Fear and Denial in Public Policy
by Carmen Lawrence
Address by Dr Carmen Lawrence, Federal Member for Fremantle, to the
Australian Psychological Society (APS) Sydney Branch on 19 June.
The text of this address originally appeared as a PDF file on this location:
"We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply
call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead
load which by itself time will bury in oblivion ". Hannah Arendt, "The
Origins of Totalitarianism" [1]
Introduction
Perhaps because of my early training in psychology and my exposure as a
young adult to the graphic depiction of the Vietnam carnage, I developed a
strong desire to understand how human beings arrive at the point where they
can torture and kill one another.
I have read fairly extensively- perhaps to the point of obsession - about
torture and mass murder as instruments of political regimes, particularly
in Nazi Germany.
Like those who lived through the horror of the Holocaust and its aftermath,
I have asked how ordinary people could have become "Hitler's willing
executioners" [2], how doctors could have employed their skills to
experiment on and kill disabled people, communists, homosexuals, gypsies
and the Jewish people [3].
How was it that so many could stand by as their Jewish neighbours were
first branded and excluded from normal life, then herded into ghettoes and
cattle trucks and say that they did not know what was happening?
How could so many otherwise unexceptional men become expert in torture and
murder for tyrants like Stalin, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot. How
could they so completely deny their victims' humanity, slaughtering them
with no more thought than they would give to swatting a fly?
The easy answers are that they were terrorised into complicity, or that
they were somehow deranged or, even less satisfactorily, that they were
simply evil. These glib assessments allow us to escape the uncomfortable
conclusion -which I think is closer to the mark - that under certain
conditions we may all be capable of brutality or, at least, indifference to
it.
Oppressive regimes could not operate without the "willing executioners",
without technocrats to keep the wheels of the system turning or without the
majority of the populace being willing to turn a blind eye to the
disappearances and the brutality taking place around them.
The uncomfortable suspicion that any of us could be persuaded to deal with
our fellow human beings as non-human is difficult and many would want to
exempt themselves from such a damning conclusion.
Yet we know, that in the recent past, cultivated men and women were
comfortable with owning, buying and selling other human beings. In our own
history, Indigenous Australians were treated as less than human, murdered,
mistreated and taken from their families.
We know that, in living memory, many Germans voted for a man who made it
clear that he regarded the Jews as a "problem" requiring a "solution".
In Rwanda the bloodbath that erupted involved so much of the population
that the idea of individual psychopathology simply will not do as an
explanation.
In Bosnia neighbours who had lived peaceably together slaughtered one
another without apparent regret.
In all of these situations, and others like them, one of the factors
contributing to the oppression and bloodletting is the continued depiction
of the targets of brutality as non-human, as dangerous, as unworthy of
being treated with respect and decency.
Very often, this characterisation is the result of a very deliberate and
carefully constructed propaganda campaign by political figures exploiting
-indeed cultivating- primitive fears and encouraging us to deny the reality
of our senses when we inflict damage as a result of our actions.
At other times, it reflects the longer, slower process of the formation of
prejudice. The most lethally effective of these campaigns feeds on ancient
group prejudices. The dark fears of citizens are easily exploited by the
unscrupulous.
There are many less spectacular, more mundane, examples of our all too
human tendency to diminish the humanity of others - read the letters pages
of most newspapers and sample popular talk back radio for a few examples.
Hateful attitudes toward Indigenous people and Muslims abound, often with
the predictable disclaimer - I'm not a racist, but...."
Asylum seekers as "the other"
The last election in Australia was dominated by the dehumanisation of
asylum seekers, by fear and xenophobia - the fear of strangers - and a
rejection of "the other".
We appeared to be operating in a moral vacuum which reached its zenith when
our political leaders and the majority of the community were as one in
refusing to allow the Tampa asylum seekers to reach our shores and turning
our backs when 352 people died in the now notorious SIEVX.
This suggests that our moral compass is awry. Put simply, as Robert Coles
does when discussing moral intelligence, "a moral person has room in his or
her heart for others." [4]
Recent events showed there is not much room in our hearts and our policy on
refugees does not have a strong moral basis. We live, increasingly, in a
world in which we -and our children- are told that we should find ourselves
first, take care of ourselves first; a value system which lauds individual
action at the expense of co-operation, which denigrates the compassionate
as "do-gooders", "bleeding hearts" or, more recently as "elites" out of
touch with the so-called "aspirational" class.
The community's response to events like the arrival of asylum seekers shows
that there is still a lot of prejudice amongst Australians, although it is,
most of the time, underground. It is usually expressed in indirect and
subtle ways; it is encrypted.
Such prejudice is, however, easily mobilised for political purposes; it is
very agile and can easily find hooks on which to hang itself, no matter
what the landscape. "Race" is one such hook; religion is another.
Much of the debate in Australia about the "asylum seekers" especially from
those promoting exclusionary policies has been designed to provoke a
racially based, xenophobic response.
Much of the argument to exclude refugees takes the form of a denial of
moral responsibility; it ranges from indifference to focusing on formal
equality, often ignoring the facts (for example, insisting that people
should join an orderly queue to apply for passage to Australia when their
circumstances preclude such action).
I agree with Paul Keating that we have moved from being on the brink of
creating a tolerant, creative society in which xenophobia was on the wane
to one in which "tolerance looks frailer and xenophobia more robust." [5]
As he also said in the third Manning Clark lecture in 2002, "this
government [the Coalition] has consistently looked inward and backward" and
its predominant theme is captured by its actions in closing borders and
keeping people out. The emphasis is on exclusion rather than inclusion, on
fear rather than hope.
In deliberately portraying asylum seekers as a threat, the Howard
government has succeeded in gaining traction for the bizarre notion that
desperate people in leaky boats were somehow a threat to our national
security.
He counted on being able to arouse our fear of being overwhelmed by
strangers envious of our good fortune, to speak to our old dark fear of
invasion. Perhaps our own deep knowledge that we are alien invaders who
have stolen the land we occupy allows him to feed this anxiety.
As Anthony Burke pointed out in "In Fear of Security" [6], Australian
political figures have often portrayed Australia as vulnerable to loss of
sovereignty and have generated levels of fear and anxiety that are
disproportionate to the actual threats.
It is no accident that Ruddock chose to represent the arrival of an
increased number of asylum seekers during last year as an "urgent threat to
Australia's very integrity" and invoked the phrase "national emergency" to
describe the increase in numbers.
The Government began with the assumption - no doubt carefully tested in
publicly funded opinion polling - that to simply mention "illegal migrants"
to some Australians would cause them to lose their grip on reality.
As Burke sees it, a community which sees itself in terms which emphasise
threat and vulnerability, "is always an exclusive one, bounded by a power
which seeks to enforce sameness, repress diversity, and diminish the rights
(and claims to being) of those who live outside its protective embrace."
Burke posits the question which I regard as the crucial battleground for
the hearts and minds of the Australian people: "Whether an 'Australian'
community would be thought of on the basis of a walled and insecure
identity, or a generous and outward looking diversity?"
Successive Governments have often justified their actions by the "awful
moral calculus", as Burke puts it, of defining our security in such a way
that it justifies the massive insecurity and obliteration of others.
In all of his pronouncements about the need for Australians to attack Iraq,
Howard returned again and again to the threats to our security, even
invoking the Bali bombings, despite the absence of any convincing evidence
that we were threatened by Iraq.
Ours is a time in which the politics of fear is in full flight, although it
may be argued that exploitation of fear is the politicians' normal "stock
in trade".
But it seems that now, more than ever before, we are invited to feel
insecure - worried about becoming victims of crime or disease, afraid of
terrorist attacks and invasion by hoards of greedy strangers.
Those who raise these fears hope that, by concocting and exaggerating
threats to our survival, by pushing the panic button, they can control us.
The imminent "threat" from so-called "weapons of mass destruction" appears
to have been exaggerated and spun to convince the community that their very
lives were in jeopardy.
A recent poll [7] found that a third of the American public believes U.S.
forces have already found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A further
twenty-two percent said Iraq had actually used chemical or biological
weapons. But, as you know, such weapons have not been found in Iraq and
were not used.
Still, it's not surprising. Before the war, half of those polled in the
U.S. said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 although most of
the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis and none was an Iraqi.
Maybe this is because Americans -and I suspect Australians - don't
distinguish one Arab (or Muslim) from another.
One commentator speculated that, "Given the intensive news coverage and
high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some
Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."
(That is, of having their beliefs conflict with the facts).
This speculation is given some credence by the fact that the mistaken
belief that weapons had been found was substantially greater among those
who favoured the war.
Pollsters and political analysts offered several reasons for the gaps
between facts and beliefs: the public's short attention span on foreign
news, fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or
scepticism, and the Bush administration's efforts to sell a war by
oversimplifying the threat and appealing to fear.
Bush described the pre-emptive attack on Iraq as "one victory in the war on
terror that began Sept. 11.
Tapping into the feelings and fears after Sept. 11 is one way to sell a
policy, even if it is a deeply cynical and manipulative strategy.
In Australia, such appeals to fear are used simultaneously to justify
restrictions on our civil liberties and the detention of persecuted asylum
seekers. It reached its hilarious zenith in the "fridge magnets" mail out.
We're encouraged to believe "it's them or us." Such fear is functional. It
is needed to justify such policies and distract from policy failures.
And it's clear that fear always serves the real elites - as opposed to
those concocted by the conservative commentators; the privileged who
throughout history have claimed to be uniquely positioned to identify the
"dangers" from which they must protect us - witches, Jews, blacks, Muslims,
communists, terrorists, illegals. Fear sells and it gets people elected.
Fear also sows mistrust in the community and reduces people's desire and
ability to come together for constructive social change.
How can we work together if we do not trust one another? If we come to
trust the experts and mistrust our own judgments, we are less likely to see
the point of being involved in political life.
Those in a high state of impotent anxiety are likely to feel overwhelmed
and withdraw into their private worlds. As many authoritarian leaders have
well understood, a populace is best controlled when it's afraid -
controlled and diverted.
Denial and Indifference
In this, as in our response to the illegal attack on Iraq, many of us seem
to entertain the vain hope that ignorance will confer innocence. Many of us
are in denial - again.
We appear to believe that if we don't see the suffering, the deaths, they
can't be real. It seems almost as if, in some larger sense, we don't see
asylum seekers as human beings, don't see them as precious lives to be
valued as we value our own.
We are good at denial and our Prime Minister understands that. He never
tells us things we do not want to know. He knows that we would prefer to be
"relaxed and comfortable", untroubled by gloomy thoughts and speculations.
He often tells us the comforting story that we are a generous people,
especially when we are at our meanest. Whatever happens, we are not guilty.
That "unseeing", that denial runs deep in Australia. It is, after all, at
the root of our relationship to Indigenous Australians, reflected in our
treatment of the refugees who've turned up on our shores asking for our
succour.
Our ancestors deliberately chose to "unsee" that there was another people
standing in the way, doing their best not to be consigned to oblivion. The
artifice of Terra Nullius still survives in the hearts and minds of many
Australians.
Like others faced with violence and brutality we are also capable of
indifference. In a speech in 1999, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and
Nobel Peace Prize winner, spoke eloquently of the "The perils of
indifference." [8]
He surveyed the legacy of the 2Oth century, labelling it a "violent
century", a century which encompassed two World Wars, countless civil wars,
a senseless chain of assassinations, civilian bloodbaths in many armed
conflicts, the inhumanity in the gulags, the tragedy of Hiroshima, and the
vile stain of the Holocaust.
"So much violence", said Wiesel and perhaps, more surprisingly, "so much
indifference."
Indifference, as Wiesel describes it, is "a strange and unnatural state in
which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and
punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil."
He goes on, "Of course, indifference can be tempting-more than that,
seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much
easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes.
It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's
pain and despair." I suspect this is the state of mind of many Australians
who manage to remain untroubled by our nation's treatment of asylum seekers.
How much easier to retreat into indifference, to render those who suffer as
of no consequence, reducing them to an abstraction?
Indifference thrives when people are encouraged, as they have been with
recent asylum seekers, to emphasise the difference between themselves and
those they are ignoring or mistreating. We can be seduced into believing
that we have no obligation to people who do not share our culture and race
or who do not belong to our political sphere of influence.
Differences felt between them and us can be magnified to a point where
these people become so alien that they tend not to be seen as fully human.
They stop existing as human beings with whom we share a great deal of
common ground. As a consequence our capacity to empathise with their
suffering and take in the nature of the hurt inflicted on them becomes
partially obliterated.
It is only when people are directly confronted with clear evidence that
others are more like us than not, when we see their faces and know their
names and stories, that this barrier is breached.
The Government clearly understands that keeping a safe distance and
reducing the opportunities to "humanise" asylum seekers is necessary to
ensure the continuing acceptance by the Australian people of the more
brutal elements of the asylum seeker policy.
They are housed in remote camps in Australia and thousands of kilometres
from the mainland on Christmas Island and on Nauru, where visas are refused
to journalists and human rights activists.
The Government's refusal to allow any photographs or personal contact with
those who were stranded on the Tampa was part of a deliberate campaign to
prevent any identification with the people on board.
The Defence Minister's press secretary gave explicit instructions to the
Defence Department that there were to be no "personalising or humanising
images" taken of the asylum seekers. [9]
The capacity to ignore the suffering of others and to be apparently
indifferent may be stem from what is described in the research literature
as "modern racism" [10] - a surface belief in racial equality that masks
latent prejudicial feelings.
At a conscious level, people may endorse principles of fairness and
equality, but simultaneously experience negative feelings toward other
racial and ethnic groups, like the Iraqis and Afghanis who have arrived on
our shores.
Research has shown that this is more likely to be expressed by a reluctance
to engage in interaction and a failure to help people from such groups
rather than in actions that directly inflict harm.
Research in the U.S. has shown that nearly half of all whites demonstrate
this propensity. There is no good reason to believe that Australians would
be markedly different.
Indifference may also feed on what some researchers label the 'Just world
hypothesis" [11], the belief that people "get what they deserve and deserve
what they get", that beneficiaries deserve their benefits and the victims
of misfortune deserve their suffering.
They subscribe to the view that individuals can control their fates, an
illusion which allows people to see their world as orderly and predictable.
People who strongly hold such beliefs are more likely to have negative
attitudes toward underprivileged groups and those experiencing injustice.
They see no need to help asylum seekers because they believe they have
somehow "earned" their fate.
When people who firmly believe in a "just world" witness the suffering of
others, they may first attempt to help but, if that is not possible, they
will switch to blaming the victim because of their "bad" acts or their
"bad" characters, a reaction which quickly developed in response to
destructive acts by detained asylum seekers.
Whatever its parents or its progeny, indifference, as Wiesel reminds is the
most poisonous of human reactions when action is needed.
When we allow ourselves to be aware of it, we solve the dissonance between
the persecution being carried out in our name and our view of ourselves as
a generous, decent people who do not wilfully injure others by not seeing,
by finding excuses, seeking refuge in "the mindlessness of the group mind"
and by bowing to authority.
The reality of asylum seeker policy
Official Government policy on asylum seekers, a form of institutionalised
sadism, has at its core the systematic degradation and torture of our
fellow human beings, treatment we would normally abhor. The ill treatment
of refugees and those on Temporary Protection Visas is confirmed in various
reports.
We cannot pretend that we do not know what is happening. Others are
certainly aware of the way we treat those seeking asylum.
Despite the cold reassurances of the Government, we know that such
detention has profound effects on the physical and psychological well-being
of detainees. The Government encourages us to turn our faces away from the
refugees. We should, instead, confront the dubious morality of the policy
and invite Australians to exercise their empathic imagination.
It is imperative that we ask ourselves how we would feel in similar
circumstances, if our freedom were taken away.
To imagine how we would feel if our children were denied an education; how
distressed we would be if we couldn't call on our own doctor when we were
ill; how humiliated we would be if we were forced to be strip-searched at
regular intervals; how desperate we would feel if we knew we might never be
allowed to bring our families to join us; how hurtful it would be to be
treated as liars and cheats.
Many asylum seekers are here precisely because they are the victims of
torture and persecution, fleeing human rights abuses, often leaving family
and loved ones behind. Others have lost family members to brutal regimes
and are still grieving for their losses. Some of them come from war zones
where they have seen their communities bombed into oblivion.
Yet their coming here is an expression of hope; they want to rebuild their
lives and give their children a better future. On arrival in Australia they
are hopeful of compassionate and humane treatment.
Instead, they are rebuffed, humiliated and tormented still further.
This indeterminate detention leads to mounting stress, not least because of
the disappointment of their optimistic expectations. The result is
frequently severe depres4and thoughts of despair and helplessness.
Some detainees demonstrate aggressive, destructive and self-harming
behaviours reflected in suicide and acts of mass violence, group breakouts,
rioting, the burning of facilities and hunger strikes.
These actions feed the hostile attitudes already prevalent in the wider
community. The Government insists that such behaviour of people "in
extremis" is a form of bullying and manipulation; that detainees are
crudely trying to "exploit our decency."
This, in my view, is an obscene reversal of the facts. Just who's being
bullied here? It is surprising, given the grim situation of so many
detainees, that there is not more of such behaviour.
We should ask our Government and our fellow citizens to ask themselves a
few simple questions.
Contemplate for a moment the care you lavish on your own children, your
thoughtfulness in protecting them from exposure to violence and suffering;
your careful planning of their education, their access to opportunities to
learn, to explore the world from a secure, loving base. How can your
children safely explore a world from behind barbed wire? There's certainly
a world to be explored, but one that will destroy them.
We should think about the importance we place on protecting our children
and ensuring their physical safety. How can parents in detention camps,
with no private place and no control over their daily lives provide such a
safe environment?
We don't need elaborate research to conclude that asylum seekers are going
to be damaged by these experiences. It's obvious to anyone prepared to
imagine their own responses, to think about what would happen to their
families if they were put under the sort of stress experienced daily in the
detention centres.
One man who has been detained for over four years describes it as "dying
every day."
The mere fact of indefinite detention is bad enough, but degrading
treatment is also regularly meted out. There are numerous reports of naked
hostility being expressed by the staff toward the detainees.
In letters to supporters, people in detention report that they are often
treated with disrespect and endure petty humiliations and intrusions into
their privacy and that isolation detention and force are routinely used.
People are identified by numbers, not names.
Following the fires that were lit in several of the centres around
Christmas 2002, strip-searching -including full body cavity searching -
became routine and many were placed in isolation and denied any
communication with the people outside who attempt to support them.
Those who do not meet the strict criteria for refugee status face the
constant threat of deportation, often to places where they believe they
will be further persecuted and even killed. Once they leave Australia's
shores, there is no attempt by the Australian Government to determine their
fate.
Those whose refugee status is confirmed and who are released on Temporary
Protection Visas (TPVs) fare only marginally better. They are forced to
live in a permanent state of suspended animation because, under the current
government, such visas may never become permanent.
The Government reserves the right to reassess their claims in the light of
changes in the conditions in their countries of origin. For example,
Afghanis fleeing persecution under the Taliban and eventually granted
refugee status are now being sent back because it is judged that they need
no longer fear persecution in Afghanistan. The same fate confronts the
Iraqi people who fled Saddam Hussein and the East Timorese who have lived
here for a decade.
Those on TPV's are forced to live in limbo, denied hope and the opportunity
to begin new lives. They are also denied basic resettlement services and
prevented from bringing their families to join them, if they have been
separated.
The denial of family reunion is the reason why there were so many women and
children among the 352 asylum seekers who drowned when the boat, which
became known at the SIEVX, [12] sank or was deliberately scuttled in late
2001.
It is why two women drowned when the another sank after catching fire and
why there were so many women and children on the vessel which broke apart
and provided the photos which the Government used as "evidence" that the
asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard, [13] a claim
subsequently shown to be a complete fabrication.
Conclusion
One of the tragedies in contemporary Australian politics is that this
degrading policy is supported, in broad terms, by the national
parliamentary representatives of both the major political parties.
This bipartisan stance is justified, even by many who are uncomfortable
with it, because it seems that the majority of Australians strongly support
the key elements of the policy - refusing "entry" of unauthorised arrival
by boat (while turning a blind eye to the many more who overstay their
visas) and detaining those who do make it for indefinite periods in
conditions that are clearly worse than those we impose on convicted criminals.
Our leaders assume we are incapable of doing better and are not prepared to
argue for a more reasoned and humane position. Most people have simply not
heard contrary arguments put cogently by the political figures who have
most ready access to the popular media.
Far from welcoming "those who come across the sea" and sharing in our good
fortune, as our national anthem boasts, we are, as a nation, rejecting the
most traumatised of people and adding to their suffering.
They have not come to embarrass us, but to beg our compassion and help,
believing us to be a nation that values human beings equally regardless of
race, creed or colour. We have yet to justify their faith in us or to earn
the description as fair and humane people.
Our willing ignorance, our denial, our susceptibility to propaganda, our
failure to properly assess or comprehend what is being done allows the
Prime Minister and his champions to keep trotting out the same old
misinformation about asylum seekers and the "threat" they represent to our
way of life.
And we hold close the dark secret that we could not feel as we do if the
people being locked up were more like us; that our distance - and Howard's
- would be impossible if these were white, Christian, English-speaking
westerners.
References
[1] Arendt, Hanna. ( 1967). The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: George
Allen & Unwin, p xxxi.
Address by Dr Carmen Lawrence, Federal Member for Fremantle, to the
Australian Psychological Society (APS) Sydney Branch on 19 June.
The text of this address originally appeared as a PDF file on this location:
by Carmen Lawrence
"We can no longer afford to take that which was good in the past and simply
call it our heritage, to discard the bad and simply think of it as a dead
load which by itself time will bury in oblivion ". Hannah Arendt, "The
Origins of Totalitarianism" [1]
Introduction
Perhaps because of my early training in psychology and my exposure as a
young adult to the graphic depiction of the Vietnam carnage, I developed a
strong desire to understand how human beings arrive at the point where they
can torture and kill one another.
I have read fairly extensively- perhaps to the point of obsession - about
torture and mass murder as instruments of political regimes, particularly
in Nazi Germany.
Like those who lived through the horror of the Holocaust and its aftermath,
I have asked how ordinary people could have become "Hitler's willing
executioners" [2], how doctors could have employed their skills to
experiment on and kill disabled people, communists, homosexuals, gypsies
and the Jewish people [3].
How was it that so many could stand by as their Jewish neighbours were
first branded and excluded from normal life, then herded into ghettoes and
cattle trucks and say that they did not know what was happening?
How could so many otherwise unexceptional men become expert in torture and
murder for tyrants like Stalin, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Pol Pot. How
could they so completely deny their victims' humanity, slaughtering them
with no more thought than they would give to swatting a fly?
The easy answers are that they were terrorised into complicity, or that
they were somehow deranged or, even less satisfactorily, that they were
simply evil. These glib assessments allow us to escape the uncomfortable
conclusion -which I think is closer to the mark - that under certain
conditions we may all be capable of brutality or, at least, indifference to
it.
Oppressive regimes could not operate without the "willing executioners",
without technocrats to keep the wheels of the system turning or without the
majority of the populace being willing to turn a blind eye to the
disappearances and the brutality taking place around them.
The uncomfortable suspicion that any of us could be persuaded to deal with
our fellow human beings as non-human is difficult and many would want to
exempt themselves from such a damning conclusion.
Yet we know, that in the recent past, cultivated men and women were
comfortable with owning, buying and selling other human beings. In our own
history, Indigenous Australians were treated as less than human, murdered,
mistreated and taken from their families.
We know that, in living memory, many Germans voted for a man who made it
clear that he regarded the Jews as a "problem" requiring a "solution".
In Rwanda the bloodbath that erupted involved so much of the population
that the idea of individual psychopathology simply will not do as an
explanation.
In Bosnia neighbours who had lived peaceably together slaughtered one
another without apparent regret.
In all of these situations, and others like them, one of the factors
contributing to the oppression and bloodletting is the continued depiction
of the targets of brutality as non-human, as dangerous, as unworthy of
being treated with respect and decency.
Very often, this characterisation is the result of a very deliberate and
carefully constructed propaganda campaign by political figures exploiting
-indeed cultivating- primitive fears and encouraging us to deny the reality
of our senses when we inflict damage as a result of our actions.
At other times, it reflects the longer, slower process of the formation of
prejudice. The most lethally effective of these campaigns feeds on ancient
group prejudices. The dark fears of citizens are easily exploited by the
unscrupulous.
There are many less spectacular, more mundane, examples of our all too
human tendency to diminish the humanity of others - read the letters pages
of most newspapers and sample popular talk back radio for a few examples.
Hateful attitudes toward Indigenous people and Muslims abound, often with
the predictable disclaimer - I'm not a racist, but...."
Asylum seekers as "the other"
The last election in Australia was dominated by the dehumanisation of
asylum seekers, by fear and xenophobia - the fear of strangers - and a
rejection of "the other".
We appeared to be operating in a moral vacuum which reached its zenith when
our political leaders and the majority of the community were as one in
refusing to allow the Tampa asylum seekers to reach our shores and turning
our backs when 352 people died in the now notorious SIEVX.
This suggests that our moral compass is awry. Put simply, as Robert Coles
does when discussing moral intelligence, "a moral person has room in his or
her heart for others." [4]
Recent events showed there is not much room in our hearts and our policy on
refugees does not have a strong moral basis. We live, increasingly, in a
world in which we -and our children- are told that we should find ourselves
first, take care of ourselves first; a value system which lauds individual
action at the expense of co-operation, which denigrates the compassionate
as "do-gooders", "bleeding hearts" or, more recently as "elites" out of
touch with the so-called "aspirational" class.
The community's response to events like the arrival of asylum seekers shows
that there is still a lot of prejudice amongst Australians, although it is,
most of the time, underground. It is usually expressed in indirect and
subtle ways; it is encrypted.
Such prejudice is, however, easily mobilised for political purposes; it is
very agile and can easily find hooks on which to hang itself, no matter
what the landscape. "Race" is one such hook; religion is another.
Much of the debate in Australia about the "asylum seekers" especially from
those promoting exclusionary policies has been designed to provoke a
racially based, xenophobic response.
Much of the argument to exclude refugees takes the form of a denial of
moral responsibility; it ranges from indifference to focusing on formal
equality, often ignoring the facts (for example, insisting that people
should join an orderly queue to apply for passage to Australia when their
circumstances preclude such action).
I agree with Paul Keating that we have moved from being on the brink of
creating a tolerant, creative society in which xenophobia was on the wane
to one in which "tolerance looks frailer and xenophobia more robust." [5]
As he also said in the third Manning Clark lecture in 2002, "this
government [the Coalition] has consistently looked inward and backward" and
its predominant theme is captured by its actions in closing borders and
keeping people out. The emphasis is on exclusion rather than inclusion, on
fear rather than hope.
In deliberately portraying asylum seekers as a threat, the Howard
government has succeeded in gaining traction for the bizarre notion that
desperate people in leaky boats were somehow a threat to our national
security.
He counted on being able to arouse our fear of being overwhelmed by
strangers envious of our good fortune, to speak to our old dark fear of
invasion. Perhaps our own deep knowledge that we are alien invaders who
have stolen the land we occupy allows him to feed this anxiety.
As Anthony Burke pointed out in "In Fear of Security" [6], Australian
political figures have often portrayed Australia as vulnerable to loss of
sovereignty and have generated levels of fear and anxiety that are
disproportionate to the actual threats.
It is no accident that Ruddock chose to represent the arrival of an
increased number of asylum seekers during last year as an "urgent threat to
Australia's very integrity" and invoked the phrase "national emergency" to
describe the increase in numbers.
The Government began with the assumption - no doubt carefully tested in
publicly funded opinion polling - that to simply mention "illegal migrants"
to some Australians would cause them to lose their grip on reality.
As Burke sees it, a community which sees itself in terms which emphasise
threat and vulnerability, "is always an exclusive one, bounded by a power
which seeks to enforce sameness, repress diversity, and diminish the rights
(and claims to being) of those who live outside its protective embrace."
Burke posits the question which I regard as the crucial battleground for
the hearts and minds of the Australian people: "Whether an 'Australian'
community would be thought of on the basis of a walled and insecure
identity, or a generous and outward looking diversity?"
Successive Governments have often justified their actions by the "awful
moral calculus", as Burke puts it, of defining our security in such a way
that it justifies the massive insecurity and obliteration of others.
In all of his pronouncements about the need for Australians to attack Iraq,
Howard returned again and again to the threats to our security, even
invoking the Bali bombings, despite the absence of any convincing evidence
that we were threatened by Iraq.
Ours is a time in which the politics of fear is in full flight, although it
may be argued that exploitation of fear is the politicians' normal "stock
in trade".
But it seems that now, more than ever before, we are invited to feel
insecure - worried about becoming victims of crime or disease, afraid of
terrorist attacks and invasion by hoards of greedy strangers.
Those who raise these fears hope that, by concocting and exaggerating
threats to our survival, by pushing the panic button, they can control us.
The imminent "threat" from so-called "weapons of mass destruction" appears
to have been exaggerated and spun to convince the community that their very
lives were in jeopardy.
A recent poll [7] found that a third of the American public believes U.S.
forces have already found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. A further
twenty-two percent said Iraq had actually used chemical or biological
weapons. But, as you know, such weapons have not been found in Iraq and
were not used.
Still, it's not surprising. Before the war, half of those polled in the
U.S. said Iraqis were among the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 although most of
the Sept. 11 terrorists were Saudis and none was an Iraqi.
Maybe this is because Americans -and I suspect Australians - don't
distinguish one Arab (or Muslim) from another.
One commentator speculated that, "Given the intensive news coverage and
high levels of public attention, this level of misinformation suggests some
Americans may be avoiding having an experience of cognitive dissonance."
(That is, of having their beliefs conflict with the facts).
This speculation is given some credence by the fact that the mistaken
belief that weapons had been found was substantially greater among those
who favoured the war.
Pollsters and political analysts offered several reasons for the gaps
between facts and beliefs: the public's short attention span on foreign
news, fragmentary or conflicting media reports that lacked depth or
scepticism, and the Bush administration's efforts to sell a war by
oversimplifying the threat and appealing to fear.
Bush described the pre-emptive attack on Iraq as "one victory in the war on
terror that began Sept. 11.
Tapping into the feelings and fears after Sept. 11 is one way to sell a
policy, even if it is a deeply cynical and manipulative strategy.
In Australia, such appeals to fear are used simultaneously to justify
restrictions on our civil liberties and the detention of persecuted asylum
seekers. It reached its hilarious zenith in the "fridge magnets" mail out.
We're encouraged to believe "it's them or us." Such fear is functional. It
is needed to justify such policies and distract from policy failures.
And it's clear that fear always serves the real elites - as opposed to
those concocted by the conservative commentators; the privileged who
throughout history have claimed to be uniquely positioned to identify the
"dangers" from which they must protect us - witches, Jews, blacks, Muslims,
communists, terrorists, illegals. Fear sells and it gets people elected.
Fear also sows mistrust in the community and reduces people's desire and
ability to come together for constructive social change.
How can we work together if we do not trust one another? If we come to
trust the experts and mistrust our own judgments, we are less likely to see
the point of being involved in political life.
Those in a high state of impotent anxiety are likely to feel overwhelmed
and withdraw into their private worlds. As many authoritarian leaders have
well understood, a populace is best controlled when it's afraid -
controlled and diverted.
Denial and Indifference
In this, as in our response to the illegal attack on Iraq, many of us seem
to entertain the vain hope that ignorance will confer innocence. Many of us
are in denial - again.
We appear to believe that if we don't see the suffering, the deaths, they
can't be real. It seems almost as if, in some larger sense, we don't see
asylum seekers as human beings, don't see them as precious lives to be
valued as we value our own.
We are good at denial and our Prime Minister understands that. He never
tells us things we do not want to know. He knows that we would prefer to be
"relaxed and comfortable", untroubled by gloomy thoughts and speculations.
He often tells us the comforting story that we are a generous people,
especially when we are at our meanest. Whatever happens, we are not guilty.
That "unseeing", that denial runs deep in Australia. It is, after all, at
the root of our relationship to Indigenous Australians, reflected in our
treatment of the refugees who've turned up on our shores asking for our
succour.
Our ancestors deliberately chose to "unsee" that there was another people
standing in the way, doing their best not to be consigned to oblivion. The
artifice of Terra Nullius still survives in the hearts and minds of many
Australians.
Like others faced with violence and brutality we are also capable of
indifference. In a speech in 1999, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and
Nobel Peace Prize winner, spoke eloquently of the "The perils of
indifference." [8]
He surveyed the legacy of the 2Oth century, labelling it a "violent
century", a century which encompassed two World Wars, countless civil wars,
a senseless chain of assassinations, civilian bloodbaths in many armed
conflicts, the inhumanity in the gulags, the tragedy of Hiroshima, and the
vile stain of the Holocaust.
"So much violence", said Wiesel and perhaps, more surprisingly, "so much
indifference."
Indifference, as Wiesel describes it, is "a strange and unnatural state in
which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and
punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil."
He goes on, "Of course, indifference can be tempting-more than that,
seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims. It is so much
easier to avoid such rude interruptions to our work, our dreams, our hopes.
It is, after all, awkward, troublesome, to be involved in another person's
pain and despair." I suspect this is the state of mind of many Australians
who manage to remain untroubled by our nation's treatment of asylum seekers.
How much easier to retreat into indifference, to render those who suffer as
of no consequence, reducing them to an abstraction?
Indifference thrives when people are encouraged, as they have been with
recent asylum seekers, to emphasise the difference between themselves and
those they are ignoring or mistreating. We can be seduced into believing
that we have no obligation to people who do not share our culture and race
or who do not belong to our political sphere of influence.
Differences felt between them and us can be magnified to a point where
these people become so alien that they tend not to be seen as fully human.
They stop existing as human beings with whom we share a great deal of
common ground. As a consequence our capacity to empathise with their
suffering and take in the nature of the hurt inflicted on them becomes
partially obliterated.
It is only when people are directly confronted with clear evidence that
others are more like us than not, when we see their faces and know their
names and stories, that this barrier is breached.
The Government clearly understands that keeping a safe distance and
reducing the opportunities to "humanise" asylum seekers is necessary to
ensure the continuing acceptance by the Australian people of the more
brutal elements of the asylum seeker policy.
They are housed in remote camps in Australia and thousands of kilometres
from the mainland on Christmas Island and on Nauru, where visas are refused
to journalists and human rights activists.
The Government's refusal to allow any photographs or personal contact with
those who were stranded on the Tampa was part of a deliberate campaign to
prevent any identification with the people on board.
The Defence Minister's press secretary gave explicit instructions to the
Defence Department that there were to be no "personalising or humanising
images" taken of the asylum seekers. [9]
The capacity to ignore the suffering of others and to be apparently
indifferent may be stem from what is described in the research literature
as "modern racism" [10] - a surface belief in racial equality that masks
latent prejudicial feelings.
At a conscious level, people may endorse principles of fairness and
equality, but simultaneously experience negative feelings toward other
racial and ethnic groups, like the Iraqis and Afghanis who have arrived on
our shores.
Research has shown that this is more likely to be expressed by a reluctance
to engage in interaction and a failure to help people from such groups
rather than in actions that directly inflict harm.
Research in the U.S. has shown that nearly half of all whites demonstrate
this propensity. There is no good reason to believe that Australians would
be markedly different.
Indifference may also feed on what some researchers label the 'Just world
hypothesis" [11], the belief that people "get what they deserve and deserve
what they get", that beneficiaries deserve their benefits and the victims
of misfortune deserve their suffering.
They subscribe to the view that individuals can control their fates, an
illusion which allows people to see their world as orderly and predictable.
People who strongly hold such beliefs are more likely to have negative
attitudes toward underprivileged groups and those experiencing injustice.
They see no need to help asylum seekers because they believe they have
somehow "earned" their fate.
When people who firmly believe in a "just world" witness the suffering of
others, they may first attempt to help but, if that is not possible, they
will switch to blaming the victim because of their "bad" acts or their
"bad" characters, a reaction which quickly developed in response to
destructive acts by detained asylum seekers.
Whatever its parents or its progeny, indifference, as Wiesel reminds is the
most poisonous of human reactions when action is needed.
When we allow ourselves to be aware of it, we solve the dissonance between
the persecution being carried out in our name and our view of ourselves as
a generous, decent people who do not wilfully injure others by not seeing,
by finding excuses, seeking refuge in "the mindlessness of the group mind"
and by bowing to authority.
The reality of asylum seeker policy
Official Government policy on asylum seekers, a form of institutionalised
sadism, has at its core the systematic degradation and torture of our
fellow human beings, treatment we would normally abhor. The ill treatment
of refugees and those on Temporary Protection Visas is confirmed in various
reports.
We cannot pretend that we do not know what is happening. Others are
certainly aware of the way we treat those seeking asylum.
Despite the cold reassurances of the Government, we know that such
detention has profound effects on the physical and psychological well-being
of detainees. The Government encourages us to turn our faces away from the
refugees. We should, instead, confront the dubious morality of the policy
and invite Australians to exercise their empathic imagination.
It is imperative that we ask ourselves how we would feel in similar
circumstances, if our freedom were taken away.
To imagine how we would feel if our children were denied an education; how
distressed we would be if we couldn't call on our own doctor when we were
ill; how humiliated we would be if we were forced to be strip-searched at
regular intervals; how desperate we would feel if we knew we might never be
allowed to bring our families to join us; how hurtful it would be to be
treated as liars and cheats.
Many asylum seekers are here precisely because they are the victims of
torture and persecution, fleeing human rights abuses, often leaving family
and loved ones behind. Others have lost family members to brutal regimes
and are still grieving for their losses. Some of them come from war zones
where they have seen their communities bombed into oblivion.
Yet their coming here is an expression of hope; they want to rebuild their
lives and give their children a better future. On arrival in Australia they
are hopeful of compassionate and humane treatment.
Instead, they are rebuffed, humiliated and tormented still further.
This indeterminate detention leads to mounting stress, not least because of
the disappointment of their optimistic expectations. The result is
frequently severe depres4and thoughts of despair and helplessness.
Some detainees demonstrate aggressive, destructive and self-harming
behaviours reflected in suicide and acts of mass violence, group breakouts,
rioting, the burning of facilities and hunger strikes.
These actions feed the hostile attitudes already prevalent in the wider
community. The Government insists that such behaviour of people "in
extremis" is a form of bullying and manipulation; that detainees are
crudely trying to "exploit our decency."
This, in my view, is an obscene reversal of the facts. Just who's being
bullied here? It is surprising, given the grim situation of so many
detainees, that there is not more of such behaviour.
We should ask our Government and our fellow citizens to ask themselves a
few simple questions.
Contemplate for a moment the care you lavish on your own children, your
thoughtfulness in protecting them from exposure to violence and suffering;
your careful planning of their education, their access to opportunities to
learn, to explore the world from a secure, loving base. How can your
children safely explore a world from behind barbed wire? There's certainly
a world to be explored, but one that will destroy them.
We should think about the importance we place on protecting our children
and ensuring their physical safety. How can parents in detention camps,
with no private place and no control over their daily lives provide such a
safe environment?
We don't need elaborate research to conclude that asylum seekers are going
to be damaged by these experiences. It's obvious to anyone prepared to
imagine their own responses, to think about what would happen to their
families if they were put under the sort of stress experienced daily in the
detention centres.
One man who has been detained for over four years describes it as "dying
every day."
The mere fact of indefinite detention is bad enough, but degrading
treatment is also regularly meted out. There are numerous reports of naked
hostility being expressed by the staff toward the detainees.
In letters to supporters, people in detention report that they are often
treated with disrespect and endure petty humiliations and intrusions into
their privacy and that isolation detention and force are routinely used.
People are identified by numbers, not names.
Following the fires that were lit in several of the centres around
Christmas 2002, strip-searching -including full body cavity searching -
became routine and many were placed in isolation and denied any
communication with the people outside who attempt to support them.
Those who do not meet the strict criteria for refugee status face the
constant threat of deportation, often to places where they believe they
will be further persecuted and even killed. Once they leave Australia's
shores, there is no attempt by the Australian Government to determine their
fate.
Those whose refugee status is confirmed and who are released on Temporary
Protection Visas (TPVs) fare only marginally better. They are forced to
live in a permanent state of suspended animation because, under the current
government, such visas may never become permanent.
The Government reserves the right to reassess their claims in the light of
changes in the conditions in their countries of origin. For example,
Afghanis fleeing persecution under the Taliban and eventually granted
refugee status are now being sent back because it is judged that they need
no longer fear persecution in Afghanistan. The same fate confronts the
Iraqi people who fled Saddam Hussein and the East Timorese who have lived
here for a decade.
Those on TPV's are forced to live in limbo, denied hope and the opportunity
to begin new lives. They are also denied basic resettlement services and
prevented from bringing their families to join them, if they have been
separated.
The denial of family reunion is the reason why there were so many women and
children among the 352 asylum seekers who drowned when the boat, which
became known at the SIEVX, [12] sank or was deliberately scuttled in late
2001.
It is why two women drowned when the another sank after catching fire and
why there were so many women and children on the vessel which broke apart
and provided the photos which the Government used as "evidence" that the
asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard, [13] a claim
subsequently shown to be a complete fabrication.
Conclusion
One of the tragedies in contemporary Australian politics is that this
degrading policy is supported, in broad terms, by the national
parliamentary representatives of both the major political parties.
This bipartisan stance is justified, even by many who are uncomfortable
with it, because it seems that the majority of Australians strongly support
the key elements of the policy - refusing "entry" of unauthorised arrival
by boat (while turning a blind eye to the many more who overstay their
visas) and detaining those who do make it for indefinite periods in
conditions that are clearly worse than those we impose on convicted criminals.
Our leaders assume we are incapable of doing better and are not prepared to
argue for a more reasoned and humane position. Most people have simply not
heard contrary arguments put cogently by the political figures who have
most ready access to the popular media.
Far from welcoming "those who come across the sea" and sharing in our good
fortune, as our national anthem boasts, we are, as a nation, rejecting the
most traumatised of people and adding to their suffering.
They have not come to embarrass us, but to beg our compassion and help,
believing us to be a nation that values human beings equally regardless of
race, creed or colour. We have yet to justify their faith in us or to earn
the description as fair and humane people.
Our willing ignorance, our denial, our susceptibility to propaganda, our
failure to properly assess or comprehend what is being done allows the
Prime Minister and his champions to keep trotting out the same old
misinformation about asylum seekers and the "threat" they represent to our
way of life.
And we hold close the dark secret that we could not feel as we do if the
people being locked up were more like us; that our distance - and Howard's
- would be impossible if these were white, Christian, English-speaking
westerners.
References
[1] Arendt, Hanna. ( 1967). The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: George
Allen & Unwin, p xxxi.
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