Category: Anti-communism
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Two new articles on the international far right, anti-communism and settler colonialism
This is just a quick plug for my two new articles on the international right, anti-communism and settler colonialism. The first is ‘Policing Communism Across the ‘White Man’s World’: Anti-Communist Co-operation between Australia, South Africa and Britain in the Early Cold War’, published in Britain and the World journal. Find a version on academia here.…
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1951 and the attempt to ban the Australian Communist Party: When Turnbull’s predecessor gambled on a double dissolution election
Yesterday Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced that if the Senate did not pass two pieces of legislation to re-establish the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC), he would call for the Governor-General to issue the writs for a double dissolution election. This would mean that all seats in both the House of Representatives and…
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Forming the National Front of Australia: ASIO and the fledgling far right group
On Saturday June 2, 1978, a group of nine people gathered in a room of the Southern Cross Hotel in the Melbourne CBD to launch the National Front of Australia (NFA). According to the ASIO informant, nine people attended the meeting, including several well-known far right activists, a 16 year old schoolboy and an undercover…
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ASIO and B.A. Santamaria: Duelling Anti-Communisms
The Australian has had a love-in this week with Catholic anti-communist B.A. Santamaria, with pieces by Tony Abbott and Gerard Henderson celebrating Santamaria’s anti-communist crusade inside and outside the Australian labour movement since the 1940s, and Greg Sheridan disclosing how his work inside the National Civic Council led him to crosspaths with ASIO and conduct…
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Policing Communism Across the British Empire: A Transnational Study
This is a revised (yet shortened) version of the conference paper I gave last week at the XXIV Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History. I am currently knocking it into shape for submission as a journal article, so any feedback, comments or questions is most welcome. If you’re interested in reading the…
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Tory anti-communism in the early 1950s
In the early years of the Cold War, many saw communism as a very real and present threat to British society and the maintenance of the British Empire. The consolidation of the Eastern Bloc, the successful revolution in China, the Malayan Emergency and the Korean War heightened fears that a communist revolution could soon occur…
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We’re all off to Newcastle: The AAEH 2015 Conference
Coming around every two years, the Australasian Association of European History conference is being held in Newcastle (Australia) in July and by all accounts, it is one of the funnest conferences to attend for historians in the field (see Brett Holman’s reports from 2013 and 2011). Like many others, I will be making my way…
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Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa in the Far Right Popular Imagination
In the aftermath of the mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, it has emerged that the killer had been photographed in clothing bearing the flags of Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa. While a lot has been written on this in the last two days, I thought I would post this on how these regimes (and…
New Historical Express 