Michael Vincent
Divide and conquer — it's a favourite tactic of any ruling class, and there are few more effective tools than racism for creating divisions among the oppressed. Politicians have tried to convince us that Australia has put its racist history behind it, but their thinly veiled racist policies, praised by the mass media, are helping to fuel the ugly rise of racism among the Australian population, as seen in the racist assaults on Muslim and Arab Australians on Cronulla beach in December.
The rich elite in Australia are seasoned experts at using racism as a means by which to divide people, and to scapegoat minorities for the social problems that capitalism creates, such as unemployment and crime.
Indigenous Australians have borne the brunt of this policy since European settlement and this oppression and persecution continues today. Aboriginal people have, on average, a life expectancy 20 years shorter than non-Indigenous Australians; and while Indigenous people make up only 2% of the Australian population, they account for 20% of the prison population and for 18% of all deaths in police custody.
In recent years, the ruling class in Australia has found it useful to whip up racism and fear towards Arabs and Muslims, reflected in the bipartisan support for the policy of mandatory detention of refugees, the so-called "war on terror" and new federal and state terror laws that are aimed at criminalising dissent.
The government needs to dehumanise Arabs and Muslims in order to sell its foreign policy to the Australian population. For instance, we needed to invade Iraq as part of the "war on terror": it had nothing to do with Australian corporate interests in getting a share of Iraq's resources, the government insists.
The corporate elite has a vested interest in perpetuating racism because they are literally making a killing by exploiting the largely non-white peoples of the Third World, from the participation in the US-led plunder of Iraq to the theft of East Timor's oil.
In order to justify such brutality and prevent the Australian people from developing solidarity with those oppressed peoples our government is exploiting, the ruling elite has to convince the Australian people that these people, their beliefs and their culture are "alien", and their lives worthless.
Racism and nationalism are also being used by the Howard government as a smokescreen for severe attacks on the basic democratic rights and working rights of the Australian population. The ASIO raids on the homes of Muslim families late last year were carefully timed to take attention away from the passing of the government's highly unpopular Work Choices legislation and attacks on our civil rights.
By convincing working people in Australia that the Islamic and Middle Eastern communities are "the enemy within", the corporate elite can prevent people from seeing who their real enemy is, assisting the drive to squeeze more profits out of workers and take away their right to protest government policy.
Activists in Resistance have been part of the struggle against racism in Australia, from organising the anti-Pauline Hanson high-school walk-outs in the late 1990s to helping lead the anti-racism protests that were organised around the country in the aftermath of the Cronulla race attacks. We're committed to fighting not only the racism being generated by the government and its media mouthpieces: but also the global system of oppression and exploitation that needs racist ideology to prop it up.
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, February 8, 2006.
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