At the beginning of last week the American commentator Steve Bannon, who used to work in the Trump administration, was interviewed by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sarah Ferguson for ‘4 Corners’, a long-form current affairs program the station runs every Monday night in prime time. The interview was widely discussed on social media, where many people expressed the view that Bannon should not have been given the platform on the national broadcaster’s show to promulgate unattractive and potentially dangerous ideas, especially those that relate to questions of race.
For my part, the interview was very valuable because I had never read anything that Bannon had written before. Apparently he writes for a far-right website called ‘Breitbart’. Views on Twitter were in the main very vocal in expressing sentiments that characterised the website and its authors as Nazis, broadly speaking. I have no way of knowing because I am not inclined to read what they publish but the term “Nazi” often gets thrown around by people who should know better for rhetorical purposes. It is a catch-all for the political left in their verbal sallies in the public sphere as they try to denigrate the opposing team. In some cases there are real similarities between policies that the German National Socialists deployed during the 1930s and 1940s when they were in power in that country and those of politicians active today in the US or Australia, but often the comparisons made just tells you more about the views of the speaker than the actions of the target.
One case in point should serve to illustrate what I mean. The refugee policies of the two major political parties in Australia are often attacked as fascistic because they entail the indefinite detention of innocent people in unhealthy camps on Pacific islands. There is no doubt that indefinite detention is contrary to legal precedents that are long-established in countries like Australia but the solution to the problem is less obvious. Mandatory detention was started by the Australian Labor Party in 1992 and John Howard, a Coalition prime minister, set up camps on Pacific islands in 2001. Howard was defeated in the general election held in 2007 and the winner in that contest, Kevin Rudd, dismantled the offshore camp system. The boats started arriving again in 2009 and Julia Gillard (who had become prime minister by this time) reopened the offshore camps in 2012. And that’s where we currently are. This year, Bill Shorten, the Opposition leader, announced that, if elected at the federal election due sometime in early 2019, the ALP would keep the offshore camps open. The only party that would bring the refugees in the camps to the mainland to be resettled is the Australian Greens.
In the US, anxieties that are similar to Australians’ about irregular refugee boats arrivals animate the political debate, especially when it focuses on migrants coming from Central and South America. I don’t think that in either case you could characterise the opinions of the mainstream as fascistic except inasmuch as a fascists like things to occur in an orderly fashion. The disorderly way that boats arriving from Indonesia carry refugees originating in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is the problem, not the feelings of average Australians. We have been having these debates for over 25 years now. The jury has well and truly given its considered opinion on this particular question.
Now Bannon also has things to say about Muslims, although I didn’t catch anything like this expressed during the ‘4 Corners’ interview. He may have been behind the president’s decision to prevent people from some countries in the world travelling to the United States, I can’t know based on current information. But I do think that this kind of discrimination has no place in Australia. I can’t speak for Americans, they may feel that Muslims are not welcome. It’s up to them to decide. But Australia is a great multicultural country and while I personally don’t like monotheistic religions on principle, I think that everybody should be free to worship whatever deity it pleases them to worship, without check or brake, as long as they don’t use ideas stemming from the foundational texts of their religions to curtail my own freedoms.
As to the things that Bannon said in the interview, I am inclined to disagree with most of them. His ideas about economics are ludicrous. His dislike of China on the basis of its economic policies (rather than on the basis of its political settlement, which should be anathema to anyone who believes in the inherent virtue of the United States of America) is idiotic. And I was a bit curious why Bannon didn’t take issue with Bill Clinton, who in 2000 gave China “most-favored nation” trading status, thus opening the way for the World Trade Organisation to invite China into its orbit, leading to China’s emergence as the world’s second-largest economy. If Bannon was going to be logical then this would have to have been a point the would protest against.
But Bannon is not logical. He’s a magician who uses shiny objects that he holds in his hands to distract the audience from where the real action is taking place. One thing he said that really puzzled me was to compare the Belt-and-Road initiative to the East India Company. It was curious to say the least, based as it was on common misunderstandings (held equally in China and in the west) about this defunct corporation that helped to usher in the era of global trade that all countries in the world now benefit from.
The EIC started under letters patent in the days of Queen Elizabeth I and conducted trade with India (mainly) for almost 400 years. During this time, geopolitical realities resulted in the mercantile interest in London moving to initiate political control over parts of the subcontinent in order to protect its investments, and these changes in practice occurred with the participation of Parliament. But Queen Victoria wasn’t crowned empress of India until 1876 (two years after the EIC was dissolved), although the first governor-general of India was appointed in 1773. In China, two wars were fought in the mid-19th century aimed at opening up the country to trade with Europe, and naturally the EIC benefited from the victories that naturally resulted from these conflicts.
But Bannon, like many people who participate in the public sphere (notably some of his detractors using Twitter), doesn’t care either for the truth or for reason, and he deploys his partially-comprehended cognates with the sort of wild and malicious intent that others use when they call Peter Dutton a Nazi. What Bannon cares about is causing pain to the Chinese by using the trope of the EIC, which of course they also use in their public sphere to stoke up resentment against the west that is felt by a large part of the population due to the two humiliating military defeats just mentioned, in an ahistorical and illogical fashion. But it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong because Americans who vote Republican are generally so ignorant that they won’t see the trick.
The problem remains whether Bannon was given a reputable platform in order to promulgate unattractive ideas. While it is true that media scrutiny has this dual function (that it both informs about and conveys cachet to its subjects) I think that in this case the interview was valuable because there is the possibility that Bannon will have a run for president himself at some point in the future. Australians are obliged to understand people like Steve Bannon and so the coverage he received was, in my view, justified.
For my part, the interview was very valuable because I had never read anything that Bannon had written before. Apparently he writes for a far-right website called ‘Breitbart’. Views on Twitter were in the main very vocal in expressing sentiments that characterised the website and its authors as Nazis, broadly speaking. I have no way of knowing because I am not inclined to read what they publish but the term “Nazi” often gets thrown around by people who should know better for rhetorical purposes. It is a catch-all for the political left in their verbal sallies in the public sphere as they try to denigrate the opposing team. In some cases there are real similarities between policies that the German National Socialists deployed during the 1930s and 1940s when they were in power in that country and those of politicians active today in the US or Australia, but often the comparisons made just tells you more about the views of the speaker than the actions of the target.
One case in point should serve to illustrate what I mean. The refugee policies of the two major political parties in Australia are often attacked as fascistic because they entail the indefinite detention of innocent people in unhealthy camps on Pacific islands. There is no doubt that indefinite detention is contrary to legal precedents that are long-established in countries like Australia but the solution to the problem is less obvious. Mandatory detention was started by the Australian Labor Party in 1992 and John Howard, a Coalition prime minister, set up camps on Pacific islands in 2001. Howard was defeated in the general election held in 2007 and the winner in that contest, Kevin Rudd, dismantled the offshore camp system. The boats started arriving again in 2009 and Julia Gillard (who had become prime minister by this time) reopened the offshore camps in 2012. And that’s where we currently are. This year, Bill Shorten, the Opposition leader, announced that, if elected at the federal election due sometime in early 2019, the ALP would keep the offshore camps open. The only party that would bring the refugees in the camps to the mainland to be resettled is the Australian Greens.
In the US, anxieties that are similar to Australians’ about irregular refugee boats arrivals animate the political debate, especially when it focuses on migrants coming from Central and South America. I don’t think that in either case you could characterise the opinions of the mainstream as fascistic except inasmuch as a fascists like things to occur in an orderly fashion. The disorderly way that boats arriving from Indonesia carry refugees originating in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq is the problem, not the feelings of average Australians. We have been having these debates for over 25 years now. The jury has well and truly given its considered opinion on this particular question.
Now Bannon also has things to say about Muslims, although I didn’t catch anything like this expressed during the ‘4 Corners’ interview. He may have been behind the president’s decision to prevent people from some countries in the world travelling to the United States, I can’t know based on current information. But I do think that this kind of discrimination has no place in Australia. I can’t speak for Americans, they may feel that Muslims are not welcome. It’s up to them to decide. But Australia is a great multicultural country and while I personally don’t like monotheistic religions on principle, I think that everybody should be free to worship whatever deity it pleases them to worship, without check or brake, as long as they don’t use ideas stemming from the foundational texts of their religions to curtail my own freedoms.
As to the things that Bannon said in the interview, I am inclined to disagree with most of them. His ideas about economics are ludicrous. His dislike of China on the basis of its economic policies (rather than on the basis of its political settlement, which should be anathema to anyone who believes in the inherent virtue of the United States of America) is idiotic. And I was a bit curious why Bannon didn’t take issue with Bill Clinton, who in 2000 gave China “most-favored nation” trading status, thus opening the way for the World Trade Organisation to invite China into its orbit, leading to China’s emergence as the world’s second-largest economy. If Bannon was going to be logical then this would have to have been a point the would protest against.
But Bannon is not logical. He’s a magician who uses shiny objects that he holds in his hands to distract the audience from where the real action is taking place. One thing he said that really puzzled me was to compare the Belt-and-Road initiative to the East India Company. It was curious to say the least, based as it was on common misunderstandings (held equally in China and in the west) about this defunct corporation that helped to usher in the era of global trade that all countries in the world now benefit from.
The EIC started under letters patent in the days of Queen Elizabeth I and conducted trade with India (mainly) for almost 400 years. During this time, geopolitical realities resulted in the mercantile interest in London moving to initiate political control over parts of the subcontinent in order to protect its investments, and these changes in practice occurred with the participation of Parliament. But Queen Victoria wasn’t crowned empress of India until 1876 (two years after the EIC was dissolved), although the first governor-general of India was appointed in 1773. In China, two wars were fought in the mid-19th century aimed at opening up the country to trade with Europe, and naturally the EIC benefited from the victories that naturally resulted from these conflicts.
But Bannon, like many people who participate in the public sphere (notably some of his detractors using Twitter), doesn’t care either for the truth or for reason, and he deploys his partially-comprehended cognates with the sort of wild and malicious intent that others use when they call Peter Dutton a Nazi. What Bannon cares about is causing pain to the Chinese by using the trope of the EIC, which of course they also use in their public sphere to stoke up resentment against the west that is felt by a large part of the population due to the two humiliating military defeats just mentioned, in an ahistorical and illogical fashion. But it doesn’t matter if he’s wrong because Americans who vote Republican are generally so ignorant that they won’t see the trick.
The problem remains whether Bannon was given a reputable platform in order to promulgate unattractive ideas. While it is true that media scrutiny has this dual function (that it both informs about and conveys cachet to its subjects) I think that in this case the interview was valuable because there is the possibility that Bannon will have a run for president himself at some point in the future. Australians are obliged to understand people like Steve Bannon and so the coverage he received was, in my view, justified.
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