I was looking at the first chapters of Against Paranoid Nationalism that deal with the question of hope to write a short piece on the subject. Like re-reading White Nation its is amazing/depressing/etc. how not much has changed:
2001 was a good year in Australia as far as opposition to
‘racism’ is concerned, and 2002 is looking better. While not claiming to have
investigated the matter empirically, my impression is that in 2001 a record
number of Australians declared themselves to be opposed to the use of the terms
‘racist’ and ‘racism’. Everywhere I turned, people were courageously stating
things like ‘I am not racist’, ‘That’s not racism’, ‘I did not mention race, I
am talking about culture’ or ‘People will say I am racist but I am not.’ And,
of course, to the delight of the connoisseurs, the famous ‘I am not racist, but…’
was everywhere. Anti-racist culture is flourishing. We’re clearly over the
timid years of Hansonism.
It is true that in 2001 a considerable number of Indigenous
people and Arab and Muslim Australians felt demeaned, inferiorised and excluded
from the rest of society (‘Asians’ were breathing with relief in 2001 – at
least they’d have time to replenish before the next round). But does being
demeaned, inferiorised, treated insensitively and excluded mean you are being
subjected to racism? It’s no longer easy to answer this question, for it is no
longer up to the victims to decide if a person is racist. Racists declare
themselves to be so. And the fact that no one in Australia has done so just
shows the depth of anti-racism in this country. So strongly do the anti-racists
feel that if you refer to one of them as racist without their agreeing, they
are likely to sue you. I have tried to get some people I think are racists to
sign a contract agreeing that they are racists before I use the term to refer
to them, but I have not succeeded so far: it is clear that they are deadset
anti-racists.
Strangely, many of the people who have been accused by some
misguided third world-looking minority or another of being racist have been key
figures in the promotion of Australia’s ‘anti-racism’ culture. They might have
occasionally demeaned, inferiorised, treated insensitively or excluded people
they have pictured as belonging to a tribe other than theirs, but obviously I
cannot apply the slur ‘racist’ to them when they have such an established
record of hating the very sight of the word.
This is especially so since in 2001 it was internationally
established, at the United Nations conference on racism, that most colonised
and previously colonised third world-looking people don’t know much about
racism. They’ve shown themselves to be notoriously oversensitive and unreliable
when it comes to this subject, and are very likely to misunderstand what is
actually happening to them. To make things worse, those living in colonial and
post-colonial slums and ghettos – the Palestinians, for instance – expressed
their hatred of their colonisers. What’s more, the Palestinians do so in a
totally vulgar and unsophisticated way. Clearly unaware of where such vulgarity
might lead, other third world-looking people expressed sympathy with the
Palestinians instead of being rightly outraged at the massive suffering
inflicted on the Palestinians’ sensitive and civilised colonisers.
Luckily, countries such as the US, Canada, the European states
and Australia used the magnificent historical record of their emergence as
nations to enlighten everyone and explain that this hatred of the coloniser was
the only real racism there is. It is now well known – and it was widely
reported in the press – that by stopping this hatred of the coloniser being
officially accepted and expressed by other delegates at the conference, they
actually ‘saved the conference’.
Having done so much for anti-racism at that conference and
everywhere else around the world, some people in Australia are rightly
‘offended’ when they are accused of racism. For instance, the Prime Minister
has publicly declared himself ‘offended’ on many occasions; he even went as far
as being ‘outraged’ once when faced with the term ‘racism’. More offended by it
than by the sight of the dehumanising concentration camps he has used to cage
third world-looking asylum seekers. In fact, in Australia today those offended
by the term ‘racist’ almost outnumber those offended by racists.
Another measure of the depth of this ‘anti-racism’ is the
degree of heroism shown by the people who are struggling in its front line.
These courageous people might appear to be in power, they might appear to have
pages of newspapers and endless radio and television time at their disposal,
but every now and then the repressive conditions under which they are operating
reveal themselves in the way they speak. They all say something along the lines
of: ‘I know they will get me, but I am going to say it …’ Even the Prime Minister
says it. ‘They’, in case you’ve been kept in the dark, is the formidably
powerful ultra-left revolutionary council of political correctness. This
council, all appearances notwithstanding, and as every ordinary mainstream,
paranoid-and-allowed-to-be-relaxed-and-comfortable-with-his/her-paranoia
Australian will tell you, is clearly still ruling the country. So one can
appreciate the effort it takes the John Howards and Alan Joneses of the country
to heroically squeeze their points of view across to the public despite the
incredibly repressive measures being used against them by the revolutionary
council. And let us not forget that these ‘heroes’ all volunteered to do so. Which goes to show you that you cannot
repress Australian values.
One version of Marx’s theory of ideology, based on the
concept of the camera obscura, is that capitalism creates an ‘appearance’ – a
level of experience – that is an ‘upside down’ version of reality. This idea
has long been academically discredited. But it clearly needs to make a comeback
to make sense of the lopsided reality which increasingly engulfs us.
As this book goes to press I find myself right in the midst
of such a reality.
In the aftermath of the April 2002 Israeli reoccupation and
vandalisation of the West Bank, I initiated, with my colleague John Docker, a
petition calling for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. A petition,
one would think, is a basic and peaceful means of democratic expression. But
not so for the editor of The Australian (well-known for standing up for the
oppressed across the world), who captured its incredible violence by
editorialising that the petition ‘verges on book burning’. On the other side of
this camera obscura reality stood the Israelis’ medieval-like rampage in
occupied Palestine, where books and documents were actually burning. Obviously,
that kind of burning was too subtle for the editor of The Australian to smell.
But there is more. This was a petition that was initiated
and signed by Arab-background and Jewish-background academics, precisely to
avoid any sense of ‘communal chauvinism’. It was a petition that had been
laboured over for many days to ensure that it was not open to claims of being
anti-Semitic, and that was then signed by some of the most important Australian
academics to have researched and written on racism in Australia. Here, the
venerable editor of The Australian, and a minister of the government that
brought us the Tampa crisis and the concentration camps and destroyed the
process of reconciliation with Australia’s Indigenous people while tabooing the
use of the term ‘racism’ to refer to any of this, finally broke the taboo, in
the face of the horrendous assault on, and exceptional inferiorisation of,
other fellow human beings that the petition represented, and called it … yes …
you guessed it … racist! I guess even anti-racism can reach its limits of
tolerance. Along with other academics, I had long dismissed Marx’s camera
obscura theory. I didn’t know that a time would come where I’d be living what
it described with all its nightmarish qualities. Sorry, Marx, I take it all
back.
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