When it comes to standing up to fascism, unity doesn’t mean uniformity

While neo-Nazis are trained for violence, pretending that mass demonstrations alone will stop them ignores history and exposes movements dangerously. Tom Tanuki reports.

I am happy to openly discuss anti-fascist tactics with other leftists. It’s not enough to lay out our tactics in response to organized racism on platforms that are little more permanent than sending Instagram stories back and forth. The debates help determine whether those of us determined to publicly stop fascists will do so together, as we should, or separately, destroying nothing in silos. (Melbourne is already very good at this. There are usually three left rallies, and they are all called roughly 100 meters and 15 minutes apart from each other.)

But when Omer Hasan Socialist Alternative (Salt) here at Independent Australia took the opportunity to respond to his response to my Red Flag. article The first note I made in response about anti-fascist tactics was as follows:

I said Omar “doesn’t go out much.” In her reply she said she was raising a baby, which I accepted with a light spirit as intended. But honestly, I wasn’t trying to accuse him of not playing enough shows. I was just saying that I thought a leading SAlt member should be knowledgeable enough about the rhetoric of the local political scene to know that ‘sheep’ is a sarcastic term used by cooks, not black bloc anarchist types.

SAlt, whether they like it or not, is in the same league as other types of Australian political fringe groups; either versus clumsily standing next to each other. If Omar can’t make this distinction better than the average normie, that tells me she’s excluded from the differences between these groups. Because he doesn’t care much about them.

It is difficult to take seriously one’s opinions about fringe political formations in which one has little interest.

But I read this again and it read like a little cliffhanger. So I wasn’t ready to answer initially. I also thought that perhaps attempting to respond to a right of reply would perhaps threaten to diminish my right of reply.independent AustraliaIt’s an important column area for the publishing equivalent of left-wing bickering in some Reddit threads.

But here I am, still arguing. (Thanks, IA.!) Because I think Omar and SAlt’s disconnection from their own fringe political circles gets to the heart of the debate she started. I also think it is very important to come to a conclusion from these discussions if it is to determine our common tactics.

So, to review:

Omar basically said it was bad that people dressed in black threw rocks at cops on October 19; but it was also bad if people dressed in black were doing anything else, including preparing to fight and/or actually fighting the Nazis. He said it was only good to build a mass movement to stop the Nazis.

I replied to this:

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Rocks may be stupid, but someone has to prepare to fight the Nazis, who have now become hyper-militant, combat-trained cultist lunatics. It is also possible to walk and chew gum, as well as fight-training with some people while speeding up your mass movement.

Omar responded to me in this space to more or less reiterate his initial statement.

He outlined some of the political context for the scale of the current far-right threat to underscore the urgency of anti-fascist organizing. I’m with him too. Nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment are on the rise in the streets, in parliament, here and across the West.

I would also add that we are seeing a moment where Australian neo-Nazis are leading the global push of internationalist grassroots fascism. Nazi movements around the world attribute the efforts of the National Socialist Network (NSN) to some success. Here they are also about to launch a realistic political party perspective. This makes our discussion a time-critical one and not Reddit niche discussion fodder.

Omar thought it was “surprising” that I did not acknowledge the throwing of rocks at police officers on October 19. I have already explained that I did not think it was strategic to attack the cops at an already unsuccessful anti-nationalist rally, and that I did not appreciate the lack of consent to this tactic by the coalition leading the counter-rallies. I’m not sure what surprised him about it then, because I’m not generally known for rock-throwing props.

I guess he thought the people throwing stones at the March on Australia (MFA) on 19 October were the same people who tried to physically prevent NSN from entering the Foreign Office on 31 August?

make the point “Not everyone with a mask is the same as everyone else with a mask” This is a Channel Seven-layered insight, and one that I expect to do with ordinary people as well.

As for the concept of physical education – the tactic that I definitely advocate. The NSN activist cadre now numbers in the hundreds. They are an extremist cult and are obsessed with the concept of violence against the left. We need to be prepared for them.

Omar gives examples of classic or contemporary anti-fascist efforts involving large numbers of people and argues that physical education efforts are a barrier to mass participation in similar initiatives locally:

‘Anti-fascists were always strongest when we mobilized in large groups. From Cable Street Due to the blockade in the 1930s AFD youth conference He was in Germany last week.”

These are strange examples an anti-fascist might cite when trying to justify the importance of physical defense; because they are all violent!

During the Battle of Cable Street, people threw rocks, rotten fruit and vegetables, and chamber pots filled with urine and shit at the fascists. And the cops.

On the other side were the blues with the riot police.AfD blockade too.

These actions were still successful. There were still many participants.

Physical conflict even helped in the battles against fascists in Melbourne during the Reclaim movement. people shed blood fights against the United Patriotic Front (UPF) to preserve places like multicultural Coburg. Meanwhile, I know Ömer is around. Didn’t he see any of this and the impact it had in 2015 and 2016?

In any case, a mass movement is great and I want Omar to build one.

What if our enemies are constantly training for war specifically to attack the mass movement that Omar wants to build? I will deliver the unique information to its owner. lazy bastard He has already written about this discussion with Omar and me for his thoughts on the subject. (If you care about Australian anti-fascism, Patreon.)

HE wrote:

As for ‘antifascist combat training’, I think this is of particular importance in the NSN because a significant part of their program is combat training. In other words neo-Nazis education for violence. In this regard, remember that whether someone may or may not be trained in self-defense, if you want to confront the NSN at public events, they have equipped themselves with the training and organization to respond effectively – just as countless fascist cadres have done in the past.

Ömer wrote the following in response to me:

‘It is not intended to clash with the police or attack a few Nazis in the absence of a conscious strategy; Rather, it is a self-aggrandizing form of theatre.’

Ok my love. But there was a conscious – obvious and equal – strategy behind trying to deny neo-Nazis the right to enter and dominate the founding rally of a nascent nationalist movement. To say it wasn’t strategic just because it didn’t work is like saying SAlt going to the State Library for an anti-racist rally half a CBD away from the fascists wasn’t strategic because it also didn’t stop racism at once. This isn’t fair. All of these tactics have a solid strategy supporting them. Deploying diversity of these is a good thing.

In my view, SAlt cannot really emerge from the extreme policy environment it is a part of, warts and all. They cannot stem the tide of autonomous groups pursuing different parallel actions aimed at the same goals. Like it or not, what will always happen is a variety of tactics. What needs to be preserved is the importance of agreement, consent and cooperation between coalitions aimed at the same goals, albeit by different methods.

Of course, bring up non-strategic things and own goals. But saying “nothing is completely black anymore” It is not a reasonable consequence of the strategic mistakes of October 19.

Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, author, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on Australia’s political wing are published on: YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.

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