A rough week for the master race
The master race has not fared well in the last little while. First, the führer of the United Patriots Front, Blair Cottrell, was spotted enjoying a halal kebab (with hummus, garlic yoghurt and BBQ sauce) in Frankston, Melbourne. Leaked threats of violence against disgruntled followers did not help make his denials more convincing.
It’s not always easy being a white supremacist. Last year, a UPF member was arrested for possession of drugs, firearms and large quantities of steroids. Last month, another, Phil Galea, appeared in court charged with possessing tasers and materials that can be used to build explosives. After breaching bail, he was banned from using the internet, attending Reclaim Australia rallies or associating with members of the movement.
Most recently, a planned UPF rally in Toowoomba met with stiff opposition, forcing them to hold their rally indoors, at a bowling hall. The groundswell of support for the #letthemstay movement can’t be encouraging them, either.
These hard times seem to be exacerbating the paranoia of the more, shall we say, touched neo-Nazis out there. Chris Shortis, Senate candidate for the Fortitude Party (the UPF’s newest enterprise) is one such individual. Among other things, Shortis’ platform includes opposing an alleged US-led plan to install the pope as world leader, via the United Nations.
So, serious cracks have begun to emerge in the movement. Neil Erikson and Sherman Burgess (both long term white supremacists) have led a charge to expose Fortitude, the UPF and Blair Cottrell as neo-Nazis. A 10 February video, posted on Erikson’s Facebook page, begins by confessing that he, too, was once a Nazi.
Formerly a member of the Nationalist Alternative, he joined the UPF, although apparently “undercover”. He then invited Blair Cottrell to join, knowing him to be a Nazi, on the condition that he, too keep the Hitler stuff under wraps.
Blair Cottrell has called for every Australian classroom to bear a picture of Adoph Hitler.
Things started to go wrong, perhaps when men with very visible swastika tattoos started turning up to UPF rallies. So, Burgess has posted videos accusing the UPF of betraying the diggers who shot Nazis during WW2. “This is the Australian patriots’ movement, not the Fourth Reich”, he says.
For Erikson’s part, he claims to have abandoned Nazism. A simple man once misled by self-proclaimed Nazi “intellectuals”, he now regards the flag of the Third Reich as a flag of failure. Assuring us that he still hates leftie “c**ksuckers”, he would prefer to start something new. Hence his bombshell revelation that Cottrell is, in fact, a Nazi.
One interesting thing about both Burgess’ and Erikson’s denunciations of the UPF and Cottrell is that they are posed largely in tactical terms. Both say that a movement which draws on historic Nazism is bound to fail in Australia and that the “patriots” movement will be undermined by association with Nazism. It is quite clear that their objections to neo-Nazism are less principled than pragmatic.
At any rate, Blair Cottrell has hit back, posting a video on the UPF Facebook group assuring us that he is not a Nazi. Sure, he owns a copy of Mein Kampf, but he also owns a copy of The Communist Manifesto and the Quran! He’s an informed man; reading Mein Kampf didn’t make him a Nazi.
Except that it did. He has called for every Australian classroom to bear a picture of Adoph Hitler. He has made extensive comments about the worldwide Jewish-Marxist-homosexual conspiracy to destroy the white race. Responding to a confused follower on a Facebook thread, he wrote: “Please shut up and take a week off the internet to read Mein Kampf. The basis for national socialism is race, which exists, it is real and important”. This is the tip of a vast and repulsive iceberg that he has never denied or distanced himself from.
The left understood that Reclaim Australia and the UPF were neo-Nazi groups from the moment they emerged, and so did Burgess and Erikson, despite their “revelations”. So their denunciations can mean only one thing: our side is doing its job well of exposing their hatred.
