°Armed and affective
Last night, the police organised a massive show of force and arms outside the mosque in Lakemba (Sydney) in an attempt, as they said, to halt retaliations that had already occured the night before in Maroubra. In any case, that mobilisation gives the lie to claims that the police were outnumbered and outmanouvered during the rampage in Cronulla ealier.
Lakemba gets fully kitted up riot police and over a hundred police vans; Cronulla gets cops in baseball caps - the very picture and meaning of ‘community policing’. In the meantime, the area around Cronulla has become unsafe for everyone who previously felt at home there - trashing of shops, cars and beatings have continued for the last couple of nights. The NSW Government has declared a de facto state of emergency and is set to introduce new policing laws. {News reports here}
But, let’s not linger in Cronulla, the scene of a previously undisturbed family outing - as the linked article notes, Cronulla has the lowest number of people from non-English speaking backgrounds than any other place in Australia and was described by the Prime Minister as “a part of Sydney which has always represented to me what middle Australia is all about”. I’ve no doubt it does.
[”We grew here. You flew here”, in case the blood and soil slogan wasn’t legible.]
This is Australia, as it finds itself in a world at war, at the edge of Empire and in the biopolitical fracture of the world. (This war does, however, produce its ironic moments as lawmakers grapple with the bonds of law and community.)
At this moment, the question the media are asking is this: “Will tough new police powers be enough to stop the cycle of violence?” And I can’t do more than recall the discussion at Long Sunday on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence”, handily summarised by Craig here. I think that discussion is more than relevant, or it was for me, in the sense that this is what is at stake in those discussions, particularly as they turned to the “cycle of violence” and Benjamin’s discussion of the “law of oscillation”.
On the law and violence, the NSW Premier, Iemma, is really something. He just said the “fight [against the retailiations] will continue. We will not be found wanting in our use of force against what effectively is a declaration of war”.
I also just head the NSW Police Commissioner insist that the racist pogrom, explicitly organised so as to “bash Lebs” was a “legitimate expression of frustration and a legitimate protest”. He added that this had, unfortunately, “let the genie out of the bottle” and “unleashed a beast”.
They just can’t help themselves. Racialisation is the national language. I don’t think people get just how racist Australia is, certainly not those who live here and whose belonging is never questioned, but also those who don’t live here.
I also just watched some ex-cop hold forth his opinion that the problem here (this being, of course, those Leb boys) was that they “don’t respect the law, they don’t respect the courts or the police. They want to run their own race.” Some olive-skinned kid hanging out in a gym said, as if he was speaking precisely in response to this ’slip of the tongue’, “If they target us as a race, we will respond as a race.” I guess this is what one might mean by ‘running one’s own race’ rather than - what? - letting someone else run it for you.
But it’s the Prime Minister’s denials of racism that are the most affective and therefore perhaps the most effective in squelching any prospect of thought or of politics:
I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country. I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people. I do not believe Australians are racist.
So, saying that Australia is racist suggests the absence of a sunny disposition, and who would want to be accused of that? This country is so fucking infantile - this resort to charges of being impolite, unsociable, not getting along are standard, and across the political spectrum. A nation of tiny tots in a schoolyard, it’s all about playing nicely.
Speaking of playing niceley, I just came back from the NUS meeting. No surprises really, I won’t bore you with the usual story of trot hypocrisy. The only thing I found startling was that at the begining a guy actually tried to run the line that this wasn’t just about racism - there was a deeper problem, that of gangs. For five minutes he read this crap from the paper, including full life story - he’s from the western suburbs, you see, so gangs have always been a part of life, blah blah blah. I actualy had to tell him to stop, because I couldn’t take any more of it. Couple more hard luck stories from Shire boys trying to bank on local cred. Totally fucked, but there were some 60 people there, so they were a tiny minority.
Someone made the sensible point that it was crazy to hold a rally at Cronulla banking on having a turn out of Bankstown folks: it would either flop, or you’d get biffo. So that’s off. There were serious suggestions of having an Australia Day Rally, to celebrate how tolerant we actually are. At least that was sort of laughed at.
The result was the predictable rally at Town Hall - that and Operation Subtle Present, the nature of which will be revealed in due course.
Ghost of the Machine [December 13, 2005 @ 10:43 pm]
The organisation of a gift economy, by stealth? I don’t know how you endure those meetings.
s0metim3s [December 13, 2005 @ 11:59 pm]
Yes! The excretal economy of police horses will be diverted! Oh, I’d make a terrible terrorist. I could never shut up for long enough. It’s nothing much really, just santa delivering the media’s well earned christmas present.
I think you would have had an aneurism at the meeting. The trots came in fully caucused on the idea of having a milquetoast luncheon at Townhall with orations by local left notables (I lie, they don’t need to caucus it, actually they don’t need to meet, since that is what they always do no matter what). When people said, well, fuck that for a joke, that’s just daft, we want to do something else, they all got very mad because we were sinking any chance of getting collective action going. You see: collective action means whatever they want to do. Sectarianism is not agreeing with them. There was a hilarious moment when a lot of the anarchists had left to meet to organize Operation Subtle Present, which in no way contradicts the project of hearing Kerry Nettle talk to the trees on sunday, and one of the trots (from a splinter of a splinter of the ISO!) told me that I had just helped ruin things, because all these people had just left. Think how huge the rally could have been with them! But then again, does it really come as a surprise that the concept of convincing people is foreign to the three letter party?
I am being boring… yes, look: there was a huge manifestation (I wish this was an english word) of racists on the weekend, yelling ‘we will kill race X’. Then race X feels they should defend themselves. There is a sense in which the racist then win - indeed, Jim Salem and mates calculate exactly like that. But they have created a real situation - and not by themselves. People of middle eastern appearance, ie. me, do feel scared. What are we going to do? You have to somehow unmake this situation. That’s a hard problem. It’s a long term problem, I wish I knew how to go about it. Part of it has to do with getting through to community organizations and try to knock some sense into them; they replicate a lot of the racism, buy into the race apology (”yes, lebs are bad, but we will lock our children up”) and so on. Part of it is also burning the Sydney Morning Herald down to cinders and dancing on the ashes. Metaphorically speaking, of course. For now.
Ghost of the Machine [December 14, 2005 @ 8:47 am]
I just read NUS’s ‘call to lunch’.
The National Union of Students is calling a rally to protest the recent race riots in Cronulla. The rally, to be called “United Against Racism”, will protest the racist violence in Cronulla last Sunday, and the ongoing racist acts that have followed from them.
Is that “ongoing racist acts” supposed to be an empty vessel for anyone to drop in their interpretation?
But it never ceases to amaze me how invested the Left is in denouncing the rabble while pretending that the state (or anything else I suppose NUS kids intend to have a career in) bears no responsibility.
s0metim3s [December 14, 2005 @ 1:31 pm]
Look, at the NUS meet yesterday, first of all the NUS was a tiny minority who contributed very little to the discussion. They seem to have had their hands forced on the rally location by an SMS that’s circulating, so that’s quite interesting, though I don’t know how much to read into that. Secondly, there was very little organization. It was actually a total mess; I think that email you got is probably an outcome of that. Maybe they’re casting a wide net, but they are also being very careless.
There was some of the ‘Australia needs to show this is not true Australia’, which I think contributed a lot to an increasingly hostile atmosphere at the meeting. I felt like strangling a Socialist Alternative delegate that started her speech by saying “we’re not doing this for us…” Normally, I feel terrible about breaking speaking lists and talking over people (I am surprisingly nice in person, I have been told!) but it was just too much. That sort of stupidity aside, however, there was a very strong commitment that this was about the media and the state. Maybe two third or more of the speakers said stuff like that. I put my foot down hard on that issue at the beginning, but I can’t take the credit for the other twenty people who had no less harsh things to say about framing the issue as one of gangs or even community.
There was a strong feeling around that the SMH should not be spared from criticism. The ISO leaflet on it is pretty good.
Correction, the trot from the splinter group of the splinter group of the ISO that I mentioned above has left to join the Greens.
Alma da Máquina [December 14, 2005 @ 2:51 pm]
There’s an SMS been circulated for a “non-violent protest against racism” here in Melb also, the original source of which is as unclear as are the reasons for that “non-violent” qualifier.
But right now, Sydney seems to be about to explode this w/end, if the various calls to action are any indication. A friend, who’s in Sri Lanka at the moment and who migrated from there as a kid, just asked me whether there was about to be a civil war in AU. Part of me, a big part of me, wants to flee in terror from the very thought of this. But another part of me knows that the whole fiction of Australia as a non-violent polity has broken apart.
s0metim3s [December 14, 2005 @ 4:27 pm]
Well, there’s the patriotic version of the callout for the Sydney thing:
It’s time for ALL Australians to Unite Against Racism!
The Unite Against Racism Rally
It’s time that the countless thousands of Sydney-siders who DID NOT like what they saw last weekend in Cronulla took the streets to make their voice heard. We need to send the strongest possible message to the rest of Australia and to the rest of the world that those 5000 people who rioted at Cronulla do not speak for us. As such we need to quadruple their number, rain hail or shine!
I’ve no doubt those at Cronulla do not represent everyone on this continent, but I’m pretty sure they’re representative of Australian politics. Not least because the PM has said as much, and the NSW Police Commissioner feels inclined to keep repeating that the rampage was a “legitimate protest and expression of frustration”.
Denial is not just a river in Egypt.
s0metim3s [December 15, 2005 @ 12:21 am]
Well, whaddyaknow… This is the speaking list at the rally:
Keysar Trad, who is only speaking if the flier does not inclue any political messages and if the rally does not go anywhere near the PM’s offices or Parliament - which of course, has been accepted.
Lynda Byrne, the ALP member for Canterbury.
Lee Rhyannon
Enough already? It gets worse, because for some reason, they have felt in necessary to get…. John Robertson, from Unions NSW. Why? Why? It’s incomprehensible. I mean, why not get a person who can actually convince someone, if you just want to have an ALP apologetica? Roberston could not convince a rock to fall if he dropped it.
Choice moment: When someone at the meeting said that ‘anarchists’ were planning on burning a flag, I corrected this saying that the plan was to perhaps burn a cocktail flag, but I wasn’t sure this was even happening since everything was falling through yesterday. I was essentially assaulted, with two people demanding that I do not burn a flag and prevent anyone else from doing it. I had to say: listen, fuckwit, I don’t care about your stupid flag enough to burn it, but if someone else is going to do it, how do you propose I stop them? Grrrrr…
The meeting was essentially the subset of the previous meeting that included the trots, a couple of anti-racism activists, and the idiot brigade with their stupid whining about anomie and disaffected youth. And they are not talking about the end of Fordism, I can tell you that…
Apparently, talking about the war and anything not precisely to do with cronulla and lebs is to confuse the issue - that according to an ALP scab from UNSW, as in, really, a scab, someone who broke a strike at the SRC over there.
It was SO TERRIBLE, so fucked, that I basically walked out firmly of the mind that these people are either stupid and racist, or both, and that I will have nothing to do with them ever again. Bunch of nationalist idiots. Wouldn’t piss on them if they were on fire. Grrr…
Ghost of the Machine [December 16, 2005 @ 12:54 pm]