Marxists Marched Across Australia and The Media Covered It Up
On Friday a revolutionary Marxist group led marches of tens of thousands of people in a dozen cities across Australia. Yet again the media covered up for the extremists, their organisations and their beliefs.
The Marxists Marched Across Australia and The Media Covered It Up
On Friday members of a revolutionary Marxist organisation that wants to overthrow the government led marches of tens of thousands of people in almost a dozen cities across Australia while calling for the sacking of the democratically elected Prime Minister. And the mainstream media didn’t say a damn word about who they were, what they believe or the groups they belong to.
In every city members of the Socialist Alternative front group “Uni Students for Climate Justice” led joyous crowds of leftists still smarting at last year’s federal election loss in profanity laced chants calling for the ouster of Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
And as usual the press as a whole covered up the extremist links of the organisers. Just as they had covered up for them all this week and just as they have done for years. In their report of the rally The Age described Anneke Demanuele (Socialist Alternative activist since at least 2015 and the Melbourne organiser of “Uni Students For Climate Justice”) as simply a “Melbourne University Student”. At the protest itself one of the speakers was Jerome Small, a Socialist Alternative organiser and co-founder of the group back in 1995. Despite Jerome’s extremist connections finally being exposed in the mainstream media after the Socialist Alternative organised IMARC riots last year this time not a single mention of his affiliations was made by the press. Also leading the chants in Melbourne was Socialist Alternative National Executive member Liz Walsh, another veteran activist who helped run Jerome’s failed federal election campaign last year under the banner of the Socialist Alternative electoral front Victorian Socialists.
The same shell game was played elsewhere. Gavin Stanbrook, the Socialist Alternative activist and “Uni Students For Climate Justice” co-convenor who publicly admitted earlier this week that the rallies were primarily about overthrowing capitalism was pictured by the Guardian Australia addressing the crowd with the caption of “activist”. This is despite Stanbrook not only being a well known Marxist extremist, but having written an opinion column which was published in the Guardian Australia itself calling for a revolution to overthrow capitalism. All throighout the crowd in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and half a dozen other places Socialist Alternative banners waved high and Socialist Alternative activists were speakers to a crowd waving red flags.
The single exception to selective blindness in the entire nation’s fourth estate sems to have been the Daily Telegraph’s Tim Blair who posted online the blindingly obvious fact that people marching down the street waving red flags and pictures of Marx while selling Socialist Alternative’s Red Flag newspaper and chanting about overthrowing communism were… well… communists. In his piece Mr Blair accurately renamed Uni Students For Climate justice as Uni Students for Communism, pointed out that Gavin Stanbrook is about as outspoken a Marxist as it is possible to be and noted that most of the protesters seemed less interested in bushfires than in overturning the results of last year’s election.
But Mr Blair is entirely alone. Uni Students For Climate Justice have been holding events since they were founded by Socialist Alternative in March last year and at every event since then their organisers and spokespeople have been activists for that group, a group that incidentally wants to overthrow the government. In every single major city in Australia for almost a year now journalists have taken quotes from people who they then described as “protest organisers” or “climate change activists” without even doing an internet search into who exactly they were giving a platform to.
And now we see the result. Socialist Alternative just led a march of an estimated 30,000 people through the centre of Sydney to a speech by a sitting Greens Senator in Mehreen Faruqi who has a record of hanging around with that exact same extremist group. Also speaking was Greens MLC David Shoebridge whose association with at least three different revolutionary Trotskyist groups goes back over a decade. Another speaker was Jim Casey who was described in the press as a “firefighter” which while true, is slightly less relevant than the fact that he’s a member of the NSW Greens who has stood multiple times against current opposition leader Anthony Albanese and was also a long time Trotskyist activist with the “International Socialists” (the parent group of Socialist Alternative).
And not a single journalist, not even Mr Blair, reported on any of this.
Perhaps if these people had been named as the Marxists they are in the media when they first began their protests last year we wouldn’t now be seeing the most virulent extremists our society has to offer wriggling deeper and deeper into mainstream left of centre Australia. But who knows? The press has covered up for these people for so long perhaps the stigma of advocating for the most murderous ideology in human history has faded.
Socialist Alternative is not a normal political actor. They’re not just some crazy kids with oddball ideas. They are a revolutionary Marxist organisation in the Trotskyist tradition with roots going back to the early 1970s. They genuinely believe that if Trotsky had won his power struggle with Stalin instead of having his long overdue meeting with an ice pick that the Soviet Union would have been a paradise.
The fact that as they keep growing stronger almost every media outlet in Australia seems to have an almost allergic response to the idea of mentioning that they even exist should be the biggest scandal in Australian journalism.
But it isn’t. And that should worry all of us who care about Australia and its future.
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