|
Imaginary enemies
Blaming multiculturalism for our
vulnerability to terrorist attack belongs to Britain's sorry
tradition of xenophobia and misplaced patriotism
Jeremy Seabrook
February 15, 2008
The polemic of
the Rusi report, which declares that Britain is a "soft touch
for terrorists" and claims this is a consequence of "multiculturalism",
has an eerily familiar ring. Is it a last gasp of a decayed
imperialism, a blast of nostalgia for a time when Britain was not a
"fragmenting post-Christian society"; or is it a sign of things to
come, when the whole world will be harmoniously united under the
triumphal values of our most priceless export commodity,
democracy, exemplified by the shining examples of Iraq,
Afghanistan and Kenya?
It is of a piece with a far older
version of the "enemy within": did Margaret Thatcher herself, as
recently as the mid-1980s, not describe sections of the British
trade union movement, especially the leaders of the miners, in those
very terms? This itself was a final outing of the proposition that
the labour movement and its organisers represented a severe threat
to Britain; a threat created by the violence of early industrialism,
and which haunted the ruling classes throughout the 19th and early
part of the 20th centuries.
It is a myth to state that Britain
was ever a nation at one with itself, a proud defender of this or
that set of values. It was riven by violent and ugly class divisions
throughout the industrial era, and those regarded as a menace to the
conduct of the business of the nation comprised a whole class - all
the people coerced by poverty out of a decaying rural way of life
and herded into the raw manufacturing towns and cities of the
industrial revolution. These wayward, estranged and alienated people
seemed always on the verge of rising up and dispossessing the ruling
classes of wealth and power. And this is why, contrary to narratives
of our ancient democracy, the franchise was extended only slowly
through the 19th century, to embrace limited sections of the people
who had some "stake" in society. The poor and the outcast had no
voice in the way the society that sheltered them was run, and the
principal role of the keepers of law and order was to ensure that
they did not, in the absence of participation, take to the streets.
It should, perhaps, be remembered that the last shooting of
industrial demonstrators in Britain took place less than a hundred
years ago, in Tonypandy and Llanelli in South Wales and in
Liverpool.
Class animosity, the unpredictable
power of volatile and restless people (referred to at the time as "the
masses", before these had been transformed into the individuals of
today) was as much feared as the alien values and rancorous
sentiments simmering in the heart of an imagined and impenetrable
underclass in closed communities speaking foreign tongues and
brooding on sombre plots of revenge and destruction. That some
disaffected people are doubtless involved in conspiracies to damage
Britain in pursuit of malign ideals from elsewhere is also not new:
the subversives of the 20th century, too, owed their allegiance to
an idealised elsewhere; and their loyalty to "Moscow" was seen then
as no less inadmissible than the feeling of some Muslims that their
true interests are embodied in an ideology which has replaced the
fallen international solidarities of socialism. It is true that
there is something more intractable in devotion to otherworldly
ideologies rather than to materialistic creeds that at least have
their headquarters on earth, even if these are in foreign capital
cities. The single-minded dedication of the west to the demolition
of secular alternatives and the substitution of ideologies of
transcendence have been a major factor in bringing about the
conditions the Rusi report deplores; and the apocalyptic
millennarianism of certain Islamists was, until very recently, seen
as a highly acceptable alternative to the godless creed of communism.
It seems that continuities between
the disaffected of another age and the alienated of today are more
powerful than the fables of a self-serving security apparatus would
have us believe. Ruling castes must have enemies, and indeed, if
these do not exist, they must fashion them. And this is precisely
what the fulminations of the Rusi report do. What more effective way
of estranging people could be imagined than the urge to "re-establish
a sense of identity", or the admonition to "immigrant communities
that refuse to integrate"? It is of a piece with earlier
pronouncements of the British on those who brought terror to the
former imperial lands; terrorists who became rulers in their turn,
more often than not employing the apparatus of repression inherited
from their colonial masters and instructors.
It is the destiny of dominant elites
to speak constantly of the nation in peril, the threat to our way of
life, our imperishable values and the inadequacy of the means willed
to defend them. How else will they create the sense of urgency and
fear that will provide them with the resources they require to set
up their maladroit (and often ineffective) paraphernalia of
surveillance; fear that results in a serviceable paralysis to unite
people in a desire to turn away the stranger at the gate and to
expel the traitor in our midst? It is an old story. But it is also a
new one with its global inflection. The language deployed by the
luminaries who see security as an industry (just as they see terror
as an ideology) feeds the very phenomenon it is supposed to combat;
since it de-legitimates all dissent, alternatives, other ways of
living and being, and all other human values.
It is not, messieurs, mesdames of
Rusi, the existence of the bogey of multiculturalism that exposes us
to the risk of terror, but efforts to impose a single monolithic and
invented sense of "nationhood", which, if it is weak in relation to
the intensities engendered by other ideologies, must mimic these,
according to Rusi, in order that "we" should prevail. What more
eloquent tribute to enemies than the urge to become as inflexible as
they are?
There are no such easy answers; and
if the combined diplomatic and security experience assembled in this
think-tank (so barren of thoughtfulness) imagines it can forcibly
resurrect a uniform sense of national purpose; it is likely to be
disappointed. This may be great in terms of out-relief for employees
of an expanding security industry, but it has nothing to do with the
safety, or the ability to live together, of all the people of
Britain.
|
