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September 2, 2005
I'm sick with the flu so this is a post of quotations by necessity.
Remember all the Howard government talk about, if you don't like 'Australian values', then Muslims can 'get out' of Australia? That talk was associated with stripping Australians of their citizenship and rewriting the Citizenship Act.
In New Matilda magazine Guy Rundle writes:
It would be futile to point out the manner in which the current shameless spruiking of fear and panic is against the spirit of anything that could remotely be called 'liberalism'. It's probably also of little use to talk about the way in which it plays into a sort of cowardice---a willingness to throw liberal principles overboard at the sound of a bomb 20 000 kilometres away.
Well that throwing away liberal values is what I've pointed out in Multiculturalism under threat post. I thought it a significant point myself. Oh well.
Rundle calls this kind of talk political kitsch, and he does have a point:
Politics is unthinkable without kitsch, and maybe, as Milan Kundera observes, kitsch is the aesthetic ideal of all politicians and all political parties and movements. Kitsch does suggest vulgarity and a desire to please, and the current tabloid "nationalistic" rhetoric and cheap populism is political kitsch. This kind of kitsch is everywhere and it relies on codes and clichés that convert complex and troubled emotions into a pre-digested and trouble-free form—---the form that can be most easily pretended. Political kitsch is pretense.
Rundle then goes onto to ask:
The most important question is, does it mean anything? It would be easy to say, 'no,' and try to ignore the plaster-ducks-flying-up-the-wall talk of Australianness, but it is probably unwise. Political kitsch and opportunism has a way of hardening into something else if it is not contested.
Which is? For Rundle it is racism:
So what is the purpose, or at least the result, of this urging on of a grab-bag of universal social values and particular modern ones as 'Australian'? It is racism pure and simple. It is an attempt to paint the global Islamic community as some sort of de-socialised rabble, who are so barbaric that they have to be told to teach their children the virtues of care and honesty.
I think that kind of response to a conservatism's policy of assimilation that says multiculturalism creates ghettos and allows terrorism to flourish,is too easy as it is too quick and habitual.
It plays off high culture critics to the politicians appeal to the worst instincts in the contemporary public----ie., the economically battered and debilitated mass--- who will gladly hand over the liberal freedoms they have to the strong leader who will ensure law and order. Kitsch is the aesthetics of totalitarianism.
Political kitsch does away with having to think about what is happening to Australian liberalism or Australian conservatism. Could not the constant use of racism by the left as a knock down argument against a totalitarian conservatism be seen as a form of political kitsch?
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