Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear: The Sydney PEN - 3 Voices Collection

Christos Tsiolkas Gideon Haigh Alexis Wright Tolerance, Prejudice and Fear Sydney PEN Voices *** The 3 Writers Project

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Copyright Copyright Copyright Copyright

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‘Introduction’ J.M. Coetzee 2008 ‘On the Concept of Tolerance’ Christos Tsiolkas 2008 ‘In Matters of Prejudice’ Gideon Haigh 2008 ‘A Question of Fear’ Alexis Wright 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Christos Tsiolkas, Gideon Haigh, Alexis Wright Tolerance, prejudice and fear: Sydney PEN voices; the 3 writers project. ISBN: 978 1 74175 502 2 (pbk.) Toleration—Australia. Nationalism—Australia. Australians—Attitudes; Social conditions; Politics and government. 305.0994 Typeset in Australia by Bookhouse in 11/15 pt Eplica Book. Printed and bound in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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Contents

Introduction J.M. Coetzee

v

On the Concept of Tolerance Christos Tsiolkas

1

In Matters of Prejudice Gideon Haigh

57

A Question of Fear Alexis Wright

129

Bibliographies About the Contributors About Sydney PEN

170 174 177

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Introduction J.M. Coetzee Introduction There are two ways of thinking about how the benevolent state should behave towards social minorities, particularly those of its minorities with distinctive cultural and religious practices. One is that it should treat them even-handedly but distantly, stepping forward to protect them only when they come under threat. Such treatment would constitute tolerance at the lower, minimal end of the scale; ‘mere’ tolerance. The second way is more utopian: that in the name of tolerance the state should lead the way in encouraging respect for minority practices and generally celebrate the social diversity in its midst. To advocates of tolerance of the second type, among whom Christos Tsiolkas clearly numbers himself, people who prefer the first type are resorting to a fine-sounding concept to cloak a desire to conserve the status quo, which is more often than not an unjust status quo. v

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Tolerance, as Tsiolkas reminds us, is a Western concept, with a long history behind it of lessons learned from religious persecution and the resistance to persecution. Is it therefore a vain enterprise to seek to foster habits of tolerance in other parts of the world? Let us consider the case of Africa. Most African countries are diverse in respect of ethnicity and culture; some are even diverse in respect of religion. In most African countries the apparatus of state control is quite limited. Though principles of tolerance may be written into their Western-style constitutions, the actual exercise of tolerance depends on the temperature on the ground. When the temperature rises too high, violence may break out — murderous violence even, of the kind that we have recently seen in Kenya. What is striking, however, is that such intercommunal violence is rare. Most of the time people of different backgrounds get on with one another, or get on well enough for practical purposes, considering how little social control there is from above, considering in particular how little policing there is of ethnic stereotyping, ethnic jokes and ethnic prejudices — in other words, how little policing there is of what people think and feel and say about ‘the Other’. What the case of Africa suggests is that, pace Hobbes, the unpoliced or barely policed state does not have to be a locus of war by all against all. In practice it tends to be something messier and more complicated: a theatre in which people of different origins and

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beliefs live side by side, if not harmoniously then harmoniously enough except rarely, when everything goes to pieces and they slaughter one another. If the rather mixed, home-grown African version of tolerance I describe has any relevance to the wider world, then the lesson would seem to be that it is sufficient, most of the time, for the state to keep out of the picture and let people get on with their tolerant or mainly tolerant lives; but on the other hand that when trouble does flare up, it would be a good idea if the state had enough policing power in reserve to save lives and restore order. Life in the big immigrant cities of the world suggests a similar lesson. New York and Chicago in the early twentieth century, Saõ Paulo and Cairo and Calcutta in our own times, have attracted immigrants of diverse backgrounds from far and wide. We cannot say that in these cities diversity has been joyfully celebrated. On the contrary, people have tended to cluster in ethnic enclaves and practise intermittent low-level warfare (‘gang warfare’) one against another. Yet, on balance, big cities are places of peace rather than war, where de facto tolerance is practised, enforced to some degree from above in the name not of virtue but merely of social order. The aspect of tolerance that particularly concerns writers is of course free speech, and particularly freedom to express unpopular or minority opinions. When unpopular or minority opinions include, for

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example, the denial of things that really happened (the attempt to eradicate the Jews in Europe, the attempt to eradicate the Armenians in Turkey), or so-called hate speech, or calls to violent jihad against the West, the ideal of free speech is sorely tested. Here opponents of carte blanche freedom are wont to distinguish between speech as the expression of ideas and speech as a form of action, as in a call to violence. This neat-sounding distinction is of course spurious, as Tsiolkas shows. One man’s celebration of the suburban idyll is another man’s call for the perpetuation of the status quo, no matter what the cost. Tsiolkas identifies himself as a supporter of ‘radical tolerance’. It is to be doubted whether many members of PEN would want to differ from him. But we should be clear about what such a position entails. It means opposition to imposed, top-down official history such as we find in Germany, to give one instance. It means opposition to the shutting down of militant Islamist websites. It may even mean opposition to the clampdown on paedophilic images. We must tolerate free expression, Tsiolkas argues, because in the absence of dissent a society stagnates. ‘This extremely blasphemous position of the outsider embodied in the always dissenting, always tolerant role of the artist — a romantic concept, yes, an impossible concept, yes, a dangerous concept, yes — is essential to political and social emancipation.’

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To the question of whether a society is better or worse off, in the long run, for denying free expression to those in its midst whom it regards as extreme, beyond the pale, history does not give a clear answer. So if we are going to espouse radical tolerance, it cannot be because radical tolerance has been demonstrated to yield good consequences. The example of African laissez-faire may again be relevant: what you gain in freedom from the policing of expression you may lose in the occasional pogrom. Aside from the very handy historical account that he gives of the concepts of nationalism and patriotism, Gideon Haigh’s essay is notable for its intriguing diagnosis of the malaise of the Howard years, namely as a bout of national narcissism encouraged for his own ends by a politician exquisitely attuned to the deeper mood of the electorate, ‘perhaps the ideal therapist for countrymen desperate to think well of themselves’, prepared to exploit the affinities between narcissism as a state of the soul and nationalism as a communal tendency. Haigh quotes the anthropologist Ernest Gellner: ‘In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning . . . camouflage’, then goes on to link Gellner’s observation with cults of memorialisation, in the celebration of ANZAC Day in particular, and hostility towards immigrant communities. He quotes Freud: ‘It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in

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love . . . so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.’ Haigh takes his diagnosis of national self-absorption further, pointing out that narcissism is sometimes a way of shutting out uncomfortable feelings — in the case of white Australia, uncomfortable, undying feelings of shame attendant on the settlement and conquest of the continent. ‘There could hardly be a better description of the new Australian nationalism, circa 2007: shallow, thick-skinned, sure of itself, aloof from the world’s problems, impervious to the suffering of others—then retracting in angry confusion at the hint of questioning, raging petulantly when crossed, impassioned and empurpled about “their” country.’ In Alexis Wright’s analysis, at the bottom of much that is wrong with today’s Australia lies fear. Not only has mutual fear been an ever-present factor in relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, it still lies heavy on the soul of the nation. How has fear done its dark work? First, Wright says, over the course of many years self-doubt and timorousness have been fostered among Indigenous people; whether wittingly — by ‘spell-casters’ — or not makes no difference. ‘You would have to be stupid not to see that Aboriginal people are suffering injury from a profound sense of betrayal by the governments of this country. This betrayal has developed a fearfulness of White Australia that has been handed down

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the generations.’ The effect has been one of spiritual paralysis. Only when this paralysis is cured will the creative and liberating dreaming among Aboriginal people be resumed. But in fact, she continues, fear afflicts all Australians. Far from being the lucky country, Australia is, in Manning Clark’s words, ‘the Frightened Country’. On the guilty fearfulness of the settler, passed down from generation to generation, John Howard played so successfully, making what might have been a time of prosperity and the generous sharing of prosperity across the nation into a time of self-absorbed anxiety. Not that the anxieties of the nation are mere phantasms. The world that our children and grandchildren will inherit, says Wright, will look very different from our own. Our children and grandchildren will need writers of a new stripe, ‘writers closely tied to the countless millions on earth who have always lived with far less and have experienced far more fear than the great majority of Australians’. The writer whom Wright singles out as a model for the future, particularly for what he has to say about the place of fear in the modern psyche — and not just the prosperous Western psyche — is Orhan Pamuk. Pamuk shows that ‘the hard work ahead of the world’s independent writers’ will consist in going deep into the self, to ‘the place where humanity makes thoughts about itself . . . When it comes to the question of fear, it is a frightening journey to the place of thought which

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is in the geography of deep consciousness, and once writers enter this world, they may locate a spectacle of fears that will test their courage to continue describing what they have already seen in themselves.’ All three essays collected here are deeply marked by the times. The Australia they describe is an intolerant, fearful and introverted place. Of the three, that by Tsiolkas is the most pessimistic. Among the Australian left, says Tsiolkas, ‘hopelessness, irrelevance and confusion’ reign. He makes much of the impact on the left of the collapse of the Soviet empire. ‘This enormous transformation of history saw an ethics and a politics that defined the passion, suffering, despair and hope for millions of people across the globe disappear, become extinct.’ In this respect there are two consolatory observations worth making. The first is that from as early as 1929 the Soviet Union — not the idea of a Soviet Union but the real Soviet Union — ceased to have much to do with socialism. The second is that Tsiolkas wrote in the after-shadow of the Howard years. Whether the Rudd years will prove less gloomy for the left has yet to be seen. What is undeniable is that, as of the time of the present writing, the mood of hopelessness he describes has palpably lifted; a future again seems possible. April 2008

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On the concept of tolerance Christos Tsiolkas On the Concept of Tolerance In the short story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas’, by Ursula K. Le Guin, the classic liberal, utilitarian belief that justice is that which promotes the greatest good for the greatest number of people is explored through the imagining of a utopian society called Omelas, which is dependent for its good fortune on the abject suffering and oppression of a lone child. Le Guin takes care not to specify the exact nature of her utopia. Though we are told that suffering, war, hunger and bigotry have all been eliminated, Le Guin’s descriptions of the citizens and structures of Omelas are cautious, tentative. ‘Some say,’ she writes, ‘it could be that.’ This hestitation in the description allows the individual reader to imagine an idyll reflective of our own desires, our own hopes and beliefs. Written in 1973, the utopia she has conjured for us could conceivably be communistic, it could be libertarian or feminist; a sprititual community or a secular, democratic ShangriLa. It could be all of these at once. What interests 1

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Le Guin is not the question of what the utopia could look like or be like. Her interest is in the meaning of the one moment of civil responsibility every single adult of Omelas must undergo. This is the moment when they descend to the netherworld of their city and are forced to witness the suffering of the child with whom their happiness is cruelly intertwined. Le Guin deftly communicates the profundity of that moment for the citizens of Omelas; but here as well she leaves room for our own imagination. When I first read the story as a young teenager I imagined the child living in the squalor of a medieval dungeon, the walls dark and dank, with torture instruments fitted in the stone. Later, on rereading the story as an adult, I pictured Christ’s sufferings on the cross. On rereading the story again recently I saw the outrage that is Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, an image which manages to travel back through time and reconcile both my childish and adult imaginings. Le Guin’s utopia is fantastical, impossible, but not at all insipid. The experience of bearing witness to torment humbles the citizens of Omelas, for, no longer innocent of the nature of their good fortune, they realise at what cost their freedom from war, poverty and hate has been obtained. Though saddened by their exposure to suffering, regretful of the lone child’s pain, the majority of citizens in Omelas return to their lives, their occupations, their families; they accept the Benthamite utilitarian argument on which their society is based:

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better that only one child suffers if that eliminates the suffering of the vast multitude. I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it. Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, 60 Minutes (USA), 1996, on being asked by journalist Lesley Stahl whether sanctions against Iraq were worth the death of half a million Iraqi children.

But Le Guin’s interest is in those who refuse this social contract, those who give the short story its title. The ones who walk away from Omelas cannot accept the injustice done to even one individual. They cannot bear to live a life of happiness, contentment and security that is reliant on this child’s pain. They walk away from their charmed city and come to live as exiles in our world. In refusing to tolerate this one instance of injustice they demand that we repudiate any instance of injustice. What do we mean by this tenuous, elusive word, ‘tolerance’? Why is a concept associated with the political consensus that developed in Western Europe to bring an end to the religious wars in wake of the Reformation again re-entering the language of politics? Is tolerance a virtue? It is true that when we speak of a tolerant person we are usually intending a compliment. This also holds true when we are describing a culture as tolerant. Opposed to this, someone who is

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intolerant, a society that is intolerant, is someone and something we would like to distance ourselves from. It is safe to assume that even at our most fervent, our most adamant and unbending in the defence of a belief, we would not describe ourselves as ‘intolerant’. Instead, that is how we describe the fundamentalist, the dogmatist, the fanatic. But if being tolerant is a virtue, the act of extending tolerance is much more ambiguous, nuanced and complicated. We keep some distance from that which we tolerate. If I was to say to a friend, I tolerate your friend, it would most probably be taken as an insult, for the implication is that there is something about the friend that I am suspicious of, or that I may even dislike. I am putting up with them out of sufferance. I am saying to my friend that there is something about their friend that I do not accept. To reflect on the concept of acceptance seems apposite here because when we affirm we accept a person or a belief we are affirming an identification with that person, a shared respect for the belief. That is not what occurs when we extend tolerance. The more we begin to explore the spaces between tolerance in the forms of noun, adjective and verb, the further the ambiguities of the word increase. What do we mean by tolerance? We are told that Australia has assisted in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, in part because we wished to see them become more tolerant states. Tolerance is something liberalism identifies as intrinsic to the democratic state.

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We justify our continued occupation by claiming that only by staying can we ensure the creation of new states that will understand tolerance, the importance of freedom and equality. But in the very same breath we are also told we will not tolerate those who oppose our way of life. In fact it is further argued that what has made us vulnerable to our enemies is ‘our’ own tolerance. We are told to be suspicious of multiculturalism because through its ‘social engineering’ we may have created inroads for the enemy, an enemy that is prepared to destroy all we hold dear, precisely because they are intolerant of us. Multiculturalism is further damned because it is identified with pluralism, with a cultural relativism that is eating away at our culture, our values, our way of life. We are said to have become too permissive, too complacent about the dangers of drugs, promiscuity, family breakdown. Against this laxity we increasingly hear talk of ‘zero’ tolerance. But in case we think this means we should abandon tolerance we are reminded that globalisation, which we must enthusiastically embrace, is to be supported because it brings freedom, opportunity and liberalisation to the whole world. Globalisation annihilates tradition, smashes the borders of the nation state, allows the free flow of capital, ideas and trade. Globalisation celebrates diversity and tolerance. This most ruthless form of capitalism, in promising us the freedom to identify as part of a global community, makes the nation state itself obsolete; and through

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the marriage of capital and digital technology we are even promised that we can transcend the limitations of physical and temporal space. But when it comes to dealing with the most manifest development of this globalisation, the displacement and homelessness of millions of people around the globe, we are then told that we must secure our borders, that we have to affirm our nationhood. We require border patrols, detention centres, checkpoints and passport controls. Thus what we are confronted with is a looking-glass world where we talk endlessly of the freedom that the global markets have created for ‘us’ but are told we must be ever-vigilant of ‘them’, who resent our freedoms. We, the fortunate, the wealthy, the democrats, are free to roam the world, but the non-citizens of the world, those without a homeland, a passport, a job, a future, a livelihood are permitted nowhere. In the fearful years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months in prison queues in Leningrad. One day somebody ‘identified’ me. Beside me, in the queue, there was a woman with blue lips. She had, of course, never heard of me; but she suddenly came out of that trance so common to us all and whispered in my ear (everybody spoke in whispers there): ‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘Yes, I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face. Anna Akhmatova, ‘Instead of a Preface’, Requiem, 1 April 1957, Leningrad

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At the end of the ferocious twentieth century we celebrated the dismantling of a wall in Berlin that symbolised the failed, inhuman totalitarian dictatorships that blighted that century. We were told that we would never tolerate another wall that separated humanity from itself. But at the beginning of the twenty-first century the Israelis have constructed a wall that separates them from, and increases the suffering of, the Palestinians; American politicians discuss the building of a wall along their border in order to stem the flow of desperate Mexicans seeking work in the USA. The Spanish government holds onto a tiny plot of land in what is Morocco, a dying wheeze of their past colonial glory, and it builds a barricade around this ludicrous symbolic shithole, a barricade topped with razorwire: African refugees bleed to death attempting to climb over this obscene fortress. And in our own country we build detention camps in the desert, and bribe our poorest neighbours to allow us to build these concentration camps on their soil. In there we throw the tired, the hungry, the poor, the destitute, the child, the old woman, the sick, the mad, the helpless, the wretched. Those camps, these barricades, these walls, they all represent the limits of our tolerance. Yet listen to what we say about ourselves: it is we who are civilised, it is we who are not the barabarians, it is we who are tolerant. A doubt — seditious and provocative — may need to be expressed at this point.

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Tolerance is something the powerful grant or extend or commit. Has tolerance little to do with democracy and everything to do with power? I fold the city as I fold my papers And carry it away, a sack of clouds. I wake and look in my body’s clothing For myself. Mahmoud Darwish, Qasidat Bayrut (Ode to Beirut), 1982

Tolerance as a concept in political philosophy emerged in Western Europe as a principle of accommodation, a means through which to bring to an end to the religious violence that arose from the Reformation. The separation of church from state, however, was a slow, sometimes tortuous process in the newly emerging nation states of Europe, its codification into law, complex and contradictory. Great Britain had its official church; the revolutionary French Republic did not adequately deal with this separation, leading to the confusions which were to bedevil subsequent revolutions and counter-revolutions; the German states maintained a strictly Christian constitutional identity. In Spain the Christian Catholic basis to the state was savagely maintained. However, no matter how riddled with contradiction the process was, the revolutionary age in Europe saw a transformation in the nature of religious belief in which the question of religious faith

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became increasingly considered a matter of individual conscience. The ideal became that one could extend one’s fellow citizen a tolerance in regard to religious belief and practice as long as these beliefs and practices did not impact on the functioning of the state. In re-reading the classic liberal writers of this age — Rousseau, Mills, Voltaire, Hume and Bentham — one is struck by how little they have to say about tolerance outside the sphere of religion. The dominant preoccupation of classic liberalism is the franchise, the nature of the nation state, the right to property. Freedom, emancipation, equality are the concepts that animate their writings. Liberalism’s battle in the nineteenth century is not fought on the terrain of religion but with the emergence of an alternative conception of both liberty and history, a politics which grounds emancipation not on the rights of property but on the rights of labour; one which argues that class, not the individual, is the motor of history. The liberal project and the socialist project began to be understood in opposition and conflict. This divergence was present even at their ‘birth’, in the left and right opposition that emerged in the French revolutionary state. The Jacobin Terror came to define the liberal’s nightmare of socialism, just as the brutal violence enacted by the nineteenth-century states against the emerging European revolutions convinced the radical left that bourgeois liberalism was intrinsically hypocritical and repressive. Right up to the end

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of the Cold War, a mutual distrust — finding its apt metaphor in the nuclear détente of Mutually Assured Destruction — dominated the relationship between liberalism and the left. In this battleground between state and collective, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, tolerance was abandoned. So why is it that the politics of tolerance interest us anew? Why do they make their return? An easy conclusion to draw is that the events of September 11, 2001, ressurected the shadows of religious intolerance and initiated a new conflict in which questions of faith and belief are again central. Terms and concepts that we might have thought had been abandoned to the graveyard of history arise again. We hear demands that the so-called Muslim world undergo a Reformation — though, as Waleed Aly has so accurately pointed out in his recent book, People Like Us (2007), this is precisely what Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are also calling for in their radical Wahhabist construction of Islam. We hear that we must steel ourselves for a war with an enemy that is a war to the death, a war between civilisation and barbarism. We dig through the fetid soil of history’s graveyard and cloak ourselves with the stinking bones of the Crusaders. Our righteousness, our will, our civilisation is not to be questioned just as their righteousness, their will, their civilisation is not to be tolerated. The tragic power of that image of the fallen buildings looms so large in our consciousness, shadows

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all that we say, but I want to resist the conclusion that Ground Zero in New York City also represents a year zero for our contemporary politics, the moment which washes us in the West clean of all our sins but damns those who are not us to the inferno forever. I am not interested in what is dead in history’s graveyard, but in that which remains alive, that which still may illuminate our knowledge and our understanding today. I am suspicious of this word tolerance, suspicious because of its atavistic reach back to its genesis in religious war. This is not to refuse that aspect of the concept which values human potential and human collaboration. But that is not how tolerance is always, or even often, utilised. What concerns me about tolerance is not when it comes into play between equals, those imaginary beings that live their lives on the level playing field, but what comes into play when we are being tolerant in a world of unequal power. In this light, it is worth remembering that the return of the concept of tolerance predates the terrorist bombings in New York City, in Washington, in London, in Madrid, and in Baghdad. It was with the end of the Cold War that we can trace a re-emergence of the concept of tolerance in the Anglo–European world. Though we now fight the enemy cloaked in our defence of the greatness of our tolerant civilisation, the end of the twentieth century saw an outpouring of works in the academy, in the media, in literature which argued against tolerance, or at least asked

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us to reconsider the liberal consensus on diversity and multiculturalism. The terrain of this battle was culture. The most fierce and fervent denunciations came from the United States, but it quickly developed a homegrown aspect. The question asked was: had we become too tolerant? A consensus began to emerge in Australian liberalism, for both the conservatives and the social democrats, that ‘political correctness’ had gone too far, that Australian national identity had been hijacked by a so-called ‘black armband’ view of history that falsely misinterpreted the past. Wherever we positioned ourselves in relation to this debate, the result was a shift in the language we began to use to explain ourselves to ourselves. With the most fraught of issues that confronted contemporary Australia — the poisoned history and relationship between Indigenous and nonIndigenous Australians — the language of genocide, reparations, the language of treaty and land rights, gave way to the question of reconciliation. I’m not, in this instance, concerned with the worthiness of the goal of reconciliation, but simply want to suggest that reconciliation presupposes a different politics and therefore different outcomes to a politics centred on land and questions of ownership and dispossession. It subtly introduces a new inflection in the question of the state and Aboriginal Australia. The responsibilities arising from individual consciousness and behaviour come to seem as important as the

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collective responsibilities and actions of the nation state. Extending tolerance, such an inappropriate concept when dealing with the state’s relationship to Aboriginal dispossession (for we have the Stolen Generation as living proof of what violence can be enacted under the legitimisation of tolerance), makes much more sense in the individualised context of contemporary Australian politics. Equally, a different emphasis on the meaning and politics of the citizen’s relationship to the state comes into play when we shift from speaking about multiculturalism to speaking of nationhood. The Australian state is no longer one which can be positively transformed culturally, politically, economically, linguistically, socially, by the arrival of immigrants and refugees. Instead, the Australian state is a monolithic institution, Anglo–Celtic, Judeo–Christian, so much so that a citizenship test can now be constructed to articulate the unchanging, fixed nature of this thing called ‘Australianness’. Conflict, contradiction, change — the very stuff of living history is abandoned. One politician who proudly wrapped the stench of a moribund past around herself was Pauline Hanson. As if descending from the heavens to lead this battle we were having about culture, history, identity and nationhood, Hanson’s and One Nation’s attacks on multiculturalism, Aboriginal rights and immigration were so fierce, so extreme, that they enabled even John Howard to appear moderate. Pauline Hanson’s success was such that it allowed tolerance, so discredited in

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the cultural wars as a manifestation of left-wing extremism, to reappear as a virtue, a liberal corrective to both the extremism of One Nation and of the ‘left elite’. Hanson’s boot had so effectively kicked in the heads of the boongs, the wogs, chinks and muzzas, that even those of us who had grumbled about multiculturalism and the number of bloody ethnics on stage, on film, in print, or who were sick of feeling guilty about the sufferings of Aboriginal Australia, or who disliked the girl at the cash register flauting her hijab in our faces, even we could recognise that whatever we were, we were not One Nation, we were not that. That being hate, that being uninformed prejudice and bigotry. We were much more tolerant than that and our attacks on pluralism and multiculturalism had nothing in common with the vehemence of the hatred revealed by One Nation’s appearance. The culture wars, so much about identity, so much about what books to read and what words to use, were revealed as having nothing at all to say about economics and the social. Though we were told to be suspicious of the media, of the academy and the arts because they were elites promoting agendas contrary to the desires and political demands of the majority, the nature of this majority was never explicitly formulated. The language of class relations, because it was identified so strongly with socialism and Marxism, had been abandoned. Instead, opposed to the elites was the figure of the ‘battler’, a word imbued with the myth of

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colonial Australian nationhood, a word that only refers to the individual, never to the collective. The battler has no relationship to economics, to struggle, except struggle on an individual or — at most — a familial level. In fact, the battler could be working class or an aspiring bourgeoisie, a maverick entrepreneur, a straight-talking millionaire journalist. When the battler, however, stepped over the line, when they erupted into violence on the sands of Cronulla, when they beat a young Sudanese–Australian to death in the far-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, they stopped being part of who we are and instead became ugly, became the mob. The battlers, who never speak for themselves, are always spoken for by someone else, now mark the symbolic ground for what constitutes political tolerance in Australia. You either speak for the battler or you speak for no one at all. The result? We have a national body politics in which the rhetoric of both major parties is indistinguishable, where any ethical component to the social contract has been torn up as unnecessary or cumbersome or simply uneconomical. The political parties not only share a commitment to similar economic policies, they both also espouse and are deeply committed to a nationalism which must be ruthlessly patrolled, tested, complied with: all of this done in the name of the battler. Though they should not feel that secure. If you fall through the cracks, are dependent on welfare, are one of those who have not participated in and benefited from the

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explosive gushing of wealth and greed of the past fifteen years, you will find yourself no longer one of the battlers, but one of the mob, one of ‘them’. Unconnected to a party, a movement, a politics or a history, wrenched apart from the concept of class, the battler cannot afford to fall through the cracks. No one will speak for her then. When the ideal or practice of tolerance is substituted for justice or equality, when sensitivity to or even respect for the other is substituted for justice for the other, when historically induced suffering is reduced to ‘difference’ or to the medium of ‘offense’, when suffering as such is reduced to a problem of personal feeling, then the field of political battle and political transformation is replaced with an agenda of behavioural, attitudinal, and emotional practices. While such practices often have their value, substituting a tolerant attitude or ethos for political redress of inequality or violent exclusion not only reifies politically produced differences but reduces political action and justice projects to sensitivity training, or what Richard Rorty has called an ‘improvement in manners.’ Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, 2006

In the logic of liberal tolerance, let us imagine a dinner party in which the Liberal voter is seated next to the Labor voter. Social democrats are guests, a fair few

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of the party voted Green in the last election. There are economic rationalists there. The host was a Maoist in his youth, at university, but as he has aged his views have become increasingly right-wing and conservative. His wife was once a radical feminist but now finds herself most passionately objecting to those deluded Muslim women who use feminist language — which she believes is her language — to justify their wearing of the hijab. It is possible that seated at the table is a bureaucrat who was involved in fine-tuning the questions for the citizenship test. He sits across from the host’s daughter who has returned to Australia after three years of working for NGOs (non-government organisations) in Dili and in Kabul. There could quite well be a Catholic priest at the dinner, a man who works with the homeless; there might be a Muslim academic as well, but only a nice one, a ‘moderate’ Muslim who won’t object to the fine wine served with the meal. There is a journalist and blog-writer, the son of a junkie single mother, who as a self-made man now writes articles bashing defenders of welfare and the anti-war elites. His wife is a French television producer whose ancestry links her to the French court of the Sun King. The conversation throughout the meal will be stimulating, far-reaching. They will discuss nationalism, Iraq, global warming. The talk will be animated, vigorous, opinions freely expressed. There will also be an unpsoken agreement about behaviour that is not to be tolerated. There must be no violence,

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no insults, no belligerence. Consensus on every issue might not be possible but they might sway each other’s view to some extent. The economic rationalist might acknowledge that, provided there are no restrictions placed on free trade, in a time of unparallelled global wealth the present government should provide more monies for public infrastructure and utilities. The guests might differ on whether Australia should have involved itself in the occupation and destruction of Iraq, but they unanimously agree on the justification for invading Afghanistan. How can we argue against this dinner party? Does it not represent the best of liberal tolerance, the non-violent promise of liberal democracy? Of course, there are some essential shared beliefs that makes the consensus possible. There is a respect for human rights; the denunciation of terrorism, always, and in every instance. There might be a few guests who believe in relinquishing some of their universal rights when it comes to the war on terror, that torture might be justified if it saves innocent lives. There are others at the table who believe that there are economic and political reasons that explain — if they still do not quite justify — terrorism. However, there are some views that one must keep to oneself in order to facilitate robust, unthreatening discussion. And, of course, there are other dinners, other opportunities to share such concerns with more like-minded friends. How can we possibly be critical of such a conversa-

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tion, such an example of democracy and tolerance in miniature portrait? Surely only the most intolerant of fundamentalists would object to this dinner party? But what if we were to introduce the serpent into this dinner in Eden? What if the host was to rise from the table, concerned about the delay with the main course, was to walk into the kitchen and find that the cook and her family were sitting around the kitchen table hoeing into the roast? When the host, outraged, demands that they stop immediately, the cook calmly announces that she finds it difficult to survive on the wages her employer pays her and that she has decided feeding her family takes priority over the success of the dinner party. She urges her children to continue eating. This is a protest, she tells her employer, a form of strike. By this time the dinner guests have all entered the kitchen too, concerned about their host’s absence and the shouts coming from there. How would a politics based on the concept of tolerance make sense of this moment? Is consensus possible or even desirable in this situation? How do we enact tolerance beyond the level of ideas and belief, extend it to encompass our material reality: property, labour, land? Does the concept of tolerance have anything to say to us in this situation? Or should we just call the cops? People, people, why can’t we all just get along. Mick Jagger, Gimme Shelter (documentary), 1940

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In the Maysles’ brothers documentary Gimme Shelter, which records the free concert given by the Rolling Stones in Altamont, California, in 1969, we watch, horrified, as a black youth is stabbed to death by one of the Hell’s Angels ostensibly hired as a bouncer to protect him. Altamont has been read as the symbolic death of the summer of love, the moment when the hippie and counter-cultural utopia fragmented, was ripped apart by the contradictions and confusions of class, race and violence in North American society. In the documentary the camera is fixed on the stoned, frightened face of Mick Jagger as he looks out at the increasingly distressed drug-fucked crowd, at the young boys and girls being bashed by the now out-of-control Hell’s Angels. Jagger’s response is a limp, pathetic lament, a utopian hope for tolerance, peace and love, made redundant by the very violence at his feet: ‘People, people, why can’t we all just get along?’ There is, no doubt, an innocence about those hopes which we all participate in and express whenever we speak the language of universal human rights, when we speak the language of mutual respect, mutual tolerance and mutual acceptance. But the desire for such a universalism — for its own sake — obscures economic violence and social contradictions. That was as true for the United States in 1969 as it is for our globalised late capitalist world in 2008. In a strange twist, it is the proponents of the free market and of unfettered liberalism who have now become heirs to

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the Messianic fervour that once characterised the communist’s passion for Heaven on Earth. Though history has not ended, what economic rationalism promises — and what its less confident sibling, liberal democracy, hopes for — is a future in which the logic of the free market will bring justice, freedom, liberation and whitegoods for all. So for the women in the stinking textile factories of Indonesia, China and the Philippines, forced to piss in plastic bottles or face punishment for taking a break, they are told to wait, that prosperity is just around the corner. As for the boys and girls sold into sexual slavery in Bangkok, in Kiev, in Phnom Penh, they too are asked to wait patiently for the alleviation of their suffering. For the miners breathing in the noxious fumes of prosperity in Papua New Guinea, South Africa or Sierra Leone, their deaths, their torture, all of it is worth it for the day to come in which everyone on the globe will be able to participate in the consumerist freedom which is promised by the globalised free market. As this mania for wealth accelerates, sucking whole cultures, identities, worlds and histories into its vortex, those displaced and made homeless find themselves being born, educated, raising children and dying in the refugee camps which constitute their land, their home, their promise. If they dare to take to the roads, to the boats, to the convoys which will lead them into a future of statelessness and illegality in the West, they are met with armed force, with citizenship tests, with

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hiding underground and attempting to make a living in a brutal black market economy. The liberals stand at the borders with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights and intone: do you believe in the equality of women, do you believe in the rights of the homosexual, do you understand the concept of free speech and freedom for the arts? These rights mark our understanding of freedom, of tolerance, of justice. There are further rights, of course; rights about equal pay for equal work, rights to do with asylum and nationhood, rights to do with work and trade unionism. But these rights are not incorporated into our citizenship tests, in our braying for universalism, in our insistence that only those who are like ‘us’ cross our borders. It is this contest over what are the key principles of human rights and human dignity that lays bare the inequities that bedevil our attempts to ‘all just get along’. This is not to argue that rights should be understood as a hierarchy where we plot the emancipation of women somewhere just below the right to form a trade union. But we have to comprehend that economic relationships have an impact on the claims of universality embodied in the concept of human rights. Those of us who do not fear deportation, starvation, the knock on the door from the police or the immigration officer, are going to experience liberation and opportunity differently to someone living in fear, living in poverty. If it is a nonsense to create a hierarchy of

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human rights it is equally ridiculous to maintain that we all have an equal relationship to the state. As long as a contemporary politics of liberal tolerance maintains the fiction that politics is the expression only of individual belief and has nothing to do with the role, functions and power of the state, it is buying into this dangerous, inhuman lie. ‘People, people, why can’t we all just get along?’ Mick Jagger’s desperate, empty response echoes in its language the hopelessness, irrelevance and confusion that constitutes the left in my society today. For make no mistake, the left is pathetic, the left is only fit for mockery, at least in the English-speaking world. In Australia we scuttle behind the back of the ethically moribund Labor Party, taking hit after hit — Tampa, detention centres, David Hicks, Dr Mohamed Haneef, sedition laws — and we still come back, tails between our legs, celebrating a Labor Party victory in the elections as if that constitutes a left victory. There are the Greens, and they, thankfully, have taken committed, ethical stands against the issues listed above, but the Greens, too, speak to us only in a language of tolerant liberalism. The laughable position of the left is so evident that I risk stating the obvious in documenting its failure. But these ghosts and disappointments must be raised again because it is precisely this catastrophic failure that has seen all political alternatives, all dissent and opposition, only permissible within the paradigm

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of liberalism. And tolerance is what liberals do, as opposed to the authoritarianism or intolerance or lunacy or fanaticism or fundamentalism of any politics which dares critcise liberalism. These assaults on the left — that is, to a politics and ethics that must at their centre have a commitment to the notion that wealth belongs to the social body, not only to the individual — have been made possible by the ethical, economic and social bankruptcy of the former communist states. Perceiving, understanding, comprehending the history of communist totalitarianism cannot fail to force us into a reckoning with the limitations of left thought, left politics and practice. The communist collapse did not affect only those of us who identified as communist or Marxist but all of us involved in activism, struggles and identities that in part originated from the grand socialist vision of emancipation — an emancipation not rooted in the individual but in collectivities, in social movements; that collective emancipation embodied most succinctly in the term ‘camaraderie’. The collapse of communism affects feminism, sexual politics, race politics, it affects questions of radical aesthetics and art. This collapse created a vacuum in politics which liberalism, whether in its tolerant quasi-Christian ethical form or in the extremity of libertarian economic rationalism, rushed in to fill. Seemingly overnight the language of politics began to change. The insights of historical materialism were abandoned, the concept of class disappeared and

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talk of the redistribution of wealth became anachronistic. All that was solid melted into air. This enormous tranformation of history saw an ethics and a politics that defined the passion, suffering, despair and hope of millions of people across the globe disappear, become extinct. Hence, we became bereft of a language with which to comprehend and understand the effects of power. The result is that in a contemporary world where the generation of wealth is unparallelled in human history, we remain confused, silent, uncomprehending. I asked a group of high school students recently. ‘Do you want to know what the gold rush was like?’ Look around you, it was something like this. And just as previous explosions of wealth, such as the conquering of the so-called ‘new world’, had as their underbelly the massive suffering, exploitation and displacement of millions, so does our national prosperity rest on an equally unspeakable inhumanity — except we cannot describe it as such, for to do so makes us dinosaurs, fools still beholden to a failed experiment. Watching the protests at recent anti-globalisation rallies I experienced both a nostalgic euphoria at the evidence of resistance and a debilitating melancholy. Can I trust the language of resistance now? The language of struggle, of opposition? If I answer in the negative I have to retreat, retreat into identity, into selfishness, into my home. In my home, I avoid the news, I avoid the world and I indulge the remnants of

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my political engagement in enjoying the satire of The Chaser’s War on Everything. In their skits they expose and mock the limitations and Orwellian idiocies of the ‘war on terror’. It feels good to laugh but a short comic skit cannot provide the complexity, the knowledge, the arguments we need. Only determined, courageous, diligent journalism and independent intellectual scholarship can provide that for us, but I fear even that falls on deaf ears. I am part of the failure I am describing. I turn off the news, put on a DVD, play on the net. If I were to isolate one moment, one historic process that created the current cul-de-sac for the left in the Anglo–European late capitalist world I would point to the beliefs and practices coalesced around the concept called ‘political correctness’. Political correctness allowed liberalism to define and caricature the left and all progressive social movements as intolerant, almost malevolant forces. The concept of political correctness proved highly useful in liberalism’s attack on the left at the height of the culture wars, but so stained and discredited is the notion of political correctness now that it continues as a phrase to signify something ludicrous, idiotic and humourless in political extremism. The slur of political correctness continues to confuse and immobilise the Australian left’s attempt to reclaim ground as a viable influence in the sphere of politics. As I believe that political correctness has been a destructive obsession for the left — to be clear about

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this, a failed cultural intervention — I think it deserves to be explored in some detail. Political correctness encapsulates the most authoritarian and anti-critical mistakes of socialist and communist history, the perfect phrase to symbolise the suspicion of all dissent, of all counter-argument. The concept itself owes its genealogy to the Maoist doctrines of the Cultural Revolution, but its echo reaches further into the past to embrace the totalitarianism of Stalin and the ‘purist’ Terror of Robespierre and the Jacobins. It is precisely because this authoritarian character has been for so long part of the organised left that liberalism was so successful in turning the phrase ‘being politically correct’ into such an effective insult. Given how successfully the concept has been ridiculed and undermined it is worth remembering that political correctness, as the concept is currently understood in the Anglo–European world, first emerged as a feminist intervention in the sphere of language. It was a recognition that our language reflected the exclusions that our politics practised and that this has an effect not only on the way we speak but how we frame and conceptualise the social. It asked us to recognise that ‘man’ does not include ‘woman’, asked us to recognise difference in language, culture and society. In this strictly semantic sense, political correctness is not necessarily intolerant; though it might require a certain policing of ourselves in order to reflect on how we speak and how we use language,

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it does not in itself pose a problem for argument, debate, conversation. There are, of course, further implications suggested by the concept of political correctness. Exclusion on the level of language also implies an exclusion on the level of political organisation and political practice. It is with the question of these implications that the concept began to concern liberalism, the concern being that these exclusions could only be addressed with political and legislative policies. Fears about quotas, special treatment and affirmative action were expressed in the corridors of our parliaments, academies and workplaces. It is neither my intent nor my concern to attack political correctness at the level of such practice because, unlike liberals, I believe that overcoming and challenging historic disenfranchisement and historic oppression does require a struggle for collective recognition. To put it bluntly, I might believe, like liberals do, that we are all born equal, but this belief is meaningless in that we are all born into unequal social formations and histories. Further, I do not believe that rights, recognition and power are granted to us but rather that they are fought for and claimed. My antipathy for political correctness occurs with the slip away from its concern with language and linguistic practice to its concern with questions of morality. On the left, the concern no longer was whether a joke, an evaluation, an assumption was sexist, whether a law, an exclusion, a rule was homophobic, whether

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a conception, an idea, a belief was racist, but rather that the expression of any of the above could mark a person as somehow sexist or racist or homophobic in totality. Politics moved from the sphere of language into the sphere of morality and manners. And just as the manners of bourgeois society mark out who belongs and who does not belong in that definition of society, so did speech and practice begin to mark who did or did not belong in the community of the left. This intolerance at the level of identity and personal psychology has had a paralysing effect on the left. By privileging personal behaviour it made the self and identity the focus of left politics and devalued economics and history. It is as if the radical insight of second-wave feminism, that the personal is political, was taken up and reversed, placed on its head. Now the political became personal, which is not at all the same thing. Personal morality and individual behaviour began to cloud our experience of the political. Guilt, shame, resentment, frustration: this is how we now spoke to one another, scared of upsetting each other, scared of saying the wrong thing. Liberals in all their guises — because the individual is their terrain, their politics — pounced on this conflation of politics with morality. They were right to pounce because when it came to argument, debate and critique, political correctness did prove not only intolerant but infantile, a policing of contradiction, doubt, change, conflict and power. History — that sphere of knowledge

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most important for the left because in presenting it not as the linear and progressive triumph of great men (and now, ocassionally, a few great women), it offers, instead, history as eruptive, disruptive, as a challenge to liberalism’s suppression of the silences, violences and human misery on which this triumphalism is based — history had been abandoned. Contradiction and struggle, which mark how we should see and understand history, cannot be contained in moral concepts derived from theology. It is not that black is good, woman is good, gay is good, the working class is good. It is not that men are evil, or whites are devils or that the rich are bad. By playing into such barren dichotomies, concepts stripped of complexity or sophistication, we were rendered speechless when the realities stemming from contradiction were thrown in our faces. Political correctness cannot answer how we are to respond politically to blighted Indigenous communities where men rape their children and everyone is drowning in grog. Political correctness does not offer us a critique through which to oppose the rapacious sexual exploitation of young boys and youth by bourgeois, monied First World gay men as they head off for their cock-tours through the developing world. Political correctness has rendered us impotent when confronting an Australian working class that is so cowardly, so apathetic and politically selfish and ignorant that it gladly countenances and supports the

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exploitation and suffering of Asian, African, Arabic, Hispanic working men and women as long as it can satisfy itself with the trinkets and baubles and junk that late consumer capitalism is happy to shit out in one huge unstoppable stream. And, most urgently, political correctness offers us no critique or analysis that provides an alternative to the sterile oppositions embodied in the current ‘war on terror’. Though the Australian left is, I think, correct to identify racism directed towards the Muslim and the Arab as a crucial contemporary concern, this in no way necessitates us to support — let alone identify with — religious-based movements and ideologies that are antithetical to the emancipations promised by socialism and feminism. Though we may be able to form tentative coalitions with such movements in our opposition to the war in Iraq, and in our protesting against detention centres, I would argue that the proper coalitions to build on are with representatives of the Iraqi people who are socialist, communist or social democratic, and with refugee and community advocates whose politics are not conservative and right-wing. We should not be echoing either liberalism’s reduction of international politics to the ethical banality of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ or an ahistorical left politics that places identity before ethics and politics. It must surely be obvious that if we can formulate a politics that is as opposed to anti-Semitism as it is to Zionism then we are capable of a politics that opposes racism directed

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at the Muslim and Arab but which at the same time makes our opposition to Islamic political theocracy clear. I do not wish to suggest that any of this is simple, that it does not require ferocious debate and political resurrection for the left, but I think is is undoubtedly urgent and necessary. Liberal commentators such as Tony Cohen in the UK, Christopher Hitchens in the USA and Pamela Bone here in Australia have been quick to berate the left for our so-called alliances with ‘terrorists’ or ‘Islamo-fascists’, but what their opposition does not admit to is the fact that liberalism as espoused by the ‘coalition of the willing’ has actively silenced and suppressed left opposition in the Middle East, often in willing unity with Islamicists. Conceptually, political correctness which can’t see the politics for the identity is bereft of the means of offering real political alternatives and programs in situations such as those described above. As a symbol of a failed past, political correctness can be abandoned. In this sense the liberal critics are right and a concession is owed by the left to the espousement of tolerance, in that we must accept that the politics of terror — Jacobin, Leninist, Stalinist, Maoist and terrorist — have been a colossal failure and regression for socialist and revolutionary politics. It seems clear that we who call ourselves left must be beholden to the challenge of democracy, not only as a set of legislative and parliamentary practices, but as an intrinsic element of our imagining, our activism,

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our being in this world. The historic murderous intolerance of the left must humble us. Without this re-engagement with democracy we might as well abandon the left to history. In doing so, however, we would also be abandoning history to the victors. That liberalism understands the danger of history in undermining its sole claim to universalism and to Messianic triumphalism can be discerned in the dual nature of its response to political correctness. Critiques of the concept function to bolster the perception that liberalism offers a more tolerant, more democratic politics than that offered by socialism. Simultaneously, a diluted rhetoric grafted from the concept of political correctness enters the bureacratic and legislative language of the liberal state in order to assure us that it is more able to manage, accommodate and assimilate so-called minorities which were once associated with the movements and politics of the left. It is as if we no longer require activists, unionists, organisers or independent intellectuals because the ‘benign’ state is the sole provider of such representation. Every week we receive brochures, pamphlets, propaganda from the three levels of Australian government which, while reminding us of our civic responsibilities to do with drugs, the environment and terrorism, also ask us to respect diversity. Inside this propaganda the Australian face can be black, white, Asian, Indigenous. At the time when multiculturalism as a central aspect of Australian identity is being eliminated we are

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being asked to affirm the peripherals of our migrant and racial history: food, music, dance, the way we do our hair. But when it comes to history tolerance is abandoned — history is being reduced to singular interpretations that conform to one narrative. The Liberal federal government’s intervention in education was centred on the teaching of an approved Australian curriculum that offered history as an undiluted progression of democracy and capitalism in our nation, in which every sickening manifestation of racism — genocide, White Australia, the Stolen Generation, One Nation, the detention camps — would be identified as exceptions because the mantra runs that we are not racist, that we have always been good, decent, courageous. Similarly the crucial importance of the labour movement in Australian history is being undermined, rewritten, so that the emancipations which arose from committed political class struggle and trade union mobilisation would be reinterpreted as manifestations of an almost transcendental Anglo–Celtic nationalism. We are the embodiment of egalitarianism, we are larrikin, we are anti-authoritarian: we continue to believe all this even as we imprison refugees in detention centres; even as we once again venture blindly, willingly and unquestioningly into another war overseas at the behest of our masters; even as we acquiesce in terrible silence to increasingly severe restrictions on our freedoms and civil liberties. We accept liberalism’s claim to truth and as our nation

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state is representative of it we are incapable of any protest or revolt against it. We have all become perfect corporate, democratic citizens, heirs to a glorious unthreatening history. Liberalism always washes the slate clean. History begins and ends with its victory. Everything is tolerated as long as we accede to this. So we find ourselves living in a perpetual present stripped of any resonance or remembrance, for the past has been denuded of any danger, confusion or complexity. The past can only be allowed to return as symbolic theatre, carefully controlled and managed to always speak the one mythology that history has always been ‘us’ and ‘them’. A real history would be one that shatters our complacency, one that would keep contradiction and struggle alive. Such an understanding of history would allow us to speak of both Gallipoli and genocide as foundations of this nation, not as exhibitions at the museum but as fragments of history that still speak to us now about who we are and how we became who we are, how history is not dead but the very possibility of our potential as a nation and as a society. Such a history would be a remembering that opposition to war, the strength of the anti-conscription movement, was as much a part of our history in World War One as were the bodies of the young soldiers dying on a beach in Ottoman Turkey. Such a history would undermine the mythic lie we white Australians still persist in telling about ourselves, that claim to fortune

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which arises from ‘never having to experience a war on our own soil’, a lie that obliterates the resistance and opposition of Aboriginal Australia to colonial rule. It is history such as this that cannot be tolerated in liberalism because this history asks questions of us, now, in the present. This stagnant interpretation of history which reduces it to a game of us versus them is most vividly and terribly expressed as the ‘clash of civilisations’. What is this madness that forces us to choose between a self-righteous, rapacious always conquering West and an equally self-righteous fanatical religious totalitarianism? What is this mummification of the past that has led us to the current tragedy in Iraq where our liberal platitudes about democracy and freedom are revealed to be, once again, justifications for a colonial, military conquest that secures our right to the exploitation of Iraqi resources and labour? We have forgotten history and it returns, as both tragedy and farce, to remind us of previous complicities. What is truly astounding is that, given what we have done to Iraq — not only in this war, but over half a century of exploitation, of actively supporting the betrayal of and violence against its people — we can still maintain the fiction of our good intentions, our idealism, the integrity of our claims to universalism and human rights. History has returned as a tragedy for the Iraqi people. We are the farce of that return.

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Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain. Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940

We live and write and work and love in a world of contradiction, fragmentation and unease. We engage with history to understand this; not to argue that there is one clear solution, explanation or revelation that can dissolve these contradictions and fears, but to remind ourselves that it is through the struggle of this engagement that we can occasionally reach an understanding of our world. What this history

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reminds us is that there has never been one answer or one solution to contradiction. Furthermore the attempts for the simple answer or solution have always brought a cataclysmic result for us. This is as much a lesson for the right as it is for the left. Contemporary liberalism, as fearful of this insight as the most fundamentalist monothiest because it unsettles its claim to perpetual correctness, to perpetual truth, responds to contradiction by accusing those who speak through it as being elitist, obscurist, as no longer sharing the language of the crowd. And the left, stunned from its grand historical failure, wrapped in the sackcloths of political correctness, cannot respond because it too has confused the crowd with history. The liberals themselves are blind to how the market now makes a lie of their claims for universality. The market tells us that we are broken, unfulfilled and that only by filling our homes, our souls, our selves with the endless junk of consumption can we ever hope to attain some approximation of the whole. But the whole is an infinite abyss that cannot be sated. We are no longer communities, no longer society, we are niches, lifestyles, we are our opportunities not our commitments. I, for one, don’t wish to buy into that ludicrous fallacy that to speak another form of humanity and engagement makes me intolerant, makes me elitist. We are reduced to speaking in whispers, looking over our shoulders because we are told that the only language

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acceptable is one which speaks to that which is most base, most bigoted and most isolationist in us. This language, which has a name, also has a history. It is a history which even liberals understand as dangerous, as volatile, one which they cannot always control, one which can turn on them, and one which has always utilised the claim to speak for the ‘crowd’ as justification for violence and intolerance. The name of this history is nationalism. The failure to articulate and defend a coherent viable multiculturalism represents a failure for both Australian liberalism and for the Australian left. The former, so concerned with instances of special pleading, and almost fanatical in its fear of reading racism as integral to Australian history and Australian culture, ceded to the conservatives the imperative of defining Australian statehood and Australian identity. The left, by succumbing to the moral purity of political correctness and moral righteousness, found themselves isolated and speaking to themselves, becoming obsessed with the minutiae of culture. The one party that did understand the importance of race to this country, that understood it at a visceral, dangerously unmediated level, was One Nation. No argument can be made about the concept of tolerance in Australian society in the early twenty-first century if it does not comprehend the implication of this failure by liberalism and the left. Both of the major parties in this country, for blatant political expediency,

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consented in betraying a hope for this nation that we could understand ourselves as multi-ethnic and multi-lingual, as emerging from a history that is as much Irish as it is British, as much Aboriginal as it is colonial, as much Asian as it is European. That there were sections of the Liberal Party that were always opposed to such an understanding is evident: John Howard may well be the epitome of this conservative monocultural view of Australia, but there were also equivalent nationalist conservatives in the Labor Party. My argument is not with them. My argument is with those members of the Liberal and Labor parties who did not share such beliefs and sentiments but who gladly sacrificed their own principles on the altar of political ascendancy and the mob. Though the Greens and the Democrats did take principled, courageous stands opposing this betrayal they unfortunately did not have enough of a constituency to reverse it. The intolerant aspect of contemporary Australian nationalism is evident in the fear so many experience when confronting it. There is no innocent patriotism at play when people paint their faces in the colours of the flag or when they wrap the flag around their bodies. The success of One Nation made such a claim impossible. Naive? Possibly. Innocent? Never. Aboriginal Australians don’t wrap themselves in the Australian flag, Muslim–Australians do not, and precious few Asian–Australians or Mediterranean–Australians do either — and if they do, it is only as an ironic or fearful

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gesture. One Nation and the politics that followed in its wake made it clear what they wished for the flag to represent, and through political gutlessness or expediency or simply their deep amorality, our politicians went along with it. And what is the result? Australia is more ghettoised, more fearful, more distrustful and more ignorant than at any time in my memory. A promise articulated in multiculturalism — a promise, it is true, that still needed to be explored, debated, critiqued, developed, committed to — was sent kicking, flung out to sea, destroyed on the sands of Cronulla. I don’t want liberalism to cry crocodile tears and claim that this was not what they meant when they were clamouring for multiculturalism to be disbanded at the height of the culture wars. This is the effect and I know that if I had been on that beach, how would the murderous mob, waving their flag, have known if I was one of them? In our swimmers, a Greek wog looks very much like a Lebo wog. This is what contemporary Australian nationalism does. It reminds us that there are the true Aussies and then there are the boongs, the wogs, the slope-heads, the refos, chinks and niggers. Any protest, any dissent from such a view, any expression of intelligent engagement with Australian history is met with the arid, brain-numbing, immature response of ‘you are being unAustralian’. If in the last two decades the Australian left has had to deal with some of the shame and responsibility that came from our collective failures, silences and

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complicity, Australian liberalism should not fool itself that it does not also have its own shameful mistakes to deal with. But I fear that liberalism is incapable of such reflection at the moment, so vehement is its faith in its self, in its principles, in its righteousness. ‘This is the best of all possible worlds,’ that expatriate Candide, Clive James, popped over recently from southern England to remind us. As a writer, as an artist, what does this concept of tolerance mean for me? What are the implications of tolerance for my art and my work? As I have suggested the concept of tolerance cannot be liberated from its history. The abstractness of the concept, the fact that it remains elusive depending on whether we are talking about it as pertaining to the individual or to the social, as to whether we are talking from the experience of tolerating or the experience of being tolerated, means that I remain suspicious of the concept even as I utilise it. Nevertheless, my critique of liberalism cannot escape the inexorable link between its history and the history of socialism and the left. The emancipatory projects that arose in eighteenth century Europe have created a politics, an ethics and a language that we now identify as progressive and secular. Social democratic liberals are right to remind the left of this shared legacy, a legacy which has made possible the concepts that gave rise to feminism, the abolition of slavery and the universal franchise. Just as important, especially for the writer and artist, the emergence of an ideal

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of ‘free speech’ must concern us, must obsess us, must be interrogated by us. However, for those of us on the left, though we are heirs to liberalism, we cannot forget that we are also heirs to a legacy that links emancipation to the freedom of exploitation from alienated labour. To put it simply, a left that is not critical and in opposition to capitalism is not left at all. There is one further legacy that the left is beholden to and that is the revolutionary insights that arose from the anti-imperialist struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What we understand of the left must be informed by these three intellectual, ethical and political legacies: liberalism, historical materialism and anti-imperialism. This tripartite understanding means that though I do not relinquish democratic ideals to liberalism, I am required as a writer, as an artist of the left, to commit to a radical tolerance which, while not ignoring the material constraints and limits on the ‘freedom’ of speech, also insists on a defence of ‘speech’ — of the act of giving voice — even if that voice condemns me, even if that voice argues for annihilation. This is the inescapable implication that arises from reconciling ourselves to the historic failures and mistakes of communism. As writers we cannot afford to re-enact a totalitarianism des lettres, to collaborate in a policing of expression and the word. For me, then, tolerance in speech is not only about how many voices we hear, or even how it

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is that we hear certain voices above others. The support of free speech requires a commitment that places the writer, the artist, against both the liberal and the socialist. I am alone here, I am at the world’s end, withheld from every gaze, here no one can reach me, there is no creature that can come nigh where I am; no limits, hence, no barriers; I am free. Marquis de Sade, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom, 1785

In 2006, a Danish newspaper published a series of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammad. A friend, knowing my antipathy to all forms of censorship, asked me what I would have done if I had been the editor of the Age for a day. Would I have published the cartoons? Yes, I replied, after thinking it through, but I would do it as a special insert in the paper. I would publish the cartoons next to a speech by David Irving next to a reproduction of the photograph Piss Christ next to a pornographic image of a child sourced from the internet next to an image of a woman in the burqua next to a speech from Osama bin Laden next to a monologue from the comedian Sarah Silverman. My point, I argued, would be that if we were to have a debate on censorship then we should address the complexity of censorship. In respect to the ‘Danish cartoons affair’, the condemnation of the Muslim

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opposition to the cartoons must engage with the specific history of their publication: how it was not initially the Danish Muslim community that protested but rather religious organisations in Pakistan and the Middle East who wished to make political mileage out of it in order to foment anti-European sentiment at home; how the newspaper involved had for months editorialised against the immigration of Muslims to Denmark; how the cartoonists themselves were largely racist and intolerant of Islam. But in acknowledging all of the above, which is important to an understanding of the political complexity of the ensuing uproar, I do not want to dodge the implications of my own beliefs. As a writer I do ask society to extend a tolerance to that which I write and which I have published. Therefore, though I think the Australian newspaper editors who refused to publish the cartoons made the most responsible and most principled choice (and I argue this because I do believe the cartoonists’ intentions were moronically racist rather than politically courageous). If I was the editor for a day I would have done as I said to my friend. The desire is sometimes expressed that there should be more writers, artists, filmmakers and poets in politics. This sentiment expresses something of a desire for politics as we know it to be more imaginative. But I’m not sure if politics requires artists. One of the lessons the tragic history of communism in the twentieth century has to teach us is the central impor-

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tance of dissent. Rather than being politicians I think one of the most important functions of writers, intellectuals and artists is to pose the questions, articulate the silences and protest the violences committed by regimes of power. The imperative role of dissent in totalitarian, military and theocratic states is clear to us, but that should not blind us to the necessity of dissent in our own nation, our own culture. This is especially true at a time when our media has become more monopolistic, where the ideology of nationalism shrouds itself in the cloth of anti-intellectualism, where we have embarked on a neo-colonial war in the Middle East and when our government has introduced security and sedition laws that can be activated at any moment to silence opposition and the expression of political alternatives. That my freedom to protest is greater here in Australia than it would be if I were in Burma, China or Sudan is not the issue here. That is undoubtedly true but I think it is a dangerous and somewhat nonsensical comparison, though writers as diverse as Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and Clive James continue to propound it.* The danger lies in assuming *

The delusion that these three writers participate in is believing that the state exists ‘over there’, while they themsleves write within a ‘global community’ that renders them ‘stateless’. Though I think Hitchens the more intelligent and incisive of the three, he too ends up being an apologist and propagandist for the British and USA states precisely because he believes these states are ‘universalist’, outside struggle and history.

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a teleological end to history in which a commitment to liberal ideas is confused with an allegiance to the democratic liberal state. The nonsense arises from the refusal to countenance the economic and imperialist exploitation of the liberal states. To limit the role of dissent to something that is permissible over ‘there’, as something not of value to our very own culture and society, is to acquiesce in the creation of a safe art, a compliant art, a sanctioned art. We might very well call it an apparatchik’s art. I don’t require of art that it is always an art of dissent but I would be much less interested in cultural expression if that possibility was stripped from it. It is this motivation for dissent and resistance that convinces me that artists are not necessarily good politicians, because the urge to speak the unspeakable, the unpopular, the uncompromising, the dangerous and the seditious is what art, but not politics, can countenance. It is also why I have to, in the end, align myself with a position of anti-censorship and free speech that beholds me to defend artistic expression even if I am opposed to the motivations and intentions of the artist or the writer. Undoubtedly I will be more vocal, more committed, to defending Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses over the Danish cartoons because I believe the former to be a necessary, important book on the radical implications of multiculturalism and consider the latter as juvenile at best, and deliberately racist at worst. But on the point of principle I defend

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the right to expression of those whose point of view I find intolerable. This radical tolerance towards expression necessitates a scepticism and, when required, a resistance to the sanctions, laws and political power of the state. And it is this position that creates a tension between the intentions of the artist and the intentions of the political activist or the politician. This tension can best be described using a term borrowed from religious history and the catastrophes heaped upon the heretics: I think it is essential for the writer, the artist, to be blasphemous. This is a position beyond the bourgeois politeness that taints the liberal’s conception of free speech, and also a position at odds with the redemptionist hope that defines the socialist and feminist ideal of art. It asks that the writer and the artist always exist in a position of readiness to opposition, a consciousness that we live in a state of emergency; not an emergency as articulated to us by politicians or the media but as a concrete reality that defines our past and present and our potential. This is not to say that the artist cannot hold an opinion, express a political opinion, join a movement, take on a faith. But we are required, I believe, to always look towards that defined as unspeakable, intolerable, traitorous, seditious, evil and abject in order to ensure that the violence enacted against its expression is given a voice, shaped into a memory.

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It is this that the twentieth century has to teach the artist and writer, and it is precisely this that those artists and writers running blindly after the train of progress, bellowing ‘the clash of civilisations’, have forgotten. The tolerance of the radical artist cannot be a liberal tolerance. It is a radical, disturbing, dangerous tolerance; heretical, blasphemous, cruel. It has to speak on behalf of not only the oppressed, the imprisoned, the condemned, it also has to refute the silencing of the racist, the inhuman, the murderous and, dare I say it, even the fascistic. It is this aspect of radical tolerance which distances the artist and writer from politics, which makes our involvement suspicious, tentative, infuriating. The artist’s dissent should in no way be confused with the work, responsibilities and commitments of the activist, the politician, the intellectual or the revolutionary. This radical dissent may even require the ardent opposition of the activist, the liberal and the socialist. But I think this extreme blasphemous position of the outsider embodied in the always dissenting, always tolerant role of the artist — a romantic concept, yes; an impossible concept, yes; a dangerous concept, yes — is essential to political and social emancipation. I poeti appartengono sempre ad un’altra civiltà. (Poets always belong to another civilisation.) Pier Paolo Pasolini, Bestia da stile, 1967

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We live in fear. Even those of us existing in the comfort of the free market live in anxiety. We don’t trust our politicians, we understand that our consumerist manias are destroying nature and we all feel that we might be potential targets of the globalisation of terror and war. We retreat into our houses, our enclaves, our digital alternatives because we wish to be safe. To be a writer in this context, to be an artist, demands of us a response. As I hope I have made clear, in my arguments with liberalism it is not that I believe there is nothing of value in the ideals of tolerance, of universality, of human rights, democratic participation and free speech. I passionately do. But the abandoning of historical knowledge is something we can not afford politically and ethically to countenance. Whatever the ambiguities of the concept of tolerance, what is clear for our present moment is that it is intolerance that we are required to counter, to relinquish and to abandon in our intellectual, imaginative and creative thinking. That includes the intolerance of religious fundamentalism but also the intolerance of an economics and politics which claims right only for itself and which asserts that only its priorities and desires are to be fulfilled. We must espouse ideals of free speech, female emancipation and democratic participation but we need to understand that there are also ideals that people across the globe espouse equally passionately to do with the end of hunger, the end of labour exploitation and the

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repossession and restitution of land and resources. Crucial to that goal is refuting the apocalyptic language that makes conversation, argument and debate impossible because it annihilates the very possibility of conversation. It is my hope that, as so many liberals have succumbed to the evangelical absurdities of the clash of civilisations, that spaces and opportunities for a revived left-wing intervention are now possible: an intervention that demands more than accepting crumbs from the Labor Party’s table, an intervention that radically transforms our racist monolithic interpretation of nationalism, an intervention that does not confuse the promise of global fellowship with the goals of neo-imperialist economic exploitation. Why do we speak of tolerance now? It is in no small part to do with the fact that we live in a globalised world where access to information, travel, exchange and the flow of imagery and ideas circulates at a pace unimaginable even a generation ago. We can look into worlds and cultures instantaneously. What we forget is that we too can be observed from the other side of the computer. The Anglo–European world is so used to identifying itself as the centre of the world, of technology, of ideas that it is easy to forget this. What do we look like under a different gaze? Do we look liberal, tolerant, compassionate, just and fair? It is possible to perceive some of this because we are some of this. But I think all of us

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can understand that we also look bloated and sated, decadent and rich, fat, cruel, selfish and greedy. I think it is fair to say that we can understand how the gaze from Darfur or La Paz or the Gaza Strip may find us and our behaviour and our wealth hypocritical and intolerable. Years ago, when I first decided to take this vocation of being a writer seriously, I came across a declaration that all writers need to be bisexual. I took this to mean not that individual writers are required to be polymorphously perverse in their personal life but that, for a writer of fiction, being able to slip easily from the feminine to the masculine and vice versa is important if we wish to represent something of the complexity of human life and human emotion. I think an equivalent observation could be made that it enriches the scope of the writer’s canvas if they can be truly internationalist when it comes to expressing themselves on the page. By this I do not necessarily mean internationalist in the global sense (for in the end thinking ourselves through gender is not as difficult as thinking ourselves through a culture and history unknown or mysterious to us) but internationalist on our own turf, in terms of our own national identity as writers. I have had the good fortune recently of reading the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s Snow and the US writer Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men. These two novelists, so different in style, in form, share a

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profound understanding that what it is to be Turkish, what it is to be North American, is not at all simple and straightforward but is dependent on place, class, the question of whether you come from the city or from the country. The danger of current Australian nationalism is that it manifests itself as opposite to this understanding. Nationalism as espoused by our politicians, by many of our journalists, is a narrow singular identity so rigidly expressed that it can be reduced to banal regurgitation of symbolic dates in history or to boxes to be ticked off in a multiplequestion citizenship exam. This is where the dissent of the artist and the writer is crucial. And this is what the best of our artists and writers are doing: refusing the reductionism of history and instead creating narratives which recognise that reconciliation to this notion of being Australian requires an acknowledgement and remembrance of silences, revolt and revolution, of violence and resistance. Our desire for tolerance in politics, in religion, in civic culture is a straightforward human desire. ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ we urge. But I think we need to be suspicious of this desire if it arises from an equally straightforward and human desire to be safe, untouched by violence, by conflict and suffering. For society and politics and art are not only subjects for dinner parties and we cannot pretend we are released from questions of inequality and injustice. The collapse of the Berlin Wall did not end history

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nor did the collapse of the World Trade Centre towers in 2001 magically wipe the slate of history clean. The demands for tolerance, and the equivalent demands for democracy, for the emancipation of women, for global human rights are resounding clarion calls but in themselves they cannot address the fundamental facts of persistent economic and political exploitation in this world, they cannot as mere ideas alleviate the suffering of imperialist appropriation and war. It is human to desire to be safe, to be free from violence. We fear so much in the present moment, we are so anxious about the escalation of war and terror, we are shocked by our Promethean annihilation of nature. Like children we wish to banish death and sickness and suffering and despair from our world. We are promised that we can live longer, be healthier and possess more than we have ever known before. But in seeking such freedoms for ourselves we cannot be insensible to the war, poverty, hunger and hatred upon which our prosperity is based. It is my fear that at times our recent calls for tolerance are a moral equivalent to the economic rationalist’s level playing field. If we are to demand an end to intolerance on the level of belief and the individual then we must be prepared to accept the demand that we also require freedom from social and global economic exploitation. Otherwise our demand for tolerance is a hypocrisy. Iraq, Guantanamo, the sending of the military into communities in the Northern Territory and the continual

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shame of our detention camps are testament to the inhumanity of this hypocrisy. We acquiesce to a suffering we would not tolerate for ourselves. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story the majority of the population of Omelas are able to remain in their city even after witnessing the cost of their prosperity. In Omelas it is one lone child who suffers. But even that is too much suffering for some of citizens. They make the choice to abandon that world. We are told that we too live in a version of Omelas. We are heirs to an almost unimaginable wealth. Like the citizens of Le Guin’s story, we too believe we have vanquished famine and war from our gates. But, just like the citizens of Omelas, we must recognise that our good fortune and happiness is built on the suffering not of one person but of millions. Those who make our shirts, our toys, who pick the beans for our coffee, who process the petroleum to power our cars, who we barter with or tip or get to fuck when we holiday in their world. And what do we do with this knowledge, this understanding? We become resentful, we blame the poor for their poverty, the dispossessed for their homelessness, and we decry their choosing fanatics and fundamentalists for martyrs when we have denied them all other political options and have even funded their fanatics and fundamentalists. Everyone is to blame except ourselves because we are good, we tell ourselves, we are decent, we are civilised, we are democratic, we are tolerant. Unlike the citizens of

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Omelas we lie to ourselves. We have become something truly monstrous, truly unique. We are indeed a strange beast that is slouching into history. We are the masters who don’t recognise our own slaves. What we have become is truly intolerable.

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In Matters of Prejudice Gideon Haigh In Matters of Prejudice John Howard should have seen it coming; perhaps he even did. On 27 February 1992, the House of Representatives was due to debate the economic package presented the previous day by the new prime minister, Paul Keating. But nothing made Keating’s sap rise like a contest of ideas. He had been inciting Howard throughout the two months of his premiership with insurrectionary talk of a new republic, a new flag, a new manifest destiny for Australia in Asia — a bait to which Howard had finally risen with a speech praising the 1950s as a golden age of Australian accomplishment. On what he termed one of his opponent’s ‘rare philosophic outbursts’, Keating that afternoon turned all his acrid, atrabilious wit. ‘That was the “golden age” when Australia stagnated,’ Keating began. ‘That was the “golden age” when Australia was injected with a near-lethal dose of fogeyism by the conservative parties opposite.’ He surveyed them with a gimlet eye. ‘That was the “golden 57

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age” when vast numbers of Australians never got a look in; when women did not get a look in and had no equal rights and no equal pay; when migrants were factory fodder; when Aborigines were excluded from the system; when we had these xenophobes running around about Britain and bootstraps; and that awful cultural cringe under Menzies which held us back for nearly a generation.’ With the opposition benches in uproar, the press gallery swooning in admiration, Keating zeroed in on Howard (‘the Honourable Member for Bennelong’) and his leader John Hewson (‘the Honourable Member for Wentworth’). Why not, the Prime Minister guffawed, turn the old Parliament House into a museum for the cultural detritus of the 1950s? ‘The Morphy Richards toaster, the Qualcast mower, a pair of heavily protected slippers, the Astor TV, the AWA radiogram.’ Then, the punchline: ‘And, of course, the Honourable Member for Wentworth and the Honourable Member for Bennelong could go there as well. When the kids come and look at them they will say, “Gee, Mum, is that what it was like then?” And the two Johns can say, “No, kids. This is the future”.’ On behalf of a group of old loyalists from the New South Wales north coast, Howard had that morning presented a petition deploring the idea of a new flag. Keating now unceremoniously wiped his boots on that flag’s British quarter. What about Malaya? Singapore? The Pacific? ‘This was the country that you people

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wedded yourself to, and even as it walked out on you and joined the Common Market, you were still looking for your MBEs and your knighthoods, and all the rest of the regalia that comes with it. You would take Australia right back down the time tunnel to the cultural cringe where you have always come from.’ By this stage, Howard was on his feet, so florid that the Speaker named him: ‘I think the Honourable Member for Bennelong is going to have a heart attack if his face goes any redder, so he might cease interjecting too.’ But Keating concluded by yanking the debate into the present: ‘You can go back to the fifties to your nostalgia, your Menzies, the Caseys and the whole lot. They were not aggressively Australian, they were not aggressively proud of our culture, and we will have no bar of you or your sterile ideology.’ Such style — such panache. No wonder the loss of Keating has scarcely been made up in the theatre of Parliament. No wonder, too, that Howard is still defined partly by this, his formative political enmity: the simplest means of extracting a laugh at his expense has been to cast him as Menzies redux, a craven Anglophile nostalgist sleeping with the Queen’s photo under his pillow. Yet, as an act of prophecy, Keating’s proved as hopeless as his predecessor’s promise to inoculate children against poverty by 1990. There was no time tunnel. The cringe, if anything, became a cocksure strut during Howard’s premiership. Contra the conviction that only an Australian republic could

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foster true pride in the nation, the last decade has seen an explosion in patriotic sentiment — uninhibited, unabashed, even exhibitionistic. Consider the extraordinary rejuvenation of the flag, underwritten by government grants for flagpoles extended to RSLs, schools, war memorials and aged care hostels; the rediscovery of Australia’s martial traditions, most visible in the mass annual pilgrimage to Anzac Cove, and the towering cenotaphs that now dot northern France; the inexhaustible passion for declaring and exalting cultural ‘icons’, whether ancient cricketers or modern pop stars; the appetite in popular culture for celebrations of the homegrown, culminating in Baz Luhrman’s $130 million outback epic Australia. Throughout these celebrations of the native, Australians were egged on by their Prime Minister. ‘I just believe in the pursuit of Australia’s national interests,’ he declared. ‘I believe Australians are an overwhelmingly warm-hearted decent people; they’re very capable, very adaptable and they have a great capacity in emergencies and disasters to pull together in a practical way.’ The needs of the nation were even invoked in discussions of Australia’s fecundity. When fertility rates reached their 2002 nadir of 1.7 children per family, treasurer Peter Costello responded with a ‘moral encouragement’ to bear ‘one for mum, one for dad and one for the country’. He greeted a ‘heartening increase’ five years later as ‘a vote of confidence in our future’.

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Of course, the phrase ‘aggressively Australian’ acquired new and repellant meaning on the streets of Cronulla in December 2005, when the flag was appropriated in subcultural clashes disputing ‘control’ of the suburb’s beaches. But the shocks of Cronulla did not reverberate far beyond it. When the film West, Daniel Krige’s bleak post-Cronulla vision of Sydney’s western suburbs, was released in June 2007, its young star, Nathan Phillips, turned out to be the most ingenuous of patriots, glowing with pride about Australian cinematic achievement in Hollywood: ‘We are all diggers over here. We are all arm in arm. This is what we love to do, so you just do it. It’s great to be flying the Aussie flag.’ The greatness of flying the Aussie flag is such, moreover, that one reins the enthusiasm in at one’s peril. When organisers of music festival Big Day Out worried publicly last year about flag flourishing assuming outsized proportions, they invited prolier-than-thou admonitions from not only Howard (‘offensive’) but Morris Iemma (‘outrageous’), Kevin Rudd (‘political correctness gone mad’) and Peter Debnam (‘political correctness in the extreme’). Indeed, what is striking about the flag today is not so much its associations — subject, like any popular symbol, to perennial dispute — as its sheer ubiquity. Where even five years ago the flag was seldom flourished with real exuberance outside sporting events, it is now a popular fashion statement: on Australia Day 2007, I saw it being worn in the heart of Melbourne

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as a shirt, T-shirt, skirt, sarong, cape and overcoat, sported as face paint and displayed as tattoo. What looked outré in Pauline Hanson’s wardrobe is now curiously conventional: when Sheikh Taj Din al-Hilali wished to substantiate his love of country, he posed eagerly for the Australian draped in the flag on display in his office at Lakemba Mosque. It is a shock to see it brandished as such — for some, a rude one — even if, in the main, this brazen Australianism has an air of innocent, often guileless, merriment, redolent not so much of political rally as street party, with boys dressed up as ‘Boonie’, and girls in torsotight tops advertising the wearer as ‘Young, Hot and Aussie’. Extreme reactions, indeed, flow as much from the uninvolved. In explaining modern Australia in the bestselling His Master’s Voice (2007), David Marr quoted Patrick White’s sixty-year-old jeremiad: ‘In all directions stretched the Great Australian Emptiness, in which the mind is the least of possessions . . .’ At a book launch on Australia Day, I commented to a talented young novelist on the profusion of flags in the city. ‘Well,’ she said angrily, ‘it’s just fascism, isn’t it?’ A day or two later, I found the writer Marieke Hardy boasting on her blog of accosting flag wearers at the Big Day Out: Me: Nice flag, fuckhead. Moron child: Whatever.

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Me: Why are you even wearing that? Do you have any idea what you’re doing? Moron child: Aussie pride, man. Me: Go and die.

This essay concerns two related trends. One is the last decade’s tsunami of national sentiment; the other is a backwash of bien-pensant liberal resentment. Howard was often reviled for practising ‘wedge politics’. But the capture of ‘Aussie pride’ by the forces of conservatism was made easy by its ideological foemen, appalled by Hansonism, disillusioned by the republic’s ignominious fate, who could hardly have surrendered the disputed area more quickly. Patriotism? That was . . . ugh . . . Howard stuff. Here was what Richard Rorty has called ‘the spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country’. And as security and sovereignty became watchwords after 9/11, liberals were easily boxed in, identified with an effete cosmopolitanism. While Howard might finally be receding into history too, he has helped press patriotism into common political coin. When Kevin Rudd accepted his mandate on 24 November, it was with a speech hymning ‘the people of our great land’, saluting Howard as sharing ‘a common pride in this great nation of ours, Australia’, promising to ‘govern always in the national interest’, foreseeing a ‘future as a nation united, forged with a common vision’. The new government embarked on

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its mission with some tried and trusted sentiments — sentiments whose roots lie in social and political forces well worth reckoning with. On 11 July 2007, Paul Keating gave another speech, to the Sydney Film School: one of his periodic salvos, partly for the edification of his old cadre, partly to burnish his own reputation. In it, he returned to the gauntlet of national identity he had thrown down at Howard fifteen years earlier, arrogating to himself the mantle of patriot-in-chief once more. He found solace in George Orwell’s famous essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’, published in Polemic in October 1945, with its oftquoted distinction: By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

No prizes for guessing the respectable, inclusive school to which Keating belongs, and the disreputable, exclusionary leanings of his successor. Nor was this the

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only distinction in a speech replete with crisp, if idiosyncratic ones. Anzac Day, for instance, was identified as a graven idol. For him [Howard], Gallipoli was an exercise in nationalism. For me, Kokoda was an exercise in patriotism. The nationalism surrounding World War I, and Gallipoli in particular, has fuelled the Australian conservative story for nine decades. The same nationalism that prevented the conservative parties from similarly celebrating Australian heroism in Papua New Guinea and in Southeast Asia. Those Australian fought for all we had created here and become, not for some notion of a ruling class or people’s community, let alone an empire.

Yet almost everything about this is fallacious. Gallipoli has hardly been cordoned off by conservatism: from Mary Gilmore’s lyric of 1918 (‘Where the world called him there he went;/When the war called him, there he bent’) to Peter Weir’s quiveringly anti-British film of 1981, it has provided just as much grist for progressive mills. As for Kokoda being a more authentically native victory, it rests uneasily alongside John Curtin’s descriptions of Australians as ‘the trustees for the British way of life’ and of Australia as ‘a territory corresponding in purpose and in outlook and in ace to the motherland itself’, not to mention his appointment of the King’s brother (the Duke of Gloucester)

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as governor-general to stress ‘the supreme importance of the Crown as the centre and symbol of Empire unity’. And Keating, with his division of the world between ‘true believers’ and ‘narcs and straighteners’, is poorly placed to be deploring exclusionist rhetoric anyway. Good patriotism and bad nationalism are not so simply distinguished. Even Orwell’s definition is diffuse, for he admitted to using the word ‘nationalism’ in an ‘extended sense’: to him it included ‘such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Anti-Semitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism’, of which, among the English intelligentsia, ‘Communism’ was clearly the ‘dominant form’, while admitting there was ‘no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted’. Keating’s speech drew heavily on a recent book by the HungarianAmerican historian John Lukacs, Democracy and Populism (2005). Lukacs sees Hitler as the nationalist nonpareil, citing his exclamation in Mein Kampf: ‘I was a nationalist not a patriot.’ Lukacs proposes another definition of nationalism, which embeds it in ‘the myth of a “people”’, a phenomenon inherently ‘modern and populist’: Populism is folkish, patriotism is not. One can be a patriot and cosmopolitan (certainly culturally so). But a populist is inevitably a nationalist of sorts. Patriotism is less racist than is populism. A patriot

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will not exclude a person of another nationality from a community where they have lived side by side and whom he has known for many years but a populist will always be suspicious of someone who does not seem to belong to his tribe.

This is a useful test, probably most efficacious in Europe. But how would Lukacs regard Australia, which has severely restricted non-white immigration and has treated its indigenes as second-class citizens, yet in which English, Irish and Scots, traditionally mistrustful and antagonistic, and Protestants and Catholics, with centuries of blood feuding behind them, enjoyed civil and religious equality from the first? The reality is that patriotism and nationalism cohabit so closely they often overlap, while their distinction is deeply subjective. What resembles benign patriotism to a conservative might smack of toxic nationalism to a liberal; what a liberal might defend as an act of loyal dissent may seem treasonable to a conservative; what may begin as a patriotic desire to preserve, may mutate into the nationalistic impulse to make mandatory. Pace Orwell and Lukacs, there is no separate literature on patriotism and nationalism: periodically, one may move from behind the others’ shadow; otherwise, they march in step. We might think of nationalism as ‘patriotism’s bloody brother’, to borrow from the historian Jack Schaar; the family resemblance, though, is uncannily exact. Notions of

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nationality predate defined borders and established sovereignties; expressions of allegiance to a pre-modern patria can be transposed without difficulty into the context of a modern nation. It is more helpful to see the national impulse as a mille-feuille of meaning, rich in antecedents and influences; a force capable like nations themselves, of appeals to antiquity. ‘Patria, mihi vita mea multo carior est.’ So begins Cicero’s first oration against the insurrectionary Catiline: ‘Our fatherland, which is much dearer to me than my life.’ And in classical antiquity, it is to the Roman republic that patriotic sentiment is traditionally traced back. As demos was to the Greeks, so was patria, the country or fatherland, to the great republicans like Cicero and Cato, and their interpreters Sallust and Plutarch. The patria commanded pietas and caritas, respect and compassion, and was owed a kind of benevolent love expressing itself in acts of officuum and cultus, service and care. It was a love, Cicero argued in De Officiis,(44 BC) similar to but superseding that felt towards kin: But when with a rational spirit you have surveyed the whole field, there is no social relation among them all more close, none more dear than that which links each one of us with our country. Parents are dear; dear are the children, relatives, friends; but one fatherland embraces all our loves; and who that would hesitate

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to give his life for her, if by his death he could render her a service?

Invocation of ‘a rational spirit’ seems incongruous, given the modern context of love of country: emotional, impassioned, unreasoned. But a stern equation of fatherland, liberty, laws and common good was seen as an essential republican bulwark against oligarchic government. If parts of its language and lore survived vestigially, however, the patriotic urges of the republic were swamped in the resistless flood tide of empire. And for centuries after, wars would be fought and crusades waged not in the name of a ‘rational spirit’ but out of fealty to God and/or his earthly representatives, regal and religious; the warriors who mobilised in the name of a king, a pontiff or a caliph were honouring a bond of fidelity or faith rather than exercising a civic duty. What we recognise as nationalism today, with its notion of a ‘people’, a core culture, or at least a common ancestry, springs from an older taproot of tribal or racial bonds. Its resurrection was a slow-dawning phenomenon. Senses of nationality — English, French, Provençal, Slav, Teuton — pervaded the crusades and the Hundred Years War. Geoffrey of Monmouth exalted his island kingdom in History of the Kings of Britain during the twelfth century; Walther van der Vogelweide composed lyrics celebrating the German civilisation

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in the thirteenth century. But even after the principle and practice of state sovereignty was enshrined in the Treaty of Westphalia, borders remained porous, and sovereignties faded imperceptibly into one another: indeed, this was a secret strength of pre-modern kingdoms and empires in governing communities that were often far from homogenous and contiguous. Rousseau’s advocacy of democracy as an expression of the ‘general will’ in his pioneering vision of civic nationalism, The Social Contract (1762), cast into question the Divine Right of Kings. Yet crowned heads did not cease to engender respect during the Enlightenment. Montesquieu, inspired by the Glorious Revolution, merely recommended limiting monarchy with a virtuous aristocracy; to Mercier de la Rivière is owed the phrase ‘enlightened despotism’. By the time of the ancien régime, then, the hierarchy of everyday allegiances had not altered significantly in almost a thousand years. In its challenge to religion, nonetheless, the Enlightenment had wrought a subtler toll. Benedict Anderson, in his wise and witty exegesis of nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983), describes the phenomenon as looming out of the ‘modern darkness’: ‘Disintegration of paradise: nothing makes fatality more arbitrary. Absurdity of salvation: nothing makes another style of continuity more necessary.’ The French Revolution touched off national reflexes across Europe by demonstrating how public acclamation could

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transform the laical — fatherland, liberty, reason — into the sacred. ‘I am French, I am one of thy representatives!’ Robespierre exulted. ‘O sublime people! Accept the sacrifice of my whole being. Happy is the man who is born in thy midst, happier is he who can die for thy happiness.’ The sans-culottes liked the ring of such ecstatic professions. During their baptism of Prussian fire at Valmy was first heard the cry: ‘Vive la nation!’ The earliest known use of the word nationalisme, meanwhile, was by a priest, the fiercely anti-Jacobin Augustin Barruel in Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du jacobinisme (1798), who saw it as patriotism by another name, of which he also disapproved: both were gravid with threats to legitimate governmentsbased on divine or hereditary ordination: At the moment in which men combined in nations . . . they ceased to recognize one another under a common name. Nationalism, or the love of nation, took the place of the love of mankind in general . . . It became a virtue to extend [one’s territories] at the expense of those who did not belong to one’s empire. It became permissible, in order to achieve this, to despise strangers, to deceive them, to injure them. This virtue was called patriotism.

French Revolutionary nationalism was actually of a somewhat constrained character. Revolution, as Simone Weil put it, ‘melted all the peoples subject to

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the French crown into one single mass, and that by their enthusiasm for national sovereignty’; yet it was founded, paradoxically, ‘not on love of the past, but on the most violent break from the past’. Popular symbols and cries were minted: the tricolour, the republican monogram, the Marseilles. But because history recalled the monarchy and the church, the revolution had to delve into antiquity for symbolic sustenance. Its leaders swore by Cicero, Cato and the Gracchi, adopted Roman dress in the legislature, and mimicked Roman gestures: once when some counterrevolutionary tracts were burned, Saint-Just plunged his hand into the flames to affirm his inflexibility of purpose. (Roman republicanism also enjoyed a powerful vogue during America’s War of Independence: Addison’s Cato became massively popular, even being performed for the suffering, starving soldiers at Valley Forge.) French Revolutionary nationalism also had a liberal soul: there were no serious attempts to coopt the arts, the press or the education system in the exercise of nation building. The last, in fact, was specifically prohibited by Concordet in the First Memorandum on Public Instruction: Public authority does not have the right in any matter to teach opinions as truth. It is not entitled to impose any belief . . . If one arouses a blind enthusiasm for an exclusive doctrine, one makes the citizens incapable of judgement.

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It would take the campaigns of Napoleon to, as it were, turn the citoyen into the Frenchman. Even then, Napoleon, a Corsican, was excited by the dynamism of revolution rather than the justness of any cause. He was, as Hans Kohn summarises, a seeker after personal rather than national glory: ‘Napoleon was ready to use national aspirations as far as they seemed compatible with his system, but without having any sincere desire to satisfy them . . . For him, nations had no reality.’ Perhaps his chief contribution to the myriad competing nationalisms of the early nineteenth century was as their nemesis, inspiring a generation of ambitious insurrectionaries to brood on French domination. Perhaps the most sophisticated of these movements emerged in Germany, ignited by romanticism, inflamed by the humiliation of occupation — and here it is worth dwelling on, because its stately, quite self-conscious progress shows off all the sinews of a strengthening national surge. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Germans had been famed for their enthusiastic cosmopolitanism. Among its creative elite were Hellenists like Hölderlin, Schiller and Winckelmann, and Anglophiles from von Ranke to Dahlmann, while Goethe’s formative experience was his pilgrimage to Italy. Many German political thinkers, notably Hegel, were enamoured of Napoleon, while the bourgeoisie were infatuated with French ideas, fashions and language; the second sentence of Thomas Mann’s

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Buddenbrooks (1901) is an artefact of cultural interpenetration, beginning in low German dialect, then finishing in French: ‘Je, den Düwel ook, c’est la question, ma très chère demoiselle’ (‘Yes, what the devil, that’s the question, my dear young lady’). But such permeability, argued the French nationalist Germaine de Staël in her survey of German culture, De l’Allemagne (1810), was also a source of weakness: In literature as in politics, the Germans show too much consideration for foreigners, and not enough national prejudices. Self-abnegation and esteem for others are qualities in individuals, but the patriotism of nations must be egotistical.

Germany reminded her of ‘a place which recalls the sojourn of a great people who have long abandoned it’. An emerging generation of German nationalist writers, like Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Ruhs, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Ernst Moritz Arndt, agreed. Believing Germans had become alienated from their authentic cultural forms, they envisioned the nation as an organism of which the individual was a subordinate part, and proposed an immanent national Volksgeist (spirit of the people) based on shared history and language. ‘I am nothing,’ stated Herder. ‘But the whole is everything!’ Distinctions between French and German nationalisms, then, were immediately obvious. The former emphasised civic

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forms; the latter privileged ethnic characteristics. Where the former was anchored to the present, the latter was characterised by strenuous objections to modernity — expressed, for example, when Herder derided the philosophes of the Enlightenment, with their ‘cold philosophy of the century’, bycelebrating feudal society: You mock the servitude of these [feudal] times, the simple country seats of the nobility, the numerous little social islands and subdivisions and all that depended on them. You praise nothing so much as the breaking of these ties and know of no greater good which ever happened to mankind than when Europe, and with it the world, became free. Became free? What wishful thinking! If only it were true! If only you could realize what these earlier circumstances . . . did in fact achieve: Europe was populated and built up; generations and families, master and servant, king and subject, interacted more strongly and closely with one another.

The nationalists partook instead of the advice of Herder’s close friend Goethe that ‘the best thing about history is the enthusiasm it arouses’. In place of the fissures and failures of the present, German nationalism offered stories, myths and symbols celebrating ancient grandeurs that begat rites, festivals and monuments. The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD, where the

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Germanic tribes led by Arminius the Cheruscan routed the legions of Rome, was rediscovered, its anniversary as a date for thanksgiving promoted by Heinrich von Kleist’s play Die Hermannsschlacht (1809), its romantic landscape exquisitely realised in Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Grave of Arminius (1814). Likewise disinterred from history were the Battle of Merseburg during the Peasants’ War of 1524–5, whose anniversary was first marked in 1810, and the figure of Barbarossa, depicted in Max von Schenkendorf’s epic poem as slumbering beneath the Kyffhäuser mountain awaiting Germany’s hour of need. When in October 1815 the anniversary of a more recent event was celebrated, the Allied victory over Napoleon at the battle of Leipzig two years earlier, the ‘holy festival’ was vested with an ancient ‘authenticity’. Participants decorated with oak leaves undertook pilgrimages to ceremonial bonfires ignited on mountain tops, and to pillars of fire lit on altars and in town squares: the oak was coming to be regarded as the ‘national tree’; the flame, a Christianised remnant of the pagan symbol associated with Freya, the goddess of light, had been a favoured motif of Herder, who wished Germany to unite so ‘that it might become a common flame’. For Germany, of course, was not united, a state of affairs reinforced by the Congress of Vienna which left Germany a patchwork of states and statelets dominated by proudly martial Prussia and insecurely insular Austria, whose great statesman Metternich

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famously described nationalism as a disease from which Europe might never recover. There were tensions for decades afterwards between conservative censure, notably the Carlsbad decrees of August 1819, and the emerging customs of voluntary patriotic exertion, originating in the militamen of the Lützow Freikorps, the students of the Burschenschaften, and the gymnasts of the Turnplatz. Resentment at official restraints boiled over in such dramatic mass endorsements as the ‘German May’ celebrations in Hambach in 1832, when young Germans affecting ‘the manly toga of German national honour’ burned corsets, a symbol of effeminate Francophilia, and the instant popularity of von Fallersleben’s ‘German Hymn’ (1841), otherwise known for its opening refrain: ‘Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles/Uber Alles in der Welt.’ To take its definitive stride, however, the national impulse had to be yoked to economic imperatives, embodied in the Zollverein (customs union), and military ambitions, chiefly the Prussian desire to punish the France of Napoleon III: a case made most emphatically in a book whose title, at least, endures. In Grundsätze der Realpolitik (Principles of the Material Politics, 1853), the journalist Ludwig von Rochau set aside philosophical abstractions for naked power politics: ‘For Germans unity is basically a pure business affair . . . The test of political power is the struggle . . . The highest judgement in all cases of power against power is war.’ Von Rochau’s brisk

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practicality appealed to Prussia’s envoy to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt, Otto von Bismarck. ‘The idea that ideas did not matter,’ notes the historian Harold James, ‘made Bismarck very happy.’ Prussia destroyed the countervailing force of Austria in June 1865, and rallied the German states to the rout of France five years later in a war waged with a pent-up sense of destiny. The Germany established in the Hall of Mirrors in the Château de Versailles in January 1871 — dynastic as well as nationalist, constitutional as well as autocratic — was still neither fish nor fowl. But it was culturally and economically coherent, rich in distinctively native art, ranging from the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm to the operas of Weber and Wagner, and in industry and innovation of proudly local character, symbolised by emerging corporate dynasties like Werner Siemens, with his Wotan lightbulb, and striving scientists like Clemens Winkler, who verified theories of a periodic table with the discovery of what he loyally called Germanium: in German, in fact, Kultur encompasses the manufactures of commerce and science as well as art and culture. Nineteenth-century Germany, then, furnishes a model of integrated nationalism, a gesamkuntswerk to fire native ambition: the initial desire to unite disparate elements, the paeans of praise to an imagined golden age, the refurbishment of the past for popular consumption, the communication of a unified vision

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through literature, art and music, the harnessing of cultural objectives to economic and military ends, finally encompassing war. And it is remarkable how the tropes of German nationalism have endured. When John Howard addressed contemporary concerns, his words often had unconscious echoes of Herder and Fichte: Herder believed that his countrymen had been doing themselves down (‘For the last century we have been ashamed of everything that concerns the fatherland’), that history should be uplifting and integrative (‘an instrument of the most genuine patriotic spirit’), and that the past should not be submitted to the astringent judgement of the present (‘What you call despotism . . . was actually only paternal authority for governing house and hut’); Fichte saw the national experience as secured by a silent majority (‘quiet is the first duty of the citizen’), and as felt rather than reasoned (‘Whoever feels it within himself will be convinced. Who does not feel it cannot be convinced’). In the case of Germany, too, in order that inclusion meant something, there had also to be exclusion — an eventuality Rousseau had forseen when peering into the mind of a theoretical citizen in Considerations on the Government of Poland (1772): The equality and moral freedom so precious to him can, he thinks, be achieved only in a community whose members feel an intense loyalty to it, which they

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will not do if their manners and values diverge . . . Members of a political community, if that community is to be united and strong, must share the same fundamental values.

And it’s not uncommon now to see the German nationalists of two hundred years ago as harbingers of ethnic nationalism, because of the stress they placed on the primacy of language, and even of Nazism, not only because of their desire to inure the Volk to contamination and impurity, but also their antiSemitism, which all espoused to differing degrees; Ruhs even suggested that Jews be forced to wear a distinctive garment so that ‘the German could always recognise his Hebrew enemy’. In fact, identifying the germ of intolerance in the impulse to glorify the nation, high-minded Herder preached a common humanity and a cultural permeability. Yet from the process of the definition of a nation flows inevitably inferences of what it is not — even if what it is not might dwell in its own midst. Like individuals, nations attain self-identity and self-awareness by comparative means, in contradistinction to other nations — a procedure that encourages a simplifying to perceived essences, and entails an examination of how the nation’s various constituencies cohere with these. Pluralism is not far behind truth as a casualty of war, when the celebration of one culture plunges perforce into the denigration of others.

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Likewise can it be a casualty of economic decline and imperial ambition, among Fichte’s proclamations being many statements of manifest destiny: ‘Should the German not assume the government of the world through philosophy, the Turks, the Negroes, the North American tribes, will finally take it over and put an end to the present civilisation.’ And when the process of national definition is incorporated in a political platform, nationalism takes on a more vivid hue. Unleashed by one revolution in 1789, nationalism was embedded in Europe by the sequence of revolutions almost sixty years later, for it was the ensuing extensions of the franchise that gave cries in the name of ‘the people’ such potency. The irony is that a process originating in liberal impulses ended up sharpening nationalism’s illiberal edge: for example, the election that followed the third British reform bill of 1884, which doubled the size of the electorate, left the Conservative Party for the first time as the biggest in Parliament, an influence consolidated when the Liberal Party split over Irish Home Rule. Raw appeals to national prestige in Germany and France also obtained a deepening resonance from the trend to universal male suffrage. Bismarck rallied Germans with the spectre of French revanchism in 1875, then again in 1887. Charles Maurras and the virulently nationalist Action Française emerged amid the Dreyfus affair, and did not disappear with his exoneration; when the

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document used to frame the loyal Jewish captain was revealed as a fake, Maurras obdurately described it as a ‘faux patriotique’ (a patriotic forgery). Nor was there fellow feeling for liberals from those who had enlisted in the other great outcome of the century’s democratic impulse. Socialists cheered on extensions of the franchise: they could do no other. And for communists, class was always prior to nation. Marx and Engels, as economic determinists, cleaved to the unexamined assumption that nationalism was merely an outcome of capitalism’s need to build larger territorial markets and trading blocs; they approved of Polish and Irish nationalisms, but only insofar as these undermined Tsarist absolutism and British capitalism. Otherwise, even as nationalism’s popular potentialities grew clearer, they dismissed it as a distraction, and a dishonour. When British workers showed a propensity for voting conservative, for instance, Engels merely growled to Marx that they were ‘disgracing themselves’. Something had been missed. In the rush to govern in the name of the people, it had been assumed that the flood of freedoms and rights would only be welcomed. In fact, following so soon on the usurpation of religion, they were also deeply unsettling; there was comfort in submission, as Erich Fromm would argue, to a ‘new idolatory of blood and soil’. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most effective and eloquent critics of national instinct in the second half of the nineteenth

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century were often Christians, for they recognised in nationalism its spiritual hankerings. In one of his most stirring essays, ‘Christianity and Patriotism’ (1894), Tolstoy invoked a millenarian movement common among the Russian peasantry: proselytes of Malevanism, believing the world about to end, urged followers to sybaritic and sentimental excess. How, Tolstoy asked, did this differ from patriotism? The only difference . . . is that in one case the madness is confined to some dozens of poor peaceful villagers living on their own small means and therefore unable to do violence to their neighbours, and infecting others only by the personal and vocal transmission of their mood; while in the other case it is the madness of millions of people who control vast sums of money and have the means of doing violence to other people (rifles, bayonets, fortresses, ironclads, melinite and dynamite), having moreover at their disposal most powerful means of spreading their madness — postal services, telegraphy, enormous numbers of newspapers, and all sorts of publications which vie with one another in spreading the infection to all ends of the earth.

This concluding comment on the dissemination of nationalism by modern communications was a penetrating analysis, for few phenomena engender national sentiment so reliably as the sight of it among others, especially those with whom one has quarrelled, and

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few messages are as suited to the inevitable simplifications of mass media; commercial communications outlets benefit little less than governments from the fear and loathing of an enemy within. The inchoate popular press would participate zealously in enlarging and exploiting the alarmism of pre-war Europe, playing a crucial role in Britain, for instance, in spreading the Navy Scare of 1909, when the Admiralty importuned more funds to keep pace in the dreadnought race with Germany, and when the Daily Telegraph improbably appropriated the language of the French Revolution: ‘Citoyens, la patrie est en danger!’ (A ‘curious and characteristic solution’ was reached, jested Churchill: ‘The Admiralty had demanded six ships; the economists offered four; and we finally compromised on eight.’) To the spread of nationalism, then, liberals and socialists could find no answer. The most direct response was Herveism: admonitions of the stern French socialist Gustave Hervè, who deplored society’s part in inculcating ‘a superstition more injurious, brutal and inhumane than religion’: The child can scarcely walk when they give him leaden soldiers, cannon, cardboard forts, a drum, a trumpet, a rifle or a sword bigger than himself for his Christmas box . . . Before even going to school the urchin already bears in his blood the hatred of the foreigner, national vanity, idolatory of the sword, mystical adoration of the country. He is already a patriot.

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At Herveism’s height in 1905, its eponymous leader famously told a mass meeting in Tivoli-Vaux-Hall that the peasants of l’Yonne would not march in the event of war: his anti-militarist manifesto earned him six months’ jail. But his argument that nationalism was merely a trick of plutocratic elites, and that ‘patriotism in every nation masks the class antagonism to the great profit of the leading classes’, was self-deluding; likewise Lenin’s forecast in May 1913 that ‘the workers of the world are building up their own internationalist culture, which the champions of freedom and the enemies of oppression have for long been preparing’, and which would make ‘national bickering and national isolation’ a thing of the past. In fact, when the working men of all nations marched off eighteen months later to blow one another to bits, they did so without a backward glance at Herveism or ‘internationalist culture’. And what the sociologist George Mosse has called ‘the nationalisation of the masses’, a combination of the extensions of the franchise with a cheap mass media and near universal literacy, not only permanently undermined the traditional claims to authority of a liberal intelligentsia, it left conservatives perplexed and disoriented, aligned with masses they had no particular feeling for or sympathy with. The residue of the First World War was thus an even more toxic admixture, in which nationalism was an important propellant. •

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What is remarkable about the First World War is that it was not the last, so hideous was its cost, so lingering were its traumas: by rights, it should have discredited nationalism ever more. For confirmation that it had perversely opposite impacts, go no further than Australian rituals of ancestor worship at Anzac Cove each 25 April. Before the First World War, Australians could sustain the boast of Tom Collins that their land was ‘free’, ‘recordless’ and ‘clogged by no fealty to shadowy idols’. But their country’s nationhood had been shaped by forces similar to those at play in Europe, albeit with slightly different outcomes, reflecting Australia’s colonial controls and geographical isolation: it contained a drive both to exclude and to be included. Federation drew on sensations of racial superiority, articulated by the first prime minister (‘I do not think that the doctrine of equality of man was ever really intended to include racial equality’), not to mention in the original objectives of the Labor Party (among which was ‘the cultivation of an Australian sentiment based on the maintenance of racial purity and the development in Australia of an enlightened and self-reliant community’). It also betrayed what would now fashionably be called status anxiety. The Constitution’s designer, Sir Samuel Griffith, explained that he was ‘tired of being treated as a colonial’: a word which reeked of the derived and the second rate. ‘We are children,’ he complained, ‘dependent on a superior

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people.’ Our fabled egalitarianism — the accent of nation builders falling on ‘the people’ and ‘the working man’ — made the best of unpromising prospects. The spread of democracy in the second half of the nineteenth century, and retreat of the propertied to upper houses, had left politics to what Francis Adams summarised as ‘the monopoly of men whose verbose incompetence is only equalled by their jovial corruption’: the Australian contempt for its elected officialdom is no outgrowing of the age of spin and modern political puerilism. But how might Australia join the comity of nations other than by legislative fiat? In one of the earliest sociological expositions of the phenomenon, What is a Nation? (1882), the French philologist Ernest Renan proposed that happiness could never be as effective as ‘common suffering’ in the incubation of collective drives: ‘National sorrows are more significant than triumphs because they impose obligations and demand a common effort . . . a grand solidarity constituted by the sentiment of sacrifices which one has made and those that one is prepared to make again.’ Indigenous dispossession scarcely registering, Australia’s past had not offered enough: Paterson’s ‘Song of the Future’ (1889), for instance, had to nod to its lack (‘In sooth there was not much of blood/No war was fought between the seas’), while Lawson’s ‘Freedom on the Wallaby’ (1891) could only acknowledge its future possibility (‘If blood should stain the wattle’). So when

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Richard Somers passed his controversial judgement in Lawrence’s Kangaroo (1923) that ‘somebody will have to water Australia with their blood before it’s a real man’s country’, it was belated attestation of Anzac Day’s made-to-measure qualities. Commemoration even fitted seamlessly into the calendar. For the five years before the first Anzac Day, Australian schoolchildren had been honouring Discovery Day, 19 April, which marked Cook’s first sighting of the Australian coast, and was devoted to celebrating explorers, pioneers and an earlier set of ‘diggers’ — those of gold. The Anzacs might not have seized the Dardanelles, but they effectively colonised Discovery Day, with teachers encouraged to include in their new Anzac Day rituals ‘matter appropriate to Discovery Day, such as reference to the discovery, settlement and development of Australia’. The commemoration also became a means of inclusion. As 25 April is the feast day of St Mark, at first no Catholic priest could give an Anzac Day requiem mass: a potential source of division given the Catholic opposition to conscription. But in the first months of his reign, Pius XI granted permission for masses consecrated to the Anzac spirit: a gesture of healing. And for all its maudlin and bathetic tendencies, Anzac Day has been the gift that keeps on giving: a self-contained military engagement evoking both the futility of war and the magnificence of sacrifice, that did not involve the venting of ancient antipathies, that left no legacy

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of hatred, that spared civilians and even settlements; a sort of knightly conflict, in which, the legend holds, there was a mutual respect and admiration — one set, furthermore, on the picturesque coast of an exotic faraway country ideally positioned to one day form part of a young Australian’s standard European backpacking jaunt. Anzac Day has also reinforced existing patterns in Australian nationalism. The act of honouring a defeated army is often remarked on; it is peculiarly Australian, too, that so many of the acts and events inspiring greatest pride have occurred far away: from Beersheba, Kokoda and Long Tan to Bradman at Lord’s, Florey at Oxford, Fred Hollows in Eritrea and Vietnam, Kylie in London, Russ and Nicole in Hollywood. This outward turn may be partly an accident of history, a residue of colonialism; it also established the self-protecting distance from lurking low-level discomfitures at home — originally the convict stain, later Indigenous dispossession — exercising a restraining influence on self-celebration. Certainly, Australian nationalism has generally had an improvisatory, ‘make-do’ quality. There has been a cringing from outright hero worship. ‘The Australian world is peopled by good blokes and bastards,’ said Max Harris, ‘but not heroes.’ There has been a squeamishness about unbridled passions: at American wallowings in their exceptionalism, for example, Australians have always looked askance. Pride is at its most overt only on sporting occasions,

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when its seriousness is licenced by play, and its symbols are edged with irony: for all its tired hoariness now, the boxing kangaroo was a calculatedly nonsensical creation. Australian good fortune is seen in starker relief when it is considered how closely grieving and grievance cohabited in other nations. Just before Australians marked their fourth Anzac Day, a decorated ex-soldier who boasted of forty wounds redirected patriotic passions to altogether different ends: the inaugural meeting of Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento in Milan expressed bitter indignation at the paltriness of Italy’s war spoils. The question of why nationalism remained a relatively benign force in Australia while metastasising so aggressively elsewhere takes us to the heart of the agonies that national sentiment occasions among liberal and progressive thinkers, and why they so quickly have recourse to long-ago debased words like ‘fascism’. Part of our fortune is undoubtedly luck. Australia had no post-war mythology equivalent to the German ‘stab in the back’; stubbornly monocultural, it feared no ‘enemies within’; geographically discreet, it neighboured no disputed territories of the kind that nourish irredentist fantasies. But perhaps more significant still was the lack in Australia of anything resembling fascism’s opposite. Fascism’s pre-eminent scholar, Robert Paxton, argues that such movements are inconceivable in the absence of a mature and expanding

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socialist left, under the influence of which nationalism has tended to more conspiratorial and Manichean extremes. It was the rise of Bolshevism, he believes, that animated in Europe the sense of crisis, the primacy of the mass, the dread of decline, and the perceived need for exclusionary violence that are among fascism’s mobilising passions. And it was the increasing sophistication and exclusivity of the left that forced some hitherto natural constituents to swear different allegiances: In the nineteenth century, wherever anger or protest arose, the left automatically spoke for them. In the mid-nineteenth century, the left was still a capacious family: it could include nationalists and anti-semites, artisans and industrial workers, middle-class democrats and advocates of collective ownership. It was a coalition of the discontented. The left could no longer play that role in 1919. As its organizations became disciplined and domesticated by Marxism after the 1880s, it tried to expel the old working-class xenophobia it had once tolerated. Especially in 1920, reacting against the patriotic brainwashing of the war and awaiting world revolution expectantly, the left had no room for the nation within the international revolutionary cause.

The first declaration of the Fasci di Combattimento, in fact, was ‘to declare war on socialism . . . because

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it has opposed nationalism’, and its first political act was to smash the presses of the socialist newspaper Avanti. Fascism’s vitality and populism then attracted the patronage of conservatives, equally anxious about Bolshevism, but almost as worried about democracy. Politics here developed no such divisions. The Communist Party’s brief affiliation with the Labor Party in New South Wales was revoked after a year. Labor members worried aloud about the machinations of militant socialists, stirring the forces of violent reaction to form citizens’ militias, but these were left without traction when Governor Game simply dismissed his troublesome premier Jack Lang. While Robert Manne’s splendid book on the Australian impacts of the Russian Revolution is entitled The Shadow of 1917 (1990), the shade here loitered only palely. Why, then, the hyperbolic cast of mind in Australia that has, for instance, Phillip Adams writing of Hansonism that it ‘reminds us that fascism can arrive wearing high heels instead of jackboots’? Perhaps it is a case of the smaller the politics, the bigger the words; perhaps it is the intellectual preference, expressed by American sociologist Todd Gitlin, for ‘the pleasures of condemnation’ over ‘the pursuit of improvement’; it is also a stubborn failure to acknowledge that while nationalism is a precondition of fascism, fascism is not an inevitable outcome of nationalism. And this is genuinely odd, considering that the defeat of fascism was not in the name of

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cosmopolitanism; rather was it spurred by competing national sentiments, not least in Soviet Russia, which designated the defeat of Hitler ‘the Great Patriotic War’, and which pointedly abandoned the ‘Internationale’ as its anthem in favour of a hymn to the motherland, ‘Gimn Sovetskogo Soyuza’. At times since the Second World War, liberals have grappled with nationalism’s enticements, seeking to distinguish between reactionary and progressive versions, in order that they might, say, revile Franco while revering Nasser, Nkrumah and Kenyatta. Nationalism in secure countries with a mature polity, like the United States, tended to be typed as a reversion to primitive hates; nationalism for nations in utero, like newly independent African countries, could be condoned as a step in the path of post-colonial progress. Yet in general, they have found love of country crude, vulgar, even reprehensible, at odds with an approved global citizenship. As Orwell observed in ‘Notes on Nationalism’: In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case

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he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can appear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience.

To this abiding detachment since the Second World War has been linked a liberal article of faith: at least a wariness, in extremis a visceral disgust with Americans, the most ebulliently, even naively nationalistic people in the world. One need not be Noam Chomsky or Howard Zinn to sense the contradictions in American nationalism. ‘We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock,’ said Malcolm X famously, ‘It landed on us.’ But for the New Left of the 1960s, as Todd Gitlin comments in The Intellectuals and the Flag (2006), an acid assessment of America was a form of ritual purification: You can hate your country in such a way that the hatred becomes fundamental. A hatred so clear and intense came to feel like a cleansing flame. By the late 1960s this is what became of much of the New Left. Those of us who met with Vietnamese and Cuban

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Communists in those years were always being told we had to learn to love our people. In my case it was a Communist medical student in Havana who delivered the message in the waning days of 1967. Love our people! How were we supposed to do that, another New Leftist and I argued back, when the national history was enmeshed in slavery, when this experience of historic original sin ran deeper than any class solidarity, when it was what it meant to be American? Lessons in patriotism taught by Communists — a definitive New Left experience drawn from the comedy of the late sixties.

In a sense, though, the liberal disdain for the phenomenon of nationalism is an evasion rather than a serious objection. In Imagined Communities (1991), Benedict Anderson dwells on the idea of Tombs of the Unknown Soldier; he jestingly asks readers to consider ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Marxist’, or ‘a cenotaph for Fallen Liberals’. As he says: The nation is interestless; one’s membership in it is involuntary: dying for one’s country, which usually one does not choose, assumes a moral grandeur which dying for the Labour Party, the American Medical Association or perhaps even Amnesty International cannot rival, for these are all bodies one can join or leave at easy will.

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What, Anderson asks, about the big questions? ‘Why was I born blind? Why is my best friend paralysed? Why is my daughter retarded?’ These, he says, are the sort of suprarational perplexities that religion once addressed: ‘But the great weakness of all evolutionary, progressive styles of thought, not excluding Marxism, is that such questions are answered with impatient silence.’ While nationalism cannot answer them directly, it does provide comfort in senses of continuity, belonging and pride: In an age when it is so common for progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals to insist on the pathological character of nationalism, its roots in fear and hatred of the Other, and its affinities with racism, it is useful to remind ourselves that nations inspire love, and often profoundly self-sacrificing love. The cultural products of nationalism . . . show this love very clearly in thousands of different forms and styles. On the other hand, how truly rare it is to find analogous nationalist products expressing fear and loathing.

If this last naturally invites at least anecdotal dispute, it does help explain why, even in the environment of relief and resolve that accompanied the end of the Second World War, even amid the building of those immense multilateral bulwarks against the untrammelled exercise of national power, the United Nations, its Bretton Woods auxiliaries and the European

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Economic Community, there was still an exquisite pang in the sound of a leader invoking ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’. Just six weeks after the Japanese surrendered to the Allies in Tokyo Bay, three hundred thousand supporters thronged the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the name of Colonel Juan Domingo Perón, the national secretary of labour at odds with the ruling junta, who stated the three honours of his life as ‘to be a soldier, to be a patriot and to be Argentina’s number one worker’, and his chief desire as ‘to press all of you against my heart, as I would with my mother’: a moment so mythologised in the country’s history that tens of thousands lined the streets of Buenos Aires in 2006 as Perón’s coffin was conveyed to his former presidential retreat for reburial. Nor have banana republicans monopolised such sentiments: one of the chief reasons for the abiding esteem of Gough Whitlam is his honouring of promises ‘to liberate the talents and uplift the horizons of the Australian people’, to ‘establish and express an Australian identity through the arts’ and ‘promote an awareness of Australian culture abroad’. For all his urbane cosmopolitanism at home, Whitlam in public policy appealed unashamedly to nationalist instincts. There has never been a shortage of fine minds anxious to will nationalism into non-existence. As eminent a historian as Eric Hobsbawm was, he was prepared to argue in the mid-1980s that nationalism was a spent force, and to regard the ‘great achieve-

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ment’ of communist regimes around the world as being the limitation of its ‘disastrous effects’ — a curious assertion that not only left the likes of Pol Pot, Nikolai Ceaus¸escu of Romania and Todor Zhivkov of Bulgaria out of account, but which underestimated how straightforwardly former communists such as Serbia’s Slobodan Milos˘evic´ and Slovenia’s Milan Kuc˘an would recalibrate themselves as passionate promotors of national pride. In Australia, multiculturalism was in some circles imbued with the utopian end of curing the country of any nationalist emanations at all. ‘It would be nice,’ stated Janis Wilton and Richard Bosworth in their Old Worlds and New Australia (1984), ‘to contemplate a relatively rich and relatively safe Australia that was proud to state that our nation, so varied and complex, is little more than a geographical expression.’ In their Mistaken Identity: The Demise of Nationalism in Australia (1988), Stephen Castles, Bill Cope, Mary Kalanztis and Michael Morrissey argued that it had in fact already happened, multiculturalism having banished the traditional ‘unitary’ definition of national character, leaving only ‘residual symbols and images’. ‘The homely simplifications needed to make nationalism work are no longer plausible,’ they argued — something which now sounds like the economist Irving Fisher’s prediction a few days before the 1929 Stock Market Crash that ‘stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau’. Yet there remained a

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stubborn preference for living in places rather than spaces, and nationalism around the world was shortly to make a stunning comeback, revealing with the end of the Cold War both an anciently powerful and newly protean nature. As Tom Nairn puts it succinctly in Faces of Nationalism (1998): ‘Within a few months of the end of communism, twenty-five new nations had been created into a world that had been dedicated to overriding its importance.’ ‘Not all people live in the same now,’ noted the Weimar Marxist Ernst Bloch. This has seldom seemed truer than after the disintegration of the eastern bloc at the end of the 1980s, when out of its cracks and craters crawled all manner of macabre national obsessions, some deep-buried, but many hammered together for instant exploitation, and underlaid by the paranoia and suspicion which was perhaps communism’s chief legacy. Most infamously, while addressing Serbs on the six-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo Polje, a whey-faced apparatchik called Slobodan Milos˘evic´ discovered he had a talent for exciting crowds. Serbs, then heavily outnumbered by Albanians in the Kosovo region, were induced to such a frenzy of revenge, victimhood and separatism that they set off a conflagration across one of the most ethnically integrated areas of Europe. Even when nationalist politicians were stymied, their neutralising was the mother of many pyrrhic

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victories. The nationalism reintroduced to Russian politics by Edouard Limonov’s National Salvation Front had at first a zany edge: its popular news weekly Dyen theorised that Boris Yeltsin’s brain had been chemically altered by Americans, and that his supporters were ‘zombified’ by ‘psychotropic generators’ housed in the US embassy. In the Russian parliamentary elections of December 1993, the biggest gainer was then the fantastically misnamed Liberal Democratic Party led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a tubthumping populist who promised vodka for votes, with fantasies of the reconquest of the Baltic States and Alaska. Russia lives with the consequences of Boris Yeltsin’s panicky decision to ignore the Duma, anoint as his successor Vladimir Putin, and commence a ruinous war in Chechnya to re-establish his Russophilia. ‘We don’t like you but we are with you, Mr President!’ exulted Limonov. ‘Long live war!’ Yet for all the sudden flag waving and cultural atavism in the east, there were also fissures in what might be called the western bloc. The economically bleak 1970s had created a mandate for new solutions in the 1980s, whether they were the low taxes of Reaganomics or the public sector slimming of Thatcherism: working populations were buffeted by waves of technology, deregulation and trade liberalisation, combined with the decline of agricultural and smokestack industries. A generation of the long-term structurally unemployed displaced by the new economy

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was finding that the fortunes of the state since the Second World War had not tracked the fortunes of the nation. The nation was being reaffirmed as the basic building block of world affairs; the state, that is the government, exchequer and bureaucracy that allocate the fruits of taxation, was increasingly inhibited by exogenous factors: the need to impress financial markets and hit budgetary targets, the requirements of supranational institutions and multilateral treaties, the scouring away of surface differences by the steady encroachments of globalisation. There was disenchantment; there was anger; there was a desire for the reassertion of inner differences, in language and imagined mentality; there was a resentment of perceived perpetrators and a hunger for potential enemies. With the dwindling of communism, the eclipse of trade unions and the retreat by parties of the left from socialist principles like state ownership, a re-energised radical right had a ready supply of volunteers. And with waves of mass migration after the Second World War, there were visible minorities to submit to spiteful scrutiny. The ambivalent relations between nationalism and immigration need hardly be spelled out, even in the most successful of immigrant societies, and even among intellectuals. Surveying The American Scene (1907) a century ago, Henry James registered the disgust of ‘a sensitive citizen’ viewing the teeming multitudes on Ellis Island, and wincing at the need ‘to

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share the sanctity of his American consciousness, the intimacy of his American patriotism, with the inconceivably alien’; he detected the ‘hard glitter of Israel’ on the Lower East Side, whose Yiddish cafes were ‘the torture rooms of the living idiom’. When such oldfashioned fears of cultural dilution in Europe resonated with disgruntlement at the homogenising influence of Brussels, the rising stars of continental politics became the likes of Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei, which burst open the dreary alliance of socialists and Catholics in Austria, and Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which in collaboration with the far right Alleanza Nazionale routed Italy’s Christian Democrats. The Front National in France made a comeback, mimicked in its antimigration message by the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and the Pim Fortuyn List in the Netherlands. Victims ranged from the new, such as Muslims in France increasingly sequestered in public housing projects, to the familiar, like the benighted Jews of Germany whose synagogues in Lübeck and Dresden were firebombed. The Beast Reawakens (2000) was the title Martin Lee chose for his book on the authoritarian trend of the politics of Europe’s new right — it was a beast with unfamiliar appendages. By the late 1980s, few countries of significance lacked a ministry, department or secretariat devoted to the preservation, promotion, endowment and even export of their ‘national culture’, whether it was literature, film, theatre, music or dance,

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while cultural nationalists revived old gripes about the hegemonic pretensions of the American entertainment industry. The French took particular care of their ‘cultural exception’, claiming an exemption for its ‘audio-visual’ product from the supervision of the World Trade Organisation in order to shovel half a billion euros into its film industry annually. ‘American globalism . . . dominates everything everywhere,’ complained Hubert Védrine, France’s socialist foreign minister. ‘Not in a harsh, repressive, military form, but in people’s heads. Americans have “mental power” to inspire the dreams and desires of others, thanks to their mastery of global images through film and television.’ Globalisation also flushed out economic nationalists hostile to cross-border mergers where companies of public stature were involved. Anti-trust authorities in France, Germany, Italy and Japan all either blocked or pre-empted foreign takeovers perceived to be against a ‘national interest’. Even Peter Costello joined the trend, his populist instincts overcoming his free market convictions when he capitulated to West Australian Liberals opposing Shell’s attempted takeover of Woodside Petroleum in March 2001. Sometimes the interests of the cultural and economic nationalists overlapped. When Jean-Marie Messier built France’s Vivendi Universal into the world’s second-largest entertainment conglomerate with a series of audacious acquisitions, his fans ranged from Bono to Bernard-

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Henri Lévy: Messier, said Lévy, was the harbinger of a new national confidence ‘fed up with seeing French culture and cinema live in permanent surrender to large American corporations’. French ‘declinists’ felt ruefully vindicated when Vivendi lost $US12 billion in 2001 and Messier his job in July 2002 . . . At the extreme of objection, although ironically itself a worldwide phenomenon, was the anti-globalisation movement: a loose-knit confederacy of anti-capitalist and environmental interests hostile to free trade, multilateral bodies and multinational corporations, which first showed itself a force to be reckoned with during the World Trade Organisation summit in Seattle in December 1999, where more than six hundred protestors were arrested. At high-level meetings in Genoa, Barcelona, Davos and even Melbourne, it issued cries variously for protectionism, primitivism, anarchy and autarky; its pantheon were an unlikely assembly, from the comely Canadian social critic Naomi Klein to grumpy French farmer José Bové. The decision to imprison Bové in December 2001 for having destroyed a field of genetically modified rice grown experimentally by the National Center for Scientific Research was assailed by French Greens as a victory for ‘multinationals, economic lobbies and liberal globalisation’. In the eerie way that radicalisms can echo one another, such rhetoric recalled the early days of fascism; among Mussolini’s first targets were foreign

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ownership, bourgeois materialism and ‘speculative international finance’. But then, it was also a time of improbable political realignments and unlikely common causes, labor governments seeing eye-to-eye with business, environmentalists marching alongside trade unionists. And if the anti-globalisation message was too inflammatory and excessive for the major political parties in Australia, its rhetoric was taken up by two new ones: its environmental catchcries were adopted by the emergent Greens; its economic ones were echoed, mirabile dictu, by One Nation. An artefact of this country’s generally low esteem for politicians is that Australians tend to vote prime ministers out rather than in, sticking with them for as long as they remain principally unobjectionable, assuming unless there is unassailable evidence to the contrary that the alternative is probably worse. Nonetheless, after the thrills and spills of the 1980s, the cycle in Australia was ready to turn. Voters who cleaved to Keating in 1993 rather than gamble on John Hewson soon sickened of him, and three years later awarded to John Howard an election almost nobody could have lost. Yet Howard proved not to be the most visible manifestation of the national change of mood: the avatar was the new independent member for Oxley, Pauline Hanson, who made her fabled maiden speech, an appeal for ‘one people, one nation, one flag’ on

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behalf of ‘ordinary Australians’ hitherto excluded from ‘the debate’, on 10 September 1996. Among Hanson’s litany of complaints were that Australia would shortly be ‘swamped by Asians’, that ‘the [welfare] privileges Aboriginals enjoy over other Australians’ were sowing separatist seeds, that all international treaties signed under the auspices of the United Nations should be repudiated, and that ‘big Australian industries and icons’ should be protected from foreign investors and predatory importers: boilerplate nationalist rhetoric, familiar to anyone who had been following the right’s revival in Europe, that was nonetheless transfixing in a country of apparently entrenched political gradualism. Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party, founded five months later, garnered twenty-three per cent of the vote in the Queensland state election in June 1998, its eleven seats virtually wiping out the Coalition. Of course, it did not last. Just four months later Hanson lost her seat in the federal election as the result of an unfavourable electoral distribution, leaving behind one inconspicuous senator, and the party survived chiefly as a spoiling influence: its division of the conservative vote in Western Australia toppled Coalition premier Richard Court and in Queensland underwrote Premier Peter Beattie’s record Labor win. Yet if Hansonism’s efflorescence was brief, its legacy was lasting, so quickly was it metabolised by the conversative body politic. In their John Winston

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Howard (2007), Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen offer a vivid vignette of Howard, coincidentally on Sir Donald Bradman’s last birthday in 2001, on his way to turning away the MV Tampa and its refugee supercargo in order to shore up Coalition defences against a recrudescence of Hansonism: As he walked towards the House of Representatives for Question Time, the minister for Sport and Tourism, Jackie Kelly, approached him. Kelly’s seat of Lindsay took in the far western fringes of Sydney. It was ‘Howard battler’ territory and Kelly was worried that the boat people issue was reigniting support for One Nation . . . ‘One Nation is just chewing us up,’ Kelly told Howard. ‘I’ve lost two branches to them; one of them is my best fundraising branch. We need to do something or I’m a goner.’ Howard waved his speaking notes towards her. ‘Don’t worry, Jackie,’ he responded. ‘That’s all about to change.’

Visceral objection to refugees is hardly a Howard invention: Whitlam told his Cabinet he was ‘not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into the country’; Hawke as ACTU leader declared that ‘any sovereign country has the right to determine how it will exercise its compassion’, and as prime minister that ‘we’re not going to allow people just to jump that queue by saying “well jump in a boat, here we are, bugger the people who’ve been around the world”.’

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But no Australian political leader has made such crude and brazen use of what became known to pundits and pollsters as a ‘national security’ issue: Hanson was a mere dabbler by comparison. Given the hindsight conviction that politics had left a One Nation-sized hole into which Hanson stumbled then Howard filled, Hansonism seems to offer a valuable aperture on electoral change. Both sides of politics tend to see it as rooted in the 1980s: conservatives as a rejection of headlong multiculturalism and/or elite denigration of the core culture; liberals as an outcome of the damage wrought by economic deregulation, alienation from the political mainstream and/or the rediscovery of a seething racist undercurrent in Australian society. As Marx noted at the start of ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, people learning a new language habitually translate it back into the one they already know. And what neither reading factors in is that the preconditions for a swing to the right and a reassertion of the old monoculture existed throughout the 1980s: thus John Howard’s public conviction when he became Opposition Leader in June 1986 that ‘the times will suit me’. They didn’t. Van Onselen and Errington reveal that the shadow cabinet discussed taking up historian Geoffrey Blainey’s March 1984 critique of multiculturalism but judged it would be ‘too dangerous an issue to run on’. Howard was drawn to the conceit of ‘oneness’

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considerably before Hanson, but signed his own (shortterm) political death warrant when he flourished the idea of ‘One Australia’ in June 1988; likewise did the xenophobic Heart of a Nation Party founded that year by Gold Coast businessman Bruce Whiteside to oppose Japanese investment in Australian property die unmourned. Conservative populism in Australia enjoyed at best local success, which proved its weakness nationally: Joh Bjelke-Petersen only looked prime ministerial to the white-shod; Kalgoorlie loved Graeme Campbell but, as the failure of Australian Betrayed (1995) and the follies of the Australia First Party revealed, nobody else did. Even Hanson’s initial success in Oxley was a working of the law of unintended consequences. Hanson would almost certainly have disappeared without trace had she remained a Liberal candidate; only after her disendorsement, following the airing of her farouche views in the Queensland Times, was she able to attract both disillusioned Labor voters and disaffected gun owners. Hansonism is generally agreed to have been a ‘protest vote’ against the convergence of party politics on a mythical centre. Thus One Nation’s ersatz platform, cobbled together from offcuts of social and economics policies left lying around when the major parties built their bipartisan dream home, including a wing that might almost have been in honour of Rex Connor: support for protection, antagonism to privatisation, vision of a state-owned lending institution

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dishing out cheap loans, restrictions on foreign capital and the end of ‘kowtowing to financial markets, international organisations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people’. Yet while Hanson was quickly classified as the voice of lumpenproletarian victimhood, One Nation’s support did not map tidily with the new economy’s victims. While concluding unsurprisingly that the party’s modal voter was a male blue collar worker of below-average education, psephologist Murray Goot also admitted: ‘One of the difficulties with the model is the way it leaves out — the way it has to leave out to be at all plausible — the state of Queensland.’ At times, more than half the One Nation vote stemmed from a state where rates of economic growth were above the Australian average, and well above what was then being called the ‘rust belt’ of Victoria and New South Wales. Queensland has always been electorally combustible: recall Wayne Goss’s reverberating warning to Keating before the 1996 election that ‘the baseball bats are out for you up here’. For a state whose highest-flying federal politician had until then been Artie Fadden, Hanson was worth rooting for. And while Hanson’s appeal was more diffuse beyond her heartland, she still exerted a weird fascination. Margo Kingston came to bury Hanson, not to praise her, in keeping the campaign diary Off The Rails (1998), yet they developed a strange kinship: Hanson’s confusions, she found, were utterly sincere. ‘I come here not as a polished politi-

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cian,’ she began her maiden speech, ‘but as a woman who has had her fair share of life’s knocks.’ And it was hard to doubt it when she explained herself as ‘just an ordinary Australian who wants to keep this country strong and independent’. In Australia, however, the prefatory ‘just’ to the word ‘ordinary’ is misleading. Introducing their fascinating study Ordinary People’s Politics (2007), Judith Brett and Anthony Moran observed: ‘Whatever the meanings political commentators attribute to it, the term “ordinary” comes up again and again when Australians talk about their social world and their place in it, as do its synonyms, “average”, “normal” and “everyday”.’ This is not so much a descriptive of class as an opting out of it: the interview subjects in the book show an uncanny ability to construct a version of social hierarchy that places them squarely in the middle. Mark Peel noted the same phenomenon in his survey of the Australian ‘underclass’, The Lowest Rung (2003): ‘If those to whom I spoke were best characterized as disadvantaged, they mostly called themselves “ordinary”.’ The respondents in Brett and Moran also illustrate, almost without exception, the central place of work in the construction of Australian ordinariness. ‘Honest toil and valiant life,’ to use Paterson’s expression, amounts almost to a de facto citizenship test — which Hanson passed effortlessly, basing her views on ‘my experience as a mother of four children, as a sole

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parent and a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop’. Perhaps in no other country would this have been considered a certification of authenticity. But if political fixers and wonks had combined to construct an identikit Australian ‘people’s politician’, they would surely have come up with something like Hanson: a nationalistic self-employed working mother who so walked and talked like One Nation’s core constituents that they rallied ever more protectively with each attack on her. Australians have traditionally held their politicians at such a contemptuous distance that the slings and arrows of Canberra do not carry far: when a Costello lashes a Beazley, no affront or discourtesy is felt among Beazley supporters. Hanson so collapsed the distance between herself and her followers that attacks showed up as bruises on her loyalists: it was being pummelled in parliament, in print and on television that progressively endeared Hanson to the disaffected. While Howard revealed a deplorable streak of cynicism in dealing with One Nation, even welcoming ‘the fact that people can now talk about certain things without living in fear of being branded as a bigot or as a racist’, the common conviction he could simply have ‘shut her down’ at any time is at odds with the outcome of the media’s campaign to do the same. As Maxine McKew was told by a One Nation supporter: ‘The more you ridicule her, the more we warm and rally to her cause.’

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Hansonism floundered at an organisational level because she achieved far more than her ramshackle party apparatus could handle, then at a cultural level because Australian valorisation of ‘ordinariness’ became a double-edged blade: uncomfortable with extremes of rhetoric, Australians sooner or later muddle towards the middle — and there they found a prime minister waiting. Consensus wisdom is that the coalition bought up the policies of Hansonism stock-in-trade, and certainly some, like the abolition of ATSIC, were not even given a fresh lick of paint. But Hanson had veered so paranoiacally right — quailing from fantasy assassins, denouncing imagined Indigeous separatists conspiring with the United Nations — that Howard, usually with the addition of a few qualifications and granting the possibility of some exceptions, was able to set out his as the stall of studious moderation. Though Howard’s rhetoric was sometimes strident, it was more often deceptively measured. On everything from Medicare to anti-terrorism, he incanted promises to ‘safeguard’, ‘protect’, ‘preserve’ and ‘secure’, so as make ‘stronger’ and ‘fairer’: nothing, in other words, too confrontingly new; simply improvements on the already good. Hanson’s message that the cultural ‘centre’ could not hold was as energising as the cry of ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre, and as unrepeatable; Howard found a more sustainable version of appearing to stand guard over the centre, and in periodic announcements that ‘everything is under control’. In some respects, Howard

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was no more articulate or persuasive than Hanson. At home in parliament and at press conference, his prepared speeches betrayed a staggering vacuity, not just devoid of thought but actively antagonistic to it. Consider the freedom from the encumbrance of content inherent in this: You don’t indulge in some kind of intellectual exercise in trying to enumerate Australian qualities and values, you practise them . . . We spend an enormous amount of time in this country navel-gazing about what kind of society we are. It seems that, on some occasions, that we engage in a form of public fretting about what it really means to be an Australian. It always strikes me as rather unnecessary and rather odd and rather unproductive . . . You don’t write down what it means to be an Australian. You feel what it means to be an Australian.

Or the stubborn, soporific immemorability of this: It’s important to understand that there are some things about our country that don’t change and shouldn’t change, and we should fight hard to stop changing . . . there are certain enduring Australian values that I still identify with and are still as strong and as worthy and as valuable to us as Australians as they were when I left Canterbury Boys High School in Sydney in 1956 . . . There is that continuity,

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that golden thread of Australian values that hasn’t changed . . . There will be a continuity, there will be a golden thread of basic Australian values that will be there.

And for someone who incanted the word ‘values’ so weightily, Howard’s efforts to express them were stunningly inadequate. He ascended his giddiest rhetorical heights in the draft preamble to the Constitution — a muddle so effectively dismembered by Guy Rundle in The Opportunist (2001) as to require no further comment. The government’s efforts to lend administrative force to a job lot of platitudes in its new citizenship test humiliated everyone involved. None of the items on immigration minister Kevin Andrews’ values checklist — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, gender equality, tolerance, compassion, peacefulness, support for parliamentary democracy and the rule of law — was straightforwardly demonstrable, while some weren’t readily reconcilable; nor are they uniquely or even particularly Australian. Their assertion in this context smacked instead of Australian amour propre — and this, I suspect, is fundamental to understanding Howard’s electoral success. It became a cliché to describe Howard as the master of the politics of fear, as though he somehow was the first to grasp fear’s political potential, or that fear is something that politics should have no truck with, even though without fear there can be no courage. It is more instructive,

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I believe, to see his success as harnessing the politics of narcissism. Everyone is familiar with the myth of the Boeotian beauty Narcissus, spellbound by his own reflection in a still pool of water. Narcissism is not the same, however, as egotism, or selfishness, or even selfish individualism. It is more accurately a self-focused grandiosity, a strident prioritising of one’s own needs and wants: dispositions harboured by everyone to some degree, and flowing from our acute dependence on others in infancy and childhood. It is also hard to gainsay that this is an intensifyingly narcissistic age, with a therapeutic ideology of disinhibition and demonstration that preaches the paramount value of ‘self-esteem’, that ‘nobody can love someone else without first loving themselves’, and that ‘learning to love yourself’ is actually ‘The Greatest Love of All’; an ideology that is celebrated in popular culture by reality television, talkback radio, autobiography, memoir and celebrity confession; that is facilitated by technology putting a camera in every mobile telephone and a webcam on every computer, while creating in Web 2.0 a space for endless selfadvertisement and self-gratification. Man of the Year in Time? ‘You! . . . Yes, you. Welcome to your world.’ Top of ‘The Fifty People Who Matter Most In The New Economy’ as ranked by Business 2.0? ‘You!’

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Defining force of commerce in the new millennium according to Businessweek? ‘You! You! You!’ This ‘power of you’ obtains plausibility by chiming both with the time-honoured nostrums of democracy, and so many wholly- and half-remembered messages of the mass media, consumer culture and even civic institutions. After all, it has become the mission of schools to build the student’s self-image at all costs. In the name of ‘relevance’, students are encouraged to read books about others exactly like themselves, are taught a version of history in which they must see their own reflection, and are told that education is merely a preparation for their own career. A major recent study by psychologists at San Diego State University, collecting data from twelve different surveys spanning 1.3 million students, concluded that the young are actually now suffering a surfeit of selfesteem. Professor Jean Twenge’s Generation Me (2006) has the expository subtitle Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before, the last of which she attributes to ‘soaring expectations and crushing realities’. The power of you is now also elaborately fetishised in the political sphere by endless polling, open lines that never close, and a slavish media devotion to ‘the issues that matter’: interest rates, the economy, interest rates, law and order, interest rates and interest rates. And it was here that Howard proved a master. Although

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nationalism might seem to be about flags, stories, marching bands and folk entertainments, it is also a parallel impulse to self-love. In religion, Durkheim contended, societies worshipped a camouflaged image of itself. In his classic study Nations and Nationalism (1983), Ernest Gellner went a step further: ‘In a nationalist age, societies worship themselves brazenly and openly, spurning the camouflage. At Nuremburg, Nazi Germany did not worship itself by pretending to worship God or even Wotan; it overtly worshipped itself.’ Nationalism and narcissism both involve a prioritisation of one’s preferred interests, and encounter difficulties with the possibility that one’s norms aren’t universal. Previous surges in national pride have added generally to the stock of selfhood; in the last decade, this flow has operated both ways, the renewed infatuation with the nation owing its vigour, and its volatility, to the collective force of individual self-worship. Keating endeavoured to tap these sensations, perhaps most memorably in his speech at the consecration of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Remembrance Day 1993, when with breezy ahistorical confidence he intoned: ‘He is one of us.’ But nobody felt this about Keating, and it is Hanson who can be regarded as pioneering the politics of narcissism, providing voters with the vicarious thrill of a politician who looked like them: it’s fitting that she and her political right hand David Oldfield careered into reality television after their stint in what might be called

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‘reality politics’. It was then Howard who perfected the art of appearing to look up to voters, never wavering from his praise of them, reinforcing their senses of rectitude, insisting that ‘professional purveyors of guilt’ should not impinge on our ‘freedom to be proud’. In His Masters’ Voice, David Marr complained that Howard had ‘the loudest voice in Australia’ and does not ‘listen’. Yet if a single image will linger from his premiership, it will be of Howard wearing the cans in a radio studio dealing with talkback callers. Howard’s use of radio began as a means of speaking over the head of a hostile press gallery, a technique that made him, as Michelle Grattan put it, ‘simultaneously overexposed and underavailable’. Withal it entrenched the idea of a politician at home in demotic forums: a man who listened, even if he perhaps heard only that which he wished to. And by thus collapsing the distance between his government and the public, he sometimes appeared to make criticism of him almost a treasonable activity. When the United Nations criticised Australian treatment of asylum seekers, for example, his response was to call it ‘an attack on Australia’. Don’t tell us we’re bad, was the message: we are essentially good! This may not have been so self-conscious as it appeared. Van Onselen and Errington view their biographical subject as a man of steadfast beliefs and profoundly limited empathy:

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Howard’s empathy is limited to areas he is familiar with. He cannot empathise with those of backgrounds different to his own . . . Howard’s tendency to take a step too far in indulging his prejudices of his fellow Australians is typical of his approach to politics. His desire to reach the top justifies in his mind behaviour that he, as an educated urbanite, might otherwise find distasteful . . . Howard empathises with Australians who work hard and resent sharing the nation’s bounty with those they consider undeserving.

And it was this that made Howard perhaps the ideal therapist for countrymen desperate to think well of themselves, straining after every scintilla of selfesteem, anxious about any speck of self-reproach. It is a standard symptom of narcissism to be unable to cope with too much past or future. And for all the carping about Howard’s fealty to the past, he actually seldom visited it except to partake periodically of various martial and sporting legends. Brisk, pragmatic, in time, in touch, he rooted the love of country mainly in the here and now: Australian prosperity, Australian lifestyle, Australian people. You. What else might be learned by looking at the glow of our renewed national sentiment through the prism of narcissism? The potential of self-love as an admixture in mass movements, and as a catalyst for exclusionary violence, occurred to the condition’s earliest analyst.

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‘It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love,’ Freud argued in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), ‘so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.’ In Blood and Belonging (1994), Michael Ignatieff describes being put in mind of Freud by a conversation with a Serbian soldier in Mirkovci, thirty kilometres from the Croatian city of Vukovar, in March 1993. Ignatieff asked the soldier to explain why he was capable of waging war on Croats who had so recently been his neighbours. The reply startled him: ‘See this? These are Serbian cigarettes. Over there,’ he says gesturing out the window, ‘they smoke Croat cigarettes.’ ‘They’re both cigarettes, right?’ ‘Foreigners don’t understand anything.’ He shrugs and resumes cleaning his Zatovo machine pistol.

To explain the phenomenon ‘that the level of hostility and tolerance between groups bears no relation to the size and their cultural differences as measured by an outsider’, Ignatieff invokes Freud’s phrase the ‘narcissism of small differences’. In some ways, the smaller the better, for then they can be designated as essences, indivisible, irreducible, ancient, arcane — which tend to command from outsiders an earnest respect. (In Complicity With Evil [2006], Adam LeBor describes how Bill Clinton’s resolve to separate the warring

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parties in Bosnia was derailed by the proclamations of his secretary of state Warren Christopher that the hatreds were ‘almost terrifying’ and ‘centuries old’, and by his reading Balkan Ghosts [1994], a travel book by Robert Kaplan, ‘which seemed to reinforce the “ancient hatreds” theory’. Yet as LeBor says: ‘There was nothing mysterious about the Serb onslaughts on Croatia and Bosnia. They were carefully planned and meticulously realized . . . War was a deliberate choice for the Serbian ruling elite, to maintain its political power and economic privileges.’) Such prejudices actually aren’t especially ingrained or evolved, for the narcissistic self does not engage with other selves in any real sense — it merely glances at them in order to confirm its own existence. But the narcissistic self does respond, and aggressively, to those who have disturbed its autonomic reverie. Because narcissism is rooted in dependence, Christopher Lasch explained in his famous critique The Culture of Narcissism (1979), the narcissist’s illusions of omnipotence mask an anxious vulnerability to the esteem of others: In order to polish and perfect the part he has devised for himself, the new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection, not so much in admiration as in unremitting search for flaws, signs of fatigue, decay . . . Imprisoned in his pseudo-awareness of himself, the new Narcissus would gladly take refuge in an idée fixe, a neurotic compulsion, a ‘magnificent obsession’ — anything

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to get his mind off his own mind. Even unreflecting acquiescence in the daily grind . . . comes to seem like an enviable state of mind.

The state that is intolerable is shame. As Anne Manne notes in her essay ‘What About Me?’ for The Monthly: ‘Both the strident insistence on one’s own superiority and the screaming vituperative rages — an alternative strategy is a collapse into maudlin self-pity — that occur when a narcissistic injury is experienced happen because shame is a feeling that simply cannot be dealt with.’ Liberals have flung all sorts of epithets at Australia over the last decade: we have been in the grip of racism, fascism, xenophobia, Islamophobia. Yet none of these conditions seems to fit the national malaise so well as what psychologists regard as a core quality of narcissism: a condition called ‘bypassed shame’. ‘Bypassed shame’ was given its name in the 1960s by a Yale psychotherapist Helen Block Lewis after examining transcripts of one hundred and forty psychoanalytic sessions involving patients who had undergone apparently successful courses of analysis but been plunged back into their former symptoms by some crisis. She explained in Shame and Guilt in Neurosis (1971) that often the only trace of previous analysis was what she called ‘an enriched language of self-debilitation’ — something she attributed to the asymmetrical nature of analysis. Far from helping the

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experience by maintaining a disinterested professional distance, the therapist aggravated the patients’ sense of shame in disclosure, then not only sent them away to cope with the consequences, but with the sense that they should be ‘better’. In the narcissist, writes Sandy Hotchkiss in Why Is It Always About You? (2002), ‘bypassed shame’ shows up as ‘a protective barrier of denial, coldness, blame, or rage’. He observes: Since there are no healthy internal mechanisms available to process this painful feeling, the shame is directed outward, away from the Self. It can never be ‘my fault.’ We sense that these people are emotionally shallow, and we may think of them as thick-skinned, sure of themselves, and aloof. Then, all of a sudden, they may surprise us by reacting to some minor incident or social slight. When shaming sneaks past the barriers, these ‘shameless’ ones are unmasked for what they really are — supremely shame-sensitive. That is when you will see a flash of hurt, usually followed by rage and blame. When the stink of shame has penetrated their walls, they fumigate with a vengeance.

There could hardly be a better description of the new Australia nationalism, circa 2007: shallow, thickskinned, sure of itself, aloof from the world’s problems, impervious to the sufferings of others — then retracting in angry confusion at the hint of questioning, raging

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petulantly when crossed, impassioned and empurpled about ‘their’ country. Where lurks the shame that has been, so angrily, bypassed? No answer is as compelling as the obvious one: the origins of white settlement. It can be argued that Australian nationalism was always insecurely rooted: I suspect, as I remarked earlier, that its sardonic streak has been an unconscious nod to the country’s original inhabitants; the halting, faltering, partial acknowledgements of Indigenous dispossession, and the febrile, outraged assertions of national proprietorship seem to me to be conflicted responses to a growing consciousness of the same discomfiture. In some ways, the White Blindfold version of history has become more stressful than the Black Armband. While the inevitability of the course of white settlement can be debated by men of goodwill, what can’t be escaped is that the consequences of interaction of settler and Indigenous populations were altogether ruinous for the latter — and ours is a better country for grasping it. When liberals mounted their high horses, they almost immediately sound censorious. Progressively embarrassed by Hansonism and embattled by Howardism, they din the ears with protest. Eleven years! You get fewer for murder! But such is democracy. De Tocqueville warned of the tyranny of the majority, how the need to make policies acceptable to the mass of men would slow the movement of ideas, how the price of a bulwark against revolution would be some

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political stagnation. Alas, in Australia, few sounds have been quite so calculated to drown themselves out as the cry of the caterwaulling intellectual: ‘Look at me, I’m being silenced.’ I am not being silenced. On the contrary I count myself as blessed to enjoy the benefits conferred by Australian citizenship, which I did no more to deserve than live here, strive not to take them for granted, as this seems the least of reciprocal gestures, and find in the stains and sorrows of Australian history a challenge rather than a threat, given the grounds for despair with which other nations have had to cope. At the end of his account of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda, Philip Gourevitch asks the impossibly brave hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina how the events have made him feel about his land. ‘Disappointed,’ he says simply, then adds hopefully: ‘With my countrymen — Rwandans — you never know what they become tomorrow.’ I’ll end this essay with a recollection of my own, from another Australia Day. A few years ago, by happy accident, I spent the day on a sheep property in Victoria’s Western Districts, and joined the farmer on his appointed rounds. He was a phlegmatic character, no more inclined to waste words than water. But over the day, quiet satisfaction peeping just occasionally through innate self-effacement, he shared more and more about how he operated, what his family had learned over generations about the qualities and the vulnerabilities of the land, the genuinely clever ways

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in which he mitigated the environmental impacts of his farming, the personal features he’d introduced out of fun and fancy: he had lightened up his shearing shed, for instance, with panes of stained glass. Not until mid-afternoon did I notice he was wearing a little stickpin of the flag on his shirt pocket. Late in the day, we adjourned to watch some of the Australian Open, where an Australian was playing in front of the usual vociferous crowd of face-paint patriots and to the standard partisan commentary of blazered boors. We soon turned off in favour of watching the sunset. Nobody could really have mistaken the two types of national pride I experienced that Australia Day — yet both sides of politics seem susceptible to doing just that. There is a liberal tendency to darken the Australian past, partly because it had too roseate a glow for too long, partly as an assertion of moral superiority; this competes with conservative resentment that celebrates the face-painted minority as a rousing riposte to the elite jeremiahs. Both are failures of imagination. Nationalism, it is true, doesn’t surrender readily to intellectual interrogation, can be cynically faked and exploited, substituted for genuine civic engagement, flourished as a cover for the meanest punitive instincts; but amid anomie and upheaval, it can offer a sense of attachment, an antidote to individualism, a ground for sacrifice, a source of solace. The subjects of Ordinary People’s Politics vary greatly, but on one point Brett and Moran find notable

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uniformity of views: ‘They loved Australia, it was beautiful, the best country in the world, the lucky country, people were easygoing and friendly, they wouldn’t live anywhere else.’ For them, Australia was an empowering idea. Much good can be accomplished by people disposed so optimistically.

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A Question of Fear Alexis Wright A Question of Fear The closing years of the last century and most of those of the first decade of the twenty-first century will be remembered in the history of Australia as the time when the country lost its image of innocent carefreeness and wellbeing — an image that had seemingly always represented Australianness. This long-held identity was lost when the federal government of the period could have chosen to engage the country in a dialogue about ideas of difference, but decided instead to join the USA and the UK in a brutal war against what it labelled ‘the forces of darkness.’ Australians are accustomed to placing a great deal of trust in their government, but in this period the government played on their fear to propel them into the unknown. They found themselves responsible for the harsh realities of what happens to their own sense of humanity from being a key player in the so-called war on terror. They became implicit in the detention of the defenceless people of the world who came to 129

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Australian shores seeking shelter. And the nation began facing the complexities of what was either official truths or lies about global warming and drought. But what was also shaping the conscience of the population at this time, faced with a sense of confusion and personal powerlessness to engage with the challenge of recognising that there were other voices insisting on change in the world outside and the environment at a global level — both being matters that it neither knew — nor probably cared too much about before — was escapism. Of course, escapism was nothing new for a nation that was formed on the basis of denying the truth. The government could count on this historical attitude of turning a blind eye to matters of the truth and use it to instil, manage and manipulate public fear. After all, this nation was shaped through its ability to lie and get away with the land theft of the entire country from Aboriginal people since day one of colonisation; it is the most fundamental issue of what is still wrong in the country, ongoing and long outstanding. So when Australians were unable to respond to the changing world — particularly as much of what was happening right before their eyes was so foreign to them, and because it is almost impossible to change the decisions of government outside election time — and wanted to escape the weight of the awful realities and responsibilities forced on them which they had no idea how to own, they did so through a form of escapism that

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allowed the population at a personal level to artificially restore their sense of being in control of one’s own destiny. Australians put their heads in the sand, tuning out of the political commentary dominating the media during this time and, instead, reinventing an identity of individual control of ‘localness’ through reality TV makeovers. Nightly, Australians glued themselves to the couch, giddy with the choice of makeover programs to watch. There were the personalities or health of people, children and pets to overhaul, along with houses, rooms, gardens and wardrobes that were stripped bare and changed ‘for the better’ through a step-by-step process so convincing that almost anyone could become an instant expert in design and renovation, or a shrewd judge of character. The makeover changed the Australian psyche. We were back in charge, and comfortable with the idea of how we could change and judge what we disliked in our immediate surroundings, or what the personality and ‘the look’ should be of life in Australia. Hardware shops made a fortune as the middle and upper classes of the population became addicted to improving their surroundings — out the door went unsightly gardens and house structures, furniture and daggy clothes. How easy it became to believe in the possibility of changing any surrounding that did not suit this new image of ourselves while the government was left to its own devices with a mandate to swiftly change other people and other countries into something that looked

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like us. Whether those years of reaching for images that could be applied easily and in haste worked in homes across the nation remains for the future to decide. Many makeover merchants might now admit that not enough thought was given to the consequences of discarding what was already there, or whether the change was really what was intended. Even the old metaphorical prison wall of dictatorial government policies that were controlling Aboriginal Australia since colonisation received its own media makeover — one, wholly manipulated by the federal government of the last decade, silenced the Aboriginal leadership it controlled through institutions it had initially created before destroying by squeezing tight resources to further erode Indigenous humanity. This wall became a billboard for the graffiti of any commentator — mostly non-Indigenous — to condemn Aboriginal people. What was being said about Aboriginal people in the media was often vicious, relentless and wholesale. There were so many commentators who weren’t Indigenous writing about Indigenous people, nor did they have any meaningful contact with Aboriginal people or live in an Indigenous community — those few who did, did so as result of the privilege and status accorded to them as ‘professionals’, which is different to Indigenous people actually speaking for themselves. Strangely, as though Indigenous people had become innate objects, their voices were practically never heard. The constant message to them from

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others was to forget Indigenous rights, which also included, it seems, the right to be heard. The effect of this vitriolic attack of vilification from the powerful on a defenceless people mostly living in poverty was that Indigenous people became silent. You could call it a counterattack by Aboriginal people — sometimes it is a cultural strength to remain silent — that instead became a terrible self-inflicted wound of psychological harm to the spirit, intensifying inside the wall. Tens of thousands of Aboriginal people became more deeply hurt, continued to be hurt, and many defenceless people died from deliberately imposed injury to selfworth in the forms of suicide or murder that were so inexplicable and at such a rapid rate that most of our people have yet to understand what happened to them, or how we might even survive in the future. The question yet to be answered is why Indigenous people were silent, whether Indigenous voices, apart from the lone voice of Noel Pearson, really had been silenced, needed to be silenced, or chose to become silent during this period. Where was their freedom of speech? Did Aboriginal people choose to be silent in agreement or disagreement, or was it forced; was it a silence created through fear, or a silence that was self-inflicted? Did Aboriginal people use silence as a weapon in what became a futile attempt to combat the force of the attack? Yet it must be recognised that Aboriginal people had not been easily silenced before and had put in decades of hard work to ensure survival

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of culture through two centuries of land theft and deepening poverty created by decades of failed government policies. They had survived as fighters in much better shape in the past fifty years than in the last decade. Can fear rob hope? It is the impact of silence in the space of one decade for almost two per cent of the population that once had a reputation of strongly representing its views which is the puzzle, and it is worth considering how fear tactics can be applied to affect any part of the population, if not every person — man, woman and child — in this country.

1. A question of fear If you tell me about your fears, I will listen, and then I will tell you about mine, but I fear we will only discover what is already commonly known about fear — it’s frightening, and rather than confront fear, or imagine how we might create a place, a nation or a world without fear, we let our fears slip to the back of our minds. We feel that our fear is personal, that no one else would understand, but fearfulness is universal and, universally, each of us has the potential to use our fears destructively against others or ourselves. Fear is the back-seat driver in busy lives that leaves little space for deep thoughts about how to understand oneself, let alone other people. If we

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try, our fears cry out, What about us? What about all our clutter of self-preservation? You feel won’t survive without it. So it is too hard. We feel we must preserve the status quo. It is too frightening to think otherwise. But what of the future if we take comfort in allowing people more powerful, and more fearful, than ourselves to do the thinking for us? I wonder if we take as many opportunities as we should to learn more about other people. One of the world’s leading philosophers, Kwame Anthony Appiah, has suggested in his moral manifesto for a planet shared by more than six billion strangers, ‘that we should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another.’ I doubt that, even to this day, many people outside the Aboriginal world in Australia have a reasonable understanding of the first literature composed on this land, which is still contained within the enormous archive of epical storytelling poetry held by each Indigenous nation across the country. These are the ancient stories of the ancestral creation beings that are learned and stored as mind maps that define the philosophical understanding of Aboriginal law, and which, taken together, embrace the entire continent. With this Indigenous memory men and women can name and tell the story of thousands of individual sites in their country, continuing a long tradition of watching over

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this country and maintaining the ecologically sustainable life. I want to talk a little bit about poetry because it is the art of defining essential things worth remembering about ourselves. This idea can be found anywhere in the world where people describe the soul of who they are in their stories. Poets excavate deep within the psyche to find words that speak about, describe, and bring some sense into the world about how to be human. Irish poet Seamus Heaney described Joycean ideas in Finnegans Wake as ‘eddying with the vowels of all rivers’, remembering everything at the level of the unconscious, because there is much amnesia in people that they do not learn from their own history. This is how the Chinese poet Bei Dao works in his poem about ‘The Sower’ in time of war, ‘throwing seeds across marble floors’: a sower walks into the great hall it’s war out there, he says and you awash in emptiness you’ve sworn off your duty to sound the alarm I’ve come in the name of fields . . .

The poetics of reminding and remembering mostly sits in hidden places, in uncrowded little fires that flicker in the homes in lonely places of the world’s exiled, persecuted, threatened and tortured. These

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hidden hymns are sung too quietly. The wall is diabolically claustrophobic. It has closed us in. We desperately need to focus on the lessons of fearfulness by listening to the poet’s deep sense of consciousness, so that we do not continue making the same mistakes. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish is a writer who speaks to the universality of our feelings of spiritual crisis. Searching lost realms of Arab culture, he seeks to reconnect with ‘the original spirit of mythmaking’, and through this understanding, he expresses all times in the ‘intimate depths experienced by every exiled human psyche on earth’. He strikes deep into the core of remembering the meaning of belonging and the loss of its essence in the soul of who we are, so deeply afflicting all people through the experience of separation from the traditional roots that provide the spirit of their humanity, such as in his poem ‘On a Canaanite at The Dead Sea’: This is my absence, A master who imposes his laws And mocks my visions . . . All the prophets are my kin. But heaven is still far from its earth And I am still far from my words.

I think that Australia is exposed throughout the world as being devoid of spirituality from never adopting or coming to terms with the original values for under-

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standing this land voiced time and again by Indigenous people. Surely many countries must find it difficult to develop a close understanding or respect for this country if it appears to be a child without a set of beliefs that are grounded in strong, long-term cultural principles. Perhaps the way for Australia to create credible relationships worldwide will be through the development of a literature that understands not only how Aboriginal people think, along with the cultural matrices of the foundation myths that Australians of immigrant backgrounds cling to. In this way we might also begin to build a road to accepting Indigenous spiritual sovereignty of land, rather than continuing the absurdity of simply mouthing about practical measures for reconciliation. I would like to refer to one recent example of how the original spiritual values of this land have clashed with Australian values. The Yanyuwa, Gudanji and Garrawa people in the Gulf of Carpentaria have long voiced their fear about the mining group Xstrata’s proposal to divert the McArthur River, which is home to a giant ‘rainbow serpent’, because it will bring storms, cyclones and other disasters. The Yanyuwa people have fought relentlessly for three decades for the return of their island country. A senior traditional owner said on ABC television’s Stateline program in 2003: ‘It is no good. I will be sick if they cut the place, because my spirit is there. All my songs are across the river. I don’t want to see that thing happen in the

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McArthur River.’ What value has this country placed in this belief? Do we understand how the ancient knowledge of Aboriginal law governs Aboriginal people today? In May 2007, the Northern Territory government enacted legislation in the dead of night to allow the mining development to go ahead. When I was a child I instinctively knew how thinly spaced I stood from potential harm. For instance, a fear that lasted throughout my life began when I was about five or six, after my father died, through the growing understanding of what it meant to have him disappear forever from my life. I feared for a future without him, and I felt that a lot of fear lived in our house because of my mother’s personal crisis, which was as much to do with the affect on my family of a colonising history as it was to do with her hard efforts as a widow to raise my sister and myself in a world that she felt was unjust and without sympathy. I was already fearful that our home would be struck by lightning when I heard thunder so close that it shook the house, after a flash of lightning had struck a child nearby. I feared drowning before reaching a seemingly distant pylon under a bridge, while teaching myself to swim in the only place possible to learn to swim with the rest of the kids at the time, the flooding Cloncurry River. As a child, I feared most adults in the small town where we lived because of the colour of my skin. I remember fearing the ghosts and spirits

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of the night, as much as I learned religious fear at my Catholic primary school. Obviously, I survived this childhood of mixed fears. I claimed the status of bravery at an early age with the other fearless children swimming in flooding rivers after a good storm. I also had a kind and doting grandmother who nurtured her granddaughter’s wildness and recklessness, while at the same time nurturing me with the stories Aboriginal children are told. It was these two childhood influences, from my grandmother and from other children, that probably helped keep in place the hairline fracture so easily traversed, between being and not being fearful of a hard world, something my mother was also teaching me to understand. It is interesting to reflect on how fear was generated and maintained for various purposes during childhood and its continuing legacy into adulthood. It helps us to grapple with the complexity of understanding how fear is being developed worldwide, not only by terrible acts of terrorism, but by deliberate attempts by governments to frighten the public into supporting a ‘war on terror’. Our respect for the dignity of human rights can be trashed, as we have seen through our government’s cowardly endorsement of outsourcing torture, even though experts on national security studies tell us that if the aim of terrorism is to terrify, then terrorists can be defeated simply by not becoming terrified.

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It is true and logical to believe that people everywhere have fears. We all fear being attacked, particularly by an unknown assailant — a stranger lurking in some dark place on the planet. This country’s former government’s tune of fear extended to distant places and countries, to the cultures and religions of strangers that it claimed have the potential to deprive us of our ability to trust. Yet, paradoxically, at the same time we fear the possibility of being ostracised and disliked, even by those strangers in distant corners of the world whom we believe wish to harm us. I have experienced racial fears that are deeply related to the legacy of harm created by the Howard Government through decades of injurious Indigenous policy. This injury is deeply rooted in the fabric of our families. I have been spared some of the injury of long-term institutional racism, an exclusion that, in its fullest potential, is experienced as wholesale poverty, condemnation, and terrible psychological harm. This fear is unresolved in the lives of thousands, and is similar — even worse, if that is possible — for millions of people across the world who have had their lives destroyed through racism. There is no ‘privilege’ in the Indigenous world of the type that the media and government like to use as a source of dividing us — and to counter this we would be wise to heed the thoughts of Samir Kassar, the visionary Lebanese journalist and historian. In his collection of essays on the Arab malaise in Being Arab, written before he was assassinated, Kassar reminded

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the Arab world not to create separateness within and without: ‘Arab culture has begun to relearn how to integrate plurality into its unity of place and time, and stop thinking of difference as a source of division.’ I believe that our continent continues to be the sacred land of ancient culture and that today Australia’s Indigenous people are living through the most fearful era of our existence after decades of almost total abandonment to official policies of ignorance. We continue to suffer some of the worst poverty among any people on earth and endure some of the worst socio-economic, health, mortality and education statistics imaginable. This situation was created through a historical chain of arrogance and ignorance from day one of colonisation, and extends even now, by the demonisation of Indigenous efforts throughout the media and by governments. In this cloak of arrogance, stitched with misrepresentation, Indigenous people are blamed for creating communities of violence and fear. Now you might ask why do we keep on making the same mistakes with one another, and what has any of this Indigenous issue got to do with fear? On the one hand the mistakes are bound up in the method of spell-casting imbued in the overall consciousness of Australia. In my wildest imagination, I suspect that the ancient knowledge of fear still locked away deep in the consciousness of many unsuspecting nonIndigenous Australians is continuously whispering to them, but the cauldron’s magical power is malfunc-

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tioning, and can cast no spell that totally works for this land. The power of wizards and witches transported from European cultures is being diluted and misused here. The cauldron conscience improvises with the wrong ingredients, refuses to grant the vision of white supremacy as far as the eye can see. Nevertheless, Aboriginal people live in the mire of the spell-caster’s fear, which in turn creates our own fear of not being able to fulfil our responsibility to the spirits of the land inside ourselves. I know that our senior men and women of high degree in religious laws understand much better than I do the seriousness of the clash of religious beliefs that exists between Indigenous thought and laws based on the philosophy of religions introduced in this country since colonisation. A way of explaining how introduced religious thought has been practised on the Indigenous world is through understanding how thought operates through the prism of an egotistic projectile imagination which has a linear sensibility towards invasion, suppression and always-changing laws. This idea of imagining through projecting outwards and colonising by sinking down roots over the deeply rooted native realm, as a rhizome would spread, was originally described and analysed by the French–Caribbean writer and philosopher Edouard Glissant in Poetics of Relation. For Glissant, by contrast, indigenous religious thought is of an ‘epic’ voice, of being and belonging to one place, while sitting stationary in the ‘whorls of time.’

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Our people say our law is constant and understandable but white law always changes. The values associated with colonisation as the repressiveness that Glissant speaks of is also about the fear engendered in nation-building by boundaries that work for containment and control. This form of containment built through aggressive fear is also how Aboriginal people are governed in the Australian psyche, as objects that are owned, while anyone outside is involved in the management of the contained area — for example, the taxpayer. I have often thought that Indigenous people cannot break through the deafness caused by the walls of the status quo that surround our containment, even if we wanted to, because of the layers in the maze of institutional violence. Although individuals might create something for either themselves or their people, as we see in the difficult work our people undertake across the country in the unconnected government policies of health, education, employment and so on, our desire to survive as people in our own right, with a plan for our cultural future, has been impossible to achieve.

2. Too many spirits The spiritual beliefs that belong to this land have long been challenged by the religious/spiritual beliefs others have used for conquering and oppression. While the

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spiritual world connects us to the land, many of our senior people have thought about the other religions that have been introduced to this land. They have tried to understand how other spiritual belief systems, such as Christianity, might exist here, to understand why it is here and what use it is to us, and some Indigenous people have incorporated these other spiritual beliefs into their thinking. I bring up this subject of religion because religious tolerance will be more important for Australians to understand in a world predicted to be severely affected by climate change. I want to demonstrate that during our own two-hundred-year war with turmoil, Indigenous people have shown not necessarily fear, but interest in and respect for other people’s spiritual beliefs. While we have endured the onslaught of those who wished to indoctrinate our people by ruthlessly attempting to destroy our beliefs through horrific methods that have been well documented and described, a tolerance for religious viewpoints has been intellectualised by our Aboriginal religious leaders. If I were to conduct a search throughout Aboriginal Australia, I would not have to go far to find examples of our religious tolerance. Some well-known examples in Central Australia demonstrate this acceptance of a wider sphere of spirituality. In Yutju (Areyonga), the donkeys that live in the area are thought about as being a part of the life of Christ. Aboriginal people throughout these parts of Central Australia are very protective of donkeys and do not want them culled.

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The same applies to camels because of the significance of these animals in the birth of Christ. On a hill near Hermannsburg (Ntar), there is what looks like a large footprint in a rock that is said to be where Jesus ascended to heaven, and it is featured in a song sung in the local language. There is also a spring at Santa Teresa that is believed to be holy water with healing properties, and in another place in Central Australia a split rock has an image of an old man with a beard who is said to be Moses. I am told that on a road running past Camels Hump outstation on the Mereenie Loop Road, there is a desert oak tree whose branches form a distinct crucifix. These are examples of how Indigenous people have thought of ways of imbuing the Tjukurrpu landscape with the symbols of other religious beliefs. When senior Aboriginal lawmen from Central Australia visited Israel in 2002 to look at horticulture, it was also a spiritual journey to the Holy Land for them. Anangu, or any other Indigenous Australian spiritual beliefs connected to this land, derives from a body of knowledge and moral imperative, and has a similar source of spirituality as those contained in the Bible. There is a way of understanding Aboriginal law and its world view which can be found described in the report ‘Understanding Aboriginal Injury and Injury Prevention in Central Australia.’ It explains the Indigenous view of how different belief systems can flow together. The Garma Festival, an event celebrated

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each year by the Yolngu peoples of north-east Arnhem Land, promotes the idea of Yolngu and non-Indigenous knowledge flowing side by side. There is no valuing of one over the other — the central tenet is one of equality, each with potential for new ideas flowing between, but self-contained. Garma is a Yolngu idea that considers the confluence of two streams of knowledge represented by salt water and fresh water. The same idea occurs in other parts of the country, and in the Western Desert of Central Australia, where they acknowledge streams of knowledge entering from sun or shade into ceremony. Alison Anderson Nampitjinpa, MLA, has spoken of such understanding and of the mutual benefit that accrues when each element is regarded as a complementary component of a whole. This is a process that requires constant negotiation, where the common environment holds the potential for ‘new life, creativity and knowledge to occur, with such outcomes belonging and accruing to each stream’. Such a phenomenon can only occur when there is a balance that assures the integrity of each flow.

3. We create fearlessness to fight fear In 2000, I undertook a literature review on the injury of Aboriginal people for the collaborative research project Community Initiatives Injury Prevention

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Project — Central Australia. I found that wherever you looked through the huge stockpile of academic research collecting dust in the academic institutions of Australia, their recommendations ignored, you would have to be stupid not to see that Aboriginal people are suffering injury from a profound sense of betrayal by the governments of this country. This betrayal has developed a fearfulness of White Australia that has been handed down the generations, and it is a fear that has become a deeply entrenched amalgam of hurt, anger and mistrust. It might also be described as fear expressed in many different forms, from self-harm to harm of others, that can be seen through a scale running across the country from north to south, east to west, and every day, as it tips from one end of the scale to the other, while spinning uncontrollably, unpredictably and in full fright with the weight of seriousness pressing on top of psychological trauma. It is Indigenous fear that responds to the institutions that continue to believe that they govern us. A resounding voice in this report is from the late Mr Cook of Intjartnama Rehabilitation Community, who worked tirelessly to help the very troubled in his community: ‘People don’t always do what they are told, they do what’s on their minds.’ The main report of this research project found that the injury ‘runs deep and is profound’, and that a major symptom of Aboriginal injury in Central Australia was from the

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attack upon the self-definition of the Aboriginal person, and the people as a whole. I think one of the great lessons I have learned from many of the important Aboriginal thinkers that I have worked with is that fear comes with our dreams, and if you can learn how to conquer your fear, you will learn how to become a fearless dreamer and an instrument of possibility. I would like to think that the most significant work I have been asked to contribute to by various Indigenous groups, particularly in Central Australia, has been to help to build dreams fashioned by us for our future. I can still hear the voices of some of our more astute Indigenous managers, after being berated by their bosses, the senior Aboriginal law people who were dreaming the future, to accomplish an extraordinary idea: What? Another dream. Let’s give it to a dreamer. I asked a friend who spent many years working with Indigenous people in Central Australia to advise me on fear. He said he remembered a Pintupi woman once describing a part of a traditional song, ‘a kind of dismemberment lament,’ where she pointed towards a sandhill as a hypothetical location (because the actual site must have been somewhere else), and said/sang that over there, ‘liver and kidney are crying out . . .’. Aboriginal philosophy is holistic and is tied to the land; a similar principle is found in the holistic point of view in Chinese medical philosophy that internal diseases are caused by the mental state of mind, where

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the kidney, liver and spleen are connected to fear, fright, anger, anxiety and brooding. Dreams that should have been easily accomplished have never been successful in accomplishing the Indigenous Self-Defined Dream for our future. These were brave dreams, but required others more entrenched in the status quo’s way of incremental change to listen, to help build the ideas that many remote communities thought would work for the future. At the time when these dreams were being discussed in various forums clinging to the power of the status quo, I knew in my heart that, even though these dreams were realistically simple to achieve, we were working on ideas that were too brave for the prevailing mindset of containment. It has taken me a long time to overcome the frustration we were left with, to understand more fully why Aboriginal dreams are still not embraced by Australia. One of the dreams I worked on concerned ideas of how to build Indigenous self-determination on our terms. I did this through considerable research while developing and coordinating two major Indigenous constitutional conventions in the Northern Territory. The first convention in 1993 was in Tennant Creek, on Warumungu land, and was attended by around one thousand people who travelled from across the Northern Territory to talk about their future. The three-day event was called ‘Today We Talk About Tomorrow’, but it was more a one-off exercise that

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became lost in the crisis of the Indigenous everyday world. Our next constitutional convention, the Kalkaringi Convention of 1998, was held at the place where land rights began in the Northern Territory, at Wattie Creek. Again, one thousand Aboriginal people came from across Central Australia and camped in the heat and dust for several days to talk about the future. They responded to our messages and advertisements about the convention that portrayed two Indigenous hands of the caller — beating boomerangs. Basically, the convention discussed and rejected the flawed attempt of the Northern Territory government to create the state of the Northern Territory. The Aboriginal people conducted their assembly in eight local languages, and through dance and abstract dot paintings of their country. They said that they had always governed themselves, and signed the outcomes of their deliberations on what is called the Kalkaringi Statement. This dream, led by a very brave man, a senior Aboriginal lawman, visionary, philosopher and educator from the nation of the Pintupi, established the Combined Aboriginal Nations of Central Australia. Mr Zimran was the kind of person who felt compassion for all people. As he was doing this work he was suffering from kidney failure, and was forced to live away from his country to be attached to a dialysis machine several times a week at the Alice Springs Hospital. He did not want to live away from his

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homelands, and his family suffered greatly while staying in Alice Springs in a suburb where they had very little in the way of support systems to help them to survive. He took great risks to use whatever opportunity arose to go back to Kintore, even though it was often difficult to organise his return to Alice Springs in time for the dialysis treatment. However, this did not keep him from his work for the Combined Aboriginal Nations of Central Australia, or from conceptualising and accomplishing idea after idea for the betterment of his people. His memorial plaque at Kintore states that he could turn distrust into mutual understanding, and is inscribed with his words: We Go Into the Future As One Tribe and One Family. One monumental task Mr Zimran set upon at this time was to organise Western Desert artists to place their work in an auction at Sotheby’s that raised one million dollars to set up a dialysis unit in their community. He also went every week to the Aboriginal Topsy Smith Hostel, in the street where I lived, to encourage gospel-singing of his own songs with other dialysis patients living away from their communities. He told me he had to do this to help cheer them up. He once led gospel-singing convoys in the Western Desert as a way of bringing people together and because he also saw a place for other religions in the traditional spiritual world. What he feared was not meeting his obligation to people, and to the misplaced spirits he heard in the Alice Springs Hospital. He said that his

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spirit should be in its rightful place. I also remember him once asking why Australia was fighting in Iraq. He said, ‘We are all people. We are all the same people.’ Before Mr Zimran passed away, he and senior Aboriginal law holders described the form of Aboriginal government that they believed was correct within a structure that already existed, but needed to be recognised by Australia. It was not an outrageous idea. It threatened no one except the status quo of entrenched domination in policy, research and the administration of Aboriginal people by others. However, to Indigenous people on the ground the recognition of their law made sense. It meant that they could move; they could plan and work towards a future, with agreed and adequate resources from Australian governments, in an agreement that recognised culpability and responsibility for the crisis we see in the media. It meant that Aboriginal law could find its path in Australia, with Indigenous people being able to talk about how it could be carried into the future. This group also led a campaign that gathered together diverse groups in the Northern Territory that would have been disaffected under the misguided arrangements for Northern Territory statehood, and together ensured that the statehood referendum in the Northern Territory was defeated. This result not only demonstrated how two laws could work side by side, but also saw the defeat of twenty-eight years of entrenched conservative government in the Northern Territory.

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What happened to the dream established by the Combined Aboriginal Nations of Central Australia? It went nowhere. It became a dangerous idea that threatened the organised status quo, working with fear of retribution from the federal government against criticism and the assertion of rights. It became a question of whether anyone who lived outside of Aboriginal law in communities in Central Australia wanted this law to survive. So why is there a continuing fear of Indigenous people and, more specifically, Aboriginal law? Is it the fear of the unknown, of what is not understood, of what is not in memory and, therefore, must lie beyond possibility and consequently cannot exist? Milan Kundera’s book The Curtain touches on this problem in the discussion about the possibilities for a novelist to reach into the soul of things, to free ideas from fear. The Czech writer knows what it is for a man to live through the death of his nation. He describes the fear of a crushing force that stopped his people from being what they had been, but at the same time he was astonished to realise that he did not know how and why they had become who they were, because he could not look into the soul of the people to experience the decisions they had previously made. This absence of understanding about what we are becoming is also our problem too; we understand neither our own Indigenous epic literature, nor how to build new stories that evoke the spirits underlying our deepest emotions.

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4. Fear of the environment The world is in the midst of coming to terms with compelling scientific knowledge warning that we are headed towards devastating and cataclysmic climate change that threatens the survival of the planet’s environment as we have known it in modern times. Australians are increasingly becoming more fearful as the threats of global warming proliferate. While governments react to this news in more or less the same way as they have done with Indigenous concerns — by killing the messenger — it will be artists, songwriters, poets and authors who must imagine the future, to explain what science is telling us in cold, hard language: that we will all become the earth’s refugees. However, in the dreams of people at the individual or community level, prospects of making plans to change invoke fear whatever your race, and this is what I have learned from working for my mob, trawling for months at a time through the mountains of academic research into how our disastrous social and economic situation derives from how relationships work between ourselves and governments. Nothing much can be achieved in a relationship with a government that is stuck on the notion of conquering those without power. There is no other way of understanding how a wealthy country cannot solve a devastating health crisis affecting less than three per cent of its population. It is possible to alleviate a lot of suffering

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in the world if only nations would work together towards specific goals, as happens at a corporate level when western consumers want something desperately — like to put a new Harry Potter novel in the hands of millions of children within days of its release. Global warming will not only impact on the world’s poorest Indigenous people; environmental catastrophe is everybody’s business, because in the end, every man, woman and child will be affected. With approximately twenty-one million refugees in the world today, envisage the world if this number was to double or quadruple very quickly, perhaps within the next two decades. We need to consider Australia’s role in this kind of world when our own country will be severely affected itself. It would seem to me that Australia must play a more significant role in learning how to develop meaningful relationships with our neighbours — relationships based on ethics that value the lives of others. In the future, Australia may be forced to bargain with what it views as the Third World, not as a colonising power, but from a level playing field. Tim Flannery reminds us that we still have to learn the effectiveness of tree-planting in controlling climate change, with recent computer modelling of the impact of tree-planting worldwide concluding that it will be the tropical rainforests that have the greatest potential to cool our planet. Thus, ‘people interested in combating climate change are looking increasingly towards the tropical regions for a solution to the climate crisis.’ The importance of

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regrowing and sustaining forests in places that have historically been of little value to powerful nations will mean a change in the way developed nations interact with smaller, less developed states — especially once the populations in the tropical regions of the world begin to understand the economic power of the climate. Personal fears will grow in proportion to each new change in the climate that people observe happening around them. Many of these changes are already evident — witness the long drought in southern Australia, for example. Those sitting on the fence disputing scientific evidence are losing the argument, because Australians are not fools about the country they love, and are not blind to the changes the environment has already suffered through exploitation in the name of development. So what will we see in the future? Worse drought. Dams empty, leading to more severe water restrictions and dwindling water supplies for towns and cities. Bushfires on an enormous scale, burning out of control. Suffering wildlife and reports of species lost. New diseases. Ice melts. Whole populations seeking new countries as they flee rising sea levels. Economic disaster. When the predictions of global warming become reality, many Australians will find new outlets for their fear as they gradually try to adjust with less of a life than what they had always known or aspired to having. Many will become poorer and many will be emotionally disturbed, and will search for culpability in themselves and others.

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There will be a huge sense of loss, and Australians will become even more nostalgic for selective history that glorifies the past. The future writers of this country’s history will write large sweeping epics of the idyllic life of special people we know now, but do not like. There will also be many disheartened people writing large books on visions for creating a futuristic paradise. Australian children will grow up with less and this will be normal for them, just as normal as for the many Indigenous children who have grown up in Third World poverty. These children may well condemn their parents as abnormal human beings who keep wishing for the past, remembering times and places that were full of peacefulness, rain and abundant fresh water for gardens and baths. These children may be prone to nightmares in which all adults have become giant king and queen fish, swimming aimlessly in the dry atmosphere like predatory dinosaurs attacking the limited undeveloped possibility of the future. The children of our future might consider it wise to forget the work of several past generations of exploiters who pillaged the environment and fought fathomless wars.

5. Whose fear is heard? In the world, many writers are being threatened, tortured, persecuted, imprisoned or killed for speaking

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about their country’s fears. For this reason, millions of people are not heard loudly enough, or at all, while their representation throughout the world of literature is being censored or obliterated. A valuable lesson about literature can be found in the Nobel Lecture delivered in Stockholm by Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate for Literature. Pamuk argued that what literature needs most today is to articulate and investigate humanity’s basic fears: the fear of being left outside, and the fear of counting for nothing, and the feelings of worthlessness that come with such fears; the collective humiliations, vulnerabilities, slights, grievances, sensitivities, and imagined insults, and the nationalist boasts and inflations that are their next of kind.

Australia desperately needs readers who not only read, but who are also selectively seeking this information about our basic fears, and want to read well. We will need better access to world literature as well as our own meaningful literature, to be able to walk through the window of opportunity that writers are creating the world over to look into the minds and worlds of others. We must try harder to understand how to share this earth with others, who are demanding a new dialogue to create a greater equality that redefines the status quo. The environment is on the side of the weakest people in seeking new understanding, and it

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will not be long before this dialogue insists on the willingness of all people to assert difference and equality as the terms for world harmony. I think the future will need writers closely tied to the countless millions on earth who have always lived with far less and have experienced far more fear than the great majority of Australians. The Indigenous lawmen and women who intimately understand the ancient literature of this land should be working with the scientists and politicians to provide an understanding of how to help this country to survive. Do writers have the experience and background for the imaginative investigation of the basic fears of humanity? I ask the question about reading, but also whether Australian writers can produce the type of literature that Pamuk believes is required by the world. What Australian values will prevail in either the production or publishing of literature? I am not sure whether Australian values muddied by unresolved issues with Indigenous people will have the authenticity required to allow us to look into the depths of despair in the world. Will Australian publishers publish literature about fear in the world, even if it does not make economic sense because fearful ideas will not find a readership in our small reading population? Perhaps the logic of change will require closer and quicker movement towards our understanding of despair, as is now starting to emerge through the new literature

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concerning domestically held fears Australians have about themselves. In 1945, the anthropologist A.P. Elkin, in his study Aboriginal Men of High Degree, suspected that there might be congruencies between the practices of Indigenous healers (ngangkari) and western psychiatrists. Ted Strehlow tried to demonstrate the connection between oral and written cultural forms in the songs of Central Australia and the sagas of Old Europe. Elkin recommended a forum within which matters of concern to European and Indigenous therapeutic practitioners could be discussed and compared, and a working partnership consolidated. This never happened. Dr Craig San Roque, a practicing psychologist who has worked for several years in Central Australia, suggests that it would be useful to know how Aboriginal thoughts are built. He questions how Australia thinks from its background of cultural matrices that includes Caucasian, Mediterranean, European, Middle Eastern and Asian mythologies. He believes that there ought to be an extensive localised study to set out the parallel process between Indigenous Australian and these other Indigenous mythologies that are central to contemporary cultural matrices in Australia. I also think Australian writers should share this work, by bringing to life in their writing the different ways in which thoughts and actions can be shaped from our multiple backgrounds.

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6. How do writers transcend fear? Orhan Pamuk reminds us that independent writers of the world listen only to the voice of their own conscience to produce literature. Pamuk’s faith in humanity is the belief that we live in a world that has no centre. It is significant that Pamuk speaks of the belief that our writings will be read and understood because people all over the world resemble each other. This is the idea that I would like to concentrate on in examining how well we understand each other in Australia, and what capacity we have for understanding fear in ourselves and fear in others — whether, in fact, what Pamuk says is true, that we resemble each other. Why should I raise this question of difference if it is true that the world has many fears in common? The six and a half billion people who inhabit our planet cannot be all that different to each other in what makes us fearful. We all have fears about how we live or die, or what will become of us in sickness and in health, or what someone else is capable of doing to us. And for those of us who have children, we can no longer predict whether the world will be a good place for them to live in the future. While we contend with more reasons to be fearful, do we look away from difference and only look out for our own? Tendencies towards over-governance with protective measures imposed from outside is nothing new for Indigenous people,

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but now other Australians are noticing that they, too, are becoming over-governed and protected from fear of harm when compared to other countries. Michael Benes, a senior lecturer in criminal justice, observes, that ‘our children would benefit from being taught more about ethics and morals than being instilled with fear for doing the wrong thing’. If children grow up being over-governed, they will lose their sense of personal responsibility.

7. Collective fear Bertrand Russell once said, ‘Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity towards those who are not regarded as members of the herd.’ We have a very clear understanding of how our government, media and the very institutions we operate in can whip up fear in the population to steer us towards the ideology of policies and decisions of government that we do not fully understand. We do not fully comprehend how their decisions implicate the country, or if we are being deceived, and if we are being led down dangerous paths from which we may never return. Why do most Australians feel that they are helpless to do anything about it? Is it because no political party offers a real alternative — which is particularly so if you are Indigenous? It takes monumental effort to

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destroy our fear of change, which grows more dangerous because of the short-term interests of our governments. But, still, most Australians console themselves with the belief that we live on the winning side — having received the inheritance of the Golden Fleece and mineral wealth drawn at will from Indigenous land, with weak reference to Native Title, even if the Indigenous inhabitants are lucky enough to win concessions through battling court cases with the lucky country. Surrounded by one hundred thousand kilometres of beaches that are thought of as a playground, many Australians have not wanted to stare out to the distance towards other countries and, unless organised, to think about the plight of other people. We are entrenched in a society with a stubborn presumption of prosperity and security; a society actively being dumbed down by institutions that breed and grow richer by selling ignorance, which ensures that the majority of the population is either too busy or refuses to look at difference or to learn have to understand other people. Not many in the population would honestly seek knowledge of what happens in troubled countries, unless dragged there by the selective interests of our government — although charitable campaigns have often seen Australians give compassionately to situations of crisis or natural disaster in other countries. Still, we have been in a war based on the fear of diversity for some time now. Where will it go? Where

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did it begin? Well! In short, it began with the initial invasion of Australia some two centuries ago and, as Manning Clark pointed out in the 1930s: in Australia we are uncertain of everything, we feel insecure. What is the cause of this? . . . First . . . geography, the hostile environment, the fear experienced when alone . . . second, the doubt, do we belong here, perhaps this is geography, perhaps history . . . third, Australia as the harlot, raped by the Europeans, coarse, vulgar, meretricious.

How relevant is Manning Clark’s impression of Australia some seventy years later? Peter Hartcher, in his essay Bipolar Nation, describes the history of Australians’ fearfulness from living in the neighbourhood of Asia, and loneliness of being positioned so far away from Europe: ‘the Frightened Country alone and exposed on its “awkward slab of Europe” at the bottom of Asia.’ Hartcher outlines how our national fears have grown into a selfish adulthood where the power of fear can make it impossible for people to choose possibility — of gaining something better or good, rather than the prospect of loss. He describes how for several elections Australians have been swayed by John Howard’s formula of fear, in which he played on our fears of losing our prosperity and security. Australians it seems, would rather risk all that its society requires

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to nurture itself, like ‘health, education, industrial relations, welfare, family matters’.

8. Manipulating a nation’s fears, or finding a solution As an Indigenous writer trying to understand Australia’s phobias, I am frightened by how Australia engages with the world when, in our own sphere of Indigenous politics, there is an overwhelming belief that we are being governed by the world of non-Indigenous people. This fearfulness of the ‘other’ continually replicates its own compromised vision and, each time it does this, further squashes Indigenous ideas of self-determination from a standard achieved long ago in North America, Canada and New Zealand. In recent years, this compromised vision for the ‘other’ has been remade into weak unworkable strategies that are called good governance for Indigenous Australia. Such shortterm strategies, which are continually produced for incremental improvement, are destined to join the wasteful interventionist programs that have swamped the Indigenous world for decades. The fine accomplishments of Orhan Pamuk’s writing must include his bravery, prepared as he is to submerge himself into the fullest exploration of the fear in his own soul, which, in turn, touches on the darkness that lives within all people. The richness of

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his writing helps our understanding of the narrow point of personal crisis that has claimed many people in the world. It will be through works of literature such as his that we will form a more profound understanding of humanity’s fears, and hopefully become better leaders of our imagination. This is why I agree with Pamuk that the world is one place, not many, and we need to understand the real depths of our fears if we are to survive in the future. It we trust literature, and it is allowed to do its work of locating the truth about the darkness inside, it might somehow show us that the world is truly without a centre, and deep knowledge of what binds and separates humanity is everybody’s business and responsibility. This will be the hard work ahead for the world’s independent writers, who leave on long journeys that go deep into their being, to the place where humanity makes thoughts about itself. These solitary journeys, as Pamuk knows, may take many years in which the writer works alone, searching for the right words to show us something about who we are or what we have become. When it comes to the question of fear, it is a frightening journey to the place of thought which is in the geography of deep consciousness, and once writers enter this world, they may locate a spectacle of fears that will test their courage to continue describing what they have already seen in themselves. It is not easy to be this kind of writer in a world where mediocrity in literature is often rewarded. There

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is not a lot of vigour about the production of serious literature, and if this kind of literature appears on the radar, there is a reluctance to acknowledge or understand what it might mean to the kind of society that has developed in Australia. Yet Pamuk believes that writing is worthwhile. It is the job of the writer to turn inwards, ‘to build a new world with words’. The writer must acknowledge the secret wounds that we carry inside us, ‘the wounds so secret that we ourselves are barely aware of them, and to patiently explore them, know them, illuminate them, to own these pains and wounds, and to make them a conscious part of our spirits and our writing.’ If we want to understand the threats and fears of the world in this millennium, it would be wise to look right down to the personal as Pamuk is doing in trying to understand his native country, Turkey. Edward Said, concerned about responsibility when he spoke about the war in Iraq, was troubled by the rapid expansion of flattened and one-dimensional communication about acts of pride and extraordinary arrogance and moral blindness committed in our name: ‘One ought to be able to say somewhere and at great length, I am not this “we” and what “you” do, you do not in my name.’ The Macquarie Dictionary describes fear as ‘a painful feeling of impending danger, evil, trouble’. But, how do we recognise which danger, evil or trouble? Is it personal, something that can only be understood by personal experience? Whose privilege is it to control fearfulness

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in either one’s self, or in others? Can others have a right to be fearful, even of us? And are we the fearful nation that other people in the world are beginning to believe we are? Or are we the nation of the brave? These questions require us to focus in, to look small, here at home, to understand our own level of humanity in the catastrophic picture of what is happening in the world — in places where we believe we have enemies, or where there are wars we do not fully understand, or where incurable diseases are spreading, or where the world’s resources are being squandered. Deep self-analysis might help us to think about whether we know ourselves enough to contribute constructively to the bigger questions of whether we are ready and willing to work towards a future that belongs just as equally to others who are different to ourselves. And what will we contribute of ourselves? I believe it will increasingly become the role of literature to explain what is happening in the home of humanity, by speaking honestly to the world where those who represent us politically do not.

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Bibliographies

Tolerance Akmatova, A., Russian Poetry: The Modern Period. John Glad and Daniel Weissbort (eds). University of Iowa Press, 1978. Darwish, M., Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Penguin Books, 2000. Brown, W., Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton University Press, 2006. Benjamin, W., ‘These on the Philosophy of History’, from Illuminations. Schocken Books, 1996. de Sade, Marquis, The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom. Arrow Books, Random House, 1989. Greene, N., Pier Paolo Pasolini: Cinema as Heresy. Princeton University Press, 1990.

Prejudice Anderson, B., Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, New York, 2006. Bloch, E., The Principle of Hope/ MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986. Brett, J. and Anthony M., Ordinary People’s Politics. Pluto Press, Melbourne, 2007. Campbell, G., Australia Betrayed. Freedom Press, Victoria Park, 1995. 170

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Bibliographies 171 Castles, S., Cope, B., Kalanztis, M. and Morrissey, M., Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and The Demise of Nationalism in Australia. Pluto Press, Sydney, 1990. Cicero, M.T., De Officiis (with an English translation by W. Miller). Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, 1975. Cicero, M.T., In Catilinam I-IV; Pro Murena; Pro Sulla; Pro Flacco (with an English translation by C. Macdonald). Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, 1977. Errington, W. and van Onselen, P., John Winston Howard. Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne, 2007. Fichte, J., Addresses to the German Nation. Harper & Row, New York, 1968. Freud, S., Civilisation and Its Discontents, Penguin Classics, London, 2000. Fromm, E., Man for Himself, Fawcett, New York, 1947. Gellner, E., Nations and Nationalism: New Reflections on the Past. Blackwell, London, 1993. Gitlin, Todd, Intellectuals and the Flag. Columbia University Press, New York, 2006. Gourevitch, P., We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We will be Killed with Our Families. Picador, London, 1999. Herder, J., Philosophical writings (translated and edited by M.N. Forster). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2002 Herold, J.C., Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madam de Stael. Grove, New York, 2002. Herve, G., My country, right or wrong (translated by G. Bowman). London, 1910/ Hirst, J., Sense and Nonsense in Australian History, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2006. Hobsbawm, E., Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990 Hotchkiss, S., Why Is It Always Be About You>: The Seven Deadly Sins of Narcissism. Free Press, New York, 2003. Ignatieff, M., Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism. Farrer, Straus and Girroux, New York, 1994. James, H., A German Identity 1770–1990. Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1989. James, H., The American Scene. George Bell, London, 1907. Kingston, M., Off the Rails: The Pauline Hanson Trip. Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1999.

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172 TOLERANCE, PREJUDICE AND FEAR Kohn, H., The Mind of Germany: The Education of a Nation. Scribner, New York, 1960. Lasch, C., The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations. W.W. Norton, New York, 1979. Lawrence, D.H., Kangaroo. Imprint Classics, Pymble, 1992. LeBor, A., Complicity with Evil: The United Nations in the Age of Modern Genocide. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2006. Lee, M., The Beast Reawakens. Little, Brown, London, 1997. Lenin, V.I., The state and revolution. Resistance Books, Sydney, 1999. Lewis, H., Block, Shame and Guilty in Neurosis. International Universities Press, New York, 1971. Lukacs, J., Democracy and Populism: Fear & Hatred. Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005. Mann, T., Buddenbrooks. Everyman’s Library, London, 1994. Manne, R. (ed), Two Nations: The Causes and Effects of the Rise of the One Nation Party in Australia. Bookman, Melbourne, 1998. Manne, R., The Shadow of 1917: Cold War Conflict in Australia. Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1994. Marr, D., ‘His Master’s Voice’, Australian Quarterly Essay. Black Inc, Melbourne, 2007. Marx, K., The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1954. Massie, R., Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. Random House, New York, 1991. Mosse, G., The Culture of Western Europe. John Murray, London, 1963. Nairn, T., Faces of Nationalism. Verso, New York, 1993. Orwell, G., The Penguin Essays. Penguin, London, 1984. Paxton, R., An Anatomy of Fascism. Penguin, London, 2004. Peel, M., The Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty. Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2003. Rousseau, J-J., Political Writings: Containing the Social Contract, Considerations on the Government of Poland, Constitutional Project for Corsi. University of Wisconsin Press, 1986. Rundle, G., ‘The Opportunist’, Australian Quarterly Essay. Black Inc, Melbourne, 2001. Tolstoy, L., The Kingdom of God and Peace Essays. Rupa, New Delihi, 2006.

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Bibliographies 173 Twenge, J., Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Free Press, New York, 2006. Weil, S., The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties (translated by Arthur Wills). Routledge, London, 2006. Wilton J. and Bosworth, R., Old Worlds and New Australia: The Post-war Migrant Experience. Penguin, Ringwood, 1984.

Fear Appiah, K.A., Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. Penguin, London, 2006. Flannery, T., ‘A once-only chance to repair damage’. Opinion, the Age, 9 April 2007. Glissant, E., Poetics of Relation. 5th ed. Trans. Betsy Wing. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2006. Hartcher, P., Bipolar Nation: How to win the 2007 Election. Quarterly Essay, Black Inc.: Melbourne, 2006. Hulcombe J., 2006. Recognition as Injury Prevention, Volume 1, Understanding Aboriginal Injury and Injury Prevention in Central Australia. Report to be published by the NHMRC collaborative research project undertaken by Tangentyere Council, Flinders University and Centre for Remote Health. Kundera, M., The Curtain. Harper Collins: New York, 2005. McKenna M., 2007. Being There — The Strange History of Manning Clark. Essay in The Monthly, Melbourne, March 2007, page 26. Pamuk O., 2006. The Nobel Prize in Literature 2006 — Nobel Lecture — My Father’s Suitcase in Other Colors, pub. Alfred A Knopf, NY 2007. Said, E., Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Columbia University Press: New York, 2004.

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About the contributors

About the authors

J.M. Coetzee was born in Cape Town and has taught at universities in South Africa and the USA. His first book, Dusklands, was published in 1974, followed by In the Heart of the Country (1977), which won South Africa’s CAN Prize. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) brought international attention, and Life & Times of Michael K (1983) won the Booker Prize. It was followed by Foe (1986), Age of Iron (1990), The Master of Petersburg (1994), Disgrace (1999), which also won the Booker Prize, Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man (2005) and Diary of Bad Year (2007). Coetzee has also published fictionalised memoirs — Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) — and collections of literary essays, and translated a number of Dutch and Afrikaans works of literature. In 2002 Coetzee emigrated to Australia and lives in South Australia, where he holds an honorary position at the University of Adelaide. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003. 174

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Christos Tsiolkas wrote the novels Loaded (later filmed as Head On), The Jesus Man and Dead Europe, which won the Best Writing Award 2006 and the Age 2006 Book of the Year Fiction Award. His plays include Who’s Afraid of the Working Class?, Fever, Viewing Blue Poles, Dead Caucasians and Non Parlo di Salo, co-written with Spiro Economopoulos. His scripts include Thug and Saturn’s Return. His new book, The Slap, will be published in 2008. Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for twenty-five years, written nineteen books and edited six others. His book Asbestos House won premier’s literary awards in NSW and Queensland, the Westfield/Waverley Library Prize and Blake Dawson Waldron Business Book of the Year. He now writes for The Monthly. His next book, a history of illegal abortion in Australia, will be published later this year by MUP. Alexis Wright is one of Australia’s best-known Indigenous authors and a member of the Waanyi nation of the southern highlands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. A writer, researcher, and social commentator, she has been widely published in magazines and journals. She has worked for many years on campaigns for Aboriginal land rights, Indigenous self-government and constitutional change in the Northern Territory, and for the prevention of Indigenous injury. Her books include Grog War (1997), a study of the problems asso-

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ciated with the excessive availability of alcohol in the outback town of Tennant Creek, and she was the editor and compiler of Take Power (1998), an anthology of essays and stories exploring Aboriginal land rights in Central Australia. Her novel Plains of Promise (1997) was short-listed for the Commonwealth Prize, the Age Book of the Year Award and the NSW Premier’s Award for Fiction. Her novel Carpentaria (2006) has won the 2007 Miles Franklin Literary Award, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Victorian Premier’s Award for Fiction, the Queensland Premier’s Award for Fiction, and the ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year. She holds the position of Distinguished Fellow at the University of Western Sydney, Writing and Society Research Group, College of the Arts and she is a member of the Writers Advisory Panel for Sydney PEN.

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About Sydney Pen Since 1921 we’ve been defending your freedom to read and write . . . now PEN needs your help In today’s world it is more important than ever for Sydney PEN to continue its vital work protecting freedom of expression in our own country and elsewhere. Sydney PEN (founded in 1931), an affiliate of International PEN, is an association of writers devoted to freedom of expression in Australia and in the world at large. In accordance with the PEN Charter it uses its influence on behalf of writers anywhere who are silenced by persecution, exile or imprisonment and acts as an authoritative source on matters of free expression. Through a range of community activities it promotes the written word in all its forms as a way to understanding and the free transmission of ideas. International PEN is a non-political UNESCO-recognised body of international writers and their supporters who zealously guard free speech. Formed in London in 1921, our members have included George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Arthur Miller, Joseph Conrad, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Vaclav Havel and many of Australia’s leading writers. PEN has 145 centres in 104 countries campaigning on behalf of imprisoned writers and monitoring censorship. Will you join us in the constant fight to protect freedom of expression? You can, through practical support with funds, help our campaigns on behalf of imprisoned writers and fight against pernicious censorship. You might not be a writer, but you can still be an active PEN supporter.

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Test what you believe The PEN Charter is based on resolutions passed at its International Congresses. PEN affirms that . . . • Literature knows no frontiers and must remain common currency among people in spite of political or international upheavals. • In all circumstances, and particularly in time of war, works of art, the patrimony of humanity at large, should be left untouched by national or political passion. • Members of PEN should at all times use what influence they have in favour of good understanding and mutual respect between nations; they pledge themselves to do their utmost to dispel race, class and national hatreds, and to champion the ideal of one humanity living in peace in one world. • PEN stands for the principle of unhampered transmission of thought within each nation and between all nations, and members pledge themselves to oppose any form of suppression of freedom of expression in the country and community to which they belong, as well as throughout the world wherever this is possible. PEN declares for a free press and opposes arbitrary censorship in time of peace. It believes that the necessary advance of the world towards a more highly organised political and economic order renders a free criticism of governments, administrations and institutions imperative. And since freedom implies voluntary restraint, members pledge themselves to oppose such evils of a free press as mendacious publication, deliberate falsehood and distortion of facts for political and personal ends. • Membership of PEN is open to all who subscribe to these aims, without regard to nationality, ethnic origin, language, colour or religion. Speak up . . . by supporting the writers

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Why should you get involved in another cause? We could give you 781 good reasons why you should support Sydney PEN. In fact that’s the number of writers from around the world named in a recent report by International PEN’s Writers in Prison Committee. These names belong to writers who have been killed, or kidnapped, or imprisoned, or forced into hiding. There are writers under judicial process, victims of harassment and those deported or in exile. Their individual stories could fill volumes about freedom to express independent thought. David Malouf, a member of Sydney PEN’s writer’s advisory panel, explains why he supports PEN: As a writer who has the freedom to write without fear or constraint, and for whom silence is a choice, I would feel ashamed if I did not speak up for a writer anywhere on whom silence is enforced with all the terrible machinery of the state.

Don’t just nod in agreement PEN is more than a good idea; it deserves your action and ongoing support. You can actually make a difference by supporting the writers equipped to speak out through words in print. But you need to take action today so reach for that pen and complete the enclosed membership slip. Whether you join as a writer member or a supporter member you’ll receive our regular e-news to keep you totally up to date with PEN campaigns and our energetic program of readings, events and talks.

Join us? >>

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Become a member today Name: Address: Phone: W

H

M

Email: Occupation: I would like to become a member of International PEN via the Sydney Chapter, agree to be bound by the rules and undertake to support the objectives as described in the PEN Charter: Writer member: $75 per year Supporter member: $75 per year Concession (student / unwaged): $35 per year Please contact our office for Corporate Membership/Sponsorship and Group affiliates. Full membership details on our website.

Make a donation now Yes I’d like to make a donation to support the great work of International PEN. Amount:

$50

$100

$200

Other $

All amounts over $2 are fully tax deductible*. * The PEN Sydney Donations Fund is a tax deductible fund listed on the Register of Cultural Organisations under Subdivision 30-B of the Income tax Assessment Act 1997.

Join the letter writing team Yes I’d like to help in this practical way. Send information.

Payment options I enclose a cheque payable to International PEN Sydney Centre. Call our office on 1300 364 997 if you prefer to EFT your payment. Please charge to my credit card: Mastercard/ Visa Card number: Amount:

$

Expiry date:

/

Name on card: Your signature: Applications received from October 1 each year at the full annual fee will be valid until 31 December in the following year. Half Year fees are applicable for new applicants from July 1 each year and applicants may choose to pay 18 months membership fees.)

PEN thanks you International PEN Sydney Centre 14A Lonsdale Close, Lake Haven NSW 2263 P 1300 364 997 F 02 4392 9410 E [email protected] www.pen.org.au

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