Eck, Melbourne
(via)
So, it seems that Melbourne is about to become a militarised zone - which is to say, more than it has been for some parts of the city and people already. But this time, with an overt resort to the ‘internal’ use of the military to protect against ostensibly ‘external’ threats.
Though, it has to be said that no journalist has asked whether the soldiers patrolling the streets and the military helicopters in the air will be confined to responding to ‘terrorist threats’ - whatever that might mean - or whether their purview might include acts of lawbreaking such as, say, graffiti.
For some time in Australia there’s been a growing discussion about the paramilitarisation of the police, the assumption by police of tactics, approaches and hardware that are the usual province of the military. And while I admire some of the work done in documenting and discussing this, I’ve remained a little uneasy at the assumption that the problem might be solved by reasserting the distinction between ‘civil policing’ and a military directed toward ‘foreign’ threats.
Not simply because all it takes to justify a paramilitary response is the definition of a ‘threat’ as foreign, but also because such assumptions insist on defending the affective boundary between ‘foreigners’ and ‘citizens’ as the precondition of a political response. It’s not simply that such a politics is implicitly racist, in that it assumes ‘foreigners’ deserve a greater level of violence, but that it’s mindblowingly obsolete, nostalgic for the once-upon-a-time when state violence was directed toward the ‘other’. Or, as I’ve mentioned before, it’s a perfectly understandable panic which miserably resolves down into a ‘Take them!’ response.
