Politics Opinion

Unchecked vigilante violence on campus smacks of ambient fascism

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Students continue to protest at Melbourne's Monash University (Screenshot via YouTube)

Violent attacks by fascist vigilantes on Australian campuses, which echo similar incidents in the U.S., indicate a growing ambient appetite for fascism, writes Tom Tanuki.

WHAT MAKES middle Australia uncomfortable about student encampments protesting at universities? 

If Twitter or Parliament is anything to go by, it's words about intifadas and rivers and seas

What makes me uncomfortable about them is watching protesters abandoned by their universities, threatened by guards, brutalised by police and then attacked by autonomous fascist vigilantes. Different strokes.

Like the U.S., middle Australia has accepted paramilitarised police brutality as a staple of 6pm news entertainment. (Rather like they long ago accepted endless televised Arab pain and turmoil.) 

But this violence from fascist vigilantes, occurring at campuses around Australia in a copycat fashion after similar attacks on U.S. students, is an urgent new threat that draws no attention. It garners no institutional concern or condemnation from the Right or mainstream "Left". We’re too busy with Senate motions pretending to fret about protest chants. Who cares about vigilantes attacking our own?

I think our permissiveness towards this is a stronger indicator of a mounting, ambient appetite for fascism than any electoral victory in the past decade by far-right scumbags in suits.

Australian universities first opened the gates to this violence by not caring what happens to students, or even if their students have a right to make demands of them. They simply want the encampments out. It seems they're colluding with the paramilitary cops to get it done as brutally as possible.

These institutions were long ago made to abandon idealised notions of nationalised or free-tuition open spaces for knowledge-keeping-and-sharing in the way Gough Whitlam rendered them. 

Labor and Liberal colluded for decades to chip away at Whitlam’s dream of spaces that uplifted students based on merit, not money. Progressively defunded since the mid-1990s, universities had to locate other revenue streams and cost savings. So, they casualised much of their workforce and prioritised lucrative full-fee tuition. And in the process of privatising, they also secured private partnerships — including with Zionist arms manufacturers.

Students would prefer that partnership to cease during an unfolding genocide. Fair. But universities are structurally hostile to that demand now because they’ve been rendered by our bipartisan betters into deeply conservative spaces. They only parrot liberal language. They can’t be real bastions of the Left anymore.

It was inspiring to see University of Melbourne staff forming a ring around the Arts West building, renamed by students as Mahmoud’s Hall, to protect students as the threat of imminent police eviction and violence mounted. 

It was also depressing. Because, without students (under threat of expulsion) and staff (highly casualised and under threat of termination), who else is a university made up of? A chancellor? Some HR officers? One or two stakeholders? What will they do? Kick everyone out? Squat in the empty buildings?

I think universities aren’t defending the politics and power players of Zionism so much as they are protecting their right to cling to their money. 

Per Bruce Robbins’ The New Statesman article on student activism:

'This may be one reason why resistance to the Gaza encampments and the demand for divestment has so often met with brutal, knee-jerk appeals to the police. It is not just the defenders of Israel who will fight hard to protect capital’s right to do its work in darkness.'

We can get together to fight for Gaza, as we must, but we know by now that in doing so, we’re fighting a daunting assembly of united threats.

As Alberto Toscano points out in In These Times:

'… a de facto elite coalition has come together — from complicit university presidents and culture war ideologues to billionaires and elected representatives of both parties…'

Since 7 October, a very effective disinformation pipeline has been constructed in Australia so that we might serve as an effective Zionist outpost. 

Chants become terrorist slogans. Anyone who tries to explain them finds themselves speaking from the margins. People who do not feel any threat write repeated treatises on how threatened they feel, attaching demands for more police action. Zionists stand in the middle of pro-Palestine encampments in order to feign a feeling of unsafeness, in order to call in police to "help" them.

Zionist lobbyists and cranks furnish propaganda to an eager audience of politicians – Labor and Liberal both – who are desperate to collect any material that aids in the criminalisation of Australians protesting over Gaza. We’re rendered as "extremists", "antisemites" and even "terrorists".

This pipeline – all this fake news in the hands of career politicians and broken institutions – serves an outcome to anti-genocide activists: brutal police-led repression.

But after the past decade of police paramilitarisation, that’s never a surprise. It seems every rally in Australia is a police rally, an opportunity for the cops to show off their toys. Not only that, but it’s also begun to open a gateway to grassroots fascist violence.

Peaceful student activists get attacked at university encampments.mThey’re being beaten up at night. Their food is being taken; their equipment wrecked. Fireworks are being launched at them, similar to America’s recent shocking displays. 

The vigilantes appear to face no consequences. Because the disinformation pipeline is doing its job — only the students face consequences. Their chants are more violent than the physical assaults on them.

One night, I learn that students have been beaten up — the next day, I read statements from MPs like Allegra Spender and Zoe Daniel about "antisemitism" at Australian universities:

'Student surveys and anecdotal evidence both indicate that antisemitism... has increased since the resulting Gaza war with many Jewish students experiencing exclusion and hostility.'

It’s a surreal alt-reality. You see footage of people being brutalised before your eyes, daily, which registers no formal response. Instead, you hear a deafening white noise about harm over slogans and words, but one that caters to no response or clarification. This is only the same maddening standard we’ve all accepted for Gazans, brought home to Australia.

Systemic antisemitism occurring at Australian universities has not spiked since 7 October. It was already ambiently increasing for years as the far-right and its attendant neo-Nazi branch further permeated popular discourse. 

But I’m one of the rare people in this discussion who can talk about that, because I campaigned against organised antisemites for a long time prior to 7 October. And I can tell you that none of these Zionist lobbyists or their supporters were by our side back then. (Some of them, like the Australian Jewish Association – AJA – were, in fact, supporting the fascists.)

As with most of the abovementioned context, we’ve done this dance a thousand times. Local Zionists only pretend antisemitism is rising post-7 October, in order to speed up the criminalisation of anti-genocide activism. But because they’ve made significant inroads on this, when vigilantes attack encampments at the University of Melbourne with bats, bottles and fire extinguishers, nobody outside of our own appears to care.

No special new laws are suddenly tabled for this urgent new threat. I see no interviews with intelligence chief Mike Burgess about how many extra percentage points the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) is allocating to this problem. There is scant establishment press coverage.

My inclination is to write about vigilante violence in a coordinated system of activist repression as it compares to fascist history. In my mind, to weigh up how it compares to Mussolini’s blackshirts, for example. 

But I typically resist this kind of thing, chiefly because it has been done to death since Trump’s first era – by the kind of centre-Left platforms that attach "it can happen here!"-style threats as an encouragement to vote for a Biden. (Or, say, Albanese.) They’d threaten you about "rising fascism", but only so you can vote for the "less fascist guy". Like I said — done to death.

But, in fact, what we see from our Bidens and Albaneses and their unchecked vigilantes on campuses, and all their fretting over words and slogans, is that they’re presiding in practice over what I think is a climate of ambient and mounting fascism. And it’s more stark and obvious to my mind than any far-right electoral victories of late.

It’s a thoroughly internationalist sort of fascism that expresses itself through violent pan-nationalists beating up local students in Melbourne, Australia, to help neo-liberal private universities hold on to funding from Zionist arms manufacturers helping to annihilate occupied Palestine. So, too, must we be internationalist in our anti-fascism, then.

 ‘Antifascism After Gaza’ by Toscano also suggests:

'If we believe that fascism is something that takes place only at the level of the nation-state, we might be persuaded that resisting fascism at home necessitates ignoring complicity with genocide abroad. But it is exactly this hopelessly cramped horizon being challenged in solidarity encampments worldwide.'

The students get it. And the people in Gaza get the message, just as we get the brutal feed of people dying in Gaza streamed into our phones. This is international collectivism at work.

We have a significant power in acknowledging that and acknowledging that the world is watching what we all do. Our opponents have universities, the bi-partisan mainstream political sphere, much of the media and now, unchecked fascist vigilante violence. We have each other. But we have each other everywhere.

If you care about the anti-genocide cause, click HERE for details on how you can support these students. 

Nobody else will.

Tom Tanuki is a writer, satirist and anti-fascist activist. Tom posts weekly videos on YouTube commenting on the Australian political fringe. You can follow Tom on Twitter @tom_tanuki.

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