Big Brother's Not Been Watching Enough: The Hypocrisy Of British Tolerance (Part Four)

In the preceding three entries, I've discussed three examples of how British society and culture deal with beliefs and behaviour that are considered to be 'beyond the pale': instances of radical intolerance or hostility towards the 'tolerant society' that are by that token 'beyond tolerance' – intolerable to the tolerant society. These examples are those of 'racism', 'terrorism' and 'anti-social behaviour'. Britain responds to these phenomena in a manner that is reminiscent of psychological censorship and repression. In Freudian terms, the super-ego (the authorities) suppresses the irrational, violent thoughts and desires of the id (the racist / terrorist / anti-social individual) from the conscious mind or ego (from the public domain) and then keeps jealous watch to make sure that these 'undesirable' tendencies do not re-manifest themselves openly – resulting in them being acted out in another way that eludes the scrutiny and sphere of operation of the super-ego. Hence, the racist, terrorist and lout are placed under a regime of watch and control (Celebrity Big Brother, Control Orders and ASBOs); but their thoughts and they themselves nonetheless elude their detention, because Big Brother has merely suppressed and displaced the forces that drive its enemies, not dealt with them and resolved the conflict.

Notice that I referred to these three forms of antagonism towards tolerance in inverted commas. One of the means by which censorship of these phenomena takes place is that particular individuals are stigmatised and scapegoated as representatives of the tendencies that society wishes to repress. In psychological terms, society projects onto those individuals its stereotypical image of the racist, terrorist and yob. These stereotypes in turn partly represent the racism, destructive violence and anti-social attitudes of normal, tolerant members of society themselves. By then suppressing those individuals and confining them to a limited, private space, society believes that it is dealing with racism, terrorism and mindless thuggery themselves – in the same way, and for the same reason, that respectable and respected members of the tolerant society believe they have resolved these very tendencies in themselves: by locking them up in a private, mental space that does not, and must not, be articulated openly.

In other words, all of us individually, and society as a whole, bear an uncanny resemblance to the racist, terrorist and hoodlum. They are as it were extreme manifestations of our own petty intolerances. But because we cannot admit to being intolerant, violent and anti-social in whichever respects apply to each of us, we end up wanting to suppress those extreme examples rather than deal with the underlying issues, which would involve confronting the 'enemy within' ourselves. That's not to deny that racism, terrorism and anti-social behaviour are real problems in the external world, for which practical solutions need to be sought. On the contrary, no real solution to these issues can be found if we're not prepared to admit that we're also an integral part of the problem.

Putting this in more straightforward language: to what extent really is any kind of understanding of the reasons for antagonism between the different races, nationalities and religions currently crowded together in the UK advanced by merely stigmatising Jade Goody as a racist and reprimanding Channel Four for not censoring material that offended the veneer of British inter-racial, multi-cultural tolerance and harmony? Similarly, we do not know whether the terrorist suspects that escaped from their Control Order detention the other week were really terrorists or not: one of the purposes of Control Orders is to suppress any possibility of public scrutiny of these cases and of an open debate on the grievances of those who might be drawn to terrorist-type violence. Tony Blair said we were placing too much emphasis on the civil liberties of the suspect. But if they're only suspects – assumed to be innocent until proven guilty – surely, they should be accorded every civil liberty. But 'suspect' in Blair's book seems to imply that that they are, and indeed they are treated as, guilty without trial.

Mr Blair himself, of course, has been widely accused of being the equivalent of a terrorist: a war criminal and mass murderer because of the direct and indirect consequences of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Branding someone a terrorist or a war criminal is a way to distance and differentiate oneself from one's enemy: to refuse to see any parallel or linkage between your actions and those of your adversary. And so the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians are not to be compared with those of 2,000 tragic victims of 9/11. The former are a consequence of 'justifiable' resistance to terrorism and defence of Western strategic interests; while the latter are mere terrorism – not an example of an albeit extreme and, in some cases, desperate response to the injustices for which the West is blamed in Palestine and to Western efforts to place the Middle East firmly under its control. And yet millions of tolerant British citizens gave Mr Blair their approval for the Iraqi foray – apparently accounting the lives of Arab civilians that would be lost as of less importance than those of the Westerners supposedly threatened by Saddam's WMD; just as the so-called Islamist terrorists apparently account the lives of Western 'infidels' as of less importance than those of Muslims.

And is the anti-social individual really any more anti-social than the mass of citizens who pursue their private interests and preoccupations with little concern for those who get left behind? The 'ASBP' (anti-socially behaving person) is stigmatised, on one level, precisely because (s)he is the symbol of the asocial society we have built: one where there is no longer any real shared vision of the type of society and communities we wish to create and sustain, but where individuals invest their energies and aspirations into their own private realm – their homes, their assets, their careers and relationships. The ASBP is someone who is left behind in this rat race. Deprived of the means, opportunity or ability to strive after these personal goals – and without any social or community network to re-direct their energies – they are people confronted by social indifference and lack of personal purpose. So in a sense, it is inevitable that they take it out on a society that has turned its backs on them and attempt to wreck our nice, quiet, comfortable lives. In this way, the ASBP is perhaps more social than the rest of us: they are crying out for the help and attention of a society that doesn't want to know. Rather than opening out and engaging in the social realm that is falling apart around us, our response to ASBPs exemplifies our own social alienation that has given rise to the anti-social behaviour in the first place: the ASBP is merely suppressed, placed under the terms of an ASBO – made to become merely another private individual that will no longer demand that we reach out to them from beyond the parapets of our homes-as-castles, thereby acting in a social, collective manner that could change all of our lives and begin to re-make a broken society.

Those who we ostracise as beyond tolerance – the racist, terrorist and anti-social person – are, ultimately, symbols of the limits of our own tolerance: of the prejudiced bigot, the supporter of violence and the selfish individualist that we all are to some extent. Overcoming these problems will involve defeating them in ourselves: to love our enemies, indeed, as ourselves.

The Madness Of Tony Blair: Fighting For Tolerance and Moderation In Iraq

The Madness Of Tony Blair: Fighting For Tolerance and Moderation In Iraq

Tony Blair visited Iraq yesterday on the third stage in his Middle East tour that is supposedly aiming to promote peace initiatives throughout the region. On two occasions – a press briefing with the Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki and a speech to UK troups – he reiterated his government’s policy that British forces would remain in Iraq, in whatever role was required by the Iraqi government, until the job was done. By implication, this means until the survival of Iraqi democracy is assured. As Mr Blair put it to the soldiers, “All over the world, the same struggle is going on, and if we don't stand up and fight for the people of tolerance and moderation who want to live together, whatever their fate, then the people of hatred and sectarianism will triumph”.

Mr Blair seems to see this struggle in terms reminiscent of the Second World War: “Our country and countries like it are having to rediscover what it means to fight for what we believe in”. I don’t think that most people in the UK would share the prime minister’s vision of the purpose and nature of the fight in which British forces are embroiled in Iraq. What struck one as particularly surreal and incongruous about Mr Blair’s pronouncements was the emphasis placed on defending tolerance and moderation, which he has only recently made the cornerstone of his vision of British values and the need to defend them against Islamic extremism within the UK (see my blog of 9 December). This established a curious associative link in Blair’s statements between the battle against the Iraqi insurgency and the efforts to oppose extremist strands within Islam in the UK – a link which the UK government has persistently denied in its attempt to refute claims that British involvement in Iraq has exacerbated Islamic radicalisation in this country – as both enemies are essentially one and the same, united in their antagonism towards tolerance and moderation: “This is real conflict, real battle, and it is a different kind of enemy – not fighting a state, but fighting a set of ideas and ideologies, a group of extremists who share the same perspectives”.

But it is not at all clear to anyone who follows developments in Iraq that there is any tolerant, moderate, democratic position left to defend there. During Mr Blair’s visit, a group of insurgents kidnapped around 30 staff and visitors at the Iraqi Red Crescent office in Baghdad. It would be easy to point to this incident as proof that the security and humanitarian situation in Iraq has completely broken down and that Western forces should get out and leave the Iraqis to work out their own destiny. Indeed, humanitarian crises and violent attacks against aid workers are regularly exploited by the media to make political points like this. Probably, the people responsible for carrying out the kidnap were aware of this, and it was precisely their aim to time their action to coincide with Mr Blair’s visit for maximum impact. So in a sense, describing this incident as an example of the break-down of order and of efforts to really help the Iraqi people merely encourages the men of violence.

But what this kidnapping puts me in mind of is some of the media attention-grabbing tactics of Saddam Hussein when he was in charge of the country, such as the kidnap of Western civilians whom he used as human shields during the Gulf War in 1990/1. Similarly, the mindless violence directed on a daily basis against civilians by the Iraqi insurgency – while also in part a tactic to gnaw away at the Western conscience and keep up the pressure for military withdrawal – is reminiscent of the mass-murderous assaults against his political and ‘sectarian’ enemies that Saddam Hussein is known to have authorised. What makes the present situation arguably worse than Saddam Hussein’s rule is that now it is both sides of the major sectarian divide in Iraq (Shi’a and Sunni) that are perpetrating the same sort of anti-civilian violence against each other. And indeed, the situation has splintered still further, leading to violence between different insurgent groups on the ‘same’ side of the sectarian divide, and to Sunnis and Shi’as murdering civilians of their own and the other side, sometimes indiscriminately.

The democratic politicians are not above all these terrible divisions as some sort of beacon of tolerance and moderation, as Mr Blair referred to them. It is well known to Iraq watchers that many (perhaps most) democratically elected members of parliament in Iraq have ties with leaders of the insurgency on their respective sectarian sides. In a way, this is totally inevitable, as it is the insurgents who are the real power brokers in the land, and it is they who effectively delivered the vote for the democratic representatives of the different sectarian parties in the Iraqi elections. In other words, the relationship between the insurgency and the democratic parties in Iraq is rather like the one that existed between the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland: the parties represent the ‘political wing’ of the insurgents and terrorists, providing PR to Western and Islamic media for their sectarian positions and creating another channel for the fight for political supremacy over their enemies.

It was of course the ‘pro-democracy’ violence of the invasion of Iraq by US and UK forces that unleashed the hatred between the different sectarian communities in Iraq that had been kept suppressed by Saddam Hussein’s autocratic regime; and it was perhaps inevitable that once a cycle of violence between Shi’as and Sunnis got underway, both sides would resort to the homicidal methods that were previously practised only by the Sunni faction, from which the dictator drew his support. But are the insurgents on both sides – whom Mr Blair simplistically lumps into a single category of extremist / terrorist – really united in a common cause against democracy? Or is it the case that the British and Americans are viewed, or at least presented, by the insurgents as defenders of elements within the Shi’a and Kurdish majority (who by that token are the beneficiaries of democracy) who, together with the Sunnis, are engaged in a ruthless, violent civil war for control of the country? British and US support for democracy, in this context, appears like ever less influential but nonetheless destructive support for one side in a civil war over the other: a symbol of Sunni humiliation and a constant pretext for further violence.

The initial violence in the Iraqi crisis – the US-led and British-backed invasion – could even be viewed as providing the template, and certainly the excuse, for the sectarian violence that followed. This is because it was basically a grab for power that used the aim of bringing about democracy as its pretext and as a means to the end. A strong democracy in Iraq, so the strategic thinking must have gone, would shore up US / Western influence and power in the region: acting as a bulwark to defend Saudi Arabia in its own struggle against an Al-Qaeda-backed insurgency; a means to counteract growing Iranian regional agitation; and securing the vital access to the region’s oil reserves.

But what kind of democracy, tolerance and moderation is the UK defending in Saudi Arabia? Clearly one that is so strategically essential that Tony Blair himself had to intervene last week to halt a UK police anti-fraud investigation into allegations of bribery by the arms manufacturer BAE Systems involved in securing a multi-billion-pound deal with the Saudis? And similarly, is UK and US support for the ‘moderate’ Fatah movement in Palestine against the ‘extremist’ (albeit democratically elected) Hamas really contributing to peace and security in the Middle East as those two factions slide into civil war-like conflict in Gaza?

Strong support for one side over another in the bitterly divided Middle East (albeit if the side you back is nominally the democratically elected power, which it only occasionally is) is not a recipe for tolerance and moderation UK-style. Only engaging all the parties and affected countries in negotiation and dialogue – however difficult this is, however long it takes, and however many strategic advantages to one’s own country may have to be compromised – can provide a way forward. This is of course what was recommended by the Iraq Study Group in their report released a couple of weeks ago, which Blair and Bush – shall we say concertedly? – appear to be ignoring. But the way to achieve peace in the Middle East is certainly not standing up and fighting for a tolerance and moderation that has long been lost precisely because of all the fighting.