Sonnenkrieg Division, a UK-based neo-Nazi group, will be effectively banned in Australia once its listing as a terror group is confirmed.
The group has been outlawed in the UK since early last year, and members have been convicted of encouraging terrorism, disseminating terror material, and preparations for a terrorist act.
Two Sonnenkrieg Division members were convicted in 2019 for plotting to attack the British royal family.
Decisions to list terror groups are made on the advice of security agencies like ASIO.
As a result of the listing, it will become an offence to be a member of the group, fund the group, or in some circumstances associate with members of the group.
Penalties can range to up to 25 years in prison.
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has written to Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese, and all state and territory leaders, proposing the listing.
There are currently 27 listed terror groups in Australia, including Islamic terror groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, Boko Haram and Jemaah Islamiyah.
Increasing focus on right-wing terror
Australian security agencies have advised there are currently no Australians directly involved with Sonnenkrieg Division.
But a gathering of white supremacists in regional Victoria in January prompted calls for other right-wing groups to be listed.
Stickers promoting the “National Socialist Network” were reported by some residents in the Grampians during the group’s visit.
Some reported the group burned a cross, performed Nazi salutes and chanted white supremacist slogans.
Despite police investigations, no laws were found to be broken, which led to some experts to call for the National Socialist Network to be similarly listed.
Mr Dutton has previously asked Federal Parliament’s powerful Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to look into groups that fall short of meeting the threshold for listing, but still pose a threat.
In 2017, a professor at Oxford University in the United Kingdom proposed a research project. The key thesis: that the empire as a historical phenomenon – distinct from an ideological construct – has made ethical contributions and that its legacy cannot be reduced to that of genocides, exploitations, domination and repression.
Expectedly, such a project raised a lot of controversies to the extent that other scholars at Oxford penned an open letter dissociating themselves from such intended revisionism and whitewashing of the crimes of the empire. One leading member of the project resigned from it, citing personal reasons.
This month marks 136 years since the end of the Berlin Conference in 1885, where western powers met to set the rules for how they would divide up Africa. Historically, theoretically and empirically, it should be clear that the empire was a “death project” rather than an ethical force outside Europe; that war, violence and extractivism rather than any ethics defined the legacy of the empire in Africa.
But it is the continuation of revisionist thinking that beckons a revisiting of the question of colonialism and its impact on the continent from a decolonial perspective, challenging the colonial and liberal desire to rearticulate the empire as an ethical phenomenon.
The ‘ethics’ of empire?
In the Oxford research project, entitled Ethics and Empire (2017-22), Nigel Biggar, the university’s regius professor of moral and pastoral theology and director of the MacDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life, sought to do two important interventions: to measure apologias and critiques of the empire against historical data from antiquity to modernity across the world; and to challenge the idea that empire is imperialist, imperialism is wicked, and empire is therefore unethical.
In support of its thesis, the description of the research project lists “examples” of the ethics of the empire: the British empire’s suppression of the “Atlantic and African slave trades” after 1807; granting Black Africans the vote at the Cape Colony 17 years before the United States granted it to African Americans; and offering “the only armed centre of armed resistance to European fascism between May 1940 and June 1941”.
But the selective use of such examples does not paint a complete picture. Any attempt to credit the British empire for the abolition of slavery, for instance, ignores the ongoing resistance of enslaved Africans from the moment of capture right up to the plantations in the Americas. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 still stands as a symbol of this resistance: enslaved African people rose against racism, slavery and colonialism – demonstrating beyond doubt that the European institution of slavery was not sustainable.
At the House Financial Services Committee hearing last week on the GameStop debacle, there was an elephant in the room: naked short selling.
Short selling, effectively betting that a stock will go down, involves a trader selling shares he does not own, hoping to buy them back at a lower price to make money on the spread. The trader is supposed to locate (or have a “reasonable belief” he can locate) or borrow the shares in brokerage accounts, and then transfer them to the buyer within two days. This accounts for as much as 50 percent of daily trading.
Naked short selling is when the trader does not find those shares to deliver. It’s costly to big hedge funds to locate hard-to-borrow shares. So prime brokers, who carry inventory of stocks for high-volume short sellers, simply lie about the borrows, to assist their favorite clients.
It’s a scam central to the stock trading system, enabled by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the market regulator, and the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. (DTCC), the stock clearinghouse, to benefit the big players. The SEC has long been run by revolving-door officials who move between it and Wall Street trading houses and law firms. DTCC is owned by the prime brokers, such as Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citi, and run in their interests.
At the House hearing, Rep. Nydia Velazquez (D-NY) asked about the dangers of short selling. “GME [GameStop] sold short 140 percent. Why isn’t that manipulation?” She meant that short sellers sold 40 percent more shares in GameStop than existed. They were phantom shares that didn’t exist but that were posted in buyers’ accounts as “entitlements.” The buyers have no idea they don’t have real shares. They can sell and even loan those digital entitlements.
In other words, large numbers of “locates” or “borrows” were fake, making the shorts “naked.” Why does it matter? Because naked short selling causes the number of shares in the market to increase, which normally makes their value drop; more shares equals less value. And it can massively disrupt the market, as GameStop showed.
Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY) backed up Velazquez. “We are interested in naked shorting. How do you make sure you are first locating to borrow?” Rep. Ed Perlmutter (D-CO) asked if sellers were in a naked position.
In fact, more than one million GameStop shares were deemed “failed-to-deliver,” meaning buyers never got the shares they ordered, according to a Bloomberg report. Business Insider reported that “$359 million in stock was in limbo, with buyers lacking cash or sellers not having the shares to settle trades, according to data from the Securities and Exchange Commission.”
Kenneth Griffin, CEO of Citadel Securities, which handled GameStop trades for the internet company Robinhood, downplayed the problem. “Hedge funds have to borrow shares to short sales,” Griffin said. “The practice of naked shorting largely was curtailed by SEC mandate years ago.”
Day of the Dead (1985) | dir. George A. Romero
What the fuck is wrong with you people? They’re dead! They’re fucking dead!
