Race & Class

In recent years, an increasingly influential intellectual consensus on both sides of the Atlantic has presented Europe as a doomed and decadent continent that is being transformed into an Islamic colony called ‘Eurabia’. The term was originally coined by the British-Swiss historian Bat Ye’or to describe what she identified as a secret project between European politicians and the Arab world for the ‘Islamicisation’ of Europe. What began as an outlandish conspiracy theory has become a dangerous Islamophobic fantasy that has moved ever closer towards mainstream respectability, as conservative historians and newspaper columnists, right-wing Zionists and European neofascists find common cause in the threat to ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilisation from Muslim immigrants with supposedly incompatible cultural values.

The exposure of torture and sadistic treatment of prisoners in US-run prisons in Iraq and elsewhere in the ‘theatre’ of the war on terror has shed light on the nature of military imprisonment today. However, the actions and policies of military prison guards reflect accepted civilian prison norms. Excessive force, civil disability and the loss of internationally guaranteed rights, and indefinite detention are central means by which the wars on both terror and crime (civilian mass imprisonment) are executed. These practices, amounting to a condition of permanent imprisonment, are being pioneered by the US in its super-maximum civilian prisons. Permanent war and permanent imprisonment are not exceptional but increasingly the routine means by which the racial state organises the abandonment of surplus and potentially rebellious populations and attempts to quarantine the effects of global poverty.

The use of political assassinations against key leaders of liberation movements has had a major impact on the course of history in Africa and the Middle East. Not only have some of the greatest of Third World leaders been killed but so, too, has the hope for political change they embodied. This survey of assassinations carried out by western states and their agents from the 1960s onwards reveals a bloody legacy of killings of leaders from Algeria, Cameroon, Congo, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Morocco, Mozambique, Palestine, South Africa, Togo and Zimbabwe – all of which were linked to the interests of western imperialism. Today's daily diet of suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians by both western militaries and jihadis is one consequence, it is suggested, of the brutalisation effected by the policy of political assassination.

In September 2005, the right-wing Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published specially commissioned cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that were judged, by Muslims and many non-Muslims, to be racist and offensive. Republished in February 2006 in newspapers across Europe (except the UK), they were the occasion for demonstrations and riots throughout both the Muslim and non-Muslim world. In this wide-ranging interview, originally conducted for the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen, A. Sivanandan reflects on free speech and its relation to other freedoms in an unequal, globalised world. He looks at it in the context both of the ‘war on terror’ and past histories of colonisation.

In June 2005, the author interviewed five Sudanese men. All but one had been failed by UK asylum procedures. Their stories are related to other examples of similarly desperate asylum seekers throughout the UK and the effects of policies of forced destitution, detention and deportation are described.

The outbreak of mass racist violence against young men of ‘Middle Eastern appearance’ on Cronulla beach, Sydney, in December 2005 was the culmination of a campaign of populist incitement waged in the media and by the state. The battle to reclaim control of the beach for white Australia mirrored, it is suggested here, the battle that the Howard government has waged to reclaim control of the nation itself from asylum seekers and the Muslim/Middle Eastern ‘enemy’.