Interview: Preventing the “fractured right” from gaining traction

Paul Gregoire interviews Tasnim Sammak for Sydney Criminal Lawyers, 10th December 2025:

Why is it important to challenge these movements on the streets at the grassroots level? What would be the issue if everybody just sat at home and ignored them?

If we didn’t come together to counter the fascist protests, then Naarm’s streets would belong to fascists who are able to be emboldened by parading their program out in the public.

But this is Black Native land and the days of the colonialists spewing their white pride filth should be over.

Indigenous resistance should ground our understanding of antifascism, as it is Indigenous resistance that has stood in the way of the white nationalist project of the colony.

Indigenous people fought off racist, colonial forces that sought to annihilate, subjugate and assimilate them, springing forward, alongside international anticolonial and racial justice movements, the 1967 referendum, land rights, racial equality laws and later, the repeal of the White Australia policy.

Today’s white nationalists want a return to early settler colonial laws that empowered white settlers to plunder and purge in advance of the national project.

The NSN say, ‘Australia for the white man’, which is not a new slogan, they directly draw on early colonial ideals.

Our task is to provide and foster an alternative racial politics by attempting to disrupt far-right marches and reject their vision.

As capitalism is in crisis and social and economic problems deepen, fascism will be on the rise to keep the system intact, but we can intervene in this process and prevent white masses from embracing the populist appeal of rising neo-Nazi and far-right political programs.

Comrades today are having to face stun grenades and rubber bullets in Naarm, which has been very testing for our movement.

We are facing difficulty knowing how to withstand such police assaults against counterprotests. We should remember then that such violence is miniscule compared to the genocidal assaults that Indigenous peoples resisted on these very lands.

Indigenous and working people also fought against the spread of fascism in World War Two, which our generation is not yet asked to do. We can accomplish a lot and should look to history when our hesitations gain hold.