{"id":86889,"date":"2019-04-01T16:07:46","date_gmt":"2019-04-01T23:07:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=86889"},"modified":"2019-04-01T16:07:46","modified_gmt":"2019-04-01T23:07:46","slug":"why-australia-is-the-best-place-to-be-an-online-racist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/04\/01\/why-australia-is-the-best-place-to-be-an-online-racist\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Australia is the best place to be an online racist."},"content":{"rendered":"

BY ANDREW JAKUBOWICZ. Courtesy John Menadue \u2013 Pearls and Irritations<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n

When no name pulled the trigger over one hundred times\nas he sluiced his way through the congregations at two Christchurch mosques,\nnothing he did was new. It was bigger, perhaps more successful\u201d, and maybe\nbetter planned than his role models had been able to realise, but his actions\nwere entirely predictable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The type of perpetrator was known, his personality and\npersonal development trajectory predictable.  The likely weaponry was\nknown. The roles that social media had played and would play in the events,\napart from the new capacity offered by streaming video on facebook, were\nknown.  The social contexts that gave shape to his fantasies were known,\nand the political conditions that would authorise his actions were known. No\nname found a soft target and easy weapons; everything else has been grist for\nthe analytical methods of social scientists for decades.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Probably since Wilhelm Reich published the Mass\nPsychology of Fascism in 1933, and Theodor Adorno and his colleagues published\nThe Authoritarian Personality in 1950, bookends to the rise and fall of Nazism,\nreflective analysts of authoritarian violence have been fairly sure about the\ntypes of people, mainly young men, who are drawn to movements of racism,\nfundamentalist religious militancy, and destructive assertion of personal\nidentity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Terrorism is a work of the imagination. The terrorist\nmust imagine the act, the emotions (his own, his targets, his peer group\u2019s, the\nstartled watchers) and the various reactions that he desires to create. As a\nfantasist he inures himself to any negative emotions about his acts, through\nimagining a moral separation from the humanity that he nevertheless does share,\nin reality, with his prospective targets. He imagines himself within a\nnarrative of heroism, celebrated by a band of brothers with whom he competes\nfor glory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Internet feeds his imagination with its\nresponsibility-free feedback, from his first Call of Duty\u201d to his lurking on\nGates of Vienna\u201d to his fevered histrionics on 8Chan in the moments between\nthe imaginary and the real.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His apparent hyper masculinity masks his self loathing,\napparent since he was laughed at by his playmates in his chubby and self\nindulgent childhood, intensified by the abandonment by his absent and\nself-harmed father. As an adolescent his emerging sexual identity further\nhardens his resolve, energising his imagination with half suppressed dreams of\nviolence and sadism. Where the focus was the forbidden male bodies his self\nloathing deepened, complicated by the Sunday devotions before the carved wooden\nand painted gaunt body of the suffering Jesus. Sometimes the figure of Jesus\nbecame all too much the flesh in the person of a predatory parish priest. He\nmust perfect that body, order his followers to react immediately to his\ncommands.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He becomes, in the intersection between personality and\nculture and opportunity, the perfect storm. His nation\u2019s leaders vote to\nendorse the mantra It\u2019s OK to be White\u201d. He gasps and then grasps. The\npressure plate is released; the perfectly-made destroyer marches into battle\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our 2017 book Cyber Racism and Community\nResilience<\/a> begins thus:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Word and deed<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The cyber world and the world of action are not\ndistinct. On 29 January 2017 a Canadian student attacked a mosque in Quebec\nCity, murdering six worshippers. Alexandre Bissonnette reputedly a strong\nnationalist, joined Norwegian killer Anders Breivik  as an\noutstanding global example of the murderous capacity of White Power.\nBissonnette had apparently been turned towards White power by the visit to\nCanada of Marine Le Pen, head of France\u2019s Front National and Brevik had fondly\nquoted Australian anti-multiculturalists in his online manifesto. Each had long\nhistories of participating in White power online communities. On the same day\nthe Australian media reported the case of a local Central Coast NSW white\nsupremacist\u201d Michael Holt who had pleaded guilty to stockpiling weapons in\npreparation for a mass rampage in a local shopping mall. He was not known to\nhave been directly connected with any White power group, but had been actively\ninvolved in online hate speech. He had also searched the web constantly in\npursuit of information about what he should believe and how he should act.\nThere is no doubt that the opportunities afforded by the online world have\nexpanded the reach and impact of race hate across the planet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Holt had his gun stash about 500 km from where the no\nname murderer of Christchurch lived most of his life \u2013 Ourimbah on the Central\ncoast en route to Grafton on the North coast. Very similar places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Australia has been for some time the best place in the\nliberal democratic west to be an online racist. Our racists and white power\nadvocates are adept at using the Internet and social media, in the process\ndriving out and thereby silencing many of their targets. One of their goals has\nbeen to normalise White Power hate speech as an acceptable discourse for the\nWeb. In this they have been quite successful, reaching a crescendo of impact\nwhen the complete Coalition Senate team voted to endorse their White Racist\ngenerated slogan of It\u2019s Ok to be White\u201d late in 2018.  Vide thereafter\nSen. Fraser Anning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Governments of all parties have played a key part in\noptimising the opportunities for on-line racism. They have played down White\nPower racism as the fantastic imaginings of the deluded. They have refused to\nintroduce any laws that might restrict the availability of the Internet for\nracist propagandising and organising. They have made it almost impossible for\nthe targets of racism to push back without great personal suffering, apart from\nthrough the use of an archaic law on public carriage services for harassment.\nThe law had been used against the Martin Place Lindt killer Man Haron Monis\nbefore his rampage, and successfully to seek redress for Indigenous Senator\nNova Peris against a Liberal Party official for racial harassment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The civil provisions under the Racial Discrimination\nAct through the Human Rights Commission have been subverted by sustained\nattacks from the current Government. Australia has no human rights act, making\nit almost unique in the Commonwealth\u201d, European societies, and the USA. It\nstands almost alone with the USA (which however has the Bill of Rights), as\nrefusing to endorse the race hate provisions of the UN International Convention\non the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. When given the chance of signing\nonto the European Convention anti-racism protocol on Cyber Crime, the ALP\ngovernment withdrew the draft legislation under pressure from the Internet\nindustry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

No state or territory has any agency authorised to push back against cyber racism and\nsupport its targets; those targets are expected to do all the heavy lifting\nthemselves or clear out. The last attempt to do so was MulticulturalNSW, whose\ninitiatives were ordered to be terminated by the Berejiklian government in\n2017\/18.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Andrew Jakubowicz is emeritus professor of Sociology at the\nUniversity of technology Sydney.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY ANDREW JAKUBOWICZ. Courtesy John Menadue \u2013 Pearls and Irritations When no name pulled the trigger over one hundred times as he sluiced his way through the congregations at two Christchurch mosques, nothing he did was new. It was bigger, perhaps more successful\u201d, and maybe better planned than his role models had been able to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}