aquascoot wrote on Sep 24
th, 2014 at 10:13am:
The problem with your approach karnal is this....
You and many from the more educated left don't acknowledge the humanity of those who express
"I hate muslims" and sprint is not alone in saying that. I hear it often.
but in belittling someone who expresses this , what you do is drive them into a corner from which you only harden their attitudes.
so, in fact, this approach is worsening the situation and , as a smart man, I think you realise that this is the case.
You're 100% right, Aquascoot. Mind you, if I listened to Herbie, we'd be sending the police wake-up committee round to break down Sprint's door at 4 in the morning.
Sprint meets all the criteria: he's an immigrant, he espouses hatred, and he advocates violence. If we listened to Sprint, we'd be sending him back to where he came from (even if he came from Australia).
But we won't - Sprint is one of us. You're right, Aquascoot - having fun with humourless haters is probably not the best way to engage them.
But let me tell you, I've calmly rebutted many of Sprint's mistakes about things over the years - mistakes he's even acknowledged himself. But Sprint keeps on making them, time and time again. Lately, he's stopped acknowledging his mistakes. These days, he seems quite happy spreading porkies.
What to do?
I don't consider myself from the "intelligent left", but I acknowledge the mistake made by the left since it started finding things to blame and attack: this doesn't work. Getting angry about things doesn't work. Burning effiges of politicians doesn't work. Waging a war against elaborate universal enemies like capitalism and patriarchy and sexual repression doesn't work either.
It just turns you into a sexually repressed patriarchal capitalist.
Back in the 1970s, Australia and Britain fought a war against racists. The left fought with massive campaigns in Britain like "Rock Against Racism". In Britain in the 70s, racism became the crusade for the left that nuclear disarmament had been in the 1960s. The establishment fought the anti-racist propaganda war with sit-coms like
Love Thy Neighbour and
Mind Your Language. In Australia, we had Ted Bullpit in
Kingswood Country. Youth cultures formed around this struggle - with punks on the one side and skinheads on the other.
In Sydney, when I grew up, we tried to copy Britain with regular fights between punks and skins. In the 1980s, we all went to the same gigs. The violence was a part of life, but in Australia it was largely tribal. We forgot the origins of that violence - neighbourhoods in the UK that were filling up with Pakis and Jamaicans.
Some of the more political skinheads in Australia fought against Asians. In the 1980s, those "Asians Out" posters on telegraph poles were a regular sight around inner Sydney.
By the 1990s, we'd largely moved on - but then a new subject appeared on the horizon: Pauline Hanson. It's quaint to think now that Pauline didn't talk about Muslims at all. Pauline Hanson solely targeted Asian immigrants and Aboriginals. At one point, her party got 11% of the federal vote, so I don't discount her pulling power.
And all this without Muslims - that all happened after September 11.
Australia is quite an enlightened country. We didn't need Rock Against Racism and protests on the streets to confront Pauline - the mainstream media and political establishment did this, with the support of the majority of Australians.
But Australia is also a conservative country, prone to paranoia. September 11 provided the spark for this, and we haven't really looked back. Whenever the conservative elements are in the political ascendant, we see a return to the subject of security, and for this you need an enemy within. Right now, the Muslim plays that role, but this will shift, just as it has from Asians and Aboriginals to Muslims. Sprint's hatred fits within a wider hatred of all things foreign to Sprint - despite the fact that Sprint is a foreigner himself, living in a country that, only 200 years ago, was Aboriginal.
Here, we're all foreigners.
So yes, Aquascoot, I admit that belittling people only hardens them against you. The question is, however, whether we want to engage the haters or prevent their spread. Engaging hate rhetoric through dialogue does not work. Sprint knows that much of what he says about Islam isn't true, but he thinks the untrue bits make up for other things he can't articulate. Engaging in a point by point debate with people who don't follow the rules for debate is impossible, but here, we only have our words. I can't, for example, take Sprint to a household of Muslims. We can't sit down physically and break bread together or do all the things that real communituies do, and this is a problem with the abstract nature of the internet.
Mind you, such abstraction is how all hatred starts. In wartime Germany, it wasn't the Germans who lived near the ghettos and knew Jews who were the haters - it was the Germans who had never met Jews. In India, it's not Hindus who live in communities with Muslims who become such devout anti-Muslim fundamentalists, or Muslims in Indonesia who live near Christian communities who target Christians - it's those who's hatred is completely without cause and driven by pure tribalism. The nature of hatred is ignorance.
I agree - fighting hatred with hatred is not the answer.
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