The group of men arrested for a far-right parade on Australia Day are nothing more than a watered-down version of real Nazis with no direction, writes Zayda Dollie.
THE 16 MEN who were arrested after marching through Adelaide CBD on Australia Day call themselves White supremacists. What they really suffer from is oppression envy — they want the story of struggle without the achievement. It’s a symptom of a society that will only turn its head to look when something is wrong.
There is this joke in German.
It goes:
“Can I borrow your mother for Halloween? I’m going as a son-of-a-bitch.”
Obviously, the joke is best delivered by a man on Halloween but it still works without the context.
It’s funny because it insults both a man and his mother at the same time.
It’s amazing how you can retell this joke in almost any language. It seems to be universally offensive to call someone’s mother a bad word.
In German, the exact word is “son-of-a-whore” or, “a whore’s son”.
While not a perfect translation, “son-of-a-bitch” felt right here.
People will tell you context is everything. I disagree. Some things make sense even without context. Their impact is always the same.
Mum jokes, for example, don’t require context. If the joke comes at her expense, it’s understood.
The same cannot be said about neo-Nazis. Context here really is everything.
For starters, a Nazi is not an identity. A “Nazi” was a role assigned by the state to serve the needs of a regime. It’s a job description.
A “Nazi” was specific to a context it didn’t survive. Adding “neo” does nothing to revive an already extinct word.
A neo-Nazi requires a neo-dictatorship. Without one, neo-Nazis are a joke that never lands.
The group of 16 men calling themselves neo-Nazis, who were arrested after a staged march through Adelaide CBD on Australia Day, has accused both police and the justice system of political persecution.
They feel they are being unlawfully persecuted by the law for their beliefs.
There seems to be some gross misunderstanding on their part that they can’t have outlandish views.
They can. Like anyone, they are well within their right to hold a differing opinion to the majority, to voice that opinion, take to the streets with it, defend it in a court of law, be held accountable for how they defended it.
That isn’t outrageous. It’s a sign of a healthy democracy.
We are allowed to disagree. It is encouraged.
Differences in opinion are not a by-product of democracy. Differences in opinion have always been there, for as many people that exist in the world.
A democracy exists to protect us from having to go to war over them. So that no one has to die for having one.
These men seem hell-bent on being punished for a crime in order to have suffered at the hands of the law. For the bragging rights. They want to call themselves political prisoners and will stay in prison for as long as they can to legitimise it.
Their leader refused his own release from gaol because he didn’t agree with the conditions. One of them was that he couldn’t congregate with the other arrested men — he contested the point, even though the group convenes online over Zoom.
He chose the gaol time. He wants to serve a sentence. The punishment is the endgame for someone whose war cry is one of injustice and persecution. For a White supremacist, it’s a beta move.
These men want the struggle without the achievement. They want to dramatise their struggle — and how easily we take the bait.
They have strong opinions they hope will offend people with softer sensibilities. In South Australia, they have the right audience. These men have one agenda. To make good people feel bad.
That’s not a war crime, it’s not even a felony. It’s not ACAB. It’s not punk. It’s not anti-establishment. It borrows a little from all these things but mostly it’s just normal.
And isn’t normal a symptom of a society that will only turn its head to look when something goes wrong?
The Indigenous people get all the attention in this state but these men weren’t having any of it on Australia Day, were they? That’s supposed to be their day. If anyone is going to be rotting in a gaol cell, it should be them. Stop taking their prison cells away from them and giving them to Indigenous people, who don’t deserve it.
At least Hitler had action points. He purged a government, tried to conquer Europe, rigged the Olympics, committed genocide against 6 million people, traumatised the 80 million remaining and left a shit legacy to the 84 million who still live with it.
These men go online to talk about Hitler. They are hobbyists. The same as a book club. The people, who fear them are just not used to the strength of an argument.
I’m not scared of a man who reads.
I am scared of the oppression envy lurking beneath the surface. The urge to feel emboldened and impassioned by something with nowhere to direct it.
These men don’t want 15 minutes of fame, they want 15 minutes of fury. They want the duality of feeling wronged but the thrill of wrong-doing. They aren’t deterred by the consequences. They measure their worth by them.
I could call these men sons of bitches and sons of whores but they aren’t that. These men aren’t villains. They are Wendy’s lost boys. Searching but never finding. Eternally incomplete.
I’d be more inclined to tell them to give their mother a call.
Zayda Dollie is a sports journalist who believes in athlete story-telling, the redemptive power of sport and having female voices heard.
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