Australian Politicians in Bed With Fascism

13/03/2022

Leon Hayes

On February 14th, Anthony Albanese stood over his despatch box to deliver an unsurprising and obligatory solidarity statement against what was at the time a potential invasion of Ukraine. Leaving aside the rank hypocrisy of Australian officials shedding crocodile tears for Ukrainians after conducting decades of imperialist war in Iraq and Afghanistan, alongside NATO “interventions” in Yugoslavia and Libya, what was unusual was Albanese’s mention of a particular Ukrainian Australian – Stefan Romaniw.

On the surface, Romaniw seems like another banal NGO executive – trained as a teacher, chairing the Victorian Multicultural commission and the Victorian government’s Australia Day Committee [1], even earning himself an Order of Australia in 2001 [2]. However, simply scratching the surface of Romaniw’s biography immediately betrays this image of a model figure with an array of achievements.

In 2009, Romaniw was elected as the President of the Organisation of Ukranian Nationalists (OUN) Bandera faction [3]. The faction, named after the quisling Stepan Bandera, began as a fascist, ultranationalist organisation which attempted to establish an independent state in early WWII [4]. After pledging loyalty to Adolf Hitler and being betrayed by him, OUN-B scuttled to form the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in late 1942 [5]. From 1943-44, the OUN-UPA carried out massacres against eastern-Ukrainian based Poles – targeted ethnic cleansing which resulted in the deaths of up to 100,000 Polish Ukrainians [6]. There are also accounts of the UPA targeting and killing Ukrainian Jews while the country was under occupation [7]. After WWII, the OUN-B persisted in diaspora, reasserting itself in Ukrainian domestic politics after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 2018, Romaniw was reappointed as president of the OUN-B and is now the global leader of the faction.

Stefan Romaniw, with the red and black flag used by the OUN-B in the background.
Licensed: ВО Свобода, CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

But how can this be? How can the leader of the Australian Labor Party get up in parliament to relay that he unflinchingly proclaimed loyalty to Ukrainian sovereignty to a leader of a fascist organisation? Why does this pass without notice while mainstream media cries and caws about an interview Albanese did with revisionists decades ago [8]? A closer analysis of Australian political history provides us with some answers – revealing alignments and support for quislings like Romaniw is not out of the ordinary.

Romaniw is part of a broader cold-war remnant in which rehabilitated “patriots” served as a bulwark against perceived communist influence. In Australian politics, there are many characters in this story. Perhaps the most infamous is Ljenko Urbancic.

Urbancic was instrumental in forming a hard-right faction in the NSW Liberal party in the 1970s, derisively (and aptly) named “the Uglies” [9]. By the late 1970s, he was a major powerbroker in the state party – controlling up to 30% of the votes at the 800-member council [10]. He led efforts to crush ‘small-l liberals’ within the party, attacking moderate positions on drugs, law and order, and homosexuality. His power was only checked when his past was revealed to parliament and was exposed to be a former quisling propogandist and Nazi collaborationist. Nicknamed “Little Goebbels” [10], Urbancic produced chauvinistic contributions to collaborationist newspapers and magazines, broadcasting anti-Semitic, pro-Axis screeds over the radio. In one 1944 broadcast Urbancic spoke of the “truth” about “all the vile intentions of the chosen people [Jews]” – stressing that “above all… the Jews, [are the] sworn enemies of Christianity and all the non-Jewish world” [11]. When this was revealed to the Australian public, Urbancic was briefly suspended from the Liberal party but was never expelled – his last attendance at the NSW council meetings for the party was in 2005, a year before his death [12].

Again, people such as Urbancic and Romaniw are just two examples of fascistic political figures who have been embraced by Australian politics ever since the end of the Second World War. Mark Aarons reveals in his book Sanctuary how lesser-known collaborators and fascists – such as Urbancic, Laszlo Megay (War Criminal) and Viktor Padanyi (Hungarian Fascist) [13] – were smuggled out of Europe and become new citizens in places like England, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. Government groups such as ASIO had archival evidence detailing the war-time activities of these fugitives, yet under the circumstances of Cold war “realpolitik,” Australia became a safe haven for them. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has described Australia as

“The only country in the Western world to which large numbers of Nazi collaborators and criminals (at least several hundreds if not several thousands) emigrated after World War II which has hereto failed to take successful legal action against a single one” [14].

This stance has been reaffirmed in their most recent report into the worldwide investigation and prosecution of Nazi War criminals [15].

We can only imagine how many fascists and collaborators died peacefully and without punishment in this country. But, as the old get buried beneath Australian soil, the weeds of fascism threaten to spread above it.

Georgi Dimitrov said succinctly and correctly that “fascism is the most vicious enemy of the working class and of all working people” [16]. Mainstream capitalist parties such as the ALP and the Liberal Party will always embrace reactionary politics when it suits them to maintain their stranglehold on Australian society and have proven to be incapable (or at the very least, unwilling) of cleaning up their ranks. Only when the working class seizes political power can the cancer of fascism be properly dug out of the flesh of Australian society, politics, and beyond.

References:

Thumnail Image: Bidgee, CC BY-SA 3.0 AU https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/au/deed.en, via Wikimedia Commons.

[1] https://www.vic.gov.au/stefan-romaniw-oam

[2] https://www.sbs.com.au/aboutus/person/stefan-romaniw-oam

[3] Rossolinski, G. (2014). Stepan Bandera: The life and afterlife of a Ukrainian nationalist: Fascism, genocide, and cult. Columbia University Press: p. 467.

[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20170105084537/http://www.archivelviv.gov.ua/materials/exhibitions/do-21-richchja-vidnovlennja-nezalezhnosti-ukrajini/1146/

[5] Timothy Snyder. (2004). The Reconstruction of Nations. New Haven: Yale University Press: p. 168

[6] Pertti, Ahonen (2008). Peoples on the Move: Population Transfers and Ethnic Cleansing Policies During World War II and Its Aftermath. Bloomsbury Academic: p. 99.

[7] Risch, William Jay (2011). The Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. Harvard University Press. pp. 55, 65, 69.

[8] https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/national/revealed-albos-sitdown-with-communist-party-paper/news-story/dc65dda6379f06d7b03679a514be6f54

[9] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nazi-propagandist-and-liberal-hard-man-dies-after-30-powerful-years-20060223-gdn0wd.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true

[10] https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/return-uglies

[11] https://web.archive.org/web/20041001104337/http://www.parliament.nsw.gov.au/prod/parlment/HansArt.nsf/V3Key/LC19970924041

[12] https://www.smh.com.au/national/nazi-propagandist-and-liberal-hard-man-dies-after-30-powerful-years-20060223-gdn0wd.html?js-chunk-not-found-refresh=true

[13] https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/how-liberals-sheltered-nazis

[14] Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Nazi War Criminals Prosecution-Annual Status Report April 2001, 18 April 2001.

[15] Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Nazi War Criminals Prosecution-Annual Status Report October 2020, October 2020.

[16] https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm#s2