The Australian Classification Review Board rates, and occasionally bans, films and video games, while written materials it will only look at if they have been referred for review by:
- Australian Border Force
- state and federal police
- e-Safety Commissioner
Looking at just at the first, the part of the Border Force which refers books for review is the Counter Terrorism Unit and one of its jobs is:
detecting and seizing prohibited items or materials such as extremist propaganda or images on electronic devices
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
There are very many versions of ‘Mein Kampf’, is there something particularly spicy about the “Ford translation”?
“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?
It’s hard to see why they picked just these few, since there are hundreds of similar books out there, but maybe they just came up recently in their day to day business.
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’.
It’s interesting that they are even looking at this stuff, remembering that at ports of entry they look in people’s phones/tables/laptops for materials that would be grounds to exclude them from the country, or if they are citizens, to investigate them further perhaps.
Being a underground book seller sounds like an exciting concept…
(never thought it would be a job for an Aussie…)