A white supremacist brought a nail bomb to Invasion Day, but the response from the nation was not outrage. Tom Tanuki reports.
IT TOOK A LITTLE under a fortnight for WA Police to charge the man who tried to detonate a bomb at Perth’s Invasion Day rally with engaging in a terrorist act.
The wait confounded many of us, who expected we knew precisely what motivated that attempted bombing. We were told, in fairness, that to meet the threshold to be classified as a terrorist act, the act must have been enacted with a political goal in mind. (Again, we all suspected we knew exactly what the imagined political goal was.)
More to the point, many were frustrated sensing a lack of interest from the same public, press and political spheres which had just – quite rightly, of course – mourned the horrific Bondi shooting, loudly and in unison.
Was the line between national outrage and the comparative nonchalance we saw here simply a failed fuse in a home-made nail bomb?
Was that the only difference, even as our nation’s leaders accelerated a raft of draconian new laws and surveillance powers styled as protecting the public from further violence such as we saw in Bondi?
Celeste Liddle, writing for Crikey, asked:
What if the bomb had actually gone off? Would politicians have grabbed headlines with outpourings of sorrow and sentiment, and crammed parliamentary speaking lists with condolence statements? Would the public have descended on Forrest Chase to hold vigils and leave floral tributes?
Would we finally get the gazetted “Day of Mourning” we have been calling for recognised after 88 years? Or would they instead rejoice that the sentiments of Lang Hancock so many years ago had finally been acted upon?
There’s been a bipartisan condemnation in Parliament, yes, and a fair bit of media coverage as the situation developed, and some discussion outside of the expected Indigenous and activist circles. But beyond that, I have wondered: is this where the attitude of the layperson Channel Seven viewer has landed, after years of otherising not just Indigenous people but in particular Indigenous activists (and, for that matter, any other activists who stand alongside them in public protest at Invasion Day or elsewhere)?
I do wonder if they think:
They’re at a rally. They’re rabble. They were probably blocking an ambulance. They were probably burning a flag. They were probably interrupting morning traffic. They’re probably to blame for it in some way.
But now we know for sure that the man who is to blame was a white supremacist. Will we now take this situation seriously?
To be specific, WA’s Police Commisssioner Col Blanch said he had been "self-radicalised" by "pro-white material online".
I was pleased to see the term "pro-white" used here, because I thought it apt. It will frustrate some white supremacists to see it used there, who have hoped to deploy terms like "pro-white" in an attempted rehabilitation of the more violent implications and histories behind "white supremacy" as we know it.
But "pro-white" conspiracist propaganda funnels its targets down the very same pipeline, encouraging them into drastic, and violent, action against those accused of enacting an imagined genocide against white people.
If that bomb had detonated, it wouldn’t even have been the first "pro-white" bombing in Perth alone. The first was carried out by "pro-white" neo-Nazi Jack Van Tongeren in the 1990s, when he firebombed two Chinese restaurants.
Former NSN member Gabe Seymour shared a screenshot on his Telegram page in the days leading up to Invasion Day to essentially encourage someone to run their vehicle into one of the rallies.
It’s irrelevant in this context whether or not I believe that any honest "pro-white" "advocacy" even needs to exist. (Ha!) The bottom line is: I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to be invented by the same political scene that gave us Brenton Tarrant and, now, a nail bomb.
At the joint AFP and WA Police press conference, police asked family members to reach out if they were worried about loved ones being pulled into the same kind of “self-radicalisation” pipeline that captured the alleged Perth bomber. But to what end?
Ex-NSN members have described to me the underwhelming deradicalisation efforts on offer by the state. They report anonymous psychologists who build little rapport with the young men, and often lend the impression they’re prying rather than attempting therapy.
I alluded to some of that in my last article. Published just before Invasion Day, I warned of the threat of allowing many "lone actors" self-radicalised online by white supremacist ideology to drift away without having funded any peer support or community-led deradicalisation support initiatives to help their desperate families.
No, I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m simply, yet again, warning people that Van Tongeren, and Tarrant, and that nail bomb in Perth are all just expressions of a violent conspiracist ideology which we have recently fed and provoked with all these laws and bans. It isn’t going away, and we haven’t yet had a real reckoning with it.
Tom Tanuki is an IA columnist, writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist whose weekly videos commenting on the Australian political fringe appear on YouTube. You can follow him on Twitter/X @tom_tanuki.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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