Why Are The Media Helping Marxists Smear Victoria Police?
Why on earth are the media helping Marxists to go after the police officers who stopped them from rioting outside the IMARC conference last week?
The Unshackled was covering the months of open preparation undertaken by the Revolutionary Marxist group Socialist Alternative for its three-day illegal blockade of the IMARC conference at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre. We covered it when they announced that it was going to be bigger than the S11 riots (it wasn’t). We covered it when three far-left councils voted to help the riot organisers. We reported when the Greens state executive, former Greens senators, the Greens Victorian leader and the current Greens co-deputy leader Adam Bandt endorsed the planned mass lawbreaking organised by Australia’s largest violent Trotskyist group.
The mainstream media missed it all. Even as the spittle was flying and attendees were being thrown to the ground, the media (with one notable exception) never reported on who the organisers were, their illegal plans, or their murderous motivating ideologies. For most of the last three months, unless you were reading The Unshackled, you wouldn’t have had a clue what was coming.
But now the event is over, the media are united as to who to go after. Not the violent extremists who want to overthrow the government. Not the fanatics who want to create a totalitarian state. No, they’ve found the real villains. The real baddies are, of course, the police who dared to try and stop the extremists from obstructing decent citizens in the centre of Australia’s second largest city.
On October 19th, before the IMARC riots, in an article on this very site I made a prediction:
But we all know that when (Socialist Alternative) run riot outside the Melbourne Convention Centre, the fabulous Australian Fourth Estate will stand around scratching its head, wondering how a peaceful protest could “descend into violence”. And then they’ll probably blame Victoria Police for “starting it”.
And, sadly, it has come true. In dozens of publications, from the Daily Mail to the Murdoch stable (and especially across the multiple platforms of the ABC and SBS), journalists are hunting down a policeman who was caught on camera committing the heinous crime of making an ‘O.K.’ sign with his thumb and forefinger. For background on this 4chan troll prank and just how stupid swallowing it makes the average lefty look, an explainer is here.
The media completely ignored that a three-day riot was organised by the largest violent political extremist group in Australia and, instead, went hunting after one of the coppers who was holding back the extremist mayhem, for the crime of making an O.K. sign.
And not one of them even bothered to ask who took the photo or who was spreading it around social media.
It won’t stun you to learn that the photo was taken by Kim Stern, an activist with Socialist Alternative who traveled down from Canberra to attend the illegal blockade. Stern is an organiser with the Socialist Alternative ANU group where he has been coordinating Extinction Rebellion road blockages in conjunction with Oscar Jolly, the son of disgraced socialist and Yarra Councillor Stephen Jolly. Kim originally joined the extremist group while studying at Monash in Melbourne, before moving up to Canberra to help grow the Socialist Alternative branch there. He is one of the more prominent Marxist extremists in the ACT and it was he who took the photo of the now famous O.K sign and began the witch hunt that our valiant fourth estate so eagerly took up.
Not one of the journalists – who ignored the fact that Marxists were the people trying to violently blockade a peaceful and lawful meeting – thought it was worth mentioning that Kim Stern’s Facebook site, where they took the picture from (and in most cases even credited), has the proud descriptor “Revolutionary Socialist” at the top, under a picture of Kim with his face wrapped in a red communist flag.
Kim Stern, proud revolutionary Marxist, is calling for the police officer in question to be fired for being a “fascist”.
As a brief reminder, this is what Socialist Alternative recently printed about police in the article “The Police are not on our side”, published in the September issue of the Socialist Alternative magazine Red Flag. IMARC riot organizer and Socialist Alternative activist Sarah Garnham stated:
Socialists oppose the police because we recognise the reactionary role they play in relation to political movements and in broader society. They are the brutal enforcers of the capitalist system…The police primarily exist as an institution to defend the current order….it is wrong to see the police primarily as individuals “just doing their job”. Most jobs in a capitalist economy are immoral or compromising in some way. But there is something particularly corrupting about policing. The force stands apart from ordinary people in order to control and intimidate them, sometimes violently. This requires a degree of callousness that is not required of teachers, health workers or most other jobs. As such, there are high levels of racism, sexism and other right wing social attitudes among police. Research points to well above average rates of domestic abusers among police, for example.
Not only does Socialist Alternative hate police, it openly declares in its statement of principles that it wants the entire police force abolished and a new “workers” police (controlled by them) instituted in its place.
These are the people the media decided to help attack individual Victorian Police officers and try to drive them out of their jobs. It’s almost beyond belief, but that’s the modern Australia we live in. And that fact should make us all very angry.
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