Osama and the Culture Warriors

John Buell
Author of Liars! Cheaters! Evildoers!: Demonization and the End of Civil Debate in American Politics (NYU Press)

Okay, let me get this straight. A vast swath of land along the Mississippi is now drowning, The Southeast is recovering from a series of tornadoes historic in both scope and intensity. Texas seeks to recover from the worst forest fires in 90 years and the most severe drought in a century. Yet what concerns our leaders and the corporate media the most? Even in death, Osama bin Laden is the focus of attention. Osama apparently contemplated an attack on the US rail system. The response was as immediate as it was predictable. Legislators and national security experts demanded increased levels of surveillance. Some, like New York Senator Schumer, advocated a no ride list analogous to the airlines’ no-fly lists.

As the US government and media discussed steps to strengthen state reach in its war on terror, they were retreating on other fronts. Sierra Club chair Carl Pope pointed out, “Ironically, most of the states afflicted by recent weather extremes voted last November to shrink the federal government and drown it in a bathtub.” And as Pope notes, the state affected by these weather disasters are also the most dogmatic deniers of any connection between our carbon economy and climate change.

Merely a theory, they say. They seem unaware that science does not establish final truths but only theories. When scientists speak of theories, however, they do not mean mere speculation. Theories help guide and integrate countless empirical studies and reams of data. Every theory has some holes and gaps and part of the process of science is filling gaps and refining theories.

Deniers of anthropogenic climate change are in any case holding global climate change theory to standards that many natural scientists now regard as overly restrictive. They insist on a concept of causality that clearly connects each weather event to specific and discrete mechanisms and/or events that always produce the same predictable result. Many fields of science, however, embrace more complex models of change that include the interaction of predisposing conditions, external shocks, and self organizing and amplifying systems. Precise specific predictions are not possible, but scientists can identify conditions far from equilibrium in which a range of extreme events become more likely.

But rather than pursue further the implications of current models of causality in the natural sciences, let’s compare the “evidence” that impels No Ride Lists with the evidence regarding our infrastructure’s ability to withstand likely stresses.

Even if recent extreme weather events are only a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, the broad physical infrastructure of American life is unprepared for even routine stresses In 2009, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave the US infrastructure as a whole a grade of D.

Our bridges, highways, sewerage and water systems, dams, and levies are in wretched shape. The evidence of their failings is all around us. Yet as the New York Times pointed out, the evidence for al-Qaeda’s threat to the rail system lies in vague speculation about possible plans for which no operational details exist.

Let’s ask another simple question. Suppose al-Qaeda does derail a passenger train in the Northeast corridor or blow up a subway car in downtown Manhattan. A horrible tragedy of course and a despicable act, but the economic cost and citizens lost would be far less than those attributable both directly and indirectly to the (increasingly likely) breakdown of water or sewerage systems in major cities and dams and levies along our great rivers. Reductions in the rail and transit systems imposed over the last generation have undoubtedly already compelled millions more citizens to turn to our dangerous highways for work and leisure activities.

So why is a no ride list urgent while we relentlessly cut funds for infrastructure and turn our backs on even adequate preparation for routine events? Hard facts cannot explain this phenomenon. It is a story of cultural war and identity politics. Historically, diseases associated with despised or distrusted groups have often been deemed great threats. Thus HIV has been the subject of near hysteria, but tobacco kills far more citizens. Despite much public health study over two generations, the Marlboro man carried more resonance with our population than those deemed sexually ‘deviant’ or criminal.

Attributing extreme dangers to groups whose lifestyle or religion differs in significant ways from mainstream values and identity serves for many a deep existential need. Portrayals of the dangers of gays or Muslims, often in language reminiscent of that employed against earlier generations of others (think the equation of Osama and Geronimo) confirms for some the value and worth of their Christian civilization.

Acceptance of the risks of climate change might entail a real challenge for some to deeply held identities. Money spent on infrastructure means ‘big government.’ Regulations regarding carbon use or changes in production and consumption priorities challenge ways of life for which American workers have committed much of their time and psychic energy. The very sacrifices they have made leave them more committed to an ideal of material affluence and control of nature—either by God or man—as final and self-evident truths. Reassurance through demonization of the other—especially with the claim that they hate us for what we are rather than what we do in the world—can become especially luring or tempting today. This is a world of rapid change, population flows, and the constant emergence of new ethnic and lifestyle minorities.

Constitutional scholar and Salon.com blogger Glenn Greenwald has argued that such proposals as the no ride list are an attempt to achieve the unreachable goal of perfect security, elimination of any risk of untimely death. Greenwald is on to something. Death, even untimely death, is a part of the human condition.

Security, however, as James Der Derian, director of the Global Security Program at Brown University’s Watson Institute points out, historically has had two senses: “Coeval with the condition of security as a preferred condition of safety was a different connotation, of security as false or misplaced confidence in one’s position. In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote that ‘Security is Mortals chiefest Enemie.’” [1]

Fear of death, refusal to accept a world that may always exceed our grasp encourages an impossible quest for total security. That quest in turn, in Der Derian’s words “trigger a futile cycle of collective identities seeking security from alien others who are seeking similarly impossible guarantees. It is a story of differences taking on the otherness of death and identities calcifying into a fearful sameness.” [2]

Our obsession with this latter, hubristic sense of security has ugly consequences—especially in today’s rapidly changing world. We seek the false promise of building society on fully shared core religious and philosophical values rather than upon multiple foundations actively engaged with each other. Under the latter ideal each can come to acknowledge gaps and ambiguities in its own case as it advances critique of its opponents. As Der Derian puts it, one not only learns from and accommodates other ways of living but also “to revise one’s own way of living and doing things.” [3] Such a process aids and is aided by an openness to the new rights claims that will inevitably emerge from such a fluid process. The only absolute is opposition to any religious, sexual, gender, or ethnic group to use of the state to impose its worldview and life style on the rest of the community.

The security obsession stunts our ability to engage difference in ways that might foster a more just, peaceful, and inclusive society. It also impedes our own self-understanding and capacity to explore new currents and visions in our own complex and evolving selves. At the very least obsessive quests for a secure set of personal and national ideals may make this a much more dangerous world.

[1] Der Derian, James. "The Value of Security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard," in Critical Practices in International Theory: Selected Essays.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Constantinou, Costas M. and James Der Derian. "Sustaining Global Hope: Sovereignty, Power and the Transformation of Diplomacy," in Sustainable Diplomacies.

USA! USA! USA!

Simon Stow

The College of William and Mary

"What America wants," William Dean Howells famously observed, "is a tragedy with a happy ending." For many, it seems, the state-sanctioned killing of Osama bin Laden appears to be exactly that. The narrative of "closure" in which the death of bin Laden is supposed to bring an end to the suffering not only of the relatives of the 9/11 victims, but also to the nation itself, has been ubiquitous in the media.

Tragedy is, however, much more complex than that. Tragic theater developed in Greece as a response to the tragic condition in which humanity finds itself: a world of irreconcilable conflicts, incommensurable values, uncertainty, contingency and doubt; a world in which, as my friend Steven Johnston puts it, what is gained is marked by what is lost. Tragedies, it should be said, do not have happy endings.

Tragic protagonists are often literally or figuratively blind. Lacking the complexity of worldview of the plays in which they appear, they stick to a singular perspective that usually seals their unpleasant fates. For the Greeks the word from which we take the modern term 'theater' meant 'seeing place.' Tragic theater offered its audiences a chance to see: a democratic pedagogy meant to help them recognize their tragic predicament; to help them avoid the fate of the plays' protagonists; and to overcome the singularity of perspective that is so damaging to critical reflection and democratic politics.

It was then with some reservation that I watched the outpouring of elation that marked the announcement of bin Laden's death. Large crowds gathered in front of the White House, at Ground Zero, and, more strangely perhaps, at college campuses across the nation (including, it might be noted, at the College of William and Mary where I teach). Each was marked by the waving of flags, the honking of car horns, off-key renditions of the 'Star Spangled Banner,' 'God Bless America,' and the chant, much-beloved of Homer Simpson, of "USA! USA! USA!".

Aeschylus' The Persians has sometimes been read as Athenian gloating over the defeat of their enemies, a reading for which there is much to be said. But, as befits the complexity of tragedy, there is also an acknowledgment that both the Greeks and the Persians are bound by their shared suffering. It is an acknowledgment that is meant to temper the celebration by highlighting the costs of victory, both to the Athenians, and to humanity.

As a resident alien I should perhaps make clear that I have no sympathy for bin Laden; that even in the absence of due process (an absence which gives me the liberal equivalent of Peter Parker's tingling Spidey sense), bin Laden probably got what he deserved. Nevertheless, that I feel that I should have to make this clear suggests the persistence in American politics of the problem that tragic theater is meant to overcome; a view epitomized, perhaps, by the previous president's declaration that you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists. For the record, and indeed, for the Department of Homeland Security, I am most certainly with you, not with the terrorists. As such, I am concerned that the outpouring of jubilation following bin Laden's death bespeaks a blindness common to the protagonists of tragic theater.

Two recent books by about bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Peter L. Bergen's The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and Al Qaeda (Free Press, 2011) and Michael Scheuer's Osama bin Laden (Oxford, 2011) suggest the uncertainty of the world in which we now find ourselves. Both are experts in the field, both have written compelling, well-researched, thoughtfully-argued books, but neither can agree with the other's account of bin Laden and his role in global terrorism. The Osama bin Laden identified by Bergen was a figure who had overreached and was suffering the consequences of having done so: provoking a war that robbed his organization of their secure base in Afghanistan, and neutralizing both his and its capacity to conduct successful acts of terror. For Scheurer on the other hand, bin Laden remained at the hub of Al Qaeda ongoing battles with the West. Even after bin Laden's death, and in spite of the Obama’s administration’s obvious need and attempts to embrace Scheurer’s bin Laden, we still do not know who, or whether either man, was right. It is a world of uncertainty and conflict in which the gains to the national psyche and the president's approval ratings of bin Laden's death may yet be marked by significant losses. For the other thing that tragedy teaches us is that revenge begets revenge, begets revenge.

Wisdom, Aeschylus observed, comes through suffering. The nation's reaction to bin Laden's death suggests that in spite of the its suffering on 9/11, we may have learned nothing at all.

Speed, Democracy, Revolution: Tunisia, Egypt, and Beyond

Waleed Hazbun 

Assistant professor of international relations at American University of Beirut.

Watching Al Jazeera English in the living room of my Beirut apartment on the evening of January 14, 2011, I was mesmerized by the thrilling pace of change in Tunisia. Since December I had been aware of ongoing protests, but as I followed minute by minute the unfolding of events in cinematic fashion, on a parallel track in my mind I was remembering the words of my friend and former colleague Bill Connolly. In the last chapter of his book Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed Connolly offers a corrective to Paul Virilio who argues that speed short-circuits democratic deliberations and diminishes our capacity to think with concepts in relation to images. Connolly argues “Virilio remains transfixed by a model of politics insufficiently attuned to the positive role of speed in transtate democracy and cross-state cosmopolitanism.”

As I watched the growing numbers of Tunisian protestors surround the dreaded Ministry of Interior on the main tree-lined boulevard of Tunis, I sensed that the rush of events, accelerating from an initial protest in a poor rural village, was culminating in a near spontaneous manifestation of mass courage. With little time for deliberation, the uprising became a broad-based challenge to the authority of the regime.

One of the many tipping points that drove the cascade of momentous political change was the refusal of the military chief of staff to open fire on the demonstrators. Did he deliberate on how he would be sacked (only to be reinstated after the fall of the regime)? When I heard the news that Tunisia’s long reining President Ben Ali had fled the country, I, like many, could hardly believe it. 

I have to admit I took some emotional satisfaction in the fall of the regime as— along with many other scholars who have conducted research in the country—I had been frustrated by its tight control of the media and repression of any independent thought, let alone political dissent. While conducting my first round of research in Tunisia for what would later become the book Beaches, Ruins, Resorts: The Politics of Tourism in the Arab World, I found fieldwork challenging. I was told I must inform the authorities of the names of everyone I spoke to (I refused) and I was sure I was being followed during my first weeks in the country. This experience contrasted sharply with Tunisia’s reputation as a relatively liberal, progressive Arab country. When Ben Ali came to power in 1987 he vowed to return Tunisia to the path of political pluralism and democracy, but by the mid 1990s he had established what The Economist would call one of the most repressive police states on the Mediterranean. I later converted this experience into a major theme of the book, arguing that tourism development was a means to promote what I called “paradoxical globalization.” 

As one element of its strategy for promoting economic globalization, tourism development provided countries like Tunisia with not only income and foreign investment, but a tool the regime used to project an external image of stability and openness. This façade masked increasingly repressive state control over the economy, society, and public space. The seeming economic success of the “Tunisia Model” and the regime’s suppression of Islamist movements were celebrated by friendly western governments and many journalists (such as Christopher Hitchens). Meanwhile, the harshness of the regime and shallowness of its openness were barely recognized in the United States. That image, however, seemed to crumble quickly in the face of massive popular protests directed at economic inequality, corruption, and oppressive rule. Thinking in images can help sustain a façade, but it can also fire the imagination and topple those long reproduced images.

In the wake of the events in Tunisia, many scholars and journalists pondered if its example could spark other revolts. Most were skeptical. Many carefully reasoned op-eds and blog posts outlined why, until they were all proved wrong by the unprecedented massive protests in downtown Cairo on January 25. 

Three days later, demonstrators from all walks of life took to the streets and challenged the authority of President Husni Mubarak’s regime, sending the massive police forces into retreat. By the next day, army tanks stood guard on city streets scrawled with graffiti exclaiming “down with Mubarak.” Social media networks clearly played a role in rapid mobilization and organization of protests in Tunisia and Egypt, but protests continued even after the Egyptian regime had ordered the shutdown of mobile phone networks and pulled the country off the Internet. By the time Mubarak addressed his people, his limited concessions were several weeks, if not thirty years, too late. One journalist remarked, “Egypt's embattled President Hosni Mubarak wheels and turns like a dinosaur - too big in brute power, yet too small in the brain to comprehend that he confronts extinction.” Meanwhile, the awkward, hesitant statements of US officials highlight the impossible task of reformulating policy in the midst of what could turn out to be a massive, rapid transformation of the geopolitics of the Middle East. 

The example of Tunisia rapidly fired the imaginations of protestors across the region. But as Connolly also recognizes along with Virilio, speed can also be dangerous. The challenge to state authority in Tunisia and Egypt has ushered in much chaos and uncertainty. In the rush of events, few contemplated these darker sides of political transformation. Moreover, protests and potentially violent contestations for power remain. In Tunisia, while the media has been liberated (with pressrooms spontaneously ousting their regime-imposed editors), developing a new constitutional system that ensures political pluralism and democracy may be a long, fraught process. In Egypt, there are calls for a “mega-protest” on Tuesday to oust Mubarak. The consequences are uncertain. The regime is attempting to slow the process and collapse the momentum for change. At any moment, the army could turn on the people and violence could escalate. What we can say, in any case, is that a sudden spark has unleashed new possibilities, new imaginations, and new challenges. The Arab world will never be the same.

*This essay originally appeared on the University of Minnesota Press Blog at:
http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2011/01/widespread-protests-in-tunisia-egypt.html
The author thanks Michelle Woodward for comments and editing.

A User’s Guide to the New Racism

Jairus Victor Grove
   Co-Editor, The Contemporary Condition

The past few weeks have been very educational. Bill O’Reilly insisted that all Muslims are responsible for 9/11 only to be told that he should ‘moderate’ his remarks. A Move On activist was slammed against a curb for questioning Rand Paul’s integrity. Tea Bagger Judson Philips is openly campaigning against a Democratic candidates Muslim faith, and one of John Boener’s fellow Ohio Republicans vociferously defended spending his weekends imitating a Nazi SS Trooper. The Tea Party more generally has continued its open hostility towards Americans and migrants that are not Anglo-Saxon and apparently, and is not aware or not in support of the First Amendment.
  
   So here is what I have learned so far. Judson has carefully explained that all Muslims are dangerous because the Qu’ran approves of killing infidels (apparently Judson did not read the part of the Bible that says people should be stoned for mixing crops or taking the Lord’s name in vain and most of all for worshiping other gods). O’Reilly made the same defense of his comments on The View, arguing that it was a violent religion and that his statement was an ‘indisputable fact.’ O’Reilly demanded of a flustered Joy and Whoopie “what religion were the 9/11 attackers then?” suggesting that if 9/11 attackers were Muslims ergo all Muslims attacked us on 9/11. Barbara Walters promptly admonished her colleagues and calmly told O’Reilly he needed to refer to them as extremist Muslims. In the entire discussion that followed no one thought to ask why such tempers were flying over a moderate Muslim community center (not a mosque) when the United States was negotiating a massive and unprecedented arms transfer to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is Osama Bin Ladin’s country of origin and a state that champions intolerant and violent interpretations of Islam.
 

But we have heard this all before. The Right’s racism is unfounded and irrational. No one reading this post will change their minds about Islam simply because I point out that the Jewish and Christian Bible has just as many demands for violent punishment and killing. So is this just the rehearsed Left response? The Right does something offensive, those of us on the Left notice and bemoan it? I don’t think so. Something has changed. The Right and the particularly loud figureheads of the Tea Baggers are not just being ‘politically incorrect.’ They represent a new racism.

For those of you that like to kick it old school, don’t worry. The old racism has not gone anywhere. It will continue to find its expression in the arbitrary enforcement of drug and gun laws, the increasingly privatized prison-industrial-complex, and neoliberal bootstrapping narratives that blame the underclass for their near permanent state of despair. What is different and worth thinking about more is why these same modes of structural violence are not sufficient or to put it another way, are not satisfying for the Tea Bagger’s demographic. Fear, anger, insecurity, are not new to various classes of white voters that have felt for decades that they have been left behind by the promise of American prosperity and ignored by mainstream politics. So is the fever pitch of violence and vocal expression of heretofore unspeakable racism simply the result of the recent economic decline? Is the recent economic decline the tipping point for the downward trend of wages for the last twenty-five years or is there something else adding affective fuel to the fire?

I would suggest that what is going on here is exacerbated or enabled by the ‘near enemy’ of the 2008 derivatives debacle. However there are other major operators in the mix of the ascendent and increasingly normative racism expressed by Judson Phillips and Bill O’Reilly. The evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine that seemed so badly beaten in the 2008 election was merely bruised not bowed. In fact the hostility against non-white immigrants, Muslims, gays, liberals, scientists, academics etc is all too familiar to those of us who closely watched the Palin rallies during the last Presidential election. Is history simply repeating itself? Is it back from the dead like some kind of seasonally appropriate zombie? 

   No. Something has changed. What was publicly retracted, muffled, cut out of broadcasts, expressed only in ‘misspoken’ words (think George Allen’s Macaca comment) has found a public legitimacy that has crossed the thin line between word and deed. The assault of Lauren Valle is not likely to be an aberration. In Bill O’Reilly’s words, “Muslims attacked us on 9/11.” As cynical as I was of Bush’s plea to Americans to distinguish between terrorism and Islam, I have come to miss those days. It is no longer necessary to apologize for that conflation. In Judson’s case it can be your campaign platform. The return of the evangelical-neoliberal resonance machine has left behind its compassionate conservative voice and found a new militancy. To borrow one of neoliberalism’s favorite words, there is a fresh crop of violent entrepreneurs that make O’Reilly seem ‘mainstream.’ Therefore the possibility of a Tea Bagger caucus in the House of Representatives is not just irritating, it is dangerous. It means an audience of like-minded Congresspeople that believe in war. The cultural wars of the 80s and 90s were at best a low intensity conflict in comparison. Newt Gingrich and William Bennett may have been a preview of part of this resonance machine’s agenda but that tactics are being taken to a whole new level.

There was an initial first response in me that chalked up the comments of Tea Baggers as gaffs and enjoyable gaffs. There was a satisfaction in seeing people say what I knew they were thinking. Growing up in Texas there was always a difference in what could be said in the locker room, in protected social engagements, at church or at home, and what could be said in public. It was unmannered or unrefined to be too open about your superiority. Racist jokes, slurs, violent depictions of difference were shared openly amongst ‘friends’ and shared again in glances and unspoken behavior elsewhere.

So isn’t this better? Once in the free market place of ideas won’t these ignorant rednecks simply be humiliated by the voices of democratic reason? I don’t think so. While ‘covert’ racism and hostility are certainly not good, the expanding comfort zone where these ideas can find expression is cause for worry - not an opportunity for more debate. When issues like the significance of gay suicide or the legitimacy of racism become ‘debatable’ we have already ceded too much ground.

These ideas are toxic to even the deepest pluralism because they begin from the premise and emotional commitment that pluralism is the enemy. These discussion are not brought to forums such as CNN or The View for reasoned debate or invitational discussion. They are a provocation of war to sort friends and enemies.

As noble and recently defeated Republican House member Bob Inglis discovered after condemning Glen Beck’s racist remarks against President Obama, breaking rank carries immediate party consequences, and therefore electoral consequences. In the case of Inglis it was not crossing party leadership that lead to his downfall but engaging one of the resonance machine’s most terrifying entrepreneurs. Beck began referring to Inglis as ‘African-American’ to signal to his viewers that Inglis was a race traitor. A conservative Republican and self-described ‘proud Southerner’ Inglis said he could ‘feel’ the racist vitriol during the primary that lead to his landslide defeat by Tea Bagger Trey Gowdy. A 71% victory for Gowdy in a primary against an incumbent of his own party is unusual to say the least. What changed in Inglis’ platform? Was he found with a dead girl or a live boy? No. His crime was not standing idly by while racism blossomed in his party.

The Tea Baggers are not interlocutors. I have coached competitive college and high school debate for over a decade and just about the only thing that cannot be debated is whether your opponent has the right to speak or participate. Once argument becomes a prelude, bait, for the recording of black lists and the identification of ‘high value targets,’ the cynicism has become terminal. Politics has given way to war.

Does this mean the electoral process is dead? That all that is left is to take to the streets? Absolutely not, but if violent racism and homophobia become acceptable topics of reasoned debate then public reason is little more than a thin veneer of manners soon to give way to something much darker. Every opportunity must be seized to prevent electoral success, but even that, while necessary, will not be sufficient. The Left needs to engender a new militancy of its own. It cannot merely mimic the exclusionary tactics of the Right, we cannot simply grab out apiece of the hate pie. More militant pluralists must intervene at every level of practice from faculty meetings, media outlets, and bar discussions to set the terms of what is sayable and what is not. 

There is also the ‘near enemy’ to attend to. People have reason to feel insecure and afraid. Economic justice cannot be the democratic agenda only when it is convenient. The market will not save us and while I am the first to insist on pluralizing connections with those who would struggle with us, those committed to the neoliberal order of growth and the cruel austerity measures that are imposed on the most vulnerable when that system fails are not part of that coalition. In fact rather than looking to the ‘generous’ wings of the democratic party we are more likely to find opportunities for coalitions amongst those religious folk who are alienated by the new fury of the resonance machine then amongst those who would rather tolerate fascism than give up on market based solutions. These are fragile times and we cannot wait for a market miracle to turn down the heat on the pressure cooker. 

The MV Sun Sea

Simon Glezos

University of Regina

In August the MV Sun Sea, a ship carrying 497 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka - fleeing the violent reprisals which Tamil populations have been subject to in the wake of the civil war - was captured and boarded by the Canadian Navy off the coast of Vancouver Island. They are now being detained - the men in a maximum security prison; the women in minimum security – while their refugee claims are reviewed. As of this writing only one refugee, a pregnant mother of three, has been released.

The response in Canada has been disturbing at best. Almost immediately upon news of the Sun Sea hitting the media, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the ruling Conservative party began to fan the flames of fear. The Globe and Mail reported that “[t]he Harper government said intelligence sources give it reason to believe the passengers include human traffickers and people linked to the Tamil Tigers terrorist group,”

 this despite having little to no knowledge of who was actually on the boat (suspicions are that the intelligence sources to whom Harper was deferring was the Sri Lankan government itself).  Public Safety Minister Vic Toews claimed that that the Sun Sea was a ‘test case’, saying “[t]his particular situation is being observed by others who may have similar intentions and I think it's very important that Canada deals with the situation in a clear and decisive way.” All the while, Harper ominously intoned “We are responsible for the security of our borders.”

 Despite anything remotely resembling proof, with the specter of terrorists being smuggled into the country, and with hordes more apparently just over the horizon, a disturbing portion of Canadians have embraced the government’s fear-mongering. In an Angus Reid poll “Fifty per cent of poll respondents want to deport the passengers and crew of the Tamil ship back to Sri Lanka, even if their refugee claims are legitimate [emphasis mine]” More broadly, “46 per cent of Canadians believe immigration is having a negative effect on the country, a five-point increase from August, 2009.”

 On the elite side of things a new right-wing think-tank, ‘The Center for Immigration Policy Reform’, has been launched, focusing on asserting “moral contracts” with migrants. As Gilles Paquet, professor of governance at the University of Ottawa, and member of the center’s advisory board helpfully explains “Canada is not a bingo hall. When you come to this country, I expect you to abide by a number of things.” (This, I suppose, reassures those of us who were deeply concerned about the impending “bingo-hall-ization” of Canada.)

The desire is to dismiss this as a momentary xenophobic panic, whipped up in a fairly obvious bit of voter manipulation by desperate politicians. The Conservative party, already unable to secure a majority of parliament in the last two elections, has been falling in the polls recently, and in response has begun a series of fairly shameless vote grabbing maneuvers, of which this is the latest. If that were all this is, then we could hopefully just wait for the furor to die down and sanity to be restored.

Unfortunately, there is a long history of this kind of panicked response to migrants and refugees in Canada, happening in almost unnervingly similar ways, in seemingly regular cycles. Just a little over 10 years ago there was another public panic over immigration, this time caused by the arrival of several boats of Chinese migrants, again off the coast of Vancouver Island. There the arrival of the so-called “boat people” (it is instructive that the term ‘boat people’ has been reapplied to the Tamil refugees) prompted sizeable protests and numerous denunciations in the press. Going further back, in 1939 the St. Louis, a ship carrying mostly Jewish refugees from Germany, was refused entry and forced to return to Europe where most of its passengers were killed in the Holocaust. In 1913, the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying 376 primarily Sikh passengers, was held in Vancouver Harbour for two months, before the Navy finally drove them out. The ship returned to Calcutta “where 20 of its passengers were killed in a shootout with colonial police suspicious of their politics and others were jailed for refusing to return to the Punjab.”

These reoccurring uproars have to be put in the context of Canada’s overall immigration situation. Canada has one of the highest per-capita immigration rates in the world - a rate which is rising. According to projections from Statistics Canada, by 2031 the Canadian population will be between 25% and 28% foreign born. Additionally, according to the report “nearly one-half (46%) of Canadians aged 15 and over would be foreign-born, or would have at least one foreign-born parent.”

As a result, between 29% and 32% of the Canadian population would be visible minorities, the first and second largest groups amongst which would be those of Chinese and South Asian descent. 

Additionally, these demographic shifts are intensified by Canada’s status as a settler nation which has never properly dealt - politically, ethically or psychologically – with indigenous peoples and its colonial past and present. In recent years, settler society has becoming increasingly unable to continue its traditional approach of ignoring First Nations demands for justice and self-determination, through a combination of increasingly successful legal challenges, political movements, and demography growth which in many ways mirrors that of immigrant populations. As a result, the hypocrisy of Canadian settler society’s attempts to maintain the moral high-ground on matters of immigration (as ‘Native Canadians’), becomes a little more obvious.

These profound demographic shifts challenge easy and supposedly stable images of what Canada, and Canadians, look like. In such contexts, attachments to supposedly cherished principles of ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’ run the risk of becoming weakened. Multiculturalism, and robust immigration and refugee policies, might be an acceptable practice when one can guarantee that it will happen in a cultural context which is dominantly white, Christian, European and colonial. As white privilege in Canada become increasingly challenged, pluralism becomes much more of a gamble. Accelerating immigration challenges established accounts of identity and puts pressure on stable narratives of identity and community. The perception of the loss of impermeable borders leaves people feeling increasingly adrift in a world of accelerating global flows. In such a context, there is a tendency to seek out authoritative narratives, ones which will hopefully re-affirm traditional borders and boundaries, inscribing both space and identity. Hence the seemingly widespread acceptance of the Conservative party’s claims that these migrants are ‘terrorists and queue jumpers’. Such an account transforms the refugees into foreign others who can be legitimately excised from the moral and political space of the nation, a tactic which reinscribes the boundaries of identity and releases us from any responsibility for them, or sense of community with them.

Most dangerously is the way in which this uncertainty, resentment and fear might be used to change Canada’s refugee and immigration policy. On September 9^th The Globe and Mail reported that federal immigration minister Jason Kenney was traveling to Australia to “study its tough policies aimed at deterring asylum seekers.”

‘Tough’ does not quite do the situation justice. Over the last decade, Australian refugee policy has been the source of extensive human rights abuses. When boats aren’t openly turned around at sea, refugees have been subject to indefinite detention, with little hope of release, in privately run refugee camps on Christmas Island, far from the Australian mainland. Australia’s refugee policy has been criticized by both Amnesty International (who called Christmas Island “an extremely harsh and stark environment to detain people seeking asylum") and the United Nations High Council on Refugees, which said “[t]he combination of mandatory detention, suspension of asylum claims and the geographical isolation of detention facilities… - all without any effective judicial oversight - is a deeply troubling set of factors.”

The very fact that Australia is being looked to as a potential model for refugee and immigration policy is deeply disturbing, and goes against everything that is best in the tradition of Canada. Careful attention will need to be paid to what kinds of changes the Harper government attempts to make to refugee and immigration policy. Canada is a country that is supposed to embrace principles of inclusion and multiculturalism, of generosity and pluralism. Cases like the Sun Sea are exactly the cases which test these principles, and the occasions to which Canadians must rise.

Democracy and Violence

Steven Johnston

University of South Florida

The United States and, to a lesser extent, Europe seem hell-bent on implementing cruel, destructive economic policies—cruel and destructive to all but the well positioned, well connected, and well to do—in the face of economic catastrophe. This is a reflection not only of interests controlling politics but of true belief, a bizarre faith in self regulating free markets resistant to any evidence of their abject failure.

 These responses repeat mistakes made in the 1930s and, more recently, the failed examples of Ireland and Greece. In the case of the United States, rather than design large-scale public works projects and meaningful aid to state and local governments, each of which would help stimulate growth and address America’s crumbling, often pathetic, infrastructure, a fear bordering on hysteria about deficits has generated a call for massive spending cuts despite the predictable, self-defeating character of such cuts. Make no mistake, given the current context, with effective un- and underemployment perhaps as high as twenty percent, the response to the 21^st century’s first depression constitutes nothing less than a violent, long-term assault on the integrity of people’s lives. The assault may have originated in the private sector, but it now amounts to official state-sponsored violence.

Barack Obama once again signaled his support for such violence in his September 10 news conference. Responding to a question about the legacies of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King regarding anti-poverty efforts, Obama could do nothing but spout neo-liberal platitudes about the “virtuous” effects of “growing the economy.” As if channeling the ghost of Ronald Reagan, scourge of imagined welfare queens, and Bill Clinton, successful champion of “the end of welfare as we know it” and Reagan’s rightful heir, Obama effectively scorned efforts by the state to assist people in time of desperate need. Growing the economy, the mantra of neo-liberal indifference, is in Obama's words "more important than any program we could set up”.

Rather than articulating a political vision of state action as an expression of democratic agency, Obama professes faith in a market economy that necessarily produces the many and varied casualties he refuses to help. Thus, rather than understand the history of late twentieth century “welfare reform” as part of a wildly successful Republican-driven campaign to redistribute wealth and income upwards, Obama proceeds on the assumption that individuals are to be held responsible for their economic circumstances. It seems that even Richard Nixon (whose Family Assistance Plan proposed a guaranteed national income, however inadequate) better understood the structural deficiencies and failures of a market economy, which cannot by definition produce the achievements miraculously attributed to it. Hence the permanent need for direct state action. There is one exception to this neo-liberal logic, of course: the defense sector. Here demand artificially created by the state keeps hundreds of thousands employed in make-work jobs beyond challenge. This fact gives the structural violence of the economy a particularly nasty twist.

Despite widespread violence and suffering, including record jumps in poverty levels, those responsible for the economic crises, on the other hand, continue to conduct business as they see fit. Annual Wall Street bonuses remain as obscene and unjustifiable as ever for “work” that contributes nothing to the actual betterment of society. Regulatory countermeasures constitute little more than nuisances to be circumvented by creative financiers and money-managers skilled at finessing the law in whatever new form it might take. The American people seem not to understand what is happening. Poised to punish Democrats in midterm elections (rightly so, given their paltry response to crisis) but too ignorant or angry to recognize the GOP as the party of brutal, unrelenting, and successful class warfare and a discredited faith, nothing on the horizon promises economic relief, let alone restoration or rebirth. Tens of millions of Americans will suffer for years, even decades to come. And this is just one country.

When the G-20 met in Toronto earlier this year, the collective response to economic disaster was pitiful. Calls for austerity predominated. If anything, security arrangements for the conference symbolized the values and priorities in play. Up to 20,000 police and military personnel were deployed to guarantee…well, to guarantee what exactly? There were some demonstrations and protests, but the armed state vastly outnumbered unarmed citizens. The ratio signaled not so much fear of as contempt for citizens. Should the demand for justice, to say nothing of a display of anger, find public expression, the great democracies of the world were prepared and determined, as usual, to regulate, contain, marginalize, and, if necessary, crush it. Violence can be done to you, but don’t think of retaliating. You can have your job, career, health, family, college education, home, and retirement account taken, but don’t you dare take to the streets to do anything more than signal your concern. Wall Street financiers at Goldman Sachs and elsewhere have perpetrated far more violence against American citizens (to focus narrowly here) than criminals with guns on America’s streets, but only one class is deemed and treated as a violent offender.

Democracies reject violence as a matter of principle and design institutions to channel conflict and prevent society from feeding on itself. Machiavelli, in The Discourses, provides a vivid account of institutions working to keep the people from having to take to the streets and resort to deadly violence against those responsible for gross public misconduct in order to secure a modicum of justice. Yet what are the people to do when the institutions that supposedly represent them not only fail to do so, repeatedly, but have also been captured by the corrupt, venal amalgam of forces responsible for injuring them in the first place? And what are they to do when official state policy is to protect and enforce the rights of powerful economic interests and to intimidate, threaten, coerce, and imprison any who might meaningfully challenge the regime of property?

In the United States, the situation is exacerbated by an activist Supreme Court pursuing a blatant conservative political agenda that grants corporate entities unlimited first amendment rights to consolidate and further their interests and render democracy a sham. Again, what are citizens to do when a democracy folds selected practices of violence into its way of life while simultaneously decrying its exercise in unofficial forms? What will make hegemonic political and economic players and institutions take them seriously? Nothing that happens at the much-vaunted ballot box, for which corporate and financial interests and their army of lobbyists have nothing but scorn; electoral results can always be co-opted, subverted, and effectively overturned. Those citizens (always reduced to mere thugs) who destroy (the always already sacred) property and are subsequently demonized as if they pose an existential threat to society may be the only citizens who understand the nature of the enemy and the war being waged against the people. The violence being committed daily against tens of millions is structural; the response must be, too.