The Abbott government’s quest for authoritarian power is now corralling Muslims into a position where they must play the roles of both scapegoat and accomplice. In such a position, the Muslim community is saddled with a double burden. On the one hand, the community is placed in a condition of extended interrogation, in which it must go on the defensive and continuously justify its actions and its handling of ‘radical’ elements. On the other hand, it is pushed into a condition of social isolation, in which its inclination towards political action is more easily checked, and its dissenting and independent voices are either demonised as examples of radicalism and extensions of the ‘terrorist threat’, or brought into line by the more ‘moderate’ and pliable old guard. This double burden serves to transform the legitimate grievances of a variety of groups and individuals into a ‘problem’ within a homogenised Muslim community, and with the Muslim identity itself. The regime of consensus warps the figure of the Muslim from a coercively excluded other, who can at least act politically to initiate disputes with an accountable government, into a coercively ‘included’ semi-other, who must negotiate with a self-legitimating authority in order to be rehabilitated and acquitted. In other words, the political, speaking subject is reduced to acting as the mouthpiece and self-policing proxy of the very authority that dispossesses it. Decades ago, Edward Said wrote that ‘the modern Orient … participates in its own orientalising’. Today, the victims of racism must be made to participate in their own racializing – and that is why Abbott must include the Muslim community in the operation of its own exclusion. In the age of neoliberal capitalism, when the state has only the monopoly over violence; when the only protection it is willing to offer is to the rich and private property; when it has relinquished every form of responsibility and confesses subservience only to ‘market forces’, the state must maintain its tenuous hold on legitimacy by other means. It must blunder, blindly as Latour puts it, from one disaster to another, parasitically feeding of the energies and the desires of those it oppresses. In order to continuously create crisis and then restore its legitimacy, the post-democratic state must force its victims to negotiate the terms of their own surrender. The logic of this oblique and twisted contract in fact precludes any possibility of ‘dialogue’, let alone democratic action. To loosely paraphrase Stokely Carmichael, in order for dialogue and consultation to work, your opponent must first accept you as an equal. But a racist government is incapable of such egalitarianism. Jihadist dole bludgers: in all its perversity, this catchphrase is nevertheless fashionable enough for mainstream Australian media. This language captures more than simply the current climate of sanctioned ignorance. It also speaks to the distorted logic of a government which, in its bid to shun terrorism, is quick to ostracise and disown its own citizens, but remains fervent in its support of Israeli state-terrorism. A government that pronounces without hesitation ‘the right to be a bigot’ and then backs it up with a promise of over $600 million to boost an unashamedly racist ‘counter-terrorism’ policy, yet dismisses as fantastical the rights and claims to free education, accessible healthcare or affordable housing. Jihadi dole bludgers signifies the convergence of the new war on ‘home-grown terrorism’ with that oldest of conflicts: the class struggle, and the attack on the poor and the working class. In place of this struggle and reality, those in power attempt to simulate a consensus of opinion where a matrix of identities and crude stereotypes – the experts and community leaders, the ‘average’ Australian, the ‘moderate’ Muslim, the bogan, the wog – can all hang out together in fear of the amorphous ‘terrorist’. cont....
Posted on: Tue, 02 Sep 2014 11:41:48 +0000
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