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Last week ABC reported on federal Minister for Home Affairs Peter Dutton’s intention to officially declare the neo-Nazi Sonnenkrieg Division a terrorist organisation. Currently, the official list of terrorist organisations contains 27 groups, all of them apparently fundamentalist Islamic in ideological orientation.
To fund, to be a member or to associate with members of Sonnenkrieg Division would be a crime, punishable with up to 25 years prison. But there might be more to punishment: foreign-born Australian citizens considered members of terrorist organisations have been stripped of their citizenship and been rendered stateless.
The funny thing is that Sonnenkrieg Division is a UK-based outfit, and it’s not known to have any members in Australia.
So, what is it Dutton really wants to achieve with this measure?
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Last year, as they made their cases for yet new legal powers to spy on Australians, the top local spooks publicly identified far-Right terrorism as an emerging threat … a threat they had neglected. Understandably, many Aussies found that troubling. The fact Dutton intended those powers be used as well against non-existing Leftwing terrorists – on the grounds that, in his opinion, Islamic terrorism is obviously Leftwing – caused alarm among Leftwing commentators only. (Dutton has many such eccentric ideas, by the by.)
Either way, people have short memories.
It took the US Capitol riots to remind locals of far-Right extremism. By the end of January federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg was warning about growing antisemitism in Australia. The next month the federal Opposition – Labor – was pushing to have Proud Boys declared a terrorist organisation. A couple of recent incidents further highlighted that threat (here and here).
But it was Victoria that took the first public concrete steps to repress far-Right extremism. Premier Daniel Andrews – whom, during the Melbourne lockdown, was Frydenberg’s whipping boy of choice – unusually gained Frydenberg’s praise.
And so we arrive at Dutton’s announcement. Maybe I’m too cynical, but to me it seems transparently designed to give the impression something is being done about far-Right terrorism – so as to pacify the wider community and even his own Cabinet colleagues – while actually doing nothing.
By itself, that should concern Australians.
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The thing is, there is a more disturbing possibility. With his credentials as a law and order man established (at the cost of a locally non-existing extreme Right terrorist gang), Dutton could go against his preferred targets: existing Leftwing groups … even those acting peacefully, within the established legal order. As is well-known, Dutton himself is a prominent member of the Liberal Party lunatic Right: strictly speaking, neo-Nazis may not be his ideological next of kin, but the family resemblance is undeniable.
And something tells me Labor would not mind that at all.
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I won’t try to convince skeptical readers. Instead, they should talk to Adam Bandt, the leader of the Australian Greens, whom Dutton already declared “enemy of the State”.
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| Cheval de Troie. [A] |
Funny how the hysteria and knee-jerk reactions, typical of the professional, educated, upwardly mobile, often identitarian and liberal/Leftish, placed somewhere between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat – middle class, for short – generally points towards authoritarianism and against civil liberties.
Image Credits:
[A] “Cheval de Troie d'après le Virgile du Vatican,illustration from Histoire des jouets”. Source: Wikimedia. File in the public domain.
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