Joe Hildebrand: How the hard left and hard right paved the way for neo-Nazis

The appearance of neo-Nazi protesters outside Parliament House has exposed dangerous new fault lines in Australian politics, with both left and right enabling extremism, writes Joe Hildebrand.

When Britain declared war against Nazi Germany in 1939, the government simultaneously moved to ban Nazi symbols in the UK. A no-brainer, you would think, and yet there was one surprising objection – from within the government itself.

MI5 was hardly riddled with Nazi sympathisers – ironically, it would later turn out to be riddled with Communist sympathisers.

And so their concern was not that banning swastikas would make it harder for people to be Nazis. It was that it would make it harder to find them.

Ever since I first learned it, this little historical factoid has stuck in the back of my mind like the last unwanted dinner guest hovering in the kitchen.

But now, with the ugly image of neo-Nazis standing proudly in front of NSW Parliament House, that thought has taken centre stage.

Screengrab of the National Socialist Network Nazi group holding a rally outside NSW Parliament House this morning. Pic: Supplied.

Much has been said about the decision to grant these douchebags a protest permit – or, specifically, the failure to deny them one – but the real problem is deeper and darker.

Because the real problem is not that these people were allowed to assemble outside the nation’s oldest parliament. It is that they exist.

This is not a call for their liquidation – genocidal pogroms are Nazi policy, not mine – but a call to reality.

People are understandably outraged that these guys were able to gather in full public view but the true outrage is not that they were able to show their faces. It is that they wanted to.

In the days since, The Telegraph has done a magnificent job of exposing these neo-Nazis – a job I once took upon myself in the wake of the Cronulla riots – but the chilling thing is that they need so little exposing.

I remember one of my supposed victims complaining that, thanks to my journalistic intervention, his mum found out he was a white supremacist. No such awkward family barbecue stoppers this time.

Rioters attack a man of Lebanese appearance, who was later saved by police, at Cronulla in 2005.

Of course there have always been open ringleaders, but in latter days it seems even the followers are out and proud. At least once they had the cowardice of their convictions.

Clearly they think – to borrow a quote from the very non-Nazi John Howard – that the times suit them. So why? There are two major drivers.

The first is the vast progressive and institutional opprobrium towards Israel as a nation state, which provides almost limitless cover for the vicious and deadly anti-Semitism that is the core of Nazi ideology.

I have no love for the Netanyahu government, and have deeply opposed and objected to many of its policies and practices, but it is clear that many on the hard left have used the current Israeli regime as a cipher for their contempt for Israel itself as both a concept and a country.

And it is not hard to see how this has translated into abject anti-Semitism here in Australia.

From the attacks on synagogues and Jewish businesses that are reminiscent of a nascent Kristallnacht to the calls by activist academics for supporters of Israel to be made to “feel uncomfortable”, these are stomach-turning scenes for anyone with any knowledge of history.

Little wonder the ideological inheritors of the orchestrators of the Holocaust feel so empowered to take to the streets.

Thus it is almost refreshingly revealing that the neo-Nazis’ chants against the “Jewish lobby” are so identical to the claims of their supposed enemies on the left. It is as powerful an argument for free speech as you will ever get.

But conservatives have their own case to answer and their own flea-bitten bed to lie in.

Warnings circulated for weeks before the March for Australia demonstrations that they would be infiltrated by neo-Nazis of exactly the kind that we saw outside NSW Parliament House last week. Spoiler alert: Those warnings proved true.

These self-proclaimed neo-Nazis were openly invited by the organisers to march and allowed to speak, and later (allegedly) descended upon an Indigenous encampment to wreak violence and havoc.

Where else but Melbourne?

Like the three wise monkeys that neither speak, nor hear, nor see any evil, the rabid activists on both the hard left and hard right claim no fault for the rise in neo-Nazism we now see on our streets in the wake of these mass anti-Israel and anti-immigration protests.

Perhaps it is just a startling coincidence that this flourishing of white supremacy and the neo-Nazis’ open recruitment drive has ridden the wave of their movements.

In truth, it is not beyond the pale that they might genuinely be dumb enough to actually believe that.

I, for all my faults, am not.

And so the real question for activists on both the hard left and hard right is not how neo-Nazis were able to take control of Australia’s most august street.

It is how they paved the way.

Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: How the hard left and hard right paved the way for neo-Nazis