So what is Antipodean Resistance? This neo-Nazi groupuscule has apparently spread around the country, with branches at least in at least Brisbane and Melbourne. Although their activities have had little consequence, they are skilled at making the most of their membership’s activities, which are confined to putting up stickers and posters and doing a bit of bushwalking. So while they are only a little bit less active than campus socialist groups, unlike their Trotskyist counterparts they have had a significant media impact, mostly due to media alarm-ism that Nazis still exist.
Of course everyone on the left is well aware that neo-Nazis have existed in Australia for a long time. The Australian National Socialist Party of the 1960’s and 70’s was perhaps the last serious activist group to openly use the swastika. I’m deliberately omitting the Hammerskins and Blood and Honour because they can’t be considered activist. Apart from Patrick O’Sullivan’s prolonged campaign of putting stickers on every street-light in Mooney Ponds, those organisations, like their British and American motherships, are committed more to music and street violence rather than effecting mainstream discourse in the way the ANSP did and Antipodean Resistance is currently attempting. More serious-minded groups (if such a thing is possible) have done their best to distance themselves from Nazi iconography, precisely because outside of the left, most people think that Nazism either went extinct in 1945 or is confined to angsty teenagers like Trevor in Made in Britain.
Australia First Party boss Jim Saleam, for example, was a member of the ANSP splinter group the National Socialist Party of Australia and later leader of National Action, “emphatically” denies having ever been a Nazi. A difficult claim to make when you are photographed alongside lifelong neo-Nazi Ross “The Skull” May in full Nazi regalia and when you’ve been thrown in prison for giving skinheads guns to shoot at ANC members with.
Saleam (second right) with May (right) in Brisbane’s Centenary Place.
More recent is United Patriot Front leader Blair Cottrell’s attempts to distance himself from Nazism. Despite his claim that portraits of Hitler should be displayed in every classroom, he denies being a fascist– though this doesn’t stop him from dropping by a German club on Adolf Hitler’s birthday.
So why does AR turn its back on this trend? Paradocically, the answer may lie both in Trump’s normalisation of white-supremacist ideas in America and in the failure of groups such as the UPF, AFP and the Party for Freedom to crack into mainstream politics despite their adoption populist techniques. The furthest a far-right group has come to power in Australia has been One Nation, which initially scored quite highly (an alarming 22.7%) in Queensland when it first started in 1998 but fared terribly until 2016, when it made modest gains in Western Australia and in 2017 in Queensland, until a coalition with the LNP failed to materialise. So while AR is inspired by the rise of the alt-right in the US, which has come about through a mixture of populist and constitutional means, in Australia, the far-right has largely failed to make any significant gains through legal means.
In this sense, AR has followed the example of National Action in Britian, which turned its back on the populist tactics of the British National Party in favour of pursuing an openly neo-Nazi position. Like NA, AR insists that only an embrace of a “clean” lifestyle can challenge what it perceives as an increasingly degenerate society. National Socialism, they believe, entails the rejection of alcohol and drug consumption, promiscuity and homosexuality, which they believe are symptomatic of a crumbling society. In other words, they view Nazism, as Mark Hayes writes of NA, “not just as a set of ideas, but as a ‘way of life’, a culture and a lived experience”. AR therefore seeks to establish a cult of physical fitness and an ideologically committed core that it believes can challenge the status quo.
The way this is expressed, as in their slogan “We’re the Hitlers you’ve been waiting for”, is an aggressive campaign intended to gatecrash popular discourse. AR basically represents an attempt to provoke a reaction from the media and left-wing and its propaganda reflects this. And almost every time they do so, the media or left responds, despite the fact this activity amounts to nothing more than a handful of offensive posters. Reflecting the alt-right’s emergence from online troll culture, AR has gleefully reposted such reactions on their Twitter account (now defunct).
The problem is obvious: the more attention they’re granted the further they’re emboldened. On January 10, AR made its first public appearance, though it was rather pathetic: a banner drop off a freeway overpass in Victoria.
While their activities are for now limited to postering and bushwalking, the content of their edge-lord posters has set off alarms in both civil society and the state:
In September last year, it was reported that following a spate of AR activity, Federal Parliament was given a secret briefing by ASIO citing AR as a possible terrorist threat, while earlier in the month, a Federal Labour MP called for a ban on the organisation. Today, the AR website disappeared altogether, suggesting that the government may be moving towards such a position (though it’s just as likely the hosts are following the trend towards banning hate speech on their servers). The move isn’t without precedent. NA was banned by the British government in 2016 following an increase of extremist rhetoric within the group, despite the fact that the organisation was broadly mocked rather than taken as a serious threat. Yet as Hayes notes, the ban
may actually be counter-productive in terms of preventing fascism – it will have little tangible effect on actual activists, who will simply engage in more clandestine activity, whilst the measure itself reflects the power of a state which has dramatically (and seemingly inexorably) enhanced its discretionary authority and coercive capability.
This has proven correct: NA didn’t disappear following its ban. Rather, individual members went on to plan the murder of a Labor MP, among other things. So anarchists do not believe that state-based solutions are the key to fighting fascism. This is not to say that we mindlessly throw our lot in with the “free speech” liberals. Rather, we base our opposition based on an understanding of the socio-economic conditions that give rise to the fascism, namely in the form of the state and capitalism (despite groups like AR’s purported opposition to the latter). With or without a ban on the organisation, it is within the realm of possibility that AR will continue to gain confidence, eventually adopting the methods of Atomwaffen Division in the US, a group which shares its aesthetic, ideology and worldview and is responsible for a number of killings. Furthermore, a ban on AR would not work as effectively as the one on NA, precisely because like Atomwaffen, and unlike NA, AR has a policy of anonymity. Rather than a ban, the anarchist approach is based on militant confrontation with such organisations and the conditions which make their existence possible.
Non State Actor 