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Opinion
This week, in Perth, a man allegedly tried to bomb an Invasion Day protest. Police have described the bomb in detail, which they say was designed to explode but failed: chemical liquid in a glass container in the middle, surrounded by screws, nails and ball bearings. Two charges have already been laid, but more may follow now ASIO and the Federal Police have said they’re investigating the incident as a “potential terrorist act”. The only question is whether this alleged bombing of a political rally was politically motivated.
On the other coast, police charged a man under NSW hate speech laws for telling a March for Australia rally that “the Jew is our greatest enemy” and “heil White Australia”. Behind him, a man held a sign that blared “From the Outback to the Sea Make Australia Islam Free”. On that theme, police earlier charged a 70-year-old for sending a letter to several Islamic organisations, including Lakemba mosque, which encouraged Australians to “get ready to kill Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, Lebanese and their ATSI supporters on Jan 26th”. Happy Australia Day, everyone.
Police allege the hate speaker is a neo-Nazi connected to the now defunct National Socialist Network. The letter-writer, whose screed veered off on an odd numerology tangent, is unlikely to be. The attempted bomber, who knows? But the neo-Nazi presence at these protests is not remotely in dispute. Having formally disbanded in anticipation of the Albanese government’s newly passed hate legislation, they no longer marched in uniform. Rather they marched in plain clothes, dispersed among the crowd. Occasionally, they were violent. And obviously, they were not deterred. Not to attend. Not to chant things like “white man, fight back”. And not to violate hate speech laws.
Just before all this, an investigation in this masthead revealed the extent to which Australians are enmeshed in an international neo-Nazi network spanning the US and Europe, which includes terrorist groups and involves exchanging content, training and money. The Christchurch terrorist – an Australian citizen – was among these donors to Australian neo-Nazi leaders. But perhaps most chilling in this reporting were the suggestions the NSN’s disbanding might actually have the effect of sparking violence. Kind of like the bomb that failed to detonate in Perth.
The basic idea is that when you take a global online community, and then dissolve one of its central structured organisations, you’re left with a flock of unmoored, highly ideological people who make their own orders. The NSN’s (now former) leader might be talking of “go[ing] back to the drawing board”, and encouraging followers to avoid risking prison time and to “trust the plan” – which probably involves establishing a formal political party – but that doesn’t guarantee restraint in the short term. “This is a scary time, if someone in their orbit was going to do something,” declared Jordan McSwiney, whose research at the University of Canberra tracks neo-Nazis.
This is not entirely surprising. A few weeks ago, I noted how early signs suggest the Bondi terrorist attack fits within a trend of “leaderless” terrorism, in which violence is self-directed, and not under the control even of the organisations that inspire it. Now, it seems relevant to point out that it was American neo-Nazis who pioneered this in the 1970s. They called it “leaderless resistance”, and took inspiration from the work of a US intelligence officer, Ulius Louis Amoss, who had examined anti-communist groups trying to resist Soviet occupation in Eastern Europe. Amoss found that the Soviets could easily penetrate and break up anti-communist resistance organisations. He therefore argued a swarm of independent cells – with no central control or direction – would be much more effective.
The classic neo-Nazi adoption of this idea came from Ku Klux Klansman Louis Beam’s 1992 essay on the subject. The structured organisation, he argued, is “not only useless, but extremely dangerous for the participants when it is utilised in a resistance movement” because it is no match for the awesome power of the state. So he advocated “very small or even one-man cells” to create “a thousand points of resistance. Like the fog which forms when conditions are right and disappears when they are not.”
Beam was writing in a time before the internet; before Signal, Discord, and Telegram, or even more open platforms like X, which spread only slightly less extreme ideas. As we’ve seen with al-Qaeda and then Islamic State, conditions are only becoming more favourable for this fog. It’s therefore utterly predictable that the idea has had a neo-Nazi resurgence online since about 2015, when a previously obscure publication called Siege – which predates Beam’s work by more than a decade – started to gain rapid popularity. It’s now a foundational neo-Nazi text.
Siege, too, advocates leaderless resistance, calling for lone-wolf terrorism. But where Beam saw this as a concession to circumstance, necessary to evade law enforcement, Siege sees it as the preferred method. Specifically, it wants the chaos. It wants lots of spontaneous, unpredictable terrorist acts, with the aim of sowing social panic, and then societal collapse, which would then precipitate a race war. This is a kind of “accelerationalist” politics. And that’s precisely the term the NSN’s leaders would use to describe that group. We can therefore expect its former members to take up such accelerationalism for themselves. Christchurch was an example of exactly that kind of thing.
On balance, it seems the NSN would have preferred not to disband, given it’s raising serious funds to challenge the new hate group laws. And our authorities who asked for these laws will surely be aware of neo-Nazism’s leaderless potential. Obviously, they will be drawing on information we don’t get to see. But perhaps you’ll excuse me if the events of this Australia Day cause me to raise an eyebrow. Not because they’re a surprise, but rather the opposite. That they indicate a well-trodden direction of travel towards a threat that doesn’t diminish so much as change shape. And that it’s a shape movements like these have shown they are happy enough to assume.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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