A man — later described with those inevitable words “loner” and “kept to himself” — kills a pro-EU British Labour MP, allegedly yelling “Britain first” as he stabs and shoots her repeatedly. The focus is immediately on his mental health — after all, he has a well-recorded history of mental health problems.
If he’d shouted “Allahu Akbar” or claimed allegiance to Islamic State, however, we’d be seeing very different coverage of the murder of Jo Cox — of the latest IS atrocity, inevitably “striking at the very heart of rural England”. The media aren’t quite as ready to talk about terrorism when it’s a white man involved in acts of political violence. For many in the media, white men, despite being the primary perpetrators of violence in Western countries, despite being identified as the current greatest terrorist threat in the United States, despite the long history of left-wing and nationalist political violence up until the 1980s in Europe, don’t do terrorism.
There is a definite politics of labelling at work in all this, because the way we name things is critical to how we frame events and the narratives that ensue. Like those forms of magic in which knowing the “real name” of an object or animal could bestow power over it, labelling is about control. Barack Obama this week criticised Republicans who complain that he doesn’t use the term “radical Islam” about terrorism. My colleague Helen Razer accurately noted the demand for labelling the Orlando massacre as a “hate crime” raises serious issues. The right in Australia perpetually complains that the left fails to talk enough about the failings of Islam and its connections to terrorism.
Our obsession with labelling has real-world consequences. In a radio discussion I had with Wendy Harmer this morning, a Muslim talk-back caller explained that he had heard about the murder of Jo Cox last night and, before further details of her murderer came to light, he was praying it wasn’t a Muslim perpetrator, because it would lead yet again to verbal and perhaps physical attacks on Muslims, including his own family. And obsessing over labelling can also lead all of us — no matter what political orientation — to ignore the most important thing, the lives lost to violence.
It’s not merely labelling that flows through into the real world. Other words do, too. The rhetoric of politics isn’t only rhetorical — tone matters in political debate; it can shape how people feel, it can legitimise or delegitimise, humanise or dehumanise participants. In the aftermath of Cox’s murder, this is being recognised even in a conservative outlet like The Spectator (the quality UK publication, not the dreadful Australian knock-off).
Nearly all of us involved in public debate are guilty of this — every time we play the person and not the ball, every time we impute sinister motives to those we criticise, every time we strain for rhetorical effect, reach for ever more “cut-through” in an increasingly unviable media industry, to get those clicks, to go viral.
The broad left can be guilty, too: “calling out” racism in opponents is often entirely legitimate, identifying the racism that underpins the position of powerful institutions can serve to illuminate and inform. But it also often uses the claim of racism, or some other expression of identity politics, simply as a means of shutting down debate and delegitimising opponents, regardless of any actual bigotry on their part.
But when deployed by rather than against the powerful, the rhetoric of delegitimisation becomes more dangerous than a mere threat to free speech and meaningful debate. The violent, bigoted rhetoric of Donald Trump is echoed and amplified in the anger and aggression of his supporters and his rallies, where death threats and threats of violence against pretty much everyone outside the Trumposphere are common. What Trump has tapped into is the inchoate rage of white Americans, particularly white American men, who feel dispossessed and disoriented by a third of century of neoliberal economics, Republican promises to fix things that never deliver, and social change that has empowered other communities — women, African-Americans, Latinos and LGBTQ people — and thus is seen as disempowering of “traditional” white males. They’ve lost their jobs, they’ve lost their incomes, they’ve lost their social status, and they’re ready to back someone who promises to magically restore those.
Trump’s self-anointed status as an outsider — his opponent, Hillary Clinton, was an honoured guest at Trump’s third wedding in 2005 — is crucial to tapping into that anger, because it must be directed at an unaccountable elite that is responsible for those social and economic changes. That’s not to suggest there aren’t powerful elites who strongly influence public policy — large corporations, the politicians they fund, the media that acts as their cheerleaders. But the concept of “unaccountable elites” is a staple of right-wing rhetoric, an implicit assertion that there’s a conspiracy of powerful interests at work against “ordinary people” (read: white heterosexual Christian people). But note that Trump is no traditional right winger: his position on trade and industry policy wouldn’t be out of place on the hard left — he is vehemently opposed to free trade deals and wants to compel large American companies to “onshore” jobs. His stance on immigration is also a traditional left one, albeit at odds with the cultural left.
And above all, the anger that should be directed at the corporate, governing and media elite in the US has been redirected by Trump downward at the marginalised — immigrants, Muslims, women (he directs it at the media, yes — but only those that subject him to scrutiny. In fact, as a reality TV show star, Trump himself is part of the media elite).
Trump’s message is similar to the appeal of regional independents in Australia in recent years, like Pauline Hanson, who also directed white rage downward at immigrants. Trump’s economic message is now echoed here by a very different politician to Hanson, Nick Xenophon, who offers a strong reaction against neoliberalism in favouring of overt interventionism, conveying a sense to the disempowered and the economically marginalised that the protective, protectionist world of the 1960s that many of them grew up in can be restored.
Similar themes run through the Brexit campaign, where older, and more poorly educated, voters and those engaged in manual labour occupations are the ones more likely to want to leave the EU. That campaign has successfully exploited concerns about immigration — and that fact that the Cameron government promised to dramatically reduce the level of immigration to the UK and has been unable to do so because of immigration from EU countries. The campaign has also associated the “Remain” camp with British elites — ludicrously, given a key Brexit leader, Boris Johnson, went to Eton and Oxford like his (erstwhile) good friend David Cameron. In fact Brexiteer Tories and other Leave campaigners have combined elites and immigration into a single narrative in which a “metropolitan political elite” has “betrayed” and “abandoned” ordinary Britons as immigrants flood the country. Arch-Brexiteer Nigel Farage has even suggested violence is “the next step” if ordinary Britons feel the country has lost control of its borders and don’t get their way by voting.
Like Trump’s fake status as an outsider Boris Johnson’s pose as a foe of an out-of-touch elite serves to disguise that their rhetoric of delegitimisation isn’t aimed upward at the powerful but ultimately downward at the marginalised who have, somehow, been able to displace white middle-aged lower income people from their privileged status in US and UK society.
That some people — whether because they have mental health problems or simply because they have been stoked to uncontrollable anger — decide that violence is indeed the “next step” to deal with what they’ve been constantly told is an elite conspiracy against them reflects yet again that labelling, and language, are critical. If it’s accepted that the message of IS — for adherents to attack non-believers wherever they may be — delivered via social media has the capacity to influence some individuals, then how much more so a message that is given mainstream media coverage and wears the friendly face of high-profile political figures?
Delegitimising rhetoric in Australia is hardly absent from our political discourse. Even ignoring Pauline Hanson, who may very well secure a Senate spot on July 2, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has overtly demonised refugees; some Coalition MPs peddle profoundly Islamophobic and homophobic claims unchallenged by their party leaders. Islamophobic and anti-racist protesters clash violently on the streets of Melbourne. It’s irresponsible to suggest we’re likely to see similar events here to the ones recently seen overseas. But it’s hard not to see the murder of Jo Cox and think, there but for the grace of god …
Yes, Bernard, it’s true. One of the ironic double standards allocated to Muslims is the centrality of religion to their lives. If they say that their faith guides their actions, they are ‘fanatics’ but anything from traffic offenses to murder is attributed to Islam. It seems to be the one element, no matter how incidental that negates all others. For example, a young (non-Muslim) man who was in possession of an arsenal and an intention to disrupt a Gay Pride march in California had been detained. No, I didn’t keep the link but it was a small incidental para in The Guardian a couple of days ago. Not Muslim, so no panic inducing story there.
As is usual in these anguished Crikey diatribes – whether it be Keane or Rundle or whomever else – the analysis always descends into a pseudo-Marxist critique of the imperialist neo-colonialist oppression of racial, gender and even sexuality minorities by white hetero male Europeans. There seems to be a congenital inability or unwillingness to ever ask that – apparently radical question – who benefits? (I’ll spare you the Latin). When a Muslim man attacks a club full of gays, who benefits? When a white man kills a popular Brexit opponent, who benefits? In the first instance, clearly it is those trying to demonise Muslims. In the second, it is clearly those wishing to discredit and cast a pall over Brexit campaign.
I know it is terribly fashionable to dismiss overarching conspiracy theories as stupid and lunatic but with 50% of the world’s resources now in the hands of less than 80 people I’m past caring what people call me. The conspiracy is real, it is tyrannical and it is coming to you. Buffoons like Trump are easily manipulated into demonising Muslims but that is because they have fallen into a trap set by the elites running the show. Demonising Muslims is good for the wars in the middle east in pursuance of support for oil and other treasure there and in Central Asia (and much else besides). That an apparently mentally unstable man kills should likewise be seen – not as Keane imagines as a disturbed expression of old white male frustration – but rather as calculated strategy and tactics by those very same elites in pursuance of their agenda. Apart from completely gutting the middle classes of the world which they have almost achieved in American and Europe – that agenda is to turn the world into a series of undemocratic authoritarian entities freed from the democratic restraints of national parliaments – and the Eurozone is the most important of these.
It is said somewhere in the Bible that Satan’s greatest achievement was convincing mankind that he doesn’t exist. The elite’s greatest achievement is convincing humanity that there is no overarching conspiracy. So I’m not swallowing the meta-lie any more – and I don’t care how indignant about white male privilege (excuse me while I laugh under my unemployed breath!) Bernard Keane feels obliged to get.
And incidentally, the identification of white men as “the current greatest terrorist threat in the United States” upon which your world view is here premised is a claim made by the New American Foundation which is a George Soros front, so completely worthless unless used as confirmation of my argument that the elite conspiracy – of which Soros is such a key part (he is in charge of what Lenin long ago identified as the job of controlling the opposition). Just thinking about it, maybe he’s already funding Crikey and I just haven’t caught up!
I hope that this is an arch attempt at humour, Mr Oxenford, because, if not, you are one sick puppy.
The tired and predictable ad hominen response from the troll.
The worst thing about this is no party has a better idea than ban immigrants or build a wall or whatever. Here the politicians puff up to look tough as they send people off to death camps, assuring us that this will fix everything.
Their concerns should not be dismissed. But in the mainstream all we have is Protect The Borders. The left vacated the field, retreating to the moral high ground and digging in.
George Megalogenis’s latest book goes into our love-hate relationship with immigration and its like to our economy and society and, what it means for our now and our future. It’s worth a read.
Better still, get the labelling correct rather than resorting to these grotesquely incorrect social and political theories.
These killers, one and all, are barking mad. The label that needs to be appended to them is ‘Barking Mad’. Not terrorist, or white supremacists, just another barking maddie killed someone over some perceived or real slight that they just didn’t have the mental resources to overcome, and that led to its inevitable outcome, barking madness – killing people – and mouthing ridiculous conspiracy theories whether they be religious or political or social or economic.
A sane person does not respond to difficulty by murdering other people. Get it right and label them correctly, and don’t give them the benefit of some legitimacy by suggesting they are motivated by a political/religious/social/economic agenda. Call them what they are, Barking Mad!
Mr Oxenford, it woudl be better if you spent your time checking out who does the bulk of the killing, 90% plus, white males. The theory of the elites falls down on the basis that everybody identifies the ‘elites’ as someone other than themselves, even if they are multi-billionaires. ‘The elites’ is a group without any members, and therefore no conspiracy can be made if they have no members.
Unstable individuals, wound up, just waiting for “justification”, from whatever source – religion is no barrier.
….. Does anyone dwell on the motivational religion of white supremacists such as the Klan and their ilk? Or doesn’t their sort of terror count?
Not as much.
For they be some significant proportion of us.
Unlike those dastardly ‘them’.
Them bashing (of the downward variety) sells media, buys votes, engages us emotionally and protects the other ‘them’. The upward ‘them’.
Of course the elite has members that can be named! Start with the Rothschilds and then move onto the other 13 families owning most of the world’s resources: the Rockefellers, the Astors, Duponts, Windsors, Warburgs etc. These families count their wealth in the tens of trillions of dollars – perhaps more for the Rothschilds. If that’s not an elite what is? Of course this tight knit group can’t do it alone and they have structures which bring in other families and individuals of lesser but still staggeringly immense wealth to us. They use a variety of secretive groups the so called 300 group for example; and have their regular planning sessions at their Bilderberg meetings.
Still other lesser actors who do their work for them work for the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations (take time to listen to David Rockefeller’s infamous 1991 statement thanking the heads of the US media for keeping quiet about the globalist agenda for the previous 40 years). Supporting their agenda is ultimately the worldwide network of secret societies preeminently the Freemasons, whose nefarious activities throughout history are now well documented. Surely this stuff is pretty widely known by now?
As to the white terrorist stats. I hesitate to say this because the average Crikey reader is never challenged by Crikey to look much beyond what we are told in regard to the facts of particular events. But the simple fact is that many of the gun massacre events in the US by lone gunmen – Sandy Hook, Charleston and even, yes, the most recent Florida shooting – are hoaxes – or mass manipulation ‘pyops’ in the lingo – the purpose of which is to traumatize the public into demanding the US government take action to remove guns from ordinary citizens. It would be no good having lots of blacks or Muslims being the shooters in these hoaxes as that would just galvanise the majority white population into wanting to hold onto their guns (though as I said in my previous post there are obviously elite agenda benefits for instilling fear of Muslims into the majority population and the occasional Muslim terror killing spree doesn’t go astray).
If you are confident that this is not the case just take some real time to investigate the matter for yourself. The phoniness of the events are actually quite easy to recognise once you have come to terms with the fact that they are mass psyop manipulations of the public mind. Some of the formerly mainstream writers who are now pointing out that the news of such events is fabricated include Naomi Wolf, Pulitzer nominee Jon Rappaport, Emeritus Professor James Fetzer, and former Wall Street journal editor Dr Paul Craig Roberts. Think of how bad – how traumatised – you felt when the Sandy Hook massacre occurred and now go and read what Professor Fetzer amongst hundreds of others do to show that no little children were killed. The experience will make you happy to know the truth and then angry to know how you have been manipulated. give it a go – what is there to be afraid of?
I actually agree with you that the best description of these ‘terrorists’ – be they Muslim or white loner – is barking mad. Because it is precisely the barking mad who are most easily manipulated by those in charge. Don’t believe me? Look up Tavistock Institute, the Monarch Mind Control program, and the CIA’s MKUltra program. The techniques of manipulation of weak minded individuals is a part of the world we have all grown up in for the last 100 years.