Part 1 of this article can be read here.
One of my earliest political memories is seeing the footage of Keith Warburton lying on the ground bleeding and unconscious. Mr Warburton [despite not even being a One Nation supporter] had decided to go down to a One Nation meeting in Dandenong in Melbourne’s south east, just to see what all the fuss was about.
He was attacked by three men; out of a screaming mob of hundreds one punched him, another took him into a head-lock and the third kicked him. As he fell, already unconscious, he hit his head on the curb and split it open.
The rally was led by Ian Rintoul, and scenes like this were being repeated across the country wherever the ISO could gather enough of their thugs and allies together. At meetings with other Marxist extremists, the ISO stood out from even the other groups of thugs in demanding more and more violence to close down One Nation meetings with a [in their words] ”strategy of militant confrontation”.
Under this strategy the ISO under Rintoul’s direction began a campaign of intimidation against any business, venue or even local council that dared host a One Nation meeting anywhere in Australia. Nowhere that dared to let dissident thought even just be spoken on their premises was safe.
The violent extremist ideologues behind the anti-One Nation protests were accurately reported on in the mainstream press at the time, and both Ian Rintoul and future Yarra councillor Stephen Jolly openly boasted in print that they were using the rallies to build up their organisations for a future Communist revolution.
Ian was forty four years old and had finally found his niche, his star was rising. The evil Hanson had been chased out of politics in part thanks to him, and the world was his oyster.
The violent S11 riots in 2000 where Rintoul again led attacks on police must have confirmed this impression. Ten thousand leftists, including for the first time in years large numbers of ordinary trade unionists, flooded the streets around Crown Casino, taking over the public spaces around the giant towering monument to capitalism.
Ian as well as other Marxists like the DSP led it go to their head a bit, and decided that Australia was ready to vote a Marxist political party into power. Together, they managed to scrape every extremist group they could convince or cajole together to form the Socialist Alliance.
That didn’t really work out. Socialist Alliance crashed and burned at the polls. Anti-Howard far-left votes went to the Greens instead.
Without Ian as its focus the ISO started to fall apart. Ian himself became ever more involved in the running of the Refugee Action Coalition which he himself had founded in 1999.
Eventually as their strength drained away and their old enemies the DSP took complete control of the Socialist Alliance project, and the other members of the ISO became frustrated with the path that he had led them down, Ian resigned from the group in 2003.
Ian remained involved in Trotskyite politics [in between sweetheart interviews with the ABC] and was instrumental in organising the merger in 2008 of the Socialist Action Group [Who split from Socialist Alternative] with Solidarity [a split from the ISO] and what was left of the ISO itself after the Socialist Alliance chewed it up and spit it out.
While to journalists he’s some sort of fluffy fellow who cares for poor desperate brown-skinned angels from behind mythical lines of razor wire, Ian still remains a Marxist organiser with the radical extremist Solidarity group today.
And what does the Solidarity group stand for?
On their own website they proclaim that they are against Capitalism and want to replace it with totalitarian socialism.
They wish to abolish Parliament, the army, the police and the courts and advocate mass violence and mob rule to circumvent elections.
They consider Australia an evil imperialist power and oppose all Australian patriotism as well as any form of immigration controls. They hate our country, they hate our culture, they hate our people and they hate our flag.
Yet in hundreds of interviews, it’s almost impossible to find a single journalist who will mention that the most prominent media mouthpiece for refugee activism in Australia is one of the main organisers of violent political extremism over the course of forty years.
For his entire adult life Ian Rintoul has worked towards the ultimate goal of the violent destruction of Australian society as it now exists. He has been the motive force behind violent demonstrations that have left blood on the streets and police in hospital. He has held membership for four decades with some of the most extreme radical groups in Australian politics.
If the most prominent member of an anti-immigration group here in Australia had not only been a leader of a neo-Nazi group four decades ago, but had remained a leader and a committed neo-Nazi through until today, do you think the media might mention that fact?
The extreme left gets a pass because we let it get a pass, because we don’t put pressure on journalists to be honest about the causes of political violence in Australia and the groups behind them.
The journalists in the mid to late nineties, even from the Fairfax stable, were able to accurately report on the groups behind deranged violent fanatics like Rintoul. Yet now in the internet age with all such information available at the touch of a button, the valiant, self-regarding slobs of our fourth estate don’t seem interested.
It’s up to us to change that. Spread the word, send angry emails, share this article on social media and flood the comment sections next time rats like Rintoul are given a platform to pretend that they’re normal, compassionate human beings.
Nothing will change if we do nothing. The mobs of violent extremists that plague our streets and attempt to stamp dissenting voices into the dirt don’t appear by magic. The groups that create them are carefully cultivated and grown over the course of dozens of years.
It’s beyond time, well beyond time that the toxic curators of these factories of division and hate like Rintoul be cut out of the body politic and put under the microscope.