Pogrom talk

The media commentary on the Cronulla riots on December 11 and 12, 2005, has been disappointing. Our non-academic, well-paid, elite commentariat of the major newspapers has let us down. Only few exceptions, like Clive Hamilton’s broad contextualisation (Sydney Morning Herald, December 23), offer new perspectives. Otherwise, we have been presented with the entrenched positions, staked out and clung to with dogmatic tenacity. Little critical self-reflection is evident, and few appear interested in appropriating the strengths of the opposing argument. Too many writers give the smug impression of already having all the answers.

A major problem is that both “sides” (for want of a better term) generalise negatively about groups as a whole (Anglo Australians and Lebanese Australians) from the small sample of young men and women involved in the violence - typically by exempting the group to which they feel sympathetic. Where Greg Barns vented his spleen about Anglo Australia and Anglo Australians on this site (December 22), columnists from The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald made the predictably symmetrical counter-arguments against the Lebanese Australians.

For these writers, the Lebanese Australian men are members of “gangs” while the youths of Anglo-Cronulla are merely “beachgoers” (Andrew Norton, The Australian, December 22). The Sunday, December 11 violence was the responsibility of a tiny minority of “white supremacist cells” and “vigilantes” (i.e. not your typical citizens of the Shire) on the one hand, and “tribal violence among Lebanese in Sydney’s south” (i.e. your average Lebanese-Australian) on the other (Paul Kelly and Janet Albrechtsen, The Australian, December 21 and December 14 respectively).

Or as Miranda Devine put it, “pasty-faced nerds with a taste for Nazi literature” opposed “the real hardmen, the Lebanese-Australian criminal gangs” (Sydney Morning Herald, December 22): in other words, the problem is not the home-grown neo-Nazis but the immigrants they despise irrespective of how they behave.

This is not the only instance that Devine plays fast and loose with the Nazi analogy. The violence by the Lebanese Australian on Monday, December 12 is described by her as “Sydney’s mini Kristallnacht ‘night of broken glass’”, a reference to the November 9, 1938 pogrom instituted by the Nazis against German Jews.

The comparison is grotesque. Across Germany that night and the next, Jewish shop windows and homes were smashed by Nazi thugs who also torched synagogues while, with some exceptions, the police and fire brigade turned a blind eye. Twenty-thousand Jewish men were interned in concentration camps and only released when they committed to emigrating forthwith. Whatever you want to call the revenge violence on December 12, Kristallnacht, even a mini one, is not an appropriate analogy.

Although Devine is embarrassingly out of her depth with historical material, she raises an important issue of terminology about these events. What is a pogrom and is it a useful term? We don’t need to resort to cheap Nazi analogies to answer these questions. Comparisons are available earlier and further east: in Imperial Russia where pogroms against Jews and Roma (“Gypsies”) were the order of the day.

Pogroms are violent attacks by majorities against minorities. They usually begin because a subordinate group has been felt to provoke the dominant ethnic group in some way. An isolated incident would be taken as general “arrogance” or some other transgression. The point of the pogrom is to put the subordinate minority group in its place. The violence is not just instrumental (i.e. looting shops), it is also symbolic. The message is: “We decide who comes to this place and the circumstances in which they come. This is our country. Don’t behave as if you own the place. Stay in your (subordinate) place!”

Whatever the provocation - and I am not denying offensive behaviour by some Australian men of Lebanese-Muslim descent - did it warrant the extent of the wanton brutality of December 11? After all, anyone with Mediterranean looks was attacked, irrespective of whether they were members of gangs, including women with hijabs. This targeting was very discriminating in its indiscriminateness. Similarly, the excess of rhetoric cannot be explained by inter-gang rivalry or youthful machismo. Let’s not hide the truth from ourselves: December 11 was a pogrom.

What is striking is that senior journalists and other elites are now effectively justifying it in the same way as the authorities of central and eastern Europe did a century ago. Back then, they condemned actual violence on law-and-order grounds while sending the message that they sympathised with the perpetrators. We remain on your side, they implicitly signalled to the pogromists.

Australian media elites do the same. By identifying the Lebanese-Australian community’s supposed inability to integrate, by focusing on the bad beach behaviour of youths “of middle eastern appearance”, they are suggesting that the good burghers of Cronulla were unduly provoked. That the Lebanese Australian youths brought the violence on themselves is the inescapable implication. Well before the Nazis, the German rightwing referred to nativist violence against outsiders as understandable Volkszorn (the wrath or anger of the people). Now Australian media leaders are excusing the wrath of the people here.

The editorial in The Australian (December 22) made this point plain when it argued “there is a degree of racism” in all societies and people - that is apparently an anthropological constant - so that the efforts of many to end racism is “an exercise in fanaticism”. Consider closely the message here: the fanatics are not the neo-Nazis but those who oppose them!

Moreover, the ethnic self-defense of the native born is natural and normal; it should not be pathologised by what that newspaper recklessly calls “the multiculturalism industry” (whatever that is). The problem, we must conclude, is the supposed inability of Lebanese-Australian youths to assimilate. After all, as Devine pointed out in one of her most impressively orientalist statements, these lads are “descended from the lawless hill tribes of Northern Lebanon”! (Or does she mean Borneo? Her sentiment is straight from the “boys own adventure” genre of the early 20th century contempt for non-Europeans.)

What can we learn from the Cronulla pogrom, the revenge attacks the next day, and the polarised media debate? Refreshingly, even the rightwing media elite of this country, in tune to the labour market requirements of our globalised economy, has finally committed itself publicly to multiculturalism and non-discriminatory immigration. It does not endorse the sentiments of Macquarie University academic, Andrew Fraser, who in the pages of The Australian (September 21, subsequently posted on this website on September 28) wrote that “white Australians now face a life-or-death struggle to preserve their homeland” against “the Third World colonisation of Australia”.

I don’t know if Fraser exulted at the pogrom, although it was, in terms of his version of “Australian-ness”, an authentic if vulgar expression of locals “re-attached to the history and destiny of its own people” (his words). The mandate for such an interpretation of the pogrom is the widespread incidence of Australian flags wrapped like superman capes around the pogromists. Their self-understanding needs to be taken more seriously if we are to appreciate the inner nature of national identity: they were not simply guarding their beach against unwelcome intruders. They were defending the nation against its colonisation by foreigners (“Lebs” and “Wogs”): hence the rhetoric of “ethnic cleansing” rather than simple gang rivalry.

The infamous text message says it all: “Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the shire get down to North Cronulla to support the leb and wog bashing day ...”

These symbolic acts and statements reveal a truth that dare not speak its name in the current debate: that an ethnic hierarchy of belonging persists in this country long after the demise of the White Australia policy. It is articulated in the division between “Aussies” (or “Skips”) and “Lebs” and “Wogs” (I omit for the moment, the Asian dimension of the issue). I recall this vocabulary growing up in Brisbane in the 1970s and 1980s. Friends whose parents had emigrated from Greece long before we were born referred to themselves as “Greek” (never “Greek-Australians” or “Australians”). Those of Anglo-descent were “Australians”. Paul Sheehan uses the same language in his article on the background to the pogrom in the Sydney Morning Herald on December 17.

That division has endured, but we should not be surprised. As Anthony Smith (London School of Economics) observes in his book, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (1986), even nation-states based on territoriality (like most states in Western Europe and the Americas, as well as Australia and New Zealand) rather than ethnicity (like most central and Eastern European nations) contain an ethnic core because no nation can exist without historical myths. Mythic memory comprises stories of what “we” did and suffered, and it is borne by ethnic groups, not abstractions like “society”.

Despite the acknowledgement of Indigenous peoples as the “first Australians”, the majority of non-Indigenous Australians has come to understand that authentic “Australian-ness” inheres in those descended from Anglo-Celtic settlers and those who have shed blood defending the country. They are the first people to whom the word “Australian” referred, and they have died in their tens of thousands in its name. The incessant invocation of Australian military history and the reiteration of the sacred lexicon of sacrifice in our public life are designed to reaffirm that core Australian ethnic memory and definition. The cultural dominance of the core ethnicity is what makes a nation a nation.

But why are Australians of Muslim Lebanese descent the despised “other”, and why now? The reasons are complex, certainly more complex than pointing to the lawless hill tribes of northern Lebanon. Part of the answer lies in the local reaction to the geopolitical situation since the 9-11 and Bali attacks. In their wake, a blatant exercise of cultural exclusion has gone on against Australian Muslims and Arabs by the media commentariat.

Here is Piers Akerman in The Daily Telegraph on September 13, 2001: “How, for example, do Muslim residents in Australia differ in their views from those of the Taliban or others capable of ordering these atrocities?” This statement not only links all Australian Muslims in Australia, it also de-nationalises them: these people are not Australians, they are only “residents in Australia”. This kind of statement used to be made of Jews. Akerman should know better; his father fled pogroms in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, he told me when we spoke about his article on the phone.

He also mentioned how awful it was that these Lebanese youths “out west” leered at “our girls”. Once again, some historical background is a useful antidote to this kind of primal reaction to ethnic diversity. Anxiety about “racial defilement” was a staple of German rightwing rhetoric, as it was in the American South under Jim Crow. As is so often the case, the female body - covering it and uncovering it, having access it - is a bone of contention in ill-tempered arguments about national identity.

Given the likes of Akerman, it is not surprising that many Muslim Lebanese Australians feel alienated from mainstream culture. Not a week passes when some talk-back jock calls for them to profess their loyalty to the country. In some cases, plainly, the message has been internalised: we Lebanese Muslim youths are indeed foreigners here.

I don’t pretend to have the answers to the challenges of reconciling multiculturalism with national identity. But if we are to begin to generate some, we need to resist the temptation to indulge in group-think clichés about “racist White Australians” and “lawless Arabs”. Instead, we need to reflect on the dilemmas of fashioning a civic culture, indeed “a nation”, with very different people from all over the world.

Given the persistence of an ethnic hierarchy, it is not as simple as asking everyone to play by the rules. After all, even if you do, as Christian Lebanese have in reaching the top of sport, business, politics, and science (names mentioned are Steve Bracks, Nick Shehadie, Marie Bashir), you are deemed a “good Australian” - for a “Leb” (see Gerard Henderson, Sydney Morning Herald, December 13).