If the last few days have shown us anything, it is that we don’t understand the role violence plays in our society.
On Saturday a small group of protesters took to the streets of Sydney as part of global rage over a film produced in the United States which denigrates Islam and the prophet Mohammed. Some parts of this protest turned violent, attacking police officers and other members of the community.
The response has been predictable. NSW Barry O’Farrell said “What we saw yesterday was the unacceptable face of multiculturalism.’’ Prime Minister Julia Gillard was quoted as saying ‘‘To anybody who wants to replicate that behaviour today, I just want to say very strongly that this kind of conduct has no place on the streets of our country.’’ Calls for moderate Muslim leaders to condemn the violence have been fierce, whilst right-wing shock jocks have predictably used this as an opportunity to continue a crusade against Muslim people in Australia, with some calling for an end to multiculturalism and for Australia to ‘give intolerance a go’.
What very few people have done however have been to truly think about the role violence plays in our society, and ask the question, what has lead people to such acts? In fact, this is a common tendency of our discussion around Islamic Terrorism and violence – we see it as an inherent evil, but don’t question why it happens and our role in it.
In his book ‘Violence,’ philosopher Slavok Žižek argues that our society tends to focus on what he calls ‘subjective violence’ – acts of assault, murder, terror and war. In doing so, we ignore two other forms of violence in our society, ‘symbolic violence embodied in language and its forms,’ and systematic violence, which he states are the “often catastrophic consequences of the functioning of our economic and political systems.” These forms of violence are what are described as ‘structural violence,’ or the violence embedded in our society through the way it operates.
We can see Žižek’s theory in play when we discuss modern protest movements. We are very quick to condemn violence when it involves at the Seattle World Trade Organisation ‘riots,’ the riots in London or the Tent Embassy protest on Australia Day, without commenting on the ongoing systematic violence conducted by the World Trade Organisation, the British economy, or the 200 year oppression of Aboriginal people. We criticise queer protestors when they engage in violent acts, whilst ignoring the symbolic violence embedded in the homophobic language that still dominates our society today.
Let me explain a little bit more that this means looking at the reaction to the protests recently.
Whilst we are quick to condemn the ‘subjective violence’ of the protest on the day, we continue to ignore the systematic and symbolic violence the Islamic Community in Australia faces every day.
Islamic people in Australia face systematic violence in every aspect of their daily lives, whether it having lived through centuries of their homelands being colonised and (often secretly) bombed and invaded, being assumed to be violent and/or potential terrorists everywhere they go, or having their religion continuously called inherently violent and a cancer on our society.
For those living in Australia, this is not the overt, media worthy sort of violence that you see in a protest, but rather the covert, hard-to-film sort of violence. It is the violence of eliminating people’s basic rights, the violence of inflicting people to structural discrimination every day, the violence of denigrating the very things people believe in, the violence of decades of colonisation, invasion and war, and then wondering why people get angry. It is the exact kind of systematic violence that Žižek describes.
At the same time, Australia’s Muslim population continues to suffer symbolic violence. At the most basic level, this occurs through the racism these people face in the Australian community, whether it is overt racist statements or ongoing comments about how all Muslims are terrorists, or people who don’t share any basic human values with us.
At the political level, our elected leaders engage in symbolic violence on an almost daily basis. One only needs to look at Australia’s refugee discussion and the suspicion created around those arriving from the Middle East to see examples of this.
Symbolic and systematic violence are prevalent throughout our society. Indigenous and queer people, women and members of the lower class, migrants and those from the third world all experience this kind of violence every day. It is the kind of violence that is embedded in the very way our economy and society works, and it is the sort of violence we should be fighting against every day.
We should condemn violence in our society. But when we do, we need to understand that no matter how much we focus on subjective violence, we will have achieved very little until we tackle the structural violence our communities face every day.