I’m insecure

I WAS listening to a new album by a rapper called Common the other day. He’s heavily into black consciousness, in the tradition of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye, and he’s rhyming away about the odds stacked against black Americans from the word go. The song is building up in its anger and sense of injustice and I’m finding myself waiting for him to say something like “Al Qa’eda never called me nigger”.

But he doesn’t, of course.

“No Vietcong ever called me nigger” was heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali’s great declaration of the 1960s as he refused to be conscripted to fight in Vietnam, was sentenced to five years’ jail (a conviction eventually overturned on a technicality) and stripped of his world title.

Imagine the repercussions of a similar statement today, as once again the world has been ideologically divided (by Donald Rumsfeld amongst others) between those for and against the American way.

Suggest in public that Osama bin Laden ain’t such a bad guy in the United States of Australia and you’d come under surveillance for a start. If you’re a Muslim, expect to be carted off by the federal police and held for up to 14 days without charge. Or placed for 12 months under the kind of freeze imposed on Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. Or face seven years’ jail for encouraging an enemy.

If you hold dual citizenship, you could be deported to a country you may not have been in since you were a baby. And if you go away on holiday, you may not be allowed back. (And let’s not hear that having two citizenships is unpatriotic. The citizenship of some countries, like Britain, sticks to you for life.)

See the existing laws in action against anti-war activist Scott Parkin, who was deported back to the United States last month after being deemed a threat to national security by ASIO.

And consider that anti-terrorism measures employ the same methods as the terrorists themselves: the chief weapon is not so much the exercising of the counter-terrorism laws but the implied threat of them.

Fantastic, many will be exclaiming, if that’s the case. If Australia can deter would-be terrorists by hanging this fear over them, that’s great.

But what about the effect of fear on people who aren’t potential terrorists? The public discourse in this country is weakened enough by a regular diet of crap TV, home improvement and indifference. Self-censorship would be crippling.

The route to tyranny is incremental. It starts with liberties being raked back in small portions — for convenience, for public safety, for the public good.

Putting the case for the public good in The Australian on October 12, Janet Albrechtsen wrote:

“Australia is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian state. Or so say those who apparently know best when it comes to interpreting our new anti-terrorism laws. As the media keep reminding us, the lawyers came out in force to oppose these new laws. And the lawyers should know best.

“As it turns out, those responsible for the safety of Australians — the federal Government and every state and territory government — agreed that we need stronger anti-terrorism laws. And now that the dust has settled on that decision, it’s worth throwing the spotlight on these lawyers who pretend to know better … Who are they? Let’s start with the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. Its website, which lists the executive committee and the general committee, includes former Labor candidates, former Democrat candidates, former Whitlamites, unionists, more unionists, recipients of union prizes, proteges of Labor academics. And so the list goes on.”

Call me suspect, but I don’t think political allegiances disqualifies anyone from putting a case for the preservation of democratic freedoms and legal traditions. And opposition to a tightening of national security laws comes from across the spectrum, including from within the federal government.

Looking outside Australian commentary on the issue, Harpers Magazine editor Lewis Lapham evoked the ripple effect of high security in a speech about the debasing of democratic culture in the United States (made in May but rebroadcast on Radio National [Make-believe democracy: TT link to Radio Nat] on October 18): “I think under the pressures of the last, say, 50-odd years, which is when we begin to build the National Security State after the victory of World War II, we become more and more like our enemy, the Russians,” Lapham said.

“People get more afraid to speak their minds, to laugh out loud, to laugh at themselves. The humour, if you read back through Harpers Magazine — which is 150 years old and occasionally we do anthologies, where I read back through the writing of past years and you can see that a sense of humour that shows up in the ’20s and in the ’30s, even in the ’40s, begins to change. And the voice becomes more frightened, not as willing to laugh at itself, not as generous. The jokes used to be the have-nots making the jokes about the haves, and now the jokes are the haves making fun of the have-nots as a paltry form of satire.”

White rapper Eminem took the Osama challenge: he dressed up as Osama bin Laden in a video clip he made in 2002. But this was clowning pure and simple, without a political intent other than to be irritating. It was look how cheeky I can be — a rebellious gesture with no content, like the revival of the Che Guevara t-shirt. (Dunno who Che is, but he sure is
good-looking.) It bought Eminem invaluable free media exposure for his new album and boosted his bad-boy standing with his fans. But I get the feeling that nobody in the Department of Homeland Security lost sleep over the possibility of Eminem as a promoter of the terrorist cause.

If our black rapper Common had done the same thing, it would immediately raise the spectre of African-Americans politicised by Islam. How much harder would it be to keep the US forces up to strength in Iraq if others started pulling a Muhammad Ali?

Finally,

IS Australia becoming a security state? Have a listen to the language being used in public discussions these days and we’re certainly talking the talk. Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott had an interesting throwaway line as he was discussing bird flu on ABC Radio on October 18: “Plainly this is not a Government which is going to take risks with the health of the Australian people,” Mr Abbott said.

“This is a Government which takes national security seriously and that’s not just national security against terrorism, it is national security against all forms of threat, including biological threat.”