The Plot Against Australia, Part IV: Jews, Porn and the Trappings of Servitude, Part 2

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October 5, 2022/11 Comments/in Featured Articles/by Jason Cannon

The Video Revolution

Just as occurred with the internet almost two decades later, it was a revolution in technology that changed the game when it came to pornography. Small, hard to detect, portable, and easily replicable, the Video Home System (VHS) tape proved to be the perfect vehicle for the flourishing of pornographic films throughout the world. The VHS and its corresponding television playback sets (VCR) first appeared on the market in the late 1970s, and by the mid-1980s it had become the dominant form of distribution of home entertainment in households throughout the West. In 1979, a grand total of four VHS-based films were registered with the Australian Film Censorship Board for classification; in 1983, this number was 8,883, or 32.5 percent of all films examined.[1] The stage was now set for the proliferation of video-based pornography, allowing it to move away from sex shops and adult theaters and into the privacy and security of people’s houses—an environment where it was ready to be encountered by children.

Pornography made up a sizable chunk of the broader VHS market, as the porn industry, ever seeing the opportunity offered by new technology, had jumped to VHS at an early date. Despite it being illegal to import a “film” (the category under which a VHS tape technically fell) and not submit it for classification, VHS-based porn was easily sneaked into the country, bypassing the Film Censorship Board. Other than amateur products, pretty much none of the pornographic tapes circulating in the country were being produced in Australia,[2] and records of the Film Censorship Board published in the government gazette during this period demonstrate that the overwhelming majority were American productions, alongside a sizable minority of films originating from Denmark and West Germany.[3] It was soon becoming obvious to authorities that unregistered and unclassified VHS porn was flourishing under their nose, as more often than not tapes were submitted to the Board by police who had encountered them in the line of duty. The question then is, who was importing them?

The Culprits

The nature of organized crime makes establishing the facts of a coherent history of the early importation and distribution of VHS pornography into Australia an extraordinarily difficult task. The very intent of the purveyors is to hide behind layers of companies with innocuous sounding names and secretive importation networks designed to leave as little trace as possible. Government investigations make it clear that much of the production of pornographic films from America and their distribution into Australia was being undertaken by, or with the support of, organized crime.

Few of these individuals ever publicly identified themselves, and as a result, often only tantalizing snippets of information can be deduced, offered up by crime writers who investigated a story on the condition of maintaining full anonymity of their sources. What emerges from this sparse documentation is that at some point during the early 1980s, Jews with strong associations to organized crime in the United States had made the decision to set up an illegal importation and distribution network of VHS pornography in Australia. So successful was this early network, that by the time X-rated tapes were legalized in 1984, there was already a thriving local industry in the country.

The key figures identified in this network were Norman Arno[4] and Theodore Gaswirth, both of whom were associates of Rueben Sturman, the “King of Smut.” Alongside plenty of other Jews, the pair were named in the Meese Report in 1986 (Final Report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography) as major players in the pornographic industry in America since the early 1970s. Gaswirth specialized in the production of hard-core 8mm films produced by his company Lyndon Distributors, a leading Los Angeles porn producer, and Arno held the video rights to Debbie Does Dallas (1978), a film as popular in Australia as it was in America. Arno’s company, VCX Incorporated, was an early mover to the video market, and transferred many of the old stag movies and hard-core theatrical films to VHS tapes. According to leading Australian crime writer Bob Bottom, Arno travelled to Australia in March 1980 for a 15–day visit and Gaswirth followed in January 1981, making another two trips that year.[5] Bottom gave evidence at the Video Material Committee that Rueben Sturman himself also came to Australia in 1981.[6]

Their main Australian contact appeared to be Alexander Gajic[7], the proprietor of a network of video companies in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra which distributed VHS tapes around the country. A mail order advertisement placed in The Age newspaper in 1982 by one of Gajic’s companies (Curbydex Pty Ltd), show that he had access to VHS and Betamax versions of all the big 1970s hard-core films.[8] Gajic was not alone in these ventures, and further allegations against the men that made up this Jewish porn importation and distribution network came from politician Dennis Stevenson, who in 1991 used parliamentary privilege in the Australian Capital Territory Legislative Assembly in Canberra to name names (though did not make mention of them all being Jewish)—Frank and Joseph Shellim, Amos Kormornick, Todor Gajic (the father of Alexander) and Esmond Mooseek. Stevenson tabled as evidence a licensing agreement dated October 1985 between another of Gajic’s many companies (Sienna Pty Ltd) and Arno’s VCX.[9] Gajic was also alleged to have been a client of Sydney law firm Simons and Baffsky, a firm which had long since been acting as legal advisors for Abe Saffron. Veteran pornographer Gerald Gold, now publishing the Australian edition of Sunday Sport, was touted as another member of this network and chafed at his name being mentioned in criminal involvement. He later extracted a public apology from Stevenson for one of these claims, and wrote op-eds to major newspapers demanding that something be done to limit parliamentary privilege.[10]

Sketches of Arno and Gaswirth[11]

Some of the more explosive claims made by Dennis Stevenson in his lengthy parliamentary speeches on the criminal nature of the Australian porn industry touch at the heart of Jewish powerbrokers in Australia:

In attempting to expand his pornographic dealings and US connections, Alexander Gajic instructed Melbourne solicitor Leon Zwier to travel to the United States to buy porn titles for Gajic to distribute in Australia. Among Gajic’s written instructions to Zwier was a report on Al Tapper, the president of CPLC. In his instructions to Zwier, Gajic wrote:

‘Speak to him, he’s a top bloke, who virtually controls the West Coast market in pornographic books and accessories. I will be importing books etc. from him as well, as soon as I get more cash together. He knows Australia well, being a friend of Abe Saffron. His attitude is always cash up front.’[12]

A few months later, Zwier took up a role at law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler, where he is now a senior partner and a high-profile legal advisor to countless Australian political and business figures. (See Brenton Sanderson’s five-part article on the influence of Mark Leibler, a partner in Arnold Bloch Leibler, on Australian politics and his support for Jewish causes.)

THE PORN BACKLASH

When it came to VHS tapes, this new medium proved to be a significant challenge not only to police and customs, but also to the classification regime. The proliferation of pornographic VHS tapes between 1980 and 1983 eventually resulted in the breakdown of the Film Censorship Board’s regulatory process, which administered the classification of films at a federal level. As a VHS tape was not intended for public exhibition like an ordinary film, it had fallen into a regulatory anomaly and for a while the board persisted with a confusing policy of registering but not classifying some tapes with the instruction that it was not to be publicly exhibited, or applying an R rating to those tapes that would otherwise be classified R for films shown in cinemas.

As of January 1983, the board began simply refusing to classify VHS tapes, owing to their inability to establish a cohesive and functioning classification response,[13] and once again shifted responsibility for enforcement to the states. To rectify the situation, the newly elected Labor Federal government was the first to move, with Attorney General Gareth Evans seeing the passage of the Classification of Publications Ordinance 1983 for the Australian Capital Territory (ACT; a federally administered area that contains the capital city of Canberra) on February 1, 1984, which established a new “X-rated” category above the R-rating to properly classify explicit films.

The ACT ordinance, which applied only to that territory,[14] was intended as model legislation for the states to follow to rectify the VHS anomaly and provide a coherent framework for regulation and classification. It was only once the ordinance passed however, that people realized it did nothing to restrict the sale of video pornography. The numbness induced by twelve years of porn proliferation meant that the law sought only to ban content that could still arouse opposition even among the supporters of liberalisation, namely depictions of violent sex, snuff films, bestiality and child porn.

Community backlash grew in response and an unholy alliance of feminists and religious conservatives teamed up in a country-wide campaign against the legalization. Stalwart morals campaigner Mary Whitehouse came to Australia to lead a Festival of Light campaign alongside Reverend Fred Nile, the founder of the Christian Democrat Party. One-by-one the state governments fell in line with public pressure, and by 1985, the sale, rental and display of X-rated VHS tapes was banned in every state. The industry had, under bi-partisan leadership, become illegal but there was a catch—the ACT ordinance still remained.

FESCENNINE FYSHWICK

As the (legal) sale of pornography collapsed in the states, distributors simply relocated to the federal territories around the capital city of Canberra and established mail-order businesses. Here they used a legal loophole to continue their operations, as a sale for a mail-order did not occur until the money changed hands, which happened on federal territory. The state laws also contained the usual caveat that it was not illegal to possess an X-rated tape. This ultimately compromised application of the laws, as there was no disincentive for people seeking out and purchasing tapes, and no fear of being prosecuted. The Northern Territory was too far away from the population centers to become an effective location for this mail-order trade, and so Canberra, more specifically the industrial suburb of Fyshwick, became the porn center of Australia.

With the industry legalized, American Jews continued to contribute to the Australian VHS porn market in less direct and more legal methods. Importers and distributors were now identifiable through the classification listings as “applicants,” which were awash with companies either importing films from Jewish-owned production companies in America or were Jewish-owned importers themselves. With the sheer volume of product, these records were now being published on a monthly or even fortnightly basis, compared with the annual reports of restricted publications from 1975.

Noel C. Bloom (also identified in the Meese Report), was the founder of the Caballero Control Corporation, believed to be the largest U.S. producer of pornographic films and another early adopter of VHS. Bloom’s company conveyed product and distribution rights to Australia through John Lark, the owner and director of the Australian offshoot Caballero Home Video. The first major VHS distributor in Australia, Video Classics (founded in 1979 by former nightclub manager Walter Lehne, who made a trip to Los Angeles to investigate the newfound VHS market), procured its X-rated product from Essex Distributing, an LA-based pornographic group run by Joe and Tony Steinman.[15] Before collapsing in 1985, the publicly listed Video Classics had Jewish solicitor John Landerer as chairman.

Another importer and distributor of X-rated tapes that operated legitimately was 14th Mandolin, a Jewish-owned entertainment company, with Joseph Rabaiov as managing director. 14th Mandolin operated X-rated film labels Pink Video and King of Video and was a consistent presence on classification listings for X-rated films throughout the 1980s (including plenty of films refused classification). In 1978 the company ran an Israeli Film Festival at the Palais Theater in St Kilda and by the mid-1980s it appears to have been linked with the Israeli-owned film company Cannon Group. Mark Josem’s Filmways company also made regular appearances on the classification listings as the applicant for R and X-rated films.

Richard Klugman and the Joint Select Committee on Video Material

A win for pornography though it was, community concern continued to galvanize against the availability of pornography that the ACT ordinance permitted and the government responded with the creation of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material in March 1985.[16] The committee, comprising a cross-bench group of members of parliament, was set up to investigate the ordinance and to provide final recommendations to the federal government on further action. The key terms of reference for the committee to decide on were:

Point 1i—whether the sale, hire, distribution or exhibition of films and videotapes/discs that would, under existing law, be accorded a classification above ‘R’ should be made unlawful; and
Point 1l—the likely effects upon people, especially children, of exposure to violent, pornographic or otherwise obscene material.
The state bans and similar committees elsewhere in the world showed that the anti-porn campaign had momentum on their side, and here was a clear opportunity to stop pornography in its tracks. A win for the forces of decency would require a strong, morally just figure as chairman, someone without a compromised mindset on sexual matters who could guide the committee to a forceful routing of the local porn industry and deliver a clear mandate to the government to press for further action on X-rated tapes. Instead, the chairmanship was given to Richard Klugman.

Gonzo the Muppet

Born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Klugman was a hardline anti-censorship figure from the Labor-left who had long since been publicly identified with the liberationist cause, the last sort of person one would want as the chair of a committee attempting to investigate the harmful effects of pornography. Appointing him was the equivalent of putting the spokesman for a cigarette company as chairman of a committee investigating the harms of smoking. Klugman was a founding member of the New South Wales (NSW) Council for Civil Liberties and used his maiden speech to parliament in 1969 to advocate for the legalisation of marijuana and the decriminalisation of homosexuality.[17] In a parliamentary debate on censorship in 1971, he had argued (using the Kutchinksy study) that rapists were produced by growing up in a “sexually repressive” household where sex was not spoken about and nudity was hidden from children, concluding that

a reasonable exposure to erotica, particularly during adolescence, reflects a high degree of sexual interest and curiosity that correlates with adult patterns of acceptable heterosexual interest and practice.[18]

In other words, Klugman is proposing that exposure to pornography is necessary for the creation of what Klugman believed is a sexually healthy adult, one that is ultimately conducive to left-wing ideas and non-religious patterns of behaviour.

In his role as Chairman of the committee, Klugman predictably proved to be a tireless opponent of the wide-ranging forces against pornography. Regardless of how much evidence was presented on the link between pornography and violent or otherwise depraved behavior, or testimony on the moral degradation that it inflicted on the people of Australia, Klugman’s mind was made up, and he could be counted on to muddy the recommendations of the report and publicly rubbish any suggestion that pornography should be restricted.

In this, he was assisted by Jews like journalist Adele Horin, who led the “sex-positive” side of the feminist debate in Australia during the Feminist Sex Wars, and Professor Edward Donnerstein from the University of Wisconsin, an expert on the social effects of mass media. Donnerstein was a prominent witness during the hearings of the U.S. Meese Commission (the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography) during the Reagan administration, and he made the trip to Australia to adamantly give evidence (in opposition to the other non-Jewish researchers that testified) that so-called “non-violent” pornography did not have any harmful effect on behavior or attitudes.[19] Klugman then used his academic qualifications as proof that there was no solid evidence of harm. Elsewhere, lawyer Ken Horler of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties publicly took the extreme libertarian position that people should be free to even view material such as child pornography if they wish to do so.[20]

After more than three years of deliberation (which included watching X-rated videos to “assess the evidence”), the committee finally tabled its report in April 1988 in two volumes, one for the majority report and the minority report respectively. The eleven members of the committee were deeply divided when it came to recommendations and were scathing in their critiques of each other. Klugman, who led the minority group of five members, laid bare his thoughts in the minority report:

We believe that Chapter 13 of the Majority Report [the chapter dealing with impacts of pornography] is extremely biased and very selective in its choice of evidence. The obvious aim is to come to the conclusion that even non-violent erotica is harmful. … There is an underlying belief that a depiction which shows a woman enjoying sexual activity is degrading.[21]

A meeting of all Federal and State Attorneys General was held in late June, which resolved to ignore Klugman and the minority group’s recommendations, and proceed with a full ban on X-rated videos.[22] With the committee’s discordant report in hand, the issue finally went to the Labor Party caucus for a vote on November 8, 1988, accompanied by strong lobbying from the recently formed Adult Video Industry Association (AVIA—founded by John Lark). Attorney General Lionel Bowen tabled the resolution for a ban on X-rated videos and spoke as a lone voice of support; Klugman, Gareth Evans and Senator Zhakarov, a former communist who was also a member of the Video Material Committee, spoke against the resolution.

A record of the exact final count is unclear, but according to Klugman, Northern Territory Labor Senator Bob Collins had made a decisive impact on the negative outcome.[23] Collins was another member of the Committee, siding with the minority report and Klugman, and had offered some of the most strident defenses of pornography in the Australian Parliament. If Klugman and the other members of the minority group needed proof that a society seeped in pornography produced morally depraved individuals, it turns out they need not have looked any further than among their own ranks. In 2004, police raided Collins’ house and found a collection of child pornography on his computer. And before his death in 2007, he was facing multiple allegations of rape and sexual assault against children dating back to the 1980s.[24] That apparently a deciding vote on whether or not Australia should ban video pornography came down to a homosexual rapist and pedophile is a fitting ending to this sad tale.

The End

“The only reason that Jews are in pornography is that we think that Christ sucks. Catholicism sucks. We don’t believe in authoritarianism.”—Al Goldstein

Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of the foundation of Australia, we arrive at the end of our story in the year 1988. With the federal caucus vote, pornography was now politically entrenched and it would be another seven years before the more socially conservative Liberal Party came to office again. Dennis Stevenson attempted unsuccessfully to ban pornography in the ACT in 1990, which would have left only the Northern Territory as the last holdout, and further half-hearted attempts would be made over the course of the next decade to stem the tide. But for all intents and purposes, once porn reached the internet age it was beyond the power of the Australian government to control it anymore.

This series has deliberately focused on the battle over obscenity in Australia, only covering foreign works and influences where they were directly relevant to the Australian context. To include the full scale of Jewish involvement in the wider conflict over obscenity and sexual material in America would quadruple its size, but the events that occurred there are just as relevant in understanding the full picture of the situation in Australia. As outlined by Sullivan, during the 1960s Australian politicians argued

that the problem of violent and salacious literature was caused by the declining standards of American culture and its influence on Australia through film and literature. American literature in general was said to demonstrate “a complete disregard for moral and ethical standards, the sanctity of marriage and the fundamental principles of family life.”[25]

Furthermore, events such as the Roth Decision had an enormous influence on the interpretation of obscenity law, and much was made in Australia of the Kinsey Reports and Berl Kutchinsky’s infamous study of the impact of the legalisation of pornography in Denmark in 1969. For the better part of two decades this study was cited by journalists and armchair experts alike in defence of pornography. Going further back, Jay Gertzman’s book Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (1999) gives a concise history of Jewish involvement in the American smut trade from as early as the late nineteenth century. Even back then, such artefacts were making their way over the Pacific.

The reasons for the prominent Jewish role in these global assaults on obscenity law and their over-representative involvement in smut and the pornographic industry can be found elsewhere and does not need to be recapitulated in detail in this essay.[26] Whether it results from an “atavistic hatred of Christian authority,”[27] from an evolutionary in-group strategy to weaken the moral hegemony of the host society, or just a vulgar desire to make profit in any way possible, the end result is the same. Ultimately, the story of this conflict didn’t just play out in the realm of books, magazines and films as encompassed in this series. It occurred in art, music, fashion, advertising, photography, and just about any other form of cultural expression you care to name. The entire vehicle of modern culture from the 1960s onwards was commandeered, largely by Jews, away from a previously dominant moral center into the depraved hole where it now sits—a hole where sexual themes and imagery are so all-encompassing that people now know little else. The idea that there once existed a world where this wasn’t the case seems incredulous to younger generations.

Numbness and Servitude

For many years the purported consequences of the breakdown of obscenity law and the flourishing of obscene material were mocked by the pornographers and the liberators. As far as they were concerned, the world went on functioning the same as before and people did not seem to be acting any more depraved than usual. The wild claims of moral degeneration and societal decay offered up by critics were seen as laughable. Fifty years on from Portnoy, these claims are no longer laughable and such degeneration is now becoming widely apparent. There are a multitude of examples that one can point to, but what moral person can, in the face of news stories like a transexual school teacher in Ontario (Canada) who wore grotesque prosthetic breasts to school—a behavior for which he was not disciplined by the school board—think otherwise? Or horrors like sex-reassignment surgery on “trans children”? That there are people who think it is legitimate to lop off the genitals of an 8-year-old child who has been deluded by hypersexual social media content into thinking they are a sex they are not, and that such incidents do not cause mass outrage and protest, shows how far things have deteriorated.

Writing about the famous risqué photos of Bettie Page produced by Jewish photographer Irving Claw during the 1950s, E. Michael Jones notes that:

Those who look at the Bettie Page photos 50 years later wonder what the big deal was all about without realizing that the big deal lies in the very fact that the viewer can no longer feel the passion the photos were intended to incite. Pornography is something based on transgression, and the boundaries of 1950 have been so often and so thoroughly transgressed, that no one can see that they were once boundaries. This numbness has become the prime political problem of our age.[28]

The moral and political numbness inflicted by pornography and other obscene Jewish cultural products defines so much of our lives, a numbness that is ever more pressing for people to awaken from as the West hurtles towards cultural oblivion and demographic replacement. Aldous Huxley famously remarked (channelling J. D. Unwin) that as political and economic freedom decreases, sexual freedom tends compensating to increase. This is certainly borne out in Australia, where the victory of Portnoy and the full embrace of pornography from 1972 to 1988 neatly coincided with the arrival of chronic wage stagnation which has not abated to this day, and the instituting of “neo-liberal” reform—a process of economic deregulation that would eventually kill off the family wage and the Australian Settlement.

This period also saw the enshrinement of the poisonous ideology of multiculturalism and the effective criminalization of White solidarity, whereby even the mildest dissent from political orthodoxy can now bring down the wrath of the commissars and result in unemployment and social ostracism. Every manner of economic domination, cultural perversion or political tyranny can be imposed on a people who have been numbed into submission. We in the West may now have the freedom to clog our minds with porn, to dance at a gay bar, or to purchase and read whatever obscene literature we want, but conversely, we are losing our homelands and even the ability to raise a family and teach our children the values we hold dear. Such sexual freedoms are not freedoms at all, only the trappings of servitude.

Select Sources and Biblioliography

Newspapers:

The Australian Jewish Times
The Canberra Times
The Sun Herald
The Sydney Morning Herald
Government Reports/Gazettes

Annual Reports of the Victorian State Advisory Board on Publications, 1974-1978
Classification notices under the Indecent Articles and Classified Publications Act 1975, published in the Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales
Classification Reports of the Film Censorship Board 1980-1988, published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette
Final Report of the U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (Meese Report), 1986
Report of the Joint Select Committee on Video Material, Volume I & II, 1988
Report on Activities of the Australian Film Censorship Board, 1980-1988
Books & Academic Papers:

Bongiorno, F 2012, The Sex Lives of Australians: A History, Black Inc, Australia.
Bowes, D 2012, Exposing Indecency: Censorship and Sydney’s Alternative Press 1963-1973, Honours Thesis, University of Sydney.
Calder, B 2015, Gay Print Media’s Golden Era: Australian Magazines and Newspapers 1970–2000, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne.
Coleman, P 1962, Obscenity, blasphemy, sedition: censorship in Australia, Jacaranda Publishing, Australia.
Dutton, G & Harris, M 1970, Australia’s Censorship Crisis, Sun Books, Australia.
Jennings, R & Reynolds, R 2014, Acts of Love and Lust: Sexuality in Australia from 1945-2010, edited by Lisa Featherstone, Cambridge Scholars, Australia.
Jones, E.M. 1999, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, Fidelity Press, USA.
Matthews, J 2007, ‘Blue Movies in Australia: A Preliminary History,” Journal of the National Film and Sound Archive, Vol.2(3), p.1-12.
Mullins, P 2019, The Trials of Portnoy, Scribe Publications, Australia.
Munro, C & Sheahan-Bright, R 2006, Paper empires a history of the book in Australia, 1946-2005, University of Queensland Press, Australia.
Nette, A 2022, Horwitz Publications, pulp fiction and the rise of the Australian paperback, Anthem Press, London, UK.
Nette, A & McIntuyre, I (eds.) 2019, Sticking It to the Man: Revolution and Counterculture in Pulp and Popular Fiction, 1950 to 1980, PM Press, USA.
Nowra, L 2013, Kings Cross: A Biography, NewSouth Publishing, Australia.
O’Connell, D 2021, Harlem Nights: The Secret History of Australia’s Jazz Age, Melbourne University Press, Australia.
Reeves, T 2007, Mr Sin: The Abe Saffron Dossier, Allen & Unwin, Australia.
Reich, W 1933, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, English Translation 1946, Orgone Institute Press, New York.
Saffron, A 2008, Gentle Satan: My Father, Penguin Group, Australia.
Sullivan, B 1997, The Politics of Sex: Prostitution and pornography in Australia since 1945, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Other:

Australian Dictionary of Biography: https://adb.anu.edu.au/
Australian Film Censorship Database: https://www.refused-classification.com/
National Library of Australia, Trove Database: https://trove.nla.gov.au/

Source: https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2022/10/05/the-plot-against-australia-part-iv-jews-porn-and-the-trappings-of-servitude-part-2/