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What do you do with a drunken ’soldier’?

From The Hun:

Southern Cross Soldiers plan Australia Day rally

January 23, 2009 12:00am

A RIGHT-WING nationalist group has organised a show of strength at a popular Melbourne beach on Australia Day.

The Southern Cross Soldiers, or SCS, has told members to gather at Mordialloc beach in Melbourne’s south this Monday to promote “Aussie Pride”.

The nationalist group, which boasts about 900 MySpace members, plans to meet at the steps of Flinders Street station at 12pm before heading to the beach “for drinks, etc” in what it describes as “the biggest day for SCS 2009″.

Police are monitoring the group and have assured beachgoers that existing patrols will be able to deal with any antisocial behaviour.

News brief · 24 January 2009

Southern Cross Soldiers, Tyler Cassidy and the far right

The (racist) far right has reacted fairly predictably to the shooting death of 15-year-old Tyler Cassidy in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote last Thursday (December 11). For those for whom The Jew is Public Enimy #1, the fault lies, of course, at the feet of The Jew.

Clouds

Stormfront, Dr. David Duke’s online, Florida-based Mental Hospital for Racist Cranks, abounds with penetrating insights. Ten of the best:

    brude: “I hope karma comes back to these rotton [sic] barstard [sic] PIGS like it did in the 1980’s.”
    Spinosus: “Police officers in the west are ZOG enforcers, that[']s why I don’t like them.”
    303pugs: “It looks very much like an anti white manouver [sic] by our new order gov.”
    Sam: “As much of a tragedy [as] it is, there is also a lesson to be learnt: Don’t touch drugs.”
    Silverfern (CHURCH OF THE NATIONAL KNIGHTS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN): “I believe the cops were justified, if I was me [sic] the little toerag wouldn’t of made it two steps.”
    Cup-of-Ruin: “If that had been a Muslim or an Abbo [sic] they blasted there would be an uproar…”
    Patriot08: “I love that Brutal Attack song on his myspace page too.”
    Etain: “Tyler Cassidy, another white victim of the final solution… Tyler Cassidy is quickly becoming a Ned Kelly. An Australian “outlaw”, fighting to defend what it meant to be an Australian, who tried to survive in a place where he was a MINORITY, and was constantly reminded of his white man’s burden.”
    sixtytwo [SCS Sydney]: “The [SCS] are vowing revenge they are vowing to get together.”
    firestone: “So SCS: stay strong and hold your ground. Know that your cause is a noble one, as is ours, and the enemies [sic] main weapons are lies and manipulation. Only the weaker-minded guys will fall away for good because they fear criticism too much. This incident will no doubt attract more attention from your/our enemies, so learn as much about who they are and why they do what they do as you can. They will try to manipulate public opinion against you, but understand that these antis are a bunch of pussies who only do such things safely hidden away behind their [computer]. The only time you may catch a glimpse is if they venture out for the latest anti-Nike or G20 protests.”

    http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=550686

Latrines

Also on the anti-Semitic far right, in typically florid prose, Dr James Saleam, Fuehrer of the Australia First Party (NSW), asks, If The Victorian Police Wrongfully Shot A Boy, Why Does The Media Now Wish To Dig A Latrine As His Grave? (Statement By The Australia First Party, December 14.) Herr Doktor — sentenced to three and a half years jail in 1991 for organising a shotgun attack on the home of Eddie Funde, Australasian representative of the African National Congress — blames The (Jew) Controlled Media for plunging headlong down a Super Fun “slippery-slope of untruth, building up a shadowy Internet discussion board, the Southern Cross Soldiers, into a racist, extremist, activist and criminal circle.” Further: “Australia First Party denounces the media line that the Southern Cross Soldiers, an ostensible “nationalist” group, existed outside of the Internet site - MySpace.”

Slackbastard · 16 December 2008 · Discussion

Compare & Contrast

From Crikey:

Teenage deaths in Athens and Melbourne: A comparison

Cam Smith writes:

“Police murdered a 15 year-old kid in Northcote last night,” read the text message, “Come to Northcote police station. Crew heading there now. Demand justice. Fuck the bastards.” In the carpark outside the police station, a group of young radical types stood in a huddle, discussing the events of the previous night. Spread throughout the carpark, the media were identifiable by their obscure gang patches, 7, 9, 10.

“Do you think it’ll go Greek?” one anarchist asked me. “I don’t think so,” I replied, “This is Northcote, not Exarchia.”

And yet, despite my pithy response in the damp patch of ashphalt between Northcote Plaza and All Nations Park, the question persisted throughout the day — on radio, on blogs, on the newspaper websites… even my mum asked me: Why does nobody listen to me?

The similarity was striking, I suppose. Only five days after Athenian police had gunned down a 15-year-old boy, Alexandros Grigoropoulos, police in the third-largest Greek city in the world had shot dead another 15-year-old boy, Tyler Cassidy. The key is in the contrast:

  • In Northcote, the police [claim to have] had no choice.
  • In Athens, eyewitnesses describe the police initiating conflict by provoking the youths.
  • In Northcote, the police tried to negotiate, before turning to capsicum foam, then resorting to their sidearms.
  • In Athens, eyewitnesses describe the police officer who fired the shots as having exposed his genitals just prior to executing Alexandros.
  • In Athens, the police officer was a member of a neo-Nazi gang.

There is contrast in the response too: While anarchists in Greece reported on goings-on there in an almost poetic manner, on 4Chan, Anonymous amused itself by photoshopping pictures of knives into Cassidy’s hands and bombarding a tribute MySpace with abuse (it has since been taken down).

While Greece burned, hundreds of people around the world expressed solidarity (some then had riots of their own). In Melbourne, Cassidy was mentioned at a solidarity vigil attended by 30 well-soaked bleeding hearts outside the Greek consulate on Saturday. On Sunday afternoon, two dodgy looking blokes in a car tried to organise a rally outside the Northcote police station. Nobody showed up.

Cassidy’s juvenile politics makes him easy to hate, but while the Southern Cross Soldiers are a bit of a nasty bunch, being a dickhead is not yet a capital crime. Alexandros Grigoropoulos’ death will be long remembered for the actions it initiated.

Cassidy’s death will fall down the memory hole — a stupid, messed-up kid on a suicide mission. He deserves better — he should be remembered as the kid whose death prompted increased funding to Crisis Assessment Teams and improvements to police training. He should be remembered as the last needless police death in Victoria. He won’t be, but he should.

News brief · 16 December 2008

Southern Cross Soldiers: Life in the trenches

Following the police shooting of Tyler Cassidy last Thursday evening (December 11), and the subsequent exposure of his membership of the ‘Southern Cross Soldiers’, there has been a barrage of media attention coming the Soldiers’ way. In response, some appear to have ducked for cover (their main page on Myspace has been deleted: see Google cache) while others are cowering in their foxholes (setting their pages to ‘private’). In summary, the tragedy surrounding Tyler’s death is now competing for public attention with the farcical manoeuvrings of the volunteer army that is the Southern Cross Soldiers. Below are links to a number of posts on the slackbastard blog which discuss the Soldiers and which provide further links to some of the enormous (and growing) media coverage that Tyler’s association with SCS has generated.

More press on Tyler Cassidy shooting…
Provides links to a dozen or so press articles, including:

Call for answers after cops kill 15-year-old Tyler Cassidy, Julie-Anne Davies and Milanda Rout, The Australian:

…According to Cam Smith, the organiser of FightdemBack, a group which fights race-hate groups in Australia, the Southern Cross Soldiers is mainly organised through MySpace and there are at least 1000 members in nine chapters across the country.

The gang is made up of mainly teenagers, but the leaders were aged in their mid-twenties and the group was set up through the internet after the Cronulla riots. “They are mainly young people and are organised extensively through MySpace,” Mr Smith said. “It is a post-Cronulla thing. A lot of people who had been inspired by Cronulla have connected through the internet.”

Mr Smith said the Southern Cross Soldiers first came across the radar in January. “They are a gang whose activities are mainly limited to fights with other groups and occasionally picking on the random minority in the street,” Mr Smith said.

“A number of them are fairly hard-core neo-Nazis. The rest of them are fairly hard-core racists. They are interested in racial purity in Australia.”

Southern Cross Soldiers : Into the Blogosphere
Links to a small range of commentary on the case in the Australian blogosphere.

The Ugly Australian(s)
Links to an article in The Australian and very brief coverage of the reaction on everyone’s favourite White supremacist forum Stormfront.

Slackbastard · 14 December 2008 · Discussion

Tyler Cassidy and the Southern Cross Soldiers

As alluded to earlier, the police shooting of 15-year-old Tyler Cassidy in the Melbourne suburb of Northcote last night (Thursday, December 11) has particular significance at FDB: Tyler was a member of the racist youth network Southern Cross Soldiers (SCS).

The SCS initially came to the media’s attention in November, when Liam Houlihan published an article in the November 23 edition of the Sunday Herald Sun: Victorian police vow crackdown to stop ‘another Cronulla’. The slackbastard blog provides some additional commentary, and a number of SCS members were moved to denounce the article, S.C.S Melb Leader commenting:

The pro-Cronulla riot videos released onto youtube then added to our myspace had more than just racism about them, they showed a whole army of my fellow countrymen and women standing up for themselves, for something they believe in, and most importantly standing up for there country. They were not put there to glorify the cronulla riots in any way, just merely a well compiled video of plenty of aussies and australian flags, that really caught my eye and made me feel good

In keeping with the Cronulla tradition, the previous weekend — the third anniversary of the Cronulla riot — the Melbourne chapter of the group held a party.

Slackbastard · 12 December 2008 · Discussion

Teenager shot dead by police in Northcote

[The relevance of this incident to the FDB brief should become clearer later today - we can't say much at the moment.]

From the Herald Sun:

Police shoot teenage boy dead in Northcote
Wayne Flower
December 11, 2008

THREE police officers shot dead a knife-wielding teenager last night after failing to stop him with capsicum foam.

The boy, 15, died after being shot in the chest about 9.30pm in a skate park outside the Northcote Plaza Shopping Centre.

Police had twice unsuccessfully used the foam on him.

It is believed the victim entered a Kmart store shortly before the shooting in an agitated state and demanded knives from staff.

He grabbed several, left the store, slashing boxes on his way and behaving in a very agitated manner, witnesses said last night.

He was shot by police in All Nations Park, east of the shopping centre.

Police said they found him carrying two knives.

News brief · 12 December 2008

Crazy kids and their intarwebs.

The Southern Cross Soldiers (SCS) finally make it into the papers.

(See below.)

They’re just like real soldiers (only not quite as well paid).

“Friends, today was an historic day, the day Australians stood up against state-imposed multiculturalism,” Darrin Hodges wrote on the night of the Cronulla riots. Accompanying his posting is a series of photographs he took at Cronulla that day, including one of a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “wog free zone” and another of a sign offering free sausages to the crowd, with “no tabouli”. Darrin also speaks of footage he filmed on the day which [FightDemBack!] believes was used in a video released over the weekend that glorifies a mob of rioters bashing various non-whites at Cronulla.

In his article (Victorian police vow crackdown to stop ‘another Cronulla’) Liam makes reference to a Cronulla vid (Videos on [SCS] websites glorify the Cronulla riots to a neo-Nazi soundtrack promising “race war”), which is presumably a reference to the vid Australian Protectionist Party (APP) members Darrin Hodges and Martin Fletcher helped to produce and distribute on Stormfront in the riot’s immediate aftermath. Hodges & Co. maintain that the ‘riot’ was in fact a ‘White Civil Uprising’, an opening shot fired in a civil war in which their side seeks to return Australia to its natural status as a 100% White outpost in Asia. While Hodges & Co. are based in Sydney, at the same time, in Melbourne, another APP member, Luke Connors, in his then capacity as spokesperson for the now-defunct ‘Patriotik Yoof League’:

…predicted further outbreaks.

“‘When you have areas which are majority Muslim, because they don’t tend to adapt that well, or majority African or Middle Eastern extraction, and right next door you have an area which is 90 per cent Anglo-Saxon, or Anglo-Celtic, there is going to be friction,” he said.

“West Heidelberg is a big one because you have a very large black working-class community next to a white middle-working-class community. That would be my best guess actually if it was going to start up in Melbourne.

“Also, out past Springvale, along the train line, there is that same sort of segregation going on, in working-class areas where they are competing for the same jobs and there is a high unemployment rate.”

~ Ewin Hannan and Richard Baker, Nationalists boast of their role on the beach, The Age, December 13, 2005

Slackbastard · 23 November 2008 · Discussion