By now I’m sure everyone is aware that Senator Fraser Anning is a racist.
By now I’m sure everyone is aware that Senator Fraser Anning is a racist.
He proudly marches side by side with neo-nazis.
He blamed the victims of the Christchurch massacre for getting murdered.
And he has now been censured by the senate, which was thoroughly endorsed by Liberal, Labor and independents alike. Cory Bernardi and One Nation abstained, for obvious reasons.
Fraser Anning is a proponent of the White Genocide Conspiracy Theory.
— Senator Fraser Anning (@fraser_anning) May 18, 2018
This is the belief that the white race is being destroyed by any number of factors. Since its inception these factors have included immigration, multiculturalism, abortion, homosexuality, fertility rates, racial integration, ‘mixed breeding’ and government endorsed land confiscations.
The theory posits that the White Race may one day disappear altogether from the above factors, or at the very least that white people may one day become a minority in what they often fancifully refer to as ‘white countries’, like South Africa, Australia, or America unless dot dot dot.
The proposed strategies for preventing white genocide range from an end to immigration, mass deportation, ethnic cleansing, sterilisation, ending mixed marriages or, unironically, the outright genocide of other races who are deemed to pose a threat to the superiority and domination of white people.
Who is to blame in this theory varies according to belief, and to what various white supremacists think they can get away with in their respective countries. As such, the source of blame ranges from Judaism, Hollywood, feminism, immigrants, Islam, political correctness, the ‘left’, and any number of other convenient scapegoats.
While Anning is fairly straight forward with his support of the White Genocide Conspiracy Theory, in that he has actually used the phrase on various occasions, it is not hard to see more mainstream support for elements within it. Opposition to non-white immigration (by any other name), fear campaigns about Australia losing its ‘way of life’ or the alleged decline in support for ‘Western civilisation’, or Peter Dutton’s fervent desire to save white South African farmers.
These are all similar arguments to those put forward by proponents of White Genocide, although seemingly more palatable in their choose of wording, or the adamant refusal that this represents any form of racism. (Scott Morrison has heaps on Muslim mates, according to Scott Morrison… Maybe not boatloads of them, sure, but heaps nonetheless).
In Australia, overt white supremacists like Fraser Anning cop some backlash for their aggressive white genocide rhetoric, but as long as support for this theory is couched in somewhat more palatable, but still pretty bloody racist, terms you’ll generally be fine. You might even get yourself elected, a weekly column with the Australian or the Herald Sun, or at the very least a regular appearance on Sky News ‘after dark’.
And despite there being no evidence of white genocide either by design, by evolution or by accident, there is unmistakably a large number of white Australians, and some non-white Australians, who sincerely feel that white people are under attack, and that the decline of Western civilisation as a result of immigration and multiculturalism is real.
Many in our media and political landscape are all too often either happy to fuel this fear, and on the other side too few are willing to confront it head on, although this has been changing somewhat in recent years.
A good starting point for combating a conspiracy theory is to look at where it comes from, and how it operates though.
So let’s take a closer look at the White genocide Conspiracy Theory.
Many in our media and political landscape are all too often either happy to fuel this fear, and on the other side too few are willing to confront it head on, although this has been changing somewhat in recent years.
Even if you’ve been lucky enough to never hear of it before, you’ve undoubtedly encountered elements of it if you’ve grown up in Australia.
If you read The Great Gatsby in high school, for example.
In Chapter One of the F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 classic, Buchanan is seen reading a book called ‘The Rise of the Coloured Empires’ and remarks “The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
Just for the record, it’s not scientific stuff, and it hasn’t been proved.
If your schooling was anything like mine in the late 1990s, discussion on this part of the book probably didn’t lead to any fruitful anti-racism conversations.
The idea of white genocide obviously predates this though, stemming largely from white eugenicists who feared that non-white races, being the global majority, would eventually overtake and eliminate white ones. This was a convenient fear to help justify the British invasions, colonisations and various forms of genocide committed by the Empire.
This theory was taken seriously in various parts of the self-proclaimed Western world, be it in Britain, Australia, Rhodesia (part of Zimbabwe), South Africa, America, or in Germany.
It’s links to white supremacy throughout the past few centuries are as undeniable as its ongoing influence in Western discourse about race relations, diversity, multiculturalism and immigration. It’s influence can be seen in Australia treatment of Indigenous people (historic and ongoing), the White Australia Policy, and our current immigration policies and our treatment of refugees, as well as within anti-Muslim, anti-Asian, or anti-African discourse.
It can be seen in Nazi Germany, Apartheid South Africa, Jim Crowe laws in America… basically wherever there is white people being racist anywhere over the past few centuries, which is wherever there are large enough numbers of white people to get away with being racist), you can see elements if eugenics, Social Darwinism, and the fear of White Genocide.
The current iteration of white genocide theory that we are witnessing today obviously builds upon this racism of yesteryear, but has its direct links tied to the more recognisable white supremacist movements of America, beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the rise of the alt-right.
Its purpose is very explicitly to scare white people, and to use this fear to re-establish and increase popular support for white nationalism as a social norm. At the other extreme it is used as a call to violence, which has resulted in various mass shootings and other terrorist attacks.
This is why the links between popular right wing rhetoric in politics and media and acts of violence are so unmistakable. The conservative right may find violent acts to be totally reprehensible, but they are exploiting the same fear within the same target demographic; disenfranchised and scared white people. And while they may hope to just create enough fear to make people not vote for Labour, you don’t get to pour fuel on a fire and then claim innocence when the fire gets too high.
I feel like conservative media denying their role in inciting violent extremism is like saying “Hey, we poured all of our fuel on the far right side of the raging dumpster fire, not on the extremely far right side!” pic.twitter.com/75LE9Ec6m0
The neo-nazis, KKK members and other white supremacists who have been promoting the White Genocide conspiracy theory for the past few decades may have originally only had their sights set on further inciting hatred and paranoia in their brethren, it quickly escalated into a recruitment strategy to move disenfranchised white people into white supremacy, and from their it found favour with other more mainstream conservative commentators.
Australia has already shown the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to not let him have too big a gun to begin with. Similarly, the best way to stop white privilege is to not let anyone have too much of it in the first place.
The overlap between traditional covert racist dog whistling and overt racist propaganda has become almost indistinguishable in recent years. This is how the Liberal party were tricked into voting for a white supremacist slogan in the Senate, and is why many of those who support Fraser Anning’s censure are the same ones who lined up in a row to shake hands or give him a hug after his maiden speech where he lamented the loss of the White Australia Policy and called for an end to Muslim immigration.
Where there once appeared to be a significant ideological gap between overt white supremacists and those who were merely proponents of Western values, it is now hard to distinguish between them even on a good day.
White supremacists can be academics, too. Eloquence and elaborate sentences don’t make white supremacy less violent. Just saying.
Truth be told, many of us have known about the direct links between them for a long time, but many others are starting to pay attention now too.
Whether it is former Grand Wizard of the KKK David Duke saying “It’s OK to be white”, or Pauline Hanson saying “It’s Ok to be white” or the entire Liberal party voting in favour of “It’s Ok to be white.”
Even those who go to America begging for money to help repeal Australia’s gun laws probably aren’t too stoked about the idea of large numbers of Aboriginal people, or Muslims, or African Australians walking around packing heat.
It’s almost as though the laws of Australia were never intended to benefit such people…
Even the idea of telling white people to use their white privilege for good instead of for evil, that’s kinda like saying the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Australia has already shown the best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to not let him have too big a gun to begin with. Similarly, the best way to stop white privilege is to not let anyone have too much of it in the first place.
So while Australia shrieks its fury at the resurgence of overt white supremacy and dreams of a return to the glorious days of covert white supremacy, maybe it’s time we considered dismantling white supremacy altogether.
A Treaty would be a good start.
Maybe some teeth in the anti-discrimination laws, like even just getting rid of the bit that says only people directly affected by discrimination can make a complaint, meaning that a whistle blower can’t make a complaint of discrimination regardless of how much proof they have, only someone directly affected by the discrimination can… that would be a good start.
Or how about we add those criminal sanctions to the RDA that Howard and the Liberals blocked twenty odd years ago? At the moment racial vilification under the act isn’t illegal, it’s just ‘unlawful’.
Or let’s look at the fact that Native Title isn’t Land Rights.
Hell, maybe we even think about not locking up innocent people for seeking asylum, since it’s not a crime to do so… if that’s not going too far for our current white supremacist sensibilities.
Or at the very least, let’s stop pretending that Fraser Anning is an anomaly and just accept that he is instead an inevitability.
And unless we start to take meaningful steps to educate against white supremacy, legislate against racial discrimination and racial vilification, ensure social, cultural, political and economic opportunities for Indigenous people, and start treating refugees as human beings, there are going to be a lot more Fraser Annings in our future.
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