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Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice
THE FAR-RIGHT, EDUCATION AND VIOLENCE AN EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY READER VOLUME IX Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley
‘We have arrived at an historical infection point few believed would be possible in countries such as the United States, which has long claimed the bragging rights as the world’s greatest democracy. The ascendency of the despotic Donald Trump and his administration that excels at grooming the public for an embrace of fascism has sent chills throughout what is left of the civilized world. The Rise of the Far-Right, Education and Violence is a book that offers both a deeply layered and granular understanding of the feral shift to an excremental far-right politics and what it means for the future of the human race while providing important insights into ways to defeat this transnational purge of our humanity.’ —Peter McLaren, Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies, Chapman University and author of Pedagogy of Insurrection ‘In this collection of essays, Peters and Besley examine the global return of national populism, placing it within the broader context of its historical and philosophical origins, and exploring its serious implications for education.’ —Fazal Rizvi, Melbourne Graduate School of Education, The University of Melbourne ‘In their new book, Michael Peters and Tina Besley address the multifaceted contemporary crises of liberal democracy. So-called “neo”-liberalism has created fertile ground for the germination of a panoply of anti-liberalisms, variously classifed as ethnonationalist, racist, sexist, and homophobic. Sometimes these symptoms of social malaise are tied together under the umbrella word “fascist”— in a reminder of the worst of the twentieth century’s anti-liberal horrors. The important question Peters and Besley address in this book is the relationship between these anti-liberalisms and social inequality. The symptoms of fascism may well be proxies for a deep seated disease that goes to the heart of liberalism itself.’ —Mary Kalantzis, Professor, Department of Education, Policy, Organization and Leadership, University of Illinois, USA ‘The indefatigable and ever-creative Michael Peters, with Tina Besley has done it again. Critical times require critical theory that works the dialectic of facts and norms, systems and cultures, traditions and innovations, the global and the local, the big picture and the forensic detail. This book has the best qualities of critical thinking in spades and as such demands the best of us as critical readers and citizens in response.’ —Trevor Hogan, Co-ordinating Editor of Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology, Australia
The Far-Right, Education and Violence
In the last decade the far-right, associated with white nationalism, identitarian politics, and nativist ideologies, has established itself as a major political force in the West, making substantial electoral gains across Europe, the USA, and Latin America, and coalescing with the populist movements of Trump, Brexit, and Boris Johnson’s 2019 election in the UK. This political shift represents a major new political force in the West that has rolled back the liberal internationalism that developed after WWI and shaped world institutions, globalization, and neoliberalism. It has also impacted upon the democracies of the West. Its historical origins date from the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, and Austria from the 1920s. In broad philosophical terms, the movement can be conceived as a reaction against the rationalism and individualism of liberal democratic societies, and a political revolt based on the philosophies of Nietzsche, Darwin, and Bergson that purportedly embraced irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism. This edited collection of essays by Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley, taken from the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory, provides a philosophical discussion of the rise of the far-right and uses it as a canvas to understand the return of fascism, white supremacism, acts of terrorism, and related events, including the refugee crisis, the rise of authoritarian populism, the crisis of international education, and Trump’s ‘end of globalism’. Michael A. Peters, FRSNZ is Distinguished Professor of Education at Beijing Normal University and Emeritus Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory and the Beijing International Review of Education. His interests are in education, philosophy, and social policy, and he is the author of over 100 books, including The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future (2019), Wittgenstein, Education and Rationality (2020), and Wittgenstein: Antifoundationalism, Technoscience and Education (2020). Tina Besley is Distinguished Professor in the Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, University of Auckland. She is Founding President of the Association for Visual Pedagogies (AVP) and Immediate Past President of Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia (PESA). She has published over 12 books and many articles and is deputy editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory, and an associate editor for the Beijing International Review of Education. She works closely with Professor Michael A. Peters and with a wide international network of scholars.
Educational Philosophy and Theory: Editor’s Choice
Series editor: Michael A. Peters, Beijing Normal University, China
The EPAT Editor’s Choice series comprises innovative and influential articles drawn from the Educational Philosophy and Theory journal archives, spanning 50 volumes, from 1969. Each volume in the series represents a selection of important articles that respond to and focus on a particular theme, celebrating and emphasizing the heritage and history of the work, as well as the cutting edge contemporary contributions available. The series creates a rich vertical collection across five decades of seminal scholarship, contextualizing and elevating specific themes, scholars and their work. The EPAT Editor-in- Chief, Michael A. Peters, introduces each volume, the theme, and the work selected. Titles in the series include: Feminist Theory in Diverse Productive Practices An Educational Philosophy and Theory Gender and Sexualities Reader Edited by Liz Jackson and Michael A. Peters The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future An Educational Philosophy and Theory Chinese Educational Philosophy Reader, Volume VII Michael A. Peters Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume VIII Michael A. Peters The Far-Right, Education and Violence An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume IX Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley For more information about the series, please visit www.routledge.com/Educati onal-Philosophy-and-Theory-Editors-Choice/book-series/EPAT
The Far-Right, Education and Violence
An Educational Philosophy and Theory Reader Volume IX
Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley
First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley The right of Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-0-367-56201-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-09678-8 (ebk) Typeset in Galliard by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India
Contents
Previously published chapters Acknowledgement
ix xi
Introduction
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National populism and the rise of the far-right—‘bad Nietzsche rising’ and the ‘fascism in our heads’
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‘The fascism in our heads’: Reich, Fromm, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari—the social pathology of fascism in the twenty-frst century
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The return of fascism: Youth, violence, and nationalism
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The unforeseen: Education and the fowers of sacrifce
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White supremacism: The tragedy of Charlottesville
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Terrorism, trauma, tolerance: Bearing witness to white supremacist attack on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand
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The refugee camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the West
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The refugee crisis and the right to political asylum
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The end of neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarian populism
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10 Trump’s nationalism, ‘the end of globalism’, and ‘the age of patriotism’: ‘The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots’
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11 The crisis of international education
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12 The failure of liberalism and liberal education Index
105 113
Previously published chapters
This edited collection of essays by Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley has been collected from the journal Educational Philosophy and Theory. Together the essays provide a philosophical discussion of the rise of the far-right and uses it as a canvas to understand the return of fascism, white supremacism, acts of terrorism, and related events, including the refugee crisis, the rise of authoritarian populism, the crisis of international education, and Trump’s ‘end of globalism’. Permissions have been granted for the following articles from Educational Philosophy and Theory: Chapter 2, ‘The fascism in our heads’: Reich, Fromm, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari – the social pathology of fascism in the 21st century, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2020.1727403 Chapter 3, The return of fascism: Youth, violence and nationalism, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51:7, 674–678, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1519772 Chapter 4, The Unforeseen: Education and the fowers of sacrifce, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48:6, 545–548, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1054621 Chapter 5, White supremacism: The tragedy of Charlottesville, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49:14, 1309–1312, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2017.1370896 Chapter 6, Terrorism, trauma, tolerance: Bearing witness to white supremacist attack on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 52:2, 109–119, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1602891 Chapter 7, The refugee camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the west, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50:13, 1165–1168, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2017. 1379753 Chapter 8, The Refugee Crisis and The Right to Political Asylum, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47:13–14, 1367–1374, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015. 1100903 Chapter 9, The end of neoliberal globalisation and the rise of authoritarian populism, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50:4, 323–325, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2017.1305720
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Previously published chapters
Chapter 10, Trump’s nationalism, ‘the end of globalism’, and ‘the age of patriotism’: ‘the future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1678447 Chapter 11, The crisis of international education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1663410 Chapter 12, The failure of liberalism and liberal education, Educational Philosophy and Theory, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1675469
Acknowledgement
We would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the support of Katie Peace, our editor and the staff at Taylor and Francis.
Introduction
Far-right extremism has extended its tentacles into all corners of the planet, perpetrating acts of violent extremism and racist attacks. There has been an increase in both hate groups and reported hate crimes in most Western-style democracies. These violent acts have been associated with white supremacy, its global spread and novel social media network consolidation. The far-right embraces a range of different ideologies, including racism, xenophobia, white nationalism, and anti-democratic practices, together with new forms of authoritarianism and populism. In the last decade the far-right, associated with white nationalistic identitarian politics, has established itself as a major political force in the West, making substantial electoral gains across Europe, the US, and Latin America. The global movement has coalesced with the populist movements of Trump and Boris Johnson’s Brexit election in the UK. This political shift represents a major new political force in the West that has rolled back the liberal internationalism that developed after WWI and shaped world institutions, globalization, and neoliberalism. It has greatly impacted upon the democracies of the West. With a strong online presence, the far-right have engaged in hate speech, rallies, and protests against various religious and ethnic minorities, compromising civil rights and paradoxically appealing to free speech and freedom of movement and association, the very hallmarks of democracy. The hate agenda has been extended to a wide range of social groups including LGBTQ and women. Sometimes the attacks have accompanied political rallies; sometimes they have involved lone terrorists like Dylan Roof who, acting in the name of White Christian fundamentalism, in 2015 killed nine African American church members at Emanuel AME Church, Charleston, S. Carolina.1 This situation has led to the serious problem of ‘far-right extremism in the classroom’: With a strong online presence, youngsters nowadays are much more likely to come across explicit or implicit far-right extremist content. Far-right extremism (FRE) is often overlooked when it comes to strategies for preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE). For schools it is indispensable
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to pay attention to the phenomenon, because just a few students with hate speech, polarising messages and/or extremist political views can ruin the climate in a school.2 The RAN EDU,3 a European Commission (EC) ‘Radicalisation Awareness Network’ aimed at youth, expressed its concern for a safe environment at school and in the classroom: ‘the RAN EDU Working Group calls for a long-term, structural and evidence-based programme on dealing with FRE [Far-Right Extremism] to be made available for schools, in order to make a real impact’ (bold in original). The EC group also calls for the establishment of ‘Schools as labs for democracy’. Education as the broad means for socialization of democratic values, their historical defence, and ideological justifcation requires a fundamental rethinking in an age riven by the unequal health effects of COVID-19 and US police brutality that sparked the mass US and global anti-racism Black Lives Matter protests following the strangulation death of George Floyd. The world watched in horror the video from 25 May 2020 where unarmed Floyd had a white police offcer in Minneapolis kneel on his neck for almost 9 minutes, ignoring his pleas: ‘please, please, please, I can’t breathe’ and ‘mama’ until he died. It is hardly new that fgures show police disproportionately searching and using force against people from black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities. The protests that followed Floyd’s death galvanized crowds, who demonstrated solidarity in spite of COVID-19 fears of transmission, have reverberated around the world, indicating that the struggle for equal civil rights is a powerful historical force for racial justice in America that has inspired a broad coalition of people after fgures showing police disproportionately searching and using force against people from black, Asian, and minority ethnic communities. It brought out opposing far-right and white supremacist demonstrations too, many wanting confict and confrontation. Trump’s reaction was multiple. He declared that Antifa (a left-wing anti-fascist, communist, and anarchist group of activists who state they are prepared to use violence against the alt-right4) was behind the violence and looting associated with the otherwise peaceful protests, so he wanted to ban it as a domestic terrorist organization but is legally prevented from doing so. He decided to bring in the military to peaceful protests in Washington DC and on 1 June 2020 (in violation of First and Fourth Amendments) to use tear gas, pepper spray capsules, rubber bullets, and fash bombs to clear the Lafayette Square so the President could walk to a photo opportunity at St. John’s Episcopal Church, playing to his electoral base. ‘He did not pray,’ said Mariann E. Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington. ‘He did not mention George Floyd, he did not mention the agony of people who have been subjected to this kind of horrifc expression of racism and white supremacy for hundreds of years.’5
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and His visit ‘outraged’ Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who oversees the church. ‘Consider the context,’ Budde told Craig Melvin on the TODAY show on Monday. ‘After making a highly charged, emotional speech to the nation where he threatened military force, his offcials cleared peaceful protests with tear gas and horses and walked on to the courtyard of St. John's Church and held up a Bible as if it were a prop or an extension of his military and authoritarian position, and stood in front of our building as if it were a backdrop for his agenda.’ She added that she was ‘deeply disappointed’ that Trump did not enter the church to pray or ‘offer condolences to those who were grieving’.6 Alongside these now global protests, questions raised have not only been about racism, white supremacy, and slavery in the US, but also about Britain’s mercantile involvement and wealth that was derived from the transatlantic slave trade and the monuments to leaders of imperial Britain. Much information that had been ignored, ‘buried’, or covered up is now being revealed and challenged with statues like that of Edward Colston being toppled in Bristol, and calls for statues of avowed racists like that of Rhodes at Oxford, and even Churchill, to be removed. Liverpool, Bristol, Glasgow, London, all became wealthy from the slave trade. But now the National Archives, T 70 series, Company of Royal Adventurers of England Trading with Africa and Successors, which contains the names of thousands of individuals who travelled on board the Royal African Company (1693–1743) ships to and from Africa, as well as the names of those who lived and died at the numerous company forts, is digitized and searchable.7 Despite abolishing the slave trade in 1807, the Slavery Abolition Act saw Britain only outlaw slavery in 1834. In such a big disruption of trade, the British government paid 20 million pounds (estimated to be over $21billion today) compensation to the slave traders (loss of business) and slave owners (loss of ‘property’), but not to the enslaved, taking out a loan which was only paid off in 2015. That means that living taxpayers in the UK, including descendants of enslaved people, paid billions of pounds to slave traders to stop them from trading in human lives, and to slave owners for the loss of their ‘property’. Yes. The British government, using public money, paid slave owners but not those who were enslaved. The backs and souls of enslaved people built Britain—the backs of those who toiled in cotton felds and plantations in British colonies, and the souls of those who did not survive the journey. Between 1640 and 1807 some 3.1 million enslaved people were transported from Africa. According to the government's own national archive fgures, 2.7 million arrived; the rest died en route.8
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Racism and white supremacy are at the heart of slavery, just as they are for the far-right. The movement ‘Why Is My Curriculum White?’ has been gathering pace since being founded in 2015 by National Union of Students at University College London.9 It challenges the focus and assumptions on ‘white’ history, people, arts, and humanities in the curriculum, and also the lack of diversity and institutional and systemic racism in education and academia, with associated movements, ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ and ‘Decolonise Education’, also asking ‘why isn’t my professor black?’10 Of course, Britain’s imperialist colonial past impacted far and wide, such that racist abuses in former colonies (such as Australia and New Zealand) are being brought to the fore following these global protests. Can the far-right, historically and ideologically connected to both fascism and Nazi ideology in Italy, Germany, and Austria since the 1920s, in broad philosophical terms, be conceived as a reaction against the perceived rationalism and individualism of liberal democratic societies, and a political revolt based on the philosophies that embrace irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism? The far-right has reappeared and grown enormously since 2013 with a number of extremist and terrorist groups that have a strong presence on social media, spawning sites that recruit a new generation of young people, mostly male, who have been increasingly associated with racist acts of violence against African-Americans in the US and other ethnic groups around the world.11 It is an emergent threat that has been directed at migrants and refugees in Europe and America, after and as a consequence of ongoing wars and conficts in the Middle East, creating a historically large number of displaced peoples who have sought a haven in the West. Far-right extremist groups have become adept at recruitment and coordination through and especially among disaffected young people who have suffered unemployment and austerity. According to research by the Counter Extremism Project, ‘far-right groups across Europe are successfully integrating themselves into the political mainstream by shunning street violence and adopting the same recruitment techniques used by jihadis’. This tactic and focussing on topical issues shifts them into the political mainstream, so they are able to broaden their public appeal, increasing the reach of their ideas and potential radicalizing; ‘the real worrying issue is that, with the power of social media, these claims create an ecosystem where people looking for legitimate mainstream movements access extremist culture.’12 Far-right groups will use secret codes that often have hidden, violent meanings (e.g. use of numbers—14, 18, 28, 88, 318, and many more13) and are seen in tattoos, graffti, email addresses, etc. The lockdown of governments and states and the abrupt halt to all forms of economic activity caused by COVID-19 has caused social dislocation, isolation, alienation, and depression, leading to widespread unemployment that has fuelled social and government discontent. These are the conditions ripe for the growth of the far-right and extremist movements that ride on the back of peaceful protests in the US, aided and abetted by Trump’s rhetoric. Two recent far-right groups described by BBC are Boogaloo and Proud Boys. The Boogaloo far-right movement is a violent organization that boasts hundreds of thousands of members who are
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prepared to travel to incite civil unrest and exploit peaceful and legitimate public protest. Followers have a variety of views and levels of seriousness towards the movement, but most could be described as extreme libertarians and sign up to two fundamental beliefs: A desire for an armed overthrow of the government, and an unwavering commitment to gun ownership. Boogaloo Bois were overwhelmingly opposed to coronavirus lockdowns, which they saw as an alarming sign of tyranny.14 The combination and overlay of COVID-19, Black civil rights, austerity, and massive youth unemployment is a dangerous recipe for ongoing civil unrest, social alienation, and far-right violence, with the prospect of militarizing the police and the rise of the authoritarian state that threatens the state of social democracy. In these times public education needs to take concerted action in defence of life, liberty, and civil rights that comprise social democracy. It is vital to the health of the body politic and the very survival of democracy and the democratic form of life that the political virus of the far-right and authoritarianism is eliminated. One of the best forms of inoculation and defence of social democracy is public education and education based on informed public discourse and debate. Here there is a strong conceptual and historical basis for the link between philosophy and education and for a philosophically informed approach to democracy and the history of civil rights. The forms of education going forward must address multiple issues, but for there to be social justice, they must address inequalities and racism; they must study our histories and work together to create a positive and inclusive world.
Notes 1 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/28/dylann-roof-charl eston-church-shooting-appeal 2 https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/sites/homeaffairs/fles/what-we-do/n etworks/radicalisation_awareness_network/about-ran/ran-edu/docs/ran_edu _academy_far-right_extremism_in_classroom_berlin_13-14_062019_en.pdf 3 Radicalisation Awareness Network, https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-w e-do/networks/radicalisation_awareness_network_en 4 https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2020/06/11/what-is-antifa-trump-p rotests 5 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/us/politics/trump-st-johns-church -bible.html 6 https://www.today.com/news/dc-bishop-mariann-budde-disappointed-t rump-visit-st-john-s-t182950 7 https://search.fndmypast.com/search-world-records/britain-royal-african-co mpany-1694-1743-browse 8 https://www.aljazeera.com/blogs/europe/2020/06/britain-built-backs-souls -slaves-200610084304081.html
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9 See: NUS, Mariya Hussain, https://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why-is-my-curr iculum-white/; https://www.nusconnect.org.uk/articles/why-is-my-curriculum-white -decolonising-the-academy Peters, M.A.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/00131857 .2015.1037227 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-60261-5_14 10 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/why-my-professor-still-not-b lack 11 The Southern Poverty Law Center (https://www.splcenter.org/) and the AntiDefamation League (https://www.adl.org/who-we-are) have tracked the recent increase in extremist activity, and the Network Contagion Research Institute has tracked the growth of hate crimes across social media sites (https://ncri.io/ about/). 12 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/far-right-groups-europ e-afd-tommy-robinson-generation-identity-recruitment-islam-a8674136.html https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312494919_Recruitment_and _Radicalization_among_US_Far-Right_Terrorists see: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/opinion/sunday/white-supr emacist-recruitment.html 13 https://www.adl.org/hate-symbols; https://www.adl.org/education/refer ences/hate-symbols/1488; https://smallstepsconsultants.com/the-far-right-threat/ 14 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/19/intel-report-warns-far-rightextremists-target-washington-dc-329771 https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-53018201
Chapter 1
National populism and the rise of the far-right—‘bad Nietzsche rising’ and the ‘fascism in our heads’ Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley
Democratic institutions are quarantine arrangements to combat that ancient pestilence, lust for tyranny: as such they are very useful and very boring. —Nietzsche (1983: 383)
Introduction In the last decade the far-right, associated with white nationalism, identitarian politics, and nativist ideologies, established itself as a major political force in the West, making substantial electoral gains across Europe, the USA, and Latin America, coalescing with the populist movements of Trump, Brexit, and Boris Johnson’s 2019 election in the UK. This political shift represents a major new political force in the West that has rolled back the liberal internationalism that developed after WWI and shaped world institutions, globalization, and neoliberalism. Its historical origins date from the rise of fascism in Italy, Germany, and Austria from the 1920s, where it was based on forms of ultranationalism, authoritarianism, and totalitarianism of the one-party state. The ideological roots have been traced back to Jacobinism, Napoleon, and the police state, on the one hand, and the line from Bismarck to Hitler, on the other (Payne, 2005; Zeev, 1998). In broad philosophical terms, the movement can be conceived as a reaction against the rationalism and individualism of liberal democratic societies, and a political revolt based on the philosophies of Nietzsche, Darwin, and Bergson that purportedly embraced irrationalism, subjectivism, and vitalism. It also stemmed from Fichte and Hegel’s theory of the State. Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), the selfstyled ‘philosopher of Fascism’ who wrote part of The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) with Mussolini, drew on Hegel for the inspiration of his own idealist subjectivism, where everything is considered Spirit (Geist), and the State is the result of a living organic process unifying all opposition. The philosophy of fascism emphasizes how liberal rational individualism has destroyed the social bonds and collective basis for civilization. From the outset, the philosophical roots of fascism emphasized and promoted a form of political violence to help craft and achieve the organic unity of the state and the ideology of
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strongman (dictatorship) politics. This philosophical analysis of the roots of fascism indicates some of the forces that motivate national populism and the far-right today, and the extent to which interpretations of these philosophies remain relevant today. The philosophical roots also contain the genesis and platform for understanding current politics and for designing long-term educational policies that take the rise of the far-right seriously and work to provide education for social democracy. The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) occupies the central ground in discussions and interpretations of politics in the period since his death, and both the Right and the Left have claimed him for their own, to legitimate their political views or to advance arguments concerning conventional accounts of European morality and religion. In particular, many thinkers have been highly infuenced by Nietzsche’s prophetic critique of modernity (Anderson 2017). Since his death, Nietzsche has been appropriated by the Right and the Left, which makes an understanding of him and his work important for understanding not only the history of contemporary fascism and its opposition but also its major sources of inspiration. In fact, only through this process can we get a better view of the issues at stake and design an educational programme that can deal with its anti-social and violent consequences.
Bad Nietzsche rising Ever since Nietzsche died in 1900 his work has been riffed through, savaged, and pulled apart to support all kind of causes that mostly do not respect him or the integrity of his work. He was a controversial thinker, and his work lends itself to dramatic and melodramatic statements about the end of Western civilization, the end of Christendom, the end of morality, and other ‘end tropes’ normally expressed in a foundationalist sense. Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism is the breakthrough of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that rationality and knowledge are not dependent on having foundations in any sense and that antifoundationalism does not imperil knowledge or rationality; it just makes it more human, complex, and risky. He offers us a way through modernism’s obsession with foundations that imposes a burden on humanity: you can’t have knowledge, morality, values, faith, etc., unless you have frm foundations from which everything else can be inferred. Yet against the spirit of Nietzsche’s work, statements made in his name are often incendiary, bending his ideas and distorting them to give expression to one ideology or another. Actually the process is offensive. It shows little respect for Nietzsche, the classical scholar, or for his work. In these circumstances, the rag-and-bone would-be scholars lift something from Nietzsche’s opus to proclaim support for their own political views without much in the way of interpretation, historical understanding, respect for scholarship, or criticism. Given Nietzsche’s own sophisticated views on interpretation, this is a travesty based on a fundamental misreading and an implicit theory of textual interpretation we can call ‘literary fundamentalism’—‘words mean what they say,’ a kind of literalness that today in the world of literary analysis stands as
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an obviously crude and nasty understanding that upholds the position and power of the interpreter of the word. Nietzsche’s work is a paradigm of the diffculties of philosophical interpretation, and to use phrases, sentences, or paragraphs from his work to support a political position is illicit, foolish, and manipulative. It is plain bad ideology based on several dubious premises. Nietzsche himself is an interpreter of himself and his own work: ‘How to become who you really are.’ But Nietzsche also regarded himself as the frst psychologist, so what he calls ‘philosophy’ is a problem—it is a problem because, as Badiou (2001) explains, Nietzsche does not regard himself as a philosopher because the philosopher is a ‘criminal’, a variant of the priest. He is, by contrast, an anti-philosopher intent on opposing speculative philosophy to replace it with an act that is explosive and will destroy philosophy and its ideal of ‘truth’. As Badiou (2001) explains, the Nietzsche of Ecce Homo—‘Why I am Destiny’—is an announcement of himself as the anti-philosophical actor (and proper name) who breaks up the history of mankind and delivers a new revolutionary politics based on the model of the French Revolution that abolishes the old system of Christian values after the historical event of the ‘death of God’. Nietzsche’s work is notoriously diffcult to interpret partly because he did not prize standard philosophical analysis or argument and he never wrote in a standard philosophical way. He chose to write in a way that favoured an operatic, narrative, fctive, and autobiographical style that comprised metaphors, anecdotes, gnomic utterances, poetic statements, little stories, confessions, and aphorisms. He recorded many notes and then he composed his works. He favoured the French Romance language over German and professed cultural ideals that located him closer to art than logical argument. He was a conscious stylist in the same sense that a novelist perfects his/her writing through literary devices, and he tried to invent new forms or genres—new ways of doing philosophy. And while he was very concerned about who might read his works, he knew that he would be misinterpreted. He seems to have known in advance that his works would be strangled, simplifed, distorted, and taken out of place to bolster false idols. The history of Nietzsche criticism is strewn with attempts at understanding and interpretation, from his own self-musings to those artists who received his works in Vienna soon after his death. The Nazi Nietzsche and the ‘new Nietzsche’ Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, became the curator and literary executor of his works after he died in 1900, publishing his notes as Der Wille zur Macht (The Will to Power) in 1901 in a notoriously distorted edition. It was a monstrous interpretation. Nietzsche’s work has been since appropriated by fascists and the far-right. Elisabeth’s husband, Bernard Förster, was an antiSemitic agitator who believed in the racial superiority of the Teutonic ‘races’. She joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and began to promote her brother’s work through the Nietzsche Archive, established in 1894, as ‘the philosopher of Nazism’ and
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inspiration for the concept of a higher race (a distortion of Übermensch, a nonracial notion). It was a powerful lie that conditioned his reception thereafter. His work was read by both Hitler and Mussolini and referred to by Nazi philosophers like Alfred Rosenberg and Alfred Baeumler (1931). Baeumler’s Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker argued that a new theory of the state and the future of the Germany could be found in the inspiration of Nietzsche’s philosophy rather than Bismarck’s creation. Fascists, anarchists, and Zionists claimed him for themselves. After this disaster in interpretation, the history of Nietzsche criticism is legendary for its scale and scope, with contributions in many languages. This chapter isolates just four of them: frst, the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche’s work, including Förster-Nietzsche’s; second, the ‘new Nietzsche’ presented by David Allison’s (1977) collection that is evident in the readings of contemporary French philosophers; and third, the scary appropriation of Nietzsche by theorists to dress up the alt-right. This meta-reading leaves out perhaps more than it includes: such as early readings by Kaufmann and Bataille. It is also worth noting that the movement known as post-structuralism originated and developed in the 1960s in part as a reappraisal of the Nazis’ interpretation of Nietzsche. The ‘new Nietzsche’ presented in David Allison’s (1977) collection is evident in the works of contemporary French philosophers like Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, Gilles Deleuze, Michael Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Deleuze and Klossowski organized a series of Nietzsche conferences in the early 1960s, generating French Nietzscheanism, a movement that developed new concepts and approaches. Foucault, for example, working with the Nietzschean notion of genealogy developed an antifoundationalist theory of power that divides rather than unites. Deleuze used the concept of rhizome to analyze lateral movements outside state power. In his closing address at the Abbey de Royaumont conference in 1964, Deleuze talked of Nietzsche’s remarks and the necessity of interpretation, and reinterpreted the ‘will to power’ as a positive affrmation rather than negation. The 1972 conference at Cérisy-la-Salle placed Nietzsche at the centre of French thought focused on the critiques of humanism and capitalism (Schrift, 1995, fn 9). Our primary aim is not an exhaustive or even comprehensive view of Nietzsche criticism, that would be too much for a single chapter or even a single book, but rather an analysis of the see-saw interpretation of the political spectrum that sees him as forecasting a new future for the West from opposite readings by the Left and the Right. In order of proceeding we might say Right, Left, Right: ‘the march of Nietzsche criticism’. Below we will investigate whether there is any basis for the current alt-right Nietzschean interpretation of politics, but frst we must clarify the ‘pedagogical problem’.
The pedagogical problem Both Deleuze and Foucault addressed the fundamental contradiction that lies at the core of political philosophy—what we call the ‘pedagogical problem’:
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why and how do individuals and groups come to desire and embrace their own oppression? In the Preface to Anti-Oedipus, Foucault identifes fascism as one of political philosophy’s three ‘strategic adversaries’: And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.1 It is this question that we deal with in the frst chapter focusing on ‘the fascism in our heads’, but frst let us give some attention to some general features of fascism by reference to one of the world’s most gifted semioticians. Umberto Eco (1995) in his essay ‘Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt’ usefully outlines a list of features that are typical of Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. He writes: ‘These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contradict each other, and are also typical of other kinds of despotism or fanaticism. But it is enough that one of them be present to allow fascism to coagulate around it.’ We present an abbreviated version here. 1. The cult of tradition. ‘One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to fnd the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult elements.’ 2. The rejection of modernism. ‘The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defned as irrationalism.’ 3. The cult of action for action’s sake. ‘Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous refection. Thinking is a form of emasculation.’ 4. Disagreement is treason. ‘The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientifc community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.’ 5. Fear of difference. ‘The frst appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by defnition.’ 6. Appeal to social frustration. ‘One of the most typical features of the historical fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.’ 7. The obsession with a plot. ‘The followers must feel besieged. The easiest way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.’ 8. The enemy is both strong and weak. ‘By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.’
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9. Pacifsm is traffcking with the enemy. ‘For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.’ 10. Contempt for the weak. ‘Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.’ 11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. ‘In Ur-Fascist ideology, heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death.’ 12. Machismo and weaponry. ‘Machismo implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.’ 13. Selective populism. ‘There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented and accepted as the Voice of the People.’ 14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. ‘All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.’ 2 Eco’s list provides a description and explanation. As he says: Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier for us if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Blackshirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent of disguises. Our duty is to uncover it and to point our fnger at any of its new instances—every day, in every part of the world. Franklin Roosevelt’s words of November 4, 1938, are worth recalling: ‘If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.’ Freedom and liberation are an unending task.3 The pedagogy of freedom demands frst a recognition of the signs and symptoms of fascism not only as a kind of politics but also as a set of behaviours, as a psychology, that Foucault says is ‘in our heads’. This provides the basis for a philosophy of education that is also a form of therapy, which can be used as a means for treating the pathological condition. Social education and education for democracy can be seen as treatments for fascism, and teachers can be seen as ‘physicians of culture’, a concept we explain below.
The alt-right Nietzsche The liberal social media, blogs, and journals are concerned to point out how the alt-right takes inspiration from Nietzsche. Richard Spencer (b. 1978) is a
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self-confessed alt-right white nationalist who coined the term ‘alt-right’. As the Southern Law Centre reports, Only days after Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton, the NPI held its fall conference on November 19, 2016, in Washington, D.C. In what he later described as a moment of exuberance, Spencer, fush with victory, offered the toast, ‘Hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!’ to the nearly 200 attendees.4 Graeme Wood (2017), writing for The Atlantic, describes his meeting with Richard Spencer in a piece entitled ‘His Kampf’, someone he grew up with.5 It’s a chilling tale. Sean Illing (2018) puts it on social media through his article ‘The Alt-Right Is Drunk on Bad Readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis Were Too’.6 He explains the point as follows: ‘You could say I was red-pilled by Nietzsche.’ That’s how white nationalist leader Richard Spencer described his intellectual awakening to The Atlantic’s Graeme Wood last June. ‘Red-pilled’ is a common alt-right term for that ‘eureka moment’ one experiences upon confrontation with some dark and previously buried truth. For Spencer and other alt-right enthusiasts of the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, that dark truth goes something like this: All the modern pieties about race, peace, equality, justice, civility, universal suffrage—that’s all bullshit. These are constructs cooked up by human beings and later enshrined as eternal truths. Hugo Drochon (2018) asks ‘Why Nietzsche has once again become an inspiration to the far-right,’ and he observes: ‘The philosopher was appropriated by the Nazis and now infuences the alt-right. Is he doomed to be abused and misunderstood?’7 He begins with Steven Pinker’s tirade against Nietzsche (an intemperate rage) to link it with the ubiquitous and self-promoting Jordan Petersen tying him frmly to the sway of contemporary American politics: Another who blames the ills of the world on the type of postmodernism Nietzsche is often associated with is the Canadian academic psychologist Jordan Peterson, who has become the darling of the alt-right. Peterson presents himself as the defender of ‘traditionalism’ or ‘classical liberalism’. Beyond his online lecture series, what brought Peterson to international attention was his railing against a Canadian law that would enforce genderneutral pronouns. His colleague at the University of Toronto, Ronald Beiner, a professor of political science, explicitly links Nietzsche to the alt-right in
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his book Dangerous Minds. Beiner argues that Nietzsche’s rejection of the Enlightenment has infuenced right-wing ideologues from Richard Spencer to Steve Bannon.8 There has been a veritable outpouring that makes similar connections.9 Rather than work our way through this welter of fashionable takes on the signifcance of the struggle for Nietzsche, demonstrating his importance to the alt-right among other thinkers coming after Nietzsche, we fnd Douglas Kellner’s (nd) account of Nietzsche critique of modernity, written some time ago, compelling and relevant: Along with Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche can be read as a great theorist and critic of modernity who carried out a ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists’ …. His powerful broadsides against religion, morality, and philosophy deploy a mixture of Enlightenment-inspired criticism and anti-Enlightenment vitalism to attack the life-negating aspects of modern culture. In addition, Nietzsche criticizes many of the institutions and values of modern societies as oppressing bodily energies and creativity, while blocking the generation of stronger individuals and a more vigorous society and culture. In his appraisals of the modern age, Nietzsche developed one of the frst sustained critiques of mass culture and society, the state, and bureaucratic discipline and regimentation, producing perspectives that deeply infuenced later discourses of modernity. Since his writings display cogent insights into the origins, dynamics, culture, and personality-formations of modern societies, Nietzsche deserves to be read in the narrative of social theory.10
Teachers as cultural physicians Almost 20 years ago, in Nietzsche’s Legacy for Education: Past and Present Values, a collaboration with James Marshall and Paul Smeyers, Michael A. Peters (2000) we tried to demonstrate that Nietzsche was one of the greatest educators of the nineteenth century and one of the great moral philosophers of all time. We noted at the time that Nietzsche’s educational thought and works, with some notable exceptions, have been ignored, or remained hidden and obscured. And we argued that this was true of his philosophy as a whole until its recent reception by French post-structuralist thinkers during the 1960s and 1970s, and later by English-speaking philosophers in the 1980s. We deliberated on the fact that the controversy surrounding Nietzsche involved not only his style (his way of doing philosophy) and the radical nature of his inquiries, but also the history of Nietzscheanism, the politicization of the Nietzsche Archive, and his appropriation by the Nazis. Our edited collection focused on the question of defning value in the era of postmodernity and included the history of the reception of Nietzsche’s work;
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Nietzsche’s early educational writings; genealogy as method, ethics, and difference; Nietzsche’s notion of the self and its importance for education, the arts, and the limits of academic life; Nietzsche’s critique of liberal education and modernity; and the question of nihilism. It’s a set of themes that Peters has returned to again and again (Peters, 1997; 1999; 2009; 2012). In the introduction to a recent book—Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education—Peters (2020) writes: In the Preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche (1886) talks of a ‘philosophical physician’. For Nietzsche the philosopher of the future has the task of pursuing the health of a people, race, humanity, ‘to muster the courage to push my suspicion to its limits and to risk the proposition: what was at stake in all philosophy hitherto was not at all “truth” but something else—let us say, health, future, growth, power, life’ …. Nietzsche looks for a ‘cultural physician’ to heal the wounds of modernity. The cultural physician is a phrase that appears in Nietzsche’s notes of the early 1870s. He had used the phrase at one stage as a title for a book considered a companion to The Birth of Tragedy. The ‘Philosopher of the Future’ is a phrase that Nietzsche used consistently in his later works. The earlier notion of cultural physician informs and shapes Nietzsche’s notion of the philosopher of the future whose principal concern is the health of culture. The central responsibility of the philosopher of the future is the project of cultivation and education of humanity as a whole. (pp. 1–2) We would argue that understanding the historical conditions of fascism and fascism as a social pathology is one of the most important tasks of the philosopher and the teacher in the coming decade. This is not necessarily a process of bagging democracy but using Nietzsche to reinvent and reinvigorate it for an era plagued by authoritarianism.
Notes 1 https://thefunambulist.net/history/foucault-episode-2-do-not-becomeemamored-of-power 2 The original article is in New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp.12–15. Excerpted in Utne Reader, November–December 1995, pp. 57–9, http://int erglacial.com/pub/text/Umberto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fascism.html. The abridged list comes from http://openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list -of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html 3 http://interglacial.com/pub/text/Umberto_Eco–Eternal_Fascism.html 4 https://splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-ber trand-spencer-0 5 https://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/his-kampf/524505/ 6 https://vox.com/2017/8/17/16140846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer -nazism
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7 https://newstatesman.com/2018/08/why-nietzsche-has-once-again-become-i nspiration-far-right 8 https://newstatesman.com/2018/08/why-nietzsche-has-once-again-become-i nspiration-far-right 9 Galupo (2017). ‘The Troubling Rise of Bad Nietzsche’ http://theweek.com/ articles/699001/troubling-rise-bad-nietzsche; Bescizza, Rob (2017). ‘The Alt-Right Loves Nietzsche, but Nietzsche Would Not Love Them’ (2017), https://boingboing.net/2017/08/17/the-alt-rightloves-nietzsche.html; Hilhorst (2018). ‘Posthumous Interview with Nietzsche: “Alt-Right, I Am Not on Your Side!”’ https://medium.com/thegreatdeadthinkers/posthumousinterview-with-nietzsche-alt-right-i-am-not-on-your-side-c5339bb66dbc; Lennard (2017). ‘The Philosopher with a Thousand Eyes’, https://dissentmagazine.org/article/nietzsche-great-politics-hugo-drochon-revie; Michel (2018). ‘Meet the Favorite Philosophers of Young White Supremacists’, https://thinkprogress.org/this-philosophers-of-young-white-supremacists33605ba538c0/; Elgat, Guy (2017). ‘Why Friedrich Nietzsche Is the Darling of the Far Left and the Far Right’, https://tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/228455/ nietzsche-left-right; Lauren (2017). ‘The Alt-Right’s Philosophical and Aesthetic Underpinnings Prove They’re a Bunch of Racist Dilettantes’, https://fnallyablog.com/2017/ 12/08/the-alt-rights-philosophical-and-aesthetic-underpinnings-prove-theyrea-bunch-of-racist-dilettantes/; Illing (2017). ‘The Alt-Right Is Drunk on Bad Readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis Were Too’, https://fipboard.com/@Vox/the-alt-right-is-drunk-on-badreadings-of-nietzsche.-the-nazis-were-too./a-7pwML8jNRUSoEQRS3xx8sQ% 3Aa%3A1444157402-93201c5412%2Fvox.com; Marenqo (2017). ‘The alt-right is drunk on bad readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis were too’ https://steemit.com/politics/@marenqo/the-alt-right-is-drunkon-bad-readings-of-nietzsche-the-nazis-were-too; Fluss (2018). ‘Jordan Peterson’s Bullshit’, https://jacobinmag.com/2018/ 02/jordan-peterson-enlightenment-nietzsche-alt-right; McKinney (2018). ‘Philosophical Fight Club: Alt-Right Recruitment (and How to Fight It)’ (), https://medium.com/@rachelannmckinney/philosophical-fght-club-recruitment-into-what-20920 4b83f 5b 10 https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/papers/FNmod.htm#edn1
References Allison, David B. (1977). New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. MIT Press. Anderson, R Lanier (2017). Friedrich Nietzsche. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition). Edward N. Zalta (Ed.). https://plato.stanfo rd.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/nietzsche/ Badiou, Alain (2001). Who Is Nietzsche? Trans. Alberto Toscano, PLI: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy, 11, 1–11. Baeumler, Alfred (1931). Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker. Leipzig: Reclam. Drochon, Hugo (2018). ‘Why Nietzsche has once again become an inspiration to the far-right’, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/2018/08/why-niet zsche-has-once-again-become-inspiration-far-right
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Eco, Umberto (1995). ‘Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt’, New York Review of Books, 22 June 1995, pp. 12–15. Excerpted in Utne Reader, November-December 1995, pp. 57–59. http://interglacial.com/pub/text/Um berto_Eco_-_Eternal_Fascism.html Illing, Sean (2018). ‘The Alt-Right Is Drunk on Bad Readings of Nietzsche. The Nazis Were Too’, The Atlantic, https://www.vox.com/2017/8/17/16140 846/alt-right-nietzsche-richard-spencer-nazism Nietzsche (1886). The Gay Science. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1983). The Wanderer and His Shadow, no 289, in Human All too Human, trans. R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Cambridge University Press. Payne, Stanley G (1995, 2005). A history of fascism, 1914–1945. Digital printing edition. Oxon, England: Routledge. Peters, Michael A (1997, online 2013). Nietzsche, poststructuralism and education: After the subject? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 29(1), 1–19. doi:10.1111/j.1469-5812.1997.tb00524.x Peters, Michael A (2009). Derrida, Nietzsche, and the return to the subject. In Michael A Peters & Gert Biesta (Eds.), Derrida, deconstruction, and the politics of pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang (Chapter 3). Peters, Michael A (2012). Nietzsche, nihilism and the critique of modernity: PostNietzschean philosophy of education. In Education, philosophy and politics: the selected works of Michael A. Peters. Routledge. Peters, Michael A (2012). The selected works of Michael A. Peters. London: Routledge. http://modern-hermeneut.blogspot.com/2010/02/nietzsche-und-wittgenstein -part-one.html Peters, Michael A (2020). Wittgenstein, Anti-foundationalism, Technoscience and Philosophy of Education. New York and London: Routledge. Peters, Michael A & Marshall, James (1999). Wittgenstein and Nietzsche: Philosophers of the future. In Wittgenstein: Philosophy, pedagogy, postmodernism. New York: Bergin & Garvey. Peters, Michael A, Marshall, James, & Smeyers, Paul (2000). Nietzsche's legacy for education: Past and present values. Critical Studies in Education and Culture Series. New York: Praeger. Schrift, Alan, D. (1995) Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism. New York: Psychology Press. Shift, Alan (1995). Nietzsche’s French legacy: Poststructuralism and critical theory’s second generation. The History of Continental Philosophy (Book 6). London/ New York: Routledge. Sternhell, Zeev (1998). Crisis of Fin-de-siècle thought. In Roger Griffn (Ed.), International fascism: Theories, causes and the new consensus, pp. 30–34. London/ New York: Bloomsbury. Wood, Graeme (2017). ‘His Kampf: How Richard Spencer became an Icon for White Supremacy’, The Atlantic, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ 2017/06/his-kampf/524505/
Chapter 2
‘The fascism in our heads’ Reich, Fromm, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari— the social pathology of fascism in the twenty-frst century Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
https://peoplepill.com/people/wilhelm-reich/ The strategic adversary is fascism (whereas Anti-Oedipus’ opposition to the others is more of a tactical engagement). And not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini—which was able to mobilize and use the desire of the masses so effectively—but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. Michael Foucault1
Introduction The frst two decades of the twenty-frst century has been accompanied by the ‘return’ of fascist behaviour and the cultivation of fascist philosophy in the troubled liberal democracies of the West. We have also witnessed the consolidation of authoritarian one-party States in Russia, China, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, producing some non-traditional alliances across the East-West and
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North-South divides.2 Political theorists make various distinctions between totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism to advance both historical analyses and connections between civil society and authoritarianism.3 While they are all forms of government they differ in terms of the power of the state, the cult and charisma of the leader, the limits of political freedom, the celebration of violence, and in terms of the concept of desire. Fascistic sexuality based on domination and sex-authoritarianism in a ‘masculinist culture’ is fundamentally anti-women, believing in general that women should be at home having and looking after babies (and of course their husbands). Increasingly, illiberal elements have appeared in democracies with the rise of anti-immigration, antienvironmentalist, racist, and white supremacist parties and movements, as well as the rise and consolidation of various darknet terrorist networks across Europe, Latin America, and the US. In Europe the need to resurrect national identities that refect the assertion of ‘pure’ ethnic and religious affliations have accentuated strong nationalistic sentiments with an emphasis on concepts of sovereignty and territoriality as well as the appeal to racist ideas of ‘pure blood’ and ‘whiteness’. The rise of neo-fascist parties in Europe is often seen as a consequence of the mass ‘refugee problem’ of immigrants from Syria, Libya, and North African states who are feeing war or confict, often instigated by the USA and its allies. Fascist parties in Germany, France, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Poland, Italy, Greece, Spain, and other European countries have become extremely xenophobic, insisting on limits to immigration and increasingly militarized borders (Peters & Besley, 2015). The scholarly press is awash with reports of the ‘rise’ or ‘return’ of fascism which is normally taken to be a specifc historical period between the years 1919 and 1945, especially in Germany, Spain, and Italy. Many commentators emphasize the continuity with historical fascism and focus on racism, eugenics, and white supremacy, based on the biopolitical paradigm of the ‘camp’ and policies for the extermination of Jewish and other groups, including Roma people, communists, ‘homosexuals’ (LGBTQ), and the mentally ill, all of whom were classifed as non-citizen and non-human in the eyes of the state (Agamben, 2000; Peters, 2018). A study of the social pathology of neofascism in the twenty frst century has given rise to a novel form of ‘radical right-wing populism’ characterized by ‘nativism (i.e., a combination of nationalism with xenophobia), authoritarianism (law and order issues), and populism (a populist critique of liberal democracy rather than outright anti-systemic opposition)’ (Copsey, 2013). The post-1980 ‘third wave’ was highly policized and dominated by emotional left-wing analyses. As Copsey (2013) explains: Instead of viewing radical-right populism as a ‘normal pathology’ of liberal democracies—a pathology that is alien to democratic values and which, under normal conditions, is ever present but struggles to spread throughout
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the body politic—Cas Mudde contends that radical right-wing populism is best interpreted as pathologically normal, that is to say, both entirely unremarkable and whilst not necessarily part of the mainstream, is connected to it nonetheless.4 Copsey (2018) wants to challenge the distinction between the ‘radical right’ and ‘fascism’ made by contemporary studies to suggest that ‘(neo)fascism’s past offers the best route to understanding the present-day radical right.’ In these terms education is best seen as challenging youth racism and the formation of far-right attitudes (Copsey, 2018; Copsey, Temple, & Carter, 2019). Some scholars argue that this rise is a consequence of the failure of liberal citizenship to address historical oppression and to deliver on the promise of inclusion and expansion of the rights of citizenship as part of the emancipatory intent of the Enlightenment project (e.g., Tam'as, 2000). Others see the rise of the white nationalist and alt-right as a reaction to foreign policies pursued by the US and the West in a series of wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria and the provocation of Iran that has caused the largest historical migration of displaced people into Europe (Bergman & Mazetti, 2019; Hinnebusch, 2007). For some Marxist theorists fascism is a stage of capitalism precipitating an economic crisis that develops out of the decay of liberal institutions (Amin, 2014; Suvin, 2017). Each of these perspectives impinges on the question of citizenship and citizenship rights, although Suvin (2017) also depicts fascism as a mass social pathology under capitalism. In this chapter I want to follow a line of argument that puts less emphasis on specifc historical conditions and focuses instead on the psychology of fascism, in an argument frst developed and explored by the much-maligned fgure of Wilhelm Reich, whose work has been picked up in different ways by Erich Fromm, Michael Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1980/1987). Evans and Reid (2013) provide the general gloss on retheorizing fascism and its relations with liberalism: The problem of fascism today cannot simply be addressed as that of the potential or variable return and reconstitution of fascism, as if fascism had ever, or could ever, ‘disappear’, only to return and be made again, like some spectral fgure from the past. The problem of fascism cannot, we believe, be represented or understood as that of an historically constituted regime, particular system of power relations, or incipient ideology. Fascism, we believe, is as diffuse as the phenomenon of power itself.5 Neo-fascism defnes the new age of politics after the decline of liberal internationalism. I do not hold to the thesis about the inevitable decay of liberal institutions under capitalism but do emphasize a culpability of liberalism in dealing with problems of citizenship that in part spring from its complicity with neoliberalism
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at the level of philosophical assumptions. This is clearly visible in the way in which the universities have been ‘corrupted’ and systematically closed down as institutions designed to protect liberal freedoms. By focusing on proft and grants at the expense of academic freedom, by utilizing public choice apparatus and policies, universities have been turned into businesses with a corporate identity and voice, unable to intervene in social and political debates, especially when profts or reputation are at stake.
Reich and the psychology of fascism Wilhelm Reich, the dissident Freudo-Marxist Viennese psychiatrist, colleague of Freud and erstwhile member of the Frankfurt School, published The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933 with the aim of explaining why Germany turned toward fascism rather than communism in the period 1928–33. He reasoned that one of the main factors was that the working class chose fascism principally because of increased sexual repression, which was the basis of repressed sexual energy that turned toward authoritarianism. This was in marked contrast to the relative sexual liberation of revolutionary Russia. He was at pains to explain a central conundrum: What was it that caused [the masses] to follow a party the aims of which were, objectively and subjectively, strictly at variance with their own interests? (Reich, 1946 [1933], p. 34) Why do people seek their own repression under authoritarian regimes when it is clearly against their own self and class interests? Why do people crave an authoritarian fgure, a transcendent authority behind which they can mask their repression of all-powerful biological impulses that percolate through to the rational mind often accompanied by violent outbursts? The ideology of Germany at the time was an ‘affective ideology’ anchored in emotions rather than argument. Reich joined the Communist Party in 1928 and visited Russia in 1929, studying nurseries and schools. In The Sexual Revolution he praised the undermining of the bourgeois patriarchal family through the process of collectivization and warned against the banning of homosexuality. He was one of the frst to examine the social pathology of fascism as a psychological condition that adopted a Freudo-Marxist approach: In 1932, on the eve of Hitler’s triumph in Germany, he worked with Erich Fromm, Karl Landauer, the director of the Frankfurt Psychoanalytic Institute and Heinrich Meng at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, the beginning of the merging of Marxism and Psychoanalysis.
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Reich saw sexual repression in society as the origin of psychological repression in the mind of an individual. Thus Reich urged a sexual revolution and greater sexual freedom in order to reduce the prevalence of neuroses, and facilitate the development of a more healthy political life.6 In his approach to the psychology of fascism he used an approach he called ‘Sex Pol’ that related the economic to the psychological to argue that the nexus was the authoritarian family that embodied the structures and ideologies of the authoritarian state. As he put it: Suppression of the natural sexuality of the child, particularly of its genital sexuality, makes the child apprehensive, shy, obedient, afraid of authority, ‘good’ and ‘adjusted’ in the authoritarian sense; it paralyzes the rebellious forces because any rebellion is laden with anxiety; it produces, by inhibiting sexual curiosity and sexual thinking in the child, a general inhibition of thinking and of critical faculties. In brief, the goal of sexual suppression is that of producing an individual who is adjusted to the authoritarian order and who will submit to it in spite of all misery and degradation. At frst, the child has to adjust to the structure of the authoritarian miniature state, the family; this makes it capable of later subordination to the general authoritarian system. The formation of the authoritarian structure takes place through the anchoring of sexual inhibition and sexual anxiety. (Reich, 1946 [1933], pp. 25–6) Fascism is thus not simply an ideology in the sense of being part of a cognitive schema; it is anchored in the body, in desire and emotions. Reich argued that suppression of natural genital sexuality in a child can produce a malformed political subject with a sense of powerlessness and aggression, who is always looking for a father fgure on the analogy of the patriarchal family. Reich biologizes sex and desire and ties fascism to the patriarchal structure of the family. His views, not surprisingly, were seen as suspect from the start. He was expelled from the German Communist Party and later the International Psychoanalytic Association. His books were burned by the Nazis and later, after emigrating to the US, his work came under attack, and under a judge’s orders his books and other apparatus were destroyed. He was imprisoned in 1957 at Danbury Federal Prison and later Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, where his mental health was examined. He died the same year in Lewisburg.
Fromm’s humanism, alienation, and freedom Erich Fromm, a German-escapee Jew who fed to New York when the Nazis came to power, was a prominent social psychologist and philosopher associated with the Frankfurt School. He published Escape from Freedom in 1941 that later became
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known in Britain as Fear of Freedom (1942). It was one of the foundation texts of political psychology. He was interested in exploring the psychological conditions that gave rise to the Nazi regime. Fromm distinguished between negative freedom (freedom from) and position freedom (freedom to) where the former referred to freedom from state and social conventions and the latter was a mark of authenticity that laid the basis for an integrated personality through creative acts. The latter requires the overcoming of feelings of hopelessness and struggling to free oneself from authority but personal authenticity often is not achieved and gives way to replacement of the old system by submitting to a new authoritarian system. He begins The Fear of Freedom (1942) with ‘Talmudic Saying Mishnah, Abot’: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, what am I? If not now—when?’ In the Preface he goes on to lay out his argument: It is the thesis of this book that modern man, freed from the bonds of preindividualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless. This isolation is unbearable and the alternatives he is confronted with are either to escape from the burden of this freedom into new dependencies and submission, or to advance to the full realization of positive freedom which is based upon the uniqueness and individuality of man.7 (p. ix) The task he sets for himself is to understand ‘the reasons for the totalitarian fight from freedom’. He sought to understand why millions in Nazi Germany sought ways of escaping freedom: ‘eager to surrender their freedom’, ‘instead of wanting freedom, they sought for ways of escape from it’ (p. 3). And he quotes Dewey (1940) to good effect: The serious threat to our democracy … is not the existence of foreign totalitarian states. It is the existence within our own personal attitudes and within our own institutions of conditions which have given a victory to external authority, discipline, uniformity and dependence upon The Leader in foreign countries. The battlefeld is also accordingly here—within ourselves and our institutions. (p. 3, Freedom and Culture) It is worth referring to Fromm’s questions that he sets for himself: These are the outstanding questions that arise when we look at the human aspect of freedom, the longing for submission, and the lust for power: What is freedom as a human experience? Is the desire for freedom something
24 ‘The fascism in our heads’
inherent in human nature? Is it an identical experience regardless of what kind of culture a person lives in, or is it something different according to the degree of individualism reached in a particular society? Is freedom only the absence of external pressure or is it also the presence of something—and if so, of what? What are the social and economic factors in society that make for the striving for freedom? Can freedom become a burden, too heavy for man to bear, something he tries to escape from? Why then is it that freedom is for many a cherished goal and for others a threat? (p. 4) Fromm (1947) further developed his humanist theory of alienation in Man for Himself by distinguishing ‘character orientations’—one ‘productive’ and four ‘non-productive’: receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing. These ideas became the basis for his The Sane Society (1955) and his highly successful The Art of Loving (1956) that completes his theory of human nature by arguing that love is a skill that can be taught and developed.
Foucault’s ‘introduction to a non-fascist life’: Bio-power and neoliberalism In the Preface to Anti-Oedipus (Deleuze & Guattari, 1983), Foucault observes that fascism is already an ‘everyday behavior’; it is ‘fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us’ (Foucault, 1983, p. xiii). The Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung (RLS) (2017) express the essence of Foucault’s approach: Ever since the rise of Italian fascism and German Nazism in the frst part of 20th Century and up till today the term fascism comprised the terminological core of left-wing (especially socialist) theoretical and political projects. … Michel Foucault’s discovery in the 1960s of ‘everyday life fascism’ is a symptomatic example. Foucault’s reconceptualization of fascism strove to shift the analytical focus from big political personalities, parties, movements and regimes of the early 20th Century towards the ‘tyrannical bitterness’ of our minds, and actions that endow us with the lust for power and domination.8 Yet RLS also argue that Foucault’s reconceptualization also suffers from the abstract nature and level of generality of the concept that does not provide enough discrimination among mechanisms of power relations. Foucault investigated the resurgence of fascism in terms of the political framework of bio-power demonstrating interesting and useful conceptual links between the bio-politics of neoliberalism and the extreme bio-politics of Nazism/Fascism, where many disabled, and mentally ill people, or just those
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labelled as ‘antisocial’ were described as economically bad investments and termed Unnu€tze Esser (useless eaters), or simply Lebensunwertes Lebens (life unworthy of life) …. In Foucault’s works Fascism had its origins in bio-politics and ideas from psychiatric history such as eugenics and degeneration theory, which justifed state racism and extreme violence in order to maintain a certain ‘social body’. (York, 2018)
Deleuze and Guattari, and the social production of fascist desire Eugene Holland (1987) provides a clear analysis of ‘Introduction to the NonFascist Life’ through Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983 [1972]) Anti-Oedipus, emphasizing that while the work addressed the way fascism manifests itself in our behaviour and how we can thus deal with it, it was directed toward ‘both the radical nature of the new student and worker demands and the reactionary nature of the opposition voiced by the Communist Party and other supposedly “radical” institutions.’ He goes on to note that Anti-Oedipus for Foucault was not a ‘grand synthesis’ but that Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘materialist psychiatry’ does emerge as an intersection among the three great materialisms of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. parts of the Freudian conceptual apparatus are retained, but are then grafted onto a historical perspective derived in part from the Marxian notion of modes of production; the basic value system of schizoanalysis, fnally, is grounded in a Nietzschean critique of consciousness and celebration of unconscious will-to-power. The lines of interference among these materialisms meet in a notion of general semiosis that includes the investment of energy in all domains of human endeavor, from the production of value in a factory, for example, to the production of consensus in a political formation, to the production of meaning in a work of art. (Holland, 1987) The concept of desire enables Deleuze and Guattari to consider production as an investment of human energy that produces social reality, ‘both in the economic sense of labor-power shaping the material world and in the cognitive sense of psychic drives shaping the phenomenal world’… and ‘libidinal and social production are for schizoanalysis simply two domains of application of the same general semiosis.’ As Emma York (2018) puts it, ‘Deleuze and Guattari suggest that their theory of materialist psychiatry has two goals: introducing desire into the social realm and introducing production or economy into desire.’ As she notes, fascism for Deleuze and Guattari is something that ‘develops out of ingrained behaviour, relationships, and patterns of thought, which stem from structures of domination, control, and exploitation’. It is a latent force that operates within neoliberal global capitalism that thrives on the free fow of goods even at a time when
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borders have become the basis for greater territoriality and militarized borders that divide the population along racist lines to affrm the menace of white-only and other forms of ethnic nationalism.
Educational approaches to the non-fascist life Many political commentators have noted the rise of twenty-frst-century fascism. Adele M. Stan (2018) describes Trump as a neofascist. Umair Haque (2018) usefully extends the notion to the Islamic world as ‘theofascism’ and speaks of American proto-fascism as ‘a clear derivative of centuries of supremacy, slavery, and segregation’. Others talk of ‘Why 21st Century Fascism is Inevitable’ or the rising threat of fascism.9 Steve Bynum (2019) describes ‘What Fascism Looks Like in the 21st Century’ through an interview with Jason Stanley, who explains in his new book Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them that fascist roots are part of an ‘Us and Them’ ideology that has been ‘present in American politics for at least the last hundred years’.10 Contemporary American politics does set the trend within the West and it’s not just a contagion effect. People like Steve Bannon have been actively supporting far-right politics in Europe for some time. Clearly, much rides on the upcoming 2020 US elections and whether the joint forces of the Democratic left can achieve solidarity, reinvent itself in a more populist way, and repair the damage that Trump has caused to democracy and the democratic way of life. For me this takes precedence as the primary goal for philosophy of education in a new key—one that aims to address the question of how we can pursue a non-fascist life. In this Natasha Lennard’s (2019) Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life provides a sophisticated analysis that, perhaps surprisingly, draws on Wittgenstein and Eco’s use of ‘family resemblance’ to address questions of meaning. She provides a mash-up of ‘We Anti-Fascists’ in the frst chapter of her book and intones: ‘Liberal appeals to truth will not break through a fascist epistemology of power and domination.’ Lennard talks of ‘fascistic habit formed of fascistic desire to dominate, oppress and obliterate the nameable other’.11 Philosophy of education in a new key needs to move to try to understand how we become fascist and exhibit fascistic behaviour in the neoliberal mode where we can at once espouse humanist ideals and anti-neoliberal rhetoric in our writing, but then as neoliberal managers (in say universities) engage in fascistic habits in our work environments. For my part I do believe that we need a closer understanding of the institutional and familial conditions of microfascism, but this understanding also requires a detailed investigation of the current and emerging institutions, politics, and historical changes accompanying the rise of fascism. As psychiatry was exploited as a weapon of fascism (Abbott, 2016; Piazzi, Testa, Del Missier, Dario, & Stocco, 2011), so anti-psychiatry can be a good starting point to unthread fascism as a society-level mental disorder, a repudiation of democracy, and a form of social pathology of politics that turns on Reich’s observation
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that people desire their own oppression in authoritarian regimes. In the epoch of digital reason where bullying is a normalized part of (un)social media, fascistic habits are formed and consolidated.12 If social democracy is to be ‘saved’ it needs to be reinvented as a critique of capitalism and its abuses of power. We need also to return to Reich’s insight of linking sexuality, desire, and fascism. There is a strong link between sex and violence as a sadomasochistic concept of fascist desire, as that which desires its own domination and oppression manifests in gaining pleasure from acts or the infiction of pain and humiliation. In sexual acts it desires its own repression through totalitarian emotions. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write in A Thousand Plateaus: only microfascism provides an answer to the global question: Why does desire desire its own repression, how can it desire its own repression? … The question demands both and historical and psychological explanation, especially given the way in which authoritarianism has grown profusely and in different ways in the troubled democracies of the West but also in terms of the rise of one-party states. In their ‘Introduction: Fascism in All its Forms’ to Deleuze & Fascism: Security, War, Aesthetics, Evans and Reid (2013) write: ‘The post-war Liberal imaginary is predicated on the doubly political and moral claim to have somehow overcome fascism.’13 But overcoming fascism is not just a matter of politics and morality; it is a depth psychology that requires the cultivation of the liberal (open) as opposed to the authoritarian (closed) personality. The social pathology of fascism in the twenty-frst century requires a social antidote to sadism and masochism and why and how people gain pleasure from the misery of others. The rapid growth of violent hate groups, the rise of fundamentalist and exclusionary religious groups, both Christian and Islamic, the extreme violence against immigrants and refugees, the social pathologies associated with white supremacism, and the systematic sexual oppression of women require immediate and ongoing attention.14 Ultimately, the growth of forms of neofascism and its philosophical defence in terms of the appropriation of Nietzsche’s works needs the most robust philosophical analysis.15
Notes 1 Preface to the English edition, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, 1983 [1972]. Translated from the French by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, p. xiil. 2 See the list of authoritarian regimes at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autho ritarianism 3 See Finchelstein (2019) for an analysis of the relations between fascism and populism; Riemen (2018) explores the theoretical weakness of fascism and the spiritual crisis of our age in terms of European humanism; Riley (2010) explores
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4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
the connection between civil society and authoritarianism in Italy, Spain, and Romania; Hett (2018) investigates how the Nazi Party came to power; and Albright (2018) issues a warning about fascism and the erosion of democracy. https://brill.com/view/journals/fasc/2/1/article-p11.xml?language=en https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203374702/chapters/ 10.4324/9780203374702-6 https://www.marxists.org/glossary/people/r/e.htm#reich-wilhelm https://pescanik.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/erich-fromm-the-fearof-freedom-escape-from-freedom.pdf https://www.rosalux.rs/en/how-do-we-think-about-fascism-today https://medium.com/why-21st-century-fascism-is-inevitable; https://sociali sm.com/fs-article/the-rising-threat-of-21st-century-fascism/ https://www.wbez.org/shows/worldview/what-fascism-looks-like-in-the-21st -century/f4771081-ddfc-45d9-b9cf-e61b1e6b2c6f https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bF3m6v5fFuU Jojo Rabbit (2019) is a comedy movie written and directed by Taika Waititi, based on Christine Leunens’s book Caging Skies, at https://www.youtube.com /watch?v=tL4McUzXfFI, that deals brilliantly with some of these themes. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9780203374702/chapters/10.4324 /9780203374702-6 I have beneftted from Rowan Tepper’s ‘In The Time of Fascist Desire’, https:/ /www.academia.edu/228788/In_The_Time_of_Fascist_Desire See by comparison, Babich (2019) and Beiner (2018).
References Abbott, K (2016). Psychiatry as a weapon of fascism: How psychiatry was systematically exploited to advance the ideological objectives of the Nazi regime. https://www .ucl.ac.uk/selcs/sites/selcs/fles/travel_essay_3.pdf Agamben, G (2000). What is a camp? In Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt, & Brian Massumi (Eds.), Means without end: Notes on politics, pp. 37–48 (V Binetti & C Casarino, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Albright, M (2018). Fascism: A warning. New York: Harper. Amin, S (2014). The return of fascism in contemporary capitalism. Monthly Review. https://month-lyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemp orary-capitalism/?v=6cc98ba2045f Babich, B (2019). Nietzsche (as) educator. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(9), 871–885. doi:10.1080/00131857.2018.1544455 Beiner, R (2018). Dangerous minds: Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the return of the far right. University of Pennsylvania Press. Bergman, R, & Mazetti, M (2019). The secret history of the push to strike Iran. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/magazine/iran-strike-israel-america. html Copsey, N (2013). ‘Fascism … but with an open mind.’ Refections on the contemporary far right in (Western) Europe. Fascism, 2, 1–17. Copsey, N (2018). The radical right and fascism. In J Rydgren (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of the radical right. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ oxfordhb/9780190274559.013.6
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Copsey, N, Temple, D, & Carter, A (2019). Challenging youth racism: Project report. Teesside University. Deleuze, G, & Guattari, F (1983, [1972]). Anti-oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R Hurley, M Seem, & HR Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Deleuze, G, & Guattari, F (1987, [1980]). A thousand plateaus (B Massumi, Trans.). Minnesota, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Dewey, J (1940). Freedom and culture. New York: Putnam. Evans, B, & Reid, J (2013). Introduction: Fascism in all its forms, deleuze & fascism: Security: War: Aesthetics. London: Taylor & Francis. Finchelstein, F (2019). From fascism to populism in history. University of California Press. Foucault, M (1983). Preface. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Retrieved from https://libcom.org/fles/Anti-Oedipus.pdf Fromm, E (1941). Escape from freedom. New York:Farrar & Rhinehart. Fromm, E (1942). Fear of freedom. UK. Retrieved from https://pescanik.net/wp -content/uploads/2016/11/erich-fromm-the-fear-of-freedom-escape-from-fre edom.pdf Fromm, E (1947). Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics. New York: Rhinehart. Fromm, E (1955). The sane society. New York: Rhinehart. Fromm, E (1956). The art of loving. New York: Harper. Haque, Umair (2018). The (new) fascisms of the 21st century: Why fascism’s spreading to every corner of the globe, and how it differs from last time. Retrieved from https://eand.co/the-new-fascisms-of-the-21st-century-2c1a3ce3b45e Hett, BC (2018). The death of democracy: Hitler’s rise to power. New York: Holt. Hinnebusch, R (2007). The US invasion of Iraq: Explanations and implications. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, 16(3), 209–228. doi:10.1080/10669920701616443 Holland, EW (1987). “Introduction to the non-fascist life”: Deleuze and Guattari’s “Revolutionary” semiotics. L’Esprit Cr'eateur, 27(2), 19–29. doi:10.1353/ esp.1987.0048 Lennard, N (2019). Being numerous: Essays on non-fascist life. London: Verso. Peters, MA (2018). The refugee camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the west. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 50(13), 1165–1168. doi:10.1080/0013185 7.2017.1379753 Peters, MA, & Besley, T (2015). The refugee crisis and the right to political asylum. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47(13–14), 1367–1374. doi:10.1080/00131 857.2015.1100903 Piazzi, A, Testa, L, Del Missier, G, Dario, M, & Stocco, E (2011). The history of Italian psychiatry during fascism. History of Psychiatry, 22(3), 251–267. doi:10.11 77/0957154X10378270 Reich, W (1946, [1933]). The mass psychology of fascism. New York: Orgone Institute Press. Riemen, R (2018). To fght against this age: On fascism and humanism. New York: Norton.
30 ‘The fascism in our heads’ Riley, D (2010). The civic foundations of fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945. London: Verso. Rosa Luxemberg Stiftung (RLS) (2017). How do we think about fascism today? https ://www.rosalux.rs/en/how-do-we-thinkabout-fascism-today Stan, AM (2018). Trump and the rise of 21st century fascism. The American Prospect. https://pro-spect.org/power/trump-rise-21st-century-fascism/ Steve, B (2019). What fascism looks like in the 21st century. Retrieved from https:/ /www.wbez.org/shows/world-view/what-fascism-looks-like-in-the-21st-centur y/f4771081-ddfc-45d9-b9cf-e61b1e6b2c6f Suvin, DR (2017). To explain fascism today. Critique, 45(3), 259–302. doi:10.1080 /03017605.2017.1339961 Tam'as, GM (2000). On post-fascism: The degradation of universal citizenship, Boston Review. Retrieved from http://bostonreview.net/world/g-m-tamas-post-fascism York, ED (2018). Disorder: Contemporary fascism and the crisis in mental health (A thesis submitted to the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in Partial Fulfllment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts, the Department of Political Studies). University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada.
Chapter 3
The return of fascism Youth, violence, and nationalism Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Fascism is hostile to egalitarianism and loathes liberalism. It champions ‘might is right’, a Darwinian survival of the nastiest, and detests vulnerability: the sight of weakness brings out the jackboot in the fascist mind, which then blames the victim for encouraging the kick. Fascism not only promotes violence but relishes it, viscerally so. It cherishes audacity, bravado and superbia, promotes charismatic leaders, demagogues and ‘strong men’, and seeks to food or control the media. Even as it pretends to speak for the people, it creates the rule of the elite, a cult of violent chauvinism and a nationalism that serves racism. Griffths (2017)
Fascism has been defned as a radical form of authoritarian nationalism (Turner, 1975, p. 162). As Griffn and Feldman (2004) argue, all forms of fascism have three common features: anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal, and a conception of a nation in crisis. The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides some missing pieces, especially the conceptual and historical connection between ‘nation’ and ‘race’. Fascism is a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition. ‘Fascism’, the English word is derived from the Italian fascism frst used in 1919 to refer to Benito Mussolini’s combat forces which seized power in 1922. Its opposition to parliamentary liberalism, communism (and Marxism), and conservativism places it on the far-right of the political spectrum. It is opposed to all forms of egalitarianism and motivated by a myth of rebirth (‘palingenetic’ a word that Griffn (1991) uses to distinguish it as a modernist political ideology). There are those among the current generation in the West who are still able to
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remember the rise of fascism in Europe. It is rising again, all over Europe and in other parts of the world. It never died, like an ancient virus in the bloodstream of the body politic, it grows, multiplies, and mutates. In order to understand its contemporary forms and the conditions that gave rise to it, we need to reevaluate its history, understand its background, and recognize its links with the forms of government and institutions it wants to negate. We need to know it again within the propaganda era of digital media and analyze and understand its power of attraction to young white men. Rooted in a form of revolutionary nationalism, the Italian fascist party (under different names) was led by Mussolini, who governed from 1922 to 1943. It stood for the value of national superiority based on Roman-ness (Romanitas) defned in The Doctrine of Fascism (1932). The Doctrine, ostensibly written by Mussolini but substantially ghost-written by Giovanni Gentile, the Italian Hegelian idealist philosopher and educator, aimed at combatting moral degeneracy and all forms of individualism by promoting ‘the will to power and empire’ as the ‘Third [Roman] Empire’. As the Doctrine makes clear, the State is all-embracing. There is nothing outside the State, and it is the source of all spiritual and moral value. The practical dimension of fascism, such as the system of education, is supposedly derived from its spiritual view of life. Fascism sees in the world not only those superfcial, material aspects in which man appears as an individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfsh momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a moral law, with common traditions and a mission which suppressing the instinct for life closed in a brief circle of pleasure, builds up a higher life, founded on duty, a life free from the limitations of time and space, in which the individual, by self-sacrifce, the renunciation of self-interest, by death itself, can achieve that purely spiritual existence in which his value as a man consists.1 As an ideology, it demands the form of a totalitarian State where political power is exercised by one leader buttressed by State-controlled media and political repression, including the use of terror. Totalitarianism is different from authoritarianism in that it attempts to change human nature and the world. The concept and its legal basis were developed by Schmitt (1932) in his The Concept of the Political that argues confict is an anthropological trait of human nature. Fascism sees itself as a spiritual State evolved from socialism that rejects individualism, pacifsm, Marxism, parliamentary democracy, egalitarianism, and economic liberalism, based on ‘the absolute primacy of the State’ and ‘a totalitarian vision of the future’. Its revolutionary fervour is given in the Doctrine in these words:
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Granted that the XIXth century was the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy, this does not mean that the XXth century must also be the century of socialism, liberalism, democracy. Political doctrines pass; nations remain. We are free to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right’, a Fascist century. If the XIXth century was the century of the individual (liberalism implies individualism) we are free to believe that this is the ‘collective’ century, and therefore the century of the State. It is quite logical for a new doctrine to make use of the still vital elements of other doctrines …. All doctrines aim at directing the activities of men towards a given objective; but these activities in their turn react on the doctrine, modifying and adjusting it to new needs, or outstripping it. A doctrine must therefore be a vital act and not a verbal display. Hence the pragmatic strain in Fascism, its will to power, its will to live, its attitude toward violence, and its value. Italian fascism appealed to the Aryan myth and employed a racial hierarchy that explicitly employed a white-black conception of rule based on an ideal of superior consciousness. It was also targeted at youth and the ‘moral hygiene’ of youth but reduced women to child bearers and prohibited all forms of contraception. Mussolini reputedly had relations with more than 400 women and propagated the ‘virile’ cult of fascism. The link between Italian futurism and fascism is well documented. Fascist ideology was prepared and well supported by Italian futurism, emphasizing values of speed, technology, youth, and violence. It also celebrated modernity, aiming to lift Italy out of its past to create a new culture. Marinetti’s (1909)2 Manifesto of Futurism exalted violence: 1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. 3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. 4. We affrm that the world’s magnifcence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. 5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit. 6. The poet must spend himself with ardor, splendor and generosity, to swell the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements. 7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.
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8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! … Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed. 9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. 10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fght moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice. 11. We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicolored, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, fashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek fight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. (https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/ foundingmanifesto/) Futurism underlined the principles of aesthetic modernism in a negation of traditional aesthetic forms, trying to turn art practice into a revolutionary praxis and celebrating youth, virility of the young man, and violence based on war as a kind of social hygiene based on Marinetti’s aestheticization of power and violence personifed in Mussolini (Bowler, 1991, p. 776). The connection between the two movements is now well known and while there was some short-lived direct contact around 1919, it could be argued that fascism was informed by the aesthetics of futurism before it became a mature political movement. The key fgures of Marinetti, Boccioni, Severini, Balla, Carra, and Russolo, infuenced by Cubism, went on to celebrate modernism and modernization and infuence other art movements of the twentieth century, including Surrealism and Dadaism.3 Bowler (1991, p. 763) puts it as: Futurism inaugurated the avantgardist attack on the autonomous status of art in modern bourgeois society, the repudiation of tradition, and the emphasis on formal innovation that would characterize modernist movements for decades to follow. Boler also points out how ‘Futurist aesthetic principles articulated a language of nationalist violence and destruction explicitly congruent with the basis of Italian Fascism’s ascendence to power’ but ‘Futurism’s aesthetic vision of politics’
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became disenchanted with fascism’s turn to the routine of bureaucracy. Today the aesthetic shaping of the political community is achieved through social media. Twitter is a media form that maintains a broadcast function allowing Trump to directly communicate with his nearly 20 million supporters by-passing the liberal ‘fake’ media that he has been warring with since before his election. In the last couple of years, journalists and political commentators have talked of the ‘return of fascism’ across Europe and in America. Schwarz (2018) is unhappy that the younger generations are becoming indifferent to the history of fascism. Benhabib and Rassmussen (2017) begin a photo essay by recalling the appalling carnage wreaked by Breivik in 2011 against a group of Norwegian youth and Breivik’s attack on cultural Marxism that he regarded as the principal source of all problems. Amin (2014) writes of ‘The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism’ arguing that ‘Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specifc circumstances.’ Snyder (2018) blames the Internet. Arvas (2018) talks of the return of Italian fascism led by Luigi Di Maio’s Five Star Movement. Others like El-Gingihy (2017) talk of the return of fascism in the ‘age of Trump’, recounting far-right election victories in Europe and warning that Trump’s authoritarianism tendencies ‘could evolve into ever more sinister permutations’. Papageorgiou (2013) examined the return of fascism in the Greek case that descended into a social crisis as a result of the debt crisis. And Blair (2018) warned that the rise of populism could mean a return to fascist politics of the 1930s in his anti-Brexit speech. Karlin (2017) in an interview with David Neiwert, author of Alt-America (2017), begins by saying, ‘Americans may not realize that democracy is over and the country has descended into fascism until it is too late.’ Riemen, the Dutch author, incensed by the rise of Geert Wilders’ far-right party, wrote a pamphlet The Eternal Return of Fascism in 2010. His new book To Fight against This Age: On Fascism and Humanism (2018) argues that the West is facing not the threat of populism but rather the threat of fascism. He argues that the right response to this ‘sickness’ is education, teaching ‘care for the soul’ through European culture, philosophy, and art. Only humanism can immunize Europe against ‘the deadly bacillus called fascism’. One might also add the absolute necessity of democracy, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, public debate, and public education built on these principles. Albright, US secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, also reminds us in her new book, Fascism: A Warning (2018), that the contemporary resurgence of fascism releases global repressive and destructive forces that threaten democracy and ultimately lead to economic collapse, humanitarian crises, and sectarian violence. Henry Giroux (2018), a restless champion of public pedagogy, talks of ‘Facing the Challenge of Fascism’ in what has quickly become an American Nightmare. He sees a uniquely American form of fascism emerging from the white supremacism and ultranationalism promoted by Donald Trump, who propagates and defends fascist policies while trying to shut down public debate.4
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In dealing with fascism we must understand that it is a political doctrine that subordinates the individual and the rights of individuals to the all-powerful state and national advancement. It discourages freedom of speech and does not believe in peace. In subordinating everything to the State it champions a concept of duty, spirituality, youthfulness, and obedient submission. Its xenophobia, ultranationalism, racism, masculism, and militarism not only sets itself against liberalism and Marxism, but also helps explain why contemporary identity politics that is based on the extension of rights and equality for all is so antagonistic to fascists. The characteristics of fascism as defned and spelled out by political theorists provide a clear checklist of criteria for judging Trump. In 2016, Donald Trump retweeted a quote from Benito Mussolini through an account called @ilduce2016 that had posted ‘It is better to live one day as a lion than 100 years as a sheep.’ When asked why he had done so, Trump said he knew it was Mussolini but what did that matter—he simply wanted to be associated with interesting quotes (Wright, 2018). Is Trump a fascist? Giroux and many on the Left certainly think so. Albright (2018) hangs back from the direct equivalence to say he is the ‘frst antidemocratic president in US history’ (Cited in Wright, 2018). He is an odd and eclectic mix of doctrine and views. Narcissistic and self-interested, if he fnds that something does not feed his ego or his capital, he will jettison it, be it an element of fascist ideology or Christian thought. That same old ancient unprincipled self-interested pragmatism makes him dangerous for the world, to himself and members of his administration, and to the new generation of hero-worshipping youth who grew up on social media and whose own roots of identity do not include a critical awareness of recent world history.
Notes 1 http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini. htm 2 italianfuturism.org/manifestos/foundingmanifesto/ 3 In this context it is worth noting Ezra Pound, infuenced by Marinetti, praised Mussolini and wrote ‘The Pisan Cantos’ and other poetry in his honour. Morrison (1993, p. 4) writes: ‘Pound’s fascism and anti-Semitism have their origins in a profound and potentially revolutionary dissatisfaction with the liberal settlement; the anticapitalist, antibourgeois fervor that motivates both need not have assumed the reactionary form it did.’ 4 See a prescient comment by Norman Mailer, written in 2003, https://www.smh. com.au/national/theres-one-way-to-protect-democracy-send-in-the-fascists20030228-gdgce5.html
References Albright, M (2018). Fascism: A warning. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Amin, S (2014). The return of fascism in contemporary capitalism. Monthly Review. https://month-lyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemp orary-capitalism/
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Arvas, T (2018). What the return of fascism to Italy this Sunday may mean for Eurozone. Daily Sabat. https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/taha-meli-arvas /2018/03/01/what-the-return-of-fascism-to-italy-this-sunday-may-mean-for-eu rozone Benhabib, S, & Espen, R (2017). The return of fascism. The New Republic. https:// newrepublic.com/ article/144954/return-fascism-germany-greece-far-rightnationalists-winning-elections Blair, T (2018). Tony Blair says rise of populism could mean return to fascist politics of the 1930s in anti-Brexit speech. The Telegraph. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ politics/2018/06/27/tony-blair-brexit-date-might-have-delayed-impasse/ Bowler, A (1991). Politics as art: Italian futurism and fascism. Theory and Society, 20, 763–794. El-Gingihy, Y (2017). The age of Trump and 21st century fascism. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/trump-brexit-le-pen-geert -wilders-far-right-new-age-of-fascism-a7602336.html Giroux, H (2018). American nightmare: Facing the challenge of fascism. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Griffn, R (1991). The nature of fascism. London: Psychology Press. Griffn, R, & Feldman, M (Eds.). (2004). Fascism: Critical concepts in political science. London: Routledge. Griffths, J (2017). Fire, hatred and speed. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/the-macho -violent-culture-of-italian-fascism-was-prophetic Karlin, M (2017). The American roots and 21st century global rise of fascism. TruthOut. https://truth-out.org/articles/the-american-roots-and-21st-century -global-rise-of-fascism/ Morrison, P (1993). The poetics of fascism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and Paul De Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Neiwert, D (2017). Alt-America. London: Verso. Papageorgiou, E (2013). Total social crisis and the return of fascism. Dossier: The Greek symptom: Debt, crisis and the crisis of the left. Radical Philosophy, 181, 39–42. Riemen, R (2018). To fght against this age: On fascism and humanism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Schmitt, C (1932/2008) The concept of the political. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Schwarz, G (2018). My family has a Nazi past. I see that ideology returning across Europe. The Guardian.https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/ apr/18/family-nazi-past-ideology-europe-germany-fascism-far-right Snyder, T (2018). Fascism is back. Blame the internet. The Washington Post. https:/ /www.washing-tonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/21/fascism-i s-back-blame-the-internet/?utm_term.426ef349bbde. Turner, H (1975). Reappraisals of fascism. New York: New Viewpoints. Wright, R. (2018). Madeleine Albright warns of a new fascism—and Trump. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/madeleine-albr ight-warns-of-a-new-fascism-and-trump
Chapter 4
The unforeseen Education and the fowers of sacrifce Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
For wisdom, listen not to me but to the Word, and know that all is one …. Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.1 (Heraclitus, Fragments) modernity is … a way of shaping a sequence of moments in such a way that it accepts a high rate of contingency. (Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘Time Today’ in The Inhuman. Refections on Time, G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Trans.) (Stanford University Press, 1991, p. 68.)
The 2014 Peshawar school massacre by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (‘the Taliban Movement of Pakistan’) killed 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren, as a revenge attack for Operation Zarb-e-Azb, a Pakistani military offensive in North Waziristan. Abu Shamil,2 a Chechen fghter, led a group of Arabic speakers from Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco, and Herat in a retaliation for Malala Yousafzai’s Nobel Peace Prize. Pakistan Today carried the headline ‘After Beslan, Peshawar’3 and suggested the nature of the attack was similar to the Beslan school hostage crisis of 2004 in North Ossetia where 385 people were massacred and 783 were injured. Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord, used the hostages to demand recognition of the independence of Chechnya and Russian withdrawal. These incidents, causally unrelated in time and territory but not in ideology, bear the same imprint and led to the same horrendous and unforgivable mass slaughter of young innocents. Other commentaries have remarked on the similarities between the Beslan and Pakistan school massacres. Both were the result of attacks by Islamic terrorists, and bear all the marks of the religious extremism that characterize it: false appeals to the Qur’an, among other texts and prophets, in order to justify the use of jihad against non-Muslims and the struggle as a religious duty against those who do not believe in Allah.4 Yet, it might be argued that the basic principle of Shar’iah is to see the will of God done on earth, a will
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known through revealed scripture, that is both a moral code and religious law, to bring about compassion, kindness, generosity, justice, fair play, tolerance, and care in general, as opposed to tyranny, cruelty, selfshness, exploitation, and murder. Shar’iah is based on mercy that can be understood in terms of the education of the individual, the establishment of justice and upholding of morality, and the prevention of hardship and oppression. In 2011, Anders Behring Breivik shot and killed 69 people, mostly teenagers, at the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) camp on the island of Utøya, and bombed government buildings in Oslo, killing eight people. His militant ideology described in the electronic manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence,5 a compilation of texts from existing websites, declared violent opposition to Islam, Eurabia, and multiculturalism, attacked ‘cultural Marxism’, and argued for the deportation of Muslims from Europe. The text was emailed to 1,003 addresses 90 minutes before his attack. In this tract, Anders Breivik suggests ‘the root of Europe’s problems is the lack of cultural self-confdence (nationalism)’ and goes on to claim ‘You cannot defeat Islamization or halt/reverse the Islamic colonization of Western Europe without frst removing the political doctrines manifested through multiculturalism/cultural Marxism.’ Breivik’s far-right, militant, antiIslamic terrorism calls for the violent annihilation of ‘Eurabia’, and his motive for his atrocities was to draw attention to his manifesto. His deep-seated hatred of Islam echoes the intensity of ideological-inspired hatred against the West by fundamentalist Islamic militant terrorists. It raises the question concerning the ideological, sociological, and religious similarities between fundamentalist Islamic and Christian groups rather than their differences. It might be argued that Breivik’s manifesto and acts of terrorism were motivated by a fundamentalist religious extremism against the fear of Islamization. Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Idaho, writes: There are some chilling parallels between Christian and Islamic fundamentalists. Both divide the world between believers and unbelievers, and by deciding for themselves who is saved and who is damned, they think that they can play God with our lives. Both have also declared war on the secular culture of liberal democracy, the most peaceful and prosperous means of social organization ever devised by humankind. They both reject the separation of church and state and would set up governments based on their own views of divine laws. Of greatest concern, however, is the fundamentalist view of the violent end of the world. A common scenario is a great war in the Middle East in which the armies of God destroy the armies of Satan. Radical Muslims of course identify Israel and the USA as the forces of evil, but Christian fundamentalists see Islam as the ultimate enemy. The horrifying implication is that the Jews, Muslims, and Christians of the Middle East will be the primary victims of this holocaust.6
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These school massacres and other events like them, including attacks on civil society, especially women and children, share the characteristic of their radical contingency: they are motivated by forms of religious extremism that select schools and school children or youth as soft targets, striking at the heart of an enemy society often with the explicit agenda of attacking the principles of Western education with its universalist provision, including equality for girls and women.7 According to the Global Terrorism Index, since 2001, religious extremism has overtaken national separatism to become the main driver of terrorist attacks around the world. The report recorded 18,000 deaths in 2013, a rise of 60% from the previous year, and most of these fatalities were attributable to just four groups: Islamic State (Isis) in Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram in Nigeria, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and al-Qaida. There has been a fvefold increase in the number of deaths from terrorism since the 9/11 attacks.8 The ‘Pedagogy for the Unforeseen’ expresses a notion central to the philosophy of radical social change in an increasingly interconnected world characterized by interdependent systems that produce global networks ‘that we do not understand and cannot control well’, as Helbing (2013) argues: These systems are vulnerable to failure at all scales, posing serious threats to society, even when external shocks are absent. As the complexity and interaction strengths in our networked world increase, man-made systems can become unstable, creating uncontrollable situations even when decisionmakers are well-skilled, have all data and technology at their disposal, and do their best. (p. 51) Where Helbing (2013) calls for a ‘Global Systems Science’ to create the required knowledge and paradigm shift in thinking, by comparison, and following Levinas’ (2004) Les imprevus de l’histoire (translated as ‘Contingencies of history’ or ‘Unexpected history’ or ‘Unforeseen history’), I emphasize a philosophy that calls on the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the unimaginable nature of history.9 These elements become central to a new interconnected notion of ‘space-time’ that has become the central metaphor for understanding globalization: where the ripple effect reverberates in the system. Political and historical contingency as a part of the study of the unexpected, the accidental, and the unforeseen (Shapiro & Bedi, 2007) is also central to the pedagogy of the unforeseen, that teaches us the survivalist lesson against all forms of fundamentalism that history and politics could have be different. What is more, the unexpected and the unforeseen may be accounted for in a systematic way as we come to grasp the dynamics of globalization. We can come to terms with the enigma of the unexpected in a way that prepares students for a future global society based on a philosophy of radical contingency.
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Acknowledgement I am grateful to Tina Besley for discussing ideas concerning aspects of this text.
Notes 1 Heraclitus is the central fgure in the mystical philosophy of logos and discourse that runs through the Orphics, Pythagoreans, Empedocleans, the Stoics, and Platonists. Logos (the Word) emphasizes opposites are necessary for life, but they are unifed in a system of balanced exchanges. The world is not identifed with any one substance but is a set of interrelated processes governed by a law of change that demonstrates an ever-changing universe. For Fragments, see http://www.heraclitusfragments.com/ and http://www.classicpersuasion. org/ pw/heraclitus/herpate.htm. See also the Daniel Graham entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/heraclitus/ 2 Ashfaq Yusufzai in a Daily Telegraph story carried by the NZ Herald names the leader of the attack as Saddam Jan, see http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/new s/article.cfm?c_id=2&objec tid=11379523 3 See http://www.pakistantoday.com.pk/2014/12/16/comment/after-beslan-p eshawar/ 4 The term ‘jihad’ in its exact form appears only twice in the Qur’an at 60:1 and 9.24, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad 5 See http://fas.org/programs/tap/_docs/2083_-_A_European_Declaration_o f_Independence.pdf. The compendium covers: 1. The rise of cultural Marxism/multiculturalism in Western Europe; 2. Why the Islamic colonization and Islamization of Western Europe began; 3. The current state of the Western European resistance movements (antiMarxist/anti-Jihad movements); 4. Solutions for Western Europe and how we, the resistance, should move forward in the coming decades; and 5. Covering all highly relevant topics, including solutions and strategies for all of the eight different political fronts. 6 Nick Gier, http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/ngier/parallels.htm. See also ‘Fundamentalism versus Modernity: Contrast and Comparison between Christianity and Islam’ by Charley Earp at https://www.academia.edu/2,054,836/ Fundamentalism_versus_Modernity_Contrast_and_Comparison_between_ Christianity_and_Islam 7 See my ‘“Western Education Is Sinful”: Boko Haram and the Abduction of Chibok Schoolgirls’ (Peters, 2014). 8 For the Global Terrorism Index, see http://economicsandpeace.org/resear ch/iep-indices-data/ global-terrorism-index. For an analysis of Education, Globalization, and the State in the Age of Terrorism see Peters (2005). 9 Unforeseen History is the English translation of early essays by Levinas published by the University of Illinois Press that foreshadows some themes of his mature thought. McDonald (2010) begins his account of ‘Levinas, Heidegger, and Hitlerism’s Ontological Racism’ with the statement: ‘Emmanuel Levinas developed his ethical philosophy in response to the ontological thought of Martin Heidegger in the wake of the latter’s active complicity with Nazism as well as his ensuing silence, after the War, about the Holocaust’ (p. 891).
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References Helbing, D (2013). Globally networked risks and how to respond. Nature, 497, 51– 59. doi:10.1038/nature12047 Levinas, E (2004). Unforeseen history. Translated from the French by N Poller. Foreword by D Ihde. Introduction by RA Cohen. Urbana-Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. McDonald, H (2010). Levinas, Heidegger, and Hitlerism’s ontological racism. The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms, 15, 891–896. doi:10.1080/1084877 0.2010.528909 Peters, MA (Ed.). (2005). Education, globalization and the state in the age of terrorism. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Peters, MA (2014). ‘Western education is sinful’: Boko Haram and the abduction of Chibok school girls. Policy Futures in Education, 12, 186–190. Shapiro, S, & Bedi, I (Ed.). (2007). Political contingency: Studying the unexpected, the accidental, and the unforeseen. New York: NYU Press.
Chapter 5
White supremacism The tragedy of Charlottesville Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Charlottesville is a city in Virginia of just over 48,000 people, formed as an act of assembly in 1762. It is home to the University of Virginia designed by Thomas Jefferson and gateway to Shenandoah National Park. Unlike the rest of Virginia, it was relatively unscathed by the Civil War. The frst Black Church was established in 1864.1 Prior to this, Black churches were illegal. On 11 August 2017, Charlottesville was the location for the ‘Unite the Right’ rally and march to protest against the removal of the bronze statue of General Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller from Emancipation Park, which had been known as Lee Park until the city council unanimously decided to change its name in June 2017. The renaming of the park and the proposed removal of Lee’s statue was a catalyst for the march, but was not the frst. On 13 May 2017, altright white supremacist and president of the National Policy Institute, Richard B. Spencer, led a tiki-torch night rally, ‘Take-Back Lee Park,’ featuring chants, ‘Jews will not replace us’ and ‘Russia is our friend.’ On 8 July 2017, when the Ku Klux Klan protested there was a counterprotest and several arrests. The August 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ Rally was organized by Jason Kessler and Nathan Damigo, including notable attendees Richard Spencer and David Duke, former KKK Imperial Wizard. Kessler was president of ‘Unity and Security for America’ (see Business Insider Australia, retrieved 23 August 2017). Nathan Damigo was the founder of the California-based white supremacist group Identity Evropa (https://www.identityevropa.com/). The protest included white supremacists, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, and militias carrying semi-automatic weapons (Virginia law permits open carry of fre arms), intending to unite these groups. The alt-right protesters sported swastikas, Confederate fags and memorabilia, anti-Semitic banners, Trump/Pence signs and carried torches, chanting, ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Blood and soil’, and ‘Jews will not replace us.’ After a state of emergency was declared the following morning, James Field, a 20-year-old security guard, deliberately drove his Dodge into the crowd, killing Heather Heyer, who died at the scene, and injuring 19 others by also reversing over people in the vicinity demonstrating against white nationalists.
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Damigo was a 31-year-old ex-Marine and later a student of California State University Stanislaus. On his return from serving a second term in Afghanistan and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), he was involved in substance abuse, robbed a taxi driver who looked like an Iraqi, and was imprisoned for six years after a dishonourable discharge. He was radicalized in prison and during his time as a Marine (Keller, 2017). The Southern Poverty Law Centre reports on the myriad of far-right activist groups—over 20 different clubs—involved in the ‘rally’, including the neo-Nazi websites The Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff, and the National Policy Institute; the four groups that form the Nationalist Front—League of the South, the Traditionalist Workers Party, Vanguard America, the National Socialist Movement—and other groups such as Ku Klux Klan, the Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights, the Three Percenters, Identity Evropa, the Oath Keepers, the American Guard, the Pennsylvania Light Foot Militia, the Virginia Minutemen Militia, the Detroit Right Wings, the Rise Above Movement, True Cascadia, and Anti-Communist Action. Groups counter-protesting included representatives from the National Council of Churches, Black Lives Matter, Anti-Racist Action, Antifa, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Workers World Party, the Revolutionary Communist Party, Redneck Revolt, the Industrial Workers of the World, the Metropolitan Anarchist Coordinating Council, and Showing Up for Racial Justice (https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/ Unite_the_Right_rally). Damigo established Evropa, a self-described white identitarian movement that advertises itself to ‘become who we are’ (https://www.identityevropa.com/). The movement is strongly linked with the European Right and with Richard Spencer. Guillaume Faye’s (2011) manifesto of European white nationalism, Why We Fight: Manifesto of European Resistance, ‘holds out the prospect of a racial and revolutionary alternative to the present decayed civilisation. The manifesto’s principal objective is thus to unify the resistance by developing a common doctrine that unites everyone and every tendency seeking to constitute a European network of resistance—a doctrine that goes beyond the old sectarian quarrels and superfcial divisions.’ The invective against ‘Cultural Marxism’ originated in the European far-right and is very similar to the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto that describes Cultural Marxism as ‘political correctness’ and seeks to critique the Frankfurt School and deconstruction as being responsible for the empowerment of ‘minorities’ against ‘white civilization’ (see Knights Templar, https://sites. google.com/site/knightstemplareurope/2083). Brevik (now known as Fjotolf Hansen) was responsible for the 22 July attack on the Workers’ Youth League camp in Utøya in 2011, when he shot 69, having murdered another eight people by earlier bombing the Regjeringskvartalet (the Government quarter) in Oslo (Revese, 2017). The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish organization founded in 1913 that fghts anti-Semitism, bigotry, and hate, released a report in 2015, ‘With Hate in their Hearts: The State of White Supremacy in the U.S.’ that
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‘describes a dramatic resurgence in the extreme right since 2000 that has led to a signifcant increase in violence’ and highlighted several worrying trends, before the election of Donald Trump: •
•
•
•
•
•
White supremacist ideology in the United States today is dominated by the belief that whites are doomed to extinction by a rising tide of non-whites who are controlled and manipulated by the Jews—unless action is taken now. This core belief is exemplifed by slogans such as the so-called 14 Words: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’ During the recent surge of right-wing extremist activity in the United States that began in 2009, white supremacists did not grow appreciably in numbers, as anti-government extremists did, but existing white supremacists did become more angry and agitated, with a consequent rise of serious white supremacist violence. Most white supremacists do not belong to organised hate groups, but rather participate in the white supremacist movement as unaffliated individuals. Thus, the size of the white supremacist movement is considerably greater than just the members of hate groups. Among white supremacist groups, gangs are becoming increasingly important. The white supremacist movement has a number of different components, including (1) neo-Nazis; (2) racist skinheads; (3) ‘traditional’ white supremacists; (4) Christian Identity adherents; and (5) white supremacist prison gangs. The prison gangs are growing in size, while the other four sub-movements are stagnant or in decline. In addition, there are a growing number of Odinists, or white supremacist Norse pagans. There are also ‘intellectual’ white supremacists who seek to provide an intellectual veneer or justifcation for white supremacist concepts. White supremacists engage in a wide variety of activities to promote their ideas and causes or to cause fear in their enemies. They also engage in an array of social activities in which white supremacists gather for food and festivities. Among domestic extremist movements active in the United States, white supremacists are by far the most violent, committing about 83% of the extremist-related murders in the United States in the past 10 years and being involved in about 52% of the shootouts between extremists and police. (ADL, 2015)
Trump’s election victory, in part based on the white vote from ‘middle America’ and especially the so-called Rust Belt, a group from the de-industrialized areas in the US who got left behind when American manufacturing went offshore and East in search of cheap labour. Arguably, this group is less educated, more open to conspiracy theories, and less likely to change their deeply seated beliefs in the face of evidence. Derek Thompson (2016) of The Atlantic argues that ‘The single best predictor of Trump support in the GOP primary is the absence of a college degree.’
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In his response to what both the National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both named as ‘domestic terrorism’ in the car ramming in Charlottesville, Thrush and Haberman (2017) argue that no US President has given white nationalism as much credibility as Trump has in his prevarication and ‘moral equivalency’ in suggesting there are ‘very fne people on both sides’. There is no doubt that the far-right has been energized by the election of Donald Trump (Bethea, 2017). Steve Bannon, one of Trump’s key advisors, took over Breitbart News (https://www.breitbart.com/)—once described by Bannon as ‘the platform of the alt-right’ (Corn, 2016; Elliott & Miller, 2016)—when the founder died and has driven it forward on the basis of a far-right agenda that attracts right-wing Americans disillusioned with mainstream politics and the Washington liberal political class (Kuttner, 2017). The tragedy of Charlottesville is not only the death of Heather Heyer, who gave her life for the struggle, and the injuries sustained by the 19 victims, but is also the rise of white supremacism in the US and continental Europe, including Russia, where the ideology is proliferating and linking up together in new international networks to propagate ideology and violence. It is no longer (and never was) merely a movement, a historical anachronism, or legacy of the US past; it is a fully fedged form of political activism that has extensive geographical distribution, that has taken various forms—religious, political, and populist—and that locates the education of ‘white children’ and their future as their primary cause. David Lane’s slogan is, ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’ (SPLC, https://www.splcenter.org/fghting-hate/extremist-fles /individual/david-lane). By June 2020, violence by far-right is among US’s most dangerous terrorist threats, a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/27/us-farright-violence-terrorist-threatanalysis?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other. So what does philosophy of education have to do with this, with these events, with white supremacism? It has to be more than simple clarifcation, or analysis. It requires action and activism. It also requires an understanding that democracy is a living experiment and that while we cannot change the past we can atone for it and change the present and our future. This means fundamentally a recognition of ‘whiteness’ and white supremacism as a virus in modernity, associated with genocide, with the Holocaust, with the Aryan myth, and with assumptions of white superiority, that like a chronic bad infection needs treatment every time the body politic becomes sick.
Note 1 First Baptist Church: Prior to 1863, African-American Baptists in Charlottesville worshiped under segregated conditions, attending services in the balcony of the white First Baptist Church on Park Street. http://places.afrovirginia.org/items/show/138 https://www.ame-church.com/our-church/our-history/
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References ADL (2015). With hate in their hearts: The state of white supremacy in the United States. https://www.adl.org/education/resources/reports/state-of-white-sup remacy Bethea, C (2017). What a white supremacist told me after Donald Trump was elected. The New Yorker. August 17, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/ what-a-white-supremacist-told-me-after-donald-trump-was-elected Corn, D (2016). Here’s why it’s fair—and necessary—to call Trump’s chief strategist a white nationalist champion. Mother Jones. http://www.motherjones.com/pol itics/2016/11/why-its-fair-and-necessary-call-trumps-chief-strategist-stephen-ba nnon-white-nationalist/ Elliott, P, & Miller, Z (2016, November 16). Inside Donald Trump’s chaotic transition. Time. https://time. com/4574493/donald-trump-chaotic-transition/ Faye, G (2011). Why we fght: Manifesto of European resistance. https://arktos.com/ product/why-we-fght/ Keller, J (2017). Second marine veteran identifed as Charlottesville white nationalist leader. Task & Purpose. https://taskandpurpose.com/nathan-damigo-charlottesv ille-marine/ Kuttner, R (2017). Steve Bannon, unrepentant. The American Prospect. https://pr ospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant Revese, R (2017). Anders Brevik: Norwegian far-right mass murderer changes his name to Fjotolf Hansen. The Independent. www.independent.co.uk/news/wor ld/europe/anders-breivik-norway-terrorist-mass-murderer-changes-name-fjotolf -hansen-a7784186.html Thompson, D (2016). Who are Donald Trump’s supporters, really? The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic. com/politics/archive/2016/03/who-are-donald-tru mps-supporters-really/471714/ Thrush, G, & Haberman, M (2017, August 15). Trump gives white supremacists an unequivocal boost. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0 8/15/us/politics/trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists. html?mcubz=0
Chapter 6
Terrorism, trauma, tolerance Bearing witness to white supremacist attack on Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand Tina Besley and Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Kia kaha Aotearoa, be strong New Zealand
To bear witness to the aftermath of a terrorist atrocity as a national outpouring of grief and a memorializing of those who have passed away is a very touching and deeply emotional process. We are both New Zealanders, with Tina’s hometown being Christchurch, and were working in Beijing when we learned of the mass slaughter of Muslim people at their most important day of gathering for Friday prayers—50 killed and 48 injured including a 4-year-old girl still in critical condition1—at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in the early afternoon on 15 March 2019. We wish to offer our heartfelt sympathies and condolences to the families and friends of those killed and injured and to the Muslim community in this outrageous terrorist attack on the main Masjid Al Noor (the light) and the smaller Linwood mosques. The positive, non-partisan, and supportive leadership of all our politicians and especially of our young 38-year-old Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has been noted worldwide. She immediately called out the atrocity as terrorism, and said in media conferences about the Muslim victims: They have chosen to make New Zealand their home, and it is their home. They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not. They have no place in New Zealand. There is no place in New Zealand for such acts of extreme and unprecedented violence, which it is clear this act was. While ‘this attack was brought to us by someone who was not a citizen, we cannot hide from the fact that the ideology also existed here’…. ‘One of the things we can all do is never allow New Zealand to be an environment where any of that hostility can survive. [But] terrorism doesn’t have borders, we’ve seen that now. So we can do our bit in New Zealand but actually we need to try and play a leadership role too.’ Gunlaw reform has been one way to show leadership to the world. That response was
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‘completely obvious’. Tackling social media is another and those companies ‘know there will be a call for change’. (Ardern, 2019a) In Parliament on Monday, 19 March 2019, Prime Minister Ardern addressed the nation: That quiet Friday afternoon has become our darkest of days. But for the families, it was more than that. It was the day that the simple act of prayer—of practicing their Muslim faith and religion—led to the loss of their loved ones’ lives. Those loved ones were brothers, daughters, fathers and children. They were New Zealanders. They are us. And because they are us, we, as a nation, we mourn them. We feel a huge duty of care to them. And Mr Speaker, we have so much we feel the need to say and to do. In addressing the families, she said, We cannot know your grief, but we can walk with you at every stage. We can. And we will surround you with aroha, manaakitanga and all that makes us, us. Our hearts are heavy but our spirit is strong. (Ardern, 2019a) There were multiple outpourings of grief and support in the weeks following. On Friday, 21st March, throughout New Zealand and worldwide, services and vigils had been held with millions stopping to honour the dead. Some 20,000 gathered at a memorial service in Hagley Park opposite the Al Noor Mosque. After the Islamic call to prayer (adhan), the Jummah Salah, or afternoon prayer, was held and at 1:32 pm a 2-minute silence was observed nationwide. Imam Gamal Fouda conducted a sermon where he said of those killed: ‘they are not just martyrs of Islam, they are martyrs of this nation New Zealand …. With all the shades of our diversity is a testament of our humanity. We are here in our hundreds and thousands, unifed for one purpose – that hate will be undone.’ He gave thanks for: ‘your haka, thank you for your fowers. Thank you for your love and compassion. To our Prime Minister, thank you. Thank you for your leadership—it has been a lesson for the world’s leaders.’ He thanked paramedics, people who used their own vehicles to transport the injured to hospital, ‘our neighbours who opened their doors to save us from the killer’. He stated, ‘Islamophobia is real … we call on Governments across the world, including New Zealand, to bring an end to hate speech and the politics of fear’, and added that white supremacy
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was a threat to mankind, and ‘this must end now …. Last week’s event is proof and evidence that terrorism has no colour, no race and no religion.’2 Further vigils continued throughout NZ towns and cities over the weekend, with 40,000 attending in Christchurch on Sunday. Placards noted: ‘this is your home, you should have been safe here.’ With the approval of the Muslim community, in a show of solidarity many women in NZ wore head scarves. Yet there was some criticism that this was tokenism since the hijab is not worn by all Muslim women ‘nor a piece of clothing to be worn as a costume—there are other ways to show aroha (love)’. The attack in Christchurch was not just about Muslims, it was against any person of colour in a ‘white’ country so this focus on hijabs is derailing the examination of white supremacy, systematic racism, Orientalism and bigotry. We don’t want to be turned into a caricature.3 The news fooded to us frst on social media and then through our own NZ media searches. It was incomprehensible. We were dumbfounded: the scale of the killings; the cold, calculated planning of the shootings over many months; the undetected hate speech on social media; the interconnections with other attacks on Muslims, Christians, and civil society in the West. How could such a cowardly act of terrorism happen in NZ, an otherwise peaceful and open society? How is it possible in words to express our grief and to whom? People struggled to fnd the words that convey their deep sympathies to the Muslim community and at the same time to cope with their own feelings of shock and outrage that it was possible for such mass killings to take place at all and that the planned attack could take place as the result of a deep uncontrollable hatred of one man against the religion and people of another race and culture with his white supremacist views. This terrorist atrocity constitutes a form of trauma frst to those who experienced it and survived, their relatives and friends and affects the whole Muslim community worldwide. It also affects the frst responders—paramedics, hospital staff, police, and ordinary citizen witnesses/ helpers. It is, in fact, a double trauma for many in the New Zealand Muslim community who have come to NZ to escape war and strife in their country of birth. For instance, the frst burials included Syrian refugees Khalid Mustafa and his 16-year-old son, Hamza. His 13-year-old son, Zaid, was wounded and in a wheelchair. The family had been in New Zealand for less than a year. Both Hamza and another teenager, 14-yearold Sayyad Ahmad Milne and 24-year-old former pupil Tariq Rashid Omar were from Cashmere High School4, amongst the frst of many places visited nationwide by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. For those at the mosques who survived the assault there will be a long healing process. Many will be comforted by their religious beliefs that the victims died as martyrs in the most sacred of places, closest to Allah, with the outpouring of love
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and community support. Nevertheless, people will have to learn to live with the trauma and a host of feelings that might be accompanied by a form of denial and then feelings of fear, helplessness, anger, and maybe guilt and sadness. Trauma may result in a state of numbness, of being dazed and feeling cut off from the reality, the classic symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, followed by being unable to sleep or eat, palpitations, extreme tiredness, poor concentration, and headaches.5 Often victims of PTSD fnd themselves reliving the trauma again and again through vivid and distressing memories or dreams. Sometimes it leads to a kind of perpetual feeling of being on guard, a state of readiness and alertness, to counter feelings of helplessness. It may lead to extreme suspicion of others and long-term depression, depending on the gravity and scale of the assault. Tragically, despite Islam’s religious prohibitions, it may even lead to self-harm or suicide, as has recently occurred in the US with three suicides by people associated with mass school shootings at Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School and Sandy Hook. Trauma for victims’ families is ongoing. Two women had heart attacks and one mother whose son was killed, died. With so many men killed, the wives they’ve left behind have ongoing trauma and diffculties to face as they put their lives back together. Some, who did not drive or work and had relied on their husbands who were the sole breadwinners, were left with no immediate money, while others have jobs and professional qualifcations. Some spoke limited English. Several were on temporary visas attached to their husband’s work visas, while others had been there for many years. Government support was available from Accident Compensation Commission, and Victim Support saw NZ and overseas donors raise over NZ$8.4 million to support the community.6 But of course, there will be multiple forms to be flled and constant reminders of their trauma. Amid the shock and disbelief that it happened in an otherwise peaceful Christchurch, a common theme has been that New Zealand has lost its innocence. New Zealand police are not armed except in emergencies. We never had to fear a bag or bulky backpack left lying around. Emergency procedures emphasize what to do in a fre or during a tsunami or an earthquake. Schools have crisis and lock-down plans and on 15 March all Christchurch schools were locked down for 4 hours as terrifed children heard choppers circling, some watched the news on their phones, and all wondered if/when the gunman would come for them. Many of children and adults who inadvertently saw the terrorist’s video of the killings as it popped up in news feeds before being removed have sought counselling, and there has been a considerable upsurge in those seeking help, some of whom may need it for years to come (Lewis, 2019). Local Christchurch people, especially older children, teens, and adults who had already lived through the trauma of the earthquakes of September 2010 and February 2011, when a 6.3 magnitude quake killed 185 and decimated Christchurch, will have been retraumatized. The continuing quake aftershocks added to their anxiety and stress in subsequent years, and it united the country in support.
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Yet the trauma from terrorism is different, and is part of the intended psychological effects whereby indiscriminate violence is the means to create terror and fear as a deliberate political act designed to incite hatred and further bloodshed that aims to threaten the innocent, to shock the population, and to create enemies among the non-combatant civil population. It is a political act of intimidation designed to galvanize both sides of a confict. Unfortunately, terrorism is not new—its roots and practice go back at least to the frst century when the Sicarii attempted to expel the Roman invaders from Judea. Whereas terrorism aims to divide, in NZ this has been unequivocally resisted in the national outpouring of support and tolerance uniting the country with such sayings as: ‘Terror will not win!’ and ‘They r us.’ Increasingly, in the modern world we have come to experience acts of terrorism and civil war as a daily possibility. In the era of the alt-right, associated with the Trump’s presidency and Brexit, we have seen the global growth of white supremacist extremism and terrorism (https:// www.csis.org/analysis/rise-far -right-extremism-united-states). We reported on the tragedy of Charlottesville7 and ‘Unite the Right’ rally organized by Jason Kessler and Nathan Damigo led by Richard B. Spencer and David Duke who, with their alt-right supporters, chanted, ‘You will not replace us,’ ‘Blood and soil’, and ‘Jews will not replace us’ (Peters & Besley, 2017). We noted that Guillaume Faye’s (2011) manifesto of European white nationalism ‘holds out the prospect of a racial and revolutionary alternative to the present decayed civilisation. The manifesto’s principal objective is thus to unify the resistance by developing a common doctrine that unites everyone and every tendency seeking to constitute a European network of resistance—a doctrine that goes beyond the old sectarian quarrels and superfcial divisions.’ We noted the links of the alt-right with the identitarian movement (Peters & Besley, 2017): The invective against ‘Cultural Marxism’8 originates in the European farright and is very similar to the Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto that describes cultural Marxism as ‘political correctness’ and seeks to critique the Frankfurt School and deconstruction as being responsible for the empowerment of ‘minorities’ against ‘white civilization’ (https://sites.google.com/site/knightstemplareurope/ 2083). Brevik (now known as Fjotolf Hansen) was responsible for the 22nd July attack on the Workers’ Youth League camp in Utoya in 2011, when he shot 69 having murdered another eight people by earlier bombing the Regjeringskvartalet (the Government quarter) in Oslo. (Revese, 2017) The 28-year-old terrorist gunman9 in the Christchurch attack was from Grafton, Australia, and sent a ‘manifesto’ called ‘The Great Replacement’ to our political leaders minutes before starting shooting. This document was named after the racist, anti-immigration, misogynist conspiracy theories set out in the Great Replacement
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by Renaud Camus (http://www.great-replacement.com/) and which replaces the term ‘white genocide’ as used by alt-right in the US, that white people face existential demise and ultimately extinction. As Manjoo notes, not only is there no evidence of such genocide, but the term sounds ‘more polite than “genocide”, which fts with a long-term effort among white supremacists to craft a cleaner-cut image for themselves (that’s why the hipster new term for “white supremacist” is “identitarian”’ (Manjoo, 2019)). Within a week, both the gunman’s document and his 17-minute live-stream video of the attack in a frst-person shooter style similar to a video game for viewers to comment on in real time, a form of ‘performance crime’,10 that was intended to inspire other alt-right followers as he posted on Facebook, have now been classifed as ‘objectionable publication’ material by the NZ Chief Censor, David Shanks (https:// www.dia.govt.nz/Response-to-the -Christchurch-terrorism-attack-video).11 While they may be banned in NZ, unfortunately these items are still available in various global sites. Worse still, in Turkey, President Erdoğan has repeatedly replayed blurred footage of the video multiple times as part of his current election campaign. There is obviously huge danger of this inciting hatred. But with the support of both major political parties, NZ has banned assault rifes and military style semi-automatic rifes (MSSAs), parts that can convert guns into MSSAs, parts that cause a frearm to generate semi-automatic or close to automatic gunfre, and high capacity magazines. These are now illegal, so owners need to turn them in to Police and will receive some compensation (Small, 2019). While many Americans have praised this move, the NRA and its supporters have already targeted and trolled New Zealanders who have turned in their weapons. For New Zealand, gun ownership is a privilege, for the US, the 2nd amendment provides a right to bear arms. Social media remains a huge concern in how it enables racist hate to perpetuate, to recruit and propagandize extremism and glorify violence. Does banning them simply push them more underground to darker Internet sites like 4chan and 8chan where they continue to radicalize others by using their ongoing techniques of memes, humour symbols, anti-social trash-talking, competitiveness, trolling, codes, etc.? Michelle Duff states that Followers on the internet chat room the gunman frequented—a site that began out of a harassment campaign known as GamerGate, to target highprofle women in the gaming industry with trolling, rape and death threats, and doxing—cheered along and encouraged him as innocent people died. Moreover, she points out that the gunman ‘mentions video games, the name of a massively popular online YouTube gamer, and leaves what are known as “easter eggs”—gaming terminology for a hidden message or image that reveals a work’s “true” meaning’. It seems that far-right extremists use the same recruiting techniques online as Islamic State had, such as ‘using fabricated narratives and false concepts designed to deceive, with messages deliberately targeted to different online platforms’ (Duff, 2019).
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Although Facebook and YouTube worked hard to take down the offensive video, it had already spread through Twitter. Facebook reported that it had ‘1.5 m uploads within 24 h and claimed to have caught 1.2 m before they made it into users’ newsfeeds. (That still left 300,000 copies on the loose though)’(Naughton 2019). To deal with the huge number of uploads on YouTube, the chief product offcer overrode its human content moderation systems ‘relying entirely on AI software to immediately identify the most violent parts of the video and automatically block them. Predictably this was only partially successful.’ Alarmingly, YouTube engineers found that there was not just simple sharing by pressing a button; rather, deliberately tweaked copies were created that would escape their AI systems (Naughton, 2019). The call now is for a delay in live-streaming similar to that on TV, but of a few minutes so that the moderators have time to check content. After considerable criticism, including complaints from the NZ Privacy Commissioner John Edwards who said, ‘Your silence is an insult to our grief,’ about Facebook’s level of engagement and accountability (Nadkarni, 2019), fnally to address propagandizing and recruiting by white supremacist groups, on 26 March 2019 Facebook announced it ‘will no longer allow content supporting white nationalism and white separatism … since white nationalism cannot be meaningfully separated from white supremacy and organized hate groups … we will not tolerate praise or support for white nationalism and separatism’ (Beckett, 2019). The terrorist’s ‘manifesto’ follows the same ideological pattern of that are commonly seen from white supremacist groups: ‘white genocide’ through mass immigration and high birth rates of immigrants, with low birth rates of the white population; ‘to take revenge’; ‘to incite violence’; ‘to create an atmosphere of fear’; and ‘to create confict between the two ideologies within the United States on the ownership of frearms in order to further the social, cultural, political and racial divide within the United States’. The link to fascism is self-consciously deliberate, as he writes: I support many of those that take a stand against ethnic and cultural genocide. Luca Traini, Anders Breivik, Dylan Roof, Anton Lundin Pettersson, Darren Osbourne and so forth. But I have only had brief contact with Knight Justiciar Breivik, receiving a blessing for my mission after contacting his brother knights. Although he may have acted alone in the massacre, contrary to reports of being a ‘lone wolf’, the Australian gunman was not alone, but was clearly connected with alt-right and white supremacist groups that confate Islam with terrorism and most likely was carefully groomed by their networks. He came to NZ in 2017 after touring Asia, Greece, and Turkey in 2016, a ‘study tour’ in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, Austria, France, Portugal, Spain, Hungary, Bulgaria, and other parts of Europe and visited locations of signifcant Ottoman Empire battles, where it seems he made contact with others like him.12 It seems he was infuenced by the far-right, white nationalist ‘identitarian’ movement, originating
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in France in 2016 which takes ideas from Renaud Camus, philosopher Alain de Benoist, and Guillaume Faye (2011). As an Economist (March 2018) article stated, ‘Identitarianism’ is ‘a growing movement led by young European activists aimed at reshaping identity politics’ (https://www.economist.com/europe /2018/03/28/how-identitarian-pol-itics-is-changing-europe). Subsequent to the massacre, the Austrian government investigated its Identitarian Movement (Generation Identity—GI) and uncovered links and a donation of €1500 from the gunman in 2018. It’s leader, Martin Sellner, revealed that he urged the shooter to watch the Group’s English-language videos online but denied meeting him. In considering banning the group, Chancellor Sebastian Kurtz stated, ‘Our position on this is very clear, no kind of extremism whatsoever—whether it’s radical Islamists or right-wing extremist fanatics—has any place in our country and our society’; however, the Identitarian Movement has clear links to the minor coalition partner of the government, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPO), with Vice-Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache being an FPO member who had previously promoted Generation Identity online and tweeted ‘Fanaticism has no place in our Society’ (Besser, 2019). More than ever, in liberal democracies, political parties will now need to think very carefully on the ramifcations of who they choose as partners. This highlights just how the internet and social media enables such groups to exist globally and to share ideas that most of us fnd unacceptable. The network effect is important to understand the emergence of narratives of white nationalism, not just the chat sites on social media, or the propaganda, or shared videos, but also a history of the far-right and a set of texts that propose a philosophical justifcation of white civilization, nationalism, and supremacy. The gunman quoted Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British fascists, on ‘the great awakening of the European soul’. As is well known, Mosley went to Italy to meet Mussolini in 1931 and to study the new movements. On his return, he set up the British Union of Fascists in 1932. There is a return of fascism in Europe based on anticonservatism, a myth of ethnic or national renewal and a conception of a nation in crisis: There are those among the current generation in the West who are still able to remember the rise of Fascism in Europe. It is rising again, all over Europe and in other parts of the world. It never died, like an ancient virus in the bloodstream of the body politic, it grows, multiplies and mutates. To understand its contemporary forms and the conditions that gave rise to it we need to re-evaluate its history, understand its background and to recognize its links with forms of government and institutions it wants to negate. We need to know it again within the propaganda era of digital media and to analyze and understand its power of attraction to young white men. (Peters, 2018) Albright’s (2018) Fascism: A Warning addresses the contemporary resurgence of fascism and its global repressive and destructive forces that threaten democracy
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and Trump’s entanglement with and support for the far-right. Albright is only prepared to say that Trump is the most undemocratic president in American history, but he has clear links to Steve Bannon and has defended various white nationalist groups. The question is, what can we do? What is the role of education in an age of terrorism? This was the underlying question in Education, Globalization, and the State in the Age of Terrorism (Peters, 2006), which was an analysis of the Gulf War and the neocon (neoconservative) justifcation for intervention in Iraq. The synopsis argued: Education plays an important role in challenging, combating and in understanding terrorism in its different forms, whether as counter-terrorism or as a form of human rights education. Just as education has played a signifcant role in the process of nation-building, so education also plays a strong role in the process of empire, globalization and resistance to global forces—and in terrorism, especially where it is linked to emergent statehood. This book focuses on the theme of education in an age of terrorism, exploring the conficts of globalization and global citizenship, feminism post-9/11, youth identities, citizenship and democracy in a culture of permanent war, and the relation between education and war, with a focus on the war against Iraq. In ‘The Unforeseen: Education and the Flowers of Sacrifce’ Peters (2016) commented on the 2014 Peshawar school massacre by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, (‘the Taliban Movement of Pakistan’) that killed 145 people, including 132 schoolchildren, relating it to Beslan school siege and massacre, North Ossetia, Russia (334 dead) and Breivik’s massacre of 69 people, mostly teenagers, at the Workers’ Youth League (AUF) camp on Utøya, Norway, in 2011, commenting: Breivik’s far-right militant anti-Islamic terrorism calls for the violent annihilation of ‘Eurabia’ and his motive for his atrocities was to draw attention to his manifesto. His deep-seated hatred of Islam echoes the intensity of ideological-inspired hatred against the West by fundamentalist Islamic militant terrorists. (Peters, 2016) White supremacist racism as a form of extremism that is linked to a set of religious circumstances—a civilizational set of religious wars that go back to the Middle Ages and political manifestations of the Crusades and the jihad and manifest in our contemporary world as a war of religion between fundamentalist forms of Christianity and radical Islam. Hence there is now a conversation about changing the name of the Christchurch-based Super Rugby team, the Crusaders; the signifcance of whose name and affront to Muslims would most likely have escaped most New Zealanders when it was chosen in 1999, which
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refects how the socio-political landscape in New Zealand has been impacted and is now changed. Much has been said about the encounter between Islam and Europe, most recently by Edward Said (1978) in Orientalism but that stretches back to ‘war on Islam’ conspiracies starting with Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, a leading member of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1950s and 1960s who was critical of Muslim governments and promoted Islamist ideology, the hostility of the West against Islam, and violent jihad, infuencing al-Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Anwar-al-Awaki, and others. There are pronounced ideological, sociological, and religious similarities between radical fundamentalist Islamic and extremist Christian groups as Nick Gier’s (n.d.) observes (see Chapter 4). Increasingly, there are forms of extremism, and there are strong historical connections between them: each trying to mobilize sentiments, ideology, and terror against civil society. Some argued that this is in part ‘blow-back’ of American wars and Western aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, but it seems to be much deeper. New Zealand is now a multicultural country13 with over 200 ethnicities and 160 languages spoken. It follows a set of bicultural (Maori and non-Maori) policies, many of which have been established since the late 1980s and 1990s, related to relationship between Maori and the Crown as described in our 1840 founding document, Te Tiritiri o Waitangi, Treaty of Waitangi (for a very brief overview, see Hayward, 2012). There have been ongoing struggles to honour the Treaty, to establish ways to settle reparations for past injustices with iwi (tribes) on behalf of the Crown via the Waitangi Tribunal, and it is outrageous that it took until 1987 for Maori to become an offcial language. While Muslims have been in NZ for many years, there has lately been an increase in their numbers, 46,000 at the 2013 census, with the majority being Sunni, and the Shia population concentrated in Auckland. At almost 1% of the population it totally destroys the great replacement theory as sheer nonsense. The dead and injured in this atrocity, aged from 3 to 77, were mostly men, but women and children were not spared. They were from many countries, including Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Fiji, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and New Zealand. There are multiple media accounts from Maori, Muslims, and people of colour about their experiences of contemporary racism, including reports from a vigil in Auckland on 21 March where speakers also referred to ‘hard truths’ about New Zealand’s history of white settler colonial violence. Forms of racism were part of the colonization of indigenous peoples around the world and took place against Maori in Aotearoa-New Zealand and we still grapple to redress this on-going legacy. The Waitangi Tribunal goes only some way in this. Nevertheless, some attendees were dismayed at the political tone, that having come to mourn they thought this was too soon although noting that such conversations need to be had (Neilsen, 2019). Attitudinal and actual racist practices defnitely still need to change. The NZ Chief Human Rights Commissioner, Paul Hunt (2019), points out that ‘casual racism can lead to the stereotyping, and the stereotyping can lead
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to the othering … and as soon as you start treating others as alien it’s close to demonising, and demonising can slip into the 15th of March.’ He believes it is timely to seriously focus on the country’s human rights shortcomings, and have a mature debate about human rights, and the balance between free speech and hate speech, noting that ‘There is Islamophobia, there is racism …. This is not “political correctness gone mad”. It is a matter of life, death and human rights. Disrespectful words and actions give permission for discrimination, harassment and violence.’ However, it is not just in New Zealand, there have been reports of increases in Islamophobic comments and actions across the world, including New Zealand. For example in the UK, an organization called Tell MAMA, which measures anti-Muslim attacks, said there had been a 593% increase in the number of incidents reported after 15 March (Paul Hunt, 2019 cited in Walters, 2019). Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, reported ‘he has been repeatedly subjected to anti-Muslim abuse from Tory members and supporters’ and with the number of hate crimes against Muslims reported across Britain increased by 593% in the week after the attack on two New Zealand mosques, he asked Theresa May to adopt ‘a defnition of Islamophobia drawn up by the all-party parliamentary group for British Muslims, already accepted by Labour and the Lib Dems’. The defnition reads: ‘Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’ (Savage, 2019). In light of all of this, Jacinda Ardern’s leadership has been vital and exemplary both nationally and globally. In the UAE, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid praised her support for the Muslim community and on Friday 21 March, Dubai lit up the tallest building in the world, the Burj Khalifa, with her photo embracing a woman in hijab at Kilbirnie Mosque, Wellington, and the words ‘Salaam Peace’, in Arabic and English. Similar expressions of support against hatred and for tolerance and co-existence have been made by many world leaders. Ardern’s leadership has received many plaudits from around the world: ‘A leader with love on full display’ (Nagesh, 2019) and are summarized by Edwards (2019): The strong consensus—both here and abroad—is that Ardern has demonstrated extraordinarily impressive leadership since the terrorist atrocities. Numerous commentaries have celebrated her emotional and empathetic response, combined with her strength and ‘steeliness’ in taking decisive action on matters such as gun control and victim support, her correctness in labelling the murders as ‘terrorism’, and her ability to project and foster unity (when there is a tendency towards division, even from many of her own supporters). Ardern, in speaking at the National Memorial in Christchurch on 29th March, captured the impact on New Zealand and worldwide, stating: The world has been stuck in a vicious cycle of extremism breeding extremism and it must end. We cannot confront these issues alone, none of us can. But the answer to them lies in a simple concept that is not bound by domestic
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borders, that isn’t based on ethnicity, power base or even forms of governance. The answer lies in our humanity. (Ardern, 2019b) In trying to answer, what can/shall we do, some things become obvious, as noted above, but accepting diversity, addressing racism, and being tolerant while enabling free speech, all form part of the mix. Considering the parallels of being in exile or a refugee from war, it seems signifcant that we should invoke Karl Popper’s famous 1945 paradox of tolerance following the tragic events in Christchurch, ‘To maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance’ (see Popper, 1945, note 4 in Chapter 7): Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. Popper was an Austrian Jewish exile who came to NZ as a lecturer in philosophy at Canterbury University College, University of New Zealand, in 1937 and wrote the famous book The Open Society and Its Enemies while in Christchurch. Much public debate about free speech arose in NZ in 2018 when alt-right speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneaux, who are closely connected with the altright identitarian movement, had a speaking event cancelled (‘no-platforming’ or ‘de-platforming’) when Mayor Phil Goff denied them an Auckland City Council venue. Similarly, much debate occurred when Don Brash (former head of the Reserve Bank and ACT party leader) was not allowed to speak at Massey University later that year. This is the political embodiment of this paradox. But if we believe in an open society, to take John Rawls’ (1999) viewpoint, we need to carefully consider how much of a threat to an open society are such adherents? Where do we draw the line? Currently, there is no specifc offence for hate crime in NZ which is subsumed under other crimes. Should there be one? We continue to hope that the points made about the vital tasks of dialogue in dealing with diversity as outlined in our book Interculturalism, Education and Dialogue (Besley & Peters, 2012) can be heard and acted upon. Without dialogue we have nothing, except confict and, in the end, war. The overwhelming stance is that civil society must be defended. In New Zealand at the central mosque and Al Noor in Christchurch, innocent people were slaughtered while peacefully at prayer. They too were ‘the fowers of sacrifce’ in a networked war of terrorism that knows no safe or secure place. Bearing witness is a concept that allows for the expression of sympathy and empathy, and as multiple media accounts testifed, the people of New Zealand responded by forming a national bond with the Muslim community, turning out in their thousands in many towns and cities to hold vigils to honour the slain and to express their grief, having read the stories of so many, clearly understanding that the great majority of Muslims are peace-loving people who want to pursue their own faith and in so many ways ‘are us’. Tolerance, respect, diversity, and unity. As Ardern (2019b) said,
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And we remember, that ours is a home that does not and cannot claim perfection. But we can strive to be true to the words embedded in our national anthem: Men of every creed and race, Gather here before Thy face, Asking Thee to bless this place God defend our free land From dissension, envy, hate And corruption, guard our state Make our country good and great God Defend New Zealand Tātou Tātou Asalamu Aleykum. [Peace be upon you] Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King Jr
Postscript The terrorist, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, pleaded guilty to all charges at his trial on 26 March 2020, making a shock admission that he was the lone gunman who murdered 51 Muslims at two Christchurch mosques on March 15 2019. He also admitted 40 charges of attempted murder and pleaded guilty to one charge of engaging in a terrorist act laid under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002. (http s://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12319961)
Notes 1 Subsequently, the number of people killed rose to 51. 2 See NZ media—both Stuff and NZ Herald: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/ christchurch-shooting/111479826/ livestream-new-zealand-two-minutes-of-si lence-for-victims-of-christchurch-terror-attack-vigil?cid¼app-iPhone 3 https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111473440/headscarves-movement-means-well-but-it-is-cheap-tokenism 4 It was particularly poignant for Tina since she is a past student and teacher at Cashmere High. 5 https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/mental-health/problems-disorders/coping-after-a -traumatic-event 6 Donated by March 20—see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christchurch_mo sque_shootings
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7 On 27 March 2019, James Alex Fields, 25, who drove his car into counterprotesters at a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in 2017, killing Heather Heyer and injuring dozens, a professed neo-Nazi, pleaded guilty to 29 federal hate crimes out of 30 counts in a deal to avoid the death penalty. In the aftermath, President Donald Trump was criticized for saying there had been ‘very fne people’ on both sides in Charlottesville. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada47727275; Carma Hassan & Eric Levenson (2019). https://edition.cnn.com /2019/03/27/us/james-felds-charlottesville/index.html. Accessed 28 March. 8 Cultural Marxism is notable as an anti-Semitic meme (Moyn, 2018). 9 In keeping with the intent of Prime Minister Ardern and others to counter his wish for notoriety, we will not give him, as Thatcher called it, ‘the oxygen of publicity’ and not name him. 10 Dr Stuart Bender, an early career research fellow at Curtin University in Australia, said the shooting was notable for its use of live-streaming video. ‘This makes the attack a form of “performance crime” where the act of video recording and/or streaming the violence by the perpetrator is a central component of the violence itself, rather than being incidental.’ He said the video should not be seen as a disgusting trophy for the perpetrator to re-watch later—the video is part of the violent activity itself. ‘The performance crime element of this attack links it to the new era of participatory media terrorism and shows the dark side of livestreaming services’ (Stevenson & Anthony, 2019). 11 The content of the video fle is disturbing and harmful for people to see. Furthermore, the video fle depicting the terrorist attack in Christchurch (the video fle) is an objectionable publication under the Films, Videos, and Publications Classifcation Act 1993 (the Act) as it depicts and promotes extreme violence and terrorism. Accessing, possessing, or distributing (including sharing or hosting or showing other people) the video fle are criminal offences against New Zealand law. The Chief Censor has now also confrmed that the video of the attack is offcially classifed as objectionable. 12 See Daily Mail, UK, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6824407/H ow-Christchurch-gunman-far-right-ideology-infuenced-travels.html 13 NZ population: 74% European; 15% Maori; 12% Asians [both Indian & Chinese]; 7.4% Pacifc Islanders (2013 Census, www.stats.govt.nz, note there are considerable overlaps in ethnic identity). There were 213 ethnic groups identifed in the 2013 census. 3% speak Maori, 2% Samoan, 2% Hindi, with many other languages spoken by a small number of people, primarily by recent immigrants.
References Albright, M (2018). Fascism: A warning. New York: HarperCollins. Ardern, J (2019a). New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern says she will never say Christchurch shooter’s name. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-19/c hristchurch-shootings-jacinda-ardern-house-speech-shooter-name/10917030 [Ardern’s speech to Parliament]. Ardern, J (2019b). Jacinda Ardern: We will remember the tears of our nation. https ://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111645738/jacinda-ar dern-we-will-remember-the-tears-of-our-nation?cidapp-iPhone [Prime Minister’s speech & video at the National Remembrance Service, Christchurch]. Beckett, L (2019). Facebook to ban white nationalism and separatism content. https ://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/27/facebook-white-nati onalism-hate-speech-ban?CMP Share_iOSApp_Other
62 Terrorism, trauma, tolerance Besley, Tina, & Peters, MA (Eds.). (2012). Interculturalism, education and dialogue. New York: Peter Lang. Besser, L (2019). Austrian far-right group faces ban after donation from alleged Christchurch shooter. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-28/austrian-far -right-group-faces-ban-brenton-tarrant-donation/10947002 Duff, M (2019). Gaming culture and the alt-right: The weaponisation of hate. https ://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111468129/gaming-cul ture-and-the-alt-right-the-weaponisation-of-hate?-cid app-iPhone Edwards, B (2019). Bryce Edwards’ political roundup: International fascination with Jacinda Ardern. https://eveningreport.nz/2019/03/28/bryce-edwards-polit ical-roundup-international-fascination-with-jacinda-ardern/ Faye, G (2011). Why we fght: Manifesto of European resistance. https://arktos.com /product/why-we-fght/ Gier, N (n.d.). Chilling parallels between Christian and Muslim fundamentalists. Retrieved from https://www.web-pages.uidaho.edu/ngier/parallels.htm Hassan, C, & Eric, L (2019). Charlottesville car attacker pleads guilty to 29 hate crimes and avoids the death penalty. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/27/us/ james-felds-charlottesville/index.html Lewis, O (2019). Mental health need expected to last years following Christchurch terror attack—GP. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/ 111560145/mental-health-need-expected-to-last-years-following-christchurchterror-attack–gp Manjoo, F (2019). The white-extinction conspiracy theory is bonkers. https://www .nytimes.com/ 2019/03/20/opinion/new-zealand-great-replacement.html Moyn, S (2018). The Alt-Right’s favorite meme is 100 years old. ‘Cultural Marxism’ might sound postmodern but it’s got a long, toxic history. https://www.nytimes. com/2018/11/13/opinion/cultural-marxism-anti-semitism.html Nadkarni, A (2019). ‘Your silence is an insult to our grief’: Privacy commissioner tells Facebook. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/11152 7196/your-silence-is-an-insult-to-our-grief-privacy-commissioner-tells-facebook Nagesh, A (2019). Jacinda Ardern: ‘A leader with love on full display’. https://www .bbc.com/news/ world-asia-47630129 Naughton, J (2019). Christchurch shows how social media sites help spread the poison of far-right ideology. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/201 9/mar/24/christchurch-shows-how-social-media-sites-help-spread-poison-far-r ight-ideology-youtube-facebook?CMP Share_iOSApp_Other Neilsen, M (2019). Christchurch mosque shootings: Debate intensifes over timing of vigil/’political’ rally at Auckland Domain. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index .cfm?objectid 12215860&ref twitter. Peters, MA (2006). Education, globalization, and the state in the age of terrorism. New York: Peter Lang. Peters, MA (2016). The unforeseen: Education and the fowers of sacrifce. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(6), 545–548. doi:10.1080/00131857.20 15.1054621 Peters, MA (2018). The return of fascism: Youth, violence and nationalism. Educational Philosophy and Theory. doi:10.1080/00131857.2018.1519772 Peters, MA, & Besley, T (2017). White supremacism: The tragedy of Charlottesville. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49(14), 1309–1312. doi:10.1080/00131857 .2017.1370896
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Popper, K (1945). The open society and its enemies, Vol. 1, The spell of plato. London: Routledge. Rawls, J (1999). [orig 1971]). A theory of justice. (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Imprint of Harvard University Press. Revese, R (2017). Anders Brevik: Norwegian far-right mass murderer changes his name to Fjotolf Hansen. The Independent. Retrieved from www.independent.co.u k/news/world/europe/anders-breivik-norway-terrorist-mass-murderer-changes -name-fjotolf-hansen-a7784186.html Said, E (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon. Savage, M (2019). Sadiq Khan challenges Theresa may to act against Tory Islamophobia. https:// www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/24/sadiq -khan-challenges-theresa-may-tory-islamophobia?CMP Share_ iOSApp_Other Small, Z (2019). Gun law changes: What you need to know. https://www.newshub. co.nz/home/polit-ics/2019/03/gun-law-changes-what-you-need-to-know.html Stevenson, R, & Anthony, J (2019). ‘Thousands’ of Christchurch shootings videos removed from YouTube, Google says. https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/11 1330323/facebook-working-around-the-clock-to-block-christchurch-shootings -video. Walters, L (2019). Christchurch shootings: New Zealand is complacent on human rights. https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111579425/ christchurch-shootings-new-zealand-is-complacent-on-human-rights?cidapp-iPh one.
Websites Charlottesville murderer Fields pleads guilty to hate crimes, https://www.bbc.com/ news/world-us-canada-47727275. Accessed 28 March 2019. Christchurch mosque attacks: Thousands attend Hagley Park service to remember victims, http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111479826/l ivestream-new-zealand-two-minutes-of-silence-for-victims-of-christ-church-terror -attack-vigil?cidapp-iPhone, Accessed March 22, 2019. The Economist. (2018). How ‘identitarian’ politics is changing Europe, Mar 28, 2018, https://www.economist.com/europe/2018/03/28/how-identitarian-politics-is -changing-europe. Accessed March 22, 2019. Headscarves movement means well but it is ‘cheap tokenism’, https://www.stuff.co .nz/national/christchurch-shooting/111473440/headscarves-movement-means -well-but-it-is-cheap-tokenism?cid app-iPhone. Accessed March 22 2019. http://www.great-replacement.com/; https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/20/ opinion/new-zealand-great-replacement.html; https://www.dia.govt.nz/R esponse-to-the-Christchurch-terrorism-attack-video
Chapter 7
The refugee camp as the biopolitical paradigm of the West Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Today it is not the city but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, ‘Threshold’, p. 181 The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to fnd out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulflled life. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 150
Living in the early twenty-frst century, it is impossible to avoid the fact and moral signifcance of ‘the camp’ in its pervasiveness and diversity: labour camps, concentration camps, extermination camps, death camps, reservations, immigration camps, and camps for seemingly more benign purposes such as school, health, or scout camps. Above all, at this time we cannot fail to notice the prominence of the refugee camp. The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) indicates there are 65.3 million displaced people worldwide, 23.1 million refugees, and 10 million stateless people.1 The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants statistics show 4.2 million refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) in the Middle East, with Palestinians, Afghans, and Iraqis comprising the majority, 3.2 million refugees and IDPs in Africa, with the majority coming from Sudan, and 2 million refugees and IDPs in south and central Asia, with over 1 million Afghanis living in Pakistan alone.2 These camps are the result of civil wars and zones of confict that, like the Syrian and Afghan wars, increasingly seem to be directed as much against civilians as against ‘rebels’ or state forces. Nearly 50 million children currently are refugees with few opportunities for any kind of education or schooling, although this would arguably be the least of their survival problems.3 Half this number comes from Syria and Afghanistan. It might be argued that some of these children become the source of terrorism tomorrow. Benjamin R. Barber (Barber, 2003, p. xxvii) put the argument some time ago: Children have been soldiers and victims in the raging ethnic and religious wars; children are the majority of the global cohort that suffers poverty,
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disease and starvation. Children are our terrorists-to-be because they are so obviously not our citizens to come. In basic agreement with Barber I argued: The fundamental challenge for the west and for western education is in promoting a form of political education …. But this would have to be a form of political education that is not based on the logic of conversion or crass assimilation to American or western values but to as-yet unformulated ethos of a world civic space and concept of world citizenship. Such a vision may not be based on a simple projection of Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’ although it might invoke a kind of cosmopolitanism that can still be shaped through participation, dialog and exchange of world cultures. (Peters, 2005, p. 3.) In regard to this possibility western agencies might begin with questioning its ruling myths, as Gray (2003) argues in Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern: Western societies are ruled by the myth that, as the rest of the world absorbs science and becomes modern, it is bound to become secular, enlightened and peaceful—as contrary to all evidence, they imagine themselves to be. (Ibid., p. 118) The ‘European immigration crisis’ that culminated in 2015 with a massive increase of displaced persons seeking asylum in Europe was the worst since the end of WWII. As it has intensifed, the right to political asylum has been abrogated as most European states have reached the limits of liberal tolerance with strong blow back from local populations and the rise of anti-immigrations politics and racism (Peters & Besley, 2015). If anything, the refugee camp is the creation and symbol of the age of failed Western globalization policies that point to free trade and liberal international global politics on the one hand, and yet on the other, involve ‘globalization as war’ and ongoing conficts over oil, oil pipelines, and strategic territories (for ‘globalization as war’ see Peters, 2005). One can only surmise how much worse the refugee problem will be under the oil geopolitics of Trump’s national populism and protectionism. The history of the camp in the modern era dates from the Boer War when the British, under Kitchener, pursued a ‘Scorched Earth’ policy forcing mostly civilian populations of women and children into internment or concentration camps, some 45 tent camps for Boers and 64 for 107,000 Black Africans. It is reported that because the conditions in these camps were so severe, with poor hygiene and food shortages, some 28,000 people, mostly children, perished (22,074 children under 16, 4,177 women, and 1,676 men).4 Most of the prisoners of war were sent overseas. Ferguson (2004, p. 250) argues that the concentration camps were not part of a deliberate genocidal policy, but many such as Erica Lally (2015) note the impact of racism in such policies, and the deaths of 20,000 Blacks in concentration South African camps believe that this was not genocide.5 The British used internment as part of their counterinsurgency strategy during the so-called Malayan Emergency.
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Under German colonial rule in Namibia fve concentration camps were established during the Herero and Nama genocide programme during 1904– 8. Lieutenant General Lothar von Trotha, the Oberbefehlshaber (Supreme Commander) of the protection force in German Southwest Africa, is on record as saying that he believed the Herero nation should be annihilated. Herero males were executed and women and children were driven into the desert. Survivors of a planned massacre ended up in the Shark Island concentration camp where they worked as slave labour. Prisoners were used for medical experiments and some 300 skulls were sent back to Germany for scientifc racism-related investigations. Jeremy Sarkin’s (2009) Colonial Genocide and Reparations Claims in the TwentyFirst Century: The Socio-Legal Context of Claims under International Law by the Herero against Germany for Genocide in Namibia, 1904–1908 details the Herero genocide, that is recognized by the United Nations as the frst organized state genocide in world history. The Herero became the frst ethnic group to seek reparations from the German government and Deutsche Bank that fnanced German companies in Southern Africa in the various US federal courts. On the 100th Anniversary of the genocide the German Minister for Economic Development and Cooperation accepted German moral responsibility but ruled out reparations. The Herero genocide set a historical precedent in Germany later to be followed by the Nazi death camps (Madley, 2005). It seems both the concept of the camp and that of medical experiments were sources for the Nazi Holocaust. There also is some evidence that US concentration camps and the strategy of containment and internment were used extensively on Cherokee and other Native American Indian populations during the 1830s. Andrew Jackson authored and championed the Indian Removal Act. The Indian Removal Act was signed into law by President Andrew Jackson on May 28, 1830, authorizing the president to grant unsettled lands west of the Mississippi in exchange for Indian lands within existing state borders. A few tribes went peacefully, but many resisted the relocation policy. During the fall and winter of 1838 and 1839, the Cherokees were forcibly moved west by the United States government. Approximately 4,000 Cherokees died on this forced march, which became known as the ‘Trail of Tears’.6 There is no doubt that the concentration camp, a term frst coined by the British to describe events in the Anglo-Boer war, was used extensively by Western colonial administrations as a tool of colonial policy, but it rose to prominence with the Nazi Holocaust. It was used extensively in the 1920s by the USSR in the system of Gulags (forced labour camps) to incarcerate millions who opposed Soviet collectivization. The camp was also employed by the Japanese and the Americans (‘relocation camps’) during WWII; by the Chinese during the Cultural Revolution retitled ‘reeducation camps’ and currently in Xinjiang for Uighur Muslims in ‘Vocational Education and Training Centers’; by the Pol Pot regime
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in Cambodia during the 1970s, North Korea, and more recently in Bosnia to inter Muslim, Croat, and Serb male civilians. When I visited Dachau, the frst of the Nazi camps established on 22 March 1933, near Munich, I read a facsimile of an original SS order that prohibited music and poetry on the pain of instant execution.7 There is another side to Adorno’s dictum, the full version of which reads: The critique of culture is confronted with the last stage in the dialectic of culture and barbarism: to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, and that corrodes also the knowledge which expresses why it has become impossible to write poetry today. While it is important to question the role of the poet and the artist ‘after Auschwitz’—and even to question artistic representations of torture, pain, and death—it is also necessary to recognize the signifcance of poetry and music, however risky, as a source of solidarity and hope for prisoners within Dachau. Dachau became the pilot and prototype for a national system of concentration camps. It began as a labor camp for political prisoners. Himmler, The Munich Chief of Police, declared in the newspaper Münchner Neueste Nachrichten: On Wednesday [21 March 1933] the frst concentration camp is to be opened in Dachau with an accommodation for 5000 persons. All Communists and—where necessary—Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here, as in the long run it is not possible to keep individual functionaries in the state prisons without overburdening these prisons, and on the other hand these people cannot be released because attempts have shown that they persist in their efforts to agitate and organize as soon as they are released. In the 12 years of its existence Dachau housed some 200,000 prisoners from 30 other countries, one-third of whom were Jewish. Over 25,600 people died in the camp, with the most in the last year before liberation on 29 April 1945. After 1942, the camp became a complex network of 150 subsidiary camps that forced over 30,000 prisoners to work in the German armaments industry. The SS under National Socialism established a variety of detention camps to confne those whom they defned as political, ideological, or racial prisoners. The camp system came to include concentration camps, labour camps, prisoner of war camps, transit camps, and extermination or death camps. By 1939, six large camps had been established, including Dachau (1933), Sachsenhausen (1936), Buchenenwald (1937), Flossenbërg (1938), Mauthausen (1939), and Ravensbrück (1939). Other major camps within Germany included Bergin-Belsen, Börgermoor, Dieburg, Esterwegen, Flossenburg, Gundelsheim, Neuengamme, Papenburg, and Sachsenburg. This national system was further extended through an elaborate system of 565 subcamps. Camps were also set up in Austria (including
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Mauthausen with 49 subcamps), Belgium, Czechoslovakia (Theresienstadt with 9 external kommandos), Estonia, Finland, France (13 camps), and Algeria (11 camps) by the Vichy government, Great Britain (Alderney in the Channel Islands), Holland, Italy, Latvia (6 camps including Riga), Lithuania, Norway (6 camps), Poland (28 camps), Russia (20 camps), Yugoslavia (22 camps).8 In effect a massive system of camps. Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2000), following Foucault’s theoretical instincts, has described the camp as ‘nomos’ of the modern defning his sense of biopolitics in the concept of ‘bare life’, which was defned in the introduction as ‘that which may be killed yet not sacrifced’. The camp is founded on this state of exception that is associated with bare life. ‘The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule’ (pp. 168, 169).9 Looking at the contemporary world picture—the appalling ongoing wars and armed conficts in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Mexico (drug wars), Somali, Nigeria, Yemen, Libya, South Sudan, Kashmir, Palestine, to name some obvious examples—it is clear that refugee camps have become a permanent feature of the political landscape. With 5 million refugees and over 400,000 dead in Syria alone, the costs of war are almost incalculable.10 With 22 million refugees, 65.6 million permanently displaced persons worldwide and some 10 million stateless people, ‘We are now witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record.’11
Notes 1 https://www.unhcr.org/fgures-at-a-glance.html 2 Cited in https://millionsoulsaware.org/. For 50 most populous refugee camps see https://storymaps.esri. com/stories/2013/refugee-camps/ 3 See the UNICEF (2016) report ‘Uprooted: The Growing Crisis for Refugee and Migrant Children’ at https://www.unicef. org/publications/fles/Uproote d_growing_crisis_for_refugee_and_migrant_children.pdf 4 https://www.sahistor y.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentrationcamps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902 5 https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/1999/oct/10/focus.news 6 https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Indian.html 7 By contrast, famously Adorno (1949) in ‘An Essay on Cultural Criticism and Society’ writes, ‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch’ [It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz]. See the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site at https://www.kzgedenkstaette-dachau.de/english.html 8 See the list of concentration camps by Chuck Ferree (Holocaust Witness and Liberator) on the Jewish Virtual Library site where it is estimated that the Nazis established some 15,000 camps in occupied territories, https:// www.jewish virtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/cclist.html 9 See the special issue in Educational Philosophy and Theory, on ‘Agamben’s Philosophy and Pedagogy’, Vol 46, Issue 4, 2014. 10 See https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/syria 11 See https://www.unhcr.org/fgures-at-a-glance.html
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References Adorno, T (1949/1981). Cultural criticism and society. In Adorno, TW, Weber, S, & Nicholson, SW (Eds.), Prisms (S Weber and S Weber, Trans., pp. 17–34). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Agamben, G (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G (2000). What is a camp? In Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt, & Brian Massumi (Eds.), Means without end: Notes on politics (V Binetti and C Casarino, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Barber, B (2003). Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s challenge to democracy. London: Corgi. Ferguson, N (2004). Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order. New York: Basic Books. Gray, J (2003). Al Qaeda and what it means to be modern. London: Faber. Lally, E (2015). Race and racism: British responses to civilian prison camps in the Boer War and the Kenya Emergency. UCLA Historical Journal, 26(1). https:// escholarship.org/content/qt0h5760fh/qt0h5760fh.pdf?t=nydl36 Madley, B (2005). From Africa to Auschwitz: How German South West Africa incubated ideas and methods adopted and developed by the Nazis in Eastern Europe. European History Quarterly, 35, 429–464. Peters, MA (2004, Spring). Postmodern terror in a globalized world. Globalization, 4(1). Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press. https://globalization.icaap.org/con tent/v4.1/peters.html Peters, MA (2005/2016). Education, globalization, and the state in the age of terrorism, Paradigm: Republished 2016, Routledge. Peters, MA, & Besley, T (2015). The refugee crisis and the right to political asylum. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 47, 1367–1374. doi:10.1080/00131857.201 5.1100903 Sarkin, J (2009). Colonial genocide and reparations claims in the 21st century: The socio-legal context of claims under international law by the herero against Germany for genocide in Namibia, 1904–1908. Westport, CT: Praeger Security International.
Chapter 8
The refugee crisis and the right to political asylum Michael A. Peters and Tina Besley Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
The right to asylum is an historic right stretching back to Ancient Egyptian, Hebrew civilizations, and the Greek city states that afforded protection against extradition and an inviolable place of refuge to criminals, and debtors from other countries. By the early Christian era, sanctuary was given to those feeing from religious persecution, with refuge provided in a consecrated place, generally a
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church. The right of sanctuary was recognized under the Code of Theodosius (399), and later by Roman law under the Justinian Code. Papal sanction came with Leo I in 441.1 King Æthelbert of Kent enacted laws regulating sanctuary in about 600 AD in laws that governed licences of church sanctuaries where the asylum seeker had to surrender himself and confess his sins, and be supervised by the abbot or church father. The political right to asylum, the granting of refuge to an alien in a sovereign state, evolved from the religious notion of sanctuary. France was the frst to recognize the right to asylum in its 1793 constitution. In the section ‘Of the Relations of the French Republic towards Foreign Nations’, the following articles appear: 118. The French nation is the friend and natural ally of free nations. 119. It does not interfere with the affairs of government of other nations. It suffers no interference of other nations with its own. 120. It serves as a place of refuge for all who, on account of liberty, are banished from their native country. These it refuses to deliver up to tyrants. 121. It concludes no peace with an enemy that holds possession of its territory.2 Its expression in the twentieth century was developed by the United Nations in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.3 The Introductory Note by the Offce of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides the historical summary of the evolution and scope of the law: Grounded in Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of human rights 1948, which recognizes the right of persons to seek asylum from persecution in other countries, the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in 1951, is the centrepiece of international refugee protection today. The Convention entered into force on 22 April 1954, and it has been subject to only one amendment in the form of a 1967 Protocol, which removed the geographic and temporal limits of the 1951 Convention. The 1951 Convention, as a post-Second World War instrument, was originally limited in scope to persons feeing events occurring before 1 January 1951 and within Europe. The 1967 Protocol removed these limitations and thus gave the Convention universal coverage. It has since been supplemented by refugee and subsidiary protection regimes in several regions, as well as via the progressive development of international human rights law. According to the defnition embraced in Article 1, as the Note suggests: A refugee … is someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons
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of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion. (p. 3) As a rights-based instrument, the Convention is underwritten by three main fundamental principles: non-discrimination, non-penalization, and non-refoulement (non-expulsion). The Convention currently enjoys the support of some 147 countries around the world. The original signing of the Convention was attended by some 26 states. Although WWII had ended, hundreds of thousands of refugees still wandered Europe or were still confned to refugee camps. Marilyn Achiron (2001) remarks: On the 50th anniversary of its adoption, the Convention is coming apart at the seams, according to some of the same capitals which had breathed life into the protection regime a half century ago. Crises such as Kosovo have multiplied, spilling millions of people into headlong fight in search of a safe haven. Intercontinental travel has become easy and a burgeoning business in human traffcking has swelled the number of illegal immigrants. States say their asylum systems are being overwhelmed with this tangled mass of refugees and economic migrants and are urging a legal retrenchment. The Convention, they say, is outdated, unworkable. (p. 6)4 Refugee law, as a branch of international law, has developed enormously since the 1938 League of Nations, and has come to embrace a set of international and regional legal instruments, including the Bangkok Principles on Status and Treatment of Refugees (1966), OAU Convention Governing the Specifc Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa (1969), Cartagena Declaration on Refugees (1984), the Council of Europe’s Situation of de facto Refugees (1976), and the European Council’s Directive (2004) on third country nationals and stateless persons as refugees. Refugee law is anchored in an understanding of the history of population movements, the emerging framework of refugee protection, the UNHCR and other international actors, and the political context of statelessness and displacement.5 Roger Zetter (2015), in his article ‘Protection in Crisis: Forced Migration and Protection in a Global Era’, writes of more than 51 million people worldwide who are forcibly displaced as refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced persons.6 He goes on to write: The contemporary drivers of displacement are complex and multilayered, making protection based on a strict defnition of persecution increasingly problematic and challenging to implement. Many forced migrants now fall outside the recognized refugee and asylum apparatus. Much displacement today is driven by a combination of intrastate confict, poor governance and political instability, environmental change, and resource scarcity. These
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conditions, while falling outside traditionally defned persecution, leave individuals highly vulnerable to danger and uncertain of the future, compelling them to leave their homes in search of greater security. In addition, the blurring of lines between voluntary and forced migration, as seen in mixed migration fows, together with the expansion of irregular migration, further complicates today’s global displacement picture.7 What is known as the ‘European immigration crisis’ erupted in the mid-2000s, and culminated in 2015 with the worst crisis in immigration, and greatest increase in the numbers of displaced persons seeking asylum in Europe since the end of WWII. The sheer numbers of refugees and migrants fowing across borders involved many in travelling the Mediterranean to Greece (in particular, to the island of Lebos) in hazardous conditions, risking their lives in small overcrowded boats provided by people smugglers who charge some 1,200 euros per person. Numerous migration corridors from war-torn states like Syria, Afghanistan, Eritrea, and other Middle East and North African states, as well as the Western Balkans, take refugees overland through Turkey, Macedonia, Serbia, and Hungary to their preferred destinations in Germany, Britain, or France. The numbers are staggering: Frontex 2015 Annual Risk Analysis estimates some 283,000 illegal border crossings in 2014 alone, with some 114,000 refusals of entry.8 The executive summary records the major features of the geopolitical context: As regards the wider geopolitical context, two issues clearly stand out: the confict in Syria and the continued volatility in North African countries, notably Libya, from where migrants often depart in their attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea. The large number of displaced Syrians in the Middle East and North Africa suggests that Syria will likely remain the top country of origin for irregular migrants and asylum seekers in the EU for some time to come. In Libya, migrants are in an extremely vulnerable situation, especially those in areas affected by the fghting. Migrants in Libya also face arbitrary detention and very poor conditions of detention, marked by overcrowding, poor sanitation and exploitation. (p. 6) According to Eurostat statistics, some 626,000 asylum applications were received by EU member states in 2014, the highest number of asylum applicants within the EU since the peak in 1992.9 The major increase has come from Syrian refugees, with over 122,000 in 2014, roughly 20% of the EU total, with another huge increase in 2015, although reliable estimates are hard to come by. The New York Times (2015) reports 7.6 million displaced persons within Syria, with some 1.9 million refugees in Turkey, 1.1 million in Lebanon, 629,000 in Jordan, 250,000 in Iraq, and 132,000 in Egypt—that is, roughly 12 million Syrians have been displaced, with 4 million seeking refuge abroad since 2011, which is over half
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the Syrian population.10 World refugee hotspots, according to Patrick Boehler and Sergio Pec¸anha (26 August 2015), include the Balkans, the Middle East, Eastern Europe (Ukraine), and the Mediterranean coast. But the problem is not confned to Europe. South East Asia is another hotspot, with thousands of Bangladeshis and Rohingya, an ethnic minority from Myanmar, feeing by sea from poverty and persecution to Indonesia and Malaysia or risking their lives at sea to make it to Australia.11 Australia’s ex-Prime Minister Tony Abbott had consistently ruled out resettling any of the thousands of refugees stranded at sea amid the South East Asia asylum seeker crisis, arguing that irregular migration should be stemmed at the source.12 Mexico-US migration is a major issue in the forthcoming US elections with nearly 12 million Mexicans resident in the US, up from just over 2 million in 1980.13 It is one of the defning issues between Republicans and Democrats, and an issue that has become highly politicized, although there is some evidence that migration patterns have recently changed reversing previous trends.14 It is not surprising given this historic upsurge that immigration issues have suddenly gained a great deal of news coverage and have become one of the dominant issues on political agendas of governments in most countries of the global North, especially the member states of the EU. European Commission President, Jean-Claude Juncker on 9 September 2015 announced a binding quota system distributing an additional 120,000 asylum seekers among EU nations. While Germany expects to receive 800,000 asylum seekers in 2015, other EU countries like Hungary have opposed the quota system, and closed their borders.15 Estimates are changing almost daily of numbers of refugees making their way over land to Germany, with fgures of between 800,000 and 1 million being made in news reports. The infux of Syrian refugees has divided EU member states with those like Germany temporarily abandoning border controls and EU protocols to accept asylum seekers, and others like Hungary closing and policing their borders.16 This has led to the emergence of very different philosophies of immigration within the EU with very different positions taken on the moral status of refugees, their rights to asylum, and the obligations of host countries—issues that standardly raise questions of closed or open borders and of the ‘open society’ per se (see Wellman, 2010).17 The refugee crisis has also exacerbated the internal politics of EU member states and consolidated the rise of the radical right across Europe based on an anti-immigration platform with immigration emerging as one of the defning issues of the next round of elections.18 As Ambrosini and Van Der Leun (2015) write in their introduction to a special issue on civil society and migration policies that while public discourse has mobilized outspoken moral positions, state migration policies have become increasingly restrictive, aiming to control unwanted migration to protect labour markets, fence off state-funded social provisions, and expel undocumented and unwanted persons (p. 103). They write:
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Despite globalization and the development of an international human rights regime, legal residence and citizenship are still to a large extent dependent on the nation-state. State authorities therefore play a signifcant role in granting or refusing certain social rights (Bloch & Chimienti, 2012). This power of the nation-state may have diminished in other spheres but only to a lesser extent in the defnition and implementation of citizenship (Mora & Handmaker, 2014). Over the years, many states and federal governments have developed fne-grained policies to select immigrants to regulate who can reside in the territory and who is eligible for certain social rights (Engbersen & Broeders, 2009; Torpey, 2000). The concept of ‘mobility regimes’ (Faist, 2013) highlights the social and political stratifcation of people moving beyond national borders. (p. 106) The truism that planet Earth is one interconnected functioning whole—a selfregulating complex system—has various environmental, cybernetic, and political readings. Earth system science provides some evidence for the regulation of the biosphere to support the conditions for life. The ‘global brain’ is another such metaphor for an interconnected ICT network connecting human collective or distributive intelligence as a kind of planetary nervous system that emerges as self-organized dynamic semiotic networks in which everything speaks. The political reading adds another dimension that we might call cosmopolitanism with its philosophical roots in Ancient Greece and its juridical notion of a single community based on a shared morality and cosmopolitan law or right anchored in an extended hospitality. One part of this shared understanding among these different systems is the notion of equilibrium and equalization that operates on the principle that changes in one part of the system causing related changes in other parts. This rudimentary notion of equilibrium or homeostasis is a way of charting the dynamic nature of systems that evolve in unpredictable ways. Liberal internationalism provides an account of an evolving globalization that is based on universal values of free movement—the free movement of capital, of trade, and of people where asylum is granted to refugees feeing persecution. Asylum is seen as a fundamental right philosophically linked to the notion of free movement and also to notions of security and justice pointing to the control of external borders. While in the past, freedom of movement and residence for persons in the EU has been the cornerstone of Union citizenship established by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, its practical implementation in EU law is now at a critical pressure point and there are cracks in the policy and in its implementation that threaten the right to asylum. The current ‘European migrant crisis’, more aptly named ‘refugee crisis’, is one of historic proportions and with over a million migrants it represents the largest movement of people since the establishment of the EU and one that will no doubt change European society in the future. Angela Merkel’s welcome to Syrian refugees
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and her refusal to contemplate an upper limit has increasingly come under criticism from within Germany and from Germany’s neighbouring states, with the danger of splitting the coalition over her plans to build ‘transit camps’. Meanwhile, the EU has backed an action plan by Turkey to stem the infux promising to re-energize talks on joining the EU. Many of the EU member states have started to raise the issue of increased welfare costs by incoming refugees, especially in areas of education, health, and housing even though these are only a fraction of the cost borne by Syria’s neighbouring states of Jordan and Lebanon that have taken most of the 4 million-plus refugees. A recent Save the Children report (2015) estimates almost 3 million Syrian children are out of school, commenting: Education can have a transformative effect on the futures of Syria’s children, on economic growth and on stability in Syria and the wider region. Going to school equips children with the skills they need for life and it protects them: when they are in school they are less vulnerable to recruitment into armed groups, early marriage and child labour. Without substantial investment in, and support for, education, the prospects of a generation of Syrian children, and Syria’s chance at a prosperous and peaceful future, are bleak. (n.p.) In Lebanon, the number of Syrian school-aged children is reported to be greater than the number of Lebanese children enrolled in the public system. Even with the ‘double system’—two shifts of schooling in one day—most Syrian children are missing out on schooling or have dropped out even in the refugee-host countries and now constitute the ‘lost generation’. In response to this bleak situation, we asked a number of prominent scholars and specialists in education to provide a brief response to this editorial: Nesta Devine, Sonja Arndt, Gert Biesta, George Lazaroiu, and Maarten Simons and Jan Masschelein, who organized the moot on this topic at the ECER conference in Budapest (7–11 September, 2015). These appeared in 2015 in Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Notes 1 See http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13430a.htm 2 See http://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1793-french-republic-constitution-of1793 3 See http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49da0e466.html 4 See http://www.unhcr.org/3b5e90ea0.html 5 See, for instance, some the current research papers from the Refugee Studies Center at Oxford University at http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications 6 According to the UNHCR, the number of displaced people worldwide reached 59.6 million at the end of 2014, of which some 14.4 million were refugees. See http://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2015/06/09/world/migrants-globalrefugee-crisis-mediterranean-ukraine-syria-rohingya-malaysia-iraq.html?_r=0 7 See http://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications
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8 Frontex is the European Agency for the Management of Operational Cooperation at the External Borders of the Member States of the European Union. See its annual report at http://frontex.europa.eu/assets/Publications/Risk_Analysis/ Annual_Risk_Analysis_2015.pdf# page=59 9 See http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Asylum_sta tistics. This report also recorded the four major legal instruments that the EU has developed since 1999 to work toward creating a common legal framework, including: the Qualifcation Directive 2011/95/EU on standards for the qualifcation of non-EU nationals and stateless persons; the Procedures Directive 2013/32/EU on common procedures for granting and withdrawing international protection; the Conditions Directive 2013/33/EU laying down standards for the reception of applicants for international protection; the Dublin Regulation (EU) 604/ 2013 establishing the criteria and mechanisms for determining Member State responsibility for examining an application for international protection lodged in one of the Member States by a third country national (national of a non-member country) or stateless person. 10 See Patrick Boehler and Sergio Pec¸anha (26 August 2015), ‘The Global Refugee Crisis, Region by Region’, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/09 /world/migrants-global-refugee-crisis-mediterranean-ukraine-syria-rohingyamalaysia-iraq.html?_r=0 11 The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) report: ‘Since 2014, approximately 94,000 refugees and migrants are estimated to have departed by sea from Bangladesh or Myanmar, including 31,000 departures in the frst half of 2015.’ See also, the timeline of events detailing those abandoned at sea http:// www.unhcr.org/554c6a746.html 12 See Taylor’s (2015) account at http://thediplomat.com/2015/07/australia -and-the-southeast-asia-refugee-crisis/ 13 See http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/mexican-immigrants-united-states 14 See http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/23/net-migration-from-mexico-f alls-to-zero-and-perhaps-less/ 15 Victor Orban, Hungary’s Prime Minister, has erected a fence along it Serbian border, employed the army to police it, and gone on record to say Hungary’s Christian heritage is at risk. See Chris Morris’ blog http://www.bbc.com/news /blogs-eu-34,144,554 16 See http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refdaily?pass=52fc6fbd5&d ate=2015-07-15&cat= Europe; see also the so-called Schengen Area, that is 26 countries of the EU that have abolished passport and internal border controls for international travel purposes. 17 See also ‘Philosophies of Migration’ at https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/ jennifer-all sopp/philosophies-of-migration 18 See Guiberau’s (2010) paper at http://www.policy-network.net/publications _list.aspx?Page=9. See also ‘Islam and the End of European Multiculturalism’, Michael Peters and Tina Besley (2014), Special Issue in Policy Futures in Education, Editorial at http://pfe. sagepub.com/content/12/1/1.full.pdf +html, and Besley and Peters (2012).
References Achiron, M (2001). A ‘timeless’ treaty under attack. Refugees, 2, 6–8. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/3b5e90ea0.html
78 The refugee crisis and political asylum Ambrosini, M, & Van Der Leun, J (2015). Introduction to the special issue: Implementing human rights: Civil society and migration policies. Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, 13, 103–115. Besley, T, & Peters, M (2012). Interculturalism, education and dialog. New York: Peter Lang. Bloch, A, & Chimienti, M (2012). Irregular migrants: Policy, politics, motives and everyday lives. London: Routledge. Engbersen, G, & Broeders, D (2009). The state versus the alien: Immigration control and strategies of irregular migrants. West European Politics, 32, 867–885. Faist, T (2013). The mobility turn: A new paradigm for the social sciences? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36, 1637–1646. Guiberau, M (2010). Migration and the rise of the radical right. Policy Network Paper. http://www.policy-network.net/publications_list.aspx?Page=9 Mora, C, & Handmaker, J (2014). Migrants’ citizenship and rights: Limits and potential for NGOs’ advocacy in Chile. In TD Truong, D Gasper, DJ Handmaker, & SI Bergh (Eds.), Migration, gender and social justice: Perspectives on human insecurity (pp. 281–290). New York: Springer. Peters, M, & Besley, T (2014). Islam and the end of European multiculturalism. Special Issue in Policy Futures in Education. http://pfe.sagepub.com/content/12 /1/1.full.pdf+html Save The Children (2015). The cost of war: Calculating the impact of the collapse of Syria’s education system on Syria’s future. http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/s ites/default/fles/images/The_Cost_of_War.pdf Torpey, J (2000). States and the regulation of migration in the twentieth-century North Atlantic world. In P Andreas & T Snyder (Eds.), The wall around the west. State borders and immigration controls in North America and Europe (pp. 31–54). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefeld. Wellman, CH (2010). Immigration. In Edward N Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (Summer 2015 ed.). http://plato.stanford.edu/arch ives/sum2015/entries/immigration/ Zetter, R (2015). Protection in crisis: Forced migration and protection in a global era. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute. http://www.migrationpolicy.org
Chapter 9
The end of neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarian populism Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Scanning the headlines a day or so after the surprise of the ‘Brexit’ on 23 June 2016 with 52% voting to leave the EU, a number of commentators examined its loaded signifcance for the neoliberal ideal of globalization. One such commentator writing for the Economic Times suggested: Brexit heralds not just Britain’s exit from the European Union but the decline and maybe fall of the twentieth century ideal of a liberal, globalised world. It heralds a twenty-frst century ethos based on ultra-nationalism and racist xenophobia, blaming foreigners and minorities for all ills, and claiming against all logic and humanism that turning your back on the world will somehow bring back a golden past.1 Another, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, followed with a similar theme: The economic story of the past quarter century was the rapid advance of globalisation, the unleashing of trade and commerce among countries rich and poor—a McDonald’s in every European capital, ‘Made in China’ labels throughout Toys R Us. The Brexit vote on Thursday ends that story, at least in its current volume.2 Jim Tankersley registers a peak in anti-globalization sentiment that fows from a slowdown in trade growth, the stand-off on trade agreements, the growth of antiimmigration among an anxious working class, the rise of a populist xenophobia in parties of the Right and endlessly exploited by Donald Trump, at that point the presumptive Republican nominee. By reference to the Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), David Lipton in a paper ‘Can Globalisation Still Deliver?’ Tankersley raises the question of whether globalization can show positive results for working-class people.3 The more pressing issue was whether this was a harbinger for Trump taking the White House in 2016. As Stephen Collinson puts it:
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The referendum campaign—just like the U.S. election—has boiled with populist anger, fear-mongering by politicians, hostility towards distant political elites and resurgent nationalism, and exposed a visceral feeling in the electorate that ordinary voters have lost control of the politics that shape their own lives. Its success raises the question of whether those forces will exert a similar infuence in America in November.4 With uncanny timing Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri (2016), all from IMF’s Research Department, enquired whether neoliberalism has been ‘oversold’. That the IMF should use this term, once considered notionally abusive and avoided by most economists, implies that ‘neoliberalism’ has broken new ground. Ostry et al. (2016) recount the alleged benefts of neoliberalism thus: The expansion of global trade has rescued millions from abject poverty. Foreign direct investment has often been a way to transfer technology and know-how to developing economies. Privatization of state-owned enterprises has in many instances led to more effcient provision of services and lowered the fscal burden on governments. (p. 38) They turn their attention to areas where expected benefts have not materialized: Our assessment of the agenda is confned to the effects of two policies: removing restrictions on the movement of capital across a country’s borders (so-called capital account liberalization); and fscal consolidation, sometimes called ‘austerity’, which is shorthand for policies to reduce fscal defcits and debt levels. An assessment of these specifc policies (rather than the broad neoliberal agenda) reaches three disquieting conclusions: • • •
The benefts in terms of increased growth seem fairly diffcult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries. The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomise the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda. Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects. (pp. 38–9)
Capital account liberalization has revealed uncertain growth benefts with increasing bouts of economic volatility and crisis frequency. The capital infow surges—some 150 since 1980—have led to fnancial crises in 20% of cases and a boom-bust cycle. Ostry et al. (2016) directly question the high cost-to-beneft ratio of capital account openness and they also question austerity as a means of
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curbing and paying down public debt. Both openness and austerity are associated with increasing income inequality that may also undercut growth prospects. Inequalities had been further exacerbated by privatization policies and governmental load-shedding so that now social provision has been whittled away and consumerized. Thomas Piketty (2013) in an academic blockbuster, argued that inequality is not an accident but rather an endemic feature of capitalism that can be reversed only through state intervention and will threaten the democratic order unless capitalism is reformed. Capital in the Twenty-First Century analyzed economic data sets to develop his formula explaining economic inequality: r > g (meaning that return on capital is generally higher than economic growth). ‘Economic inequality is not new, but it is getting worse, with radical possible impacts.’5 Neoliberal globalization—the target of so much Left critique over the ReaganThatcher, Bush-Blair, and, some would say, Obama-Cameron years—seems now on the back foot, both in the US under Trump, and also in Europe with the emergence of the alt-right and the likes of Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front in France, Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Nigel Farage and the UK Independence Party, Heinz-Christian Strache in Austria and the Vlaams Belang Party in Belgium, to name a few. Right-wing populism is on the rise. It is fercely anti-immigration and anti-integration, often associated with neo-Nazis and white supremacist groups. It commonly assumes a kind of authoritarianism and antiliberal stance toward rights, and while it appeals to the ‘common man’ (sic)— sometimes explicitly anti-women and anti-feminist—it paradoxically nevertheless does not subscribe to the notion and practice of equality. The far-right is antipluralist and anti-democratic, believing in the strong state and an authoritarian populism. Right-wing populism has strong links with elements of the far-right not only in terms of ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and anti-immigration stance but also over traditional and social conservative values concerning heterosexuality, the patriarchical family, the subordination of women and cultural minorities, often combined with fundamentalist Christian values. Economically, as is evident in the raft of Trump’s executive orders, there is a strong tendency toward protectionism and an isolationism in foreign policy. Trump’s election in 2016 unleashed ‘a new offensive against academia’6 with universities are already feeling the effects of Trump’s travel ban on their application numbers. With the new travel ban policy placed on six mostly Muslim countries, it seems clear that international students in US universities will be severely curtailed. Many US universities and universities around the world have been outspoken against the discrimination of Trump’s immigration and travelban policies. Trump’s ascendancy was also bad news for both US and world science with the disappearance of governmental science websites such as the White House pages on climate change and the likely curtailment of alternative energy science funding.7 Various publications have complained that President Trump’s views on science are shockingly ignorant.8
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At the level of schooling Trump is on record saying he may cut the Department of Education9 and his appointment of Betsy DeVos10 indicates an education agenda that will boost Charter schools, defend the ideology of school choice, support the radical Christian orthodoxy to advance private religious schools, and rethink the necessity of the Common Core. Other elements on the agenda include vouchers, greater teacher accountability, more student debt, and an attack on America’s public schooling system with a commensurate downsizing of the Department of Education. Many educators are worried about the future of liberal arts colleges and STEM education, and the undermining of teaching about evolution and climate change.11 CBS reports Trump as saying: ‘As your president, I will be the biggest cheerleader for school choice you’ve ever seen,’ he said, promising that in his White House ‘parents can home school their children.’12 We face the end of the liberal era of schooling—the end of educational equality—and a reassertion, especially as Trump’s presidency unfolds, of less government involvement and the endorsement of socially conservative values.
Notes 1 See Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/ news/international/world-news/brexit-may-mean-end-of-globalisation-as-we -know-it-stormy-days-lie-ahead/articleshow/52909952.cms 2 See Jim Tankersley, http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/britains-b rexit-just-killed-globalisation-as-we-know-it-20160626-gps0js.html 3 For other similar accounts see Don Lee http://www.latimes.com/business/ la-f-brexit-globalisation-future-20160624-snap-story.html; Larry Elliott who writes: ‘The age of globalisation began on the day the Berlin Wall came down. From that moment in 1989, the trends evident in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s accelerated: the free movement of capital, people and goods; trickle-down economics; a much diminished role for nation states; and a belief that market forces, now unleashed, were unstoppable.’ He argues that Britain rejection of the EU is ‘a protest against the economic model that has been in place for the past three decades’, https://www. theguardian.com/business/ 2016/jun/26/brexit-is-the-rejection-of-globalisation; Joseph Murray talks of ‘Ebd of New World Order’, http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/06/ 23/brexit-signals-end-new-world-order/; Nelson D. Swartz and Patricia Cohen head their joint piece ‘Brexit’ in America: A Warning Shot Against Globalisation, http://nytimes.com/2016/06/26/business/economy/for-a merica-brexit-may-be-a-warning-of-globalizations-limits. html?_r=0; Vassilis K. Fouskas writing for Open Democracy before the vote suggests: ‘British voters on June 23 may also decide the future of globalisation/fnancialisation. If Britain votes to leave the EU, globalisation may be over, and with it an era in history’, https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/vassilis-kfouskas/brexit-real-threat-to-globalisation 4 See http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/24/politics/us-election-brexit-donald -trump-hillary-clinton/ 5 See http://ideas.ted.com/thomas-pikettys-capital-in-the-twenty-frst-century -explained/ and https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_piketty_new_thoughts_o n_capital_in_the_twenty_frst_century?language=en
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6 See http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=201701131645 52838 7 See https://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/have-politics-trumped-science/ 8 E.g. https://www.scientifcamerican.com/article/trump-comments-on-science -are-shockingly-ignorant/ 9 https://qz.com/898530/in-just-one-week-as-president-donald-trump-has-w reaked-unparalleled-havoc-on-american-education/ 10 See Secretary DeVos at 2017 Conservative Political Action Conference, C-Span https://www.c-span.org/ video/?424394-101/betsy-devos-delivers-remark s-cpac 11 https://www.scientifcamerican.com/article/trumps-frst-100-days-science-ed ucation-and-schools/ 12 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/where-donald-trump-stands-on-education/
References Ostry, J, Loungani, P, & Furceri, D (2016). Neoliberalism: Oversold? Finance and Development, 53(2). http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2016/06/ ostry.htm Piketty, T (2013). Capital in the twenty-frst century (A Goldhammer, Trans.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chapter 10
Trump’s nationalism,‘the end of globalism’, and ‘the age of patriotism’ ‘The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots’ Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Competing globalisms There have been four main metanarratives, social imaginaries, and institutional arrangements that have dominated the conception of globalization in the last 70 years and a ffth, new story, of rising China, given here in rough chronological order:1 1. The narrative of liberal internationalism, originating with Woodrow Wilson as a movement of peace, democracy, security, and trade; 2. The postcolonial story of decolonization and cultural difference as a movement of national self-determination based on the analysis of inherent unequal power relations that comprised colonialism and imperialism; 3. The neoliberal story of increasing world economic integration, marketization, and fnance capitalism; 4. The technological narrative of increasing openness, interconnectivity, and convergence; and 5. Chinese ‘infrastructuralism’, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and the new model of Eurasian regional development, as an alternative mode of globalization and form of global diplomacy. These very different conceptions, following Manfred Steger (2008, 2009), we call ‘globalisms’ in the plural to distinguish dominant and counter-ideologies as ideas and beliefs that shape the social world and its shared guiding norms and understandings—both what is and what ought to be. The view made explicit by Steger in line with the notion of ideology and its literature indicates that he uses the concept to explain that ideologies are inherently political in that they privilege and construct certain social meanings that refect and instantiate the exercise of power and power relations.
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Globalisms, then, picture reality and refect a particular representation of the world, both how it came to be and how it actively shapes the future. ‘Globalism’ as a concept provides a ‘context of justifcation’ for institutions and policies as well as a framework for action that powerfully shapes a conception of shared interests as though it referred to a set of general truths depicting the world. This ideological view then makes existing social institutions and their power relations appear natural and at the same time diminish other possible worlds or alternatives. Globalism, then, is the dominant political ideology of our time (Steger, 2008, p. 6) and neoliberalism as the dominant globalism ‘endows the concept of globalization with market-oriented norms, values, and meanings’ (p. ix) and presents ‘globalization as a natural economic phenomenon whose essential qualities are the liberalization and integration of global markets and the reduction of government interference in the economy’ (p. 54). After 70 years liberal internationalism as the dominant model of world order is in crisis, as is the form of international education based upon it (Peters, 2016). As I argued recently: International Education was largely the brainchild of the liberal global order based on the ideology of liberal internationalism that emerged after WWII. Its major goals shadowed liberal internationalism: international understanding and collaboration, free trade, interventionism, world peace, the promotion of democracy and justice. With the election of Trump to the Whitehouse and Brexit, the ‘hard’ exit of Britain from the EU under newly elected Prime Minister Boris Johnson, liberal internationalism is questioned, cut back and rearranged. Internationalism is on the back foot in all its forms as the liberal world order is being turned upside down by a systematic attack of core liberal values including an attack on open global trade, and the prosecution of trade-tech wars, the increase of anti-democratic practices and deliberate electoral interference, the cancellation of anti-nuclear and other non-proliferation agreements, repudiation of asylum and protection of refugees, and the growth of anti-globalization. Authoritarian populism and ‘big man’ politics have encouraged forms of racism and white supremacy and a return to the closed society with an emphasis on border security (Peters, 2019, p.1). Neoliberal globalism is also a political project that makes the market model appear the best and only path to economic growth and development, advocating a set of policies known as the ‘Washington Consensus’ on economic deregulation and privatization; free trade and capital fows; low corporate tax rates; fscal austerity and reduced social programmes. Steger (2008) believes that the ideology of globalism ‘diminish[es] the capacity of human beings’ to ‘participate in shaping their destinies’ and to ‘Live in dignity and relative\material security’ (Steger, 2008, p. xii). We differ from Steger only in using the concept of globalism to
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refer to all and many different ideologies of globalization, which means that neoliberal globalism is the dominant but not the only globalism. Steger also distinguishes between different globalisms such as justice globalism, jihad globalism, and market globalism. Any view that attempts ideologically to depict the underlying emergent structures or networks of a shrinking world might be dubbed a globalism. So globalism as a discourse provides the ideological and cultural baggage that purports to explain and make natural a set of processes that we have come to call globalization. These globalisms are important to understanding the emergence of conceptions of global education. These are some important globalist conceptions, but we are not claiming that they are the only ones. It is also important to recognize the conceptual overlap with other terms like metanarrative and social imaginary, both employed to indicate comprehensive accounts of contemporary world history based on the appeal to truth, values, institutions, and laws that are seen to be universal. William Marling (2000) argues that the term globalism should be used to discuss the broader context of globalization typifed by the transnational fows of capital that intensifed after WWII. It has a history in a range of other concepts of similar scope, like ‘modernization’ and ‘modernism’ that attempt meta-narrative descriptions of world history. He prefaces his discussion by mentioning the work of Edward Said—Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993)—as a signifcant development in the sweeping analysis of colonization and cultural practices. Marling (2000, p. 323) writes: If ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonization’ were the frst stages of theorizing about globalism, John Tomlinson’s Cultural Imperialism (1991) was arguably the end of this stage. Tomlinson pointed out that the discourse of ‘imperialism’ pioneered by Said’s earlier work was binary, and that ‘Underlying this is the broader discourse of cultural imperialism as the spread of the culture of modernity itself. This is a global movement towards, among other things, an everyday life governed by the habitual routine of commodity capitalism’. Marling (2000) also complains that literary and cultural theory seems relatively uninformed by economic theory but there is little doubt that out of this analysis spring the ideas of ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘postcoloniality’ that together take the long view (longue durée) stretching back many hundreds of years to problematize the accepted theories of colonization as an extension of civilization, providing an analysis of colonizer-colonized power relationships, and advancing a politics of knowledge that focused on forms of racialized and genderized identity—the identity politics of subaltern colonial subjects—within broader emancipatory narratives. The postcolonial critique thus questions the cultural hegemony of the West and the metanarratives of the dominant neoliberal globalism, providing a platform to entertain other possible and nascent global narratives. The other
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globalism briefy considered here is the story of technological convergence that occurs through greater global interconnectivity. This is often seen as an inevitable historical process and is also often seen as associated strongly if not with neoliberalism then certainly with American-styled capitalism dominated by the global information utilities and internet-based multinationals like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and the like. In terms of the dominant globalism education is seen simply and naively as an extension of the progress of communication and information technology. A new signifcant form of globalism has emerged that we can call ‘Chinese infrastructuralism’ and BRI that began in 2013. President Xi called it the ‘project of the century’. With over 70 countries involved and over a trillion dollars of Chinese investment to develop economic, digital, and social infrastructure of Eurasian countries, the BRI represents an alternative Chinese model of globalism. There is a close connection between the Chinese Dream and BRI that is seeking to develop a new Chinese model of development and alternative mode of globalization that matches Chinese infrastructure investment to BRI countries with weak infrastructure across the land bridge that links Asia and Europe. ‘Chinese infrastructuralism’ is a new philosophy of development that includes ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure and concepts of (infra)structure including ‘New Digital Silk Road’, people-to-people exchange, and university alliances. One of the major concepts is interconnectivity to promote regional Eurasian integration, based on digitalization, speed, compression, and the new digital technologies (AI, ML, quantum computing) which are important for transport hub development. There is a strong intersection between education and the ‘communicative turn’ (an aspect of the cultural turn), considered as a three-tier communication system (Content, Code, Infrastructure) that also includes deep-sea fbre-optic cables required for the Internet. This ‘communication model’ of education will enable better forms of cultural archival development and student exchange outside the current neoliberal market of export education currently dominated by the US, the UK, and Australia. The concept of ‘Eurasia’ is a geo-political concept increasingly related to the conception of the ‘civilizational state’ that identifes strategic concerns: who controls ‘High Asia’ controls Asia. ‘Educating the Future’ is a metaphor I use in relation to a narrative analysis of The Chinese Dream: Educating the Future (Peters, 2020) and its expression of the BRI in the Postscript of my book summarized here in abbreviated form: a. ‘Educating the future’ is a straightforward argument about educating future generations of Chinese students. Indeed, the future depends upon releasing the talents and collective intelligence of the Chinese mind, which is a civilizational concept. This is not an argument about human capital but rather a semiotic view of creative intellectual labour under conditions of increasing connectivity. b. It is a schema for promotion of constructive narratives that make sense of the past by reading the future. This is a national narratological resource essential
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for the Chinese Dream. It is imaginary and populist and acts to share a national vision. c. It requires ‘education’ of the entire population at the level of content and coda. This national education requires an openness and freedom to imagine, to experiment, and also to work at national consensus through CCP guidance that aids the process of thinking about China’s future. d. ‘Educating the future’ is also about teaching the populace to dream, to engage in dreaming, and to understand dreaming as consisting in the repository of national symbols and culture that are part of an inherited cultural framework that includes ‘core values’ not in an essentialist sense but in a historical, pragmatic, and materialist sense: these are the ruling images; this is the reservoir of poetry, philosophy, and literature that are the resources for civilizational dreaming. e. There is also a sense that encourages the local population not only to dream in this way but to translate this into substantial terms for others to understand—the Chinese Dream for foreigners. This surely is an educative process that already takes place through Confucius and language institutes but also through art and literature. BRI is six years old: the next stage of dynamic process is the move toward education considered as ‘education for the future of humanity’ based on a philosophy of openness. Each of these globalisms is a complex of competing narratives and sometimes opposing views. For instance, the technological globalism of educational progress can be seen broadly as either a variant based on neoliberal intellectual property and the market based on planned Silicon Valley or the new Chinese techno-state that made huge investments a decade ago on technology-led science in strategic areas of AI, machine learning, robotics, and quantum computing. Alternatively, it may also refer to a new paradigm of social media based on values of sharing and collaboration.
Trump on the end of globalism? It is about as plain as it gets in international politics: US President Trump, fanked by Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, addressed the 72nd United Nations General Assembly at UN headquarters in New York, on 19 September 2019.2 In his speech to the UN, Trump articulated the features of his new nationalism, taking aim at globalism and globalists who want to abolish national boundaries. By contrast, Trump stated: ‘If you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold onto your sovereignty. And if you want peace, love your nation’ and went on to say: Wise leaders always put the good of their own people and their own country frst …. The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who
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protect their citizens, respect their neighbors, and honor the differences that make each country special and unique. He added, ‘Love of our own nations makes the world better for all nations,’ and he encouraged the free world to ‘embrace its national foundations’. It must not attempt to erase them or replace them. Looking around, and all over this large, magnifcent planet, the truth is plain to see: if you want freedom, take pride in your country. If you want democracy, hold on to your sovereignty. And if you want peace, love your nation. This is a clear rebuttal of the main tenets of liberal internationalism that was established by Woodrow Wilson after WWI and prevailed for 70 years as an architecture of world institutions and a system of values that, while not always perfect, were the only ones the world had. By contrast, today according to Trump we are entering the era of patriotism and new nationalism that is founded on sovereignty and the territorial control and policing of borders. Some forms of globalism based on religion persuaded leaders to ignore their own national interests. Trumps says: ‘Those days are over.’ Trump’s new nationalism is based on renewed national self-interest, which, he says, was developed in the aftermath of two world wars that was ‘based on the vision that diverse nations could cooperate to protect their sovereignty, preserve their security, and promote their prosperity’. ‘The Marshall Plan was built on the noble idea that the whole world is safer when nations are strong, independent, and free.’ Trump makes clear what national populism means in foreign policy: Our success depends on a coalition of strong and independent nations that embrace their sovereignty, to promote security, prosperity, and peace, for themselves and for the world. We do not expect diverse countries to share the same cultures, traditions, or even systems of government, but we do expect all nations to uphold these two core sovereign duties, to respect the interests of their own people and the rights of every other sovereign nation. Trump’s speech sings the praises of the nation-state. It’s a eulogy to the nationstate: ‘All responsible leaders have an obligation to serve their own citizens, and the nation state remains the best vehicle for elevating the human condition.’ The world becomes a community of nation-states working together in friendship and harmony. Guided by a pragmatic emphasis on outcomes rather than ideologies, ‘We have a policy of principled realism, rooted in shared goals, interests, and values. That realism forces us to confront the question facing every leader and nation in this room, it is a question we cannot escape or avoid.’ If we ignore that principle, he says, we will slide down the path to war. At this point in his speech Trump refers to North Korea, Iran, and radical Islamic terrorism as the threats that face the world—‘the depraved regime in North Korea’, the ‘corrupt dictatorship’ of Iran that hides ‘behind the false guise
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of a democracy’, and the ‘sinister ideology’ of radical Islam and the Taliban. He also made reference to the ‘lasting defeat of ISIS’ and ‘the deescalation of the Syrian confict’, as well as the ‘criminal regime of Bashar al-Assad’. He directly addresses the question of migration in this context: ‘We have learned that over the long term, uncontrolled migration is deeply unfair to both the sending and the receiving countries’ and US fnancial support of the UN. He also turns his attention to socialism and to socialist regimes of Cuba and Venezuela that have proven socialism wherever it has been adopted has failed. America stands with all people and ‘In America, we seek stronger ties of business and trade with all nations of goodwill, but this trade must be fair and it must be reciprocal.’ The problem was that ‘Others gamed the [international trade] system and broke the rules, and our great middle class, once the bedrock of American prosperity, was forgotten and left behind, but they are forgotten no more and they will never be forgotten again.’ Trump talks about the success of the UN which will depend ‘as President Truman said some 70 years ago, on the independent strength of its members’ and ends on the note of patriotism: In remembering the great victory that led to this body’s founding, we must never forget that those heroes who fought against evil, also fought for the nations that they love. Patriotism led the Poles to die to save Poland, the French to fght for a free France, and the Brits to stand strong for Britain. Today, if we do not invest ourselves, our hearts, our minds, and our nations, if we will not build strong families, safe communities, and healthy societies for ourselves, no one can do it for us.
Conclusion Trump’s ‘end of globalism’ increasingly appears as a US self-interested strategy of ‘too little too late’, as though the White House, preoccupied with other theatres, fnally woke up to an emerging Chinese internationalism and diplomacy not based on market plunder but rather on principles of socialist internationalism, highlighting the recently recalibrated Chinese-Russian relations. Trump’s trade war has slowed down the world economy and risks world recession as well as consumer dissatisfaction at home, although unemployment in 2019 is at the lowest in decades. Washington’s attack on Huawei’s 5G betrays the fact that China has stolen a march on the US in the next phase of digital tech. China understands the strategic importance of technologies that promote both openness and interconnectivity (with some information limits). It’s unlikely that Trump’s ‘end of globalism’ will affect the pace of technological interconnectivity, although his policies might create a dual parallel technological system with fewer crossovers. In the longer term it is likely that Trump’s ‘end of globalism’ will slow down world growth temporarily and even risk world recession depending on US domestic electoral opportunities and political trade-offs in demonizing China.
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Paradoxically, Trump’s trade war policies may have the seemingly unlikely effect of enhancing the Chinese model of global diplomacy, yet that rapidly maturing diplomacy still must come to terms with perhaps the most pressing of all global narratives—that of world ecological sustainability. It is clear that any alternative global model must be prepared to offer quick action on this front that helps to harness the largest political movement the world has ever seen and to put it to useful service in saving the planet. This movement, still in its infancy and growing exponentially with each global extreme weather event, is the key to the greening of diplomacy and to the creation of a global civil society. Perhaps, only China has this capacity? While Trump talks of a new foreign policy realism based on the revival of the national state, each for itself—a kind of free market approach to foreign policy— others are suggesting that the nation-state, largely a product of the nineteenth century, is giving way, on the one hand, to the city state, and, on the other, to the civilizational state.
Notes 1 The frst section of this chapter draws on a reworked version of Peters and Besley (2017). 2 Full text at https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/25/trump-un-speech -2018-full-text-transcript-840043
References Marling, W. (2000). Globalisms: Real and imaginary. American Studies, 41(2–3), 321–331. Peters, M. A. (2016). Challenges to the ‘world order’ of liberal internationalism: What can we learn? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(9), 863–871. doi:10.1 080/00131857.2015.1057033 Peters, M. A. (2019). The crisis of international education. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1. doi:10.1080/ 00131857.2019.1663410 Peters, M. A. (2020) The Chinese dream: Educating the future. An Educational Philosophy and Theory Chinese Educational Philosophy Reader, Volume VII. Routledge. Peters, M. A., & Besley, T. (2017). Globalism and the experiment of openness. Knowledge Cultures, 5(1), 50–67. Said, E. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. doi:10.1086/ ahr/84.5.1334 Said, E. (1993). Culture and imperialism. London: Chatto & Windus. Steger, M. B. (2008). The rise of the global imaginary: Political ideologies from the French. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Steger, M. B. (2009). Globalism: The new market ideology (3rd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefeld. Tomlinson, J. (1991). Cultural imperialism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. doi:10.1086/ahr/52.4.744
Chapter 11
The crisis of international education Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Introduction The major premise of this chapter is that international education draws its inspiration, legitimation, and its motivating philosophy from ‘liberalism internationalism’.1 Indeed, in this argument, the former is a product both historically and ideologically of the latter. Further, it is argued that as liberal internationalism (LI) is currently in tatters, so too is international education (IE). Inasmuch as international education is part of the philosophical infrastructure of liberal internationalism it too is experiencing a crisis. There is plenty of evidence to support the proposition that both LI and IE are in crisis. I shall detail the crisis of LI below and also investigate the growing crisis of IE, but for the moment we can note in relation to the US that the numbers of IE students are declining, that fewer institutions are advertising themselves in terms of the aims of IE (its profle is slowly disappearing), that travel bans are disrupting the fow of IE students, and that there is a new atmosphere of suspicion about IE students in the US. These roll-backs are a direct consequence of the rise of authoritarian national populism both in the US under Donald Trump and in the EU with the rise of the far-right that is characterized by anti-immigration sentiments, racism, and the rise of white supremacism. These attitudes are in direct contradiction to the philosophy of international education focused on intercultural understanding, world peace, and security, and have the capacity to harm both the movement and the ideology. For example, Altbach and de Wit (2017) remark: The advent of the Trump Administration in the US along with Brexit in the UK and other changes in Europe will bring a major set of changes to internationalization. The US and the UK will be seen as less attractive for international students. It is likely that the immigration and visa restrictions will grow. Governmental support for programs such as Fulbright and ERASMUS are likely to be cut back. Perhaps most important, the spirit of internationalization in higher education is likely to change.2
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Elsewhere they note (Altbach & de Wit, 2018), ‘The global landscape for higher education internationalization is changing dramatically.’ And they argue ‘the era of higher education internationalization’ might be coming to an end and they enumerate issues concerning nationalist populism, academic freedom, ethics, the role of English, and shifting patterns in student mobility, and suggest concerns about transnational education ‘are challenging the future of internationalization’ (p. 2). Chapter 10 outlines how international education evolved out of liberal internationalism. But the roll back of liberal internationalism alongside the promotion of new nationalisms and authoritarian populism has led to increasing threats to international education. Paradoxically, we need international education more than ever at this moment but not in the current neoliberal form as neoliberal ‘export education’ but rather as a form that espouses a committed internationalism based on the values of interculturalism, the promotion of democracy, human rights, and principles of social, ethnic and environmental justice to confront the forces eroding liberal internationalism. If it is to live up to its name, international education needs a coherent philosophy and to revisit its main articles of faith. Freedom House reports ‘Democracy in Crisis: The World in 2018’. Democracy has faced its most serious crisis in decades in 2017 as its basic tenets—including guarantees of free and fair elections, the rights of minorities, freedom of the press, and the rule of law—has come under attack around the world. Seventyone countries suffered net declines in political rights and civil liberties, with only 35 registering gains. 2018 marked the 12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom: ‘The United States retreated from its traditional role as both a champion and an exemplar of democracy amid an accelerating decline in American political rights and civil liberties.’ Over the period since the 12-year global slide that began in 2006, 113 countries have seen a net decline, and only 62 have experienced a net improvement.3 Only a quarter-century ago, at the end of the Cold War, we were repeatedly told that totalitarianism had at last been vanquished and liberal democracy had won the great ideological battle of the twentieth century. Francis Fukuyama (1992) espoused the ‘end of history’ that meant prevalence of capitalism and the worldwide spread of liberal democracy as the fnal evolutionary form of human government. The progression of human history as the battle of ideologies after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 indicated the global triumph of political and economic liberalism. Fukuyama’s Hegelian notion that history is a clash of ideology to him confrmed that liberal democracy had won: Tiananmen Square, the overthrow of Ceausescu, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the partial triumph of democracy in Nicaragua and the Philippines, and the emergence of democracies in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Eastern Europe. As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing
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in the ring as an ideology of potential universal validity: liberal democracy …. Two hundred years after they frst animated the French and American revolutions, the principles of liberty and equality have proven not just durable but resurgent. (p. 42) Yet today democracy seems ineffectual, out of touch with its constituents, interfered with by foreign powers and companies like Cambridge Analytica, who manipulated voting populations of some 87 million Facebook followers, and fostered fear of the Other after the massive infux of migrants in Europe following the Syrian War and other Middle East conficts. Democracy, in short, is under attack and is eroding at the seams with the huge growth of social and economic disparities, and seemingly intractable problems on the domestic front, including the growth of elite bureaucracies insensitive to the democratic defcit and lack of local participation. These democratic defcits have led to the rise of national populist leaders who appeal to anti-immigrant sentiments and rescind fundamental civil and political liberties. Right-wing populists have continued to gain seats in Europe and increasingly, mainstream parties have had to contemplate coalition building in order to achieve any form of stable government. Young people seem less interested in politics per se and have grown more remote from the democratic project. International students seem remote from the goals and aspirations that originally motivated the project. As Ikenberry (2018) argues, the Western liberal order is faltering: For seven decades the world has been dominated by a western liberal order. After the Second World War, the United States and its partners built a multifaceted and sprawling international order, organized around economic openness, multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity. Along the way, the United States became the ‘frst citizen’ of this order, providing hegemonic leadership—anchoring the alliances, stabilizing the world economy, fostering cooperation and championing ‘free world’ values. Western Europe and Japan emerged as key partners, tying their security and economic fortunes to this extended liberal order. To grasp the nature of these changes and their consequences in the longer term it is useful to understand something about the parent discourse and, in particular, the history and current diffculties of liberal internationalism in order to answer the question of whether the crisis in international education is deep and enduring.
Liberal internationalism Liberal internationalism originates as a foreign policy graft of liberalism which is a rights-bound concept that recognizes that human beings as autonomous agents
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have won certain rights. It is a political doctrine and form of government based on the notion of liberty and the consent of the governed who are deemed to stand equal before the law. Liberalism emerged in the Age of the Enlightenment as a movement contesting absolute monarchy that replaced hereditary privilege and divine rights of kings with representative government. From the outset, liberalism was associated with free trade and internationalism, the promotion of freedom of speech, and the free movement of goods, people, and ideas. While there are many different strands of liberalism, there are some common features: liberal thought emphasizes individualism and the rights of the individual; it also tends to embrace a universalist and egalitarian philosophy (going back to Kant and Locke, though in different ways). It also supports notions of private property, human rights, and social and scientifc progress. In England, liberalism is associated with the thought of John Locke, who is regarded as its founding father. His ‘Two Treatises’ (1690) outlines a political theory that institutes government as a break with divine right based on the consent of free men. Liberal economic theory was strongly infuenced by Adam Smith (1776) and John Stuart Mill (1848) who emphasized free international trade as a basis for world peace. International education, then, is the child of liberal internationalism. Kant (1795) was one of the earliest modern philosophers to connect the Enlightenment’s belief in an age of reason and criticism with the emergence of a new international order after the French Revolution. He was the architect of the revolution in human rights that became the basis for international institutions like the United Nations and in charters like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. By offering a concept of ‘perpetual peace’ he charted the emergence of a form of cosmopolitanism toward which humanity is evolving and ultimately a condition of global governance underwritten by international law. His Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) laid the basis for a foundation of world peace based on the three articles of republican civil constitution, the law of nations of free states, and ‘The law of world citizenship shall be limited to conditions of universal hospitality.’ International education in its many foundational statements at various congresses emerging in the mid-nineteenth century take sustenance from Kant’s notion of ‘hospitality’ even without knowing its source and use this as a platform for advancing the value of world peace and cosmopolitan global order. Kant (1795/1923) indicates that hospitality ‘means the right of a stranger not to be treated as an enemy when he arrives in the land of another. One may refuse to receive him when this can be done without causing his destruction; but, so long as he peacefully occupies his place, one may not treat him with hostility.’ But as he clarifes the cosmopolitan right ‘is not the right to be a permanent visitor’. A special contract would be required in order to give an outsider a right to become a fellow citizen. ‘It is only a right of temporary sojourn, a right to associate, which all men have. They have it by virtue of their common possession of the surface of the earth, where, as a globe, they cannot infnitely disperse and hence must fnally tolerate the presence of each other’ (Benhabib, 2004). The Kantian concept is at the heart of international education even if it is not well understood.
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Kant was the frst philosopher to promote the concept of peace as a foundation for philosophy, a concept that is explicitly tied to a republic based on the defnition of human right and it legitimates the international order as a juridical outcome of republicanism. Kant’s minor essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ is the foundational text of democratic peace theory in international relations and has been the site of efforts by Rawls and Habermas to revitalize the cause of a cosmopolitan juridical order. Kant’s major contribution is to articulate the idea of cosmopolitan right as a moral foundation of peace that consists in the engagement in commerce without hostilities, which is anchored in an evolving conception of reciprocity. Danilovic and Clare (2007, p. 397) indicate that the literature largely ignores the liberal elements of Kant’s ‘republic’ as a source of international peace and show that ‘the respect for civil liberties and the rule of law—that is, liberal constitutionalism—represent even more fundamental elements of Kantian republicanism than procedural democratic institutions.’ These authors revisit Kant’s notion of republicanism delineating its three constitutive elements—civil liberties and the rule of law, separation of powers, and representative governance—and show how all are essential for Kant’s reasoning behind the ‘liberal peace’. The force of their argument leads to a recognition that liberal constitutionalism and democratic representation are both necessary features to the Kantian liberal peace (Peters & Thayer, 2012). Beginning in the 1950s the rise of peace studies saw the emergence of international territorial norms, confict management, and peace treaties. Peace and security studies began to appear as university courses. Peace education also developed mostly within international relations and politics and as a cross-disciplinary subject, although peace as a pedagogical issue has a history going back to the American Civil War. The founding of the United Nations system in the 1950s acted as a new catalyst and the Vietnam War provided a reformulation with a greater emphasis on ‘war as imperialism’ and conceptions of ‘positive peace’ (Galtung, 1971). War and peace studies rarely featured in the philosophy of education—a rather astounding observation given the prevalence of such political and military concerns in the twenty-frst century and their ‘ethical burden’ for students. One prominent exception was the late radical educator Ilan Gur-Z'eev (2001, 2010) who encouraged us to rethink the conceptualization of the feld of peace education by examining its philosophical foundations. McGregor (2014) helpfully identifes six prospective philosophical foundations for peace education that are ‘mostly Western in their orientation … and, in the process, discovered and recounted a powerful counter-education to a perceived Western hegemony in peace education’ (p. 163). Issues of confict and security for the twenty-frst century have become embedded within a post-national and post-liberal framework that shifts understandings of peace, security, and risk toward a post-Cold War context. This involved an understanding of not only how philosophical underpinnings of peace can be traced to Kant, who promoted the concept of peace as a foundation for liberal society, but also the origins of ‘crimes against peace’. The modern concept of
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‘war crime’ surfaced at the Versailles Conference after WWI but did not receive a comprehensive defnition until the end of WWII in the form of the 1950 Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal, which was among the frst international conventions to address war crimes as part of the international order (Peters, 2016). The globalization of violence, the postmodernization of peace and the neoliberalization of security must be seen against the prevailing analysis of the age as the bloodiest in recorded human history, although some critics argue the decades since the end of the Cold War are best described as the ‘new peace’, an assessment based on declining rates of homicide, the rise of humanitarian thinking, and the decreasing magnitude of wars. Peace is a creation and project of liberal modernity, a collective endeavour to develop how the principles of justice and the rule of law can produce citizens of the global polity. The peace agencies and the treaties of non-proliferation signed at the end of the Cold War that have been in place for over 50 years are now at an end. Under the Trump administration, in 2019 the USA formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, a treaty originally signed between Reagan and Gorbachev in 19874 and announced in May 2020 that the US intended to withdraw from the historic Open Skies Treaty, a major accord on arms control signed by 35 countries that permits unarmed surveillance fights over these countries in order to boost confdence and avoid attacks.5 Peace and hospitality are core values of LI and IE. During the 1990s Derrida (2000, 2005) held a seminar on the ethics of hospitality, using it to chart the rising hostility of European governments toward immigrants. At the heart of the Western concept is a contradiction: the law ordains an unconditional reception of the stranger and yet laws also prescribe a condition that places limits on hospitality such as the right of entry, asylum, and stay. The right of the stranger not to be treated as an enemy depends on the right of visit but not of residence. The laws of hospitality—through the determination of limits, powers, rights, and duties—defy and violate the law of unconditional hospitality. International education thus always draws on the law of unconditional hospitality but comes up against the laws of hospitality and their invocation, contradiction, and regimentation.
Foreign policy and internationalism: The political doctrine Liberal internationalism is a philosophy and political doctrine that frst emerged in practice and developed under Lord Palmerston (Henry John Temple, third Viscount Palmerston) as British Foreign Secretary (1830–4, 1835–41) and Prime Minister (Liberal Party, 1859) in the nineteenth century. Palmerston served when Britain was at the height of its imperial power, responding to conficts in Europe in a belligerent way that laid the template for what later became known as ‘liberal internationalism’. He was committed to extending British interests through ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and the concept of ‘balance of power’ which he applied with
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great analytical skill during the revolutions of 1830 in Belgium and Italy where he maintained the European peace and the status quo. He settled conficts in France, Spain, and Portugal, and later in the Balkans and Near East through a series of treaties and conventions. Later still, he was the architect of the First Opium War (1839–42) that was designed to force China to accept free trade which resulted in the acquisition of Hong Kong in 1851. In his second terms as Foreign Secretary (1846–51) he dealt with the 1848 revolutions which spread through Europe, and he became a strong supporter of national self-determination. Liberal internationalism was based on a policy of interventionism in pursuit of twin goals of British interests and international justice and morality. As Prime Minister (1855–8) Palmerston took a hard line on ending the Crimean War, eventually signing a peace treaty in 1856, the same year as the beginning of the Second Opium War (1856–60) which resulted in a devastating defeat for the Qing Dynasty. Palmerston, usually regarded as the frst Liberal, sided with the Confederate successionists in the American Civil War although he did not support slavery. He was portrayed as ‘a Conservative at home and a Liberal abroad’. The history of liberal internationalism gets established and becomes the basis of US-based world order with Woodrow Wilson (1918) based around his 14 Points for world peace. Figure 11.1 provides a partial account as a refection of US foreign policy. Wilson’s (US President, 1918) 14 Points was a blueprint for world peace that was to be used for peace negotiations after WWI. Wilson directly addressed the causes of the world war by calling for the abolition of
Figure 11.1 Sketch of modern history of liberal internationalism.
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secret treaties, a reduction in armaments, an adjustment in colonial claims in the interests of both native peoples and colonists, and freedom of the seas. Wilson also made proposals that would ensure world peace in the future, proposing the removal of economic barriers between nations, the promise of ‘self-determination’ for those oppressed minorities, and a world organization that would provide a system of collective security for all nations. As Eric Kendall (2012) makes clear: (1) Wilsonianism can be distilled down to a basic set of interrelated precepts: the imminent threat to international order; democratic self-determination, collective security, an integrated world economy, and American exceptionalism; (2) that these interrelated precepts are ambiguous and contingent—they have been defned in different ways by different people over the course of decades, often in response to changing circumstances; and (3) the end result of that inherent ambiguity and contingency has been a series of different, sometimes competing interpretations of Wilsonian internationalism …. No less than three related but distinct schools of thought have developed under the Wilsonian ‘big tent’. Wilson’s original formulation; Rooseveltian Wilsonianism; and the Cold War Consensus. Liberal internationalism originated as a response to the First World War. In conjunction with internationalists from the peace movement, Woodrow Wilson formulated and promoted the frst iteration of Wilsonianism—and, in a number of ways, planted the seeds of future confict over its interpretation …. Wilson’s own thinking focused on world organization, the rule of law, the free-fow of trade goods, and national democratic selfdetermination—at least for Europeans. But even during that early time frame, alternative interpretations that will become more prominent later were already being set down, either by word of by deed—the necessity of armed force as an adjunct of collective security and the progressive regulatory state as an adjunct of an integrated world economy, most signifcantly. (p. 338) It is clear that the world peace movement was a sustaining force also for international education directly deriving from Wilson’s conception of world peace, but there were attempts to develop international education based on the liberal philosophy and principles of world peace that issued in the time before Wilson, resting on Kantian and religious, especially Quaker roots. Ikenberry (2018) detects a long-term shift in the global system away from open trade, multilateralism and cooperative security to various mixed forms of nationalism, protectionism, spheres of infuence, and regional Great Power projects. But it is clear that there is no liberal internationalism without American and Western hegemony—and that age is ending. The long era of ‘liberal modernity’ is ending: Beginning with the Enlightenment and running through the industrial revolution and the rise of the West, world-historical change seemed to be
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unfolding according to a deep developmental logic. It was a progressive movement driven by reason, science, discovery, innovation, technology, learning, constitutionalism and institutional adaptation. The world as a whole was in the embrace of this global modernizing movement. Perhaps today’s crisis marks the ending of the global trajectory of liberal modernity. It was an artefact of a specifc time and place—and the world is now moving on. … What liberal internationalism offers is a vision of open and loosely rulesbased order. It is a tradition of order-building that emerged with the rise and spread of liberal democracy, and its ideas and agendas have been shaped as these countries have confronted and struggled with the grand forces of modernity. Creating an international ‘space’ for liberal democracy, reconciling the dilemmas of sovereignty and interdependence, seeking protections and preserving rights within and between states—these are the underlying aims that have propelled liberal internationalism through the ‘golden eras’ and ‘global catastrophes’ of the last two centuries. (p. 8) Some critics have argued that State capitalism and authoritarianism is better than liberal democracy. Lee Kuan Yew (Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, 19591990) has argued not only that authoritarianism is more compatible with Asia’s Confucian traditions, but also that authoritarianism is more compatible with consistently high rates of economic growth than liberal democracy. Democracy is a drag on growth, Lee has argued, because it interferes with rational economic planning and promotes a kind of egalitarian self-indulgence in which a myriad of private interests assert themselves at the expense of the community as a whole.
The project of international education The defnition of international education varies and is debated. Two general meanings emerge based on student engagement and involvement. The frst refers to an education that transcends national borders through the exchange of staff and students. A good example would be students travelling to study at an international branch campus as part of a student exchange programme. The second is a comprehensive approach to education that intentionally prepares students to be active and engaged participants in an interconnected and intercultural world. Both approaches seem to demand a knowledge and understanding of other world regions, religions, and cultures, and a working familiarity of international and global issues. Quite often this understanding is supplemented with second and third language skills based on a ‘liberal’ respect and toleration for other cultures and peoples. Some critics argue that before Trump international education was in a crisis of transition that involved a shift from the old US-led political foundation of the liberal order toward a new political confguration of global power that recognized the global South, the rise of China and Asia, to understand the new
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reality of shifting coalitions of states and new global governance institutions leading to a slowly evolving post-American and post-Western order. Certainly, international education needs to be philosophically recalibrated to take into account these factors of the new global order. In the modern context of internationalism, especially after WWII and the seemingly ever-present threat of nuclear war, there have been attempts at systematically linking the two concepts of ‘peace’ and ‘development’. Liberal theory shifted to trying to understand the kind of development that would facilitate the emergence of more peaceful economic, social, and political structures. This conceptual work went on at the same time as the international policy community investigated the economic and social opportunity costs of war and the relationships between economic growth and military spending. Since the end of the Cold War there has been little talk of ‘peace’ in the development literature and no new theory beyond democratic theory. The literature has focused on causes and costs of civil war, identifying resource endowments, poverty, democracy, rent-seeking, fnancial, and economic and political transitions as possible causes. There have been attempts to link the theory of ‘peace as the absence of violence’ with the theory of ‘development as freedom’. The new synthesis is frmly related to the tradition of liberal theory with its emphasis on freedom and its progressivist teleology of change. Yet despite the inheritance of liberal principles and policies, the twentieth century was marked by unprecedented violence and more wars with greater casualties than at any previous comparable period: two world wars killing almost 29 million people, the nuclear arms race, the Cold War, and many civil wars, and international conficts. The globalization of violence poses challenges to liberal philosophy and calls for its transformation (Peters, 2019). In ‘International Education and Development’ Carbonnier, Carton, and King (2017) note, ‘Education has been a priority sector when considering foreign aid allocation since the 1970s.’ This was the basis of the old Colombo Plan in the 1950s. The authors note the co-evolution of international education and development: The expansion of both international education studies and of development studies dates back to the 1950s. The Comparative and International Education Society (CIES) was founded in the United States in 1956 with the aim to ‘foster cross-cultural understanding and societal development through the international and multidisciplinary study of educational ideas, systems, and practices’. The Comparative Education Society of Europe (CESE) was established fve years later in London. Interestingly, the very title of those two organizations includes comparative education, a discipline that had developed in parts of Europe in the 19th century already … following the rise of nation states. Education systems were confned within national borders with a recurrent debate between proponents of universalism versus those of particularism. (para 9)
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As they go on to note, the focus of international education studies was extended beyond its Western origins to developing countries in the 1960s and 1970s, in the context of decolonization, and they note tensions between rights-based and market-based approaches, or between neoliberal policies and state-driven interventions. The rights-based vision of education as a public good gave way to a new market instrumentalism with an emphasis on human capital development and privatization strategies at the expense of policies of inclusiveness. Knight’s (2015: 2) conceptualization of international education refects a shift of understanding at the beginning of the new century around concepts of transnational education, borderless education, and cross-border education and an updating of the defnition: Internationalization at the national, sector, and institutional levels is defned as the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education. (italics in original) This defnition is clearly based on a liberal ideology of globalization and internationalization and shows how fragile these assumptions can be after the rise of forms of national populism and especially the election of Trump. There is a need for the approach called Critical Political Economy (CPE) which originated in the eighteenth century as moral philosophy and is concerned with the state’s wealth in terms of administration and distribution. It derives from Greek ‘polity’ and ‘O€ konomie’ (management of the household) and in the nineteenth century embraces the principles of radical political economy, including Marx’s critique of British liberal economists (Smith, Malthus, Ricardo) and the French physiocrats (Quesnay, Turgot). To this conception and approach we should add the approach from Foucault’s ‘governmentality’ that focuses on how governments produce citizens as a result of policies concerning international education and the organized practices (mentalities, rationalities, and techniques) through which subjects are governed. Governmentality then is a form of government rationality, focusing on the development of liberalism and liberal modernity as the best possible way of governing and involves an analysis of freedom and the limits of the state, and state/ market confgurations. International education as one of these confgurations and its analysis leads to an understanding of the governance of higher education (Peters, Besley, Olssen, Maurer, & Weber, 2009). Almost every aspect of the philosophy of international education based around liberal concepts of freedom, democracy, trade, peace, development, and hospitality (as regard of the Other) is currently being rolled back under the assault on the principles of liberal internationalism that directly impacts international education. There is a clear sense that in the age of Trump international education could easily become a philosophical and political project that draws its inspiration from its origins but recalibrates the underlying concepts to take on the racist, white
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supremacist, isolationalist, and war-mongering national populism and far-right politics that now dominate the Western world. Ikenberry (2018) closes his account of the current problems encountered by the international liberal order by suggesting that its future depends upon the liberal democracies of US and Europe supporting it and by refurnishing their progressive social democratic rather than neoliberal political orientations. He also suggests that such a future needs to be based upon expanding and rebuilding a wider coalition of states to cooperate within a reformed liberal global order. At this point, both of these assumptions seem far-fetched with Trump’s ascendancy, his reneging of old coalitions, partnerships and treaties, and his pursuit of the tech-trade wars. Under the circumstances, the Chinese model of development, of BRI, and of global diplomacy may assert regional and hemispheric dominance with new sets of international relations with Russia, in the African continent, and in Latin America. Chinese international education is already beginning to refect these regional affliations.
Notes 1 This chapter is inspired by the International Education Association of Australia (IEAA) Teaching and Learning Summit, La Trobe University, Melbourne, where I was invited to give the Closing Remarks, 9 August 2019. 2 https://ejournals.bc.edu/index.php/ihe/article/view/9831 3 https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2018 4 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49198565 5 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52760420
References Altbach, PG., & de Wit, H (2017). Trump and the coming revolution in higher education internationalization. International Higher Education, 89, 3–5. doi:10.6017/ihe.2017.89.9831 Altbach, P, & de Wit, H (2018). Are we facing a fundamental challenge to higher education internationalization? International Higher Education, 2(93), 2–4. doi:10.6017/ihe.0.93.10414 Benhabib, S (2004). On hospitality: Rereading Kant’s cosmopolitan right. In The rights of others, aliens, residents, and citizens, pp. 25–48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Carbonnier, G, Carton, M, & King, V (2017). International education and development: Histories, parallels, cross-roads. Revue Internationale de Politique de Developpement, 5. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/pol-dev /1767 Danilovic, V, & Clare, J (2007). The Kantian liberal peace (revisited). American Journal of Political Science, 51(2), 397–414. doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2007.00258.x Derrida, J (2000). Of hospitality (R Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
104 The crisis of international education Derrida, J (2005). Paper machine (R Bowlby, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Fukuyama, F (1992). The end of history and the last man. New York: The Free Press. Galtung, J (1971). A structural theory of imperialism. Journal of Peace Research, 8(2), 81–117. doi:10.1177/002234337100800201 Gur-Z'eev, I (2001). Philosophy of peace education in a postmodern era. Educational Theory, 51, 315–336. Gur-Z'eev, I (2010). Beyond peace education: Toward co-poiesis and enduring improvisation. Policy Futures in Education, 8, 315–339. Ikenberry, GJ (2018). The end of liberal international order? International Affairs, 94(1), 7–23. doi:10.1093/ia/iix241 Kant, I (1795). Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch. http://www.gutenberg.org /ebooks/50922 Kant, I (1795/1923). Perpetual peace: A philosophical sketch. https://www. mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm Kendall, E (2012). Diverging Wilsonianisms: Liberal Internationalism, the peace movement, and the ambiguous legacy of Woodrow Wilson. Unpublished PhD, Case Western Reserve University. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_fle?accession =case1323399909&disposition=inline Knight, J (2015). Updating the defnition of internationalization, International Higher Education. https://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/ihe/article/view File/7391/6588 McGregor, S (2014). Prospective philosophical foundations of peace education. Factis Pax, 8(2), 150–166. http://www.infactispax.org/journal Mill, JS (1848). Principles of political economy with some of their applications to social philosophy (W.J. Ashley ed.) [1848] https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/ mill-principles-of-political-economy-ashley-ed Peters, MA (2016). Challenges to the ‘world order’ of liberal internationalism: What can we learn? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 48(9), 863–871. doi:10.1080/0 0131857.2015.1057033. Peters, MA (2019). The threat of nuclear war: Peace studies in an apocalyptic age. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 51(1), 1–4. doi:10.1080/00131857.2017.13 67876 Peters, MA, Besley, T, Olssen, M, Maurer, S, & Weber, S (2009). Governmentality Studies in Education. Rotterdam: Brill/Sense. Peters, MA, & Thayer, J (2012). The cold peace Geopolitics. History and International Relations, 4(2), 11–26. Smith, A (1776). An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. https ://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/wealth-of-nations /index.htm United States President (1913–1921: Wilson) (1918). Address of the President of the United States: Delivered at a joint session of the two houses of Congress, January 8, 1918. Washington, DC: [Govt. print. off.]. Wilson, W (1918). Fourteen points for world peace (speech). https://history.state .gov/milestones/1914-1920/fourteen-points
Chapter 12
The failure of liberalism and liberal education Michael A. Peters Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis Ltd, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of © Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia.
Anyone living in the US in the 1970s might be forgiven for thinking that ‘this is as good as it gets’, that we are living the good life, and that we can continue to expect incremental improvements in wages, education, and lifestyle. It was the pinnacle of the age of liberalism dominated by the US’s position as the sole superpower and the achievements of civil and human rights. By 1989 with the collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War the US and the West looked unassailable. Political liberalism and the strand of liberal egalitarianism had made some progress so that it was possible to talk about rights and to think that they were essential for a democratic foundation for education. Liberal philosophy of education was at its peak also with R. S. Peters at the London Institute of Education (IOE) and Israel Scheffer at Harvard. Their particular version of analytic philosophy as a form of conceptual analysis led to an easy and comfortable assumption that if we cleaned up our concepts in ethics and educational theory then we would not suffer the confusion of a chaotic mind operating with impure categories. Everything fowed from the belief in a pure language that could describe the world clearly. Wittgenstein said, ‘What can be said, can be said clearly.’ Clarity indeed was a goal in itself. It had both therapeutic and educational effects. It was a civilizational doctrine that emanated from Karl Krauss as the editor of Die Fackel (The Torch), a satirical and cynical journal, who had a spiritual belief in Ursprung (‘origins’) and the purity of poetic language that could redeem the commodity status of language and improve our moral being. While Wittgenstein treats philosophical issues beyond Kraus’ interests, Kraus’ conception of the purity of language and its ethical and spiritual effects had an enduring impact. But Wittgenstein turned to concerns of a logically pure language that would expose all the conceptual confusions of our culture, a conception for a logically perspicuous language, an Ideal Language, that would reveal the isomorphic relation between the structure of facts and state of affairs provided in the Tractatus. It was one of the early foundational texts of analytic philosophy that helped to determine the trajectory of modern philosophy. The linguistic turn also enabled the treatment of philosophical problems as linguistic problems. Our glassy essence and that of the world could be representationally transparent. Quine (1953, 1960) called the strategy ‘the semantic ascent’
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in his From a Logical Point of View and Word and Object. It referred to the idea that philosophy was no longer about objects, but about the use of expressions for these objects. In this way, the question as to which objects are ontologically fxed is only indirectly addressed. As he argues at one point, the dispute about what exists is translated into one about words—but that does not mean that existence depends on words. Richard Rorty (1967) used Gustav Bergman’s term ‘linguistic turn’ in an infuential collection that suggested that the term referred to the beginning of analytic philosophy and a focus on the logic and philosophy of language. Glock and Kalhat (2018) in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy express the matter this way: The term ‘the linguistic turn’ refers to a radical reconception of the nature of philosophy and its methods, according to which philosophy is neither an empirical science nor a supraempirical enquiry into the essential features of reality; instead, it is an a priori conceptual discipline which aims to elucidate the complex interrelationships among philosophically relevant concepts, as embodied in established linguistic usage, and by doing so dispel conceptual confusions and solve philosophical problems. Not long after heralding the linguistic turn, Rorty turned away from it and additionally began to question the very premise of analytic philosophy to doubt that there was anything to the notion of ‘analyticity’—if no analyticity, then he argued we can’t really make sense of this notion and can’t formalize it. His conclusion, then, was that there is no substance to ‘analysis’. He is quite clear in an essay ‘Wittgenstein and the Linguistic Turn’ (Rorty, 2013) when he states: First: there is no interesting sense in which philosophical problems are problems of language. Second: the linguistic turn was useful nevertheless, for it turned philosophers’ attention from the topic of experience towards that of linguistic behavior. That shift helped break the hold of empiricism—and, more broadly, of representationalism. (p. 3) By the time that analytic philosophy of education took off in the 1970s, the heyday of linguistic philosophy was already over. The search for a locally pure language, while still important to one branch of analytic philosophy, especially the form of logical empiricism of the philosophers of the Vienna Circle, had been abandoned by others in favour of ordinary language which was regarded as perfectly in order as it was. Indeed, this was the dictum of the later Wittgenstein who advanced a conception of ‘meaning as use’ and was associated with the Ordinary Language Philosophy movement that thrived at Oxford with the work of John Wisdom, Norman Malcolm, Alice Ambrose, and Morris Lazerowitz in the frst phase and Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin and P. F. Strawson, in the second. Essentially, ordinary language philosophy was a methodology based on the painstaking analysis of the
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use of language and expression, especially philosophically contentious concepts. G. E. Moore’s infuence at Cambridge imbued the movement with a ‘commonsense’ view of reality that set the tone. Wittgenstein (1953), against the assumption of an Ideal Language, suggested that there is nothing hidden from us: ‘Philosophy simply puts everything before us’ (Philosophical Investigation, hereafter, PI: 126) and philosophy simply assembles reminders because in ordinary language ‘everything lies open to view’. This is the background to Wittgenstein’s famous statement, ‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language’ (PI: 109). The aim of philosophy was to divest language and concepts of their metaphysical expression which led to distortion and reclaim their everyday uses. It was a language philosophy based on curing us of the misuse of words through the systematic and detailed analysis of ordinary language. It was largely a conservative endeavour that left language as it was rather than trying to reform it, and it tried to dispel philosophical confusion and dissolve philosophical puzzles. The ordinary language, however, was the standard Oxford English language of the educated middle classes without the gender, working class, and migrant infections of Englishes that became recognized during the 1970s and 1980s. Analytic philosophy of education was imbued historically with both conceptions of language philosophy: on the one hand, there was the idea that philosophers could clean up the concepts of education to operationalize a form of conceptual analysis that fulflled necessary and suffcient conditions for the use of a concept; on the other hand, conceptual analysis was inherently conservative for it revealed that liberal bourgeois English culture was perfectly fne exactly the way it was. Culturally unrefective of its own mission, it became an exercise in plotting the conceptual limits of liberal education. In essence, analytical philosophy of education suffered the same criticisms as its parent discipline—it was a form of linguistic imperialism that dictated the structure of social reality by mandating the meaning and use of certain concepts, those, as it turned out, that were essentially liberal. It led to the question: do ‘we’ philosophers ban misuses? Are philosophers the best tribunal for legislating correct meanings? Should there be a tribunal at all? It suggested a lexicographical game to be played that carried and implied certain values. In one sense, analytical philosophy of education gave us a picture of the culture of liberalism and a metaphilosophical view that grounded human freedom not ontologically through natural rights, or God, or reason, but through the structure of ‘our’ concepts. It is a grand strategy that differed from the standard liberal strategy but nevertheless through conceptual sleight of hand once removed from reality, established the same principles. There were some like Rorty who followed through on Wittgenstein’s antifoundationalism to explicitly deny essences and the attempt to ground freedom in our given nature. Rorty, following Dewey, stepped away from the attempt to provide foundations for the political culture of liberalism through the metaphysics of inalienable rights or our moral essence. All we have, Rorty argued, was
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contingency and change. Still, up until very recently, liberalism seemed invulnerable, natural, and just part of the way the world had evolved. Most notably, John Rawls (1971) rescued normative liberal political philosophy, intoning in his A Theory of Justice (1971), justice ‘is the frst virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought. A theory however elegant and economical must be rejected or revised if it is untrue; likewise laws and institutions no matter how effcient and well-arranged must be reformed or abolished if they are unjust …. Justice denies that the loss of freedom for some can ever be made right by a greater good shared by others.’ He aimed to resolve the seemingly competing claims of freedom and equality. Freedom and equality could be integrated into a seamless unity he called justice as fairness. Katrina Forrester (2019a) in an essay, ‘The Future of Political Philosophy’, in the Boston Review based on her exciting new book The Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (2019b) asks, ‘For fve decades Anglophone political philosophy has been dominated by the liberal egalitarianism of John Rawls. With liberalism in crisis, have these ideas outlived their time?’ ‘Is political philosophy, like liberalism itself, in crisis, and in need of reinvention?’, she inquires. She documents the paradigm shift in political philosophy represented by Rawls’ work and how it inspired a huge body of work that explored ‘what justice and equality meant in the context of modern capitalist welfare states’ that helped us to see ‘what justice and equality demand—of our society, of our institutions, and of ourselves’. Forrester (2019a) also describes the collapse of social liberalism in the 1970s and the bad timing of Rawls’ programme: The publication of his grand philosophical defense of the welfare state came on the eve of its crisis: to some it looked as if it hailed from a bygone era, the last gasp of a dying ideology. The success of Rawls’s theory in the coming decades only deepened its untimeliness: the more welfarism fractured in politics, the more entrenched Rawls’s arguments became in political philosophy. She speaks of the growing mismatch between a political philosophy and a social and economic reality that was rapidly shifting away from principles and provisions that governed capitalist welfare states, raising the fundamental question of the relation between politics and philosophy. It is clear that Rawls’ abstract formulations of freedom and equality as the basis of egalitarian liberalism suffered the frst blows from a change in political economy that with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan introduced neoliberalism as a set of policies that sacrifced equality for freedom. Drawing on Hayek and Friedman, neoliberalism emphasized a form of market fundamentalism that ruthlessly paired back the welfare state to emphasize individual consumer rights in the marketplace and the logic of Public Choice Theory as a means of ‘reforming’ the public sector and state education. Forrester documents the way Rawls as a young scholar started off closer to the principles of neoliberalism and moved increasingly to the Left and a defence
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of the welfare state as he grew older, at a time when the very political ground was shifting in the opposite direction. We might also use a similar framework for suggesting the way in which analytical philosophy of education seemed at one point to closely shadow liberal egalitarianism in Britain’s post-war welfare state by becoming increasingly out of joint with the direction of Thatcher’s politics. Actually, the work of R. S Peters with Benn on democracy, often overlooked, was an important part of the large picture of liberal democracy. What is instructive and refreshing about Forrester’s analysis is the way she maintains that ‘The political crises of the 1970s largely passed Anglophone liberal philosophers by. Few wrote about crises of legitimacy and the challenges of postindustrial society.’ As she comments, political theory was not left untheorized by the non-liberal Left, Marxists, and others, who embraced a form of communitarianism. But she maintains that these philosophers and Rawlsians missed the larger changes to neoliberal state policies— those that outsourced and privatized public welfare functions, expanded the state’s carceral functions and the reach of public management, and introduced competition, deregulation, and new transnational forms of clientelism and governance. Forrester goes on to make the argument, now heard many times, of how The rise of Rawlsianism is thus a story of triumph—the triumph of a small group of affuent, white, mostly male, analytical political philosophers who worked at a handful of elite institutions in the United States and Britain, especially Harvard, Princeton, and Oxford, and constructed a universalizing liberal theory that took on a life of its own. (2019a) While the Rawlsians tried to universalize political liberalism ‘in the end, they remained within the contradictions of postwar liberalism.’ She writes: ‘By the 1990s, liberal egalitarianism—like liberal democracy—appeared hegemonic’ but ‘Now that the claims of the end of history seem not only complacent but mistaken, the political role of this philosophical liberalism is more uncertain.’ Rawlsians exhibited resistance to the denaturalizing and anti-essentializing strategies of critical theory and post-structuralism only to deepen the irrelevance of a model of political philosophy sporting itself as universal while increasingly facing changes of huge magnitude on the ground: Politics is changing, as authoritarians, radical movements, and new oligarchs battle in a novel international landscape shaped by unaccountable fnancial institutions, new media platforms, new technologies, and climate change. What I like about Forrester’s view is the way she is prepared to openly face up to the historical limitations of liberal egalitarianism, to ask the question ‘what it
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would take to have a political philosophy ft for our own era’?. The fact is that political liberalism and egalitarianism emerged at a time of great historical stability in the post-war West. Liberal internationalism had been solidly in place for 70 years and its world institutions (UN, World Bank, IMF) and Bretton Woods formed the architecture within which neoliberal globalization took off around the world. Only after the savage inequalities within the Western capitalist democracies began to become increasingly obvious, and the rise of new social movements began to claim new generations of cultural, gender, and environmental rights, did the paradigm of liberal egalitarianism seem hopelessly out of date and unable to theorize the political changes that have accompanied the rise of authoritarianism and the far-right. Indeed, if anything, it is the far-right’s noxious white supremacism and ‘replacement theory’ that attracts an increasing following from young people in the US and Europe. What do liberal philosophers have to say about this changing political ecology that erodes the legitimacy of political liberalism, exposing the shifting sands of a once-dominant paradigm? The same can be said for liberal philosophers of education: understand that all the conceptual analysis of political or educational concepts is not going to rescue the old paradigm. Now move on and try to come to terms with the way the world has changed, not only the rise of China and the shift in the centre of gravity away from the transatlantic democracies to Asia in a multipolar postAmerican world, but also the simultaneous rise of footloose Big Tech that have more economic power than most nation-states and a near monopoly position in the market. Come to terms with the way capitalism has changed from the old welfare state capitalism and mixed economy. Big Tech gives us no reason to trust them in handling personal data or manipulating democracies. (What are they doing to education and the profling of students and teachers?) What does the fnancialization of markets and the disappearance of labour in the fnal stage of automation mean for the purpose and nature of education? And perhaps, more than anything else, how should teachers and students respond to the impending exigencies of climate change that threatens in a short time to wipe the smaller island nations off the face of the Earth? What of addressing inequalities, of racism? What of education for the future of humanity? Is liberal philosophy of education capable of consistently addressing such issues? I wonder about the complicity between liberalism and neoliberalism, two movements that share so much intellectual heritage: where the former emphasized equality over freedom, the latter emphasized freedom over equality. They are in terms of philosophy and political economy from the same broad tradition. Maybe this historical ‘complicity’ is one of the reasons that liberal philosophers of education have been relatively ineffective in addressing the issues of the day. The world is a highly dynamic, unpredictable, and changing place, even more so as interconnectivity drives a kind of integration; world politics is characteristically notorious for eluding even the most careful predictions. Political philosophy must also learn to take account of this dynamism. Philosophies that pretend to a form of universalism in retrospect, if they are good enough, often only end up
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characterizing the broad features of a historical era. What looks permanent and unalterable suddenly gives way to a new order—history supplants the best of philosophical intentions.
References Forrester, K (2019a). The future of political philosophy. Boston Review. http://www. bostonreview.net Forrester, K (2019b). The shadow of justice: Postwar liberalism and the remaking of political philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Glock, H-J, & Kalhat, J (2018). The linguistic turn. The Routledge encyclopedia of philosophy. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/linguistic-turn/v-1 Quine, W (1953). From a logical point of view. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, W (1960). Word and object. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rawls, J (1971). A theory of justice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rorty, R (Ed.). (1967). The linguistic turn. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, R (2013). Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn. In Philosophy as cultural politics (pp. 160-178). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L (1953). Philosophical investigations (GEM Anscombe, PMS Hacker, & J Schulte, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Michael A. Peters
Tina Besley
Index
Note: ‘n’ indicates chapter notes; italics indicate fgures. Abbott, Tony 74 academic freedom 21 Achiron, Marilyn 72 activism 46; far-right 44; see also movements, social Adorno, T 67, 68n6 aesthetic modernism 34–35 Afghanistan 20, 38, 40, 44, 57, 64, 73 Africa 19, 64–66, 73, 103; see also specifc countries African Americans 1, 4 Agamben, Giorgio 64, 68 Albright, Madeleine 27n2, 35, 36, 55–56 alienation 4, 5, 22–24 Allison, David 10 al-Qaida 40 Altbach, PG 92–93 alt-right 10, 12–14, 20, 43, 46, 52–54, 59, 81 Ambrosini, M 74–75 American Civil War 96, 98 Amin, S 35 anarchism 2, 10 Anti-Defamation League (ADL) 44–45 Ardern, Jacinda 48–50, 58–60 Arendt, Hannah 64 Arvas, T 35 Asia 19, 64, 74, 100–101, 110; see also specifc countries asylum: political 65, 70–77; seekers 65, 73–74 Atlantic, The 13, 45 austerity, fscal 4, 5, 80–81, 85 Austin, JL 106 Australia 4, 74, 87
Austria 4, 7, 19, 55, 67–68, 81 authoritarianism 1, 5, 7, 19, 21–23, 27, 31, 32, 35, 81, 100, 110; authoritarian populism 79–82, 92–93; authoritarian personalities 27 automation 110 Badiou, Alain 9 Baeumler, Alfred 10 Balkans 73, 74, 98 Balla, Giacomo 34 BAME (black, Asian, and minority ethnic) communities 2, 33 Bangladesh 74 Bannon, Steve 26, 46, 56 Barber, Benjamin R 64–65 Basayev, Shamil 38 Bataille, Georges 10 Belgium 81, 98 Bender, Stuart 61n9 Benhabib, S 35 Benn, Tony 109 Benoist, Alain de 55 Bergman, Gustav 106 Bergson, Henri 7 Beslan school hostage, North Ossetia 38, 56 biopolitics 64, 68 bio-power 24–25 Bismarck, Otto von 7, 10 black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) communities 2, 33 Black Lives Matter 2 Blair, Tony 35 Boccioni, Umberto 34 Boehler, Patrick 74
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Boer War 65, 66 Boko Haram 40 Boogaloo (far-right group) 4–5 borders: control 74, 75; militarization 19, 26, 77n15 Bosnia 67 Bowler, A 34 Brash, Don 59 Breivik, Anders Behring 35, 39, 41n5, 44, 52, 56 Brexit 1, 7, 35, 52, 79–80, 82n3 Britain see United Kingdom British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 4 British Union of Fascists 55 Budde, Mariann E 2–3 bullying 27 Bynum, Steve 26 Cambodia 67 Cambridge Analytica 94 camps 64–68, 68n7, 72 Camus, Renaud 53, 55 capital: account liberalization 80; fows 85, 86 capitalism 10, 20, 21, 25–27, 35, 81, 93, 100, 108, 110 Carbonnier, G 101–102 Carra, Carlo 34 Carton, M 101–102 Charlottesville, ‘Unite the Right’ rally 43–46, 52 Charter schools 82 Chechnya 38 Cherokee people 66 children 40, 46, 56, 64–65, 76; see also young people China 19, 66, 84, 90–91, 98, 100–101, 110; infrastructuralism, Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) 87–88, 103 Christchurch mosque attacks, New Zealand 48–60 Christians: fundamentalism 1, 27, 39, 56, 81; terrorist attacks on 50 Churchill, Winston 3 citizenship 20, 21, 95 civil: liberties 93, 94, 96; rights 1, 2, 5, 105; society 19, 59; unrest 5 Clare, J 96 climate change 81, 82, 91, 110 Collinson, Stephen 79–80 Colombo Plan 101
colonialism/coloniality 4, 57, 65–66, 86; decolonization 4, 101; postcolonialism/postcoloniality 86 Colston, Edward 3 Common Core curriculum 82 communism 19, 21, 31; Communist Party 22, 25 concentration camps 65–68, 68n7 Confederates 98; neo- 43 conservatism 31; anti-conservatism 31, 55; neoconservatism 56; social 81, 82 Conservatives (UK) 58 Copsey, N 19–20 cosmopolitanism 75, 95–96 Counter Extremism Project 4 COVID-19 2, 4, 5 Crimean War 98 Critical Political Economy (CPE) 102 Croatia 19 Crusades 56; Crusaders (Christchurch rugby team) 56–57 Cuba 90 Cultural Marxism 44, 52 curriculum: Common Core 82; white 4 Damigo, Nathan 43, 44 Danilovic, V 96 darknet 19, 53 De Vos, Betsy 82 de Wit, H 92–93 decolonization 101; ‘Decolonise Education’ movement 4 Deleuze, Gilles 10–11, 18, 20, 25–27 democracy 1, 2, 26, 27, 35, 46, 55–56, 93–94, 102; anti- 1, 81; elections 1, 7, 26, 35, 74, 93, 94; liberal 4, 7, 18, 55, 93, 100, 103, 109; representation 96; social 5, 8, 27, 103 Democrats 26, 74 Derrida, Jacques 10, 97 desire 19, 22, 25–27 development 101–102 Dewey, J 23, 107 Di Maio, Luigi 35 digital technology see social media; technology displaced persons 4, 20, 64, 65, 68, 72, 73 domination 19, 25–27 Drochon, Hugo 13 Duff, Michelle 53 Duke, David 43
Index Earth system science 75 Eco, Umberto 11–12, 26 economic: crisis 20, 35, 80–81; deregulation 85; growth 90, 100, 101; liberalism 93; power 110; recession 90 Economic Times 79 Economist 55 education 2, 4, 20, 35, 38–41, 56, 110; approaches to non-fascism 26–27; communication model 87; ‘Educating the Future’ metaphor 87–88; for democracy 12; failure of liberal 105–111; international 85, 87, 92–103; levels 45; philosophy of 12, 26, 46, 92, 96, 105, 107, 109, 110; policies 88; programmes 8; public 5, 35, 82; social 12; system 32 Edwards, John 54, 58 egalitarianism 31; liberal 105, 108–110 Egypt 38, 56, 73 elections 1, 7, 26, 35, 74, 93, 94 El-Gingihy, Y 35 Emanuel AME Church, Charleston 1 emotions 21, 22, 27 Enlightenment 20, 95 environment, the 19, 91, 93; see also climate change equality 36, 40, 81, 108, 110 equalization and equilibrium 75 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 53 Eritrea 73 Eternal Fascism 11–12 ethnic: justice 93; minorities 1, 4, 44, 19, 66, 74, 81, 93; nationalism 26; ‘purity’ 19; renewal myth 31, 55 ethnocentrism 81 EU see European Union eugenics 19 Europe 1, 4, 7, 8, 19, 20, 26, 32, 35, 44, 46, 52, 57, 72, 81, 94, 98, 103, 110; Eastern Europe 74; ‘immigration crisis’ (2015) 65, 70–77; see also specifc countries European Union (EU) 73–75, 77n9, 79, 92 Evans, B 20, 27 extremism 56, 57, 58; Counter Extremism Project 4; far-right 1–5; groups 4; religious 38–40, 56; see also fundamentalism
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Facebook 53, 54, 94 fake news 35 Farage, Nigel 81 far-right 7–15, 110; activism 44; altright 10, 12–14, 20, 43, 46, 52–54, 59, 81; demonstrations 2; extremism 1–5; groups 4–5 fascism 4, 7–12, 15, 18–20, 24–27, 31–36, 54–56; British 55; Eternal Fascism 11–12; Italian 32–35; microfascism 26–27; neofascism 19–21, 26, 27; non-fascism 24–27; protofascism 26; psychology of 20, 21–22; theofascism 26; Ur-Fascism 11–12 Faye, Guillaume 44, 52, 55 fear 49, 51, 52, 54 Feldman, M 31 feminism, anti- 81; see also women Ferguson, N 65 Ferree, Chuck 68n7 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 7 Field, James 43 Finchelstein, F 27n2 Five Star Movement 35 Floyd, George 2 foreign policy 20, 81, 97–100, 98 Forrester, Katrina 108–109 Förster, Bernard and Elizabeth 9–10 Foucault, Michel 10–12, 18, 20, 24–25, 102 Fouda, Gamal 49 France 19, 55, 71, 73, 81, 98 Frankfurt School 21, 22, 44 free trade 85, 95, 98, 99 freedom 22–24, 101, 102, 108, 110; academic 21; of association 1; of movement 1, 75; negative freedom 23; pedagogy of 12; political 19; of the press 35, 93; of speech 1, 35, 36, 58, 59 Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) 55 Freud, Sigmund 21, 25 Fromm, Eric 20, 22–24 Fukuyama, Francis 93–94 fundamentalism 27, 40, 56; Christian 1, 27, 39, 56, 81; Islamic 27, 39, 56; literary 8–9; religious 39 Furceri, Davide 80 Generation Identity (GI), Austria 55 genocide 66; ‘white genocide’/ replacement theory 53, 54, 110
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Gentile, Giovanni 7, 32 Germany 4, 7, 10, 19, 21, 22, 66–68, 73, 74, 76; see also Nazism Gier, Nick 39 Giroux, H 35, 36 globalism 84–91 globalization 1, 7, 40, 65, 75, 85, 86, 102, 110; anti- 79; neoliberal 79–82, 82n3; of violence 97, 101 Glock, H-J 106 Goff, Phil 59 Greece 19, 35, 73 grief 48–50, 54, 59 Griffn, R 31 Griffths, J 31 Guattari, Felix 18, 20, 25–27 Gulf War 56 gun ownership 53, 54, 97 Gur-Z’eev, Ilan 96 Habermas, M 46, 96 Haque, Umair 26 hate: crime 1, 58, 59; groups 1, 27, 54; incitement of hatred 52, 53; speech 1, 2, 49, 50, 58 healing 50–51 Hegel, GWF 7 hegemony 86, 96, 99, 109 Helbing, D 40 Heraclitus 38, 41n1 Herero genocide 66 Hett, BC 27n2 Heyer, Heather 43, 46 higher education see universities Holland, EW 25 Holocaust 66 homosexuality see LGBTQ Hong Kong 98 hospitality 95, 97, 102 human rights 58, 93, 95–96, 105 humanism 10, 22–24, 26, 35 Hungary 19, 73, 74, 77n15 Hunt, Paul 57 Identitarian Movement, Austria 55 identitarianism 1, 7, 52, 53, 54–55, 59; white 44 identity 36, 86; national 19; politics 36, 55 Identity Evropa 43, 44 ideology 1, 4, 7–9, 21–23, 26, 32, 33, 38, 39, 46, 54, 57, 84, 85, 89
Ikenberry, GJ 94, 99, 103 Illing, Sean 13 immigration 19, 27, 54, 65, 97; anti19, 65, 74, 81, 92, 94 imperialism 3, 4, 97, 107 individualism 4, 7, 32 Indonesia 74 inequality 5, 110; economic 80–81 institutions 26, 32, 89, 101; liberal 20–21; world 1, 7, 89, 110 interconnectivity 87, 90, 110 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty 97 Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) 64 international: education 85, 87, 92–103; law 72; relations 96 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 79–80, 110 International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) 22 internationalism 101–102; and foreign policy 97–100, 98; liberal 1, 7, 20, 75, 85, 89, 92–99, 98, 103, 110; socialist 90 Internet 1, 35, 53, 55, 87; darknet 19, 53; live-streaming video 53, 54, 61n9; see also social media interventionism 98; state intervention 81, 101 IPA (International Psychoanalytic Association) 22 Iran 20, 89–90 Iraq 20, 40, 56, 57, 64, 73 Islam 39, 54, 57; Islamic fundamentalism 27, 39, 56; Qur’an 38; Islamic terrorism 38, 39, 89; Islamophobia 49–50, 58; see also Muslims isolationism 81, 103; social isolation 4 Italy 4, 7, 19, 33, 98; fascism 32–35; futurism 33–35 Jackson, Andrew 66 Japan 66 Jews 19, 22, 43, 44, 59, 67; antiSemitism 9, 44; Holocaust 66 jihad 38, 56 Johnson, Boris 1, 7 Jordan 73, 76 Juncker, Jean-Claude 74 justice 5, 93, 97, 98, 108
Index Kalhat, J 106 Kant, I 95–96, 99 Karlin, M 35 Kellner, D 14 Kendall, Eric 99 Kessler, Jason 43 Khan, Sadiq 58 King, V 101–102 Klossowski, Pierre 10 Knight, J 102 Krauss, K 105 Ku Klux Klan 43 Kurtz, Sebastian 55 Lane, David 46 language 58, 105–107; philosophy of 106–108 Latin America 1, 7, 19, 103 Le Pen, Marie 81 leadership 48–49, 58; cults 19 Lebanon 73, 76 Lee, Robert E 43 Lee Kuan Yew 100 Left, the 8, 10, 36, 81, 108–109 Lennard, Natasha 26 Levinas, Emmanuel 40, 41n9 LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) 1, 19, 21 liberalism 7, 20, 21, 35, 36, 95, 102; anti-liberalism 81; liberal citizenship 20; liberal democracy 4, 7, 18, 55, 93, 100, 103, 109; liberal egalitarianism 105, 108–110; failure of 105–111; liberal institutions 20–21; liberal internationalism 1, 7, 20, 75, 85, 89, 92–99, 98, 103, 110; liberal modernity 99–100, 102; parliamentary 31; political 93; social 108; liberal theory 101 Libya 19 linguistic turn 106 Linwood mosque attacks, New Zealand 48–60 Lipton, David 79 literary fundamentalism 8–9 live-streaming video 53, 54, 61n9 Locke, John 95 Loungani, Prakash 80 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 38 Macedonia 73 Malaysia 74
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manifestos 33, 39, 44, 52–53, 54 Manjoo, F 53 Maori 57 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 33–34, 36n1 market, the 101, 108, 110 Marling, William 86 Marshall, James 14 Marx, Karl 25, 102 Marxism 20, 31, 35, 36, 109; Cultural Marxism 44, 52 masculinity and masculism 19, 36 Masjid Al Noor mosque attack, New Zealand 48–60 masochism 27 May, Theresa 58 McGregor, S 96 McMaster, HR 46 media 32, 35; digital 32; see also social media men, white 4, 32 Merkel, Angela 75–76 Mexico-US migration 74 microfascism 26–27 Middle East 4, 19, 64, 73, 74; see also specifc countries migration 4, 20, 73, 74, 90; see also immigration military: militarism 36; militias 43; spending 101 Mill, John Stuart 95 Milne, Sayyad Ahmad 50 minorities 1, 4, 19, 44, 66, 74, 81, 93 modernism 8, 34; aesthetic 34–35 modernity 8, 14, 33; liberal 99–100, 102; modernization 34; postmodernity 14 Molyneaux, Stefan 59 monuments/statues 3, 4, 43 Moore, GE 107 morality 8, 27, 32, 33, 98; moral degeneracy 32; moral hygiene 33 Morocco 38 Mosley, Oswald 55 movements, social 2, 4, 110 multiculturalism 57 multilateralism 99 music 67 Muslims 66, 81; Muslim Brotherhood 56; terrorist attacks on 48–60; see also Islam Mussolini, Benito 7, 10, 31–34, 36, 36n1, 55
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Index
Mustafa family 50 Myanmar 74 myth 33; national renewal 31, 55 Nama genocide 66 nation state see state, the National Policy Institute 43, 44 nationalism 19, 31–36, 99; ethnic 26; new 88, 89, 93; national populism 65, 89, 94, 102, 103; ultranationalism 7, 35, 36; white 1, 7, 13, 20, 26, 43, 44, 46, 52, 54–56 Native Americans 66 Nazis/Nazism 4, 9–10, 14, 22–23; concentration camps 66–68; neo- 43, 44, 81 Neiwert, David 35 neo-Confederates 43 neoconservatism 56 neofascism 19–21, 26, 27 neoliberalism 1, 7, 21, 24–26, 85, 93, 101, 103, 108–110; neoliberal globalism 85, 86; neoliberal globalization 79–82, 82n3 neo-Nazis/Nazism 43, 44, 81 Netherlands 81 network effect 55 new nationalism 84–91, 93 New York Times, The 73 New Zealand 4, 48–60 Nietzsche, Friedrich 7, 8–15, 25, 27; Nietzsche Archive 9–10, 14; Nietzscheanism 10, 14 Nigeria 40 non-fascism 24–27 no-platforming/de-platforming 59 North Africa 19, 73 North Korea 67, 89–90 North Ossetia, Beslan school siege 38, 56 Norway, Utøya massacre 35, 44, 56 oil 65 Omar, Tariq Rashid 50 one-party states 7, 19, 27 Open Skies Treaty 97 oppression 11, 20, 27 Ordinary Language Movement 106–107 Ostry, Jonathan D 80 othering 58 Oxford, UK 3, 106
Pakistan 38, 56, 64 Palestinians 64 Palmerston, Henry John Temple, third Viscount 97–98 Papageorgiou, E 35 patriarchy 21, 22, 81 patriotism 84–91 peace 36, 95–99, 98, 101, 102; education 96 peaceful protests 2, 4, 5 Peçanha, Sergio 74 pedagogy: of freedom 12; Pedagogy for the Unforeseen 40; problem 10–12; public 35 people smuggling 73 performance crime 53, 61n9 Peshawar school massacre 28, 56 Peters, RS 105, 109 Petersen, Jordan 13–14 philosophy 5, 7, 9, 14, 15, 95–96; of education 12, 26, 46, 92, 96, 105, 107, 109, 110; of language 106–108; political 10–11, 108–110; of radical contingency 40 Piketty, Thomas 81 Pinker, Steven 13 poetry 67 Poland 19 police militarization 5, 7 political: asylum 65, 70–77; correctness 44, 58; philosophy 10–11, 108–110; theory 19, 36, 95, 109; violence 7–8 Popper, Karl 59 populism 1, 7, 8, 19, 26, 35, 65; authoritarian 79–82, 92–93; national 65, 89, 94, 102, 103; right-wing 81, 94 Portugal 98 postcolonialism/postcoloniality 86 postmodernity 14 post-structuralism 10, 14 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) 44, 51 Pound, Ezra 36n1 power 27, 32, 34, 85, 99, 100–101; bio-power 24–25; powerlessness 22; state 10, 19 privatization 81, 85, 102 propaganda 32, 53–55 protectionism 65, 81, 99 protests: anti-racism 2; far-right 1; peaceful 2, 4, 5
Index proto-fascism 26 Proud Boys (far-right group) 4–5 psychology 9, 12, 23, 26, 27; of fascism 20–22 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 44, 51 Public Choice Theory 108 public education 5, 35, 82 public good 101 Quakers 99 Quine, W 105–106 Qur’an 38 Qutb, Sayyid 56 race 9–10, 31 racial superiority see white supremacism racism 1, 4, 5, 19, 20, 26, 36, 53, 56–59, 92, 102–103, 110; racial hierarchy 33; racial violence 1, 4 ‘Radicalisation Awareness Network’ (RAN EDU), European Commission (EC) 2 Rashid, Mohammed bin 58 Rassmussen, E 35 rationalism 4, 7, 8 Rawls, John 59, 96, 108–109 Reagan, Ronald 108 recruitment 4, 53, 54 refugees 4, 19, 27, 50, 64; camps 64–68, 72; crisis 70–77; law 72; concept of refuge 70–71 Reich, Wilhelm 18, 20–22, 26–27 Reid, J 20, 27 religion 8, 19, 99; extremism 38–40, 56; fundamentalism 39; schools 82 repression 21, 35 republicanism 96 Republicans 74 Revese, R 52 Rhodes statue 3, 4 Riemen, R 27n2, 35 Right, the 8, 10; alt-right 10, 12–14, 20, 43, 46, 52–54, 59, 81 rights 36, 81, 93, 95, 101, 110; to asylum 70–77, 97; citizenship 20; human rights 58, 93, 95–96, 105 Riley, D 27n2 Rohingya Muslims 74 Roma people 19 Roof, Dylan 1 Rorty, Richard 106–108
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Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung 24 Rosenberg, Alfred 10 rule of law 93, 96, 97 Russia 19, 21, 38, 43, 46, 56, 90, 97, 103 Russolo, Luigi 34 Ryle, Gilbert 106 sadism/sadomasochism 27 Said, Edward 57, 86 Sarkin, Jeremy 66 Scheffer, I 105 Schmitt, C 32 schools: choice 82; far-right extremism in 1–2; funding 82; massacres 28, 38–40, 51, 56; religious and Charter 82 Schwarz, G 35 security 96, 97, 99 segregation 26 self-determination 98, 99 self-interest 89, 90 Sellner, Martin 55 Serbia 73, 77n15 Sessions, Jeff 46 Severini, Gino 34 sexuality 19, 21–22, 27 Shamil, Abu 38 Shanks, David 53 Shar’iah 38–39 slavery 3–4, 26, 98 Smeyers, Paul 14 Smith, Adam 95 Snyder, T 35 social justice 5, 93 social media 1, 4, 12, 13, 27, 35, 36, 50, 53–55, 88; see also Facebook; Twitter; YouTube socialism 32, 90; socialist internationalism 90 South East Asia 74 Southern, Lauren 59 sovereignty 19, 89 space-time 40 Spain 19, 98 Spencer, Richard 12–13, 43, 44 spirituality 32, 36 St. John’s Episcopal Church, Washington DC 2–3 Stan, Adele M 26 Stanley, Jason 26 state, the 7–8, 19, 31, 32, 36, 89, 91, 95, 100, 102, 103; fscal austerity 4,
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Index
5, 80–81, 85; interventions 81, 101; nation in crisis concept 31, 55; power 10, 19; privatization 81, 85, 102; theory 7, 10; welfare 108–110 stateless persons 64, 68, 72 states, one-party 7, 19, 27 statues/monuments 3, 4, 43 Steger, Manfred 84–86 stereotyping 57–58 Strache, Heinz-Christian 55, 81 Strawson, PF 106 students 110; debt 82; see also children; young people subjectivism 4, 7 submission and subordination 36 Sudan 64 suicide 51 sustainability, ecological 91 Suvin, DR 20 Syria 19, 20, 40, 50, 57, 64, 68, 73–76, 90 ‘Take-Back Lee Park’ rally 43 Taliban 40, 90 ‘Taliban Movement of Pakistan’ (Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan) 38, 56 Tankersley, Jim 79 tax rates, low corporate 85 teachers and teaching 35, 110; accountability 82; teachers as cultural physicians 12, 14–15 technology 33, 88, 90; Big Tech 110 Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (‘Taliban Movement of Pakistan’) 38, 56 Tell MAMA 58 territoriality 19, 26 terrorism 1, 4, 19, 32, 38–40, 46, 48–60, 64–65 Thatcher, Margaret 108, 109 theofascism 26 Thompson, Derek 45 Thrush, G 46 tolerance 48, 52, 58–60 totalitarianism 7, 19, 23, 27, 32, 93 trade 90–91, 102; free trade 85, 95, 98, 99 trauma 48–60 travel bans 81, 92 Trump, Donald 1, 2–3, 4, 7, 26, 35, 36, 45–46, 52, 56, 65, 79–82, 92, 97, 100, 102–103; new nationalism 84–91, 93
Turkey 53, 73, 76 Twitter 35, 36, 54 Übermensch 10 Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang 66 UK see United Kingdom Ukraine 74 ultranationalism 7, 35, 36 ‘Unite the Right’ rally, Charlottesville 43–46, 52 United Arab Emirates (UAE) 58 United Kingdom (UK) 1, 3–4, 7, 55, 58, 65, 73, 81, 87, 95, 97–98, 109; Brexit 1, 7, 35, 52, 79–80, 82n3 United Nations (UN) 89–90, 95, 96, 110; Committee for Refugees and Immigrants 64; Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) 71–72; Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1967) 71; UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 64, 71–72 United States of America (US) 1, 2–3, 4, 7, 13–14, 19, 20, 22, 26, 35, 43–46, 53, 54, 57, 66, 74, 81, 87, 92, 93, 99–101, 103, 105, 110; American Civil War 96, 98; Department of Education 82; foreign policy 97–98, 98; Mexico-US migration 74; see also Trump, Donald universalism 110–111 universities 4, 21, 26, 81; academia 4; academic freedom 21 Ur-Fascism 11–12 US see United States of America Utøya massacre, Workers’ Youth League camp, Norway 35, 44, 56 Van Der Leun, J 74–75 Venezuela 90 violence 1, 5, 19, 21, 27, 31–36, 45, 46, 52, 97, 101; political 7–8; racial 1, 4 virility 34 vitalism 4, 7 war 65, 68, 96, 101; American Civil War 96, 98; Boer War 65, 66; Crimean War 98; Gulf War 56; war crime 97 welfare state 108–110
Index West, the 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 18, 20, 26, 27, 31–32, 35, 39, 50, 64–68, 86, 94, 97, 99, 101, 103, 105, 110 ‘white genocide’/replacement theory 53, 54, 110 white identitarianism 44 white men 4, 32 white nationalism 1, 7, 13, 20, 26, 43, 44, 46, 52, 54–56 white separatism 54 white supremacism 1, 2, 4, 9, 19, 27, 35, 43–46, 48–60, 81, 92, 103, 110 whiteness 19, 46 ‘Why is My Curriculum White?’ movement 4 Wilders, Geert 35, 81 Wilson, Woodrow 98–99
Wisdom, John 106 Wittgenstein, L 26, 105–107 women 1, 19, 27, 33, 40, 81 Wood, Graeme 13 working class 21, 79 xenophobia 1, 19, 36, 81 Xi Jinping 87 York, ED 25 young people 2, 4, 5, 20, 31–36, 40, 94, 110; see also children Yousafzai, Malala 38 youthfulness 36 YouTube 53–54, 61n9 Zetter, Roger 72–73
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