OPINION: Jack Lang Was A Nazi (Not really but I'm trying to make a point)
John “Jack” T. Lang: A hero mostly to Laborites and friendlyjordies fans
Jack Lang had a complicated history, but one thing that can be accurately said about him was that he was a very questionable man. Loud, bombastic, charismatic, but most of all: pretty racist. In fact, “pretty racist” might be an understatement. In his book I Remember (1956), an entire chapter is named “White Australia Saved Australia”, and includes several paragraphs of Jack Lang defending the draconian and white-supremacist White Australia policies, with such excerpts as below:
“White Australia must not be regarded as a mere political shibboleth. It was Australia's Magna Carta. Without that policy, this country would have been lost long ere this. It would have been engulfed in an Asian tidal wave. There would have been no need for the Japanese to invade this country. We would have been swallowed up by the rolling advance of a horde of colored people, anxious to escape the privations of their own countries and prepared to impose their own standards on this country.
It is necessary only to examine the racial composition of present-day Fiji, where the Hindus have elbowed the natives out of the picture, to visualise what could have happened in this country had the White Australia policy not been fought for doggedly at the end of the l9th Century. We were then fighting for our national survival. Had we weakened, the flood gates would have opened and the natural increase of population according to Asian standards would have done the rest. It would then have been too late. This country would have become a pushover for the Asiatics.” -I Remember: An Autobiography.
Jack Lang came from the old Labor of the early 1900s, which, as it should be repeated time and time again, was incredibly racist. When the Immigration Restriction Bill 1901 became the Immigration Restriction Act, it was Labor who worked with Barton's Protectionist Party to enact this law. Unions and government worked together to enforce an explicitly white-supremacist status quo in the colonial state of Australia, suppressing non-white workers for nothing more than meagre concessions from the bosses and ruling class of politicians. Such is the bargain that is often made by white workers.
Was Jack Lang entirely a bad person? Not necessarily, despite being questionable and outright cruel in his racism, Jack Lang did make marginal improvements to the working conditions of [white] Australian workers during his two terms as Premier of NSW, from 1925-1927 and later 1930-1932. But was he some kind of hero, some shining beacon of hope in a field of darkness? Also no.
Australia as a nation-state is inextricably connected to its colonial past. We see it in its institutions, its government and laws, its policing and its ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous Australians. Jack Lang and the Labor Party were one such organ of a white-supremacist colonial government.
Jordan “friendlyjordies” Shanks is an online media personality and “comedian”, and his main achievements are managing to be the centre of numerous controversies both frivolous and meaningful. He's known more recently for his questionable statements about Indigenous sovereignty politics and baseless attacks against the Australian Unemployed Worker's Union (which further display his disregard for the unemployed).
I have what I like to call friendlyjordies derangement syndrome. Simply put: I do not like friendlyjordies. I think he has a very limited and myopic view of how politics works, and is incredibly obnoxious.
January 1st, 2020: friendlyjordies releases a video about Jack Lang. Nothing too egregious, yet. Then I start thinking. Then I'm reading. Then I'm shaking my head.
Much of what Shanks said is mostly correct: Lang was a firebrand politician and a nasty contrarian, but what Mr. Shanks completely forgets to mention is that all of the concessions Lang pushed for was for white workers, not all workers. Sounds like somebody needs to be reminded that black people also existed in the 1930s.
Lang was part of a wider populist movement that had developed since the crisis of 1893, a staunchly anti-bank movement that persists to this day. Banking, being a primarily capitalist institution, is a bad thing, but taking into account the fact that Jack Lang and his contemporaries were incredibly racist and xenophobic, it wouldn't be too far fetched to guess that their anti-banking populism was less about being opposed to capitalist exploitation as much as it was about, well, hating Jews.
Ignoring this, however, Lang's policies reducing the power of banks in the New South Wales economy were interesting, and unfortunately have fallen on the wayside since. Breaking up the banks is still a hot topic nowadays, even though the likelihood of the government intervening on behalf of people and not the banks is still incredibly unlikely.
But there's no doubt that Jack Lang resonated with [white] workers: people would go to their workplaces adorned with “Lang Was Right” pins and badges, would march in the streets in the tens of thousands with huge placards depicting Jack Lang's face, and at one point formed paramilitary militias to fight against the fascist New Guard in street skirmishes almost reminiscent of the American labor battles of old.
Don't be fooled though, if the racism wasn't enough of a red flag, Jack Lang was a bitter and hostile anti-communist, a staunch opponent of the Communist Party of Australia (the CPA is a topic of a different long-winded piece).
With this in mind, it's important to recognise that Jordan Shanks is, at most, the most stale of Social Democrats, and is incapable of a proper material analysis of anything, really. Lang's premierships were part of an ongoing class war between [white] Australian workers and the bosses, and figures such as Lang chose not the side of workers, but their own side: aligning with bosses to malign non-whites in order to win the smallest of concessions for predominately white workers only.
This is the same bargain that Nazi supporters made: in order to win the possibility of progressive economic reform, they abandoned anyone who didn't conform to their myopic ideal of a “German worker”, and we all know what happened to them when the Nazis eventually did come to power.
Now, the point: we mustn't let firebrand populists convince us that in order to win economic reforms, we must abandon our non-white fellows. Class struggle is intersectional, and the liberation of the working class comes with the liberation of women, of LGBTQ+ Australians, of Indigenous Australians and of all people. You cannot win progressive economic reforms by abandoning other members of the working class simply because they don't conform to your internalized view of “working class”, such thinking is dangerous and counter productive, and leads to people engaging in spiteful class-collaboration, as we saw with the old unions of the early 1900s.
People like Jordan Shanks are indicative of a renewed push toward Labor, but pose a question of their own: is Labor even worth supporting now? Progressives across Australia have been asking this question for decades now, and many have abandoned Labor to join the Greens instead, or focus on their own non-parliamentary grassroots movements.
We must look back at figures such as Jack Lang with healthy skepticism, and not just blindly parrot centuries old talking points and buy into a dead personality cult just to appear edgy and contrarian. The same could be said of certain other communists, as well. As Lang himself said: “In the great game of life always back self-interest, because at least you know it’s trying”.