Notes on Australian Neo-Nazis and Evading Hate Speech Laws
A couple of notes in response to an ABC Australia news article from unpublished research.
A couple of notes on this article:
- The castle mentioned is the Wewelsburg which has existed since 1603-09. Heinrich Himmler bought the castle in 1934 and it was later partially dynamited during World War II. It's now a youth hostel - and its museum library collection on neo-Nazi metapolitical thinkers has ended up on shadow library sites like Z-Library and Anna's Archive. Himmler was an architect of the Shoah / Holocaust. He was also deeply interested in the occult - a worldview that reflected the late 19th and early 20th centuries - and which Ellic Howe and others later leveraged in World War II for psychological operations and (sociological) propaganda.
- The late academic historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's second book is in part on the Black Sun or sonnenrad. His first book (a conferred PhD dissertation to book) has a Kindle edition that Amazon listed as being "under review" for at least 3-4 years. It is currently unavailable for purchase in Australia. This book had passed academic / institutional / university / publisher verification processes. Its unavailability highlights that we are in a period in which some censorship of scholarly sources is occurring: Goodrick-Clarke - who was focused on ideology, irrationality, and small group elites in history - has committed Thoughtcrime (George Orwell). The Kindle edition of his second book must thus be consigned to the Memory Hole (at least in the Australian jurisdiction or publishing market).
- Norse, Pagan, and Anglo-Saxon imagery (such as Nordic Futhark runes) and culture have a long cultural, minority religion, and semiotic history beyond what is detailed / alleged here, or how contemporary neo-Nazis have adopted them. This cross-comparative historical context has some translational issues when attempted to be overlaid over Australia's shift from its historical White Australia policy to multiculturalism, and now, social cohesion.
- The article's focus on how the National Socialist Network's Thomas Sowell uses this imagery / history for branding; metacommunication; and vanguard formation / internal cohesion highlights that Sowell and the NSN are very well aware of how memes work (Richard Dawkins; Richard Brodie; Aaron Lynch; Douglas Rushkoff and others). This is highlighted later in the article's discussion of Norway's clothes firm Holly Hansen. Scholar Gavriel D. Rosenfeld has built a cumulative research and publishing career on how Nazi imagery has been increasingly normalised in contemporary popular culture (an example book) - so it is unsurprising that contemporary neo-Nazi leaders and groups would also attempt to use, interpret and to mobilise this aesthetic imagery. The former NSN leader claim that "National Socialism is inevitable" is an example of an anchoring bias; potential fantasy proneness; is illustrative of wishful thinking; and is an "image of the future" (Fred Polak) or scenario (Peter Schwartz).
- The National Socialist Network attempting to found a White Australia party or to harness "parliamentarianism" also reflects a European strategy used by nationalist, militant, traditionalist, and far right groups. It is the first step to founding a vanguard that has a viable strategic subculture (which a predoctoral Jack Snyder coined in 1977 when at the RAND Corporation). I wrote about that in my Monash University PhD dissertation conferred on 29th April 2020.
- The "14 words" (David Lane); 88; and 18 are often referenced by antifa / extremist / fascism studies / far right researchers.
- The article considers various risk scenarios of judicial / law court impact. A recent book published by Perth's Imperium Press highlights that far right metapolitical thinkers are also aware of this (having followed the recent VDARE case in the United States and the deplatforming of Arktos).