John Wojdylo

The disempowerment of faith, Iraq, fragmentation, and the failed WTO protests

by John Wojdylo

I don’t see the dichotomy between my views and those of David Makinson that Robin Ford (Webdiary 21/11) does. We’re both saying that we ought to base our actions (say, on the question of disarming Saddam Hussein) on the knowledge we have, without prejudging or making inductive leaps.

In addition, though, I’m saying that if we are horrified at the blood on our hands that might be spilt if we act, then we should also be horrified by the blood that might be on our hands if we choose not to act.

There are no “spaces between” – or third way – that we can escape into.

Different tactics are possible, but these are just part of the same picture – of choosing either action or inaction.

The problem is that sometimes the will of others affects us by causing a choice to stand out from the milieu of events of lesser importance: it forces us into making a choice that actually matters.

It seems to me that another of these seminal choices is currently facing the people of NSW, where the proposed anti-terror legislation threatens to change the legal landscape and the character of the democracy.

The sticking point is not the harsh measures – I think they’re justified, given the nature of the terrorist threat – but that the police minister himself will be given too much power.

In the NSW case, while it remains true that the police minister, along with the government that appointed him, can be voted out of office – the anti-terror measures don’t ban elections – the government would be given a free pass to create mischief while in office, and extra power to manipulate the electorate towards its own ends, particularly at election time.

It has proved itself in the past (e.g. WTO protests) willing to undertake such manipulation: the precedent is there.

An important moment is upon the people of NSW: they are being asked to have faith in the State. In principle, forever.

The Australian’s Editorial (28/11) echoes this sentiment: Australians “should have more confidence in the robustness of Australian democracy”.

But the point is that an important pillar of this robustness will be chipped away by the NSW anti-terror legislation.

The choice is between strengthened democratic structure and faith in the State. I’m afraid that naivety and apathy will conspire to favour the latter.

Yet the solution is relatively simple and painless, if only the will could be found to implement it: an independent authority (e.g. ombudsman, governor) ought to make decisions such as extending the period of validity of the anti-terrorism measures.

The Iraq choice is not so easy.

Seeing complexity in everything (as Derrida urges) is not the most important thing: seeing why a situation is complicated – because we have to make a choice and live with the responsibility – is.

I’m arguing that this is where we’re at because of Saddam Hussein. I’m arguing for responsibility, and for seeing the whole of the world, not just the half of it that makes it easy for us. The half that we avoid might have profound consequences for our lives.

If the belief that we are innocent and disempowered leads us to reject out of hand the wielders of power – “we, the innocent of the world, reject all of you” (DM) – then this belief is preventing us from seeing ourselves and examining our actions, because each of us wields power.

This goes back to the question of responsibilities that accompany rights.

Far from being disempowered, Robin, too, wields power. The statement, “Wojdylo despises the reflection that Makinson holds dear”, unjustly drives a wedge in and fragments the space of the discussion. Readers may be tempted to believe that there is no common ground, when in fact there’s enormous common ground with regards to making decisions to act without prejudging or making inductive leaps. I believe that David simply hasn’t thought his position through carefully enough, and is being a little bit dishonest.

I don’t believe that questioning statements made in public and argumentation in front of an audience is inherently rude and confrontational. Are we to ban mirrors?

It seems to me that scrutiny – not only of elected leaders – is going out of fashion.

Those who forgive – and then forget – their own actions in advance (i.e. don’t think critically about what they doing) are invariably surprised to discover their role in their own downfall. They blame it on someone else instead of accepting their part.

If you like the idea of Zeitgeist, then the feeling of disempowerment may be a product of our times, of friction with modernity. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, then, the flavour of Islam that has gained ascendancy since the 1970s also bemoans and perpetuates disempowerment, blaming all the ills of Muslim countries on America and the rest of the infidels.

The biggest-gaining religion, however, has been Christianity, due to its boom in the developing world. There, it serves as a form of empowerment partly through strict adherence to rituals that seem harsh by first world standards.

One thread that links all these manifestations of the disempowerment faith is the demagoguery of their high priests and evangelists – the inability to engage with the facts, and lack of arguments in public statements. (See below.)

David may well despair at those who have picked themselves up off the floor after being debilitated by the horror of the reality of Saddam Hussein’s existence, and who manifest a “single-minded drive” for compelling him to disarm. But he ought to feel even more despair at what Saddam manifestly intends to do when he gets hold of a nuclear device, if he isn’t stopped.

Not to mention what Saddam said he will do to Israel and unsubmissive nearby Arab/Muslim countries with his biological and chemical weapons.

Despair can also be brought on by having one’s eyes opened to the vastness of the world – i.e. by having been refuted. That’s one reason why some people believe it’s better not to know anything (“See no evil…”). It’s an expression of life on earth, but this fact alone doesn’t make it right.

It turns out that in traditional societies (e.g. Japan) that live according to the “See no evil…” edict, methods exist for incorporating new elements of reality into the consciousness – i.e. a kind of realism has been part of the thinking for a thousand years or more.

Anti-realism sets in periodically when some principle or belief cuts people off from the facts, and prevents them assimilating new ground-level details. In the 1930s, many Japanese believed that they were the Aryans of Asia and had a divine mandate (from Hirohito) to conquer their part of the world.

Even today, a standard argument one hears in Japan as to why the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour is that the US-led oil embargo forced them to seek natural resources in East Asia.

This is similar to the oft-repeated German argument that the West – especially the United States – was responsible for Hitler’s rise to power, because the humiliating conditions of the Treaty of Versailles created the preconditions for Hitler’s success in the Weimar Republic.

This faith causes people to blame everybody but themselves.

The grain of truth – no, half a grain – in the worldview that rejects world leaders and proclaims one’s own innocence is the fact that with the advent of weapons of mass destruction, a small number of despots can enslave an entire population and use it as pawns for their own ends. It has been happening in Iraq, and is happening again now with the rise of a nuclear-armed North Korea.

Those familiar with the Japanese imperialist-apologia will be disturbed to hear that cutting off a country’s oil supply has been viewed in the past as an act of war (Japan, 1941). How will the insane Kim Jong-il react?

There’s a real choice to be made – and there’s no guarantee that any choice will be the right one, or a painless one. Critics (such as Anatol Lieven) of American actions live the illusion of a simplified world where choices are made in a vacuum: choices have no context, and so all kinds of utopias are possible, and of course none are attained, for which, naturally, the US alone is to blame. (To see this, apply the “basic questions” I listed in “Saddam Hussein’s Desire for Genocide” and “Heart of Darkness”.)

The reflections we hold dear are part of reality: there’s no dichotomy here either. We wield power also through the reflections we hold dear. These have sway over us and others, and affect our actions when they are unexamined.

David is probably unaware that the call for an internationale of innocents was repeated tens of thousands of times by Young Pioneers in the Soviet Union singing cheerful, optimistic and emotionally compelling – at times very beautiful – songs approved by the Politburo.

When the Young Pioneers grew up, many turned into willing apparatchiks for a totalitarian system whose stated and operational aim was to universalise its utopian vision. They started off professing innocence, but ended up wielding terrifying totalitarian power.

Some of those who have been touched by the communist experience are acutely aware of the use that beauty (e.g. a beautiful humanitarian goal) can be put to: i.e., propaganda and manipulation.

I’m not saying David is a communist, but that in his thinking he has hit upon a well-known path. I have no idea how far along he goes in actively retracing it. I suspect hardly at all.

But I can easily imagine situations where people sharing David’s view would unjustly wield their power, because they haven’t bridged the gap between the reflections they hold dear and how to put them into practice.

It’s natural that thinking people rediscover political positions – or snippets of instincts that they haven’t yet developed into a position – that are well-known in history. I’d go so far as to suggest that no new insight is possible. Old insights are merely recycled in different permutations against a backdrop of current circumstances.

We ought to question the instincts we have, try to see where they are taking us – and delimit them from unintended consequences.

This is part of mastering the power that each of us has.

The instinct to confuse “heartfelt reflections” with truth – or the search for truth – is dangerous, especially in political issues, because we leave ourselves open to accepting ex-cathedra pronouncements and unjustified bald assertions that attract and manipulate us.

(I’m always prepared to back up anything I say, upon request.)

I want to comment on one more thing Robin wrote. I’m still quite a way off feeling “contempt” or “despisement” for David Makinson’s view, at least because he hasn’t got it right yet, and I can see that clearly. How can you despise somebody when you understand their condition?

If I felt contempt, then I could not have spent so much time and energy – e.g. reading up on Mahatma Gandhi – trying to scrutinize DM’s position. I went way outside addressing DM’s exact words to try to give readers something of value that they can take with them.

I feel this: Unscrutinized convictions manifest the tragedy of an individual’s life.

Also, I can’t believe that talking about the fatal problems inherent in Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy cannot be “enlightening”, particularly in the present context.

Surely questioning the innocence of respecting human life absolutely is one of the central issues in all of this. Actually, Gandhi’s view is just one aspect of the worldview that I seem to be dealing with over and over again.

* * *

Each protester at the WTO meeting in Sydney had power – at the very least, the power to alienate 99 percent of their target audience. Over and over again – almost with every public utterance – a wedge was driven in that fragmented the space of the discussion.

We all know what authoritarians are capable of. Why make it easy for them?

The opposite approach might well have succeeded.

Imagine if right from the beginning, protest organizers had invited police and media representatives – and anyone else who could bear witness – to attend all stages of planning. Completely openly. No secrets.

No pretending, dishonestly, that the yearning to antagonize the powers-that-be – to provoke them in order to prove a prejudged point – did not exist at all.

Imagine if the manipulators of public opinion hadn’t been aided and abetted by fragmentary thinking, and instead the community as a whole had been given the chance to embrace the legitimate core of the protest.

Another example: strengthened by the solidarity of their mates, some found the power to wear and raise the symbol of the Gulag Archipelago.

The media, naturally – as at every demonstration of this sort around the world – paid disproportionate attention to this, and the photo appeared all over Australia. Those amongst the general public who remember what that symbol means had a ready reason to ignore everything after that. The point of the demonstration was lost.

Belief in personal disempowerment and subsequent innocence – together with mindless seeking of solidarity – might well have been the central cause of the failure of the WTO protests.

I mean “failure” in the sense that the media and others were handed complete victory in marginalizing the protesters by portraying them as worthless rabble and a danger to society, while the legitimate core of the protests was ignored outside protesters’ heads.

In Sunrise of the Autocrats (http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/25/1023864577458.html) I argued that the legitimate core consists of drawing attention to (a) the unfair wielding of power by the rich countries and (b) the need to make sure that trade deals are enforced in accordance with the law.

Especially because of the latter point, the fact that NSW police were always going to play a prominent role in the protest one way or another could have been used to advantage to sway members of the wider community. The legitimate core of the protest stands up for the law.

An obvious central platform in which people in all walks of life and the entire political spectrum could have taken part went begging: namely, GATS and the secrecy surrounding it.

It should not have been possible for a photograph – or TV news footage – to be taken without a banner addressing GATS and the secrecy surrounding it plainly in view.

The same mistakes as in every protest of this sort around the world appeared again – pushing imagined opponents away instead of inviting them in and talking and finding common ground. Instead, no message was projected out, except the one invented by the media.

Naturally, there are irreconcilable differences in the positions of the various participant groups – some want the overthrow of capitalism, while others think the WTO, and lower tariffs, can do much, much more for the world’s poor than any handouts can.

But as long as each group promotes its own view instead of reinforcing the central core, these protests will continue to be vulnerable to manipulation by powerful interest groups. The protests will continue to fail.

The cause of it is bloody-minded self-centredness, failure to see beyond yourself, that you’re not doing it for yourself or for your comrades, nor in the name of various nostalgias and utopian visions, but for the whole of our motley society. Even for the parts of it that despise, for whatever reason, the group you are from.

The entire focus should have been on getting the one message across that everybody can agree on.

Why not wear a neutral colour – white? Could have been a small boost to Australia’s clothing industry if everybody bought an Australia-made white T-shirt.

Given the nature of modern mass media, if 10 people wear red and hold red flags, and ten thousand wear white, the media will sensationalize the ten “commos”. It’s utterly predictable. So why not think, next time?

It should be obvious by now how police around the world are dealing with these protests. Those who baited police brought it on themselves and others.

Once again, instead of opening up new vistas and entering new territory, the thinking was tautological. Locked up in itself, its own complexes.

“We are disempowered in the face of a hegemony” – “we insist on this particular provocative act, because it is our right” – (and after incurring the wrath of the authorities, who acted completely predictably) “look how evil the authorities are! We are disempowered in the face of a hegemony!”

Since the goal of the protest ought to be for the good of the whole society, nobody ought to have anything to hide.

Protest organizers should have invited police and media representatives to attend all stages of planning, right from day one, before it was declared illegal. Police representatives should have been allowed to contribute to the discussion, just like everybody else present.

Get dialogue happening between authorities and protest organizers – not poisonous shouting matches, irrespective of “who started it”. Publicize the meetings, the spirit of cooperation.

Build a broad base from all sections of society – because GATS has implications for the whole of our society. There should be nothing for anybody to be afraid of.

And assure potential participants that the meeting will not be hijacked by one or another group peddling nostalgias and utopian visions. And assure participants that if treachery does happen, protest organizers will condemn those groups for breaking a pact and disassociate themselves from them for the benefit of the whole.

If the protest has to collapse because of self-centredness-induced fragmentation, then it’s just another sign that Australia is too immature a society to take personal responsibility seriously.

Authoritarianism will fill the gap. GATS, the NSW anti-terror legislation…

The crazy thing about this disempowerment faith is that people from all political persuasions believe in it. Witness the plethora of right-leaning publications decrying “leftist domination” of the media in Australia.

The right feels disempowered, burns inside and shouts down the left, setting in motion the vilest of currents against those that are not like “us”.

The left feels disempowered, and burns inside while reciting demagoguish mantras, devoid of any rational argument.

Everybody’s talking past each other.

Each side sees only themselves and their fraternal mates. Solidarity among the right, solidarity among the left. And the circus goes on.

The ability to argue the facts has gone out the window. People feel too vulnerable to reveal their mind in public. This is accompanied by a plague of demagoguery: failure to engage with the facts, and mindless sloganeering.

This, in turn, perpetuates the feeling of disempowerment.

This phenomenon is so ubiquitous that any example seems too banal. Let just one suffice: the essay, “The Push for War”, by Anatol Lieven, in the London Review of Books (3/10). The essay was enthusiastically recommended by Phillip Adams on LNL late November.

But it is atrociously written. (To see why, apply the “basic questions” in my piece, “Saddam Hussein’s Heart of Darkness”, to it.) The reader struggles to find one rational argument, one statement that is aimed at persuading the reader why they should change their mind.

Lieven’s essay attempts to reflect the reader’s desires and fears, rather than argue for a better understanding of the Iraq question. It tries to manipulate its audience by telling it what it wants to hear. It is demagoguery par excellence.

* * *

Bob Carr used exactly the same method (though in his case, the aggression was overt) against Margo, to impress supporters of “strong” government. He tried to crush her, but instead produced a gem. (She has been galvanised to articulate herself excellently apropos the NSW anti-terror legislation.)

People want to believe something, and the demagogue gives it to them.

If we were hearing poetry, that’d be fine – but on the Iraq question, we’re talking about the most important political decision that has faced humanity in many decades.

Even poetry, though, can move mountains or instigate witch-hunts.

Bob Carr, incidentally, was wrong in the demagoguery he directed at Margo Kingston. At the time Margo wrote her Bali piece, it was not clear who was responsible for the bombing. It could have been local rivalry (though I never gave much weight to this possibility).

I have seen this sort of rivalry in the old part of Jerusalem: relations between an Israeli Arab and an Armenian businessmen were at a dangerous low. The Armenian condemned the loud music – and drunken westerners – that was emanating from the Arab’s youth hostel till 3am every night as a defilement of the Holy City, and threatened reprisals. Nothing ever came of the threat, as far as I’m aware.

Without knowing the Al Qaeda/JI links, it is within the realms of possibility that a local decided to teach a rival – and all decadent westerners defiling a holy site we don’t know about – a lesson. We “decadent westerners” as a whole – not any in particular – would have been culpable, but not to blame.

Bob Carr seemed to take Margo’s Bali contemplation as a denial that Al Qaeda represents a serious threat to Australia. He thought Margo meant: “as long as we know the root causes for which we are to blame, we can reverse the threat from JI/Al Qaeda”, and this was starkly contradicted by the will for evil by the Bali bombers.

In any case, I think there was much more to his outburst: Margo had hit at least two raw nerves, with her attacking Carr’s developer links, as well as with the publishing of WTO protest material in Webdiary.

The connection with the latter is possibly the following. Paddy McGuinness – who idiotically likened the protesters to Nazis – is a good friend of Carr’s. I have a suspicion that McGuinness influenced NSW police policy towards the protesters. If Carr indeed talks to PP about these things, then I’d advise him to seek better counsel.

McGuinness despises “the inherent authority that is superior to that of the people and parliaments” (SMH 16/3/2000) which people like the WTO protesters evidently claim to have.

He believes in absolute democracy. If “the people” elect national socialists, then so be it. The “will of the people” is sacred – and our elected leaders are the incarnation of God. We must obey unquestioningly, and have faith in the State.

The Australian’s Editorial (28/11) echoes this sentiment: Australians “should have more confidence in the robustness of Australian democracy”.

But an important pillar of this robustness will be chipped away by the NSW anti-terror legislation, when the police minister himself is given the power to decide, for instance, whether the anti-terror measures are to be implemented for additional lengths of time.

The decision to extend the period should be made by an independent authority.

While it remains true that the police minister, along with the government that appointed him, can be voted out of office – the anti-terror measures don’t ban elections – the government would be given a free pass to create mischief while in office, and extra power to manipulate the electorate towards its own ends.

* * *

The clash of civilizations in Australia is not between political left versus right. It’s between those for whom the ground level details loom large and who build their cathedrals of principles from the ground up in a disordered sort of way; and those whose cathedral building blocks somehow get born into the world from transcendental heights, and are fashioned into shape through experience and questioning.

Actually the clash is not between these two ways of thinking – there’s no reason why they shouldn’t agree, since they’re working in the same reality – but between corrupted versions of them.

Corruption happens when people stop asking questions, cease engaging with the facts, but nevertheless keep wielding power. This holds in all cultures – Japan, for example, too.

Then the disordered, ground-level conscience weakens the other’s already brittle, orderly cathedral (or golden pavilion): it is vehemently rejected.

First published in ‘Carr’s new police powers’, webdiaryDec3