A group of far-left Greens called Blockade Australia have declared war on the country, waging a so-called “direct action” campaign on Australia’s most populous state New South Wales.
In November 2021, Blockade Australia executed 20 “actions” geared to disrupting coal exports from the Port of Newcastle—one of the busiest coal ports in the world. Then, in March 2022, they executed several “actions” to disrupt Sydney’s Port of Botany. And now they are planning further “actions” in June and July targeting the Sydney CBD (central business district).
Blockade Australia is deploying classic terrorist strategies built on the logic that a tiny number of activists can cause major social and economic disruption if they pick their targets well. Blockade Australia call their targets “pinch points.”
These are bottlenecks on the road and rail system that, if blocked, stop trains and trucks from moving exports to ports, and/or break supply chains so that product delivery is disrupted.
Activists launching such attacks put their own bodies on the line by hanging from cranes in front of freight trains, or by chaining themselves to vehicles that then block roads or railway lines. It is important to note that this sort of activism is designed to take advantage of the broad tolerance of liberal society.
These activists know that liberal tolerance insists that these activists have “human rights” that must be protected even while they carry out their acts of economic terrorism.
This means the police must actually protect the well-being of these terrorists by stopping the trains and trucks from moving while they rescue the perpetrators from danger (at taxpayer expense).
Of course, far-left activists laugh at the foolishness of such liberal tolerance because they know it actually becomes an enabler of acts of economic terrorism.
At heart, all acts of terrorism are based upon a strategy called “propaganda of the deed.” Activists carry out an act (or “deed”) that is designed to be so visually compelling that the news media will not ignore it.
Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was a great example of how this works. Effectively, the activists turn themselves into performers who put on a show that they know journalists will be attracted to. Journalists record images of the “direct action” and disseminate these recordings to huge audiences.
Hence, journalists also become facilitators and enablers of the propaganda that activists are trying to spread—journalists have the means with which to distribute news about the “actions” plus the embedded radical political messages far and wide, thereby helping the activists.
It is important to remember that terrorist action always encodes two aims. One is to capture the public’s attention so as to spread their political messages to new audiences. The other is to recruit new supporters in the hope that some of them will become new activists prepared to engage in “propaganda of the deed” exercises.
Significantly, Blockade Australia is demonstrating much skill in the art of communication and propaganda.
They use the full spectrum of communication possibilities including highly visible direction actions, social media, print media, flyers, media releases, and face-to-face recruitment meetings. And they are running their publicity material in English, French, German, Italian, and Japanese.
They are not only interested in recruiting Aussies, they want to recruit and import activists from outside Australia to attack us because they see themselves as internationalist revolutionaries.
So unsurprisingly, two of the activists arrested at the Port Botany “direct action” were Germans.
So what is the message Blockade Australia is trying to churn out? A sample of their messaging to date provides a good feel for their grab-bag of woke causes and a mix of cut-and-paste jargon drawn from Marxism; Greenie eco-warrior-talk; globalist anti-nationalism; plus support for Indigenous anti-colonial struggles.
One of the activists revealed a great deal when he said: “Australia is built to exploit and that’s never going to change unless we get in the way.” Another activist said: “Australia is a rigged system” which is driven by “greed and exploitation.” Both these activists deployed classic Marxist speak.
It is clear that both activists view the world from what has become a commonly held position that hybridises Marxism with Green eco-warrior activism.
Indeed, there is a long tradition of this Marxist-Green conflation amongst German Greens, stretching back to the work of Rudolf Bahro. Bahro had been an East German communist party leader who went on to help establish the German Greens movement and wrote a book outlining his political journey called “From Red to Green.”
Another revealing statement from Blockade Australia is their slogan “No borders, no nations, stop Australia’s operation.” These are leftist-globalists who see themselves as being at war not only with “capitalism” but also with anyone who expresses patriotism or pride in their own national state.
We see the arrogance (and naivety) of two German eco-warrior globalists coming to the other side of the world to wage their little war on the Australian state and disrupt the functioning of the economy.
One of the Port Botany activists even referred to the country as the “so-called Australia.” For him, Australia is illegitimate, presumably because from the perspective of a woke leftist-globalist all borders are illegitimate.
But more than this, all Blockade Australia communications makes it clear that they are aligned to an Aboriginal struggle against “settler Australia.”
Unsurprisingly, the group repeatedly uses the usual anti-colonial jargon about Australia. For these activists, the colonial settlers were apparently villains who “stole the land” and carried out “genocide.”
The newly added bits of Woke narrative say that having stolen the land, the villainous Aussie colonials built an exploitative capitalist state, carried out ecological vandalism, and so created climate change. In this regard, the group repeats the usual noble savage mythology about Aboriginals looking after the land, while Aussie settlers apparently ruined everything.
As a consequence, Blockade Australia activists have taken it upon themselves to teach the villainous Aussies a lesson and “make them pay” for being nasty to Aboriginals; despoiling the continent; causing climate change; and resisting the climate action demands of Green zealots.
It is therefore, fitting that the New South Wales government take tough action against Blockade Australia, including deporting two activists, and creating a new strike force and intelligence-gathering operation to deal with them.
