In short:
Leaders of a country town that was targeted by a white supremacist group have condemned their actions.
Former mayor says the town remains a safe place for multicultural families.
What’s next?
Victoria is continuing to strengthen anti-vilification framework while NSW Police investigations continue.
Calls grow for NSW to ban Nazi salute, symbols after 'disgusting' rally in Corowa
Submitted 2 months ago by zero_gravitas@aussie.zone to news@aussie.zone
eureka@aussie.zone 2 months ago
The problem isn’t that people are offending people, it’s that neo-Nazis are propagandising proudly in public.
Banning specific symbols is a non-solution. The symbols aren’t the problem. I tore down some of this group’s stickers this week and none of them had swastikas or salutes on them (they had things like the sonnenrad/“Black Sun” symbol and the NSN’s four-arrow logo blurred out in that article). And if you ban those, they’ll find other wolfwhistles. It’s really not hard to allude, adopt and evade. There are historically successful strategies for dealing with these kind of groups, and they rarely end with the law or police. For example, the BUF in Britain started dissolving after the Brighton police intentionally only sent one officer to their rally so the fascists could have bricks thrown at them by the '43 Group. That’s when Mosley stopped going out in public.
The fact that they’re doing these petty little masked-up rallies for photo-ops in relatively small rural towns really sings out to the fact that they’re scared of doing this in cities with established anti-fascist presence. They have to travel out to towns (and make no mistake, most of them aren’t even local to the region, they gather from various states just to make up numbers for a small rally) and make unannounced rallies with no-one around just to be safe in public without police protection. Those masks aren’t hiding from police (like some protestors do), they’re hiding from the community.
Taleya@aussie.zone 2 months ago
banning the salute is like having loitering laws. It basically gives you a legal excuse to bring 'em in