31 December, 2017

Chris Drake -- born Christie George Drakakis

I am a born Tory. I am a naturally contented person so had no interest in revolution or changing the world. I was much more interested in exploring and understanding the world. So from an early age I read a lot about history, geography, religion and politics. And from paperbacks by Eysenck and others I had acquired during my teens some knowledge of psychology, sociology and anthropology.

Religion occupied me pretty thoroughly during most of my teens but around the end of my teens, I had lost my Protestant faith and so turned my interests mainly to politics, something that endures to this day. Even during my career as an academic psychologist, I was principally interested in the psychology of politics. And despite my Tory inclinations, I was not at all closed-minded and explored all I could of other political views, in part via an exploration of political life in Brisbane, where I lived.

I have always been interested in the full range of the social sciences (which is how at one time I came to be teaching both psychology and economics) and anthropology has always been part of that interest. Even before I went to university (at age 20), therefore, I thought I would make good use of the anthropologist's most usual research method (participant observation) to study politics. Anthropologists have the view that you can never understand a group "from the outside" -- You have to join the group and become accepted into it before you will ever have any chance of understanding it.

I took this to heart and over a number of years I joined a great range of political groups. I went to meetings of: the Australia Soviet Friendship Society (a Communist front organization populated principally by wharfies and a few students); the Realist Writers group (another Communist front organization featuring luminaries like John Manifold, Kath Walker and "Twisty" Sutton, proprietor of the People's Bookshop); the university student actvist group called the SDA (a knock-off of America's SDS which organized most of the student protest marches) and The Young Liberals (which I joined and went regularly to zone meetings).

But there was one group of Brisbane socialists that had no formal meetings but which I wanted to find out about -- and that was the neo-Nazis, people who still thought Hitler was right. Their leading light in Brisbane seemed to be Chris Drake. I met Chris at a folk music club. He was about 30 at the time in the mid 60s, with his own rather entrepreneurial business, and unmarried. He seemed well-known and widely accepted in the demi monde of the local folk-music and coffee-dive "scene". Although rather serious, he was very socially oriented and seemed well-liked. He believed literally in the existence of some conspiracy to undermine traditional values and virtues in society. He saw the answer to his very real concern for Australian society in strong government and prestigious leadership. He admired strength per se and all the military virtues. At home he would listen either to Hitler's speeches (on tape) or Beethoven piano sonatas and such like. To him antisemitism was a "study". By "studying" his collection of "alternative" literature he believed that he increased his understanding of what was going on in the world and how he might come out on top. The Nazi gatherings that he occasionally organized often took the form of a study of chapters from "The Protocols".

He was by birth half Greek but had anglicized his name. Powerfully built, he had swarthy to yellow skin and looked in fact rather Chinese -- something of great mortification to him. He was a great devotee of major Douglas's Social Credit theories. He had also great admiration of traditional British values and led himself a rather Spartan life.

As a youth he had, I gathered, often suffered the humiliation of being called a "Dago". His sporting record was, at least in part, an attempt to prove himself better than his tormentors. His sport was fencing and he was rather good at that. He was at one stage listed as an alternative for the Australian fencing team in the Olympic games.

He obviously really believed that all the woes of the modern world could be traced to the corrupting influence of the Jews -- whom he identified also as being in control of the mass-media. He was indeed much concerned to copy the supposed successful tactics of the Jews. He often observed that the Jews maintained their own racial exclusiveness while selling the rest of the world a doctrine of (supposedly weakening) "race mixing". By observing that "the first race laws were passed by Nehemiah" he felt that his own racialism became justified as merely a legitimate defence against a conniving enemy: "fighting fire with fire".

He did have rather wide-ranging Fascist values but I concluded that most of those values stemmed from his beleiefs about the Jews. As Hitler was the enemy of the Jews he thought that Hitler's values had to be right and should be copied. So he could wax as eloquent about "discipline" as he could about Jews. His attitude towards religion was very respectful and one suspects that he did have some residual beliefs himself.

So I got to know him and had quite a few discusions with him and met a few of his friends. But there was no political party, no formal meetings and no outside activities of any sort that Chris took part in. He regarded any type of public demonstration as pointless and foolish. Some other Nazi-sympathizers did however go public in minor ways at that time. There is a retrospective on that era here.

I am philosemitic but as long as I kept quiet about my attitude to the Jews, I could have some good wide-ranging discussions with Chris. And in the course of that I found that I rather liked him. He was calm, quiet, unaggressive, rather cynical and with an enquiring mind. He actually tried to understand his world, which most people give up on at some stage. But he didn't give up. He found that there was something he read about which DID make sense of his world: A worldwide conspiracy by "the Jews".

But there was nothing terribly unusual about him other than his suspicions of the Jews. From what he read, he just thought Hitler was right about the Jews. Other than that he was a sportsman and a small businessman. His business was in publishing ephemera -- pamphlets, annual reports of clubs etc.

So I think this small memoir of him will not go astray and will be a small memorial to an interesting man and a friend for a time.

He never said much about his personal life but I never knew him to have a girlfirend and I understood him to be divorced. I saw him as too serious-minded for romance.

But I eventually found out a bit about his personal life in 2010 when his daughter wrote to me! She had no memory of her father due to her mother divorcing and knew very little of him. But she of course wanted to fill in any blanks that she could. She is herself a perfectly conventional wife and mother with a tall husband and four nice kinds. She sent me a photo of them and there is a remarkable resemblance between her and Chris.



Another resemblance seems to be that she shares Chris's serious nature -- but she has no interest in politics

When Chris was named by his parents, they named him in the Greek way as "Christos" but the people who processed that record were obviously more familiar with Irish names than Greek ones so he was recorded as "Christie". Chris passed away in the early 1990's.



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