Craig English spent 12 months in the thick of far-left agitation, before finding a practice older than any revolution.
For about 12 months he marched under the red banners of socialism—a blur of meetings, megaphones, and violent police clashes—but once the fervour ended, what remained was an unexpected turn towards the deep wells of tradition.
In 2018, Craig English joined the far-left activist group, the Socialist Alternative, one of a smattering of similar organisations operating in Melbourne—arguably Australia’s protest capital.
He tells The Epoch Times how the organisation operated, how he was “educated” in its ways, and what eventually shook his resolve and compelled him to leave for a different path.
‘Nobody Cared’
“Did you see what happened to Cam?” English recalls yelling to his fellow comrades—a single voice amid the turmoil of clashes with police during a visit by UK conservative leader, now-Reform leader, Nigel Farage in Melbourne in September 2018.
Just seven weeks earlier, the group blocked the busy Hume Highway in Somerton in the city’s far north to protest Canadian commentator Lauren Southern’s visit.
“[The Socialist Alternative] always made a point of not openly advocating for violent conflict, but everything that they encouraged people to do in terms of resistance, ended up being violent,” English said.
Members number at over 100 but it is active in coordinating other far-left groups, and joining (or hijacking) existing movements like climate change, Black Lives Matter, pro-Palestine, and more recently, immigration counter-rallies.
They differ from the Victorian Socialists or the Socialist Alliance with their near-puritanical focus on disruptive protest and ideology—shunning any political aspirations.
Amid the chaos of the Farage protest, English recalls one protestor walking up to the police line and emptying a water bottle onto them. Police responded by grabbing him and dragging him away.
English frantically yelled to his comrades if they’d seen what happened to “Cam.”
“Nobody cared,” English recalls. “Nobody actually cared that he might have been hurt or something might have happened to him, and no one knew where he’d gone.”
“And that was the first shock to my system that something wasn’t quite right, and that none of the people that I spoke to at this rally cared that something might have happened to him,” the now-health worker recalled.
“They actually don’t care about who you are as an individual. They care about who you are as a number,” he added.
At another protest, English remembered seeing a normally “softly spoken and friendly” person become engulfed with “blind rage.”
“He just turned monstrous,” he said. “That really shocked me. I just thought, ‘Something’s not right about this.’”
By Cindy Li and Daniel Y. Teng
