Augusta, Maine would have to be the coldest place I have ever been to, only Montreal rivalled it. I had long johns on, thermal under-shirt, super-thick woollen socks and I was still cold. It was early on Tuesday morning and I was standing on the top of a hill in Maine with four others. Jeremy, a Cape Codder, came up to me and asked, "What is happening in Sydney? It is all I see on the news."

I had dinner at a Chili's the night before. It is a kind of franchise restaurant, it has relatively cheap food of decent quality. They also have a bar where you can order food and watch sport on big screens. On Monday night I was sitting at the bar having dinner when I saw Bill O'Reilly, the famous hysterical troll from Fox News, was having a section on the "Aussie Race Riots" . I finished my dinner and beer before Fox's take on the Cronulla riots were.

I also had read the Auian blogosphere's opinion on what happened on Cronulla, from the extremism of Western Heart, to Jason Soon's impassioned shock, to Tim Dunlops and Andrew Bartlett's reasoned entries. I had also gone through the mass media depiction of it, but I am a long way away from those events. When Jeremy asked me what was going on, I replied; "Yeh, I used to live down that way, at Maroubra."

"You have the waxheads, and the highway waxheads. The beach is a scarce resource, and those gangs are fighting over it."

Jeremy laughed, and said to his New Hampshire mate; "Hey Jesse, it was gangs that started it".

Jeremy and Jesse must have been talking about it before I got there. Gangs starting civil unrest was an analogy that America understands well.

"The highway waxheads are now mainly Lebanese-Australians, a bunch immigrated to Australia after Beirut. It is their kids causing the problems. Then you get a bunch of racist dickheads who get together at Cronulla and escalate the thing into a race riot. They were hassling anyone who looked muslim."

New Hampshire's state motto is the cry for liberty; "Live Free or Die" . The arbitrary violence of the mob in Cronulla toward anyone that was perceived as muslim carries the anti-libertous and polluted motto, "Live wog and leb free or die". Nationalism begets racism. It is predicated on exclusion, and coercion to assimilate. Nationalism is incapable of accommodating universal liberty, which is why nationalism and monoculturalism ultimately fail it. They are inferior political philosophies. We have had ten years of federal nationalism and monoculturalism, Cronulla is the result.

The NSW state government responded in usual anti-liberty fashion - demanding new laws for the police to be tough on crime. We have the federal government trampling liberties with the anti-terror laws, and now NSW jumping on what remains with new anti-riot laws. The Australian-Lebanese and the Anglo-Australians who clashed on the southern beaches are to be condemned, not only for their violence and disrespect for the local communities; but also for hastening our collapse into a state hostile to liberty.

This will be the legacy of the nationalist monoculturalism which the government and media are selling. More power collapsed to the centre, and more extremist tears in the social fabric. I have warned in the past that we are creating the environment in Australia that makes Saudi Arabia and Iran failed states . Our multi-ethnic faultline was Bali , courtesy of government and media rhetoric, it just moved to the southern Sydney beaches.

The creation of the faultline was only recent, and that the Cronulla rioters were targeting "muslims" which really meant anyone of middle eastern colour, whether they were secular, devout or non-practising. This shows how a faultline has been artificially created by the furphy of the "clash of cultures" rhetoric.

More Reading on Cronulla

• Cronulla
• Nationalism
• Ethnic Faultline
• Bali
• The Moving Multi-ethnic Faultline
• NSW Law Enforcement Amendment
• The Outdated Image of Nationalism
• John Carpenter's Next Movie
• The Lost Word In Australian Politics
• Neo-Latte-Conservativism
• The Cronulla Bill