Gullibility?

Former Australian Senator, Corey Bernardi, weighs into the controversy of New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet, wearing a Nazi costume to his 21st birthday party 20 years ago. Bernardi claims that Perrottet's critics are hypocrites for attacking Perrottet, but ignoring the alleged neo-Nazis in the Azov battalion, a unit of the Ukrainian military currently fighting against the Russians in the Russia-Ukraine war. 

Even if we concede that nothing is ever black and white in war, one would hope that Bernardi is not an apologist for Russia's Putin regime, or that he is condoning Putin's unjust attempts to annexe Ukraine. In any case, other sources that have a higher level understanding of the complexities of this situation than Bernardi, such as Monash University scholar, Alasdair McCallum, state that the Azov regiment simply cannot be credibly describe as Nazi or neo-Nazi. It is depoliticised. Nor is there widespread neo-Nazism or anti-Semitism in Ukraine. This disproves Russia's claim, a prominent theme in its propaganda, that its invasion was necessary to "de-Nazify" Ukraine. On the other hand, as Dmitry Kozhurin of Radio Free Europe has proven, there are actual neo-Nazis fighting on the Russian side, such as the paramilitary Rusich group, and other extremist militia groups. 

Social media may give you access to lots of information, but on the downside it creates too many armchair experts commenting on issues that they don't understand properly, but they weigh in on them anyway for reasons known only to themselves. 

https://www.latrobe.edu.au/news/articles/2022/opinion/russias-long-history-of-neo-nazis

https://lens.monash.edu/@politics-society/2022/08/19/1384992/much-azov-about-nothing-how-the-ukrainian-neo-nazis-canard-fooled-the-world

https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-neo-nazis-fighting-ukraine/31871760.html

https://www.timesofisrael.com/as-ukraine-invasion-slows-antisemitism-seeps-into-russian-media-landscape/

It belongs in a museum

This is a contentious issue. An auction house in Queensland, Australia, is selling Nazi memorabilia, including a signed photograph of German dictator, Adolf Hitler, a propaganda children's book, and SS artifacts. A company representative sought to justify the auction as a legitimate business activity, but there is the very real danger that these items may fall into the hands of neo-Nazis, as is the opinion of a Jewish community group spokesperson quoted in the article. 

Rather than sell them to make money, arguably these items should be donated to Holocaust museum. This will allow them to be displayed to inform and educate society about recent history, and not be used as a conversation piece for a private collector, or for more nefarious purposes. 

https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/article-690328

Fake history

Firstly, this post is not intended to attack the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), our national broadcaster. You can get that from other outlets. Today their news website ran with a story about a couple of former neo-Nazis, Justin and Lisa Beulah, who have now renounced their former lives. They are now a respectable, mainstream Christian couple. For that I am glad.

However, talking about her past, Lisa claims that one of the reasons that she became interested in Nazism was that Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler "was a Christian." The story does not correct Beulah's claims. 

My problem with this is that the reader may think, "There you go, Hitler was a Christian. Look at how evil Hitler was. Think of how many people he killed. If that's what Christians are like, there's no way that I'd ever want to be one."

As I have written here before, Hitler was no follower of Jesus. He payed lip service to Christianity, because it was good for him politically. As Tim O'Neill has observed:

"Overall, the evidence indicates that Hitler was a manipulative politician who could pay careful lip-service to Christian ideas where and when it suited him. He was clearly a theist, but claims he was a Christian do not stack up and depend mainly on pre-1933 public statements and writings and some isolated later statements...which are either rhetorical or flatly duplicitous. Hitler was not a pagan and was not an atheist. But he was not a Christian and was definitely not a Catholic."

The truth is that he despised Christianity, and all that it stood for. I sincerely hope that the Beulahs realise this.

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/nazism-and-the-racial-corruption-of-religion/10097168

https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2017/10/26/was-hitler-a-christian-an-atheist-or-neither/

https://historyforatheists.com/2019/05/the-great-myths-7-hitlers-pope/

https://roscoeland.blogspot.com/2015/11/knockout-punch.html

https://roscoeland.blogspot.com/2018/04/provocation.html

By Deutsche Bundespost - scanned by NobbiP, Public Domain, Link

Evil versus evil

I love Australia, and I count myself blessed to be living here. Sadly, just as it is in other parts of the Western world, Neo-Nazism is on the rise here. Blood and Honour is one such group. Taking its name from the motto of the Hitler Youth, it is using the recent upsurge in anti-Islamist sentiment to embark on a recruitment drive.

When I saw this sticker affixed to a roadside safety barrier, I discovered that this group is active in my area. They organise underground skinhead music events and give their members combat training under their affiliated Combat 18 movement. The 18 in its name comes from the initials of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. A and H are the first and eighth letters of the Latin alphabet.

Knowing that this group is active and very likely running clandestine events in Melbourne makes me sick in the stomach. We have one set of extremists preparing to take on another set. Perhaps they envision one day battling Islamists on the streets of Melbourne. Whether it is white supremacist groups or Islamism, evil comes in many forms. We live in dangerous times.

http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/the-prowhite-gangs-spreading-race-hate-across-australia/story-fni0fee2-1227082897992