Australians, at least pre-covid, generally liked to imagine that we lived in a pretty free country. Unlike those prudish Yanks, by the 70s, we even had full frontal nudity on telly. We certainly didn’t have that communist censorship stuff.
Except that that was a total lie.
From colonial times, Australia has been subject to oversight by censors, especially of anything that might corrupt the moral climate of the colony. That nanny-state attitude never really went away, even in the swinging 70s, after the banning of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint led to the overturning of many censorship laws.
Especially by the 1980s and the moral panic over those newfangled porn machines, VCRs. Except this time, it was largely the feminist left leading the crusade against pornography. Lad’s mags were consigned to plastic wrappers, X-Rated videos were banned in all states (but not, by oversight, territories, leading to the hilarious situation of Canberra becoming the nations’ Porn Capital, where a humming mail-order business ran from the infamous suburb of Fyshwick).
Australia introduced the “Non-Violent Erotica” category, meaning not even the suggestion of “violence” was allowed in porn videos: which meant, ludicrously, that “story” x-rated movies were banned, especially those with a fantasy or pirate theme, if they featured non-euphemistic swordplay.
The internet has made a lot of such censorship completely redundant, but, as it happens, films and video games still occasionally get banned by the Australian Classification Review Board. Books too, but only if they have been referred to the ACRB by Border Force, state and territory police or the e-Safety Commissioner.
So, just what books is Border Force — more particularly, its Counter Terrorism Unit — concerned about?
ABF-Counter Terrorism has submitted a grand total of ten books to the Board, all this year, they being:
• Bronze Age Mindset
• For My Legionairies
• The Controversy of Zion
• The Camp of the Saints
• The Turner Diaries
• Harassment Architecture
• Adolf Hitler: The Ultimate Avatar
• Mein Kampf: The New Ford Translation
• White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century
• Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean
This immediately raises so many questions.
For instance, there are dozens of translations of Mein Kampf available: what’s particularly juicy in the “Ford translation”? According to online blurbs, it’s “uncensored”, while at least one reviewer says that it’s a pretty poor translation and that this “Ford” fellow is a bit of a weirdo with a talent for self-promotion and little else.
The Camp of the Saints is, of course, Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel which seems to be “controversial” mostly for predicting pretty accurately how mass-migration from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa was going to play out in France. Oh well, if Australians can’t read that, at least we can apparently still read Christopher Priest’s novel on almost exactly the same theme (but in England), Fugue for a Darkening Island, which beat Raspail’s book by several months.
“Bronze Age Mindset”, written by some swarthy internet fellow named ‘Bronze Age Pervert’, seems the oddest one, since it is apparently some sort of work of popular philosophy, which draws heavily from ancient Greek and modern German thinkers. Will the Border Force submit Friedrich Nietzsche’s works for review some day?
According to its Amazon blurb, Bronze Age Mindset explains how “you live in ant farm. That you are observed by the lords of lies, ritually probed…He shows the secrets of the detrimental robots, how they hide and fabricate. He helps you escape gynocracy and ascend to fresh mountain air”.
With all that probing and gynocracy, some fresh air might well needed.
Why Race Matters seems to be a scholarly work, somewhat in the line of Charles Murray, which “summarizes what has been written about the differences in intelligence and temperament, and, more important, explores their larger significance”.
Ooh, lemme guess: White supremacy? Apparently not: “Levin’s naturalistic outlook finds no group superior”.
Tough luck, all you Aryan Brotherhood types: sounds like it’s not even worth trying to get past all the big words.
In any case they were all but one classified as “Unrestricted” and rated “M” (Mature), which just means people who read them should ideally but not mandatorily be over 15. Only “The Turner Diaries” got Category 1 Restricted (18+), which suggests they are only interested in actual depictions of violence in text form, not ‘violent ideas’.
Clown World Australia
The biggest question, though, is why all of the books seem to fall into the “right-wing extremist” category. While these may, at a pinch, be odious enough stuff (especially Jew-baiting trash like The Controversy of Zion), one might think that our Counter Terrorism Unit would be particularly interested in the sort of literature favoured by the actual terrorists committing actual terrorist attacks in Australia.
Or maybe no-one at Border Force reads Arabic, so, hey, just wave it all on through.
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