The Canberra Times Dece,ber 24. 2001 Good Germans, good Australians
By Tony Kevin IN 1933, THE people of Germany by a democratic majority voted their National Socialist Party into power. Certainly the country was under a great deal of economic and political stress at the time; but it was a free choice of the majority. Over the next 12 years, Germans good and bad lived with the consequences of the mandate they freely gave to the Nazis. The public vilification and subsequent persecution of Germany's, and later Europe's, Jews was part of the policy package the German majority had chosen in 1933. The Nazi Party's anti-semitism had never been any secret. From 1933 on, German people quickly learned not to look too closely at what their new government was saying about, and later doing to, their Jewish neighbours. They were assured that these Jews were a national security threat, and that it was a security requirement to put under surveillance, isolate and eventually imprison them. It all happened gradually. Onlookers became desensitised to evil, bit by bit. Down the road from functioning concentration camps like Belsen, good Germans year after year celebrated Christmas with their children in familiar ways. They put on traditional nativity plays. Quietism - keeping one's head down, avoiding political discussions - seemed the only possible personal strategy in those troubled times, if one was not to make a pointless martyr of oneself. Or, one quietly emigrated. I am told that any comparison with Australia's treatment of refugees at Christmastide 2001 is completely far-fetched and inappropriate. We have a conservative government, not a fascist one. We have freedom of speech. We could vote the Opposition into power next time, if our voter majority so chose. (But it's another question - still wide open - whether the Opposition's treatment of asylumseekers would be substantively different from the Howard Government's). Yet we have 3000 men women and children imprisoned in desert camps, and about 1000 more in similar gulags in bankrupt South Pacific client states. Most of these detainees are Muslim, from Middle Eastern countries. Our Government says they are a national security threat, because they came without its permission requesting refuge in Australia from war and persecution in their countries. We are warned that many others may follow if we treat them kindly. So our Government patiently explains to us that we must in effect punish these people: make a deterrent example of them, to discourage those who might follow. And we must be indoctrinated to dehumanise them in our minds: we must be trained to think of them as alien, threatening, failing to observe the bounds of decent behaviour, almost subhuman in the way they treat their families. We are fed false stories about child sexual abuse in camps, about children being forced to come on alone as advance guards for their families, about children being thrown by parents into shark-infested waters, about parents provoking mental illness in their children. None of the terrible things that are being done to these human beings is ever our fault: it must always, by definition, be their own fault. So we are taught to hate and fear these Middle Eastern refugees, as Germans in the 1930s were taught to hate and fear Jews. "We don't want these sorts of people in Australia." And current international politics dovetails neatly into our Government's anti-refugee propaganda: potent images like Afghanistan, al Quaeda's "Islamic" terrorism , the evil Osama bin Laden, the intifada suicide bombings in Palestine, etc. But this is not so different from the 1930s in Germany either. Then, there was a ruthless international communist conspiracy, directed and organised from Moscow. Some Jews - both German and foreign - belonged to and supported that political movement. A few were undeclared "fifth-columnists", waiting to be activated. The communist movement was led by a charismatic evil man, Stalin. All of these propositions were true or plausible. They were used to bolster public enthusiasm for, or reluctant acquiescence in, the necessity of anti-Jewish discriminatory policies in 1930s Germany. But, you will say, our Government is not attacking any ethnic or religious group in Australia. It is just defending our borders and national sovereignty. People who came into Australia legally, whatever their ethnicity or religion, are not being molested in any way. We are a non-discriminatory multicultural society. How can any possible parallel be drawn with Germany in the 1930s? My answer is this. Australia cannot go on locking up thousands of innocent asylum-seekers in desert concentration camps, keeping some of them there indefinitely (ie, potentially for life), treating those whom we do eventually reluctantly allow into our society as second-class refugees, as people judged unworthy ever to share fully in the benefits of our society because of the way they entered it - without there being evil consequences for the kind of society we are, and the way we think of ourselves. Civil decency is indivisible: once the dike is breached, the wall begins to fail. And what is now happening in Woomera is no minor breach. The dark shadow over our feast is our uneasy sense of guilt at the evil we are letting be done in our country. For a lot of Australians, the defence mechanism goes like this. Because we cannot bear to think that we are treating defenceless fellow human beings with gross inhumanity, goading them into extreme physical and mental distress in which they begin to behave like desperate animals to show us their pain, we must dehumanise them further in our own minds. The brutality of our policies breeds consequences that become its own justification. So our Government - which won't let media talk to camp inmates - lets the press in to see riots and riot damage. When asylum-seekers sew their lips together, refuse to eat, reject their prescribed daily tranquillisers, burn down their barracks, our leaders can only say, how contemptible, how primitive, how right we are not to want these people in Australia. Even our "liberal" press (The Canberra Times an honourable exception) says, in reaction to the latest riots, not that the detention system is evil and must be abandoned forthwith, but that the system is "flawed" and needs to be administered "with more humanity". Bring on the camp orchestras, please. Then some of us will take the next step, first tentatively - because we know this is morally wrong - but then with increasing confidence. We will look around at our multicultural society, pinpoint areas of stress, and start differentiating between groups of immigrants: the groups that "assimilate easily", and the groups that seem not to - the groups that blend in with "us" versus the groups that maintain visible differences in the ways they speak or dress or worship or eat or look. Pretty soon, those of us who go down this path will be back in a 1930s world of two camps - Us and the Others, the assimilable and the irredeemably alien. It's happening quite widely already - read some of the recent opinion commentaries by eminent Australians in our leading "quality" newspapers, sample the letters to the editor. I don't know how to deal with this in daily life in Australia. What does one do when one encounters, face-to-face, implacable racist prejudice? How does one react? Does one quietly record one's point of view, but decline to discuss the matter further, as a courtesy to one's hosts (nobody wants to ruin a party or dinner by ugly political argument)? Or does one try as a responsible citizen to argue the moral and political case for decency towards asylum-seekers? And how does one then respond to the seemingly incontrovertible clincher argument: "Well, you're in the minority now - a majority of us voted for this Government and these policies, so lump it or leave." We're not yet in 1930s Germany. The pressures on those of us who are appalled by our Government's cruel refugee policies are social-conformist, not state-coercive. We won't be denounced or dragged off for secret police interrogation for expressing sympathy with the desperation of our fellow human beings locked up in Woomera. And yet there is something ugly in the air, something that takes my mind back to the plight of those good Germans in the 1930s who felt they had to remain silent in the face of the quietly spreading evil of anti-semitism around them. And the essential similarity is this: that the cruelty and the prejudice towards those deemed the outsiders in both situations are coming, not just from a few wackoes off in right field, but from the democratically elected government of the day: Germany post-1933, John Howard's government post-November 10, 2001. Something to think about, anyway, as we fondly send our children off to nativity plays and pageants in our churches, acting out the story of the Holy Family that first sought refuge in a stable, and then fled from persecution in their own homeland into Egypt. Maybe we might begin to find a little more empathy and compassion in our hearts towards our own poor refugees in Australia. For they are our own. They became our own from the moment they arrived here, asking us for refuge. Tony Kevin is visiting fellow in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, ANU, and a former Australian Ambassador to Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Cambodia. http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail.asp?class=your%20say&subclass=general&category=columnists%20analysis&story_id=117071&y=2001&m=12 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- RecOzNet2 has a page @ http://www.green.net.au/recoznet2 and is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznet2%40paradigm4.com.au/ until 11 March, 2001 and Recoznettwo is archived at http://www.mail-archive.com/recoznettwo%40green.net.au/ from that date. 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