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Know your enemy

By John Woodley - posted Thursday, 28 June 2007


Social instability often provides fertile ground for the development of conspiracy theories. Historical examples abound, and the growth of Fascism in the 1930s is an outstanding example.

The confusion, social and economic disruption and feeling of helplessness experienced by many in Europe led them to abandon the experiment in democracy in many nations and to opt, instead, to follow those strong leaders who promised to lead them out of the mire of the Great Depression.

Leaders such as Adolph Hitler provided not only a way out of unemployment and economic depression by arming the nation for war, but also, enemies to blame for all the nations woes. Hitler’s “enemies” included the Communists, the nations’ leaders who had surrendered at the end of the Great War, those who were not of pure Aryan blood and, above all, the Jews.

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In Australia, where the Depression also was causing great social division and hardship, John Thomas Lang, the Premier of New South Wales during the 1930s, promised to end unemployment by adopting an extensive program of public works and other kinds of support for the poor and disadvantaged. However, he was seen by the conservative establishment as a left-leaning, “monster of wickedness, hell-bent on the destruction of all private property and public honour”.

Those who felt threatened by his policies banded together in an organisation known as the New Guard, a quasi-military, quasi-secret band of “right thinking” young men from the wealthier suburbs sworn to preserve the country from “Langism”.

The point is that all conspiracy theories depend on the identification of an enemy as the threat around which the conspiracy revolves. Indeed, many political and religious movements and individuals are able to define themselves only by contrast with an enemy.

They seem unable to describe adequately what they are for, until they have identified those ideas and people or organisations they are against. Often the description of the enemy they oppose and fear is more a creation of their need for an enemy than a description of reality. Without an enemy to threaten those they want to control and influence by their particular conspiracy theory, such movements lose much of their potency. However, once an enemy has been identified, vilification, brutalisation and then elimination of the enemy becomes possible.

It is not necessary for the enemy to be the actual cause of the frustration people feel, but it is important that the enemy can be identified as the “other”. An example of how this works, in recent years in Australian politics, has been the Pauline Hanson phenomenon, although she certainly was not the first to use the strategy.

It was not only Jack Lang in the 1930s who became the focus for the anger of many people. After World War II, many political and religious movements, including in Australia, used the notion of the enemy as an effective tool in campaigning. Some will remember the “reds under the bed” scares from the 1950s up until the 1980s and 1990s and the demise of Soviet Communism.

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The threat of Communism was linked also to the various uprisings in Asia during this period, so that Australia became involved in wars in Korea, Malaya and Vietnam. In many political campaigns the threat of the “Yellow Peril” as part of the Communist plan for world domination was used as an effective political strategy. The paranoia thus created was effective in maintaining cross-party support for such policies as “The White Australia” policy.

In Queensland, from the 1960s through to the 1980s, the tenuous link made between Communism and the Labor Party by successive National (formerly Country Party) and Liberal Party Coalition governments was an effective tool to keep the Labor Party out of government for many years. Of course, internal “warfare” within the Labor Party and the labour movement generally, and a sophisticated gerrymander helped.

In 1989, following the Fitzgerald Inquiry into political and police corruption, the Goss Labor government was elected. Its election followed the sacking of Sir Joh Bjelke Petersen as premier and subsequent unrest within the National-Liberal Party Coalition. Sir Joh had, for many years, made effective use of the notion of the enemy as a political tool in many election campaigns. It was not only the Labor Party that was the target, but any one who opposed him.

In 1976 a group of clergy, members of various religious orders and other Christians, formed an organisation known as “Concerned Christians” to support oppressed minorities in Queensland and in particular Aborigines. Subsequently, some clergy were described in the parliament as “corrupt clergy” and “communists”. Even the Queensland Moderator of the Uniting Church at the time, the late Reverend Roly Busch, was accused of being a “communist” because of his support for the Aboriginal communities at Aurukun and Mornington Island.

During the months leading up to the 1989 election campaign, a religious organisation based in Toowoomba began to issue professionally produced literature and paid for advertisements in major newspapers. The Logos Foundation on its own admission spent thousands of dollars trying to convince the electorate that the findings of the Fitzgerald Inquiry were not the real issue of the election but that there was another enemy to be feared.

The Foundation’s efforts were a thinly disguised attempt to gain support for the Coalition government. Through newspaper advertisements and sophisticated direct mailing the Logos Foundation tried to redefine the agenda for the election by raising the spectre of what they said was the “real enemy”:

Homosexual lobbies, prostitution, pornography, gambling, organised crime and other vested interests are making a power play for the government of this State.

Other examples of the creation of an enemy in order to engage in religious-political “warfare” are the activities of pressure groups within the churches in Australia. The Logos Foundation has been mentioned, but long before they came on the scene, there was the League of Rights and its various affiliates. In recent years the work begun by the Logos Foundation has been taken over by the Australian Christian Lobby, also known as the Christian Coalition.

So, there are a number of classic strategies which are employed to create an enemy: these include focusing on little-known, small minority groups. When people come to know personally those identified as the enemy, this reduces significantly the potency of the strategy. It is important that the enemy does not have a human face. It is also important that the enemy is encountered only rarely by those one wants to convince there is a threat “out there”.

If an enemy is encountered regularly it is counter-productive, not only because the enemy becomes more “human”, but because the enemy may be seen to be present in overwhelming numbers and so incapable of defeat.

The enemy is always described as an outsider who has invaded “our territory”. One does not allow co-existence with an enemy because, to do so, would run the risk of infecting “our people”. There is a war to be engaged in which the only acceptable result is the elimination of the enemy. It is possible and necessary to accuse the enemy all kinds of evil and perverse practices and as a scourge of all that is good in “our society”.

Today, the “war on terror” creates such a climate of paranoia that it is possible to link all sorts of perceived threats to minority groups within society. In such a climate, the danger of distortion and misinformation makes it much more likely for great injustice to be perpetrated against minorities.

The most insidious conspiracy theory I have encountered in recent times is based on aberrant Christian theological teaching about the return of Jesus Christ to the earth. It is known as Christian Zionism, and it is particularly wide-spread in the USA. This is a formerly marginal theology of the second coming of Jesus and the end of the world, which has become mainstream within many of the churches in the USA, and has influenced the political agenda of President Bush’s administration.

Christian Zionism supports the continued existence of Israel as the Jewish homeland within Palestine, not for the sake of the Jews, but as one of the preconditions for the return of Jesus Christ to the earth. It also supports the rebuilding of a Jewish temple on its original site; the restitution of the sacrificial system of ancient Judaism; the expansion of Israel’s borders; and continued conflict in the Middle East as a precursor to the final battle of Armageddon and the end of the world.

Of course, there is a convenient escape clause in the theology of these Christians, which they call the Rapture. According to this teaching “true” Christians will escape the terrible suffering of Armageddon by being transferred from earth into heaven before the worst suffering takes place.

This theology is prominent in the agenda of the American Religious Right and at the last election their support was critical to Bush’s re-election. They saw Bush as the one candidate whose political agenda most closely paralleled their own theological-political position.

Of course, in order to continue the conflict in the Middle East, the identification of an enemy is critical. For the Christian Zionists, Islam fulfils this role perfectly, but human rights abuses by Israel are denied and the existence and suffering of Palestinian Christians ignored.

While the teaching of Christian Zionism is much more influential in the USA than in Australia, the friendship of John Howard with George Bush means that this teaching has affected the political agenda of our nation and involved us in the appalling wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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About the Author

Rev John Woodley is a Uniting Church minister who served as a Senator (for the Australian Democrats) from 1993 to 2001. Since resigning from the Senate, John has been active in the Uniting Church's Queensland Centre for Social Justice.

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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