misleading statistics, excuses, finger pointing. Anything to deflect blame and shame.
***The Australian Nazis ***are not exclusively of working-class origin but are very largely so – with a sprinkling of clerical workers of various sorts. They are in general atheists or perhaps the most nominal of religious believers. They are mostly of Protestant nominal background, but this is probably merely a reflection of the general distribution of Protestants (roughly three-quarters of the population) in Australia
In one sense, then, what these people believe is simple. There is only one enemy to their kind of civilization – the Jews of Wall Street who control the United States and the Bolshevik Jews who control Soviet Russia. On the Australian scene, too, this picture is replicated.
In the modern-day world the situation is vastly different. To see Israel, Russia, and the United States as unified is in fact perverse and necessitates an extraordinarily complex and devious view of world affairs – a view that not only receives no support but is violently contradicted by almost every news bulletin and information source.
And yet among ‘the Right’, the slogan ‘Communism is a Jewish plot’ rings out as bravely as ever. If it is comforting to unify the twin enemies of Communism and Jewry, this comfort is bought at the expense of simplicity. The most devious and implausible explanations are needed to support such a belief, given the present state of world affairs.
This point can perhaps be seen most vividly in the neo-Nazi response to the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Nazis naturally support the Arabs (although this goes against the grain: the Arabs would normally be regarded as ‘degenerate’ if they were not anti-Jewish). In so doing, however, the Nazis find themselves aligned with Communists, Trotskyists, and others of the more ‘revolutionary’ Left – whom they otherwise oppose violently.
Antisemitism may have had some simplifying effect in Hitler’s Germany (though even there its effect was to explain a unity, palatably, not to create one), but for the modern neo-Nazi the effect is the opposite. For him it does create a unity but only at the expense of great complications in the interpretation of world affairs. Antisemitism in fact requires great tolerance of contradictory information and a capacity for complicated explanations – even a ‘need for complexity’.
How indeed does the neo-Nazi fit world events into his theory that Wall Street, Israel, and the Kremlin are all but aspects of one masterful, single-minded Jewish conspiracy? He sees international politics as a charade ‘to fool the masses’ (cf. George Orwell’s 1984) –
the Nazi alone ‘knows the score’ about what is going on behind the scenes. Perhaps only outright war between East and West would convince him that there is in fact any real conflict between the two sides. But what about Korea and Vietnam? These conflicts he sees as confirming his view of Jewry. In explanation of this it must be said that he regards Jews themselves as being the real racists (the ‘chosen people’) bent ultimately on openly enslaving or eliminating all others. ‘The Right’ thus see themselves as engaged in a battle of ‘the white race’ versus the Jews.
The relevant slogans are: ‘The first race-laws in history were passed by Nehemiah’, and ‘Israel is a racist state’. The Jews are in fact somewhat admired for ‘getting away with’ their racism so successfully. Thus Korea and Vietnam are seen as rather brilliant subterfuges whose main effect is to stimulate Asians towards the highly desirable goal of wiping one another out: ‘There’s too many of those yellow bastards anyway.’
jonjayray.tripod.com/cogsimp.html
Dr. John Joseph RAY - B.A. in Psychology from the University of Queensland in Brisbane. Imoved to Sydney (in New South Wales, Australia) and took my M.A. in psychology from the University of Sydney in 1969 and my Ph.D. in Behavioural Sciences from Macquarie University in 1974.
White Australian Resistance
Two new racist Skinhead groups have made their appearance of late. One, a Sydney group calling itself Southern Cross Hammer Skinheads, has adopted the motto: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
(This expression, common among far-right activists in the United States, is known as “the 14 words,” and was originally coined by David Lane, an American neo-Nazi terrorist serving a long prsion term. It is noteworthy that the expression is now being used by an Australian Skinhead group which has also borrowed from its American cousins the term “Hammer Skinheads.”) The other Skinhead gang, White Australian Resistance WAR), located in Melbourne, apparently adapted its name from the California-based White Aryan Resistance (WAR). The head of the latter group, Tom Metzger, has boasted on his telephone hotline about the formation of the Australian organization
In 1990, Special Branch detectives in Sydney concluded that Australian National Action had been encouraging Skinheads to mount “a campaign of terror” to distract attention from the Action group’s own violent activities. The annual report of Australia’s Security Intelligence Organization, released in May 1990, indicated that extreme right-wing groups had shown “a clear potential to cause distress to sections of the Australian community, and perhaps threaten life.”
Australia’s bloodiest Skinhead violence of the 1990’s has pitted neo-Nazi Skins against each other (a common occurrence in other countries as well). In 1991, Skinhead Colin Irvine, whose bedroom was adorned with swastika flags and pictures of Hitler, allegedly murdered a fellow Skinhead, before being shot dead by police. On April 21, 1990, a National Action member in Sydney murdered a fellow Skinhead at a Hitler’s birthday party. The victim, David Noble, of Adelaide, was killed by Skinhead Dave Sweetman, with the aid of fellow neo-Nazis Martin Bayston and Sean Shilling. During Sweetman’s trial he shouted at journalists, “You Zionist maggots are going to get what you deserve. Sieg Heil!” Sweetman was convicted and is presently serving 20 years in Pentridge prison.
nizkor.org/hweb/orgs/american/adl/skinhead-international/skins-australia.html