Only economic solutions will defeat fascism

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Lead Editorial

15 September 2021
Vol. 23 No. 37

It is suddenly dawning on many Australians that their country has become a fascist police state. The rapid passage of the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2021 (p. 11), which the two major parties waved through on 25 August, shocked many people that a law that allows security agencies to access and manipulate the electronic data of any citizen could pass so easily. However, too many people are under the illusion that such authoritarian government actions started in 2020 under the cover of the pandemic, and that the passage of the Identify and Disrupt bill is almost without precedent. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Citizens Party has led the political fight against the fascist takeover of Australia for more than 20 years, and in that time has realised that the only way to defeat fascism is to change the economic system that relies on fascist policies to protect its power.

To truly understand fascism, look at its origins in the 1930s. In the context of a global depression, the financial elite who presided over the system were threatened by the rising discontent among people whose lives were ruined. All over the world these elite financiers backed the rise of paramilitary gangs who would be prepared to violently crush protests out of fear of “communism”. A model for this approach already existed under Mussolini in Italy, who had seized power with the financial backing of British intelligence—literally, a weekly stipend from MI5. The Great Depression super-charged fascist movements in Germany, France, the UK, the USA, and Australia.

The Scullin Labor government elected in 1929 included Frank Anstey, the firebrand mentor of future Australian Prime Minister John Curtin. Anstey had always railed at the anti-democratic nature of the financial elite: “The Money Power is something more than capitalism”, he wrote in his 1920 book Money Power. “These men constitute the Financial Oligarchy. No nation can be really free where this financial oligarchy is permitted to hold dominion, and no ‘democracy’ can be aught but a name that does not shake it from its throne.” Just as City of London and Wall Street banks backed the rise of fascism in Europe, including Hitler’s 1933 election campaign, their Australian counterparts were so terrified of a federal Labor government including warriors like Anstey, and the New South Wales Labor government under Jack Lang, that they explicitly sponsored the organisation of fascist paramilitary secret armies in Australia. These included the notorious New Guard, the Old Guard, the White Army, and the League of National Security. These forces were organised and fully prepared to overthrow the federal and NSW Labor governments by force if necessary; however, federal Labor split, and the NSW Governor dismissed Jack Lang in a different, “legal” kind of coup d’état. Ironically, while they had stopped their greatest fear, that the ALP would use the Commonwealth Bank to reorganise Australia’s financial system, it was only temporary, as John Curtin and Ben Chifley did precisely that in WWII.

The Citizens Party researched this history in the early 2000s, when we waged a fierce battle against the fascist laws that John Howard’s government started implementing on the back of the worsening financial crises that erupted with increasing regularity, even before 9/11. In 2002 the Citizens Party’s campaign forced the ALP under then leader Simon Crean to oppose Howard’s anti-terrorism laws, but when Mark Latham replaced Crean as leader in 2003 Labor capitulated, and have capitulated on anything to do with “national security” ever since; consequently, the latest count is that Australia is up to 92 fascist laws like the Identify and Disrupt Bill that have been waved through since 2000. Ever since, the Citizens Party has focused its fight on economic solutions like national banking, because the only way to defeat fascism is by destroying the Money Power that unleashed it.

In this issue:

• Wasted $13 billion would compensate all financial victims
• Frydenberg’s fox in the hen house
• New ASIC Chief is Frydenberg’s white-collar defender
• The War Party’s anti-China agenda stumbles
• Identify and Disrupt: Australian police-state law #92
• Towards an Afghanistan economic ‘bridge’
• Debt ceiling and infrastructure showdowns ahead
• The political fight: Policy solutions animate protests
• China to build 1,000 km/h vacuum maglev train
• ALMANAC: An age of infinite financial speculation: Who wrecked Bretton Woods, and why (Part 2)

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