By John Tully
MELBOURNE: Fawkner is a strongly multicultural working class district in Melbourne's North. Yet to step onto the platform of the local railway station is to observe the workings of diseased racist minds. There is a Greek engineering works and a bus shelter behind the platform and a used car lot out the front. All have been daubed with foul graffiti - 'Nazi skins rule' 'Slimy wogs go home' 'kill faggots'.
The obscene words are the handiwork of National Action (NA), a Nazi group which recently moved into a shop in Tyson Street, across Sydney Road from the station and just round the corner from the Fawkner Secondary College. NA Fuehrer Michael Brander claims that the Tyson Street HQ is a bookshop specialising in Australian heritage, but wherever this Adelaide-based organisation goes, hatred and violence follow. Already Lebanese shopkeepers have been terrorised by drunken fascist bums and Turkish youths have been threatened by knife-wielding thugs. An Asian shop is daubed with crude insults and the La Trobe University SRC rooms have been smeared with excrement believed to stem from the SRC's support for the campaign against NA. Farther afield, a brick was thrown through the windows of Radio 3CR and nearby shops which carried posters advertising the campaign.
The Nazi 'shop' is a squalid place, boarded up like a bunker and painted dark blue. According to a reporter from the Herald Sun, the 'literature' on sale includes posters calling for the shooting of so-called 'human trash boat people'. The 'heritage' items include mugs embossed with messages such as 'Asians Out' and 'Land Rights for Whites'.
Such filth leads one to ask: who is the real trash? If classical fascism was a mass movement of the middle classes driven into a frenzy by the horrors of capitalism, it was also a movement of what Marx called the 'Lumpenproletariat'. Urban fascism in Australia is still largely the preserve of the lumpens. They are the trash, or 'human dust' in Leon Trotsky's words.
The lumpens are a rotting social mass of petty criminals, idlers, pimps and other dubious types. [1]. According to Karl Marx, the lumpenproletariat includes 'vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds' and 'swindlers, mountebanks...pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaus [French slang for pimps], brothel keepers' and other unsavoury types. [2] Traditionally, they have sided with the Right, often acting as thugs and strong-arm men against the Left. Two hundred years ago the lazzaroni (Neapolitan lumpens) drowned the Naples Republic in blood with the encouragement of Lord Nelson. Napoleon III used the lumpens of Paris against the Left and the Republicans. They swelled the ranks of Mussolini's Blackshirts and the Nazi Brownshirts. Known as 'white trash' in the southern states of the USA, they joined the Ku Klux Klan to lynch Blacks. Their moral level is shown by the Nazi marching song the 'Horst Wessel Lied' which honours a dead pimp who lusted for the spurt of Jewish blood under his knife.
Across different languages, this social layer continues. Like them, the National Action boot boys are the sweepings and discards of the capitalist system. Demoralised, and without any sense of solidarity or human dignity, they are easy pickings for the likes of the Nazi Godfather Brander. Ignorant and brutal, without sense of personal worth, they fall for his line that migrants are to blame for unemployment. In their dim minds, here is a 'legitimate' target, for they are nothing if not 'patriots' -- or 'staunch Aussies' as one Nazi basher said recently. 'Just get rid of the migrants', said another, 'and we'd live like kings'.
If these words seem harsh, let us consider the types who hang out in the Tyson Street den. After last month's anti-Nazi rally outside the Nazi 'bookshop' the police arrested an NA member on a rape charge. NA had hidden him inside for three months.
Then there are Damien Gadsden and Darren Patching, two young skinhead members of the gang, who were jailed last month for bashing a defenceless drunk in the city. It is believed that the victim was a Maori and that a third goon, Leonard Walker, helped in the cowardly attack. The skinheads' lawyer told the court that Gadsden came from a violent family and 'would drink anything'. Both men have long records of petty crime and violence. They were unrepentant, dressing up their thuggery as politics. When sentence was passed a number of their supporters in the public gallery gave the Nazi salute. In response, the skinheads clicked their heels, gave the Nazi salute and said 'Hail the Aryan guard'. [3]
More serious was the anti-Asian terrorism of a NA splinter group in Perth. The Nazi leader, Sjef 'Jack' van Tongeren, is serving 18 years for 53 charges, including false pretences, breaking, entering and stealing, illegal use, theft, arson, causing an explosion, wilful damage, attempted arson, assault and conspiracy. Other gang members were convicted of the attempted murder of an informer.
Van Tongeren is a classic example of the type of twisted personality drawn to fascism. A drifter and a Vietnam veteran with a grudge, he is also consumed with self-hatred: his father was half-Dutch, half-Indonesian and the family suffered racial persecution because of it as he grew up in 1950s Melbourne [4]
National Action's leaders claim that their organisation is not Nazi. Brander complains they are persecuted by 'Communists and the police' (!) They have adopted the Eureka flag as their symbol and overt Nazi paraphernalia is kept out of sight, but fascist, racist and homophobic they certainly are.
Whilst they are small, we should never forget that Hitler's Nazis began as a tiny gang of embittered Munich thugs and brutalised ex-soldiers and became the mass movement of the middle classes. The stench of the Nazi gas chambers hangs over Brander's gang and the Left must unite with the Fawkner community to drive them out.
Notes