Introduction


Nothing, except being understood by intelligent people,
gives greater pleasure, than being misunderstood by blunderheads. Georges Sorel.
_______________________

This Thesis was conceived under singular circumstances. The author was in custody, convicted of offences arising from a 1989 shotgun attack upon the home of Eddie Funde, Representative to Australia of the African National Congress. On October 6 1994, I appeared for Sentence on another charge in the District Court at Parramatta. I had been convicted of participation in an unsuccessful attempt to damage a vehicle belonging to a neo-nazi informer. My Thesis-proposal was tendered as evidence of my prospects for rehabilitation and I was cross-examined about that document. The Judge (whose Sentence was inconsequential) said:

… Mr Saleam said in evidence that his doctorate [sic] of philosophy will engage his attention for the foreseeable future; that he has no intention of using these exertions to incite violence.[1]

I pondered how it was possible to use a Thesis to incite violence. This exercise in courtroom dialectics suggested that my thoughts, a product of my experiences in right-wing politics, were considered acts of subversion. I concluded that the Extreme Right was ‘The Other Radicalism’, understood by State agents as odorous as yesteryear’s Communist Party.

My interest in Extreme Right politics derived from a quarter-century involvement therein, at different levels of participation. Andrew Moore said I was:

… an unusual figure … [with] … a genuine academic interest in theories of fascism.[2]

Participation can affect historical accuracy and integrity. However, in this case, it gave me the advantage of discerning the topography of the Extreme Right.

Between 1975 and 1995, the Australian Extreme Right recruited, upon my estimate, around 11,000 persons. There was a bewildering array of electoral parties, combat parties, student cells, rural action groups, education-structures, violence squads and politicized skinheads. This permanent undercurrent in Australian politics had embraced, among other sectors, intellectuals and bashers, prosperous persons and working class poor, rural and urban voters, and alongside the great mass of mundane believers - a few colourful ‘madmen’.

The Extreme Right did not speak with one voice, nor has it ever been as significant as the French Front National or the Italian Alleanza Nazionale; but it was disturbing enough to have invited legislative counter-action, para-State reaction and ritualized denunciation by public figures. My research advantage was clear. I have met hundreds of participants, read thousands of Extreme Right and conservative publications as well as those of their opposition, and directed activities of my own. Personal experience could be brought to bear upon the research. The ‘insider’ also had the advantage of access to participants and their documents - something noticeably missing from many other research efforts.

The general objective of this Thesis is to provide an intellectual framework for, and appropriate and necessary detail to the scholarship of, Australian Extreme Right politics.

This Thesis may prove unwelcome. Unfortunately, I have been denounced by opponents as the ‘master’ of misinformation.[3] However, doctoral work is not propaganda and is subject to scholarly test. That statement encapsulates part of my objective. My researches show that the scholarship of Australian Extreme Right politics is distorted by the very aversion in which this politics is held. Truth cannot be determined if scholarship is intimidated by forces which have no interests in expounding it objectively.

The present climate bodes ill for academic analysis of the Extreme Right. Since 1996 (after the time period examined in this Thesis) a storm has centred around the Pauline Hanson/One Nation Party ‘phenomenon’. The hysteria directed at this new force does not assist in producing accurate scholarship. Powerful groups have criticized Hanson/ONP as “Extreme Right”. The main voice for Jewish community feeling, The Australian Jewish News, has anathematized Hanson;[4] one article went as far as to compare a pre-ONP manifesto, Pauline Hanson: The Truth, to the Protocols Of The Learned Elders Of Zion.[5] Mobs influenced by Trotskyist ‘anti-racist’ fronts have rampaged, associating ‘Hanson-ism’ with neo-fascism.[6] A series of activist groups such as Campaign Against Racism ‘catered’ for ONP, while Campaign Against Nazis functioned to harass more militant Right groups. If a pseudo-scholarly text, Faces Of Hate: Hate Crime In Australia[7] is any indication, the heir of Isi Leibler’s Research Services spy network at Australia-Israel Review became a major player in determining the limits of research into the Extreme Right. Apparently, a ‘network’ of reliable commentators has emerged to stymie genuine inquiry.

The developing official theory of the Extreme Right has some central precepts.[8] These are that: Anti-semitism and/or neo-nazism is the secret coded message of the Right whether in its Holocaust and Historical Revisionist, conspiratological, or Skinhead violence modes; that the Right is a hodge-podge of hatreds and resentments of cultural, economic and racial change; and that the League Of Rights fathered the Extreme Right. In sum, this dangerous proto-nazi atavism must be controlled.

To dispute such logic is to invite denunciation by the closed shop. Given that the people who have played roles in criminalizing, harassing and vilifying the Right come forward as its ideological interpreters, we can understand a State/liberal-hegemonic process in train to ensure no Right force ever enters mainstream politics. Unsurprisingly, Right politics has remained a beast in the shadows with even the histories of its leaders and structures falsified to propaganda advantage.

A thesis upon a new subject could take various pathways. It could be an investigation into politically motivated violence (or even “hate crime”) or racism and political mobilization, or what sort of Australian joined an Extreme Right organization, or whether it was economic restructuring in the 1980’s which pushed the Extreme Right from the absolute margins and the end of the Cold War which advanced it towards minor political status. However, these hypothetical projects, each of which could establish useful detail (I do take these propositions into account), would be viable only if a framework for the appreciation of the contemporary Extreme Right existed. I cannot accept the discourse of the marginalization-of-the-Extreme-Right as definitive. A central defining question was required. Even the terminology ‘Extreme Right’ is uncertain.

This Thesis has as its core question the inter-relationship between the Right and the Australian State. It was because the scholarship of the contemporary Extreme Right is neither extensive nor integrated that I sought out a theme which had received treatment, albeit for an earlier period - and advanced from there. This Thesis took as bedrock the scholarship of the Australian Right 1919-45. Chapter One, in criticizing and adapting this literature, conceives the then-Australian State as a conservative one with ideological-political characteristics born of the Imperial link. This scholarship described State-dependent and semi-independent paramilitarism directed against the communists and Labor populism. By applying new overseas scholarship on the generic nature of fascism, it was possible to sweep away the mist which obscures the inter-war Right. In determining that the inter-War para-military Right was not fascist, it became possible to define various forms of auxiliary relationship between the Right and the State power and ideology, and work with a more complex tripartite division of the Right: Conservative Right, Extreme Right, Fascist. Further, because fascism was understood as an anti-Establishment ideology with particular points of genesis, I reviewed the proto-fascist elements of Australian socialism, nationalism and cultural pessimism and their synthesis in the native-fascist movement around P.R. Stephensen. These issues were relevant to an appreciation of the contemporary Extreme Right which, as I will show, is clearly partitioned between British and nativist interpretations of Australian identity.

With this foundation, the Thesis then approached the 1945-75 period, the prelude to the contemporary Extreme Right. I firstly relied upon that scholarship and opinion which argued that the Australian State moved into an American-client phase after 1945 ‘with a special kind of power at its core’.

Chapter Two proceeded to criticize and adapt the available literature concerning the Right. However, it was necessary to carry out original research in the crucial area of para-State connected ‘Nazi’ violence groups. Essentially, the scholarship of the Right in this period is also far from settled. My analysis applied the logic of Chapter One to identify a ‘Satellite Right’ dependent upon State anti-communist ideology and requirement. I emphasized content over rhetoric even in self-organized auxiliaries such as the League Of Rights, and laid the basis for argument that this organization was not the father of Extreme Right politics. Chapter Two also located an independent Extreme Right formed around opposition to the abandonment of the White Australia Policy in 1966. I was able to catalogue an array of significant persons and organizations, especially those which survived into the study-period. I organized Chapters One and Two as Part One of this Thesis.

This Thesis advances in Part Two a new typological division of the Extreme Right which augments the continued application of the tripartite paradigm. The Extreme Right is shown as partitioned into four categories: Radical-Nationalism, Neo-Nazism, Populist-Monarchism and Radical-Populism. The organizations placed within each ideal-category are described in a separate Chapter.

This categorization and the underpinning logic of the later Chapters is founded upon an appreciation of the transformation of the Australian State, since 1966 but openly after 1975, into a liberal-internationalist formation. This permits the characterization of the Extreme Right as ‘the other radicalism’ as a result of its positioning as an internal enemy of the new State.

This Thesis argues that the State has been progressively recast after the 1975 ‘putsch’, with integrated policies to achieve economic-internationalization, apply liberal-authoritarian methods against opposition and to develop a ‘Transnational Capitalist Class’. The fall of Eastern European communism demonstrated the superiority of the emergent globalist system over old-marxism and unleashed a new aggression in the regime directed to intensify Australia’s demographic-economic merger into the ‘Pacific Rim Economic Order’. This new State has also carried out a profound twenty-year cultural and social revolution which built a new power core. It has placed the Extreme Right ideology, politics and organization beyond polite discussion.

This Thesis thus focuses upon an interpretation of the Extreme Right as an opposition not to ‘modernity’ but to internationalization. It therefore became analytically possible to explain the termination of the Satellite Right relationship and the mobilization of some Extreme Right forces from the ex-satellite reaction to this new State form. This Thesis argues that some of the structural weakness of Extreme Right politics can be located in the relationship of the new political fractions on the Right towards the symbolic forms of State power, particularly problems caused by the loyalism of the former satellites towards the British vision of Australian culture and politics. They restricted the acquisition of space by newer fractions of the Right.

The points of genesis of the specific faces of the Extreme Right vary. Research questions weave through Chapters Three to Eight, including:

(i) From which ideological traditions, political references and existent organizations did Extreme Right forces emerge?

(ii) Do Extreme Right categories reveal different social clienteles; do their memberships and support bases suggest that they have mobilized from different senses of disadvantage or political or cultural dispossession as a result of the State’s liberal-internationalist programs?

(iii) Has Extreme Right activism focused a new energetic opposition to capitalist internationalism such that it, rather than the crisis-torn marxist Left, became the focus of a new radicalism?; and further, given the new liberal-internationalist character of State discourse, did the Left find itself co-opted in the 1980’s and eventually in its turn, satellitized?

(iii) Part Three of this Thesis sets out to explain the Other Radicalism. Chapter Nine specifically addresses the relationship of the Extreme Right and the State. It asks how a process of mutual delegitimization between State and Extreme Right functioned and how the different Extreme Right categories defined this process. The para-State and other activism aimed at the Extreme Right, gingerly examined by other commentators, receives treatment to demonstrate the character of the new State.

Chapter Ten then examines Extreme Right ideology, using the yardstick of a terminologically defined ‘neo-fascism’ and reasons that the assorted political programmes be weighed accordingly for their potential to inspire radical action on the Right. These programmes and other expressions of ideological struggle were understood as substantive statements of a sincere politics rather than floss to conceal a plan to reopen Auschwitz on Lake Eyre. While the Australian material is unique it can be usefully compared with the corpus of the international Right. In the case of neo-nazism, this Thesis contributed to a developing literature.

This Thesis of course is a study in failure to breach the fortress of capitalism and I have crafted my research appropriately to show why this was so. It was however equally obvious that the Right had become a persistent force, and that it would continue to enjoy a political impact.

Methods and Sources

This Thesis applied the ethnographic research method. The method employs personal observation combined with the use of various sources of information to create a broad-brush-stroke picture required to conceptualize organizational complexity and conduct.[9] Different periods and phases-within-periods demanded varying approaches. Some truths were unraveled by detective work since the story was never meant to be told - particularly where illegal or improper activities of security-agencies were involved.

The Australian Archives were useful. The author caused several released but unaccessed Files, to be formally opened. I also had released, and accessed, about fifty Files on persons and organizations, 1945-68. Most of these Files were Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) documents. Most were censored. For example, Files on the ‘politically irrelevant’ Nazi movement were plagued by ‘exemptions’ under the Archives Act. One representative File (for Arthur Charles Smith) saw 121 pages restricted out of 157. I was surprised at the paucity of information supposedly held on the 1940’s Citizens’ Rights Committees and the League Of Rights to 1967. Even so, taken in composite, the archival material cut off as it was by the ‘30-year access rule’, served as a skeleton on which to argue that the Right in the post-war period was politically dependent upon the conservative State.

I found the Left-wing press, Tribune, Vanguard, Direct Action and others, of considerable worth throughout. The Left press not only relayed data on Right activism but also expressed Left organizational attitudes about this militancy and its political context. Further, a critical use of Left newspapers assisted the development of the argument that in the 1980’s the Left lost its political independence and suffered co-optation by the liberal anti-racist State.

To chart activities and the response of opponents to the Extreme Right, the mainstream media was consulted: newspapers, magazines, radio and television. Hundreds of citations appear. The media was certainly biased but that did not interfere with critical usage of this expansive source.

This Thesis benefited from an extensive access to the public and internal publications of the Extreme Right, to detailed information on conferences, meetings, correspondence, membership and finance, and to interviews with many of its officials and activists. The bibliography provides detail about regular publications and some biographical data on interviewees. The primary material was the ultimate arbiter of key questions. I have preferred it over the pre-judgements of other commentators who prefer to quote each other or mass media journalism.

Another untapped source was official documents: court papers, government reports and Electoral Commission Files on registered political parties. From these sources new information was found on membership of organizations, and on the para-State reaction to the Extreme Right. Such documentation was authoritative and integrated with the other sources obtained by the ethnographic method.

Regrettably, the NSW Police Special Branch files made accessible to Freedom of Information request on March 9 1999, could not be consulted without delaying the production of this Thesis; nonetheless, this rich vein of data can be tapped by future researchers.

A true scholarship of contemporary Australian Right politics is in its formative period. This Thesis is an encouragement for further, multi-directioned analysis. The author has no illusion that the present work is other than turning the earth to move the worms.

NOTE ON STYLE

(i) This Thesis uses ‘ize’ rather than ‘ise’ for words not governed by convention. Quotations are always given as they appeared.

(ii) This Thesis operates a tripartite Right model; capitalization shall be used for Conservative Right, Extreme Right, Radical-Nationalist. However, when discussing the ‘four faces’ of the Extreme Right, only Radical-Nationalist shall retain capitalization because it belongs to the former paradigm.

(iii) This Thesis capitalizes ‘State’ when it refers to the Australian State; ‘para-State’ must be treated in the same manner.

(iv) Generic terms like ‘fascism’, ‘neo-nazism’ etc. shall not be capitalized. Particular historical references to ‘Italian Fascism’, ‘Nazism’, require capitals.

(v) The word ‘Thesis’ (this document) and ‘Files’ (as refer to official publications) shall also be capitalized.

(vi) Because the author was an actor in particular events, the third person is occasionally used to maintain clarity.


[1] Judge A. Viney, Sentencing Transcript, in R. v James Saleam, District Court Registry File, No. 90/21/1432, p. 6.
[2] Andrew Moore, The Right Road?: A History Of Right-Wing Politics In Australia, Melbourne, 1995, p. 121. Note: all works cited in the Introduction shall be cited again in full at their first mention in the text.
[3] Daniel Dasey, “Beaten At Own Game”, The Sun Herald, April 20 1997, p. 32; David Greason, I Was A Teenage Fascist, Fitzroy, 1994, p. 204.
[4] Sharon Labi, “Jewish Leaders Back Call To Put One Nation Last”, Australian Jewish News (Sydney), May 22 1998, p. 3.
[5] David Bernstein, “The Protocols Of The Elders Of Hanson”, Australian Jewish News (Sydney), May 2 1997, p. 20.
[6] Sam Wainwright, “Le Pen: Pauline Hanson’s Big Brother”, Green Left Weekly, June 4 1997, p. 15.
[7] Chris Cunneen, David Fraser, Stephen Tomsen (eds.), Faces Of Hate: Hate Crime In Australia, Annandale, 1997.
[8] ibid, pp. 2-3, 36-37, 44-73, 166, 173, 198-9, 210. This ‘theory’ also underlies innumerable publications. See: David Greason and Michael Kapel, “Divided Nation”, The Courier Mail, June 11 1998, p. 17; Norm Dixon, “Neo-Nazi Thugs Offer Their Services To Hanson”, Green Left Weekly, August 19 1998, p. 14; Stuart Rintoul, Megan Saunders, Jennifer Foreshaw, “Radical Fears Pauline’s Clones”, The Weekend Australian, June 20-21 1998, p. 7; Brett Martin, “Danger Lurks On The Fringes”, The Bulletin, July 28 1998, pp. 26-27 - which reported ASIO’s mixing of nationalists and neo-nazis and fears of “violence prone” groups.
[9] Paul Spoonley, The Politics Of Nostalgia: Racism And The Extreme Right In New Zealand, Palmerston North, 1987, pp. 281-289. This author applied the method in this work (originally a doctoral thesis).