In the wake of the London bombings the current hegemonic discourse of terrorism with its duality of us as good/civilised/rational and the Other as evil/uncivilised/irrational has become easily embedded in Australia's internal experience of security.
I'm not just thinking of the displacement of asylum seekers out of a discourse from humanitarian or ethical or even international legal discourse into one of 'threat' and 'security', that defines asylum seekers as undermining Australia's sovereignty, violating its borders and so needing to be deterred and repulsed.
Nor am I thinking about the constant reminders that we Australians We are now directly threatened by a new kind of terrorism', with its recourse to fear and anxiety throughconstant reminders to us that we are not safe in the new globalised security environment after 9/11.
I'm thinking about the way the One Nation conservative media critics of multiculturalism are at it again: equating multiculturalism with ghetto's; seeing ghettos as the breeding grounds that allow homegrown terrorists to flourish; and running the sick culture of liberalism is to blame line.
Assmilation--not cultural diversity--is the conservative response, given their presupposition of the clash of civilizations, their legitimation of Australia as a defensive fortress, their rhetoric of are you with us or against us.
As Australian Muslims are deemed to be a threat to the national security state, so violence against them is warranted. Why? Because they exist outside our moral community with its Judaic/Christian tradition, and, as the Other, are therefore not entitled to access our political space or our political values.
The Greek-Australians are the best refutation of Australian conservatism. The Greek-Australian stole the best bits of Australian culture, and the best bits of Greek culture to become uniquely Australian, with a unique Australian accent and culture. To the point, that you now cannot get more Australian than a Greek-Australian.
You can see the same process occuring with the Lebanese-Australians. Phat Pizza was a wonderful larrikin celebration of Australian culture.
The authoritarian viewpoint of culture by the conservatives is to enforce, through the power of government, a monoculture. This assumes that anglo-Australian culture is static, idealised, and explicitly superior.
But if that was true, immigrant cultures such as the Greeks would drop theirs and immediately adopt anglo-Australian culture. They dont, and from my point of view, good on 'em for not accepting it explicitly.
The Australian conservatives have placed the anglosphere as the core of their belief system which informs their policies. From the "Great and Powerful Friends" doctrine of foreign policy, to Reconciliation.
The history wars are, amongst other purposes, to cover up the biggest failure of monoculturalism in Australian history - that of anglicising half-white children.
I have no time for the cultural anti-reformation going on at the moment. To use a free-market parable, if these Australians that advocate cultural conservatism cannot compete, then they should accept a Darwinian outcome. The value of multi-culturalism being, of course, that they can still practise their static culture, while the rest of us advance Australian culture through the point of transcendance.
Charles Harpur would be proud of that last sentence :)
Posted by: Cameron Riley on July 25, 2005 05:56 AMIn the Friday review section of the Australian Financial Review, Ghassan Hage, who has written extensively on multiculturalism and nationalism argued that Australia needs a mulitculturalism of interaction not coexistence. He says:
"One cannot emphasise enough the importance of this governance of interaction today. The notion of interaction here stands in opposition to the notion of coexistence. Multiculturalism in Australia has always involved an ideal of intercultural interaction, not an ideal of intercultural coexistence. Yet we increasingly hear world wide the language of cultural coexistence as opposed to the language of cultural interaction."
"For Australia this is a step backward.V Coexistence involves one culture existing alongside another culture: this culture A exists here and that culture B exists there. And people from culture A respect culture B and vica versa. Coexistence means "I respect your right to use aftershave you like but I don't want to have to smell it."....The idea that emerges out of coexistence is highly limited. So we the culture of the other "respect". And after that, what happens? Nothing. Cultures can coexist in parallel; they exist alongside each other but they never meet.'
If the Australian government or Australian media think Australian Muslims are the only Australian citizens to "exist outside our moral community with its Judaic/Christian tradition," then I've got news for them.
This deplorable religious war is wearing me out and my saviour isn't even represented.
Anyone know the present score, as I only seem to get expert statistical analysis from "our" side.
Posted by: Bricktop351 on July 25, 2005 11:09 AM