the part which is subject to the social, economic, political forces of the day – what Foster calls the ‘effects, tangible or concrete, produced within them by the impact of other movements and other forces’. Campbell Newman and industrial relations legislation, China, Hutchings and ‘anti-fascism’, environmentalism, economics (wages, supply and demand, the availability of work) – all these and more ‘operate upon’ the secondary element. Foster is most interested in this sphere, because it’s there that the communist party can play a part. Foster subdivides this secondary sphere into two subsections. The first is the ideological. The trade union membership is subject to all sorts of political and social ideas which are a mish mash and undisciplined: conservatism, socialism, environmentalism, ‘anti-fascism’, trade protectionism, racialism, nationalism and goodness knows what else. The second part is the purely organisational and functional. These are activities which are typical of a union: participation in politics; social activities; fraternal insurance and other welfare- and self-help-related initiatives; legal counselling for members; occupational health and safety training; and so on. Once he understands this division and subdivision, the communist follows a strategy which is a fairly simple one. The vanguardist joins the union with the intention of promoting the founding aims of an organisation (in this case, the aim of being a trade union). He distinguishes himself, and works his way up in the ranks, by being the best trade unionist anyone can possibly be. By engaging in the activities – i.e., the education of the membership, the participation in party politics, the participation in social activities – and distinguishing himself in those fields, he ‘gets the ear’ of the membership, in an informal way, and helps steer them in the right direction. He (in Foster’s schema) awakens their ‘class consciousness’ and educates them as to the ‘timeless truths of Marxism-Leninism’. We in the nationalist movement, of course, won’t be steering those in the union movement to those ‘timeless truths’. We shall be helping to awaken them to other truths. What’s more, the truth shall be approached in layers. Firstly, there is the immediate struggle – against Chinese imperialism, against the China which wants to conquer Australia economically, culturally and demographically; secondly, there is the struggle against both the Right (the Gina Rineharts, the Campbell Newmans) and the Left (the likes of Hutchings) who are assisting China in its task of colonisation and conquest; third, the struggle of the Golden Dawn and other European nationalist organisations, a struggle which affects not just Europe but the West as a whole… ‘What good shall all this do?’. In answer to that, I shall repeat two Leninist dictums. The first is that everything is political. A trade union’s activities are political; so are a student union’s; so are a charity’s (e.g., a charity which helps “refugees” gain permanent residency in Australia); so are a Hollywood film studio’s (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas (2008) and 12 Years a Slave (2013) are political films). The second dictum is, wherever there is politics, there are leaders and led. The events in Brisbane didn’t spontaneously ‘happen by themselves’ – leaders, such as Hutchings, made them happen. The CFMEU is a political institution, like it or not, and part of it – and the union movement has a whole – has in part been captured by a strange but political faction of crypto-anarcho-communist Chinaphiles. The important thing is to wrest the leadership of this part of a mass and working-class organisation away from the likes of Hutchings. It’s only a part of a mass organisation, but imagine what a small vanguard, a disciplined minority – members of a party of the Aussie worker – could do with it. They could exert an influence out of all proportion to their numbers. This would be a political triumph. Not every political success has to result in a ‘seizure of power’, a ‘revolution’ of the order of Russia in 1917 or China in 1949 or Germany in 1933. There are big victories and there are the little victories – and the little ones pave the way for the big ones. A show of strength Newcomers to the nationalist scene are often surprised by the aggression and violence of the ‘anti-fascist’ communist and anarchist Left; they find it hard to understand that leftism – ostensibly a philosophy of egalitarianism, brotherhood, pacifism, benevolence, humanitarianism – is used to justify acts of intimidation and violence. They also are surprised to learn that the rights of freedom of speech, association, the right to protest, aren’t givens, so far as nationalists and the extreme-right are concerned – they have to be fought for. Events such as the Brisbane march serve as a wake-up call. It’s noted, by the Whitelaw Towers blog, that the Colliers-Myles gang picked on the marchers who weren’t physically imposing, i.e., in other words, wouldn’t be able to put up much of a fight and who would be easily knocked down. To generalise that incidence of physical weakness to the political sphere: the nationalists are politically weak and don’t enjoy the same rights and privileges as, say, members of the Liberal Party or the Jewish lobby (as identified by Bob Carr); they are marginal and hence easy prey for Hutchings and Myles, who, like jackals, go after the weaker animals in the pack. One of the reasons why the marchers were attacked was because they lacked a bodyguard and march stewards – tough, husky fellows – who would have dissuaded anyone from attacking the marchers by dint of their sheer physical presence. (On that note, where were the toughest of the tough, the skinheads, on the day of the march? Why didn’t they show solidarity with AF and the Golden Dawn and turn up and help deter the likes of Colliers and Myles?). Let’s have no sentimental illusions about this: it’s very unlikely that the violence would have occurred had the marchers been facing members of, say, a retail and hospitality union, or a financial sector union. Historically, maritime and construction unions have always attracted rogue elements who are thugs, crooks and racketeers. Part of the reason is that labour, as opposed to capital, is highly immobile when it comes to the construction and maritime industries. A capitalist can’t fire his entire workforce on a building site, or at the docks, and replace them with a brand-new bunch of workers, because finding those workers at short notice is impossible. Trade unions in those industries, representing a membership which in effect has a monopoly over the supply of labour, have more bargaining power than the average union and that can lead to coercive power. A dockworker’s or construction worker’s union can bring an enterprise screeching to a halt through a prolonged stop-work action, and a capitalist must give in to their demands, and quickly. Absolute power can corrupt absolutely, and it’s easy for an unscrupulous union leader in such an industry to abuse his position. We see this in Elias Kazan’s classic movie On the Waterfront (1954) and a host of American Mafia films, all based on true stories. In short, Hutchings may use criminal types, drawn from these industries, in the future and use them for acts of violence against nationalists. So what do we do? Firstly adopt the mentality that these criminals will only respect – or fear – the strong, and not the weak. They will only prey, jackal-like, on the weak, and that means nationalist demonstrators who are in small numbers, who aren’t physically imposing and who don’t look as though they can defend themselves. Political power is concomitant with a show of strength, and demonstrations are meant to be a show of the power and strength of one’s movement. A small turnout, a lack of husky bodyguards and march stewards – these won’t be respected by the thugs relied upon by Hutchings and the ‘anti-fascists’. Some Aussie nationalists don’t understand this. They believe that, because they see themselves as the party of the worker – in the same way that the communists or the German National Socialists saw themselves as the party of the worker – the Aussie worker, or the criminal elements thereof, won’t lay a hand on them. A street struggle, where criminal elements of the CFMEU are attacking nationalists, is a political struggle, and a conflict between the two (Aussie worker versus nationalist) is a ‘brother’s war’. True enough. But the likes of Colliers and Myles need to be forced to take their place in the hierarchy. I am at present reading a book by Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1945-1956 (2012), which is about the Soviet occupation of Eastern Germany, Poland and Hungary after the Soviet victory in Eastern Europe in WWII. One has to ask, after reading it: did free and independent unions, like the CFMEU, exist in communist Eastern Europe? Did they, for that matter, exist in National Socialist Germany? The answer is no in both instances: the free and independent unions, after the onset of socialism (Stalinist socialism in one instance, National Socialism in the other) were collapsed into one big national union which was patriotic, all-inclusive and not (paradoxically enough in the communist example) prone to waging class war. But to dwell on that period – one also has to ask: were criminal elements from the trade unions allowed to assault German NSDAP members, or Eastern European communist party members, in 1933 and 1945 respectively? The question answers itself. (One also has to ask: are rogue elements in the trade unions of China allowed to assault Chinese Communist Party members? Again, the question answers itself). Like the Eastern bloc communists, the NSDAP, and the Chinese Communist Party, the nationalists of Australia need to stand for the principle of law and order… One of the good things to come out of the Brisbane march is a national unity, amongst the various nationalist individuals, groups and organisations, which has emerged, along with a renewed determination to fight for our democratic rights. A sense of solidarity against a common foe is felt across all the groups, all the parties. In other words: ‘Touch one, touch us all’. LINK: http://www.natalt.org/2014/05/06/the-battle-of-brisbane-nationalists-fight-them-back/