ed316
11-11-2005, 03:57 PM
Conspiracy theorists fuel fire
12nov05
WESTERN intelligence agencies studying the terrorist phenomenon are increasingly coming to the view that what tranforms a young man into a terrorist almost always turns on a crisis of identity.
An alarming number of terrorists are made into terrorists during time spent in the West. As we saw in the London bombings, and are perhaps now seeing in Australia, this can come to second or even third-generation immigrants who feel insecure in the identity of their nation of citizenship, but also probably insecure in the identity of their ancestors' homeland.
There is really no common denominator among terrorists. They can be rich or poor, highly religious or not religious at all. The only common factor among many seems to be a crisis of identity that then runs into an identity entrepreneur, in the shape of a charismatic religious teacher or cell leader.
The identity entrepreneur solves the identity crisis for the young men. He instructs them on their identity. They are warriors in jihad, avenging the countless crimes of the infidel against Islam.
This is the sense in which the riots in France can have a connection with terrorism. It is not that the rioters have adopted terrorist ideology. But their nihilistic rage bespeaks a crisis of identity that is bound to find some of them falling into the hands of the identity entrepreneurs of radical jihad.
In Australia these past two weeks have revealed something of our identity. We have a sober and capable leadership, both in the Government and in the Opposition, and among the state premiers. We have strong and capable police and national security institutions which can take action and take it lawfully, with swiftness and effect.
On Tuesday, November 1, senior cabinet ministers convened for a hastily called meeting of the national security committee of cabinet. Most there did not know what the meeting was for and heard for the first time the disturbing intelligence on terrorist plans in Australia. It was a deliberately restricted meeting, with fewer officials than normal in attendance. Senior ministers were shocked and startled by what they were told. The NSC discussed the proposed legal amendments with the relevant legal experts. The next steps almost dictated themselves: brief Opposition leader Kim Beazley and the relevant premiers, some of whom already knew some of the information from their own police.
What happened next was incredible. Half the media, especially the ABC, and a good portion of the intellectual class, as well as the minor parties, immediately decided that John Howard had concocted the whole thing as a stunt to distract attention from the industrial relations legislation. This is almost too insane to admit to the mainstream of discussion but it was almost the orthodoxy last week.
There was Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report, full of dark innuendo about this flow of security announcements confusing people and causing them unnecessary alarm. Media Watch, consistently among the most idiotic of ABC current affairs television shows, was even lambasting sections of the media for suggesting there would be raids soon. Lateline, after the raids, was positively seething that some journalists not employed by the ABC apparently had both better sources and better judgment about what might happen.
But the minor parties took the lunacy the farthest, with the Greens' Bob Brown as ever seeing dark, satanic forces behind Howard's every move.
This column has sometimes argued that the Democrats are the more rational third-party alternative to the Greens. But Democrats leader Lyn Allison, leading the party into oblivion, took the irrational to a kind of X-Files meta-parody by wondering aloud, after the raids, whether the Prime Minister could not have rung the state police commissioners and asked whether there was not some raid or the other that could be conducted to justify the legislative amendments.
What has all this to do with the vexed question of identity? It interacts with identity at several levels. First, this undergraduate paranoia and bizarre desire to see the world as an endless series of conspiracies naturally reinforces the conspiratorial world view of the radical Islamists.
Who can blame a radical Islamist for interpreting the actions of the Australian state as malign and directed at Muslims, if even the Australian Democrats can apparently interpret the most gravely serious police actions in this light?
In other words, what seems like just normal nonsense and tomfoolery from marginal players in Australian politics feeds into the fantasies and dark paranoia of more disturbed or dangerous players.
This is why political leaders, and media and intellectual leaders too, have a responsibility to act and speak with some restraint.
Of course, restraint often doesn't get the headlines or the time on TV.
Just imagine the incredible mess the Labor Party would be in today if Beazley had taken a Mark Latham-style populist attitude to Howard's initial desire to amend the terrorist legislation. The ALP would be utterly unelectable now.
Yet it's telling, isn't it, that while the press gallery fell in love with Latham, it can barely disguise its ennui about Beazley, its sense that politics must offer the press something more disreputable and therefore absorbing than an honest, sensible grown-up.
The paranoid style in Australian politics has a long history and is mostly associated with the Left. It certainly exists on the Right, but because the Right is less ****e to radicalism, it is much weaker there. But the Left has sought not only to oppose but to delegitimise every Centre-Right government Australia has had.
Robert Menzies, in cahoots with the security services, was believed to have concocted the affair of the KGB defector Vladimir Petrov and his wife in order to keep poor Doc Evatt out of the Lodge. Yet this was truly insane. Petrov, a senior KGB man, defected because he thought he would be killed in the Soviet Union, as was happening to many KGB men at that time. This was all even demonstrated once in a book by Robert Manne, in one of his right-wing phases, before he became the avatar of world revolution.
Malcolm Fraser was of course considered illegitimate because of the dismissal, despite winning three democratic elections. For a time the Left peddled the fantasy that the CIA was behind the dismissal.
And now the Left is busily constructing its fantasy world around Howard, the most moderate and incremental of leaders, transformed into a figure of Nixonian villainy in the conspiratorial mind.
There are three problems with this. It's untrue and cuts no ice with the people. It reinforces darker conspiracy urges in more extreme forces. And it prevents the intellectual and media class from doing the serious job they should be doing for their society.
No doubt it's all Howard's fault. Or perhaps George Bush's.
12nov05
WESTERN intelligence agencies studying the terrorist phenomenon are increasingly coming to the view that what tranforms a young man into a terrorist almost always turns on a crisis of identity.
An alarming number of terrorists are made into terrorists during time spent in the West. As we saw in the London bombings, and are perhaps now seeing in Australia, this can come to second or even third-generation immigrants who feel insecure in the identity of their nation of citizenship, but also probably insecure in the identity of their ancestors' homeland.
There is really no common denominator among terrorists. They can be rich or poor, highly religious or not religious at all. The only common factor among many seems to be a crisis of identity that then runs into an identity entrepreneur, in the shape of a charismatic religious teacher or cell leader.
The identity entrepreneur solves the identity crisis for the young men. He instructs them on their identity. They are warriors in jihad, avenging the countless crimes of the infidel against Islam.
This is the sense in which the riots in France can have a connection with terrorism. It is not that the rioters have adopted terrorist ideology. But their nihilistic rage bespeaks a crisis of identity that is bound to find some of them falling into the hands of the identity entrepreneurs of radical jihad.
In Australia these past two weeks have revealed something of our identity. We have a sober and capable leadership, both in the Government and in the Opposition, and among the state premiers. We have strong and capable police and national security institutions which can take action and take it lawfully, with swiftness and effect.
On Tuesday, November 1, senior cabinet ministers convened for a hastily called meeting of the national security committee of cabinet. Most there did not know what the meeting was for and heard for the first time the disturbing intelligence on terrorist plans in Australia. It was a deliberately restricted meeting, with fewer officials than normal in attendance. Senior ministers were shocked and startled by what they were told. The NSC discussed the proposed legal amendments with the relevant legal experts. The next steps almost dictated themselves: brief Opposition leader Kim Beazley and the relevant premiers, some of whom already knew some of the information from their own police.
What happened next was incredible. Half the media, especially the ABC, and a good portion of the intellectual class, as well as the minor parties, immediately decided that John Howard had concocted the whole thing as a stunt to distract attention from the industrial relations legislation. This is almost too insane to admit to the mainstream of discussion but it was almost the orthodoxy last week.
There was Kerry O'Brien on the 7.30 Report, full of dark innuendo about this flow of security announcements confusing people and causing them unnecessary alarm. Media Watch, consistently among the most idiotic of ABC current affairs television shows, was even lambasting sections of the media for suggesting there would be raids soon. Lateline, after the raids, was positively seething that some journalists not employed by the ABC apparently had both better sources and better judgment about what might happen.
But the minor parties took the lunacy the farthest, with the Greens' Bob Brown as ever seeing dark, satanic forces behind Howard's every move.
This column has sometimes argued that the Democrats are the more rational third-party alternative to the Greens. But Democrats leader Lyn Allison, leading the party into oblivion, took the irrational to a kind of X-Files meta-parody by wondering aloud, after the raids, whether the Prime Minister could not have rung the state police commissioners and asked whether there was not some raid or the other that could be conducted to justify the legislative amendments.
What has all this to do with the vexed question of identity? It interacts with identity at several levels. First, this undergraduate paranoia and bizarre desire to see the world as an endless series of conspiracies naturally reinforces the conspiratorial world view of the radical Islamists.
Who can blame a radical Islamist for interpreting the actions of the Australian state as malign and directed at Muslims, if even the Australian Democrats can apparently interpret the most gravely serious police actions in this light?
In other words, what seems like just normal nonsense and tomfoolery from marginal players in Australian politics feeds into the fantasies and dark paranoia of more disturbed or dangerous players.
This is why political leaders, and media and intellectual leaders too, have a responsibility to act and speak with some restraint.
Of course, restraint often doesn't get the headlines or the time on TV.
Just imagine the incredible mess the Labor Party would be in today if Beazley had taken a Mark Latham-style populist attitude to Howard's initial desire to amend the terrorist legislation. The ALP would be utterly unelectable now.
Yet it's telling, isn't it, that while the press gallery fell in love with Latham, it can barely disguise its ennui about Beazley, its sense that politics must offer the press something more disreputable and therefore absorbing than an honest, sensible grown-up.
The paranoid style in Australian politics has a long history and is mostly associated with the Left. It certainly exists on the Right, but because the Right is less ****e to radicalism, it is much weaker there. But the Left has sought not only to oppose but to delegitimise every Centre-Right government Australia has had.
Robert Menzies, in cahoots with the security services, was believed to have concocted the affair of the KGB defector Vladimir Petrov and his wife in order to keep poor Doc Evatt out of the Lodge. Yet this was truly insane. Petrov, a senior KGB man, defected because he thought he would be killed in the Soviet Union, as was happening to many KGB men at that time. This was all even demonstrated once in a book by Robert Manne, in one of his right-wing phases, before he became the avatar of world revolution.
Malcolm Fraser was of course considered illegitimate because of the dismissal, despite winning three democratic elections. For a time the Left peddled the fantasy that the CIA was behind the dismissal.
And now the Left is busily constructing its fantasy world around Howard, the most moderate and incremental of leaders, transformed into a figure of Nixonian villainy in the conspiratorial mind.
There are three problems with this. It's untrue and cuts no ice with the people. It reinforces darker conspiracy urges in more extreme forces. And it prevents the intellectual and media class from doing the serious job they should be doing for their society.
No doubt it's all Howard's fault. Or perhaps George Bush's.