Australian Nightmares: the rise of a police state
The shadowy spectre of terrorism magnifies the perceived threat
to the point that a fearful public rallies to leaders who promise
security.
Shutterstock/Oleg Zabielin
Possibly the most lamentable outcome of the raised tension
and insecurity that has accompanied the theatre of terrorism in
Australia is the decline in our political culture, which will last for
as many years as such a threat is declared, even if it is never fully
demonstrated. Opposition parties and mainstream media have become more
or less paralysed into doing nothing other than focus on the power of
terror, as a real threat and as a psychological spectre that is
pre-occupying the minds of many Australians.
As satirised recently, the Australian Labor Party has been all but neutered
by the call to protect citizens from a largely invisible threat that
few Australians seem to understand, let alone know what to do about.
The failure to understand this threat largely rests with the
spectacle-reporting that is pushed at us by the tabloid media in this
country. The tabloids have been feeding off images of beheadings, while
giving airtime to the proclamations of both extreme Islamists and the
daily repetitive pounding of the security warnings of government
ministers.
But here, we can point to a perspective for which the declarations of
the radical islamists and of the Australian government actually share a
common basis, one that is not easy to see unless we explore the
background politics of terrorism in the modern era.
For this purpose, I am going to draw on the fascinating insights of a
little-known BBC documentary released in 2004, known as the Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear.
The program, produced by Adam Curtis, is in three parts, and explores
the rise of both radical Islam and neo-conservative thinking on
terrorism as having a common origin.
Imagined threat vs empirical evidence
Post-9/11, Power of Nightmares argues that much of the threat of
terrorism is a fantasy, which has been exaggerated and distorted by
politicians.
Certainly, this is true empirically. The University of British
Columbia produced a Human Security Report the following year to show
that, measured by fatalities, terrorism was much more significant in the
1930s than it was up to that time post- 9/11. It is just that today,
the power of the “image” conveyed by instantaneous communication is
hundreds of times more powerful than it was in the ‘30s.
As the Power of Nightmares explains, terrorism has become:
a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through
governments around the world, the security services, and the
international media.
The film does not deny that terrorism exists, it is just that it is
of great benefit to Western governments to exaggerate this threat. In
turn, such exaggeration can be domestically divisive, causing alienation
in one group and imagined fear in mainstream society, to the point
where real violence can actually break out. The real event then
vindicates those who had been promoting the imagined fear and, before
long, the real and the imaginary state of affairs become
indistinguishable.
This is the place that Australia is in right now.
As the power of the image asserts itself, it is not that it directly
influences what people think, but that it changes the media ecology in
which we think. This can therefore make decisions that would have been
unacceptable before the spectre of terror was heightened come to be seen
as entirely justified.
For example, almost two weeks ago, on his last day before retiring,
the head of ASIO raised the terrorist alert level to high, even though
no specific threat to Australia has been identified, only a general
global threat.
A “show of strength” of 800 police was deployed last week in raids
that resulted in only one arrest of a person who had made a threat in a
private telephone conversation. On the same day, Australian military
were deployed overseas to fight a terrorist group that the raid in
Australia was trying to expose here. Daily the PM is making
declarations about “those who would do us harm” and foreshadowing that
the freedoms Australians are used to will have to be sacrificed in the
name of security for many years into the future.
At first glance the protection being offered by the government, at
least to non-Muslim citizens, seems to be the major benefit of these
deeds and words, but what of the terrorists, the mass media and the
Abbott government? Could they also be beneficiaries?
The Power of Nightmares
Part one of the documentary begins in the small town of Greely in the
US state of Colorado in the summer of 1949. This is the place where a
middle-aged school inspector from Egypt, Sayyed Qutb, spent time
studying the US educational system.
The documentary traces Qutb’s unique kind of anthropological
assessment of American society as a crass, hollow, materialistic and
vulgar society into the thinking of extreme anti-Western Islamic
doctrine. It makes the clam that: “Qutb was going to develop a powerful
set of ideas that would directly inspire those who flew the planes on
the attack of September the 11th.”
The documentary traces the direct influence of Qutb on the ideas of
Ayman Zawahiri, who is infamously known as the mentor of Osama Bin
Laden. A core thread running through the thinking of these men was
contempt for what Qutb called Jahillayah, a state of materialistic
“barbarous ignorance”, which Jihadist Islam sees as spreading like a
cancer across Muslim states in the Middle East, particularly Egypt,
infecting the minds of Muslims. Such people believed they were free but
were in fact trapped by their own selfishness, according to Qutb.
At the same time as Qutb’s views were becoming influential, so were
those of an obscure philosopher at the University of Chicago by the name
of Leo Strauss, on the ideas of a group who were to become known as the
neo-conservatives. The neo-conservatives were actually anti-liberal in
the sense that they shared the same fears as Qutb about the destructive
force of individualism in the US, that Western liberalism ultimately led
to nihilism, a world without values that could bind people together, a
state that some intellectuals later came to know as “postmodernism” … a
situation in which liberalism had gone too far, leading people to
question absolutely everything.
Strauss cultivated a strong following among figures who were to
become extremely influential in the conservative circles of US politics,
including Irving Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Chaney and Frances
Fukuyama.
The Power of Nightmares, documents the resolve of the neo-cons to
cultivate powerful myths for people to believe in: which could be in the
name of religion, or a nation. In America, this myth was specifically
the idea that America had been chosen with a unique destiny to battle
the forces of evil around the world. What was important for the neo-cons
was not that they themselves believed in such a myth, but that
Americans needed something to bring them together, a kind of “team
America” spirit or zeitgeist, which could transform both their
selfishness and isolation.
The documentary charts the influence of Strauss and this group on the
Reagan, Bush snr and Bush jnr administrations, but also the way that a
neo-conservative American foreign policy set the agenda for even
Democrat parties to take seriously the Commander-in-Chief role of the
President in fighting “evil” throughout the world.
The emphasis quickly shifted from the Soviet Union to Islam at the
end of the cold war. To secure popular support for the demonising and
“othering” of such groups, neo-cons managed to make an alliance with a
number of powerful preachers in America. Before the 1970s the millions
of fundamentalist Christians in America avoided politics and did not
vote. This was quickly turned around by these preachers, who the
documentary argues swept Ronald Reagan to power.
As one fundamentalist preacher, James Robinson, told his audience in 1980:
I’m sick and tired of hearing about all of the radicals,
and the perverts, and the liberals, and the leftists, and the Communists
coming out of the closet! It’s time for God’s people to come out of the
closet, out of the churches, and change America! We must do it!
At the same time, in 1979 Iran had become an Islamic state, proving
to Zawahiri that a fundamentalist Islamic caliphate was possible. This
development consolidated what was later to be expressed in US
intellectual circles as the “Clash of Civilisations” thesis.
It is possible to argue that understanding the role of media,
politicians and religion in the contemporary reality of terrorism in the
contemporary world is not possible without looking at how the emergence
of Islamic extremism and neo-conservatism co-developed.
Nightmare comes to Australia
In Australia, the rapid escalation of a real and imagined “state of terror”
has occurred very much in the shadow of the practices of the
neo-conservatives in the US. This is not to suggest that the LNP has
adopted a neo-conservative policy in its attitude to Islam and in what
some see as the overnight creation of a police state in Australia. There
are several differences between the views of the neo-cons and those of
LNP politicians, chief amongst them the inconsistency and pragmatism of
the LNP. No sooner has the government been embarking on a classical
liberalist platform of the rights of citizens to be bigots than we see
the incarceration of members of a group identified as bigots.
It would be difficult to argue that the LNP is interested in bringing
Australians together around a common spirit after the failure of its
first budget that alienated so many groups. Nor does the party have a
mass population of fundamentalist Christians to sign up to its support
base. If there is an ideological apparatus ready-at-hand for this
government, it would be the oligopolistic tabloid press which, as been
noted, are the first to receive press releases from the prime minister’s office.
Certainly some of the techniques used by neo-conservatives, as
depicted in the film, are also ones at play in Australia right now and
in many Western democracies. But it is very difficult to see any kind of
coherent philosophy behind it other than electoral survival. Some have
noted the intellectual decline of the right
in Australia and the sense that the LNP’s core agenda has become
disconnected from science and a serious or intelligent discussion of
social progress.
Perhaps, in the context of this decline, the LNP is simply defaulting
to what has worked for neo-conservatives in the past, and the
neo-conservative philosophy has temporarily become the content of a
destructive pragmatism. But to the extent it is true that the LNP is
sharing the views of the neo-cons, even if for pragmatic reasons,
according to Curtis, they actually share the views of radical Islam
itself.
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