It’s only “terrorism” if they’re not white

“Fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” – Rage Against the Machine

The state-sanctioned, IDF-trained, ICE murders on the streets of Minneapolis. The genocidal massacres of Gaza, Sudan and Congo. The Albanese government and Coles supermarket signing contracts with Palantir, corporate dealers of mass surveillance and death on an AI-fuelled platter. Isaac Herzog’s sickening invitation to tour a different settler-colony. The silencing of anti-Israel sentiment through algorithmic suppression, ZioBillionaire media consolidation, and new laws that squash free speech and protest in the UK and Australia… 

Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, all the elements of this fascistic horrorshow are linked. Furthermore, all of this has a direct throughline to the supremacist violence at the heart of this nation’s foundational story, and to the economic order in which Australia places unwarranted, unwavering faith: happy and dumb vassals to American capitalism, even as it cooks democracy and builds paywalls on the corpse. 

There is a lingering sickness at the heart of this country. Without truth-telling and restorative justice, how can a place built on genocide and the subsequent erasure of history be anything other than fundamentally broken? 

It’s why more than 600 Indigenous people have died in police custody since the royal commission. It’s why more Indigenous kids are taken from their parents today than during the Stolen Generations. And it’s why a white supremacist can throw a homemade bomb at a large gathering of First Nations peoples and allies on Invasion Day, in Boorloo/Perth, and you’ll hear less about it in the corporate press than when the Prime Minister wore a Joy Division t-shirt and Murdoch’s banshees howled for a week about quote unquote antisemitism.   

Here, inside the settler simulacrum, “terrorists” are those committing violence against the US empire and its vassals: the brown-skinned folks forced to hurl rocks at tanks so the bones of their kids don’t become foundational mortar in the most cursed casino and hotel complexes in the world.

Of the failed Boorloo/Perth terror attack, the Black People’s Union released a statement: 

“We condemn the colonial media of ‘Australia’ and its complicity in pushing false narratives that harm our communities. We condemn also the lack of outrage, not just that which is expected from the fascist press, but from the so-called allies that stood up around the continent, who have since gone silent at the attempted massacre of Indigenous people on the anniversary this continent was invaded.

“It doesn’t go unnoticed that when there is a threat against zionist institutions, destruction of colonial monuments or anti-zionist graffiti, that it is in the press for weeks. This includes condemnations and statements from political parties and settler organisations of the so-called left. But when it comes to a near mass casualty event of our people we are met with silence.”

In defiance of this systemic rot, annually, on Invasion Day, the streets conspire for a better way. 

First Nations elders speak and allies listen, hearing more truth and humanity, more directness and reality than ever falls out of the flappy mouths of the spineless apparatchicks, empty private school vessels, and closet fascists that steer mainstream Australian society.

More than a hundred thousand people marched in Naarm/Melbourne on Monday, an unbroken river from the Victorian Parliament, downhill to Burke St, the physical embodiment of the desire to be a better collective: a post-colonial “Australia” built on truth and justice, in harmony with the land and all its people. And every year our establishment, the same bloc of oligarchs, politicians and the world’s worst media, deliberately ignore, minimise, and misinterpret these calls. They do all this while simultaneously encouraging and dog-whistling to the oi oi oi crowd, jacked up on jingoism, Temu flags, racism, and shit beer.    

Outside Flinders St Station, before a massive crowd braving heat and the existentially troubling scent of bushfire on the wind, Dr Gary Foley spoke unvarnished truth. He did so in a fashion I personally find soothing to the soul after half a lifetime listening to predominantly white politicians lie as they sell out my son’s future to a climate ravaged, fascistic, corporate-ruled panopticon.

“When we hear about the Nazis marching and the rise of the right, I think it’s important for people to remember, and know, that until 1988 Australians didn’t really give a stuff about Australia Day. They never used to wrap themselves in flags and do all this crazy nationalistic shit. That’s a product of 1988 and the millions of dollars Bob Hawke put into celebrating [the bicentennial]. 

“Seeing that One Nation has now surpassed the Liberal Party, this is a cautionary moment for all of us. We need to take notice of what is happening in other parts of the world. It’s important that you keep your eyes on the malignant mango Mussolini of Mar a Lago. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you’re not paying enough attention.”

Only a few hours earlier, Nazis and MAGA-esque flagshaggers had stood in the exact same spot, chanting “oi oi oi”, blaming society’s least powerful for all of their problems: the exact behaviour that the actual problem –society’s actually powerful – routinely encourages of dysregulated dickheads. (TL;DR, if they’re blaming an interchangeable cast of minorities, they’re not uniting to eat the rich and free us all.)

Uncle Robbie Thorpe recalled the Aboriginal tent embassy protest as he spoke to a warm welcome on the steps of Victorian Parliament, having released a statement earlier on behalf of Camp Sovereignty:

“This is the first Invasion Day since the ‘Treaty for Victoria’. Which is not even a proper treaty – this is just colonial state government legislation. A real treaty would be done at an international level in accordance with the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Why aren’t they addressing this issue at that level? They’re trying to rob us again. This is the state government treatying with itself. It’s an agreement between the colonial occupying state of Victoria and its bureaucrat employees and corporate funded entities. Aboriginal corporations are hardly a representation of Aboriginal people. We’ve always had problems with them, they misrepresent our people, they prevent Aboriginal money getting to the ground.”

So overt is the boot stomping down on all of us under late-capitalism, even middle Australia should be able to relate to Thorpe’s point about being reamed by corporations. They are an anti-human economic entity, given near-impunity to commit great evil and are richly rewarded for doing so. Situating corporations as a solution to the problems caused by the corporatocracy seems utterly insane, but that’s never stopped us before!

“We demand an official end of hostilities, restoration, restitution, repatriation, compensation, sovereignty recognised and land back. We still do not have land rights – the Treaty for Victoria reinforces Native Title, which is the lowest form of land entitlement in the country, less than a pastoral lease, which is for foreign (feral) animals. It’s a pathetic excuse for a treaty. It hasn’t addressed any of the issues that we’ve been talking about since colonisation.”

Both Foley’s and Thorpe’s words stand in stark contrast to the siloing of injustices that Western leaders rhetorically employ. All the Indigenous elders that spoke on Invasion Day were unafraid to highlight the connections that tie us all together; a web of imperialist extraction that our media and politicians want us to believe are unrelated natural phenomena. For the West’s real rulers – a borderless oligarchical class of rich, supremacist psychopaths – racism and fascism are less of a threat to their status as overlords than a true dismantling of the old world: the world of colonial slaughter and capitalist extraction. Consider:

“Terra nullius.” 

“Manifest destiny.” 

“The land of the free.” 

“Civilisation and savages.” 

“Making the desert bloom.” 

“Spreading democracy and freedom.”

“A land without a people for a people without a land.”

These establishment myths are more connected than anyone in power wants the great mass of humanity, locked inside the Iron Netflix Curtain, to understand. These mythologies are all tied to an economic order that encourages and rewards greed, narcissism, psychopathy, ignorance, domination, racial supremacy, ecocide and atrocity. And that order is squeezing the ever-living-fuck out of the global working classes right now. 

It’s such a such a shitty system, in fact, in such a state of rot, that its rulers need to exert endless energy stupefying humanity into happy little consumers that love the grind life, bro podcasts, going home to overpriced, ever-smaller, shittier rentals, watching movies about the CIA saving the world from brown people and socialism, and curling up to “talk” about how “woke” is ruining everything with their ChatGPT girlfriends. We do not want this future. I feel in my bones the hell it will be for our kids.

Yes, the rampant fascism and normalised racism is as soul-destroying and alarming as it intends to be. The gaslighting is maddening and the violence and oppression is revolting. But a global awakening is occurring alongside it all. 

Tyrants rule with wealth they steal from the rest of us. With this grotesque concentration of power, they are presently seeking to quash truth, to erase history, to stomp on dissent, to neuter critical thinking, to commodify love, to demonise empathy, to numb us to violence, and to cage freedom of the mind. All the things that make us truly human are dangerous to this world order. 

Collectively, we demonstrate resistance to this empire of psychos, over and over in the streets, and yet these calls are ignored, in a bipartisan fashion, by a political elite carelessly working towards a boiling corporatised hellscape. Towards further land theft and eternal genocide.

As our media and centrist toadie politicians that pose as “Tory punchers” sell out a brighter future, we must build alternatives from the ground up. We need to do this across society, across the West. Replace captured unions with real ones. Weed out the sellouts. Continue to grow and support alternative sources of media (if you haven’t yet, consider Deepcut News, Ette Media, Crime Scene Australia, The Klaxon, Declassified Australia, Bogan Intelligentsia and Michael West Media as starting places). Abandon the political parties of the old ways. Build community based networks of support disentangled from the corporate world. Listen to the elders of this land, because with 65,000 years of wisdom, they know a fuckload more about caring for it than a bunch of careerist hacks owned by mining companies and racist, fascist newspapers. The mainstream needs to come to understand the bitter pill that the Labor Party, the Democrats, UK Labor… none of them are coming to save us from this fascist push. They are in fact an integral part of it. Hope lies elsewhere, in the streets, in the communities.

On Invasion Day, true leaders like Thorpe and Foley took the opportunity to explain that, ultimately, this is all the same fight: the people that steal your labour, your time, your life, your vigour, are the same people that steal Indigenous land. Where we decide to draw our lines of solidarity is how we change this story forever. That is how we win.