The conversation we need to have about Australia’s neo-Nazis

“You’ll be exposed as a racist to your family, your friends, your work colleagues” was New South Wales premier Chris Minns’ warning to the state’s small but apparently growing (or at least emboldened) cohort of neo-Nazis. The threat, designed to terrify them, is that of being unmasked, named and shamed.

For Victorian neo-Nazi leader Thomas Sewell, who had travelled all the way to Sydney by bus with a couple of dozen buddies, this was not a problem — he’s well known and proud of his convictions (of both kinds). Staring down a large contingent of NSW Police who had cornered the neo-Nazi horde at North Sydney Station, Sewell was happily mask-free and proclaiming “it’s not illegal to be racist” for the benefit of the evening news.

Well, he’s right — it isn’t. Even if we go the whole hog and bus every one of these good ol’ boys into the desert so they can reenact Lord of the Flies before dying of terminal stupidity, we can’t make them accept that they’re not the master race. If spending 12 hours on a bus with each other hasn’t convinced them of that, nothing will.

But this latest outburst of black-clad professional dickheadedness, a new thing for Sydney (thanks, Melbourne, we really appreciate the export), points to what is still a small problem but showing every sign of becoming a large one: what to do about our Nazis? 

Clearly, they’re not going away and the growth in their numbers and self-confidence reflects global trends towards authoritarianism and racial nationalism. The Holocaust is generations past, its lessons receding as rapidly as democracy’s gloss is fading.

The modern Australian Nazi has distinct characteristics: young, white, male, clad head-to-foot in black and — mostly, for now — masked. Like all uniforms, theirs serves a dual purpose: to give them the comfort of tribal belonging, and to send a simple message to everyone else. The message of Nazism is simple: fear us.

We should always remember that fascists are funny, until they’re not. It’s the same with this crew, self-evidently thick and deluded as they are. They are in deadly earnest, and the only thing keeping them from acting out their understanding of Mein Kampf is their cowardice. That will dissipate with numbers and impact. Left alone, they will multiply and they will perpetrate racist violence. That’s fact, not probability.

So far, governments have responded with uniformity of rhetoric — this is intolerable, we will not tolerate it — and a ratcheting up of laws specifically targeting the visible symbols of Nazism: first the swastika and SS insignia, then the stiff-arm salute. None of this has had any effect, as could have been predicted (also, I predicted it). If anything, it plays directly into their hands, as we’d know if we remembered anything about Hitler’s rise.

So, what then? We can’t criminalise racist belief, or the colour black, or marching. And banning their flags — while helpful in that it means the rest of us don’t have to see these symbols of hate paraded — won’t slow them down. What will?

Minns’ theory is that public shaming is the key to success, and he’s far from alone. In legal theory, it’s pure vigilantism; the only reason to do it is because we know how the mob will respond. I would summarily terminate any employee who turned out to be a neo-Nazi, and disown any I happened to know. Nazis get the benefit of the same doubt they give the objects of their hate: none.

Still, we would be wise to pause for breath before taking such a radical step as Minns’ comments imply: the government-sponsored exposure and vilification of individuals, solely for their beliefs. It would be a huge departure from modern concepts of privacy, freedom of expression and association, and the presumption of innocence.

To be clear, this would go a long way beyond what is currently available. NSW Police can force a person to unmask so they can be identified, and anyone charged with a crime can be named (with some exceptions). We’d be naming these guys because they turned up.

It would also, we should admit, build a new slippery slope. Black-clad neo-Nazis we can identify and categorise easily; their lack of imagination makes it easy. However, we are having this conversation at the same moment as some individuals on the extreme fringe of the Zionist movement in Israel are openly expressing attitudes and intentions towards Palestinians which are breathtakingly racist and genocidal. If that sentiment were to be imported here, how would we feel about naming and shaming then?

Nazis have a way of finding the uncomfortable intersection points between rights and wrongs. It’s their basic modus operandi, how they manoeuvre towards social acceptance and, ultimately, power, along the tightrope of tolerance. They weaponise our instincts and values — and consequently our laws — against us.

Keeping them down requires a playbook that is sophisticated and adaptable. Our responses have to be thoughtful and thought-out. We have to be alive to their unintended consequences, but equally conscious that the consequence of not taking Nazis seriously — as seriously as they take themselves — will always be worse.

Who’d have thought this would be a conversation at all, so soon? But here we are.